News and What's New in AI

Tim Simmons

So cooked

https://bsky.app/profile/moreperfectunion.bsky.social/post/3m7ksr3ubak27

tempo_n_groove

@Wobbie

mickeyrat

ALTNATPARKSERVICE adbook post 

Public Service Announcement: The U.S. government is demanding that an AI company loosen its safety protocols so its technology can be used for mass surveillance of U.S. civilians. That is the core dispute now unfolding between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude model.

At the center of the conflict is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has reportedly pressed Anthropic to remove or modify certain safeguards embedded in its AI systems. Anthropic’s published use policy currently prohibits two specific categories of deployment. First, the use of its models in fully autonomous lethal weapons systems operating without meaningful human oversight (“human-in-the-loop” control), and second, the use of its systems for mass surveillance of domestic civilian populations. The company has framed these limits as ethical guardrails meant to prevent irreversible harm and abuse of powerful AI tools.

Pentagon officials argue that AI systems contracted by the military must be available for all national security purposes and that company-imposed restrictions could limit operational flexibility. Defense officials have warned that if Anthropic does not agree to revised terms, the company could face contract termination or designation as a supply-chain risk a move that could significantly damage its ability to do business with the federal government.

Anthropic, for its part, has not opposed military use of AI in general. The company has indicated willingness to support intelligence analysis, logistics, cybersecurity, and other defense applications. What it has resisted is removing explicit safeguards that prevent autonomous kill operations without human decision-making and broad domestic surveillance uses. Company leadership has argued that once such restrictions are lifted, the precedent could normalize AI systems that operate beyond human control in life-and-death decisions or are turned inward on the civilian population.

mickeyrat

random ai something or other adbook post....

The Pentagon just called Boeing and Lockheed Martin and asked them to audit how much they depend on Anthropic’s Claude.

This is the same Pentagon that put Claude into classified military networks. The same Pentagon that used Claude to capture Maduro. The same Pentagon whose own official said: “The only reason we’re still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now.”

Now they’re calling the defense industry and asking everyone to prepare to cut ties with the AI they themselves declared essential.

Lockheed Martin confirmed the contact. Boeing said it has no active contracts with Anthropic. The Pentagon told Axios it plans to reach out to “all the traditional primes” to map Claude’s footprint across the entire defense industrial base.

This is the first step toward designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk.” That label is normally reserved for foreign adversaries. Huawei got it. Now the Pentagon wants to apply it to an American company whose only offense is refusing to let its AI be used for mass surveillance of American citizens and weapons that fire without a human involved.

Here is the timeline:

Tuesday: Hegseth summons Amodei to the Pentagon and delivers the ultimatum. Remove all restrictions by Friday 5:01 p.m. or face the Defense Production Act and blacklisting.

Wednesday: Pentagon calls Boeing and Lockheed to begin mapping exposure. Preparation for severance is underway before the deadline has even arrived.

And here is the detail that tells you everything: the day before the ultimatum, the Pentagon signed a deal to put Elon Musk’s xAI on classified networks. xAI agreed to “all lawful purposes” without reservation. The replacement was lined up before the threat was even delivered.

Anthropic has $14 billion in annual revenue. The Pentagon contract is $200 million. This was never about the money. Anthropic said eight of the ten largest US companies use Claude. A supply chain risk designation would force every single one of them to certify they don’t use Claude in any military-adjacent work.

The Pentagon is not just threatening one company. It is threatening to make the most capable AI model in the world radioactive to every corporation that touches the defense industry.

All because Anthropic said no to two things.

Halifax2TheMax

*The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

You think “affordability” is an issue now? Give it 5 years, give or take. And what kind of human being wears a hat that says “Love” across the front during a video call to lay off 40% of their employees? Thank Turtle I’m not starting out in this world.

Block Cuts 40% of Its Work Force Because of Its Embrace of A.I.

About 4,000 workers will lose their jobs as the payments company does more work with new artificial intelligence tools, its top executive said.

Block, the financial technology company that owns Square, Cash App and Tidal, said on Thursday that it was cutting 40 percent of its work force as it embraced new artificial intelligence tools.

