The Archive

Steven Lee Myers / New York Times: A look at efforts by OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to prevent anyone from using their AI tools to disrupt midterms, including Anthropic's first-ever “war room” — OpenAI, Anthropic and other tech companies have vowed to protect Tuesday's elections from efforts to undermine democracy.

Google is completely turning off Search in schools that reject its AI features, the company told The New York Times. The decision was also shared in a broader education-related update from Google on Tuesday, saying that access to Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search "will be entirely off" for K-12 student accounts unless "administrators explicitly turn them on." Administrators will not be given the option to toggle Gemini-powered features off without disabling Search, however. Chris Phillips, Google's vice president of education, tells the NYT, "Search and AI are de...

New York Times: Google plans to make it easier to restrict its AI tools for students early next year but says schools that block AI entirely will lose student access to Search — Google is making it easier to restrict its A.I. tools for students. But schools that block A.I. entirely will lose student access to Google's search engine.

New York Times: US data center operators and power developers are repurposing jet engines to secure power in as little as two years, bypassing multi-year grid-connection delays — Across wide stretches of the sun-bleached Sonoran desert in Arizona, thousands of retired aircraft sit nose-to-tail in graveyards of metal known as boneyards.

New York Times sues Brave browser for scraping publisher content to train AI models and bypassing paywalls without consent.

Anthropic securing 3.5GW+ compute capacity by 2026 via direct Nvidia and AMD procurement for infrastructure scaling.

SF dating culture adopts startup metrics; lifestyle commentary unrelated to AI technical development.

The AI tool provides recommendations and adjusts the recipe accordingly. | Image: The New York Times The New York Times is testing a new AI feature for its Cooking app that helps users to modify recipes, and it's sparked some drama among users. NYT Cooking senior editor Genevieve Ko announced the feature last Friday, which can be used to recommend substitutions for ingredients and cooking equipment, scale recipes to any number of servings, and "generally make our recipes work for what a cook needs at that moment." One of the examples given in the article shows a user asking to use baby spinac...

Journalist Kevin Roose discusses new book on AI industry transformation and departure from New York Times for independent podcast.

Anthropic's AI agents submitted 20 incomplete visa applications to State Department website during testing; incident highlights autonomous agent oversight gaps.

The California State Athletic Commission sent a cease-and-desist letter to a startup that hosted a match between a human and a robot last month, as reported by The New York Times. The fight, which took place on September 18th, pitted a human, Frankie LaPenna, against a humanoid robot owned by a tech startup, Rek, that was being piloted by a human using what the NYT described as a "remote virtual-reality system." Rek says it is the "the humanoid robot fighting league" on its website, and the robot appears to be one from EngineAI but with a Terminator-like head swapped on top. You can watch a r...

USA Today Co., along with the several local newspapers it owns, is suing OpenAI over claims that the company copied "hundreds of thousands" of articles to train its AI models, as reported earlier by Reuters. In a filing on Thursday, the publisher asks for damages of more than $250 million, alleging OpenAI's unauthorized use of its content "has done real and continuing" harm to its outlets. This is just the latest in a string of copyright lawsuits filed against OpenAI. In addition to a copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times, OpenAI is also facing legal action from The Intercept, CNET ow...

An OpenAI publicist tried to change the topic of CEO Sam Altman's interview with Vanity Fair's Mark Guiducci after the editor brought up a ChatGPT user's suicide. When Guiducci confronted Altman about the incident, the publicist warned Guiducci about running out of time, saying she'd like to "move on" to another topic. The interruption came shortly after Guiducci asked Altman if he knew who Laura Reiley is, a journalist who wrote an essay for The New York Times about her daughter's conversations with ChatGPT before she took her own life. "Her daughter committed suicide after speaking to ChatG...

Google is getting ready to launch a satellite with its AI processors to test how well they perform in space, as reported earlier by The New York Times. The move is part of Google's Project Suncatcher, the company's experimental initiative that could eventually put AI data centers into orbit. The satellite, equipped with Google's Tensor Processing Units, will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on October 1st, allowing it to harness the power of the sun in low Earth orbit. As noted by Google, the goal of the mission is to measure how well its TPUs "handle the physical stress of spaceflight ...

Recently unsealed court documents in the New York Times' case against OpenAI and Microsoft are pretty damning. The companies' own documentation warned that it was starting a "doom loop" that would damage the web, characterized its scraping of data to train its models as the "largest theft of labor in human history," and that it made a "complete mockery of the idea of fair use." Many of the most eye-catching quotes from the document come from Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht. Though, the company has tried to distance itself from Hecht's assertions. Microsoft spokesperson Al...

Poll data released Tuesday by the New York Times and Siena University confirms what we've already been seeing, and what politicians are responding to - AI and data centers are incredibly unpopular. Asked if they support or oppose the construction of data centers to power AI tech, 61 percent of the 1,503 likely voters surveyed in early September (ahead of the recent AI safety slowdown discussion) said they were opposed, with only 14 percent saying they strongly support. The split was about even among 2024 Donald Trump voters, at 49 percent support to 45 percent oppose, while people who had vot...

