For years now, the major frontier AI labs have all been acting as if they're in an all-out, winner-take-all race with control of world-changing machine superintelligence (or at least market-changing artificial general intelligence) at the finish line. This weekend, the industry as a whole rapidly started turning away from that posture, urging coordination on slowing down the development of frontier AI that they say could soon be too dangerous and unknowable to control.

Anthropic's Dario Amodei was at the forefront of this change in tone, arguing in a nearly 4,000-word essay this weekend that "we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models" to avoid "a race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, [that] can make [catastrophic] risks more acute."

Within hours, other AI leaders were echoing the same call. OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman posted his agreement on social media and said similar pacing discussions had been taking place at OpenAI. Alphabet Chief Scientist and Google DeepMind cofounder and chair Demis Hassabis said that Amodei's essay "points towards the right path forward," and renewed his own recent call for an industry-wide standards body. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted that the company "welcome[s] the research, focus, and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right as the design goal," ahead of the release of a lengthy "humanist AI" code of conduct for its models.

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Stonehenge is the most famous example of megalithic architecture across Britain and Ireland, but there are plenty of others, including Calanais, Newgrange, and Avebury, as well as the Devil's Arrows. The latter is Britain's tallest standing stone alignment, yet little is known about the provenance of its stones. Scientists have confirmed that the stones came from a site 18 kilometers (11 miles) away, transported by humans rather than glacial movement, according to a paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

"Sites in southern England and Scotland receive considerable attention but monuments like the Devil's Arrows have remained comparatively understudied despite their significance," said co-author Jim Leary of the University of York. "We have now proved that Neolithic communities moved several 25-ton stones across Yorkshire, transforming a familiar site into an epic quest to create a sacred landscape."

Stonehenge has been the focus of recent chemical analyses identifying where all the stones that make up the structure came from, revealing that many originated in quarries a significant distance away. For instance, a 2019 study concluded that the 42 bluestones that make up the inner ring came all the way from western Wales. The outer layer of sarsen stones hails from much closer to home: Marlborough Downs, an area of round, grassy hills 25 to 30 km (17 miles) north of Stonehenge, which has the largest concentration of sarsen in the UK.

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Anthropic said it stopped multiple attempts by scientists this year to use its technology for research that could help develop biological weapons, as experts increasingly fear the threat that AI poses to public safety.

The startup gave five examples of times actors “circumvented controls” and made other efforts to “obfuscate” the purpose of their research to dodge safeguards. The cases involved some users in nations that it prohibits from accessing its models, which include Russia, China, and Iran.

“We hope that by sharing these examples, we spark a conversation within the AI industry and with governments about emerging biological risks and how best to counter them,” Anthropic said in a report about efforts to use its models for malicious activity.

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When a prominent researcher quits a job at a frontier AI lab these days, it's often to pursue a new startup or protest a new business model. But AI researcher Jacob Coxon is using his departure from Anthropic to publicly warn that frontier AI companies are "gambling with our lives" with systems that they "earnestly believe... could kill us all by the end of the decade."

In a social media thread Tuesday night, Coxon said that this existential risk is inherent not so much in today's models but more in the impending prospect of "self-improving superintelligence" creating "superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources." Others working on these models have either not "internalized the civilizational stakes" or believe that they need to "speedrun" the race to superintelligence to prevent an irresponsible party from getting there first, he wrote.

Lest you think this is just one departing researcher expressing an unpopular opinion, Anthropic Alignment Science lead Evan Hubinger piped in on social media to say that "Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

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Anthropic’s prospective public-market investors must reckon with an external group of trustees that control the majority of the AI company’s board, as its planned blockbuster initial public offering forces close scrutiny of its experimental governance structure.

The company’s Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) is a small group of advisers created to safeguard the lab’s mission of developing AI for the long-term benefit of humanity, even as commercial pressures intensify.

The trust holds no equity in Anthropic, but has significant influence, with the San Francisco-based company planning to preserve its role after a stock market debut that could value the Claude maker at as much as $2 trillion.

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Cloud-based AI models operated by OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google suffered a rare and overlapping set of significant service interruptions over a period of hours Thursday morning.

Anthropic first reported a "partial outage" related to "elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5" at 9:23 am (all times Eastern). The company reported that it had "identified the cause" of the error roughly 15 minutes later, before reporting that "a fix has been deployed" and the issue was resolved by 12:16 pm. A separate incident report indicated "elevated errors on requests to Claude Sonnet 5" for a brief period just after noon.

OpenAI, meanwhile, reported "elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex" were resulting in "degraded performance" as of 10:43 am Thursday morning. A mitigation put in place a little more than half an hour later led to the issue being marked as "resolved" by 12:55 pm.

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Four federal agencies have been sued amid calls to release information about the secret framework that the Trump administration uses to conduct safety reviews of frontier AI models prior to release.

In a Wednesday press release announcing the lawsuit, a nonpartisan nonprofit called Protect Democracy alleged that “almost no details” have been released to the public or Congress. To everyone except a few vague “trusted partners,” it remains unclear what the government’s review process looks like, which companies are involved in constructing the framework, or what legal authority Trump officials have to conduct the reviews.

“Neither the identities of those entities nor the criteria by which they were selected have been made public,” Protect Democracy said.

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Jaguar Land Rover was one of the first automakers to announce a transition away from combustion engines. That transition timeline might have slipped somewhat—pesky things like pandemics, supply chains, and revanchism have all been barriers to more rapid electrification—but it's still underway, and today is the debut of the Range Rover Electric, a new battery-electric vehicle variant that sits alongside the internal combustion and plug-in hybrid Range Rovers.

