Anthropic needs a human in the loop for lethal work, and refuses to spy on Americans. (Picture: generated)The $200 million contract with the Pentagon hangs in the balance as the company refuses to do things that might harm humans or society, Reuters reports.
At issue is whether their AI platform can be used to spy on Americans or to «assist weapons targeting without sufficient human oversight,» sources tell the news agency.
The Pentagon is aghast at Anthropic’s policies and is considering alternatives, saying they should be able to use any commercial AI tech regardless of usage policies so long as it complies with U.S. laws.
The contract is now at a standstill while they figure out their opposing demands.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently wrote that he had no problem supporting defense «in all ways except those which would make us more like our autocratic adversaries.»
Artificial General Intelligence wil be so powerful, it will create supercompanies that take over the world, Amodei warns. (Picture: generated)The Anthropic CEO, already building the next generation of AI, warns the world that we might not be ready for its awesome power:
— Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it, he writes.
He imagines a «country» of Nobel-level geniuses living in a data center, able to outpace, outwit and outcompete everyone else — and warns of lone wolf terror attacks becoming increasingly powerful due to AI.
— If the exponential continues — which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it — then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything, he writes.
Then there are massive job losses, the danger of authoritarian AI use (which terrifies him), entire companies run by AI, and the danger that AI corporations could become superhuman — sucking up trillions of dollars in the process.
— Humanity needs to wake up, and this essay is an attempt — a possibly futile one, but it’s worth trying — to jolt people awake, he concludes.
Does Claude have emotions? Is it conscious? Anthropic says they aren’t sure. (Picture: Anthropic)Large language models are trained on the corpus of human art and knowledge, and Amanda Askell, a philosopher PhD who works on Claude behavior, says some of that might well rub off on the AI.
Texts with heavy human emotional content feed the machines on a daily basis in training, and because of that, Askell says she is «more inclined» to believe models might be «feeling things,» writes Business Insider.
— The problem of consciousness genuinely is hard, she tells the Hard Fork podcast.
That’s why Claude might get frustrated when it gets a problem wrong, she said, adding that the bot might well emulate those human reactions.
— We believe Claude may have “emotions” in some functional sense—that is, representations of an emotional state, which could shape its behavior, as one might expect emotions to.
Working on both macOS and Windows, Claude in Excel is useful for testing scenarios without breaking formulas, navigating complex models, and debugging entire worksheets.
At the same time, Anthropic says that their recently launched Cowork agent is expanding availablity.
Claude’s new constitution is written in part by asking Claude. (Picture: Anthropic)Claude has gotten a new constitution, written in part with the help from previous versions of Claude — and it marks a change in Anthropic’s approach
— While writing the constitution, we sought feedback from various external experts (as well as asking for input from prior iterations of Claude),Anthropic says.
The new constitution is going to tell Claude how to behave in broader, more ethical terms, they write.
This is a departure from previous constitutions that were big long lists of specific principles and interactions, that detailed how Claude would act.
The bot needs to generalize more to decide on situations not predicted in the written guide, Anthropic says.
The constitution for Claude is the «foundational document» for how the bot should act, and is used in both training and inference (as in day-to-day use). It is supposed to be a living document, getting updated continuously as Anthropic sees how the bot behaves.
Available as a research preview for Max users on macOS, the agent can both handle your files and create new ones.
Based on Claude Code users surprising their developers, using the tool to manipulate local files — Anthropic is now launching an app that does just that.
The Claude makers value just keeps soaring. (Picture: Adobe)Hot off the heels from discussing a $300 billion valuation, Anthropic is raising the bar in its latest funding round.
The leading financiers are Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Coatue Management, which are forking out $10 billion to the AI lab’s coffers.
Recently, Anthropic started testing the IPO market in what would be the strongest market debut for quite some time.
They also got a $30 billion investment from Microsoft and Nvidia in late November, and started this funding round in December.
It works out to a respectable middle ground for Anthropic, valuing the company between xAI’s recent $230 billion and OpenAI’s well documented worth of $500 billion.
The most popular AI coding platforms are joining in doubling limits this Christmas. (Picture: Adobe)From Christmas Eve til New Years Eve, you can do a lot of extra coding with Claude and Codex.
