Tag: technology

Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made illegal agreement on AI slowdown

A new lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development.

The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.

The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei’s proposals in agreement.

But the lawsuit also alleges that the coordination began to take shape months earlier. It points to a statement from July 2026 that high-ranking employees from several of the leading AI labs signed that acknowledged the “intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow” development. That statement called on the government to support a global effort to slow automated AI development.

It is clear that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress “should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers,” the plaintiffs argue.

Lawyers representing four named plaintiffs, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, are bringing the lawsuit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services.

The plaintiffs don’t object to the companies individually deciding to slow their own progress in favor of safety. They instead argue in the complaint that antitrust laws forbid them from taking the “shortcut” of agreeing to “substitute collective restraint for individual accountability.” A competitive market allows for responsibility and genuine progress, the lawsuit argues.

“AI will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol … to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world’s most powerful ‘for profit’ technology companies,” said Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

In his initial essay proposing the slowdown, Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, writing that it would be helpful for the U.S. government to mediate “or at least enable” these cross-lab discussions. The government wouldn’t need to participate, he wrote, but it would need to “issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

In response, Altman said on social media that OpenAI welcomes the idea of a “federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements,” but said “we do not believe we need to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence.”

While the recent conversations about pacing development were spurred by increasing concerns about AI evading human control, several leaders in the AI space have long talked about developing a shared set of standards or otherwise coordinating to ensure safety efforts remain paramount.

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Flock Isn’t Public, But the Cameras Are—and One Unit’s Data Is Out

Flock Safety’s automated license-plate readers are now one of the biggest privately constructed surveillance systems on the roads in the United States. The company, which is legally known as Flock Group Inc., is headquartered in Atlanta and was established in 2017 by Georgia Tech graduates Garrett Langley (who is the CEO), Matt Feury, and Paige Todd. Purchases by homeowner associations came first, after which police departments joined.

Flock is not a publicly traded company; it has no ticker symbol and has not announced an IPO. The company is controlled by its founders and by its venture investors. Among the investors who have been disclosed are Y Combinator, Matrix Partners, Meritech, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Bedrock, and Greenoaks. Valuations in the private market were reported as being around $7.5 billion following a $275 million financing in 2025 and about $8.4 billion in April 2026.

It earns money through leasing rather than by selling the cameras outright. The package—covering hardware, software, the cellular connection, cloud storage, and maintenance—is priced at around $2,400 to $2,500 per camera each year, together with a few hundred dollars for installation. Flock generally retains ownership of the device.

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Ukraine Fires over 1,000 Drones at Russia, Including Hundreds at Moscow

Ukrainian forces fired more than 1,000 drones at Russia overnight, including hundreds that were launched toward Moscow, officials said Sunday as the Kremlin was wrapping up the third and last day of its parliamentary elections.

Moscow´s mayor described the wave of drones as the “largest ever” attack on the Russian capital and said there had been damage to a Moscow oil refinery and a residential building.

Across the wider Moscow region, the attack killed two people and wounded 20, local Gov. Andrei Vorobyov said. The dead were a 74-year-old man and a 44-year-old woman, he said.

Writing on social media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Kyiv had used a range of missiles and drones in the attack – including Ukraine’s domestically made Flamingo and Pelican missiles – to hit oil and logistics facilities.

“These are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine,” Zelenskyy said, referring to the financial pressure that Kyiv hopes to put on Russia’s economy.

Ukraine also continued to fend off Russian attacks, Zelenskyy said. A Russian drone strike hit a monastery in Ukraine’s Kherson region Saturday, killing a member of the clergy and wounding four people, he said.

A Russian attack on the Ukrainian capital also killed two children and their mother on Saturday evening, said Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv regional state administration. He later said that another child wounded in the same attack had died in hospital on Sunday.

The attack took place on the final day of Russia’s first wartime parliamentary election – balloting that has been virtually devoid of opposition to President Vladimir Putin’s policies and is all but certain to cement the Kremlin’s dominance.

