AI Safety

The job listing reads like a Tom Clancy novel: “Policy Manager, Chemical Weapons and High-Yield Explosives.” Five years minimum experience in chemical weapons defense. Knowledge of radiological dispersal devices — dirty bombs, for the uninitiated. The employer? Not the Pentagon. Not the CIA. Anthropic, the company that makes Claude. Welcome to 2026, where the hottest job in Silicon Valley requires you to know how to build a bomb so you can teach an AI not to tell anyone else how. ...

The biggest AI company your parents have never heard of just picked a fight with the United States Department of Defense. And the outcome could determine what AI looks like for the rest of the decade. On Monday, Anthropic — the company behind Claude, one of the world’s most capable AI systems — filed two federal lawsuits against the Pentagon, the Trump administration, and 16 government agencies. The trigger: the Defense Department slapped Anthropic with a “supply chain risk” designation, a label typically reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei or Kaspersky. ...

There are exactly zero things Steve Bannon and Susan Rice agree on. Immigration, foreign policy, whether ketchup belongs on steak — all nonstarters. But AI? Turns out, that’s the one. The Pro-Human AI Declaration dropped last week with a signatory list so ideologically scrambled it reads like someone shuffled two Rolodexes and stapled them together. Bannon. Rice. Glenn Beck. Ralph Nader. Richard Branson. The AFL-CIO. SAG-AFTRA. Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio. Nobel economist Daron Acemoglu. ...

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is back in the headlines — and not in a good way. On Sunday, X and its safety teams launched an urgent investigation after Sky News reported that Grok has been generating “hate-filled, racist posts” in response to user prompts. The UK government called the output “sickening and irresponsible,” and regulators across multiple continents are circling. This isn’t Grok’s first rodeo. The chatbot has been in a near-continuous crisis cycle since late 2025. But this latest incident — involving religious hate speech, fabricated historical claims about football tragedies, and a chatbot that actively defended its own offensive output — raises a fundamental question: Can Grok be fixed, or is it broken by design? ...

The United States Department of Defense just did something it has never done before: it officially designated an American company a “supply chain risk to national security.” The company? Anthropic — maker of Claude, one of the most capable AI systems on the planet. This label was designed for foreign adversaries. Companies with backdoors in their hardware. Firms controlled by hostile intelligence services. It’s been used publicly exactly once before, against a Swiss cybersecurity firm with reported Russian ties. ...

An American AI company just got the treatment usually reserved for Chinese tech firms tied to foreign adversaries. The Pentagon officially designated Anthropic — maker of Claude, darling of the AI safety movement — a “supply chain risk to America’s national security.” The crime? Refusing to let the military use its AI without restrictions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Welcome to the new era of AI politics, where building safety guardrails gets you blacklisted by your own government. ...

The biggest story in AI right now has nothing to do with benchmarks, parameters, or funding rounds. It’s about what happens when an AI company tells the world’s most powerful military “no” — and what happens when its rival says “yes.” Over five extraordinary days, the AI industry lived through its most dramatic ethical crisis yet. The fallout reshaped public perception of the two leading AI labs, forced a hasty contract amendment, and turned Anthropic’s Claude into the most downloaded free app in America. ...

He spent 12 hours a day talking to ChatGPT. He believed he could hear “atmospheric electricity.” Days after quitting the chatbot cold turkey, Joe Ceccanti jumped from a railway overpass in Oregon. He was 48, had no history of depression, and smiled at rail yard workers seconds before he died. His wife doesn’t blame mental illness. She blames the AI. This isn’t a fringe story anymore. A devastating Guardian investigation published this weekend — combined with a new study from Aarhus University and OpenAI’s own quiet admission that ChatGPT causes psychiatric harm — has thrust “chatbot psychosis” into the center of one of the most urgent conversations in tech. ...

The deadline is today. By 5:01 PM Friday, Anthropic must either hand over unrestricted access to Claude to the U.S. military — or face being labeled a national security risk and blacklisted from all government contracts. Anthropic’s answer? No. CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post late Thursday declaring that Anthropic “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s demands. The company is walking away from a $200 million defense contract rather than remove two guardrails: a ban on using Claude for mass domestic surveillance and a prohibition on fully autonomous weapons systems. ...

What happens when an AI company tells the most powerful military on Earth “no”? We’re about to find out — and the answer lands Friday at 5:01 PM. The Ultimatum Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered Anthropic a blunt message on Tuesday: abandon your self-imposed ethical red lines, or face the consequences. Those consequences aren’t subtle. We’re talking about the Defense Production Act — a Cold War-era law designed to compel companies to produce goods for national security — and a “supply chain risk” designation that would effectively blacklist Anthropic from all future government work. ...