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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…

One of the world’s biggest AI startups might be eyeing a massive IPO. According to a new report in the Financial Times, Anthropic has tapped the Palo Alto-based law firm Wilson Sonsini to help the company go public as soon as early next year. The law firm has a deep well of experience shepherding major tech IPOs and has worked with Google, LinkedIn, Lyft, and Square on their public offerings. In the lead-up to a potential IPO, the Financial Times reports that the company is drumming up a private round of funding that would peg its value at over $300 billion. According to the report, the company is also discussing its plans with large investment banks, but those ta…

In a new report, AI company Anthropic detailed a “highly sophisticated espionage campaign” that deployed its artificial intelligence tools to launch automated cyberattacks around the globe. The attackers aimed high, targeting government agencies, Big Tech companies, banks, and chemical companies, and succeeded in “a small number of cases,” according to Anthropic. The company says that its research links the hacking operation to the Chinese government. The company claims that the findings are a watershed moment for the industry, marking the first instance of a cyber espionage scheme carried out by AI. “We believe this is the first documented case of a large-scale…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Anthropic uses the Super Bowl to land some zingers about the future of AI Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads are bangers. The spots, which Anthropic posted on X on Wednesday, seize on rival OpenAI’s plans to begin injecting ads into its ChatGPT chatbot for free-tier users as soon as this month. The 30-second ads dramatize what the real effects of that decision might look like for users. They never mention OpenAI or ChatGPT by name. In one ad, a human fitness instructor playing the role…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Anthropic’s stance on autonomous weapons may not survive the future Much of the AI world is watching closely as Anthropic tangles with the Pentagon over how the government can use the Claude models. Anthropic has a $200 million contract with the Pentagon, but the contract says the military can’t use the AI company’s models as the brains for autonomous weapons or for mass surveillance of Americans. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insists, after the fact, that the military should be a…

What if the chatbots we talk to every day actually felt something? What if the systems writing essays, solving problems, and planning tasks had preferences, or even something resembling suffering? And what will happen if we ignore these possibilities? Those are the questions Kyle Fish is wrestling with as Anthropic’s first in-house AI welfare researcher. His mandate is both audacious and straightforward: Determine whether models like Claude can have conscious experiences, and, if so, how the company should respond. “We’re not confident that there is anything concrete here to be worried about, especially at the moment,” Fish says, “but it does seem possible.” Earlier …

Anthropic released on Monday its Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, which it says returns results faster and can show the user the “chain of thought” it follows to reach an answer. This latest model also powers a new coding tool called Claude Code that can perform some development tasks autonomously. Claude 3.7 Sonnet offers an “extended thinking” mode that engages in a more detailed “chain of thought” reasoning but takes longer to generate a response. For simpler questions it eschews this mode and instead focuses on speed. Other models offer their own versions of “thinking” mode, but typically the user has to select that feature for harder problems; Anthropic says Claude 3.7 …

Anthropic is out with a new model called Claude Opus 4.6, an upgrade to its top-of-the-line Opus 4.5 model that launched in November. The new release could add new capabilities to Anthropic’s Claude Code coding assistant, which is facing growing competitive pressure from OpenAI’s Codex. Anthropic says Opus 4.6 improves on its predecessor’s coding skills, planning, and, perhaps most importantly, its ability to reason more clearly when handling large amounts of information. When Opus 4.6 powers Claude Code, the coding agent can comprehend larger codebases and make more thoughtful decisions about how and where to add new code, the company says. More long-term memory …

Anthropic is making hay while the sun shines. The AI company’s high-stakes dispute with the Pentagon—in which it refused to allow its product to be used for autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance—generated intense mainstream media coverage and a wave of public support, including from many within the artificial intelligence community. Claude rose to No. 1 in the Apple App Store’s free app rankings on Sunday, February 28, and on Tuesday, March 3, it hit No. 1 in a similar ranking for the Google Play store. The government is effectively banning the use of Anthropic models and tools within government agencies and their suppliers, and has labeled Anthropic…

It’s official: AOL‘s dial-up internet has taken its last bow. AOL previously confirmed it would be pulling the plug on Tuesday (Sept. 30) — writing in a brief update on its support site last month that it “routinely evaluates” its offerings and had decided to discontinue dial-up, as well as associated software “optimized for older operating systems,” from its plans. Dial-up is now no longer advertised on AOL’s website. As of Wednesday, former company help pages like “connect to the internet with AOL Dialer” appeared unavailable — and nostalgic social media users took to the internet to say their final goodbyes. AOL, formerly America Online, introduced many hou…

Launched 16 years ago with only 500 apps, Apple’s App Store revolutionized how we interact with our devices. As of 2023, the App Store had nearly 1.8 million apps, spanning categories like gaming, fitness, productivity, social media, and much more. The phrase “There’s an app for that” has never been more true. But with so many apps available, users face a new challenge: app fatigue. With millions of choices, users can easily become overwhelmed. Even when someone chooses to download an app, they can be bombarded with notifications urging them to engage, upgrade, or subscribe. With many apps competing for users’ attention and wallets, this can push them to ignore or eve…

European Union watchdogs fined Apple and Meta hundreds of millions of euros Wednesday as they stepped up enforcement of the 27-nation bloc’s digital competition rules. The European Commission imposed a 500 million euro ($571 million) fine on Apple for preventing app makers from pointing users to cheaper options outside its App Store. The commission, which is the EU’s executive arm, also fined Meta Platforms 200 million euros because it forced Facebook and Instagram users to choose between seeing ads or paying to avoid them. The punishments were smaller than the blockbuster multibillion-euro fines that the commission has previously slapped on Big Tech companies in antit…

Last week, Apple announced it would cancel one of the first shows that it had ever green lit for its Apple TV Plus streaming service: Mythic Quest, a show that first launched on the tech giant’s then-fledgling streaming service in February 2020. The show, which followed the escapades of an MMORPG video game developer, was axed after the last episode of its fourth season, which aired on March 26. Like many season finales, the last episode of Mythic Quest ended on a cliffhanger, so when viewers learned of its cancellation, they assumed that they would never get any resolution to the storyline and characters that they had followed for four seasons. Yet then Apple d…

Apple is considering reworking its Safari web browser across its devices to place a greater emphasis on AI-powered search engines, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The disclosure came from Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, during his testimony Wednesday in the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Alphabet. Cue was speaking about the two companies’ $20 billion-a-year deal that makes Google the default search engine on Apple’s browsers. The Apple executive said he expects AI search providers—like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity—to eventually replace standard sources like Google. Apple has already seen a decline in Safari searches for the first t…

A few years ago, I chronicled the journey I went on to manually merge two Apple ID accounts into one. I was attempting to rectify a problem that I and many other long-time Apple users had been stuck with: Our data—emails, contacts, movie and app purchases, photos, logins, and more—was spread across two different Apple accounts. This segregation made accessing this data on our various devices a chore. Imagine opening your closet to look for a specific shirt, only to realize it’s hanging instead in the closet at your old house across town. The process took me days. At the time, Apple provided no automated way for users to merge two Apple IDs. Yet, this week that fin…