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What’s the closest you’ve ever stood to a drone? I’m not talking about a cute quadcopter, but a military-grade death machine that can carry enough warheads to obliterate a bridge, a tank, or a building? Sure, I’d heard of them. I’d seen them on the news. I’ve closely followed the paper, scissors, rock war in Ukraine where every six weeks the Ukrainians or Russians break the rules with new drone hacks. But it wasn’t until I was standing in front of the Fury, an autonomous plane meant to fly alongside F-16s and other military jets, that our Terminator era of warfare really hit me. This thing looks mean in an unknowable way, like a deep-sea predator that’s shed its …

Electric bills are rising in Ann Arbor, Michigan, just like in other cities. But a new city program is starting to install city-owned solar panels and batteries at homes, a move that could save some residents hundreds a year. The first projects are underway now. For residents, it’s a way to get the benefits of solar without the upfront investment. “Any other way, I couldn’t afford to do it,” says Bruce Schauer, age 80, who saw the advantages of adding solar panels and a battery, but wouldn’t have gotten a system otherwise. After his system is installed in the next couple of weeks and starts sending power to his home, he expects to save around $400 a year on his electr…

Allbirds shoe brand announced on Wednesday that it will close almost all of its U.S. stores by the end of February (except for two outlets) and go online, turning to e-commerce instead. It will continue to operate two London-based brick-and-mortar locations as well. Fast Company has reached out to Allbirds for more details about the locations that will be closing. “This is an important step for Allbirds, as we drive toward profitable growth under our turnaround strategy,” Allbirds CEO Joe Vernachio said in a statement. “We have been opportunistically reducing our brick-and-mortar portfolio over the past two years. By exiting these remaining unprofitable doors, we …

A major fast food franchisee has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The franchisee, Sailormen Inc., operates 130 Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen locations in Florida, and like the franchisees of other big-name fast food chains in recent years, has faced numerous economic headwinds. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On January 15, Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen franchisee Sailormen Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida. Sailormen has been a Popeyes franchisee since the 1980s, and it currently operates 130 locations of the popular fried chicken chain. The conditio…

It’s a tough time to own fast-food restaurants. Franchisees for popular chains such as Applebee’s, Subway, and Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen have filed for bankruptcy recently, and another has joined them. Multiple entities associated with Friendly Franchisees Corporation (FFC), owner of 65 Carl’s Jr. locations across California, have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Restaurant Business first reported. Carl’s Jr. was founded almost 85 years ago and is known for its charbroiled burgers. FFC has yet to state whether any Carl’s Jr. locations will close as a result of the bankruptcies. Its founder, Harshad Dharod, owns the five associated entities that filed…

If I had a dollar for every time a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum has been charged with fraud, I’d have $5. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it has happened five times. By now, the Forbes “curse” has been well documented, from Charlie Javice’s JPMorgan fiasco (who was on the Under 30 list in 2019) to crypto poster boy Sam Bankman-Fried perpetrating one of the biggest financial frauds in history (he appeared on the list in 2021). This week, another honoree has been hit with federal charges. Gökçe Güven, the 26-year-old founder and CEO of fintech startup Kalder, faces 52 years in prison after being charged with fraud, accused of cheating investors out of millions. …

Audiences are used to Hollywood mining pre-existing material for movies. For over two decades now, the industry’s go-to source for blockbusters has been comic books. And increasingly, it’s been video games. But occasionally, Hollywood turns to Reddit, too. This week, it was announced that the popular Hollywood actress Sydney Sweeney had acquired the film rights to a four-year-old Reddit post. As noted by The Hollywood Reporter, the Reddit post in question is a short story by a Massachusetts-based high school English teacher named Joe Cote. That short story and post, titled “I pretended to be a missing girl so I could rob her family,” is about a girl who shows up a…

A great, fictional man once declared: “I believe virtually everything I read.” David St. Hubbins, lead singer and guitarist of Spinal Tap, mocked the earnest confidence of rock stars in the same way AI futurists are now mocking critical thinking itself. Right now, most of the tech industry has adopted St. Hubbins’ line without the irony. Google is embedding AI into Chrome. Tech leaders are declaring the end of websites. Hundreds of links will collapse into single answers, traffic will disappear, the open web gets hollowed out. The future belongs to whoever wins inclusion in the AI’s response, not whoever builds the best site. Sigh. We spent the last decade le…

It has been two weeks since Winter Storm Fern swept through the United States, and many cities are still busy digging themselves out of waist-high snow mountains. A brand-new building in Antarctica—where temperatures average 14 degrees Fahrenheit along the coast—might offer some useful insights for a more efficient approach. Perched on the southern edge of Adelaide, an island on the Antarctica Peninsula, the Discovery Building spans two stories and nearly 50,000 square feet. It is clad in highly insulated metal composite panels and topped with a mono-pitch roof that slopes in just one direction, so snow slides right off instead of piling up. Most notably: it s…

When Minnesota Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards steps onto the NBA All-Star court in Los Angeles with the league’s best players, there will be cameras following his every move. But it won’t just be NBC clocking the action. Edwards’s own Three-Fifths Media will be there for his ongoing unscripted show, Year Six. It’s the second season chronicling the daily grind of his NBA exploits, building on last year’s Year Five. Three-Fifths Media started in 2019, with Justin Holland, Edwards’s business partner and manager. They signed a production deal with Wheelhouse in 2024 to collaborate on projects like Year Six. So far, Three-Fifths has produced Serious Busines…

