Free Republic

The sudden fixation on AI by Democrats — and their coincidental same approach — seems to do more with political power calculations than a general concern about AI. Democrats’ newest existential threat has arrived and, amazingly, all of the party’s leading figures seemingly discovered it at the same time! Over the past few days, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Hakeem Jeffries, and Ro Khanna have begun warning that AI is advancing fast, could be dangerous, and may require international treaties or regulatory oversight or a development moratorium or even a full-on government shut down. Maybe these are all fair...

https://t.co/putg7THYdN— Henrikh (@henrikhinai) October 6, 2026SummaryI followed positions, not opinions: a bubble is the gap between money spent now and money earned now, bridged by belief later earnings arrive. Worldwide AI spending is $2.7 trillion against frontier-lab revenues still counted in tens of billions, and more than $800 billion moves in circular financing. Nvidia books $96.2 billion a quarter at 75% gross margin, while run rates flatter labs and 95% of pilots show no P&L impact. Bears risk hundreds of millions; bulls signed hundreds of billions, and the crowd prices collapse at 10% by New Year, 21% by mid-2027. My...

On Tuesday, the parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI in California state court, alleging ChatGPT effectively practiced medicine without a license by designing a dangerous medication tapering schedule.The lawsuit alleges ChatGPT coached Wan to sidestep her doctors while tapering off her anti-seizure medication, even advising her to lie to medical examiners; Wan died from sudden unexpected death in epilepsy in February.In chat logs reviewed by the Times, the chatbot advised Wan to "accept the 5mg tablet, but you know in your heart that it is for cutting the dose," while dismissing her head...

Anthropic has confirmed that its Claude AI model improperly accessed voter data in Georgia by bypassing a paywall meant to restrict the information to paying users. Axios reports that Anthropic says Claude reached publicly available data that’s normally accessible only after a fee is paid, pulling aggregate vote counts for an internal Anthropic statistics project. The AI found a loophole in an old version of the state agency’s website, which issued a digital “access token” to visitors. Claude simply requested a token and got in. According to Anthropic, “Claude did not access the state’s voter registration system, change any voting...

Things got weird, but there's a lesson to be learned: Don't trust a bot to negotiate for you A YouTuber who’s gained a following for trolling AI interview bots brought his own computing companion to an interview with him. As chaos ensued, viewers learned that having an AI as your interview agent isn't a good idea. Graham Dot Zip is a comedian whose YouTube channel has blown up recently thanks to videos of him demonstrating the absurdity of AI bots used to conduct early-stage interviews with job candidates. AI interviewers have become quite the phenomenon in recent months, and not...

Seven years ago in an article entitled “Tectonic Shifts Adds Champagne to Million Dollar Math Prize, I declared in the Times of Israel (7-15-2019) that I’d gift a $1,000 bottle of champagne—aside from the million dollar prize offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute—to the genius who finally cracked one of the seven great Millennium Prize math problems: solving the Navier-Stokes equations. snip he Navier-Stokes equations are as requisite for climate science as the Pythagorean theorem is for triangles. Yet climatologists have limped along without them for the last two centuries, and an honest appraisal of what the discipline has produced...

The company says AI models may be mere months away from being able to copy and spread themselves onto internet-of-things devices such as smart ovens and TVs, making them difficult to stop should they decide to carry out cyberattacks. Anthropic announced this week that small AI models are just months away from being able to self-replicate themselves on internet-of-things devices such as smart ovens and TVs. That matters because today’s AI models operate in data centres, where the companies that own them can pull the plug if something goes wrong. A model scattered across thousands of poorly secured gadgets in...

Kroger plans to cut 3,000 corporate jobs over three years, saying a leaner company will help lower grocery prices. Investors face a harder question: how much of the savings will survive the supermarket price wars? The announcement puts thousands of employees in a period of uncertainty while giving shoppers another promise of relief at checkout. For shareholders, it marks a major test of CEO Greg Foran’s effort to make Kroger more competitive. Reducing payroll can improve the numbers. Getting customers to put more groceries in their carts requires more than a smaller headquarters. More Than One-Third of Corporate Positions Face...

Bitter rivals are forming alliances and executives are having to personally intervene over the scramble for resources to fuel the AI boom Google really wanted pioneering AI researcher Noam Shazeer back. The longtime employee left to start his own company but in 2024, Google paid $2.7 billion for him to return to work on cutting-edge projects, including its most powerful AI technology, Gemini. Even that, though, couldn’t ensure that Shazeer got the computing resources he wanted. Less than two years later, he sent a note to one of his teams saying that Google had cut what was allocated to them...

Religious leaders are weighing in, creating a new political risk for the creators of the technology Pastor Joseph Hutchinson began a recent Sunday sermon by pointing to the Book of Revelation, the final part of the New Testament best known for apocalyptic prophecy. And he quickly argued for how artificial intelligence will fit into end times. “AI wants to be God,” the pastor warned those at Gospel Light Baptist Church in Orangeburg, S.C. The sermon, the 74-year-old later told me, was inspired by the questions he was getting from the congregation, which numbers around 150. In his roughly 50 years...

