Artificial intelligence powerhouse Anthropic’s battle with the Pentagon has sparked some soul-searching in Silicon Valley that could reshape the tech sector’s complicated relationship with war and the White House. Anthropic is the San Francisco-based startup behind the chatbot Claude and some of the most powerful AI on the market. In its negotiations with the military,…
WHITE SALMON, Wash. — Seth McBride’s life was forever changed on a snowy mountainside in British Columbia. McBride was — and is — a thrill-seeker. Growing up in Juneau, Ala., with the untamed outdoors as his stomping ground, he loved to rock climb, mountain bike and, especially, strap on his skis and fly, soaring headlong off heart-pounding…
With U.S. and Israeli forces continuing offensive strikes on Iran, federal counterterrorism authorites are warning that the desperate theocracy could launch retaliatory strikes on American soil using sleeper cells, affiliated Iranian terrorist groups, lone wolf sympathizers or targeted cyberattacks. Within days of the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28, cryptic…
In another setback for the Nancy Guthrie kidnap probe, DNA on a glove found in the first weeks of the investigation turned out to belong to a restaurant worker and is unrelated to her masked abductor, officials said. The news came as Savannah Guthrie, one of Nancy’s daughters and co-anchor of NBC’s “Today” show, on…
Savannah Guthrie made her way back to NBC’s studios in New York on Thursday after more than a month off-air, but not in her usual capacity. Instead of helping “Today” viewers begin their day, the longtime morning news anchor paid an off-camera visit to her NBC family amid her 84-year-old mother Nancy Guthrie’s abduction in…
WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at a Senate oversight hearing Tuesday ready to spar with Democrats in her first Capitol Hill appearance since federal agents fatally shot U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. But some of the sharpest comments from the Judiciary Committee came from fellow Republicans, who questioned her leadership,…
OpenAI’s Sam Altman said the company will amend its deal with the Defense Department (or the Department of War) to explicitly prohibit the use of its AI system on mass surveillance against Americans. Altman has published an internal memo previously sent to employees on X, telling them that the company will tweak the agreement to…
Santa Cruz tried out the surveillance company Flock Safety for a little over a year before deciding it was time to move on. Cambridge, Mass., also had enough and tore up its contract in December. Now, some officials in San Diego have begun to have second thoughts of their own. In recent months, dozens of…
Abandoned at the airport with nothing but a leash and a lot of confusion, a young goldendoodle has landed somewhere better than any arrival gate — on the couch of the officer who rescued him. The dog was found tied to a carry-on-baggage sizer by the JetBlue ticket counter at Terminal 3 at Las Vegas’…
Recently, I asked Claude, an artificial-intelligence thingy at the center of a standoff with the Pentagon, if it could be dangerous in the wrong hands. Say, for example, hands that wanted to put a tight net of surveillance around every American citizen, monitoring our lives in real time to ensure our compliance with government. “Yes….