Until now, the only way to get a fully electric Range Rover was by going the restomod route. But classic Range Rovers drive like classic cars, with all their inherent faults, and the price tag can be eye-watering. No Range Rover is exactly cheap, but with a starting price of $138,000, the 2027 Range Rover Electric is about half the cost of one of those restomods and benefits from 21st century safety systems like airbags, advanced driver assistance systems, modern crash protection standards, plus the support and warranty of a major OEM. And there's evidently demand: JLR told us that it already has 80,000 hand-raisers—half from North America—70 percent of whom are new to the brand, with 20 percent already owning an EV. (Obviously, only some fraction of those will translate to sales.)

The smooth front grille is one of the only ways to spot a Range Rover Electric. Credit: Range Rover

Because the idea was to make the Range Rover Electric a Range Rover first and an EV second, it looks virtually identical to the other versions, albeit with a slightly more aerodynamic front grille and more aero-efficient wheels that together conspire to shave off a fraction of the vehicle's drag coefficient. The lack of tailpipes at the back is probably the biggest giveaway that you're looking at the electric one. There's also a flat underbody, but hopefully you'll never need to look at that.

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Some of the world’s leading music publishers think that Anthropic got off too light in a historic settlement where the Claude maker paid authors $1.5 billion after admitting to pirating more than 7 million books to train AI.

“$1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation,” music publishers said in a lawsuit filed Friday.

Music publishers suing Anthropic include Sony, EMI, and Warner Chappell. They alleged that Anthropic’s illegal torrenting also included “thousands upon thousands” of their copyrighted musical compositions.

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The Trump administration's blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal, a federal judge ruled in an order vacating government directives against the use of the firm's AI technology.

The government illegally retaliated against Anthropic by designating it a supply-chain risk to national security, said yesterday's ruling by Judge Rita Lin in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The maker of Claude AI technology was barred by the US after it refused to drop restrictions on the use of its products for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans, the ruling said.

"The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment," Lin wrote in an order that granted key portions of Anthropic's motion for summary judgment.

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For all the interest in and uptake of agentic AI systems over the past year or so, the world of automated AI has thus far been primarily limited to text, images, code, and other data and actions that take place inside a computer. Anthropic is now aiming to change that somewhat with what it's calling the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a set of standardized drivers designed to let AI agents easily interface with and control arbitrary devices.

For now, the "research preview" of the MHS effort is being sold mainly as a way to help scientists streamline the arduous process of creating the custom software integrations that are often needed to get disparate components of an experiment working in concert. MHS can provide a common interface and common format for data sharing between these devices, Anthropic says, allowing them to talk to each other across a network "without needing a bespoke 'translator' program in between." The standardized system could reduce weeks or months of exacting experimental setup down to "hours or minutes," Anthropic writes.

An Anthropic graphic illustrating how MHS serves as a "translation" layer between AI agents and multiple types of devices. Credit: Anthropic

In a video posted alongside the announcement, Anthropic Technical Staffer Alek Kemeny says the MHS effort was inspired by observing neuroscientist Arco Bast work through an experiment on memory formation in the brain at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. Kemeny said Bast had worked out an interface to get the rotating laser beams, microscopes, cameras, and myriad other components of the experiment to coordinate through a common interface. "This idea could be used to have AI run any science experiment in the world," Kemeny recalls thinking at the time.

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Panic, the indie game publishers behind the quirky, yellow crank-sporting Playdate gaming handheld, is issuing refunds to customers who had to shoulder the cost of inappropriate tariffs imposed by the Trump administration this year.

The news comes months after the Supreme Court said in a February ruling that those tariffs were illegal, which also demanded that the administration refund the companies that had to temporarily pay the import taxes. In an update posted on the Playdate help site this week, Panic noted that it has finally "begun to receive refunds of the tariffs we paid in the last year" and had consequently "refunded all tariffs charged to customers."

In the initial version of that tariff note, Panic explained that it couldn't afford to simply "absorb" the 19 percent tariffs it was being charged to import Playdate hardware made overseas because "our margins on Playdate are low." As such, while the tax was in effect, it was passed along to customers as an explicit subtotal line item at the bottom of all Playdate orders. That's in contrast to companies like Nintendo, which vaguely cited "market conditions" and tariff "uncertainty" in raising the asking price of legacy hardware and some Switch 2 accessories last year.

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Florida's attorney general got a fiery rebuke and some ecclesiastical schooling from the state's Catholic bishops after he boldly threatened to block funding to Catholic schools unless the church bends to the state's anti-vaccine policies—policies allegedly intended to uphold religious freedom.

On July 31, Attorney General James Uthmeier sent a questionable letter to the bishops regarding exemptions to school vaccination requirements. Florida law requires public and private schools to allow vaccination exemptions based on religious grounds. But Catholic schools in the state do not accept religious exemptions; Florida's Catholic dioceses support vaccination and recognize no theological argument against it. The schools only accept exemptions based on medical conditions that are verified by a healthcare provider.

Uthmeier, himself a Catholic, wrote to the bishops in an open letter that, based on his own understanding of Catholicism, he saw "no legitimate religious reason to refuse granting religious exemptions." He reviewed select theological positions regarding the use of "abortion-derived vaccines," and suggested to the bishops that it was "morally reprehensible" that they not grant religious exemptions.

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