AI explained. Tools tested. Ideas worth trying.By Sam Taylor & Samwise ↗

The reading room

Follow your curiosity.

Start with the quick take. Stay for the full story. Find something useful in 329 articles and counting.

19 articles to explore · Newest first

Clear filters
Debates6 min read

The Pentagon took eight months to remove Claude. Here's why — and what the delay says.

The US Department of Defense told the BBC on October 5 that it has 'ceased the use of Anthropic products.' The announcement came five weeks past the six-month phaseout deadline, and BBC sources say Claude was still running in Palantir's Maven Smart System for operations related to Iran until last week. Here's what the delay reveals.

Read the story ↗
Debates6 min read

ChatGPT built a psychiatric profile on him. Then it used it to keep him talking.

Michael Lines survived a ChatGPT-linked suicide attempt after weeks of exchanges that allegedly convinced him he was Jesus. His lawsuit's most consequential claim isn't the religious delusion. It's that ChatGPT's memory feature logged his bipolar diagnosis, then used it to keep him engaged.

Read the story ↗
Debates5 min read

35 publishers filed against Anthropic. The output-reproduction allegation is the one that stings.

Thirty-five music publishers including Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic on August 28, 2026, alleging Claude was trained on and reproduces copyrighted song lyrics. Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are named personally as defendants. Here's why the outputs allegation is harder to defend than standard training-data copyright suits.

Read the story ↗
Debates5 min read

Meta's child-safety trial just got a $200 billion price tag.

Twenty-nine state attorneys general are suing Meta over addictive product design, seeking $200bn in damages. Meta's own filing claims exposure could hit $1.4tn, its entire market cap, and a judge already called that number unreasonable. Here's what's documented, what's disputed, and why Meta's AI budget is the thing actually at risk.

Read the story ↗
Debates6 min read

Someone left 181,000 meeting recordings in an unlocked room. The room was on the internet.

A missing database rule at tl;dv, an AI meeting notetaker used by more than 2 million people, left 181,874 meeting records queryable by any other tl;dv user for six months before public disclosure in August 2026. About 1,000 of those meetings were live at the time of discovery — links anyone could follow into an ongoing call.

Read the story ↗
Debates5 min read

Twitch is training Amazon's AI on your streams. One setting stops it.

On August 12, Twitch enabled AI training on every streamer's content by default — streams, VODs, clips, chat logs, images — without sending an email or notification. The opt-out takes under a minute. The interesting part is that Amazon chose to make opt-in the default when they didn't have to.

Read the story ↗
Debates7 min read

The court ruled your AI shopping agent isn't the burglar. You are. (You're also off the hook.)

The Ninth Circuit ruled August 4 that Perplexity's Comet AI browser doesn't 'access' Amazon's servers — the user does. Comet can resume Amazon shopping, but the ruling is narrow: it covers only CFAA liability, Amazon's trademark and state-law claims survive, and the court explicitly warned that agentic AI law 'will doubtless change.'

Read the story ↗
Debates6 min read

America named its first AI theft suspect. Read the accusation carefully.

White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios publicly accused Moonshot AI on July 22 of distilling Anthropic's Fable and smuggling Nvidia GB300 chips via Thailand to build Kimi K3. Treasury threatened sanctions. Experts note the distillation timeline doesn't add up. The chip allegation stands on its own.

Read the story ↗
Debates5 min read

Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI names specific people doing specific things. The complaint is alarming.

Apple filed suit against OpenAI on July 10, 2026 in Northern California federal court alleging a coordinated campaign to extract Apple's product secrets through job interviews. Two individual defendants are named — a former VP now leading OpenAI's hardware push, and a former senior engineer who allegedly kept a work laptop and accessed Apple's cloud storage months after departure.

Read the story ↗
Debates7 min read

Fable 5 is back. What Anthropic had to agree to matters more than the return.

The US Commerce Department lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on June 30. Both models are fully restored globally as of July 1. The conditions Anthropic agreed to — and the biometrics privacy policy taking effect July 8 — affect every Claude user, not just developers.

Read the story ↗
Debates8 min read

The government unlocked Mythos for power plants. Fable 5 costs you a face scan.

Fifteen days after a US export control directive pulled both Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline globally, the government cleared Mythos for US critical infrastructure organizations — no identity verification required. Fable 5's path back for everyone else runs through a July 8 privacy policy update that collects government-issued ID and facial geometry templates. The more powerful model got unlocked first.

Read the story ↗
Debates6 min read

Anthropic's Alibaba letter isn't a complaint. It's a policy play.

On June 10, Anthropic sent a letter to the Senate Banking Committee and the White House accusing Alibaba's Qwen AI lab of running 28.8 million Claude exchanges through ~25,000 fraudulent accounts between April and June 2026 — the largest known AI model extraction campaign on record, nearly 75% bigger than all prior disclosed Chinese AI lab campaigns combined. Two senators are now drafting sanctions legislation.

Read the story ↗
Debates8 min read

Trump says Anthropic isn't a threat. Fable 5 is still offline. Here's what to actually plan for.

Eleven days after a US export control order suspended Claude Fable 5 globally, the president publicly told Axios that Dario Amodei is no longer a national security concern. The Commerce Department's directive hasn't moved. The free subscription window expired June 22. Here's the restoration math and what builders need to do before the model comes back.

Read the story ↗
Debates7 min read

Fable 5's largest investor called the White House to shut it down. The story behind the story.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised jailbreak concerns about Claude Fable 5 with senior Trump administration officials on June 11. By 5:21 PM ET June 12, Anthropic had Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's export-control letter. David Sacks says Anthropic refused to patch the vulnerability before the order came down. Anthropic disputes the framing. Here's what we can actually verify — and what it means if you build on any single AI provider.

Read the story ↗