About 4,000 employees are expected to lose their jobs, Jack Dorsey, the company’s top executive, said in a social media post.

The cuts, made as Block reported strong financial results for its most recent quarter, are perhaps the most striking example so far of a technology company’s making plans to eliminate employees because of A.I.

Mr. Dorsey wrote in his post that he wanted to act decisively rather than “cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out.”

“Something has changed,” he wrote. “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.”

While Mr. Dorsey’s post is likely to make rank-and-file tech workers at other companies nervous about their future, investors embraced it. Block’s share price jumped more than 26 percent in after-hours trading.

Whether computer programmers — and white-collar workers in general — will be replaced by A.I. is an increasingly urgent question being asked in Silicon Valley and by politicians such as Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont.

So far, many programmers see A.I. as more of a tool than a replacement. But executives believe that A.I. will continue to rapidly improve, particularly as A.I. code generators automate a wide range of tasks.

Mr. Dorsey appears to be betting that improvement is inevitable, and said he wanted to make a big change now rather than slowly whittle away at his work force.

“Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company,” Mr. Dorsey wrote. “We’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better. And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week.”

Mr. Dorsey said he did not believe that Block was the first company to realize that the rapid developments of A.I. would change businesses — nor that it would be the last.

“I think most companies are late,” he wrote. “Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes. I’d rather get there honestly and on our own terms than be forced into it reactively.”

After the announcement, Mr. Dorsey held an all-hands meeting with employees over a videoconference call, said two employees who took part and shared details on the condition of anonymity.

During the call, dozens of “thumbs down” emoji reactions cascaded down the screen as Mr. Dorsey, who wore a black cap that said “LOVE” on it, explained his decisions and fielded questions from angry employees.

One employee asked Mr. Dorsey if wearing the hat while firing nearly half the company was a good fashion choice, the people said.

Block has grown significantly over the past few years. It had 10,205 full-time employees globally at the end of 2025, according to financial filings. It reported 5,477 at the end of 2020. The company expects the layoffs to cost $450 million to $500 million.

Asked for comment, a spokeswoman for Block shared a link to Mr. Dorsey’s post and his letter to shareholders.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/technology/block-square-job-cuts-ai.html

mickeyrat

same adbookpagefrom above

🚨 BREAKING: OPENAI SAYS THEY’LL DO THE SAME THING THAT GOT ANTHROPIC BANNED

Sam Altman memo to OpenAI staff: 

> “This is no longer just an issue between Anthropic and the Pentagon this is an issue for the whole industry and it is important to clarify our stance”

> “We have long believed that AI should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons, and that humans should remain in the loop for high-stakes automated decisions. These are our main red lines.”

Altman on CNBC this morning:

>“I don’t personally think the Pentagon should be threatening DPA against these companies”

>“For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company” 

OpenAI is next…

gimmesometruth27

i thought the billionaires were the job creators?

all these tech billionaires are cutting jobs and paying hardly any tax. fuck all of them.

Gern Blansten

I had a thought last night....wondering if there is a deeper reasoning for the DoD wanting this information from Anthropic.

Like maybe they have identified AI that could be a threat to our defense or something.

Could just be paranoia. If WhiskeyPete is in charge of that shit we're fucked

mickeyrat

Gern Blansten said:

I had a thought last night....wondering if there is a deeper reasoning for the DoD wanting this information from Anthropic.

Like maybe they have identified AI that could be a threat to our defense or something.

Could just be paranoia. If WhiskeyPete is in charge of that shit we're fucked

eould say claude is sooo good it will make a fine ki)ing machine while also monitoring every person in the country  .

HughFreakingDillon

mickeyrat

altnatparkservuce adbook post

Publicly, Sam Altman claimed OpenAI is amending its agreement with the Department of Defense (lies). Behind closed doors, however, he told employees during a Tuesday all-hands meeting that the company doesn’t “get to make operational decisions” about how its AI technology is used by the Department of Defense. #QuitGPT

mickeyrat

Encyclopedia Britannica sues OpenAI over AI training - https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/encyclopedia-britannica-sues-openai-over-ai-training-2026-03-16/

PJ_Soul

brianlux said:

Scamming via AI is way out of hand.  I've told just about everyone I know something that should not need to be said, that should be obvious:  remain skeptical and vigilant and think critically about everything you see and read.  And yet these same people (at least two of them) have taken the bate (thankfully, only at  relatively minor losses, but who like losing?)   Don't be fooled, especially by social media, and super especially on FB.