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced a $50 billion investment in computing infrastructure on Wednesday that will include new data centers in Texas and New York. Microsoft also on Wednesday announced a new data center under construction in Atlanta, Georgia, describing it as connected to another in Wisconsin to form a “massive supercomputer” running on hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips to power AI technology. The latest deals show that the tech industry is moving forward on huge spending to build energy-hungry AI infrastructure, despite lingering financial concerns about a bubble, environmental considerations, and the political effects of fast-ris…

While Silicon Valley argues over bubbles, benchmarks, and who has the smartest model, Anthropic has been focused on solving problems that rarely generate hype but ultimately determine adoption: whether AI can be trusted to operate inside the world’s most sensitive systems. Known for its safety-first posture and the Claude family of large language models (LLMs), Anthropic is placing its biggest strategic bets where AI optimism tends to collapse fastest, i.e., regulated industries. Rather than framing Claude as a consumer product, the company has positioned its models as core enterprise infrastructure—software expected to run for hours, sometimes days, inside healthcare…

Anthropic on Wednesday launched Claude for Small Business, a new package of agentic workflows, skills, and connectors designed to automate business tasks common to smaller companies. Claude for Small Business includes workflows for payroll planning, month-end close, business performance monitoring, and marketing campaign management. It also includes skills, or reusable capability packages for AI agents, focused on cash-flow forecasting, invoice chasing, contract review, lead triage, content strategy, and more, Anthropic says. Users get connectors, or integrations, to commonly used platforms including QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, …

The difference between OpenAI and Anthropic has never been clearer. OpenAI is constantly in the news with a new consumer app or feature, and is being billed as the next great consumer tech platform. Most recently it made news by offering a social network around its Sora image generator, and even says it plans to allow NSFW content on ChatGPT. Anthropic, meanwhile, has chosen a different path. The company stresses that because it gets most of its revenues from businesses and developers, it’s not trying to capture the mass market, and it’s not terribly concerned about how long users spend on its platform every day. “We are interested in our consumer users to the degree…

If you live near an AI data center, you may already be seeing higher electricity bills. But if that data center is for Anthropic, the AI company now says it will cover the price hikes consumers face. The data center boom unfolding across the country is driving up electricity costs and adding more stress to the power grid. That added demand means the grid needs serious upgrades, or even new sources of power. In many places, those rising costs are being passed directly onto community members. But more and more legislators and even tech executives are raising the idea that the companies behind the data centers should foot the bill. Anthropic, which created the …

Anthropic is turning to a Biden administration alum to run its new Beneficial Deployments team, which is tasked with helping extend the benefits of its AI to organizations focused on social good—particularly in areas like health research and education—that may lack market-driven incentives. The new team will be led by Elizabeth Kelly, who in 2024 was tapped by the Biden administration to lead the U.S. AI Safety Institute within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Kelly helped form agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic that let NIST safety-test the companies’ new models prior to their deployment. She left the government in early March, and in mid-…

Anthropic announced Thursday that it has added web search capability to its Claude chatbot. It’s not a new feature to the AI world—but the company’s approach stands as one the most thoughtful to date. Much like its rival Perplexity, Anthropic’s Claude works relevant information from the web into a conversational answer, and includes clickable source citations. Web search is available as a “feature preview” for U.S. users of the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, with plans to expand to the free tier and to more countries What sets Anthropic’s web search feature apart is that it is automatic. Rather than requiring users to manually select a web search on a given query …

Can a headline-making squabble with a client actually be good for a brand? This week’s dispute between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, a high-profile player in the super-competitive field of artificial intelligence, may be just that. The dispute involves whether the Pentagon, which has an agreement to use Anthropic technology, can apply it in a wider range of scenarios: all “lawful use” cases. Anthropic has resisted signing off on some potential scenarios, and the Pentagon has essentially accused it of being overly cautious. As it happens, that assessment basically aligns with Anthropic’s efforts (most recently via Super Bowl ads aimed squarely at prominent …

A public showdown between the The President administration and Anthropic is hitting an impasse as military officials demand the artificial intelligence company bend its ethical policies by Friday or risk damaging its business. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei drew a sharp red line 24 hours before the deadline, declaring his company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s final demand to allow unrestricted use of its technology. Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, can afford to lose a defense contract. But the ultimatum this week from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posed broader risks at the peak of the company’s meteoric rise from a little-known computer scie…

Forget about the big game on Sunday. Two heavyweights have been battling it out this week over a topic that’s become all-too-familiar over the years: advertising creep. It’s a tale as old as time, in some respects. Many a CEO have proudly declared that their company’s platform or services will remain ad-free, only to later succumb to the lure of all that advertising revenue and embrace it. And that’s creating a new divide among AI platforms—one that will play out to the world’s largest TV viewing audience during the Super Bowl. Among the nearly dozen AI-related ads on Sunday will be two 60-second spots each for OpenAI and Anthropic. While OpenAI will use…