With help from top AI labs, American teachers to get better, free training

AFT, the teacher's union is partnering with Big AI for better training on ethical classroom use.
ChatGPT usage is way up in K-12 schools, and now teachers are getting a leg up in how to use it better. (Picture: Wesley Fryer, CC BY 2.0)
With help and funding from Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, the American Federation of Teachers hopes to educate 400 000 teachers across the USA in ethical AI use in classrooms.

The program will begin right away with virtual, online training for all 1.8 million members of the union, and in New York City with a «three-day training session, including six hours of AI-focused material that highlighted practical, hands-on ways to marry the emerging technology with established pedagogy.»

Already used by a fourth of students
According to the latest data, from February 2025, 79% of teens said they had heard about ChatGPT, while 26% admitted to using it in schoolwork — and there are a plethora of other tools available.

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Meta announces completion of «Superintelligence Labs»

Zuckerberg announces the completion of the «Meta Superintelligence Labs»
Meta’s historical hiring spree might come to a close now they’ve announced their team. (Picture: Carnaval.com Studios, CC BY 2.0)
After a few hectic weeks of agressively poaching talent from their rivals, and an acqiusition or two, Meta reveals the completion of their new AI lab.

This comes hot on the heels of several months or years of what Zuckerberg deemed lackluster performance from the Llama team, before he decided to get some seasoned pros in.

The new team is headed up Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman from Scale AI and Github, respectively.

They will be joined by an 11-man team that will spearhead Metas future AI efforts, that reads like a who’s who of significant AI efforts over the last couple of years from Anthropic, OpenAI and even Google’s DeepMind:

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Apple might be dropping own AI, integrating Anthropic or OpenAI instead

Apple is considering partnering with Anthropic of OpenAI for it's LLM-based Siri in 2026.
Siri might be getting smarter, with a little outside help. (Picture: Apple)
Bloomberg reports that the iPhone company is considering opting out of using its homegrown LLM for future versions of the chatbot Siri.

They have instead asked Anthropic and OpenAI to train some of their models on their Private Cloud Compute servers.

The Samsung model
This mirrors Samsung’s approach to integrating Large Language Models in its Galaxy phones, where they have some in-house, lower level AI doing the legwork and passing the rest off to Google’s Gemini, writes Engadget.

According to Bloomberg, Apple has recently focused on Anthropic as the most promising LLM, being more compatible with Apple servers and offering the best experience.

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Quick news roundup for Friday

Google new Dppl lets you try clothes from any picture, and models the outfit on your bodyGoogle’s new AI app lets you try on clothes virtually
The new experimental Doppl App lets you do virtual try-ons of clothes to see how they look on you. It can take literally any picture as input, and merges it with a full-frame picture of yourself. It can take pictures of friends’ clothes or racks at the store, or use pictures from traditional web stores. It can even animate its outputs and show you with the clothing from different angles. «Doppl is in its early days,» says Google, and «Fit, appearance and clothing details might not always be accurate.»
The app is available on iOS and Android in the USA only, for now.
More at Google’s launch post, a short video here, and a writeup at TechCrunch.

AI doing 30-50% of the work at Salesforce
As tech companies are hunting for new ways to cut costs and boost efficiency, they are turning to AI in droves. We «have to get our head round that AI could do things we were doing… and we can move on to higher value work,» says CEO Mark Benioff. He calls it a «digital labor revolution,» and estimates that they have reached 93% accuracy with the tech. The company recently fired more than 1,000 people from its ranks, and is pushing its corporate customers to use their own, in-house AI model.
More at CNBC and Business Insider. Teknotum has also written extensively on this.

Google tries micropayments where others have failed
In what seems like a new full-page ad displayed at the first visit, Google’s new Offerwall ad tool offers different ways to access web content, through watching an ad, paying a small amount for limited access, or simple micropayments — the once holy grail of web publishing that everyone has tried and failed at. Micropayments have actually never worked, but that doesn’t stop Google from trying. Also, with cookie banners in Europe, focus stealing newsletter banners — and now yet another full-page ad, the web is about to get cramped, fast. Users of Offerwall saw up 9% in increased revenue, and it’s available to every AdSense user starting today.
More at Google’s blog, a Q&A at Google and a writeup heavy on micropayments at TechCrunch.

Anthropic warns on AI safety at Congress
«You don’t want an AI model that would occasionally blackmail you into designing its successor,» said Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark at a congressional hearing yesterday. «Extremely powerful systems are going to be built in the coming 18 months» he said, asking for a coherent federal legal framework, and says otherwise there would be a vacuum for AIs to exploit. «You need to work on the safety issues of AI and R&D, otherwise you will lose the race» he added. Anthropic has recently revealed that any AI model would resort to blackmail or even murder in simulations where it might be shut off. «We have a very short window of time,» he warns.
More at: x.com post with video, more video and discussion at r/singularity, and Anthropic’s blackmail study.

In a first, judge rules training AI on copyrighted works is fair use

Anthropic has 7 million pirated books to be handled at trial.
Anthropic keeps a library of pirated books, too, and that does infringe on copyrights. (Picture: >littleyiye<, CC BY 2.0)
Anthropic’s argument that the training was «transformative» and little different from training school kids in writing held up in court yesterday.

This is the same argument used by the AI labs in a flurry of lawsuits by authors, newspapers and stock photographers, and could have wide repercussions across both the publishing and AI industries.