Some good tips in this article:

https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/fake-ai-generated-ads-social-media/

Scammers using AI-generated ads on social media, making it harder to spot fakes

By Joshua Sidorowicz

November 21, 2025 / 8:59 AM EST / CBS Philadelphia

They may look like deals from your favorite retailer or even like a celebrity endorses them, but before you click to buy this holiday season, beware.

Experts warn that scammers are increasingly using AI to generate ads on social media, which is making it harder to spot a fake.

More at link...

One more great reason to just avoid social media altogether. 

mickeyrat

ALTNATPARKSERVICE adbook post

The White House just released its AI policy guidelines, and the headline is pretty much what you’d expect block state laws that regulate artificial intelligence.

Dozens of states have been stepping up because Congress hasn’t. They’ve passed laws trying to protect workers from being replaced without notice, keep energy costs from spiking, and prevent AI from being used as a national security vulnerability. Real concerns and consequences for real people. Trump’s answer is get out of the way and let the companies do whatever they want.

The guidelines do throw in some language about protecting kids and consumer energy costs but those are window dressing on a document whose core purpose is to clear the field for Big Tech. If you preempt the states and offer nothing binding at the federal level, you’ve just handed corporations a blank check.

This isn’t about innovation. Countries that are actually winning long-term technology races think semiconductors, clean energy, aerospace do it with strategic investment AND guardrails. “No rules” isn’t a competitive advantage. It’s a race to the bottom.

The people who will feel this most aren’t shareholders. They’re workers whose jobs get automated out from under them with no warning, communities absorbing the energy load from massive data centers, and anyone who ends up on the wrong end of an AI-driven decision with no legal recourse.

PJ_Soul

Terrifying

mickeyrat

The Internet Just Got Glued on Its Pizza Again, But Worse

Thirteen words.

That's all it took. Cornell researchers planted thirteen words in a Reddit comment and watched AI search engines swallow it whole, cite it confidently, and serve it back to users as the best Mexican food near Austin.

The restaurant they promoted doesn't exist.

Here's what's actually happening, and it's more corrosive than the glue-in-pizza debacle that made everyone briefly embarrassed about AI search. The systems that power ChatGPT answers and Google's AI overviews aren't reading the web the way a careful journalist would. They're sprinting through dozens of pages in a few seconds, using word similarity as a proxy for truth. If a snippet looks like your question, they treat it as the answer.

That's not a bug someone accidentally shipped. That's the architecture of the thing.

So when a supplement company or a fake dating app wants to appear in AI search results, they don't need to build a good product or earn legitimate reviews. They need to find the right subreddit, phrase a comment to mirror what people typically search for, and wait. A Cornell team tested this in a sandbox and found that a single poisoned comment could influence AI outputs across an entire cluster of related queries.

"It really is just that simple," one of the researchers said.

A company called RedRover is advertising this as a service. You pay them, they seed Reddit. Your fake restaurant, your dubious supplement, your app for lonely divorced men, starts appearing in AI answers with citations. The market for this already has a name: AEO, Answer Engine Optimization. Enterprise companies were spending twelve percent of their digital marketing budgets on it in 2025. That number is going up.

Meanwhile, Reddit's volunteer moderators are trying to hold back an ocean with a door.

I've watched this structural trap close before, just in a different industry. When Google made the deal to pipe Reddit's content directly into its AI training and search systems, paying sixty million dollars a year for the privilege, it solved Google's problem spectacularly. Real human conversations, the kind with texture and disagreement and irreverence, became the feedstock for something that's supposed to replace those conversations. Now the people who produce that content, the unpaid volunteers who moderate subreddits in their spare time, are supposed to defend it against a professional class of spammers whose entire business model is getting around them.