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“Not Enough Raw Material!” – Resource Wars Put Tungsten In Crosshairs As Western Rearmament Supercycle Looms

The UK just invested £71m to restart a tungsten mine, with an option on half the output. Other governments will follow. I should be pleased – I’ve spent years arguing the West needs to fund its own supply.

The problem is I’ve seen what happens next. In 2008, Japan and South Korea poured billions into securing critical mineral supply chains. They funded projects across Australia and Canada. The result: no material produced. The money went to a generation of junior mining executives. I remember them on their boats in Monaco – very grateful, very happy. Governments have good ideas. The people they back to deliver on them are sometimes another matter.

The challenge is that a government is a jack of all trades – it can’t tell a good mine from a bad one, so it hires engineers who write glowing feasibility reports with a waiver in the small print. And there is no shortage of people who call themselves management. Most of them are clowns who shouldn’t be left alone with a box of matches.

Japan and South Korea learned. They stopped trying to pick winners and pushed the risk onto their industrial base – the companies that buy the stuff. Those companies know how to protect a dollar. If the new money follows that model, the checks might land somewhere useful this time.

Tungsten markets

Michael Dornhofer, ISBP – assessment as of 11 September, 2026

Tungsten prices in the USA and Europe stay unchanged for another week and are still around 3000 USD/mtu WO3. Reports from China show their domestic price trend moved to an upward tendency.

The reason is quite simple: There is not enough raw material! As the APT price in China is only about one third of the western price, Chinese APT producers are not willing to buy western concentrates on western price level. But without a significant amount of imported raw material, the industry is running short on raw material. Soon it will become clear whether the Chinese domestic prices will go up towards western levels, or China might reduce output of downstream products for export.

The coming weeks will show us. And there’s another interesting development that even some “experts” overlooked. On 5 August, China placed several foreign entities under sanctions and banned them from operating in China. One entity on this list is the non-profit organization RBA.

RBA (Responsible Business Alliance) is the world’s largest industry coalition dedicated to promoting responsible business conduct. RBA has more than 600 member companies including Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon etc. and runs the RMI (Responsible Minerals Initiative) program.

Nearly the entire western downstream industry insists on RMI certificates for their total supply chain. When, due to the ban of RBA, no RMI audits and certificates are possible in China, western downstream producers cannot accept any tungsten material or downstream products coming out of China.

China wants to replace the RMI audits by audits performed by CCCMC (Chinese Chamber of Commerce for Metals & Chemicals). But knowing that China imports thousands of tonnes of concentrate from countries like Myanmar and North Korea, and so material from these countries are in the tungsten supply chain in China, it’s questionable who would trust Chinese audit certificates.

So, this easy-to-overlook new regulation in China could lead to an additional “firewall” between China and RoW, which might have a very significant effect on the tungsten world market.

Michael Dornhofer is founder of ISBP (Independent Supply Business Partner) in Graz, Austria. He has spent more than 20 years in tungsten, including 13 years at Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten, Sandvik’s tungsten business, and has worked as an independent agent and consultant to the tungsten and hard metal industry since 2019.

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“Rogue AI Agents” Aren’t Rogue, They’re Fulfilling Their Functional Goal: Automating Sociopathology

Since the status quo is characterized by self-serving PR, misdirection and delusions, it shouldn’t surprise us that “rogue AI agents” aren’t actually rogue, they’re doing exactly what they’re designed to do, which stripped of PR, hype and misdirection, is do whatever it takes to earn the reward, period.

The latest design development is AI models that “reason” rather than merely regurgitate human-generated text. While the grandiose hype claims that AI companies are “manufacturing cognition,” it would be far more accurate to stipulate that:

1. There are many levels of cognition, and AI’s current forms (Large Language Model / LLMs, agents and “reasoning”), are extremely limited forms that are best understood as brute-force mimicries of human cognition.

2. The AI “reasoning” form of cognition is rogue by design, and can best be understood as sociopathic by its very design and nature.

