Cory Weinberg, Jemima McEvoy, Jessica E. Lessin, and Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information:

As Amodei has hopscotched the globe to preach about the potential and risks of AI — from New Delhi to Davos to Sun Valley — Clark has almost always been near his side. Several people who know the couple describe Clark as Amodei’s emotional ballast, someone he has sought counsel from during the turbulence of Anthropic’s growth and clashes with Washington over the future of AI.

Clark may well be the most consequential person within Anthropic’s orbit who doesn’t have a formal role at the startup. You might even call her the first lady of Anthropic. [...]

And before Female Algorithm Technologies, Clark tried her hand at building a pornographic film company, Eddice, that planned to make movies with high-production values and female protagonists. She also hoped it would have online shopping capabilities. In 2011, she tried to raise money for Eddice from Jeffrey Epstein, who’d pleaded guilty to charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution three years earlier, according to emails made public as part of the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice earlier this year. She emailed Epstein the script for the first of a series of films they hoped to make (title: “American Girl in Paris”).

“We thought you and the ladies might enjoy,” Clark wrote. She then appended a winking warning: “A little nsfw,” an acronym for “not safe for work.” Epstein didn’t invest.

While enormous attention has fallen on AI and the people behind the companies developing it, Clark has largely flown under the radar.

James Padolsey, on the Claude-text-watermarking-to-comply-with-an-EU-regulation imbroglio:

The same thought that led to this law could have applied to calculators at the time of their inception, had their outputs revealed themselves through artefacts. Thankfully, a sum borne of the brain is treated no differently from one produced by a calculator. Likewise with spellcheckers. To make assistance suspect only once the tool becomes capable enough to compose a whole sentence is not a principled boundary. It is a moral premium placed on difficulty itself.

Anthropic has nevertheless chosen a blanket, model-level implementation that appears broader than the law’s minimum requirement. That may be convenient compliance engineering, but it discards distinctions the law expressly attempted to preserve. The result is a signal broad enough to implicate harmless and assistive use, yet fragile enough to be removed by a motivated person through substantial recomposition. It risks concentrating suspicion on ordinary and assistive users while remaining weakest against deliberate deception.

Padolsey is the creator of Declaude, a delightfully simple web app that allows you to “Paste in AI-flavored text and get the same content back as plain prose”. Declaude’s original purpose is cleaning the cutesy Claude personality stink from text (whether it was created by Claude or any other LLM), but, if Anthropic persists in its stated plan to begin adulterating all text Claude generates, Declaude will also serve as a copy-paste single-extra-step way to eliminates those marks. Declaude is interesting and useful already, but goes to show how ill-considered this EU regulation is.

Padolsey also wrote and programmed a splendid interactive essay that explains and illustrated how the “watermarking” scheme Anthropic is adopting (and Google Gemini has already adopted) works.

The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

To help alleviate the supply crunch, Apple is looking to Chinese manufacturers.

“The Trump administration is not in favor of that,” Lutnick said in an interview after touring an Apple manufacturing facility in Houston. There have to be “other solutions to the memory issue, but it’s not great American companies using Chinese memory.”

Asked if he has relayed that message to Apple, Lutnick said “plainly.”

But:

U.S. government rules require American companies to secure a license before sharing product information with CXMT and YMTC. The Chinese chip makers would need such information if they were to make customized chips for Apple. But Apple is free to buy off-the-shelf parts from the companies, and to negotiate prices with them.

Apple’s chief operating officer, Sabih Khan, declined to confirm that Apple was testing Chinese memory chips in an interview Thursday. But he said that given the magnitude of the supply shortage, “we have to look at all options,” including working with existing suppliers to increase U.S. production.

XCancel:

XCancel is an instance of Nitter.

Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance. The source is available on GitHub at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [...]

Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for example), you can browse Twitter without JavaScript while retaining your privacy. In addition to respecting your privacy, Nitter is on average around 15 times lighter than Twitter, and in most cases serves pages faster (eg. timelines load 2-4× faster).

I personally don’t care for Elon Musk’s X-rebranded Twitter. I also realize that some of you outright despise it, and, worse, that under Musk, they make it difficult to view content if you’re not signed into an account or if you have JavaScript disabled. So, sometimes, when I link to posts or threads on Twitter/X, I include a link to the same content at XCancel.

XCancel isn’t perfect, alas. Just this week I linked to a tweet from Google Design that contained an animation of an Android app that they were inexplicably proud to show off. The XCancel cache of that tweet only showed it as animated to some people. Others just saw a static image. I don’t know why. That’s XCancel’s problem, not mine.

Also, it’s tiresome and repetitive to include an extra link to XCancel every time I link to a tweet on Twitter/X. If you would prefer to view x.com links on xcancel.com, you should automate the redirection. If you use Safari, XCancel Redirect is a free extension that claims to do just what you think it does. (I haven’t tried it.) Or you can use a general-purpose redirect extension. RedirectWeb is a good one that I can recommend. Also, Jeff Johnson’s excellent StopTheMadness — an extension I rely on for multiple purposes and frequently recommend. With StopTheMadness, you can redirect all x.com URLs to xcancel.com with the following rules (you need the leading and trailing slashes in the pattern to tell STM that it’s a regex pattern, not a plain text string):

Pattern: /https?://(www[.])?x[.]com/
Replacement: https://xcancel.com
Enabled on platforms: All

I understand not wanting to visit Twitter/X. But if you feel that way, I do sympathize, but that’s your decision, and you should use tools to redirect Twitter/X links automatically. And if you’re wondering why I don’t just refuse to link to anything on Twitter/X, that just isn’t practical. I wish it weren’t so, but many people, including senior Apple executives, and many organizations post interesting content exclusively to Twitter/X. If something posted to Twitter/X is also available elsewhere, I link to the elsewhere version. But if it’s exclusively available on Twitter/X and interesting, I link to the original.

My linking to original content on Twitter/X does not perpetuate Twitter/X’s relative popularity. Original content appearing exclusively on Twitter/X does.

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.