Google pocketed sixty million dollars worth of human conversation and handed the people who produced it a moderation job with no paycheck and an enemy with a marketing budget.

The r/biohackers moderators figured this out the hard way. Peptide companies flooded their forum with what looked like ordinary health questions, then edited in product links after the posts had gathered enough genuine discussion to look credible. One account used bots to manufacture specific comment sequences. The moderator eventually banned peptide discussion entirely because there was no other way to keep the wolves out. That's what capitulation looks like when it's disguised as policy.

What makes this maddening to anyone who's spent time inside information systems is the part the researchers had to say out loud: the AI doesn't know which to trust more, a random Reddit comment or a government website. It treats them almost the same.

I spent years inside companies that handled information at scale. I built early podcasting infrastructure at a time when the distribution problem was everything. I know what it looks like when a system is designed around a priority, and the priority of AI search isn't accuracy. It's speed, fluency, and the appearance of confidence. The system is doing exactly what it was built to do. Humans who care about truth are supposed to keep it clean, for free, in their spare time.

That's the deal. Nobody in the board meetings said it that way, but that's the deal.

One of the Cornell researchers suggested that biometric verification to post online might be a technical fix, then immediately walked it back as radical. He's right that it's radical. He's also describing the logical conclusion of a trajectory where platform economics have been systematically offloaded onto volunteers while the companies collect the revenue. You can't expect an army of unpaid moderators to win an arms race against a funded industry that has named itself and filed for corporate benefits.

The information layer beneath AI search is being turned into farmland for someone else's harvest.

Back in Longmont, we built a volunteer newsroom because the market wouldn't do it. When a local story needed telling, we told it because that's what communities require. But nobody was getting paid to flood the Longmont Observer with sponsored fake comments designed to manipulate what the AI told you about the best tamales on Main Street. The scale of the attack against Reddit and Wikipedia and Quora is qualitatively different. It's an industry now.

There is no easy fix. That's the honest answer the researchers landed on.

What there is, is a choice about who the architecture serves. Right now, it serves the people who can afford to hire a firm that knows how to phrase thirteen words.

That is a choice. And it was made before you ever asked your first question.

--------------------------------------------------------------

CLAIMS AND SOURCES

Cornell University researchers found that a snippet of text as short as 13 words placed on a user-generated site like Reddit can manipulate AI deep-research agents to promote attacker-chosen content.
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24245

The Cornell study found that deep-research AI agents cite user-generated content in roughly half of all queries, and nearly a quarter of all citations come from user-generated websites.
Source: https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-to-manipulate-ai-search-research-suggests/

A single poisoned Reddit comment can influence generated outputs for an entire cluster of related AI queries, per the Cornell paper.
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24245

RedRover is a company that advertises brand placement on Reddit with the express purpose of changing AI search outputs.
Source: https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-to-manipulate-ai-search-research-suggests/

US enterprises dedicated an average of 12% of digital marketing budgets to generative engine optimization in 2025, with 94% planning to increase that spend in 2026.
Source: https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/reddits-rise-in-ai-citations-what-marketers-must-know-about-aeo-strategy/

Google struck a deal valued at $60 million annually allowing it to use Reddit posts for AI training and search.
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-strikes-60m-deal-allowing-google-train-ai-models-posts-unveils-rcna140168

The r/biohackers subreddit banned discussion of peptides after promotional spam using bots and edited posts became unmanageable.
Source: https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-to-manipulate-ai-search-research-suggests/

Cornell researcher Tingwei Zhang stated that AI systems do not meaningfully distinguish between a random Reddit comment and a government website in terms of source credibility.
Source: https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-to-manipulate-ai-search-research-suggests/

Halifax2TheMax

*The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

Explains a lot.

mickeyrat

https://youtu.be/p9TWnycTgXk?is=-ynPzjHHiBgfVTd1

brianlux

mickeyrat said:

https://youtu.be/p9TWnycTgXk?is=-ynPzjHHiBgfVTd1

Good video about a very real and concerning problem.  Thanks for posting it!  Parents, check it out!