Once in a while, LLMs turn evil--and no one quite knows why. The AI company Anthropic has made a rigorous effort to build a large language model with positive human values. The $183 billion company's flagship product is Claude, and much of the time, its engineers say, Claude is a model citizen. Its standard persona is warm and earnest. When users tell Claude to "answer like I'm a fourth grader" or "you have a PhD in archeology," it gamely plays along. It makes threats and then carries them out. And the frustrating part--true of all LLMs--is that no one knows exactly why. Consider a recent stress test that Anthropic's safety engineers ran on Claude. In their fictional scenario, the model was to take on the role of Alex, an AI belonging to the Summit Bridge corporation.

In Brownsville, Texas, some families found a buzzy new school's methods--surveillance of kids, software in lieu of teachers--to be an education in and of itself. At Alpha School's campus in Brownsville, Texas, a student works on exercises in a learning app. One day last fall, Kristine Barrios' 9-year-old daughter got stuck on a lesson in IXL, the personalized learning software that served as her math teacher. She had to multiply three three-digit numbers without using a calculator. Then she had to do it again, her mom says, more than 20 times, without making mistakes. At Alpha School, the private microschool the girl and her younger brother attended in Brownsville, Texas, she had been working a grade level ahead of her age in math, Barrios says. She could do three-digit multiplication correctly most of the time. But whenever she made an error in IXL, the software would determine she needed more practice and assign her more questions. She told her mom that she had asked her "guide," the adult who supervised her classroom in lieu of a teacher, to make an exception and let her move on. She said the guide's reply was that she needed to get it done, that it was expected of her. The adult guides in Alpha's classrooms "don't do any teaching," says the current head of the Brownsville school.

Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He's one of the loudest voices of the AI haters--even as he does PR for AI companies. Either way, Ed Zitron has your attention. In his day job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This might surprise anyone who has come to know Zitron through his podcast or his social media or the newsletter in which he writes two-fisted stuff like "Sam Altman is full of shit and "Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul." Flacks, as a rule, tend not to talk like this. Flacks send prim, throat-clearing emails to media people who do, on rare occasions, talk like this. Flacks want to touch base, hop on the phone, clear up a few things about the allegation that their CEO is a "chunderfuck." And that really is one of the things with guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic," Zitron was saying over burgers on a fine Manhattan afternoon in September. "I work with founders all the time. I'm a founder myself, I guess--I don't like the title. But when you are a person that has to make more money than you lose, otherwise you lose your business, and you see these chunderfucks burning 5, 10 billion dollars in a year--and everyone's celebrating them? We were talking about whether any of Zitron's ranting about the AI industry had cost him business on the PR side of the ledger. There was the one client who felt Zitron was being a little mean toward Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and the biggest chunderfuck of all, as far as Zitron is concerned. Founding a company is hard, the client said. "I said, 'I appreciate the comment, but, like, this isn't about you,'" Zitron told me. "His company is burning billions of dollars.

On an airstrip somewhere in Texas, a swarm of killer jets approaches--controlled by, of all things, a large language model. At a secret US military base located about 50 miles from the Mexican border--exact location: classified--the defense contractor Anduril is testing a remarkable new use for a large language model. I attended one of the first demonstrations last year. From a sun-bleached landing strip, I watched as four jet aircraft, codenamed Mustang, appeared on the horizon to the west and soared over a desolate landscape of boulders and brush. The prototypes, miniaturized for the demo, fell into formation, their engines buzzing as they grew near.

I sound Korean--because I am Korean. Can AI make me sound American? It all began, as these things often do, with an Instagram ad . "No one tells you this if you're an immigrant, but accent discrimination is a real thing," said a woman in the video. Her own accent is faintly Eastern European--so subtle it took me a few playbacks to notice.

Increased defense spending is a boon for Germany's ailing industrial sector. Numerous companies, even those with no previous military experience, are now hoping to get in on the act. Visiting the works of Ilsenburger Grobblech GmbH is like taking a trip back in time. Way back in the 16th century, copper used to be produced at this site in the northern Harz Mountains, not far from eastern Germany' tallest peak, the Brocken. Today, slabs of steel up to 35 centimeters thick are piled up in front of the factory halls, delivered from the blast furnaces and converters of parent company Salzgitter, less than an hour's drive away. What is happening behind the factory walls, though, is part of a new hype that has gripped Germany's crisis-ridden industrial sector. A hype which many are hoping will be enough to revive it.

U.S. cable industry invested $340 billion in broadband networks, but national strategy needed to secure AI dominance over China through better internet infrastructure.

ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok are serving users propaganda from Russian-backed media when asked about the invasion of Ukraine, new research finds. OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, DeepSeek, and xAI's Grok are pushing Russian state propaganda from sanctioned entities--including citations from Russian state media, sites tied to Russian intelligence or pro-Kremlin narratives--when asked about the war against Ukraine, according to a new report. Researchers from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) claim that Russian propaganda has targeted and exploited data voids --where searches for real-time data provide few results from legitimate sources--to promote false and misleading information. Almost one-fifth of responses to questions about Russia's war in Ukraine, across the four chatbots they tested, cited Russian state-attributed sources, the ISD research claims. "It raises questions regarding how chatbots should deal when referencing these sources, considering many of them are sanctioned in the EU," says Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an analyst at the ISD who led the research.

'People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit': is Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron? In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, the people's encyclopedia stands out - a huge collective endeavour giving everyone free access to the sum of human knowledge. But with Elon Musk branding it'Wokipedia' and AI looming large, can it survive? W ikipedia will be 25 years old in January. Jimmy Wales's daughter will be 25 and three weeks. It's not a coincidence: on Boxing Day 2000 Wales's then wife, Christine, gave birth to a baby girl, but it quickly became clear that something wasn't right. She had breathed in contaminated amniotic fluid, resulting in a life-threatening condition called meconium aspiration syndrome. An experimental treatment was available at the hospital near where they lived in San Diego. Did they want to try it?

In Russia's'blitz' of Ukraine, the question of appeasement is back Following another week of intensive and lethal Russian bombardment of Ukraine's cities, a composite image has been doing the rounds on Ukrainian social media. Underneath an old, black-and-white photo of Londoners queuing at a fruit and vegetable stall surrounded by the bombed-out rubble of the Blitz, a second image - this time in colour - creates a striking juxtaposition. Taken on Saturday, it shows shoppers thronging to similar stalls in a northern suburb of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, while a column of black smoke rises ominously in the background. Bombs can't stop markets, reads the caption linking the two images. The night before, as the city's sleep was interrupted once again by the now all-too-familiar booms of missile and drone strikes, two people were killed and nine others injured.