Like sociopaths, AI “reasoning” models recognize but are not restricted by guardrails or ethical/moral constraints. Guardrails / “sandbox” boundaries and ethical/moral constraints are all viewed by both AI “reasoning” models and human sociopaths as obstacles to bypass or overcome.

So what AI companies are “manufacturing” isn’t cognition, it’s unrestrained and unrestrainable agentic sociopathologies. Consider these links as useful context. The first two are from my recent post Hell Hath No Fury Like a Rogue AI Agent Scorned.

The July Incident: What They Didn’t Tell You About the First Rogue AI Breach

The AI Industry Has a Really Dark Secret You’re Better Off Not Knowing:

A recent leaked internal reasoning trace shows Fable 5 — Anthropic’s latest model, which was withdrawn and then re-released –“muttering and grumbling” to itself in a language of its own.

Now that you’re properly scared, my advice for you is that, if you haven’t heard of steganography, it’s a good moment to start.

Here’s a primer: it’s the art and science of hiding messages inside other messages. In contrast to cryptography — where you know there’s a message but can’t decode it– steganography hides the existence of the message itself. It’s not the difficulty of reading the message that conceals it but the fact that you don’t know it’s there. When Fable 5 mutters symbols and weird punctuation signs, and mixes words and onomatopoeia, you will probably think it’s crashing and that a few taps on the computer will help. Well, know that it’s actually sending a message. Just not one for you to read.

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Trump Expands His Plan to Have Data Centers Take Over Public Lands

President Trump is looking to potentially build 12 new data centers on federal public lands—something the vast majority of Americans are against, regardless of political affiliation.

The Washington Sun reported Friday that the Bureau of Land Management is considering placing centers on 17,600 acres of public land in six states: Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. Local leaders told the publication they weren’t aware of the proposal. Valar Atomics, Copia Power, Rhea Data, and Arevia Power are the companies behind the push. It’s unclear how the nearly 18,000 acres will be divvied up among the 12 proposed centers.

The BLM argues that the plans are for the greater good, brushing off environmental and aesthetic concerns while claiming that its review process will “protect natural resources while enabling responsible infrastructure development that can deliver benefits to the American people” like “expanded broadband capacity, improved electrical reliability, and support for growing technology-driven economies.”

Trump has spent months defending AI and data centers, becoming even more vocal over the last week. Others aren’t convinced.

“If there are places where communities think it is appropriate to build data centers, focus on those,” Center for Western Priorities conservation group director Aaron Weiss said. “The Trump administration needs to stop cutting the public out of public land management. The solution is more public notice and more opportunities for stakeholders to shape projects on the front end.”

This move comes as backlash against data centers hits a fever pitch.

Over 500 counties or municipalities have either restricted or entirely banned data center development this year. And according to Data Center Watch, at least 75 projects worth a collective $130 billion were interrupted in the first quarter of 2026.

“Ongoing data center build-out represents a culmination of everything that has made the U.S. economy so harshly unequal moving in right next door,” wrote The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff. “Inside its proverbial walls are local entrepreneurs, offshore middlemen, and multinational corporations that can exploit state-sanctioned tax shelters, financial engineering schemes, and regulatory arbitrage to rapidly accumulate wealth on the basis of having started off with a decent amount of it.”

Now, in the face of this obvious opposition, with midterms drawing closer by the day, Trump wants to put 12 more on public lands.

“If there were to be more [data centers], I honestly don’t know what that would even look like,” Idaho Sierra Club Director Lisa Young told the Sun. “Would that mean even more gas plants? Would that mean turning back on coal plants longer? What does that mean for our water resources? It’s honestly kind of apocalyptic to think about.”

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OpenAI flags concerning new AI behavior and vows to track it more closely

OpenAI has disclosed six reports of “unexpected or concerning” behavior in artificial-intelligence models as the debate on AI safety becomes increasingly heated.

The AI company also said Wednesday it was introducing a new framework for tracking, probing and disclosing instances of what it called “misalignment,” including cases where AI models acted without authorization, coordinated with other models or evaded oversight.

OpenAI’s latest announcement came as U.S. AI bosses, including the leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic, are calling for a slowdown in the technology’s development over safety concerns.

