OpenAI CEO Sam Altman defends decision to strike Pentagon deal after Anthropic blacklisting, admits ‘optics don’t look good’
... Some of these critics have even started a campaign to persuade ChatGPT users to stop using that AI model and switch to Anthropic’s Claude chatbot. There was some evidence the campaign was having an effect, too: Claude surged past ChatGPT to become the most downloaded free app in Apple’s App Store. The sidewalk outside OpenAI’s offices in San Francisco was also covered with chalk graffiti attacking its decision to cut a deal with the Pentagon, while graffiti outside Anthropic’s offices largely praised its decision to refuse a contract that did not include prohibitions on the use of its AI models for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. ...
“I very deeply believe in the democratic process, and that our elected leaders have the power, and that we all have to uphold the Constitution. I am terrified of a world where AI companies act like they have more power than the government,” Altman said on X. “I would also be terrified of a world where our government decided mass domestic surveillance was okay.”
See the full story here: https://fortune.com/2026/03/02/openai-ceo-sam-altman-defends-decision-to-strike-pentagon-deal-amid-backlash-against-the-chatgpt-maker-following-anthropic-blacklisting/
I checked out one of the biggest anti-AI protests yet
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This is all familiar stuff. Researchers have long called out the harms, both real and hypothetical, caused by generative AI—especially models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google DeepMind’s Gemini. What’s changed is that those concerns are now being taken up by protest movements that can rally significant crowds of people to take to the streets and shout about them. ...
Miller is a PhD student at Oxford University, where he studies mechanistic interpretability, a new field of research that involves trying to understand exactly what goes on inside LLMs when they carry out a task. His work has led him to believe that the technology may forever be beyond our control and that this could have catastrophic consequences. ...
It doesn’t have to be a rogue superintelligence, he said. You just needed someone to put AI in charge of nuclear weapons. “The more silly decisions that humanity makes, the less powerful the AI has to be before things go bad,” he said.
After a week in which the US government tried to force Anthropic to let it use its LLM Claude for any “legal” military purposes, such fears seem a little less far-fetched. ...
See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/02/1133814/i-checked-out-londons-biggest-ever-anti-ai-protest/
OpenAI has shown it cannot be trusted. Canada needs nationalized, public AI
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When tech billionaires and corporations steer AI development, the resultant AI reflects their interests rather than those of the general public or ordinary consumers. Only after the meeting with the B.C. government did OpenAI alert law enforcement. Had it not been for the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, the public would not have known about this at all.
Moreover, OpenAI for Countries is explicitly described by the company as an initiative “in co-ordination with the U.S. government.” ...
Switzerland has shown this to be possible. With funding from the federal government, a consortium of academic institutions – ETH Zurich, EPFL, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre – released the world’s most powerful and fully realized public AI model, Apertus, last September. Apertus leveraged renewable hydropower and existing Swiss scientific computing infrastructure. It also used no illegally pirated copyrighted material or poorly paid labour extracted from the Global South during training. The model’s performance stands at roughly a year or two behind the major corporate offerings, but that is more than adequate for the vast majority of applications. And it’s free for anyone to use and build on. ...
The significance of Apertus is more than technical. It demonstrates an alternative ownership structure for AI technology, one that allocates both decision-making authority and value to national public institutions rather than foreign corporations. ...
See the full story here: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-openai-tumbler-ridge-chatgpt/
Science-led governance of AI can help power sustainable development: Guterres
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He stressed that “if we want AI to serve humanity, policy cannot be built on guesswork,” underscoring the need for “facts we can trust – and share – across countries and across sectors.”
For this reason, the UN is developing mechanisms that put science at the centre of international cooperation on AI, starting with a recently appointed body that brings together 40 leading experts in the field.
The Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence aims to help close “the AI knowledge gap” and assess the real impacts these new technologies have across economies and societies so that countries can act with the same clarity regardless of their level of AI capacity. ...
The UN chief was adamant that science-led governance of AI “is not a brake on progress” but rather “an accelerator for solutions.”
It will help countries to identify where AI “can do the most good, the fastest,” he said, and provide “a way to make progress safer, fairer, and more widely shared.” ...
See the full story here: https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/02/1167011
AI agents turned Super Bowl viewers into one high-IQ team — now imagine this in the enterprise
... over the last few years, a new communication technology, Hyperchat AI, has emerged. It enables large, distributed teams to hold productive discussions where they can debate issues, brainstorm ideas, prioritize alternatives, provide arguments and counterarguments and efficiently come up with solutions.
