US government

2026-10-30

MONEY · 1 SOURCE · TechCrunch AI

Intel shares plunge 28% after weak Q4 outlook, shaving $12B off US government's stake

Intel's stock fell about 28% after the company gave a weak Q4 outlook (revenue $15–16B vs. ~ $17B expected), warned gross margin would drop to ~37% from 43%, and said heavy investments mean no positive cash flow; the decline trimmed roughly $12 billion from the value of the US government's roughly 10% stake. Intel said data-center revenue rose 78% year-over-year, but capacity constraints at its fabs (one Arizona fab online, next not expected until 2028) and AI-driven memory shortages and higher PC prices are weighing on PC demand.

6.0

2026-10-07

COMPANIES · 1 SOURCE · The Decoder

Anthropic opens broader security access to Claude via Cyber Verification Program

Anthropic is expanding its Cyber Verification Program (CVP) to give a wider range of vetted security professionals and organizations access to Claude’s more powerful models with reduced safety filters for vulnerability research, malware analysis, incident response, and penetration testing. The CVP has three tiers — Defense Access (corporate security teams, government, universities, critical infrastructure operators, open-source developers, and individual researchers), Red Team Access (authorized attack simulations, organizations only), and Specialized Access (testing critical systems, vetted with the US government). Public Claude models still block most offensive work, while basic code review and patching remain possible without CVP access.

7.0

2026-10-06

MODELS · 1 SOURCE · Anthropic

Anthropic expands Cyber Verification Program to give vetted security teams access to Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Mythos 5.1

Anthropic launched an expanded Cyber Verification Program (CVP) with three access tiers — Defense Access, Red Team Access, and Specialized Access — to grant qualifying security professionals reduced blocking and access to its most capable models (Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Claude Mythos 5.1 and future models). The program includes tiered verification and controls, required data retention for monitoring (with an option for zero-retention via Enterprise Frontier Safeguards later this fall), and maintains safeguards against actions that could cause physical harm or mass disruption.

7.0

2026-10-06

MODELS · 3 SOURCES · TechCrunch AI · The Decoder · WIRED AI

Reflection unveils Beam, a 501B-parameter open-weight model claiming frontier performance at lower compute

Reflection AI announced Beam, a text-only, open-weight mixture-of-experts model with 501 billion total parameters (23 billion active), a 1 million token context window, and pretraining on 23.8 trillion tokens. The startup says Beam matches top Chinese open models on advanced reasoning benchmarks while using '3–4x less inference compute,' will publish weights and full technical details this month, and is targeting enterprises and sovereign 'AI factory' deployments; the performance claims have not been independently verified.

8.0

2026-09-18

MODELS · 4 SOURCES · Anthropic · TechCrunch AI · The Verge AI · The Decoder

Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5 — lower-cost model claiming near‑frontier performance

Anthropic announced Claude Opus 5, a new model positioned as a cost‑efficient successor to Opus 4.8 and the new default on Claude Max (and the strongest on Claude Pro). Anthropic says Opus 5 matches or exceeds prior models on many coding, knowledge‑work and scientific benchmarks (Frontier‑Bench, GDPval‑AA, CursorBench, ARC‑AGI, Zapier AutomationBench, OSWorld) at lower cost per task while remaining behind Mythos 5 on security and biology frontier tasks; the company also reports improved alignment and safety in pre‑deployment audits and links a System Card for more details.

8.0

2026-09-16

REGULATION · 1 SOURCE · Anthropic

Anthropic says it does not advocate banning open-weights models and urges chip controls, distillation crackdowns, and mandatory safety testing

Anthropic clarifies it has never supported a ban on open-weights models, calling non-dangerous open models a public good. The company says bans would not address its main national-security concerns (authoritarian states gaining superior AI and misuse for cyber/biological attacks) and instead advocates restricting sales of powerful chips to China, cracking down on industrial-scale distillation, and requiring mandatory safety testing of sufficiently capable models.

7.0