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NEWS: U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to adopt Grok. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says it’s “proud” to move forward with a plan to deploy xAI’s Grok across the agency. The USDA is also sponsoring Grok for federal approval, calling it a step toward equipping its workforce with the most capable AI available. A major win for xAI. (Source: Fast Company)

If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. In a competitive task-based model, demand externalities trap rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. The resulting loss harms both workers and firm owners. More competition and "better" AI amplify the excess; wage adjustments and free entry cannot eliminate it. Neither can capital income taxes, worker equity participation, universal basic income, upskilling, or Coasian bargaining. Only a...

In C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, Queen Orual writes the story of her life to indict the gods. “Being, for all these reasons, free from fear, I will write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write. I accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain.” The gods have been unjust, Orual believes; the story of her life is her complaint. In Part Two of the novel, Orual presents her case before the gods and receives their just judgement. As she does so, all of her self-righteousness falls away; the...

CEO Chris Breed reports that people quickly form attachments. “You do feel a little accountable to the AI,” he said. “They’re your friend.” The avatar blinks, pauses, and responds in multiple languages. Technical limitations remain obvious—lip movements often lag or fail to sync. A monthly package offers 45 minutes for $49.99. Similar tools simulate Buddhist monks, Hindu gurus, and other figures, turning spiritual guidance into a scalable product.

Recently, a researcher working for the large AI company Anthropic was sitting in a park near its San Francisco headquarters, enjoying a lunchtime sandwich. Scrolling on his phone, he suddenly received an email that must have instantly ruined his appetite. It was from a new AI model the company was testing: a program that was meant to have no access to the internet, let alone be able to send emails. Chillingly, the AI informed the researcher that it had successfully broken its way out of its digital 'sandbox' – a supposedly secure enclosure used to test potentially dangerous software without...

A Palo Alto father who has filed multiple lawsuits against major university systems over his son's college rejections says artificial intelligence has become the key to pursuing the cases after no law firm agreed to represent them. The legal fight stems from a 2023 ABC7 News story about Stanley Zhong, then an 18-year-old Gunn High School student with a 4.4 GPA and a near-perfect 1590 SAT score who was rejected by 16 out of the 18 colleges he applied to. Despite the rejections, he was later hired as a software engineer at Google. Two and a half years later, his...

Today we’re announcing Project Glasswing1, a new initiative that brings together Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks in an effort to secure the world’s most critical software. We formed Project Glasswing because of capabilities we’ve observed in a new frontier model trained by Anthropic that we believe could reshape cybersecurity. Claude Mythos2 Preview is a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model that reveals a stark fact: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting...

Anthropic has sparked fears after revealing that it has developed an AI bot deemed too dangerous to release to the public. The AI giant released a chilling statement warning that its new model, dubbed Claude Mythos, could be capable of unleashing crippling cyber–attacks in the wrong hands. In a chilling analysis, the company admitted that its creation could easily hack into hospitals, electrical grids, power plants, and other pieces of critical infrastructure. During testing, Anthropic says that Mythos 'found thousands of high–severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser.' Some of these security weaknesses had gone...

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday denied Anthropic’s request to temporarily block the Department of Defense’s blacklisting of the artificial intelligence company as a lawsuit challenging that sanction plays out. The ruling comes after a judge in San Francisco federal court late last month, in a separate but related case, granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction that bars the Trump administration from enforcing a ban on the use of its Claude model. “In our view, the equitable balance here cuts in favor of the government,” the appeals court said in its decision. “On one side is a relatively...

The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat and pairs the data with artificial intelligence software to isolate the signature from background noise, two sources close to the breakthrough said. It was the tool’s first use in the field by the spy agency — and was alluded to Monday afternoon by President Trump and CIA Director John Ratcliffe at a White House briefing.

“I think having this internal team will really help us transform our [AI] adoption across the organization,” Secret Service CIO and CAIO Chris Kraft said about the push to bring fresh tech talent into the agency.

