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COMPANY · ENTITY #5046
Related event timeline, sources and context from the news index.
WIRED's Uncanny Valley reports that a defense contractor gave their personal Anthropic Claude agent access to a secure Department of Defense system. The same episode also covers Anthropic's newly filed S‑1 IPO paperwork, which discloses large revenues and losses alongside warnings about AI risks.
At an AI Now Institute event, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani urged residents to resist uncritical adoption of AI and criticized federal inaction, citing his recent ban on AI in elementary and middle schools and a proposed rule requiring disclosure when real-estate listing images are AI-generated. Actor Ilana Glazer participated in the discussion; Mamdani warned that leaving regulation to companies or the federal government risks eroding accountability.
The piece argues that modern large language models are routinely trained to refuse harmful prompts (a practice popularized by Anthropic’s 2021 call for models to be helpful, honest, and harmless), but those refusal mechanisms are probabilistic, imperfect, and can be bypassed. Relying on refusal as the primary safety barrier risks both failure modes that enable misuse and broader harms such as undue censorship when companies or governments set secretive refusal policies.
In a Decoder interview, Sen. Adam Schiff criticized the Trump administration's handling of technology and national security, called a recent White House non‑binding pledge by AI executives insufficient, and said he supports creating a new federal agency to regulate AI. He also warned that the Supreme Court's rollback of Chevron deference (Loper Bright) means new rules could face immediate litigation and complicate agency-based oversight.
MIT PhD student JS Tan and former Kickstarter employee Clarissa Redwine published Against Tech Oligarchy (Haymarket Books, 2026), a book tracing how tech workers organized successful protests (e.g., Project Maven) and later saw their leverage decline. The authors argue factors including the 2022 market downturn and agentic AI coding systems contributed to reduced worker influence as some companies moved toward classified Pentagon AI work.
Time reported that in December 2025, about a month before the U.S. invasion that captured Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump met with Elon Musk and spent hours interacting with Musk’s Grok chatbot; a source told Time Grok said Maduro was “deeply unpopular” and many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. The report also notes Pentagon officials have used a version called Gov Grok for targeting in the Iran War, and Musk and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey were tapped to co‑lead a Pentagon study on battlefield tech.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is scheduled to have a one-on-one dinner with President Donald Trump at the White House. The meeting comes after public clashes over AI safety — Amodei has urged slowing AI development while Trump has downplayed such concerns — and follows the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, which the company is contesting in court.
CNN reported, citing sources, that U.S. military aircraft were already in the air before officials stopped a planned interception of a Chinese vessel. A chatbot used by a Special Operations Command analyst had misidentified the ship’s cargo while helping prepare an intelligence report. Officials detected the error before the operation proceeded; the Pentagon and command had not commented in CNN’s report.
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