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Despite an ultimatum from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Anthropic said that it can't "in good conscience" comply with a Pentagon edict to remove guardrails on its AI, CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post. The Department of Defense had threatened to cancel a $200 million contract and label Anthropic a "supply chain risk" if it didn't agree to remove safeguards over mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
"Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters — with our two requested safeguards in place," Amodei said. "We remain ready to continue our work to support the national security of the United States."
In response, US Under Secretary of Defense Emil Michael accused Amodei in a post on X of wanting "nothing more than to try to personally control the US military and is OK putting our nation's safety at risk."
The standoff began when the Pentagon demanded that Anthropic its Claude AI product available for "all lawful purposes" — including mass surveillance and the development of fully autonomous weapons that can kill without human supervision. Anthropic refused to offer its tech for those things, even with a "safety stack" built into that model.
Yesterday, Axios reported that Hegseth gave Anthropic a deadline of 5:01 PM on Friday to agree to the Pentagon's terms. At the same time, the DoD requested an assessment of its reliance on Claude, an initial step toward potentially labelling Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" — a designation usually reserved for firms from adversaries like China and "never before applied to an American company," Anthropic wrote.
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For anyone who has been following the soap opera unfolding between Netflix and Paramount Skydance over the past few months in their financial brinksmanship to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, the saga may be nearing its end. Today, WBD said its board of directors have determined that the latest offer from Paramount Skydance amounted to the better proposal. The media outfit gave Netflix four business days to match Paramount's terms, but the streamer didn't waste any time in declining to raise its own bid.
"We believe we would have been strong stewards of Warner Bros.' iconic brands, and that our deal would have strengthened the entertainment industry and preserved and created more production jobs in the US," the statement from Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said. "But this transaction was always a 'nice to have' at the right price, not a 'must have' at any price."
In addition to the purchase price of $31 per WBD share, Paramount's latest offer also included a provision that it would cover the $2.8 billion termination fee that WBD would owe to Netflix for dissolving the existing merger agreement between the businesses. So rather than paying $82.7 billion to acquire the Warner Bros. part of the operation, it appears Netflix may walk away with no new cont
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 Apple Maps has been updated with a new guide called "2026 Formula 1 Tracks Around the World," ahead of the new season which is being streamed exclusively on Apple TV in the United States.
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 Apple is in talks with major Indian banks as it prepares to introduce Apple Pay in the country sometime in the middle of 2026, reports Bloomberg.
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NEW RESOURCES Tippah News: Mississippi auditor creates nonprofit spending database after finding state couldn't tally funding. "The Mississippi Office of the State Auditor said Wednesday it has launched an online Nonprofit Spending […]
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