Press Release
Cloudflare Has Blocked 416 Billion AI Bot Requests Since July 1
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince claims the internet infrastructure company's efforts to block AI crawlers are already seeing big results. As the large language models powering generative AI tools slurp up ever more data across the web, Cloudflare cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince said at WIRED's Big Interview event in San Francisco on Thursday that the internet infrastructure company has blocked more than 400 billion AI bot requests for its customers since July 1. The action comes after the company announced a Content Independence Day in July--an initiative with prominent publishers and AI firms to block AI crawlers by default on content creators' work unless the AI companies pay for access. Since July 2024, Cloudflare has offered customers tools to block AI bots from scraping their content. Cloudflare told WIRED that the number of AI bots blocked since July 1, 2025 is 416 billion.
PlayStation teams up with Bad Robot and the creator of Left 4 Dead for a co-op shooter
It's surely time for the Super 8 game we've all been waiting for. Sony Interactive Entertainment has signed a deal to produce and publish a game from Bad Robot, JJ Abrams' production company. The two sides are keeping most of the details close to their chest for now, but the game is a four-player co-op shooter for PlayStation 5 and PC directed by someone who knows a thing or two about that genre: creator Mike Booth. Bad Robot Games -- which is a fully remote studio -- was formed in 2018 with the help of Tencent. It has lent a hand on games including (as an investor and creative consultant) as well as interactive streaming series .
OpenAI's new confession system teaches models to be honest about bad behaviors
OpenAI's new confession system teaches models to be honest about bad behaviors I guess AI gotta give part two of my confessions. OpenAI announced today that it is working on a framework that will train artificial intelligence models to acknowledge when they've engaged in undesirable behavior, an approach the team calls a confession. Since large language models are often trained to produce the response that seems to be desired, they can become increasingly likely to provide sycophancy or state hallucinations with total confidence. The new training model tries to encourage a secondary response from the model about what it did to arrive at the main answer it provides. Confessions are only judged on honesty, as opposed to the multiple factors that are used to judge main replies, such as helpfulness, accuracy and compliance.
Siri-us setback: Apple's AI chief steps down as company lags behind rivals
Apple thanked John Giannandrea for his efforts. Apple thanked John Giannandrea for his efforts. Siri-us setback: Apple's AI chief steps down as company lags behind rivals Apple's head of artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, is stepping down from the company. The move comes as the Silicon Valley giant has lagged behind its competitors in rolling out generative AI features, in particular its voice assistant Siri. Apple made the announcement on Monday, thanking Giannandrea for his seven-year tenure at the company.
Building Resilient Information Ecosystems: Large LLM-Generated Dataset of Persuasion Attacks
Kao, Hsien-Te, Panasyuk, Aleksey, Bautista, Peter, Dupree, William, Ganberg, Gabriel, Beaubien, Jeffrey M., Cassani, Laura, Volkova, Svitlana
Organization's communication is essential for public trust, but the rise of generative AI models has introduced significant challenges by generating persuasive content that can form competing narratives with official messages from government and commercial organizations at speed and scale. This has left agencies in a reactive position, often unaware of how these models construct their persuasive strategies, making it more difficult to sustain communication effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce a large LLM-generated persuasion attack dataset, which includes 134,136 attacks generated by GPT-4, Gemma 2, and Llama 3.1 on agency news. These attacks span 23 persuasive techniques from SemEval 2023 Task 3, directed toward 972 press releases from ten agencies. The generated attacks come in two mediums, press release statements and social media posts, covering both long-form and short-form communication strategies. We analyzed the moral resonance of these persuasion attacks to understand their attack vectors. GPT-4's attacks mainly focus on Care, with Authority and Loyalty also playing a role. Gemma 2 emphasizes Care and Authority, while Llama 3.1 centers on Loyalty and Care. Analyzing LLM-generated persuasive attacks across models will enable proactive defense, allow to create the reputation armor for organizations, and propel the development of both effective and resilient communications in the information ecosystem.
Microsoft, Nvidia invest in Anthropic in cloud services deal
Microsoft and Nvidia plan to invest in Anthropic under a new tie-up that includes a $30bn commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft's cloud services, the latest high-profile deal binding together major players in the AI industry. Nvidia will commit up to $10bn to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5bn, the companies said on Tuesday, without sharing more details. The announcement underscores the AI industry's insatiable appetite for computing power as companies race to build systems that can rival or surpass human intelligence. It also ties major OpenAI-backer Microsoft, as well as key AI chip supplier Nvidia, closer to one of the ChatGPT maker's biggest rivals. "We're increasingly going to be customers of each other. We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure and we'll go to market together," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video.
Anthropic announces 50bn plan for datacenter construction in US
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced a $50bn investment in computing infrastructure on Wednesday that will include new datacenters in Texas and New York . "We're getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren't possible before," Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, said in a press release. Building the massive information warehouses takes an average of two years in the US and requires copious amounts of energy to fuel the facilities. The company, maker of the AI chatbot Claude, popular with businesses adopting AI, said in a statement that the "scale of this investment is necessary to meet the growing demand for Claude from hundreds of thousands of businesses while keeping our research at the frontier". Anthropic said its projects will create about 800 permanent jobs and 2,400 construction jobs.
Waymo announces that its robotaxis will drive freeways for the first time
Alphabet's Waymo said on Wednesday that it would begin offering robotaxi rides that use freeways across San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, a first for the Google subsidiary as it steps up expansion amid global and domestic competition in the self-driving industry. Freeway rides will initially be available to early-access users, Waymo said. "When a freeway route is meaningfully faster, they can be matched with a freeway trip, providing quicker, smoother, and more efficient rides," it said. The race begins to make the world's best self-driving cars Waymo, which already operates in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, is also extending operations to San Jose, including Mineta San Jose international airport, the second airport in its service area after Phoenix Sky Harbor. The move comes as Tesla expands its robotaxi service with safety monitors and drivers, and Zoox - backed by Amazon - offers free robotaxi rides on and around the Las Vegas Strip.
Hate Meta? Even Realities Is Making the Smart Glasses You Want
The company announced the Even G2 smart glasses, sporting a bigger display in a lighter frame, alongside the R1 smart ring, which can control the display on the lenses. As Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses continue to turn your face into a computer, with a camera and speaker, Even Realities is doubling down on a design that eschews those components. Today, the company announced the Even G2 smart glasses, alongside the Even R1, its first-ever smart ring that controls the display of the G2. The Even G2 glasses don't look wholly different from the original G1 that debuted last summer, which is a good thing, because these are still among the sharpest-looking smart glasses on the market. At a closed-doors briefing a few weeks ago, Even Realities CEO Will Wang said the company didn't advertise its first product much, as it wanted to test it in the market and receive valuable feedback, while also working on expanding its retail presence.
Tesla shareholders approve 1 trillion pay package for Musk
The $1 trillion pay agreement puts Elon Musk on track to become the world's first trillionaire. Tesla shareholders approved a $1 trillion compensation package for CEO Elon Musk, the largest payout ever awarded to a corporate leader. More than 75% of votes were cast in favor of the unprecedented pay plan, the company said Thursday at its annual meeting. The outcome caps a weekslong campaign by the electric vehicle maker's board, its CEO and prominent retail investors to build support. The pay agreement clears a path for Musk, the world's richest person, to become the first ever trillionaire and expand his stake in Tesla to 25% or more over the next decade.