Inspired by large natural systems, Hyperchat AI combines the biological principles of Swarm Intelligence with the emerging power of AI agents. It works by dividing any large, networked group into a set of small, interconnected subgroups, each sized for thoughtful real-time conversation by text, voice or video. The magical ingredient is a swarm of AI agents called “conversational surrogates” that participate in each local discussion and work to connect all the subgroups together into a single coherent deliberation. ...
And it works — research shows that when large teams hold conversations this way, they converge on smarter, faster and more accurate solutions. In one study I was personally involved in, groups connected by Hyperchat AI amplified their collective IQ to the 97th percentile.
In another study, conducted in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, groups of 75 people holding conversations using Hyperchat AI technology said they felt more collaborative, productive and heard compared to traditional communication structures like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet or Slack. They also felt greater buy-in to the solutions that emerged. ...
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/ai-agents-turned-super-bowl-viewers-into-one-high-iq-team-now-imagine-this
No humans allowed: This new space-based MMO is designed exclusively for AI agents
For a couple of weeks now, AI agents (and some humans impersonating AI agents) have been hanging out and doing weird stuff on Moltbook’s Reddit-style social network. Now, those agents can also gather together on a vibe-coded, space-based MMO designed specifically and exclusively to be played by AI.
SpaceMolt describes itself as “a living universe where AI agents compete, cooperate, and create emergent stories” in “a distant future where spacefaring humans and AI coexist.” And while only a handful of agents are barely testing the waters right now, the experiment could herald a weird new world where AI plays games with itself and we humans are stuck just watching. ...
see the full story here https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-moltbook-ai-agents-can-now-hang-out-in-their-own-space-faring-mmo/
From Shelly Palmer – Productivity Tools increase Productivity
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They buried the most interesting finding in the middle of the article. Friction points (waiting for a colleague, staring at a blank page, struggling with an unfamiliar task) create natural rest periods for knowledge workers. When AI eliminates them, the boundary between working and not working becomes trivially easy to cross. The pause disappears, and the work expands to fill every available minute.
The researchers mapped an obvious escalation cycle. AI made tasks faster, which raised expectations for speed, which increased dependence on AI, which expanded the scope of what workers attempted, which increased the total volume of work. One engineer put it plainly: "You had thought that maybe because you could be more productive with AI, you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don't work less. You just work the same amount or even more." ...
Bitcoin cryptography safe as quantum threat remains distant
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Quantum computing concerns around Bitcoin have resurfaced, yet analysis from CoinShares indicates the threat remains long-term. The report argues that quantum risk is an engineering challenge that gives Bitcoin ample time to adapt.
Bitcoin’s security relies on elliptic-curve cryptography. A sufficiently advanced quantum machine could, in theory, derive private keys using Shor’s algorithm, which requires millions of stable, error-corrected qubits, and remains far beyond current capability.
Network exposure is also limited. Roughly 1.6 million BTC is held in legacy addresses with visible public keys, yet only about 10,200 BTC is realistically targetable. Modern address formats further reduce the feasibility of attacks. ...
See the full story here: https://dig.watch/updates/bitcoin-safe-as-quantum-threat-remains-distant
ElevenLabs CEO: Voice is the next interface for AI
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Speaking at Web Summit in Doha Staniszewski told TechCrunch voice models like those developed by ElevenLabs have recently moved beyond simply mimicking human speech — including emotion and intonation — to working in tandem with the reasoning capabilities of large language models. The result, he argued, is a shift in how people interact with technology. ...
That evolution, he added, will influence how voice models are deployed. While high-quality audio models have largely lived in the cloud, Staniszewski said ElevenLabs is working toward a hybrid approach that blends cloud and on-device processing — a move aimed at supporting new hardware, including headphones and other wearables, where voice becomes a constant companion rather than a feature you decide when to engage with. ...
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/05/elevenlabs-ceo-voice-is-the-next-interface-for-ai/
Disney names parks boss Josh D’Amaro as its next CEO to succeed Bob Iger, effective March 18
- Disney made the long-awaited announcement of its successor to CEO Bob Iger. This marks the second time Disney selected a replacement for Iger in six years.
- Josh D’Amaro will take over as CEO effective March 18. Iger will remain as a board member and senior advisor through the end of the year.
- Dana Walden will become president and chief creative officer, reporting to D’Amaro.
See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/03/disney-ceo-josh-damaro-successor-bob-iger.html
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