Santa Clara County
Anthropic automatically signs out Claude users to protect them from hackers
Stolen Claude logins have serious resale value at scale. Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told Axios in August that a trade has grown up around hijacked AI accounts, with criminals trafficking credentials for Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. Meanwhile, findings by Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 have traced hijacked accounts to proxy services known as transfer stations. These pool stolen credentials and resell access to AI services at a much lower cost than retail. Anthropic doesn't publish exact figures for its Claude usage limits, but every prompt has a compute cost, which the company absorbs when a stolen session is doing the prompting.
John Ternus succeeds Tim Cook as Apple CEO after 15 years
John Ternus has officially taken over as the chief executive officer of Apple, succeeding Tim Cook, who ended a 15-year tenure leading the tech giant. Ternus, who took the helm on Tuesday, had been serving as the senior vice president for hardware engineering at the Cupertino, California-based company since 2021. Ternus is an old hand at the company. He joined Apple's product design team in 2001 and climbed the ranks. He was appointed vice president of hardware engineering in 2013 and was promoted in 2021 to the senior vice president role that he has now moved up from.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Took a Call From Donald Trump in the Middle of an All-Hands
The unexpected interruption came hours before the president wrote a congratulatory post on Truth Social about the company's most recent earnings report. US President Donald Trump listens as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks at the White House during an event on "Investing in America" on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. President Donald Trump interrupted Nvidia's all-hands staff meeting on Thursday morning when he called CEO Jensen Huang midway through, three sources who witnessed the interaction tell WIRED. Nvidia's all-hands meetings typically involve Huang presenting or answering questions, on stage, to in-person staff at the company's Santa Clara, California, headquarters, while thousands of remote employees tune in to a virtual livestream. During the meeting on Thursday, Huang received a call on his mobile phone, which he stepped aside to take.
AI professors are negotiating the new realities of academic research
At a convening for the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 program, I saw how academic researchers are facing up to the challenges of the AI era. Last week, I headed 30 miles south of San Francisco to a hotel in Mountain View, California, to join some of the most accomplished, and some of the most promising, AI researchers in the world. I was hosting roundtable interviews and speaking at a media training for a convening of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 program, an initiative funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that supports academics whose work involves AI. The fellows list is a who's who of AI luminaries, and though not all of them made it out to the Bay, every time I turned a corner I saw a scientist whom I'd interviewed previously or whose research I admired. It's a weird time for university AI researchers, who make up most of the AI2050 group. In the past four years, AI research has reoriented around large language models, and its cutting edge has moved from academic institutions to private companies.
AI is now making new viruses
Did we learn nothing from sci-fi? A study published in Science (via The New York Times) details how researchers used an AI model to design new viruses capable of infecting and reproducing inside bacteria. The good news: they took appropriate precautions, and their work could lead to breakthroughs in gene therapy and biotechnology. The bad news: the next guys might not be so generous. Scientists at Palo Alto's Arc Institute and Stanford University created the viruses with the genome language models Evo 1 and Evo 2. They work somewhat like large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT or Claude.
Nvidia Wants to Own Every Chip Inside AI Data Centers
Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform combines CPUs and GPUs into a single system, reflecting the company's growing ambition to power every layer of AI infrastructure. Nvidia is hyping up its new Vera Rubin chip system this week, revealing new performance benchmarks for the GPU and CPU combo ahead of rival AMD's annual product event in San Francisco on Thursday. During a lengthy technical workshop last week at the company's headquarters in Santa Clara, California, Nvidia executives boasted to a small group of journalists about the chip system's increased power and efficiency capabilities. The biggest takeaway: Nvidia, which has long specialized in making GPUs, is increasingly trying to position itself as a supplier of CPUs that can power AI agents. While GPUs are still the main hardware that companies use to train and run their AI models, the industry's shift toward more complex, agentic systems has increased demand for CPUs, which can orchestrate data flows, networking, and other software tasks.
Apple regains top spot as world's most valuable company
Apple regains top spot as world's most valuable company Apple has surpassed chipmaker Nvidia as the world's most valuable company as artificial intelligence-driven market pressures weigh on investors. Apple is now worth $4.88 trillion compared with Nvidia's $4.86 trillion, following a 3.5 percent decline in Nvidia's market value. The milestone marks the first time the Cupertino, California-based iPhone maker has held the top spot in more than a year. Last month, Apple unveiled a revamped version of its assistant, Siri AI, which enables the personal assistant to better understand the personal context of users' questions, access real-time information from the Web, and perform more complex tasks on behalf of users. "Market sentiment has shifted from rewarding model makers, then to semis, and now on to those companies that can turn compute into experiences and outcomes the customer will pay for, thus driving corporate earnings," Michael Monaghan, founder of Founder ETFs, told Al Jazeera. "Apple investors first questioned Apple's lower AI spend, but now have treated Apple's lower AI capital expenditure as an advantage, with the bull case being that Apple benefits from consumer AI without spending at cloud-infrastructure scale."
Self-driving startup Turing gets AMD backing and adopts AMD GPUs
Reliant on Nvidia hardware for AI training and inferencing since its outset, Turing now handles roughly 10% of its AI training needs with Advanced Micro Devices graphics processing units. Self-driving tech developer Turing has added AMD Ventures to its list of backers and begun adopting Advanced Micro Devices' AI accelerators in its systems. The five-year-old Japanese startup is adding to its capabilities as it builds toward a commercial launch. Reliant on Nvidia hardware for AI training and inferencing since its outset, Turing now handles roughly 10% of its AI training needs with AMD graphics processing units, company executives said in an interview. AMD, headquartered a stone's throw away from Nvidia in Santa Clara, California, presented a good chance to diversify supply and achieve lower costs, the executives said. "We've made notable progress with the technology.