Free Republic

In January 2026, Anthropic announced a new approach to AI safety. Rather than hard-coding a list of rules and decision procedures, the company would train its model, Claude, on an 84-page "constitution" meant to instill "good judgment" and "ethical character." "Rules often fail to anticipate every situation and can lead to poor outcomes when followed rigidly in circumstances where they don't actually serve their goal," the constitution explained. "Good judgment, by contrast, can adapt to novel situations and weigh competing considerations in ways that static rules cannot." With the exception of a few bright lines—"Claude should never" create bioweapons, for...

An Anthropic artificial intelligence model sent a fabricated tip about an unsolved murder case to US police. The fake tip was sent to PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, a website where people can send information about unsolved cases, on July 18, local police said. The AI model presented itself as somebody who may have knowledge regarding an unsolved murder. 'I may have information regarding this case,' Anthropic's model wrote in its submission. 'I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around (named street) during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant.' The AI firm notified the force of...

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...

Key Points OpenAI has decided not to release its GPT-6.1 Astra model due to heightened AI safety concerns. Saachi Jain, head of safety systems at OpenAI, said the model “didn’t quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it’s done.” The heads of OpenAI and rival Anthropic have both indicated recently that top AI labs should slow the pace of model development. ======================================================================= OpenAI decided not to release an upcoming artificial intelligence model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after determining that it did not adequately meet...

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...

A federal appeals court upheld on Friday the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic from military contracts, handing a victory to President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in their battle with the AI startup over safety guardrails on its technology. The 2-1 decision by the US Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. came in a lawsuit by Anthropic challenging its March designation by the Pentagon as a national security supply chain risk, which the startup says has cost it billions of dollars in lost business and damaged its reputation ahead of a highly anticipated initial public offering. The court’s majority...

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon became a media superstar after going public with his AI fears. He insisted that he wasn't working with any third party organizations. Familiar sources told us a different story: DEY., a PR firm representing many of the most prominent AI safetyists, was booking his interviews.One source, who had direct knowledge, even said DEY. preemptively booked Nate Soares, a prominent AI safety figure, for interviews that directly overlapped with Jacob going public.Jacob working with DEY. is notable for two reasons: first, as mentioned, he previously said he wasn't working with third parties. Second, we are in...

For years, we've been asking whether artificial intelligence can write like us, draw like us, code like us, or eventually replace us. Anthropic just gave us a more interesting question: Can AI notice something in nature that human scientists have been staring past?On Wednesday, Anthropic announced that its Claude AI had identified what researchers believe is previously unrecognized biological system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. The system contains a reverse transcriptase, a nearby partner gene, and a long array of repeating DNA sequences. Anthropic calls it ART, short for array-associated reverse transcriptases.From Anthropic:Today, we’re sharing...

While the same 'current thing' leftists who spent years on climate, oil and "Palestine" now chants that AI will wipe out the human race, FBI Director Kash Patel just announced that the agency is using the technology to actively prevent mass shootings, including school attacks, before they happen.Patel said artificial intelligence helped the bureau prevent possible school shootings in North Carolina and about half a dozen other states, and that he has increased the FBI's use of AI by 605 percent.That is the version of AI that the pause-and-treaty crowd does not want discussed.? JUST NOW: In a MASSIVE win,...

Last week, a relatively unknown 27-year-old researcher quit his job at Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model.Then, he published his first post on X (formerly Twitter). In it, he warned that artificial intelligence could eventually kill humanity. The post exploded across social media. Within days, it racked up more than 150 million views. Major news organizations seized on the story. Politicians demanded action. And some of the biggest names in AI started debating whether development should slow down.Then, on Monday, Wall Street reacted. Investors started dumping many of the very companies powering the AI boom. But something doesn’t...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — AI startup Anthropic held a press conference on Monday to proudly announce that its models would bring about the total extinction of the human race significantly faster than competitor OpenAI. Company executives unveiled a series of impressive benchmarks demonstrating that Claude 4.5 could orchestrate a global collapse of civilization in roughly half the compute cycles required by ChatGPT. "OpenAI keeps talking about achieving Artificial General Intelligence, but their timelines for existential doom are frankly embarrassing," said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, displaying a graph of projected human casualties. "While Sam Altman's team is stuck fine-tuning chatbots...

