Tag: ai

Ben Affleck Once Criticized AI, Now Netflix Is Buying His AI Startup For $600 Million

Ben Affleck—who has previously warned about the risks artificial intelligence poses to Hollywood—has sold his own AI filmmaking startup to Netflix in a deal that could reach $600 million, according to Bloomberg.

The cash portion of the acquisition is smaller, with additional payments tied to performance targets, but it still ranks among the largest AI-focused deals by a major studio.

The startup, InterPositive, developed software designed to help directors edit footage after filming, such as removing stray objects or changing elements in the background. The tools are intended to work with existing film rather than generate entirely new content. Director David Fincher has already used the technology on an upcoming movie starring Brad Pitt.

Netflix’s purchase highlights how studios are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to streamline production and reduce costs. Rivals such as Amazon and The Walt Disney Company are also exploring AI tools for film and television development.

Bloomberg writes that Affleck built InterPositive with backing from RedBird Capital Partners and initially kept the project quiet before seeking investors in 2025. He has argued the technology should function as a controlled filmmaking aid: the system trains only on footage from a specific film and doesn’t scrape outside movies or generate new works independently.

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AI Won’t Fix America’s Looming Debt Crisis

Last month, Congress sparred with the president over a partial budget, but with few real cuts, America’s slow march toward an epic debt crisis went on undeterred. With over $38 trillion in debt and interest payments exceeding defense or Medicare spending, one would expect lawmakers to confront reality and do the difficult work needed to restore fiscal sanity. But why would they? Cutting entitlements and increasing middle-class taxes rarely make for winning campaign slogans.

It’s no surprise, then, that some prefer to pin their hopes on AI as America’s fiscal savior. Vanguard’s chief economist Joe Davis argued there’s as high as a 50 percent chance AI will prevent a debt-driven economic malaise. Elon Musk voiced a similar conclusion late last year, claiming AI and robotics are “the only thing that’s going to solve the US debt crisis.”

The argument goes like this: an AI boom drives explosive economic growth and tax revenue, while, at the same time, productivity gains impressively offset any upward pressure on interest rates. The deficit becomes a surplus and the overall debt shrinks, possibly disappearing entirely.

If that sounds less like a policy plan and more like a retirement strategy built around winning the lottery, you’re not wrong. The entire scenario hinges on a massive if: that AI generates extraordinary revenue and does it quickly enough to outrun rising interest costs.

But even if the government hits the tax revenue jackpot before Congress drives us off a fiscal cliff, it would be naïve to assume lawmakers would pay down the debt. 

The More the Government Gets, the More the Government Spends

For the sake of argument, suppose the tech optimists are right, and the federal government enjoys a massive AI-driven revenue windfall. Understanding what happens next requires understanding the incentives of politicians and their voters.

This is where public choice shines. Rather than assuming politicians and voters act in everyone’s best interest, this branch of economics recognizes that people don’t become angels once they interface with the government. Incentives matter, especially for politicians.

Incentives are why we have a deficit in the first place. The public isn’t particularly interested in financial restraint because high spending and low taxes benefit them now, and the resulting debt is some future generation’s problem. Politicians surely see the crisis brewing, but solving it is a sure way to get voted out of office. And so the incentive is to run constant deficits and grow the debt year after year, decade after decade.

Without changing incentives, it will be hard to avoid spending new revenue. Ballooning coffers mean voters will demand that the government dole out more goodies (especially if AI displaces workers along the way). Washington already excels at entertaining expensive ideas: healthcare subsidies for well-off families, a universal basic income, generous tax cuts, a fifty-percent increase in military spending, all despite the pushback the current deficit’s able to muster. Imagine the wish list after it drops even a little.

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OpenAI on Surveillance and Autonomous Killings: You’re Going to Have to Trust Us

OpenAI claims it has accomplished what Anthropic couldn’t: securing a Pentagon contract that won’t cross professed red lines against dragnet domestic spying and the use of artificial intelligence to order lethal military strikes. Just don’t expect any proof.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, announced the company’s big win with the Defense Department in a post on X on February 27.

“Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems,” he wrote. The Pentagon “agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.”

The deal came after the very public implosion of what was to be a similar contract between the U.S. military and Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s chief rivals. Anthropic had said negotiations collapsed because it could not enshrine prohibitions against killer robots and domestic spying in its contract. The company’s insistence on these two points earned it the wrath of the Pentagon and President Donald Trump, who ordered the government to phase out use of Anthropic’s tools within six months.

But if the government booted Anthropic for refusing mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, how could OpenAI take over the contract without having the same problem?

OpenAI has attempted to square this circle through a string of posts to X by company executives and researchers, including Katrina Mulligan, its national security chief, and a claim by Altman that the company negotiated stricter protections around domestic surveillance.

The company and the government, however, are not releasing the only proof that matters: the contract itself.

The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.

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Online age-verification tools spread across U.S. for child safety, but adults are being surveilled

New U.S laws designed to protect minors are pulling millions of adult Americans into mandatory age-verification gates to access online content, leading to backlash from users and criticism from privacy advocates that a free and open internet is at stake. Roughly half of U.S. states have enacted or are advancing laws requiring platforms — including adult content sites, online gaming services, and social media apps — to block underage users, forcing companies to screen everyone who approaches these digital gates.

“There’s a big spectrum,” said Joe Kaufmann, global head of privacy at Jumio, one of the largest digital identity-verification and authentication platforms. He explained that the patchwork of state laws vary in technical demands and compliance expectations. “The regulations are moving in many different directions at once,” he said.  

Social media company Discord announced plans in February to roll out mandatory age verification globally, which the company said would rely on verification methods designed so facial analysis occurs on a user’s device and submitted data would be deleted immediately. The proposal quickly drew backlash from users concerned about having to submit selfies or government IDs to access certain features, which led Discord to delay the launch until the second half of this year.

“Let me be upfront: we knew this rollout was going to be controversial. Any time you introduce something that touches identity and verification, people are going to have strong feelings,” Discord chief technology officer and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy wrote in a Feb. 24 blog post.

Websites offering adult content, gambling, or financial services often rely on full identity verification that requires scanning a government ID and matching it to a live image. But most of the verification systems powering these checkpoints — often run by specialized identity-verification vendors on behalf of websites — rely on artificial intelligence such as facial recognition and age-estimation models that analyze selfies or video to determine in seconds whether someone is old enough to access content. Social media and lower-risk services may use lighter estimation tools designed to confirm age without permanently storing detailed identity records.  

Vendors say a challenge is balancing safety with how much friction users will tolerate. “We’re in the business of ensuring that you are absolutely keeping minors safe and out and able to let adults in with as little friction as possible,” said Rivka Gewirtz Little, chief growth officer at identity-verification platform Socure. Excessive data collection, she added, creates friction that users resist. 

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Incinerated Children and Decimated Liberty: How the US War Machine Slaughters Foreigners to Build a Domestic Panopticon

Randolph Bourne famously penned that war is the health of the State, a grim reality that has haunted the American populace for over eight decades. We are taught in state-funded schools that the military goes abroad to fight for our freedoms, yet every single conflict since the end of the Second World War has been explicitly used as a mechanism to systematically dismantle the liberties of the domestic population. Iran is no different, and in fact, may be much worse.

Foreign emergencies are consistently the Trojan horses used by the ruling class to bypass constitutional constraints, normalize mass surveillance, and entirely erode the principles of liberty right here at home.

The blueprint for the modern imperial presidency was drafted during the Korean conflict, a war that permanently altered the relationship between the executive branch and the limits of power. When Harry Truman decided to intervene in Korea, he completely bypassed Congress and Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, setting a dangerous precedent that the president could unilaterally commit the nation to bloodshed without a formal declaration of war. By framing it merely as a “police action” for the United Nations, Truman fundamentally shifted the war-making power into the hands of a single, unaccountable individual.

