AI

On Friday, Donald Trump announced a ban on the federal government’s use of Claude. Though he had to walk back his demand that agencies “IMMEDIATELY CEASE” using it, instead saying there would be a six-month phaseout. Part of that might be because planning for Saturday’s strikes against Iran was underway and relied on Claude for intelligence assessments and target identification. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Dean Ball, who worked as a senior AI policy advisor, said on X that designating Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” or threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act could have a chilling effect on the entire industry. Alan Rozenshtein, a former DOJ official specializing in technology law, told Politico this could be the first step toward partial nationalization of the AI industry.

CEO Sam Altman wrote on X that the agreement allowed the US military to “deploy our models in their classified network.” He said the agreement reflects OpenAI’s desire for prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and “human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems.” Altman also wrote that OpenAI is “asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept.” This follows a rollercoaster week of negotiations between Anthropic and the Pentagon.

The OpenAI co-founder, who left after CEO Sam Altman’s ouster and reinstatement and then started his own AI startup called Safe Superintelligence, posted on X:

That’s the takeaway from Altman and Co’s new safety protocols that govern when to involve law enforcement. The changes come after a fatal shooting at a school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. this month that killed eight and left dozens injured.

In December, Google Translate started using Gemini AI to improve translations for colloquial phrases and idioms that might not make sense in other languages, and now the Translate app also offers alternative phrasings on iOS or Android.

Deezer started labeling AI content last year. Now Qobuz is doing the same. It’s also enacting an AI charter promising “The heart of Qobuz is and will remain human,” saying curation and editorial won’t be AI-driven. It stopped short of banning AI content, which some customers have been asking for.

In what appears to be preparations to fully blacklist Anthropic for not budging on their acceptable use policies, the Defense Department has begun reaching out to contractors to assess their exposure to the AI company’s products. Boeing and Lockheed Martin, two of the biggest companies in the defense space, have reportedly been contacted.

After watching popular children’s channels like CoComelon, Bluey, or Ms. Rachel, The New York Times found that more than 40 percent of Shorts recommended by the platform “appeared to contain AI-generated visuals.” YouTube doesn’t require animated AI videos for children to be labeled, placing all moderation burdens on parents instead.

David Luan, head of Amazon’s San Francisco AGI lab, is leaving to work on something new. Newer than AGI, that is, which is saying something considering that’s still nonexistent.

It says the new platform “reasons, delegates, searches, builds, remembers, codes, and delivers,” across sub AI agents, creating what Perplexity calls a “general-purpose digital worker” that exists somewhere between OpenClaw and Claude Cowork.

Flow launched as a way to make AI-generated videos, but the company is bringing its experimental Whisk and ImageFX AI image generator tools into the app to let users “generate, edit and animate everything in one unified workspace.”

During his State of the Union speech, Trump claimed to have negotiated a “ratepayer protection pledge” to keep data centers from raising utility bills for other customers. He didn’t say which companies are involved or what commitments they’ve made.

The president shouted out the work of his “movie star” wife Melania, whose support of the Take It Down Act last year — a bill requiring social platforms to remove content reported as nonconsensual intimate imagery (including AI deepfakes) — helped usher it into law.

The notification was related to an incident at the BAFTAs on Sunday, as Variety reports. “We’ve removed the offensive notification,” Google spokesperson Brianna Duff said in a statement to The Verge, adding that the error didn’t involve AI, but rather that push notification systems intended to “accurately characterize” content from the web “accidentally” included the slur.

Arvind KC, who was formerly Roblox’s chief people and systems officer, has also held senior roles at Google, Palantir, and Meta, according to OpenAI. He replaces the company’s former chief people officer, Julia Villagra, who departed in August 2025 after less than six months in the role. The post had since been vacant.