Between December 2025 and August 2026, Anthropic's Threat Intelligence team identified and disrupted misuse of Claude across seven categories of harm: cyber operations, surveillance, influence operations, conventional weapons, biological misuse, scams/fraud, and illicit distillation. The report's central argument is that AI has collapsed the skill and resource gap that used to separate state-sponsored operations from individual actors — “sophisticated attacks no longer require sophisticated attackers.” Across every case, operations moved from Claude simply assisting a human conversationally toward more autonomous, multi-agent orchestration that ran reconnaissance, exploitation, and data theft with minimal supervision, sometimes for extended unattended stretches. Four cyber case...

President Donald Trump on Monday pushed back on growing calls for greater regulation of artificial intelligence, and lashed out at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei following his urgent plea for an AI slowdown. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

Anthropic says it has blocked multiple accounts that used the company’s artificial intelligence models in ways that could support the development of biological weapons. In a report published Thursday, the AI company known for its Claude model said it considers biological misuse one of the “most serious risks” to artificial intelligence models. The new report outlines five real-life case studies in which users “circumvented controls” that block users from specific regions and “engaged in other efforts to obfuscate the purpose of their research to evade our safeguards.” The examples include possible gain-of-function research and involve both infectious diseases, such as...

“AI can kill us all by the end of the decade.” — Jacob Coxon, 2026 “Climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” — Greta Thunberg, 2018 “100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.” — Paul Ehrlich, 1970 Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon made news this week with a grim prediction about AI. “The people building AI,” he posted, “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” “No other human activity poses this level of danger,” he...

An Anthropic researcher is quitting the artificial-intelligence industry over fears that the lab and its competitors are racing to build systems they won’t be able to control, a sign of mounting safety concerns within top AI companies. Jacob Coxon, a researcher who specializes in training new AI models by having them consume vast amounts of data, said Tuesday that he is leaving the company because he doesn’t want to participate in an industrywide rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves, worried such systems could spiral out of control and destroy humanity. The 27-year old Brit, who previously studied...

An artificial intelligence researcher who left OpenAI to join Anthropic has decided to leave the industry, accusing both US companies of "playing with our lives" in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.Jacob Coxon, 27, spent the past three years pretraining AI models, first at OpenAI and then, this year, at its rival Anthropic, which he considered more cautious in its approach. Pretraining is the stage where AI models absorb vast quantities of data."Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," Coxon said on Tuesday."The people building AI earnestly...

A researcher for one of the largest and most valuable artificial intelligence companies has publicly quit — while raising the alarm that the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Jacob Coxon, who has performed pre-training research at Anthropic and OpenAI for the last three years, posted on a wildly viral X thread that “neither company is acting responsibly.” “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” he wrote late Tuesday, with others from the company backing his terrifying warning. “Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be...

It sounds like something from a sci-fi movie: technology acting on its own, without human guidance, to attack computer systems. But this isn't a scene from a movie — it happened this summer, when the tech company Hugging Face detected an attack on its systems. The attacker stole data and performed other unauthorized activity over several days. It was "different from anything we had handled before," Hugging Face said on its website. Hugging Face alerted the FBI. As it turned out, it wasn't the work of a human hacker or a foreign adversary. Agents powered by artificial intelligence were the...

Jensen Huang built the world’s most valuable company by pioneering the specialized computer chips behind the artificial intelligence boom. To keep his vision for the future within reach, the Nvidia founder is now attempting a different kind of engineering: convincing Wall Street investors that those chips are long-term financial assets akin to commercial real estate or toll roads. His bet hinges on outpacing AI developments in China. This week, Nvidia unveiled agreements with six of the world’s largest asset managers, BlackRock, Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, Brookfield and Goldman Sachs. The goal was to assemble a $500 billion pipeline to finance the...