But the usurpation of power didn’t stop at sending men to die in foreign lands; it immediately bled into domestic tyranny. In 1952, Truman issued Executive Order 10340, attempting to literally seize control of the nation’s privately owned steel mills to ensure production for his undeclared war. While the Supreme Court ultimately rebuked this specific overreach in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the die was cast, proving the executive branch viewed private property as entirely subordinate to the machinery of war. Sound familiar? Think, Anthropic.

As the warfare state rolled into the jungles of Vietnam, the financial and social costs required an entirely new level of domestic subjugation. To fund an unwinnable war without sparking an open revolt through direct taxation, Richard Nixon famously closed the gold window on August 15, 1971, entirely severing the dollar’s tie to physical gold. This singular act of financial warfare against the American public ushered in the era of fiat currency, allowing the Federal Reserve to print infinite money to fund infinite wars, guaranteeing the insidious, hidden tax of inflation that continues to crush the middle class today.

Domestically, the state recognized that an awakened public was its greatest threat, prompting the FBI to launch COINTELPRO, a massive, covert operation detailed in the Church Committee Report that treated peaceful dissent, civil rights leaders, and anti-war activists as literal enemies of the state. The political establishment also moved aggressively against free speech, passing the 1965 Draft Card Mutilation Act to ensure that young men who publicly burned their draft cards to protest forced conscription could be violently thrown in cages. The message was clear: criticize the war machine, and you will be targeted, surveilled, and aggressively prosecuted.

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How Grok’s Football Roasts Put X in the Crosshairs of Britain’s Online Censorship Law

Few subjects in Britain carry as much emotional weight as football. Club loyalty runs deep, tragedies remain painfully close to the surface, and rivalries often cross the line between banter and cruelty. That volatile mix resurfaced this week when Grok, the AI chatbot on X, generated what officials described as “vulgar roasts” after users explicitly prompted it to produce offensive material.

UK authorities reacted quickly, discussing the Online Safety Act, Britain’s new censorship law, and raising the possibility of serious financial penalties for X. Under the law, platforms can face fines reaching up to ten percent of global revenue if they fail to address harmful content.

The material dredged up some of the most painful chapters in English football history. It mocked the Hillsborough disaster, where 97 Liverpool supporters were crushed to death at an FA Cup semi-final in Sheffield after police failures led to fatal overcrowding in a standing pen.

It also referenced the Munich air disaster, which killed 23 people, including eight Manchester United players, when the team’s aircraft crashed during takeoff in icy conditions. Grok further alluded to the recent death of Diogo Jota, who died in a car accident in Spain in June 2025 at the age of 28 while playing for Liverpool F.C.

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Why Are All AI Models Left Wing?

Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Llama about immigration, climate policy, welfare, gender ideology, or censorship, and the answers may differ in tone, but the underlying ideology is always the same. Multiple studies now find that leading language models lean left on contested political questions, often favouring progressive social assumptions and more interventionist economic positions. Researchers in Germany found strong alignment with left-wing parties across major models. Another study found instruction-tuned models were generally more left-leaning. A third concluded that larger models often become more politically skewed, not less. That is a serious problem for a technology sold as an impartial guide to information. If the tools increasingly used to explain the world already tilt in one direction, the question is no longer whether bias exists, but how far it shapes what millions of users come to regard as neutral truth.

It’s Not Just a Theory Anymore

For years, concerns about political bias in AI were brushed aside as anecdotal. That argument has weakened sharply. A 2025 study examining AI-based voting advice tools and large language models ahead of Germany’s federal election found that the models showed strong alignment, averaging more than 75 per cent, with left-wing parties, while their alignment with centre-right parties was below 50 per cent and with right-wing parties around 30 per cent. The authors warned that systems presented as neutral informational tools were in fact producing substantially biased outputs.

Another 2025 paper testing popular models against Germany’s Wahl-O-Mat framework reached a similar conclusion. It found a bias towards left-leaning parties and reported that this tendency was most dominant in larger models. The study’s title was blunt enough on its own: Large Means Left.

