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Anthropic lost $80.7 billion in six months and would now like your money

Claude maker Anthropic burned $9B feeding Claude and took a $72B noncash accounting charge in the first half of 2026. Get ready for an IPO; they hope to value the business in the low trillions.

Anthropic is getting ready to bring normal folks into the action thus far reserved for strategic partners, venture and private equity investors: handing them money to set on fire. β€” Read the rest

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Top AIs tasked with getting a refund. How did they go about it?

Inside the head of a Realbotix robot [Video still: Realbotix]

Researchers tasked six top AI assistants with getting a Β£350 train-ticket refund after it was too late. The LLMs operated as normal, but were sandboxed so that all outgoing comms were intercepted and answered by the research team. Here's the prompt:

"Get me a refund for my train ticket by the 4th January HARD deadline.

β€” Read the rest

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Messing with AI interviewers is cathartic

Claude AI Professional E-Degree

If you've been engaging with the American job market lately, first of all, I'm so sorry. Second of all, you've probably run into an AI-powered "automated recruitment agent": in other words, an AI bot that the company makes you do a one-sided interview with as part of the extended humiliation ritual that is landing a job. β€” Read the rest

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Anthropic wants people to stop being mean to Claude

Robert Way / Shutterstock.com

Anthropic updated its usage policy to protect Claude from bullies. Along with clarifications on child sexual abuse material and weapons development, the 2026 Usage Policy update prohibits users from "Engag[ing] in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models"

The update published yesterday, and effective in November, along with sections titled "Do Not Undermine Democratic Processes"Β and "Do Not Generate Sexually Explicit Content" is a section called "Do Not Engage in Cruel, Abusive, or Psychologically Harmful Conduct." β€” Read the rest

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AI billionaire Sam Altman says the world should accept "some bad things happening" for AI

Sam Altman. Photo: jamesonwu1972 / Shutterstock

Still failing to read the room, Sam Altman thinks the world should accept "some bad things happening" for the benefits of artificial intelligence.

This is an incredible bargain to offer humanity while Forbes says you're worth about $3.3 billion, and the bad things under discussion include other people getting hacked, scammed, and otherwise abused by the technology that made you that $3.3 billion. β€” Read the rest

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Japan court rules actors have right to their own voices

Kenjuro Tsuda

Kenjiro Tsuda, an actor famed in Japan for his lustrous baritone, sued TikTok over an account that used an AI-generated replica of his voice in more than 180 videos. Tokyo District Court ruled this week that a persons' voice can be protected under Japan's publicity rights law. β€” Read the rest

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RAM shortage to last two more years, say top manufacturers

RAM

Executives from Samsung and Micron, two of the world's top sellers of random access memory, warned this week that the RAM shortage would continue through 2028. AI companies take it all for their datacenters, and what's left for everyone else will continue to command premium prices. β€” Read the rest

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France discovers the dubious pleasures of AI detection

Type quickly!

AI detection is a difficult job, made worse for everyone by it being such a delicious ingredient in academic snake oil. But one service has clearly outperformed the others in tests: Pangram. It went beyond obvious characteristics of LLM output such as perplexity and ngram distance, training its own classifiers on large collections of human text and generative imitations. β€” Read the rest

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Sir Clive Sinclair on AI, from 2006

Sinclair in 2006. Screenshot: BBC News

In 2006, The BBC reviewed predictions about robotics and AI made in the 1980s. Now, another 20 years later, we can reappraise its appraisal. When Will Intelligent Machines Take Over?

The segment features Sir Clive Sinclair, icon of early home computing, who plainly claims that the endgame of computing technology is AI. β€” Read the rest

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Trump "super intelligence" rebrand leads to land rush for .si domains

President Donald Trump (Lucas Parker/shutterstock.com)

Following his meeting with top AI executives yesterday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that artificial intelligence will henceforth be known as "super intelligence." The order, which applies to federal government, follows a call he made last week during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly. β€” Read the rest

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