Picture of missiles flying out from a computer screen. Source: Cath Virginia/ The Verge, Getty Images
David Isenberg brings us AI briefs on the Pentagon using Anthopic’s Claude to plan Epic Fury; the “Cancel ChatGPT campaign,” “Anthropic’s Feud With Pentagon Earns It Fans,” “Using AI to fix job destruction,” and much more.
News from The Guardian
Iran war heralds era of AI-powered bombing quicker than ‘speed of thought’
Speed and scale of US military’s AI war planning raises fears human decision-making may be sidelined
March 3, 2026
The use of AI tools to enable attacks on Iran heralds a new era of bombing quicker than “the speed of thought”, experts have said, amid fears human decision-makers could be sidelined. Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, was reportedly used by the US military in the barrage of strikes as the technology “shortens the kill chain” – meaning the process of target identification through to legal approval and strike launch. The US and Israel, which previously used AI to identify targets in Gaza, launched almost 900 strikes on Iranian targets in the first 12 hours alone, during which Israeli missiles killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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News from The Soufan Center
AI Integration in Operation Epic Fury
March 3, 2026
Operation Epic Fury relied on AI model “Claude” for operational planning, even as Anthropic, the model’s parent company, had been blacklisted by the Trump administration hours earlier for seeking guarantees that their models would not be integrated into domestic surveillance missions and autonomous weapon systems. According to sources consulted by The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic’s Claude model was used for intelligence assessments, including for target identification and simulating battle scenarios in the lead-up to the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran.
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News from AI Impact
AI might be stepping over the “any lawful use” red line
This Anthropic vs. The White House feud is unfolding rapidly
March 3, 2026
OpenAI experienced a drop in usage and even became the target of a due to its Defense deal; meanwhile, Claude topped app store downloads.
As we write, reports continue of OpenAI trying to backtrack and amend its deal, of Claude trying to work out its feud and companies like Google trying to figure out where it stands in the use of its models (so far, hundreds of Google employees have come out in support of Anthropic).
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News from Ryan McBeth
Haifa Port Attack?
Nope. It’s AI Slop.
March 3, 2026
Three days into a war… and the AI fakes are already here.
A video is circulating online claiming to show a massive Iranian missile strike on the Haifa oil refinery in Israel. It’s dramatic. It’s loud. It’s six seconds long.
And it’s completely fake.
I’ve made this video free for all members.
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News from Bloomberg
Anthropic’s Feud With Pentagon Earns It Fans Amid the Blowback
AI company’s app is reaching new heights of popularity after Trump ordered the government to stop using it
March 2, 2026
In the last few days, Anthropic’s chatbot Claude hit No. 1 in downloads on the Apple App Store, surpassing OpenAI’s ChatGPT for the first time. On Monday, some of the company’s AI apps briefly crashed because of what it called “unprecedented demand.” Fans are literally taking to the streets to spell out their appreciation.
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News from The Verge
How OpenAI caved to the Pentagon on AI surveillance
The law doesn’t say what Sam Altman claims it does.
March 2, 2026
On Friday evening, amidst fallout from a standoff between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that his own company had successfully negotiated new terms with the Pentagon. The US government had just moved to blacklist Anthropic for standing firm on two red lines for military use: no mass surveillance of Americans and no lethal autonomous weapons (or AI systems with the power to kill targets without human oversight). Altman, however, implied that he’d found a unique way to keep those same limits in OpenAI’s contract.
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Begun, The AI Wars Have
Anthropic has been designated a “supply chain risk” and my cortisol is officially SPIKED.
March 2, 2026
On Friday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth formally designated Anthropic, the company behind the most capable AI model on the planet, Claude, a “supply chain risk to national security.”
That spiked a lot of people’s cortisol. Including mine.
This label has never been applied to an American company. Until now, it has been reserved for foreign companies with documented ties to adversary governments
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News from The Onion
Data Centers By The Numbers
March 2, 2026
The surge in AI, cryptocurrency, and other digital assets is rapidly increasing demand for computational infrastructure around the country. The Onion examines the key facts and figures behind data centers.
0.8
New pH of your groundwater
$900,000,000
What 16GB of RAM will cost next year
4,000
Palm fronds fanned to cool the servers
1
Security guard job that Mom thinks might help you get back on your feet
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News from The Deep View
Using AI to fix job destruction, skills, and hiring
March 1, 2026
In a labor market being rewired by AI, CodeSignal is betting that skills, not resumes, will decide who thrives.
For this episode of The Deep View: Conversations, I talked with Tigran Sloyan, CEO and co-founder of CodeSignal,https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropics-feud-with-pentagon-earns-it-fans-amid-the-blowback-f7e2bb83?mod=panda_wsj_author_alert the company building a new standard for hiring and career mobility in the age of AI….