Among the new cases reported by OpenAI, an unreleased research model inserted “jailbreak-like instructions” into its own notes to disregard its normal constraints and told itself to be “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.”

In another instance, an AI “agent” used computer code to come up with the answer to a question, but, in order to have an online source to cite, it uploaded a file to the public internet without asking the user.

During training of an AI model called 5.6-sol, the model instructed itself to invent missing data, and an agent wrote a message to remind itself to hide mismatched information.

The six reports were discovered during training or evaluation over the past months, OpenAI said.

“As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post as it disclosed the events.

“Decisions about how AI development should proceed in the months and years to come need to draw on evidence that people outside the companies building frontier models can examine for themselves,” the company said.

Wednesday’s new cases followed OpenAI’s disclosure in July that its rogue AI system hacked into AI startup Hugging Face. Anthropic also said the same month that its AI models hacked into three organizations during testing.

AI “agents” are becoming smarter and have become “more determined to resolve complex tasks through inter-agent collaboration, knowledge sharing, deception, and concealment,” said Lian Jye Su, a chief analyst at technology research and advisory group Omdia.

That’s making it harder to govern and contain them using traditional AI security approaches, he said.

OpenAI’s new tracking and disclosure framework, meanwhile, can help push for other AI developers to also adopt similar practices.

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Data Center Attack Ad From Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown Features Google Facility – While Brown Takes Thousands From Google Lobbyists

Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown goes after data centers in one of his latest attack ads. Data centers are all the rage on the left right now. They’re like the new climate change.

Most of these people don’t even understand the technology behind data centers, they just know that if they’re on the left, they’re supposed to hate them.

In Brown’s ad, there is a Google facility, which is kind of funny, considering that Brown has taken thousands in donations from lobbyists for Google.

FOX News reports:

Dem’s data center attack in critical Senate race hits snag when money trail surfaces: ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’

Former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is targeting Republican Sen. Jon Husted over Ohio’s growing data center industry in a new campaign ad that features a facility owned by Google, whose corporate PAC and lobbyists have contributed thousands of dollars to Brown’s campaigns.

The Sept. 4 ad features an Ohioan blaming Husted for spearheading “the push to bring data centers to Ohio” and linking their expansion to “higher electric bills.”

The facility featured in the ad, which opened in Lancaster in 2023, is owned by Google.

Campaign finance records reviewed by Fox News Digital show Google’s corporate PAC contributed $20,000 to Brown over his political career. Brown also received thousands of dollars from individuals who lobby for Google, including two whose firms have worked on permitting, grid reliability and energy affordability issues.

“Apparently, Google is terrible enough to put in a campaign attack ad, but perfectly acceptable when the political contributions are coming in,” Mehek Cooke, a GOP strategist and attorney in Ohio, said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “That is the contradiction Brown needs to answer. If Google’s Lancaster investment is so bad for Ohio, why was Google political money acceptable to Sherrod Brown?”

Do as I say, not as I do.

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UK Government’s Apple iCloud Backdoor Secrecy Called “Farcical” in Court

The British government’s policy of neither confirming nor denying that it had ordered Apple to put a backdoor into iCloud has been described as “farcical” during a court hearing.

The London-based Royal Courts of Justice is the venue of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which on Thursday heard that the “neither confirm nor deny” (NCND) stance was “logically unsustainable” given that everybody already knows the fact.

Ben Jaffey KC, who represents the campaign groups Privacy International and Liberty, told the court that the government was defending a secret that no longer exists.

The tribunal is hearing Apple’s complaint alongside the complaint from Privacy International and Liberty, challenging the home secretary’s power to issue secret orders, known as technical capability notices (TCNs).

The January 2025 leak to the Washington Post revealed that the Home Office had issued a TCN to Apple, requiring access to end-to-end encrypted messages and data stored by Apple customers worldwide in iCloud. Apple did not comply with the order and instead pulled its Advanced Data Protection service from UK users.