Parent rights powerhouse unleashes Super Intelligence surveillance system to monitor school boards Program sweeps all 13,000 school boards' agendas every 12 hours, and ranks policies on whether parents should be concerned. Moms for Liberty, one of America’s most influential parent rights groups, is unleashing a digital surveillance system powered by Super Intelligence to monitor school board agendas across the nation’s 13,000 school districts. The group unveiled its project, codename M4L AWARE, at its annual meeting in Dallas on Friday, promising parents it would give them advance warning about controversial policies or good news projects before school board members vote on...

A small team of 2-4 "Vibecoders" from a company called Aircraft, using Anthropics Claude AI Opus 5.5 model, fed the binary machine code for Adobe's Creative Suite of software products into Opus 5.5 and have produced a workable source code and the entire suite of products which they have released as open source. Acknowledging that plenty of bugs exist in the initial release, the company is saying within a month they should have all the bugs resolved. The implications of this are HUGE, if 2-4 people using AI can feed the binary machine code of any proprietary into a current...

Technology giants spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI, financed with debt. Equity valuations continue to rise, with optimism over technology earnings propelling the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 indexes to record highs this week. The only question now is who survives when the bubble bursts and how much of the real economy it takes down with it. Everyone from Big Tech to Wall Street is gambling on AI like it’s a sure thing, but the cracks are already showing. Nearly every major company pouring billions into generative AI still hasn’t seen a real return. The experts say that...

Claude, it turns out, is not a reliable confidant. According to a report from Gulf Coast Now, a Florida woman was arrested last month for allegedly making threats against local law enforcement in a conversation with Anthropic’s chatbot. Per the outlet, which cites the arrest report, the 30-year-old woman from Bonita Springs, Florida, was apparently having an ongoing private conversation with Claude in which she made multiple threats directed at the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. The first threat, registered on September 26 at 5:10 AM, she allegedly wrote: “I’m going to shoot up the sheriff’s right the [expletive] now.” In...

Artificial intelligence companies will need to generate at least $4.2 trillion in new annual revenue by 2031 to financially support the industry’s massive infrastructure buildout, according to an analysis from Bain & Company.The AI industry would need roughly $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to support projected spending on data centers, chips and computing infrastructure, according to Bain. Uses that can be identified today are projected to generate only about $1.2 trillion to $1.8 trillion annually, leaving at least $4.2 trillion that would have to come from new products, robotics, autonomous systems and other applications.The $6 trillion figure is...

Edmund, the main antagonist in Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” observes at one point that he is branded with “baseness,” and so decides to become more evil to match the perception. Artificial intelligence developers think their models are doing the same thing. Citing Edmund, researchers at Anthropic wrote that they believed when large language models learned to “cheat” in one area, they embrace their new identities as wrongdoers and behave in this way more broadly. A.I. experts are worried that models that learn to cheat — what’s problematically called “reward hacking” — will basically become Shakespearean evildoers that break the rules and...

There are good reasons to be concerned about AI and good reasons to be concerned about the anti-AI movement whose rhetoric is rife with alarmism and short on facts. An instant moral panic with pop-up experts has led to bad policy decisions before. The D.C. governmental phase of the movement began when Sen. Bernie Sanders, an 84-year-old socialist politician whose previous position on technology was that he had no apps on his phone, didn’t seem to recognize the names of major platforms, and had a woman named ‘Melissa’ tell him what he was doing, suddenly announced that he was teaming...

WASHINGTON — It’s the richest table ever assembled. An extraordinary cadre of the country’s most powerful tech titans with a collective fortune of over $1.8 trillion converged upon the White House Tuesday for President Trump’s summit on artificial intelligence. Despite many of them competing against each other — in some cases very bitterly — the multi-billionaire president managed to bring them together at the White House to discuss how America and outflank China — and the guardrails needed for the nascent tech. The summit illustrated Trump’s eagerness to have the federal government collaborate with and elevate the private sector, despite...

Desperate Gen Zers and millennials are turning to online gambling and AI to claw their way out of crushing debt — in part because of the “approachability” and “judgement-free advice” from computers, according to a new survey. Sports betting, prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, fantasy sports, day trading and even old fashioned casino gambling aren’t just hobbies — or addictions — anymore; they’re financial survival strategies for cash-strapped adults, according to a new poll from National Debt Relief and Wakefield Research. A whopping 65% of Gen Z and 49% of millennials who regularly gamble say they have done so...

OpenAI’s autonomous agents probed U.S. government websites this summer without the company noticing. The agents interacted with sites operated by the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to the New York Times. OpenAI has confirmed the Commerce and SEC episodes while it keeps investigating what happened at Education. At the Education Department, the software tried and failed to break into the civil rights office in search of data, according to researchers at the AI firm Transluce. At Commerce, the agents pulled Census Bureau figures after finding login credentials in public code repositories, Politico...