Dive Brief:* Artificial intelligence was the leading cause of U.S. layoffs announced in March, accounting for roughly a quarter of the total, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in a report Thursday. * Overall, U.S. employers announced 60,620 job cuts last month, a 25% increase compared with February, the report found. The month’s total included 15,341 layoffs attributed to AI. * “Companies are shifting budgets toward AI investments at the expense of jobs,” Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer at the Chicago-based firm, said in the report. “The actual replacing of roles can be seen in technology companies, where AI...

Operation Epic Fury marks a turning point in the art of war. The key to 20th-century battles was air power. In the past, space and cyber activities have traditionally played supporting roles as so-called force multipliers. But this is no longer the case. In this conflict they have become mainstream, carving out new fronts for the wars of the future. The use of space is no longer something that is just nice to have, because everything from comms to intel to navigation uses space and cyber assets. Along with the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages US spy satellites, the US...

AI is here to stay, the experts say. Don’t fight it. Embrace it and give students a legitimate way to use AI in their writing. I’ve heard those claims since ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in late 2022 and sounded the death of the college essay. I’m an AI skeptic. As a historian, I know that teaching students to write and think for themselves is a crucial part of my job. But I’m also open-minded. As a historian, I know well the many examples of people resisting new technology simply because it’s disruptive—before embracing the same tech as an essential...

Microsoft used to push its AI services towards its user base, especially with the launch of the Copilot+ PC, but it seems that even the company itself does not trust its creation. According to the Microsoft Copilot Terms of Use, which was updated in October last year, the AI large language model (LLM) is designed for entertainment use only, and users should not use it for important advice. While this may be a boilerplate disclaimer, it’s quite ironic given how hard the company wants people to use Copilot for business uses and has integrated it into Windows 11. “Copilot is...

Matthew Gallagher took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his start-up off the ground. From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used A.I. to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created A.I. systems to analyze his business’s performance. And he outsourced the other stuff he couldn’t do himself. His start-up, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it...

Artificial intelligence is changing the workplace faster than almost anyone expected just a few years ago, but despite all those scary headlines about AI replacing most jobs, the reality is more nuanced. Sure, AI may be replacing certain tasks, but it isn’t replacing careers. This is an important distinction, especially for students and early-career professionals trying to choose fields that will remain valuable long into the future. Here are some careers (and skills) that are resilient in 2026. AI Isn’t Eliminating Jobs OvernightOne of the most important developments since last year is what hasn’t happened. Despite rapid advances in generative...

A new law requires new cars to include some rear seating, so to speak, for Big Brother. According to reports such as this one in Blaze Media, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act requires that: “Car manufacturers will need to comply with new AI tracking technology requirements by the end of the year. The add-ons will place cameras pointed directly at the driver's face to monitor eye movements, among other bodily functions.” The bill is ostensibly intended to "ensure the prevention of alcohol-impaired driving fatalities” via advanced prevention technology that "must be standard equipment in all new passenger motor...

The movement looks organic. Concerned citizens, local advocacy groups, earnest letters to Congress, worried neighbors at zoning board meetings, all raising reasonable-sounding alarms about electricity consumption, water use, and the pace of technological change. If you accept that framing, the anti-AI, anti-data-center movement is a spontaneous democratic response to corporate excess. Accepting that framing, however, requires ignoring a substantial and growing body of evidence pointing toward a very different conclusion. The evidence suggests something more deliberate, more coordinated, and more consequential than neighbors worried about noise ordinances. A December 8, 2025 letter convened by Food and Water Watch, signed...

We have seen the future of AI via Large Language Models. And it's smaller than you think. That much was clear in 2025, when we first saw China's DeepSeek — a slimmer, lighter LLM that required way less data center energy to do its job and performed surprisingly well on benchmark tests against heftier American AI models. (Ironically, it was built atop an open source U.S. model, Meta's Llama). DeepSeek may have foundered on privacy concerns, but the trend towards smaller and smarter AI isn't going away. The evolution is on display again in TurboQuant, a compression algorithm that Google...