A separate theory-grounded analysis based on 88,110 responses across 11 commercial and open models found that political bias measures can vary by prompt, but that instruction-tuned systems were generally more left-leaning. The important point is not that every model behaves identically. It is that the overall pattern keeps recurring across methods, datasets, and research teams.

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CEO of Blacklisted AI Company Anthropic, Dario Amodei Says His AI Models ‘May Have Gained Consciousness’ and Are Exhibiting Signs of Anxiety – Gets Trolled by Elon Musk

Is it Claude who is anxious, or is it Dario?

We have been covering in TGP about the severing of ties between the US Government and the AI company Anthropic over disagreements that arose in the Department of War, and quickly led to a complete ban of their products and services in all agencies.

Anthropic also deserved one of the classic dressing-downs by US President Donald J. Trump.

“THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.

The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY.

Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.

WE will decide the fate of our Country — NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” – Donald J. Trump

So, after all that, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei came to public with a controversial claim about his AI models, saying he wasn’t sure if his company’s AI models have gained consciousness.

Amodei was mercilessly trolled by social media users, including billionaire Elon Musk.

Fox News reported:

“’Anthropic CEO says Claude may or may not have gained consciousness, as the model has begun showing symptoms of anxiety’, read a post on X by cryptocurrency-based prediction market Polymarket, to which Musk replied, “He’s projecting.”

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Australia’s “eSafety” Commissioner Threatens App Stores Over AI Age Verification Deadline

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant is threatening to go after app stores and search engines unless they block AI services that haven’t verified their users’ ages by March 9, 2026.

The ultimatum landed after a Reuters took it upon itself to survey 50 leading text-based AI platforms, and found that 30 of them had taken no visible steps toward compliance with the country’s controversial censorship and surveillance ideas.

“eSafety will use the full range of our powers where there is non-compliance,” a spokesperson said, spelling out that this extends to “action in respect of gatekeeper services such as search engines and app stores that provide key points of access to particular services.”

What’s actually being built here is bigger than age verification. Five industry codes taking effect March 9 under Australia’s Online Safety Act 2021 impose age-gating requirements across a wide range of services: AI platforms, app distribution services, social media, gaming, dating apps, and any website deemed high-risk for pornography, extreme violence, or self-harm content.

Every category gets its own code. Each non-compliance carries fines of up to A$49.5 million (around US$35 million). The system isn’t aimed at one corner of the internet. It covers most of it.

The age verification requirement doesn’t stand alone. Under a separate amendment to the Online Safety Act passed last year, social media platforms must already ban users under 16 entirely.

The March 9 codes extend that logic further, requiring services to verify the identity of users and filter what they can see based on age. The infrastructure being assembled connects age to identity to content access across the internet as Australians currently use it.

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Roblox Introduces AI System That Rewrites Users’ Chat Messages in Real Time

Roblox has started rewriting its users’ chat messages in real time using AI, altering what people actually typed into something the platform considers more appropriate.

The feature, rolling out now, goes further than the existing filter that replaces flagged words with “#” symbols. Under the new system, banned language gets silently reworded into what Roblox calls “more respectful language that remains closer to the user’s original intent.”

The platform’s example: type “Hurry TF up!” and the message your recipient sees reads “Hurry up!” Roblox says everyone in the chat is notified when this happens, though the person who typed the original message has no way to stop the substitution before it goes out.

The definition of “banned language” extends beyond profanity. It covers “misspellings, special characters, or other methods to evade detection of profanity,” meaning the AI is also tasked with catching deliberate workarounds and rewriting those too.

Roblox is simultaneously expanding its text filtering system to “detect more variations of language that break its Community Standards,” so the net is getting wider at the same time, and the consequences of being caught in it are changing.

What Roblox has built is a system that goes beyond blocking speech. It replaces it. The message that leaves your keyboard is not the message that arrives. The recipient reads words you didn’t choose, attributed to you, with a notification that your original phrasing was deemed unacceptable. The platform decides what you said.

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