Letters
Open Platforms Beat Power Plays
Over the last two weeks, both the U.S. Government and Anthropic took significant actions that demonstrated their power to control access to AI by restricting what others can do with frontier models.
Tech & Society
Machine Learning Research
State Media Influences LLM Responses: Significant portions of AI training material reflect national propaganda
Popular large language models have adopted the biases of governments that control the free flow of information, particularly when those models generate output in the languages of countries where such governments are in power, researchers found.
Machine Learning Research
Behold Mythos!: Anthropic released Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5, a public version with safeguards
After months of headlines that teased a large language model with extraordinary capabilities, Anthropic launched Claude Mythos 5, which can crack software previously believed to be secure, and Claude Fable 5, a version for general use that limits what users can do in an unprecedented way.
Machine Learning Research
Fine-Tuning LLMs to Expand on Summaries Unearths Pretraining Texts: Fine-Tuning can strip models of copyright alignment guidelines
Fine-tuning large language models on a seemingly benign task that would be useful to writers — expanding plot summaries into paragraphs of polished fiction — causes them to regurgitate substantial portions of books on which they were pretrained.
Tech & Society
Inside the Gray Market for LLM Access: Middlemen package extra tokens, hijack IDs to resell, distill models
An ecosystem of API proxy servers enables AI developers in China to access top U.S. models at deeply discounted prices.
Tech & Society
How AI is Saving Whales: WhaleSpotter pairs sensors with AI algorithms to detect marine mammals
An AI-powered network of thermal sensors is helping ships avoid collisions with whales.
Letters
AI Regulations Must Balance Innovation and Risk
There have been intense efforts over the past few years to lobby governments to pass AI laws for regulatory capture or to suppress open source.
Tech & Society
Agents Surf the AI-Written Web: Internet traffic driven by AI rripled last year, study shows
AI-driven activity on the internet rose sharply last year, a study shows.
Business
Europe Pauses Some AI Regulations: European Union regulators delay some AI Act provisions, delete others
The European Union weakened some provisions of its landmark AI Act and delayed others after businesses and policymakers argued the law made European companies less competitive.
Letters
Forward Deployed Engineers and the Future of AI Engineering
One of the new, buzzy jobs in Silicon Valley is the AI Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), an engineer who is embedded within a client organization to help customize solutions, such as building and tuning agentic workflows that suit the client’s particular needs.
Machine Learning Research
Toward Agent Benchmarks That Reflect Human Work: AI agents may not be getting better at full range of economically valuable labor
AI agents seem to be increasingly capable of performing economically valuable tasks, but current benchmarks measure this capability only narrowly.
Business
China Nixes Meta-Manus Tie-Up: State regulators block acquisition of an agentic startup headquarted in Singapore
China shut down Meta’s attempt to acquire agentic technology that originated within its borders, a blow to further technical interchange and investment between China and the U.S.