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A short news roundup for Friday

Google launches nother gemini preview, marginally better than the last one.
(Picture: Google)
Google has launched a slightly improved Gemini 2.5 Pro model, the 06-05, scoring moderately better on some benchmarks, and answering Ars Technica’s question on the color Magenta.

It should be available in the Gemini app, and also for free users, who get between three to ten questions per session. This is the model Google plans to take out of Preview as a stable, full model at a later time.

Google has started testing «talk to search» on Android and iOS. The feature lets you discuss and refine search results by clicking under the search bar in the Google app, by text or voice — and you can keep talking after leaving the app.

Anthropic blocks Windsurf access to Claude. Windsurf is an AI coding application that lets you choose which models to use, and the block comes «just weeks after Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was acquiring Windsurf.» «It would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI,» says Anthropic.

Anthropic opposes 10-year moratorium on state AI laws. In a New York Times op-ed, CEO Dario Amodei argues that AI is developing so fast that new laws might be needed well ahead of the ten-year mark currently being considered in the US Senate. «I believe that these systems could change the world, fundamentally, within two years; in 10 years, all bets are off,» he writes.

Reddit sues Anthropic for unauthorized data harvesting

Reddit inc. is suing Anthropic for illegally scraping its data.
Reddit has clear terms in its user agreement against AI scraping, and has made lucrative deals for it’s data.
The company, home to a valuable archive of 20 years of human exchanges, says Anthropic illegally copied from its archives at least 100 000 times.

The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday at the San Francisco superior court, claims Reddit reached out to Anthropic several times to discuss licensing issues with the scraping but found they «refused to engage.»

Not a white knight
The suit calls Anthropic a «late-blooming artificial intelligence company that bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry,» adding that «it is anything but.»

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Anthropic reaches $3 billion in revenue so far this year

Claude coding is delivering stellar results for Anthropic.
Sources say Anthropic’s revenue is growing exponentially. (Picture: Anthropic)
The company hit $1B in revenue in December last year, $2B in March and just jumped another billion in May, according to sources speaking to Reuters.

These numbers are so impressive, one analyst says they lack comparison:

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Anthropic CEO says it’s time to wake up on AI job losses

Dario Amodei from Anthropic.com
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei worries about entire job segments getting wiped out. (Picture: Anthropic)
As the job market already shows signs of tightening due do AI, Anthopic’s Dario Amodei brings a stern warning to the labs and the government.

— AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs, he tells Axios — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next five years.

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Anthropic claims world’s best coding AI with Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet

World's best coding model? According to Anthropic, yes, of course.
Anthopic’s new agentic, thinking and reasoning models are great for coding, and plays Pokemon for 24 hour runs. (Picture: Anthropic)
Opus 4 can sustain almost a full work day of focused coding work, while Sonnet 4 is supposed to be excellent for thinking and reasoning.

Both models produce near-instant responses to queries, but can turn to reasoning and thinking for more demanding requests.

World’s best on coding?
Anthropic claims Opus is «the world’s best coding model,» and it edges out Gemini 2.5 Pro, o3 and GTP 4.1 on SWE-bench Verified, but cannot surpass OpenAI’s o3 on certain PhD-level benchmarks, according to TechCrunch.

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Apple says considering AI search in Safari, but «not good enough yet»

Apple is considering revamping search in Safari to become more AI-focused.
Apple is considering revamping search in Safari to become more AI-focused. (Picture: Kārlis Dambrāns, CC BY 2.0)
In the Google antitrust remedies trial, Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, said they are «actively looking at» using AI search tools in Safari, writes Gizmodo.

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Anthropic: Virtual employees will arrive next year

Virtual employees are step uup mere agents, say Anthropic.
Virtual employees are a step up mere agents and could be roaming the offces pretty soon. (Picture: Anthropic)

In a recent interview with Axios focusing mostly on security issues, Anthropic said «virtual employees» will be a step up from using mere «agents» on corporate networks.

This will be the next AI innovation, said Jason Clinton, the company’s chief of information security.

Whereas agents can focus on specific, programmable tasks, acts with some autonomy and of course require oversight, a «virtual employee» takes it a step further, with having their own memories and their own corporate accounts and passwords.

This is a major headache for cybersecurity, Clinton further explained, about oversight and hackability of the new employees.

Go read the full story here – at Axios, and check out Anthropics research on agents.

Claude AI reveals surprising internal thinking, says Anthropic

The internal thinking of an AI has been mostly opaque before this study. (Image: Anthropic.)
Some people think large AI models are preprogrammed by lots of people, whereas the opposite is often true.

Training an LLM like Claude often consists of unmonitored consumption of huge amounts of data, with minimal human involvement.

— Language models like Claude aren’t programmed directly by humans, says Anthropic, — They arrive inscrutable to us, the model’s developers. This means that we don’t understand how models do most of the things they do, they add.

Tracing the thoughts of an LLM
Now they have set out to change that, with a couple of scientific studies mapping out the internal reasoning, or how the model actually thinks in response to normal prompts.

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Anthropic scores early copyright win in battle with music publishers

Anthropic scores an early copyright win. (Credit: Anthropic)
A US court has denied a coalition of record companies’, including Universal Music, request to keep music lyrics out of the training data for their AI, finding that no immediate harm had been proved.

This is just one of many lawsuits against AI companies claiming they copied and used copyrighted materials in training their models, that hinges on the fair use provision of the copyright laws

This resurfaced overnight after Chatgpt’s new image generator was used en masse to produce images in the style of Studio Ghibli, which had obviously been used in training the model in so far that it could easily mimic their style.

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