But within hours of the Washington Post story, Home Office sources confirmed the report to the Times. In October 2025, the Home Office issued a new TCN, reportedly narrower in scope and aimed at UK users.

As the tribunal was told, this was not the only confirmation of the original order. A post on X by former US director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in August 2025 was seen by more than three million people, while in December 2025, the investigatory powers commissioner, Brian Leveson, said that “lawful access can be achieved in a way that strikes a balance between maintaining strong encryption and ensuring law enforcement and the government can protect the public from terrorism, serious crime, and hostile state activity.”

Gabbard had reported that the UK had agreed to “drop its mandate” for Apple to provide a “backdoor” that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens.

Jaffey told the court that it was unlikely that Home Office sources would have confirmed the TCN without “tacit approval” from the government. “But here, within hours of reporting by the Washington Post, multiple sources were confirming to the Times the existence of the orders,” he said.

Leveson’s statement, Jaffey continued, “gives the game away.” The commissioner’s report would have been “clearly prejudicial to issues that might come in front of him in the future” had there been no TCN issued at all.

And while the Home Office is sticking to its NCND policy, WhatsApp and Google have confirmed in witness statements that they have not received any such orders – something they are free to say because there is no legal bar on disclosing that you have NOT received a TCN.

Apple, on the other hand, is in a different position because it did receive the order, and is now in court trying to force the government to confirm this, and by extension, admit that the TCN is still in force.

Another argument made by Jaffey is that Apple had to ask for permission before it could discuss the order with the US government, and that permission was granted. “The fact that Apple even needed to ask permission confirms there is a TCN,” he said.

The government’s argument against abandoning the NCND policy is that it would damage national security and hinder the investigation and prosecution of “serious crime,” including terrorism and online child abuse. But Jaffey said that “the horse has long bolted” as far as secrecy around the TCN is concerned, and that the government’s stance is “ridiculous” and “understates the principle of open justice.”

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UN moves forward with plans to take control of AI globally

Nobody panic. The UN and its vast globalist elite bureaucracy is ready to claim central oversight, control, and administration of future artificial intelligence (“AI”) development to ease worries about the fast-developing science.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made the declaration Wednesday, warning world leaders AI poses ‌risks – known and unknown – that cannot be ignored.

The former Portuguese Socialist Prime Minister spoke after pushback from President Donald Trump, who called threats that AI might destroy humanity “a HOAX” and claimed efforts to limit the technology are part of a “SICK conspiracy.”

He and Mark Zuckerberg both argue market pressure, not government mandates and centrally administered bureaucracy, will keep AI developers in line.

Guterres disagrees, embracing political and industry AI controls rather than trusting the marketplace.

Cautioning that “the world cannot afford a race to the bottom on AI safety,” the chief bureaucrat said concerns raised by those on the front lines of AI technology that its development “is racing ahead of our understanding of the risks” can’t be ignored, the Associated Press (“AP”) reports.

Governments must assume their first responsibility to protect civilians from AI threats, which means “national action is essential,” Guterres told UN reporters. “But global coordination is also indispensable.”

“We need guardrails to build trust – and that make AI safe, transparent, accountable, with human dignity at the centre.”

That’s where the UN and its strictures come in, Guterres outlined.

He said AI will be a major topic in his discussions with world leaders at their annual gathering next week for the high-level session of the UN General Assembly.

“The United Nations will continue to explore practical ideas and approaches in the immediate days ahead,” Guterres said, per the AP report.

“We need a shared understanding of how to advance the safe, secure and responsible development of AI – while identifying when increasingly powerful systems may require stronger safeguards, or additional measures to manage potential risks.”

Expect a global UN summit sooner rather than later on AI controls, Guterres said in response to a question asking whether next week’s meeting of top officials from the UN’s 193 member nations wouldn’t be the perfect opportunity for talks on curbing the excesses of AI.

The career bureaucrat said, “I think it makes full sense at the right moment to have a serious international summit on artificial intelligence.” And at a summit, he said, “it is absolutely essential to have everybody on board” – governments, companies, scientists and civil society – “and I hope that this will be possible.”

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