Plus: Anthropic's new tools are freaking out the markets Every time OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic drops a new frontier large language model, the AI community holds its breath. It doesn't exhale until METR, an AI research nonprofit whose name stands for "Model Evaluation & Threat Research," updates a now-iconic graph that has played a major role in the AI discourse since it was first released in March of last year. The graph suggests that certain AI capabilities are developing at an exponential rate, and more recent model releases have outperformed that already impressive trend. That was certainly the case for Claude Opus 4.5, the latest version of Anthropic's most powerful model, which was released in late November. In December, METR announced that Opus 4.5 appeared to be capable of independently completing a task that would have taken a human about five hours--a vast improvement over what even the exponential trend would have predicted. But the truth is more complicated than those dramatic responses would suggest.

New data shows AI bots pushing deeper into the web, prompting publishers to roll out more aggressive defenses. The viral virtual assistant OpenClaw--formerly known as Moltbot, and before that Clawdbot--is a symbol of a broader revolution underway that could fundamentally alter how the internet functions. Instead of a place primarily inhabited by humans, the web may very soon be dominated by autonomous AI bots. A new report measuring bot activity on the web, as well as related data shared with WIRED by the internet infrastructure company Akamai, shows that AI bots already account for a meaningful share of web traffic. The findings also shed light on an increasingly sophisticated arms race unfolding as bots deploy clever tactics to bypass website defenses meant to keep them out.

Meta Claims Downloaded Porn at Center of AI Lawsuit Was for'Personal Use' In a motion to dismiss filed earlier this week, Meta denied claims that employees had downloaded pornography from Strike 3 Holdings to train its artificial intelligence models. This week, Meta asked a US district court to toss a lawsuit alleging that the tech giant illegally torrented pornography to train AI . The move comes after Strike 3 Holdings discovered illegal downloads of some of its adult films on Meta corporate IP addresses, as well as other downloads that Meta allegedly concealed using a "stealth network" of 2,500 "hidden IP addresses." Accusing Meta of stealing porn to secretly train an unannounced adult version of its AI model powering Movie Gen, Strike 3 sought damages that could have exceeded $350 million, TorrentFreak reported . Strike 3 also cited "no facts to suggest that Meta has ever trained an AI model on adult images or video, much less intentionally so," Meta claimed.

AI is transforming medical practice and redefining the competencies that future healthcare professionals need to master. Despite international recommendations, the integration of AI into Medicine curricula in Spain had not been systematically evaluated until now. A cross-sectional study (July-September 2025) including Spanish universities offering the official degree in Medicine, according to the 'Register of Universities, Centers and Degrees (Registro de Universidades, Centros y Títulos RUCT)'. Curricula and publicly available institutional documentation were reviewed to identify courses and competencies related to AI in the 2025-2026 academic year. The analysis was performed using descriptive statistics. Of the 52 universities analyzed, ten (19.2%) offer specific AI courses, whereas 36 (69.2%) include no related content. Most of the identified courses are elective, with a credit load ranging from three to six ECTS, representing on average 1.17% of the total 360 credits of the degree. The University of Jaén is the only institution offering a compulsory course with AI content. The territorial analysis reveals marked disparities: Andalusia leads with 55.5% of its universities incorporating AI training, while several communities lack any initiative in this area. The integration of AI into the medical degree in Spain is incipient, fragmented, and uneven, with a low weight in ECTS. The limited training load and predominance of elective courses restrict the preparation of future physicians to practice in a healthcare environment increasingly mediated by AI. The findings support the establishment of minimum standards and national monitoring of indicators.

As artificial intelligence replaces entry-level jobs, California's universities and community colleges are offering a glimmer of hope for students: free AI training that will help them master the new technology. "You're seeing in certain coding spaces significant declines in hiring for obvious reasons," Gov. Gavin Newsom said in early August from the seventh floor of Google's San Francisco office. Flanked by leadership from California's higher education systems, he called attention to the recent layoffs at Microsoft, Google's parent company, Alphabet, and at nearby Salesforce Tower, home to the tech company that is still the city's largest private employer. Now, some of those companies -- including Google and Microsoft -- will offer a suite of AI resources free to California schools and universities. In return, the companies could gain access to millions of new users.

Farquhar, the Tech Council of Australia CEO, told ABC's 7.30 program on Tuesday: "all AI usage of mining or searching or going across data is probably illegal under Australian law and I think that hurts a lot of investment of these companies in Australia". Farquhar's claim overlooks that this is not a settled issue in the US, and could have devastating effects on creative industries. Farquhar's argument is that it is not theft of people's work unless the AI is used to "copy an artist directly" such as creating a song in their style. "I do think people would say that, hey, if people are going to sit down with a digital companion, an AI song creator and they collaboratively work with an AI to create something new to the world, that's probably fair use." Farquhar said the benefits of large language models outweigh the issues raised by AI training its data on other people's work for free.

Millions of images of passports, credit cards, birth certificates, and other documents containing personally identifiable information are likely included in one of the biggest open-source AI training sets, new research has found. Thousands of images--including identifiable faces--were found in a small subset of DataComp CommonPool, a major AI training set for image generation scraped from the web. Because the researchers audited just 0.1% of CommonPool's data, they estimate that the real number of images containing personally identifiable information, including faces and identity documents, is in the hundreds of millions. Anything you put online can be and probably has been scraped. AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren't doctors AI companies have now mostly abandoned the once-standard practice of including medical disclaimers and warnings in response to health questions, new research has found.

More than 40 lawsuits have been filed against AI companies since 2022. Late last month, there were rulings on two of these cases, first in a lawsuit against Anthropic and, two days later, in one against Meta. Both of the cases were brought by book authors who alleged that AI companies had trained large language models using authors' work without consent or compensation. In each case, the judges decided that the tech companies were engaged in "fair use" when they trained their models with authors' books. Both judges said that the use of these books was "transformative"--that training an LLM resulted in a fundamentally different product that does not directly compete with those books.

This article explores the feasibility of creating an "electronic copy" of a deceased researcher by training artificial intelligence (AI) on the data stored in their personal computers. By analyzing typical data volumes on inherited researcher computers, including textual files such as articles, emails, and drafts, it is estimated that approximately one million words are available for AI training. This volume is sufficient for fine-tuning advanced pre-trained models like GPT-4 to replicate a researcher's writing style, domain expertise, and rhetorical voice with high fidelity. The study also discusses the potential enhancements from including non-textual data and file metadata to enrich the AI's representation of the researcher. Extensions of the concept include communication between living researchers and their electronic copies, collaboration among individual electronic copies, as well as the creation and interconnection of organizational electronic copies to optimize information access and strategic decision-making. Ethical considerations such as ownership and security of these electronic copies are highlighted as critical for responsible implementation. The findings suggest promising opportunities for AI-driven preservation and augmentation of intellectual legacy.

Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, Daniel Okrent and several others alleged that Microsoft used pirated digital versions of their books to teach its Megatron AI to respond to human prompts. The authors requested a court order blocking Microsoft's infringement and statutory damages of up to 150,000 for each work that Microsoft allegedly misused. Generative artificial intelligence products like Megatron produce text, music, images and videos in response to users' prompts. To create these models, software engineers amass enormous databases of media to program the AI to produce similar output. The writers alleged in the complaint that Microsoft used a collection of nearly 200,000 pirated books to train Megatron, an AI product that gives text responses to user prompts.