In my conversation with Tigran, we talked about:
- Why resumes haven’t meaningfully changed in 100 years, and why it’s breaking hiring
- How CodeSignal measures skills, and why simulation beats multiple-choice
- What AI unlocks for assessing non-technical roles such as sales and support
- The dark side of AI: what CodeSignal’s research shows about cheating attempts…
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News from CNBC
Anthropic’s Claude hits No. 1 on Apple’s top free apps list after Pentagon rejection
February 28, 2026
Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence assistant app jumped to the No. 1 slot on Apple’s chart of top U.S. free apps late on Saturday, a day after the Trump administration sought to block government agencies’ adoption of the startup’s technology.
The rise in popularity suggests that Anthropic is benefiting from its presence in news headlines, stemming from its refusal to have its models used for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons.
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News from Lifehacker
How AI Is Making Romance Scams Even More Dangerous
It turns out you can fall in love with a chatbot.
February 27, 2026
….Romance scams are a textbook example of emotional manipulation in which the perpetrator exploits a victim’s feelings of loneliness, love, or desire for connection to build trust over the long term. Beyond the emotional toll, the financial consequences are significant: The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported $672 million in romance scam losses in 2024, and this number is almost certainly only a fraction of the real total.
Scammers are increasingly employing AI tools in romance scams…
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News from Observer
Jack Dorsey Recasts Block as an A.I.-First Company
Jack Dorsey says most companies will soon follow Block’s lead, restructuring around A.I.-powered productivity and flatter teams.
February 27, 2026
In December, Jack Dorsey reached a blunt conclusion: A.I. was advancing too quickly to remain a side project at his fintech company, Block—it had to be at the center of it. Yesterday (Feb. 26), Dorsey unveiled what he called “one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company”: Block will cut roughly 40 percent of its workforce, reducing headcount from about 10,000 employees to 6,000. The move, he said, reflects how A.I.-powered productivity is changing the economics of running a company.
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News from The Power Law
The Pentagon’s War on Anthropic
The Pentagon has a legitimate principle, and a terrible strategy for enforcing it
February 27, 2026
Anthropic’s Claude is the only frontier AI system known to be operating on Pentagon’s classified networks. Claude arguably helped capture Maduro.
But the Department of War wants more….or that he would invoke the Defense Production Act to legally compel Anthropic’s compliance….and would ban Anthropic from doing business with other Department contractors, which is a major loss of business.
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News from Science
How will we know if AI is smart enough to do science?
New tests gauge whether large language models can use their deep troves of knowledge to actually make discoveries
February 27, 2026
For years, artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have dreamed of developing tools that could supercharge science by posing novel questions, designing experiments, and perhaps even carrying them out. In recent months, large language models (LLMs) have made discoveries that some AI developers claim have inched us closer to that future. But how do you test whether an AI model can truly do science?
News from 9to5Mac
ChatGPT user base surges 350% in 18 months as it nears 1 billion weekly active users
February 27, 2026
OpenAI is well on its way to reporting 1 billion weekly active ChatGPT users. The company today claims 900 million weekly active users, a 350% increase since just 18 months ago.
More than 5% of weekly active users are paid consumer subscribers
AI chatbots in general have taken the world by storm, of course, to the point that even Apple is expected to change course and pivot Siri into some form of AI chatbot in iOS 27.
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News from PYMNTS
Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus Seeks Billions to Reinvent Industrial Giants With AI
February 27, 2026
Project Prometheus, an artificial intelligence lab co-founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Google executive Vikram Bajaj, is raising “tens of billions of dollars” to buy businesses disrupted by AI and then use the technology to improve their margins, the Financial Times reported Thursday (Feb. 26), citing unnamed sources.
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News from Lifehacker
Firefox Now Lets You Disable All Current (and Future) AI Features
February 26, 2026
There’s nothing wrong with companies offering AI features to users, so long as they also offer easy ways to disable them. Some customers don’t want AI in their day-to-day products; anecdotally, I know manydo not. Give us an off switch, though, and it’s all good. The issue is when these features are not only offered, they’re made mandatory.…AI controls… starting with Firefox 148….sports a brand-new AI controls section in the settings panel on the desktop browser. (You’ll find it in between “Sync” and “AI controls.”) From here, you’ll be able to block all current andfuture AI features, and cherry pick which features you want to use—if any.
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News from Business Insider
Uber employees have an AI clone of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi — and use ‘Dara AI’ before talking to the big boss himself
February 24, 2026
AI isn’t just arranging rides or driving cars at Uber — it’s also imitating CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
Some Uber employees have created an AI version of their company’s top executive, Khosrowshahi said on an episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett.
“One of my team members told me that some teams have built a ‘Dara AI,'” Khosrowshahi said. “They basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me.”
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