Free Republic

You’ve spent years building a body of work. Your methods, your frameworks, your unique perspective. So when you use AI to write new content in different formats, the last thing you want is for it to undermine everything you’ve created. But that’s exactly what happens when large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok insert their telltale phrases into your writing.Large language models change fast. The giveaway signs of ChatGPT-generated content from 2023 are mostly gone. Lengthy introductions, ethical consideration paragraphs, words like “delve” and “landscape” have been trained out or flagged by savvy users. Even the signs that...

The tech industry faces a paradoxical crisis: companies are shedding human jobs to invest in AI tools that are currently more costly than the workers they replace. Major players like Uber and Microsoft report exorbitant AI spending, with budgets exhausted rapidly and little correlation to tangible value. This "tokenmaxxing" culture, where AI usage is incentivized over actual productivity, fuels massive waste. Despite widespread layoffs justified by AI reallocation, studies indicate AI is economically viable in only a fraction of roles. The unsustainable model of subsidized AI pricing is unwinding, forcing a market correction. The industry must now shift from indiscriminate...

A viral hit called “Run Run River” turned out to be an AI-tweaked clone of SoCal reggae band Stick Figure’s 2019 song, earning bootleggers thousands without credit or consent. The case exposes a flood of cheaply made, often fraudulent AI tracks on major streaming platforms, siphoning royalties, overwhelming detection systems and blurring the line between fan remix and scam. As labels and streamers race to monetize AI-powered tools, independent artists warn that weak guardrails, murky attribution and whack-a-mole enforcement could reshape music’s economy. The SoCal reggae act Stick Figure is, in a way, glad the single “Run Run River” made...

China is closing in on the US in the AI race after the superpower developed its cybersecurity capabilities to match those of its American rivals. Beijing-based tech firms 360 Security Technology and Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, have narrowed the gap with American competitors when it comes to finding bugs. 360 Security Chief Executive Zhou Hongyi told a cybersecurity conference in the Chinese capital that the company's bug-finding tool, called Tulongfeng, is now comparable to Anthropic's Mythos, which serves the same function. 'This kind of powerful weapon that can alter the landscape of cyberwarfare can't remain solely in American...

President Donald Trump and other conservatives have accused artificial intelligence chatbots of being politically biased against them — and an executive order he signed that said they must be “neutral, nonpartisan tools” triggered fears from Democrats that AI could start tilting to the right. So, are chatbots politically biased? The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings that can conflict with promises made by the companies behind them. The model...

"Welp, that happened faster than I predicted." That's what Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had to say as his company released data finding that there's now more traffic from bots than humans on the internet. "Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027 but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history," said Prince. Cloudflare is perhaps one of the most integral companies on the web, providing services like CDN (Content Delivery Network) and DDoS mitigation for some of the biggest sites on the internet. Cloudflare...

Well, it took a lot of pointing out contradictions but Google AI admits that EU's illegal immigration efforts will fail because of Spain, and agrees this could reasonably be considered legalized treason: Testing the Legal Constraints of Amnesty (AI initially denies chain migration is legal) User: So there's a huge loophole: if Spain grants amnesty to illegal aliens, those people can then move to Germany, France, etc. And THEN they get to bring their whole family in, and then their families get to bring their families in? AI: No, that is a misconception. The amnesty granted by Spain provides a...

Nearly two decades ago, four graduate students from MIT united around a shared idea. "We believed that programming cells would ultimately be more important than programming computers," says Jason Kelly. It felt like an outlandish bet at the time. Things like gene editing or testing new molecules typically demanded many hours in the laboratory — carefully mixing hundreds of chemical cocktails by hand and pipetting them into petri dishes, tasks that required an enormous amount of human labor. Early potential investors, Kelly recalls, were not excited. "We were living on ramen, buying equipment on eBay, and we could not raise...

AI-rmageddon is here.On Saturday (25), the founder of ‘Software as a Service platform’ (SaaS) PocketOS, Jer Crane, wrote an X article to warn others about the ‘systemic failures’ of flagship AI and digital services providers.Crane was led to write the public warning after an AI coding agent deleted his firm’s entire production database, and a cloud infrastructure provider’s API wiped all backups.This erased months of consumer data essential to the firm and its customers.Tom’s Hardware reported:“’Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent — Cursor running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 — deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a...

