In the 1991 Gulf War, the US and the world condemned Saddam for burning Kuwaiti oil wells, calling it environmental warfare. The danger was profound.
In 2003, US intelligence was deeply concerned about him doing it again. Now, it’s US policy.
DoD to Anthropic: drop AI safeguards or lose your $200M contract.
Anthropic: no.
First Silicon Valley vs. Trump AI showdown, and it landed on a Friday deadline.
https://open.substack.com/pub/trulyback/p/when-the-ai-company-said-no?r=13e6w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Should the companies building the most powerful technology in human history get to choose the people who regulate them? h̲t̲t̲p̲s̲://t̲r̲u̲l̲y̲b̲a̲c̲k̲.s̲u̲b̲s̲t̲a̲c̲k̲.c̲o̲m̲/p̲/w̲h̲y̲-a̲i̲-g̲i̲a̲n̲t̲s̲-a̲r̲e̲-b̲u̲y̲i̲n̲g̲-t̲h̲e̲-m̲i̲d̲t̲e̲r̲m̲s̲
Alex Bores quit Palantir over its ICE contracts. Now Palantir's co-founder is spending some of those ICE profits to fund attack ads against Bores's congressional campaign because Bores wrote NY's AI safety law. https://trulyback.substack.com/p/why-ai-giants-are-buying-the-midterms
Of the Best Picture nominees this year, I've seen F1 and Frankenstein, and they were ... fine? I am working my way through the rest as quickly as I can, but neither F-entries struck me as Best Picture material. Not horrible, not great.
The AI industry is spending more than $400 million to pick its own regulators in the 2026 midterms.
Anthropic just dropped $20M on one side. OpenAI's backers have $100M on the other.
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The good news: You can help! Just file a FOIA request. It takes 10 minutes and creates a legal obligation to preserve records.
Update: After my post about the State Department deleting 17 years of tweets, both the Archive Team and the GW National Security Archive are looking into preservation. They were grateful for the heads-up but face real technical challenges at this scale.
If these are already archived somewhere, great. But we have to protect what we can. That is OUR data, and OUR information and OUR history. We can't let Trump become the beginning and end of American diplomatic history.
I don't have the resources to archive the tweets, but I will get as many as I can.
Imperative that there be a concerted effort on the part of maybe GWU National Security Archives, etc. to grab the tweets and archive them somehow.
So, this administration is about to memory hole all of the @usstatedept.bsky.social tweets prior to Jan 20, 2025. Is any archival organization doing anything about this? Ambassador and embassies are also affected! www.vpm.org/npr-news/npr...
Was the lack of masks not proof enough?
Loved contributing to this series. Thank you for the opportunity!
The system needing reform is the same system that prevents reformers from organizing.
Super pumped to publish a new essay for @niskanencenter.bsky.social on why the fourth industrial revolution resists political response… and why we should build capacity anyway.
When the monopolist owns the megaphone, the playbook breaks.
Today, the tools we'd use to organize resistance are controlled by the forces we need to resist. We're forced onto digital terrain owned by the people we're trying to rein in.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3RC...
The Gilded Age robber barons were ruthless. They bought legislators and hired strikebreakers. But they couldn't control what farmers thought about them. Tarbell exposed Standard Oil. Sinclair's Jungle changed federal law. The media was too diffuse to control.
That's no longer true.
As a journalist, I can tell you that is designed for you to ignore it in disgust, so they can then “report” that Prof. Mann “declined to comment”.
if you are talking today about how bad maduro was and were alive, at all, during the run-up to the iraq war you are potentially the dumbest person to ever live
People are going to try and lure you into debates about whether Maduro was a good guy or not and the thing is, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of discussing whether violent kidnappings and extrajudicial murders by the US government are ok. No, they aren’t! End of convo.
This is enraging, and you should be VERY VERY pissed off about it. But I'm happy that my lovely partner is part of the organization that did the study that revealed this shadiness!
Political leaders in Moldova, Romania, and Central and East. Europe should read the new U.S. National Security Strategy very carefully and adjust policy accordingly. It's more critical of the European Union than of Russia. It openly and gleefully spreads far-right propaganda, ...
Told you so…
'“Yes, there is a new mayor, and there are a lot of worries, but our clients are saying, ‘We love New York,’” Naftali said. “There is no slowdown in demand.”'
but the weird one: anthropic confirmed a 11k-word "soul document" describing Claude's values is actual training data. not a prompt. training data. the values are baked in.
mistral: 675B parameter model, apache 2.0, just ... download it
openai: "code red" internally, bought a company to monitor their own models
anthropic: $1B revenue in 6 months, acquired Bun, $200M snowflake deal, IPO incoming