It's the hot new thing in tech, and it's where all the jobs are. Students who don't learn to use it fall behind. And to help them catch up in time, its creators are graciously providing the resources and curriculum for learning it, often pro bono. That's the narrative AI companies are pitching schools on right now, but according to New York Times education technology reporter Natasha Singer, it's also how the tech industry has built its influence in classrooms for the past 15 years. In a new book, Coding Kids, Singer details how tech companies took a central role in promoting computers and co...

OpenAI says it found a solution to a major math problem that has remained unsolved for around 90 years, as reported earlier by The New York Times and Wired. In a blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI announced that it discovered a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem - which relates to the flow of liquid and gas - using an internal AI model more powerful than the newly released GPT-6 Astra alongside 10,000 concurrent agents. The Navier-Stokes problem is one of seven Millennium Prize Problems, each of which comes with a $1 million reward for solving. OpenAI says it started training the internal AI mod...

Microsoft's Copilot rarely reproduces even full sentences from news articles and books, let alone substantive chunks that could substitute for the original, the company says in new legal filings as it fights copyright claims from publishers including The New York Times and book authors. As part of the lawsuit's discovery, Microsoft provided 8.2 million Copilot chat logs to an expert hired by news publishers. The logs, it claims, were specifically chosen "because they hit on keywords implicating use of News Plaintiffs' websites, and therefore the most likely to contain News Plaintiffs' works."...

The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, making an argument in favor of the AI lab. The landmark lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on articles from The New York Times and seeks to recoup "billions of dollars" in damages from both Microsoft and OpenAI. This week, the Trump administration filed a statement of interest in the case, supporting OpenAI's argument that it's fair use to train an AI model on copyrighted text. "The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the...

To power its new West Texas data center, Amazon is investing in the construction of a new power plant that could be one of the largest single producers of greenhouse gases in the US, according to the New York Times. The new gas-burning plant in Pecos County, Texas has received significant investment from Amazon and, at least initially, would not be connected to the state's power grid. Instead, its 35 natural-gas turbines would primarily deliver its 7.65 gigawatts of electricity to the new data center. According to Cleanview, which tracks data centers and their associated power projects, GW Ra...

News publishers say OpenAI hid tools and datasets that could identify copyrighted journalism in ChatGPT outputs, escalating their lawsuit with a new motion for sanctions.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says his new AI startup will work toward developing an "artificial general engineer," according to reports from The New York Times and CNBC. The startup, called Prometheus, aims to develop AI-powered engineering tools to aid in the design of physical products. The NYT first reported on Prometheus last November, but now Bezos is sharing more information about the startup after a $12 billion funding round, putting the company at a $41 billion valuation. Bezos serves as co-CEO of Prometheus alongside Vik Bajaj, who co-founded Alphabet's health-focused research group, Ve...

Today on Decoder, I’m talking to Ryan Mac, a technology reporter at The New York Times and coauthor of the excellent book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, which came out in 2024. I can’t recommend it enough. I wanted to have Ryan on the show because we’re on the cusp of the SpaceX IPO, which promises to be one of the most consequential public offerings in history for a variety of reasons — its biggest-ever size, of course, at nearly $2 trillion dollars, but also because all kinds of rules that keep our markets fair are being bent, if not outright broken, along the way. I also...

10 September 2019, US, New York: Yellow taxis pass in front of the New York Times newspaper building. Photo: Alexandra Schuler/dpa (Photo by Alexandra Schuler/picture alliance via Getty Images) How newsrooms should use AI - or if they should at all - has been a recurrent debate within the media industry over the last several years. Increasingly, these rules are being hammered out at the bargaining table between unions and publishers. Right now, employees at The New York Times are gearing up for a fight. Unionized staff with the Tech Guild say Times management has refused to provide the union ...

New York Times retracted quote attributed to Pierre Poilievre after discovering it was AI-generated summary misrepresented as direct quotation.

Meta is facing a class action lawsuit filed by five major book publishers and one author over claims the company "engaged in one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history" when training its Llama AI models, as reported earlier by The New York Times. In their suit, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, Hachette, Cengage, and author Scott Turow allege that Meta "repeatedly copied" their books and journal articles without permission. The lawsuit accuses Meta of knowingly ripping copyrighted work from "notorious pirate sites," such as LibGen, Anna's Archive, Sci-Hub, Sci-M...

Interview with New York Times CEO on human expertise and editorial authority as competitive moat against aggregators.

Opinion piece critiques Anthropic's restraint and open-source stance, speculating on corporate strategy and regulatory outcomes.

OpenAI opposes New York Times subpoena for 20M ChatGPT conversations; advancing privacy and security protections.