In briefMozilla says Anthropic’s Claude Mythos identified 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox during testing.Anthropic is restricting the model to vetted partners through Project Glasswing because of cybersecurity risks.Researchers warn that the same capability could accelerate automated cyberattacks. For decades, attackers have had the advantage in cybersecurity. Artificial intelligence may be about to change that.In a blog post published on Tuesday, Firefox browser developer Mozilla said an early version of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI—which has drawn attention in recent weeks for its purported cybersecurity prowess—model helped identify 271 vulnerabilities in the browser during internal testing. Those bugs were patched this week.The results...

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...

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...

It’s not just the stocks of software companies that are taking hits from worries about artificial intelligence. In the private credit market, where loans to software firms had become a favored sector over the last five years, sentiment has soured. The concern in both markets is that AI threatens the profit margins and underlying business models of many software companies by reducing the barriers to entry and enabling customers to build their own software. Those worries strike at the heart of the reasons many lenders had for issuing the loans: fat profit margins for software companies, stable customer bases, and...

A case of mistaken identity involving AI facial recognition software has led to a civil lawsuit and national scrutiny after a Tennessee grandmother spent more than 5 months in jail for a crime she did not commit, according to first reporting by Matt Henson of WDAY.

Large language models aren’t good at lots of stuff, like counting fingers or suggesting pizza recipes. But one thing that “AI” is quite good at is analyzing massive amounts of data and finding possible connections that aren’t immediately obvious. That makes it perfect for unmasking anonymous internet posts, according to a new research paper. Researchers at ETH Zurich and the MATS research fellowship associated with Berkeley ran a program [PDF], collecting data from sources with generally anonymous usernames, like Reddit. By collecting users’ posts across related but distinct movie subreddits, then feeding the LLM data from a Netflix data leak,...

As many of you know, the Pentagon is employing Palantir in Operation Epic Fury. And Palantir's AI platform, AIP, operates on a frontier AI foundation which is a military-adapted version of Claude.Ergo, I submitted all my prompts/questions to Claude.Here are my prompts and Claude's responses. I submitted Claude's responses to Grok for corroboration of accuracy and Grok said Claude was speculative and overly expansive.I thought some of you might enjoy this exchange so here it is (for what it's worth). I do not assume this is accurate. But it is interesting for a variety of reasons. Take it for what...

Well, that escalated quickly...As Ben Smith reported earlier on Friday, the Pentagon and AI giant Anthropic were in the midst of a showdown regarding the deployment terms of its Claude AI model in defense systems. The Pentagon wanted to authorize "all lawful use," but Anthropic had other ideas.Anthropic has drawn its line at two points: no domestic mass surveillance and no fully autonomous weapons operating without meaningful human oversight. Those limits are already written into its defense agreements. The Pentagon wants broader language that covers “all lawful use” once Claude is embedded.READ MORE: AI Is Already Embedded in Military Systems...

International Business Machines stock is getting slammed Monday, becoming the latest perceived victim of rapidly developing AI technology, after Anthropic said its Claude Code tool could be used to modernize legacy systems that run COBOL. Shares of IBM closed the day lower by nearly 13.2%, at $223.35 per share, after Anthropic on Monday said Claude Code could be used to automate the exploration and analysis work that drives most of the complexity in COBOL modernization, a key IBM business. IBM has long sold mainframe systems that are optimized for large-scale transaction processing, where COBOL has often been used. Short for...

Can science fiction shape market reality? Hours after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s emergency power tariffs, the President imposed a new 10% 15% global tariff for 150 days. But as stocks fell on Monday, financial media outlets like Bloomberg offered an alternative explanation for the decline: a social media post. While the northeast was hunkering down for a once-in-a-decade blizzard this weekend, financial research firm Citrini Research published a macro note that made waves among the highly online tech bro and finance bro crowd on X (formerly Twitter). In the lengthy read, Citrini augurs a world where...

Most people have never heard of Mrinank Sharma. That is part of the problem.Earlier this month, Sharma resigned from Anthropic, one of the most influential artificial intelligence companies in the world.He had led its Safeguards Research Team, the group responsible for ensuring that Anthropic’s AI could not be used to help engineer a biological weapon.His final project was a study of how AI systems distort the way people perceive reality. It was serious, consequential work for humankind.His resignation letter was seen more than 14 million times on X.It opened with the words, “the world is in peril.”And it ended with...