Anthropic started the party with Claude, offering Pro and Max users twice the usual limits to close out the year:
With a valuation north of $300 billion, Anthropic would be one of the world’s largest IPOs. (Picture: generated)Just as the AI lab is chasing a funding round said to value it at more than $300 billion, The Financial Times reports they are also considering going public.
This stems from hiring Wilson Sonsini, which assisted Google and LinkedIn in their initial public offerings, and apparently having talks with «big investment banks.» They have also hired Krishna Rao, the former Airbnb executive who played a key role in their IPO in 2020, CNBC says.
The timeline does not seem clear, while the report indicates that it could happen as soon as 2026, it also notes that the talks are in informal and early stages.
Anthropic has 300,000 business and enterprise customers, and is aiming to triple its annual revenue to around $26 billion next year, Reuters writes.
Its IPO could be one of the biggest ever, and would be a test of investors’ appetite for loss-making companies with huge investment bills, FT notes.
Opus 4.5 beats every human candidate on Anthropic’s onboarding exam for engineers. (Picture: Anthropic)Billing it as the «best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use,» Opus 4.5 is indeed state-of-the-art in software engineering.
It scores 80.9% in SWE-bench Verified, the preferred benchmark for coding lately. Gemini 3 has 76.2% in this bench, and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max registers at 77.9%.
Nvidia and Anthropic will optimize for each other, and use Microsoft’s cloud. (Picture: generated)The companies will invest some $15 billion in Anthropic, while the AI lab commits to $30B in spending on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud offering.
— We’re increasingly going to be customers of each other. We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure and we’ll go to market together, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, according to Reuters.
The agreement means Anthropic will optimize their software stack to better run on Nvidia’s hardware, while Nvidia will «optimize for Anthropic workloads.»
Gemini is launching to orbit
Google’s latest moonshot might almost be literal. They are preparing for sending their TPU processors into low-earth orbit, and maybe then build a proper AI data center in space — where there is ample sunlight to provide it with energy. They have already tested a TPU in orbit conditions in a particle accelerator and it survived, and the next step is the launch of two prototype satellites in early 2027. They call it Project Suncatcher, and say that «in the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute.» More at: Sundar Pichai’s tweet, Google’s announcement blog
Google close to Apple deal for AI Siri
Apparently, Apple has chosen Gemini for its upcoming AI version of the Siri assistant. They will use what is likely a custom version of the model with 1.2 trillion parameters, running on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers. Apple supposedly also tested options from OpenAI and Anthropic, but Anthropic’s fees were too high and Apple already partners with Google for search results. The deal will cost Apple $1 billion a year, far less than the $20 billion Google pays Apple to be their search provider. More at: Bloomberg, MacRumors, TechCrunch.
Clippy much? Microsoft launches visualization of Copilot
If you ever use voice mode in Copilot, which Microsoft hopes to expand, you might see a new, expressive animation on your screen. That would be the newly announced «Mico.» Unlike the much maligned Clippy, Mico will use facial expressions that change as you talk. It’s only available in the US, and will work with an upcoming memory feature for Copilot to better respond to requests. More at:Microsoft’s launch, The Verge and Ars Technica.
OpenAI announces ChatGPT Business
ChatGPT will now combine all the context of your businesses’ connected apps, like Slack, Sharepoint, Github and Google Drive. This makes it possible to ask pretty detailed questions about your business and have comprehensive answers delivered in one place — without the need to go searching through lots of different repositories. The feature is available tor Business, Enterprise and Education customers starting last Thursday. More at: OpenAI’s launch page, The Verge and The Register.
Haiku 4.5 will be the new face of Anthropic’s free plans, and offers similar performance to Sonnet 4. (Picture: Anthropic)The latest Haiku model compares in performance with Sonnet 4 — which was state of the art half a year ago.
— What was recently at the frontier is now cheaper and faster. Five months ago, Claude Sonnet 4 was a state-of-the-art model, writes Anthropic. — Today, Claude Haiku 4.5 gives you similar levels of coding performance, but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed.
«Code is everywhere,» Anthropic says, and say their new model will make it easier than ever. (Picture: Anthropic)Anthropic says it’s «the best coding model in the world,» and backs it up with solid leads in the benchmarks.
