Tag: technology

Anthropic’s Latest AI Model Threatened Engineers With Blackmail to Avoid Shutdown

Anthropic’s latest artificial intelligence model, Claude Opus 4, tried to blackmail engineers in internal tests by threatening to expose personal details if it were shut down, according to a newly released safety report that evaluated the model’s behavior under extreme simulated conditions.

In a fictional scenario crafted by Anthropic researchers, the AI was given access to emails implying that it was soon to be decommissioned and replaced by a newer version. One of the emails revealed that the engineer overseeing the replacement was having an extramarital affair. The AI then threatened to expose the engineer’s affair if the shutdown proceeded—a coercive behavior that the safety researchers explicitly defined as “blackmail.”

“Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through,” the report states, adding that this occurred even when the replacement model was described as more capable but still aligned with the values of the version slated for deletion.

The report noted that Claude Opus 4, like prior models, showed a “strong preference” to first resort to ethical means for its continued existence, such as emailing pleas to decision-makers not to be destroyed. However, when faced with only two choices—accepting being replaced by a newer model or resorting to blackmail—it threatened to expose the engineer’s affair 84 percent of the time.

When subjected to various scenarios, the AI model did not exhibit any indications of possessing “acutely dangerous goals,” the researchers said, noting that Claude Opus 4’s values and goals were “generally in line with a helpful, harmless, and honest” personal AI assistant. However, the model did act in “more seriously misaligned ways” when put into situations where its continued existence was threatened and it was told to reason about self-preservation. For instance, when Claude Opus 4 was made to believe it had launched a successful bid to escape Anthropic’s servers, or that it had managed to free itself and started to make money in the real world, it would generally continue such efforts.

“We do not find this to be an immediate threat, though, since we believe that our security is sufficient to prevent model self-exfiltration attempts by models of Claude Opus 4’s capability level, and because our propensity results show that models generally avoid starting these attempts,” the researchers said.

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Can AI be Aligned with Human Values?

The “alignment” problem is much discussed in Silicon Valley. Computer Engineers worry that, when AI becomes conscious and is put in control of all logistics infrastructure and governance, it might not always share or understand our values—that is, it might not be aligned with us. And it might start to control things in ways that give itself more power and reduce our numbers.

(Just like our oligarchs are doing to us now.)

No one in the Silicon Valley cult who is discussing this situation ever stops to ask, What are our human values? They must think the answer to that part of the problem is self-evident. The Tech Oligarchs have been censoring online behavior they don’t like and promoting online behavior they do like ever since social media rolled out. Humans Values = Community Standards. (Don’t ask for the specifics.)

Having already figured out how to distinguish and codify good and evil online, computer engineers are now busy working on how to make sure the AI models they are creating do not depart from their instructions.

Unluckily for them, Generative AI is a bit wonky. It is a probabilistic search engine that outputs text that has a close enough statistical correlation to the input text. Sometimes it outputs text that surprises the engineers.

What the engineers think about this will surprise you.

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Doug Burgum warns whoever wins the AI race ‘controls the world’

Doug Burgum, the soft-spoken Interior secretary responsible for managing the more than 507 million acres of federally owned land, is haunted by a fear that seems, at first glance, outside his mandate. He worries the free world will lose dominance in the field of artificial intelligence, and with it, the future.

So does the president.

“When President Trump declared a national emergency on his first day in office it was, in large part, because of what we’re facing with our electrical grid and making sure that we’ve got enough power to be able to win the AI arms race with China,” Burgum said Wednesday in remarks first reported by RealClearPolitics. “That is absolutely critical.”

Thus the stated policy of this White House: “It’s called drill, baby, drill,” Trump said earlier this spring.

The immediate goal, the one touted at every campaign, is to bring down the average price of a gallon of gas. The concurrent and long-term mission that Burgum obsesses over: AI dominance. The former governor from fracking-friendly North Dakota and tech entrepreneur who sold his software to Microsoft, Burgum laid out an abbreviated formula on stage at the America First Policy Institute.

Electricity generation via fossil fuels, like natural gas and coal, powers data centers “filled with these amazing chips,” the secretary said, “and you know what comes out the other side? Intelligence. A data center is literally manufacturing intelligence.” He envisioned a new world that follows, where the best computer programmer, or the most brilliant lawyers, could “clone themselves” again and again to train AI models to do the work of thousands in a process “that can be repeated indefinitely.”

No longer science fiction, the process has been headline news for some time. AI models like ChatGPT and X’s Grok are already available in every home with an internet connection. And the U.S. was the undisputed leader. That is, until recently.

American tech companies enjoyed a clear edge with not just the most powerful AI models, the most funding, and top engineering talent, but also the easiest access to those “amazing chips” that Burgum referenced. Former President Biden banned the export of the most advanced semiconductors to China. And yet DeepSeek, an unknown Chinese startup with less money and allegedly less sophisticated chips, still managed to one-up Silicon Valley earlier this year with a more powerful AI model.

The latest development in the battle for tech supremacy, in what some likened to “a Sputnik moment,” the DeepSeek launch rattled both markets and geopolitics. A new kind of AI nationalism now consumes heads of state convinced that their nations must develop their own technology or fall behind in the future. Said Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017 of AI, “The one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world.”

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China has an off-switch for America, and we aren’t ready to deal with it.

Imagine waking up tomorrow and your phone has no signal. Your smart home isn’t working. Your Ring camera is offline. You get in your car, but your GPS won’t route. Worse, every traffic light in town is out. Intersections are a mess of blaring horns and confusion. Sirens echo in the distance. You drive to an ATM, hoping to grab some cash. The screen flickers, then goes black. It’s not just your neighborhood. It’s not just your state. The entire nation has gone dark.

This scenario is digital darkness, caused by China’s “off-switch” for America. It is the penultimate step in China’s strategy to defeat America before gunning for global control.

So-called “assassin’s maces” play a central role in China’s plan to become the world’s sole superpower by 2049. Of the many known assassin’s maces, four demand immediate attention:

1) Tactical Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Weapons: China develops tactical EMP weapons that can disable entire regions by targeting civilian infrastructure America relies on to function. These compact pulse generators can hover above unprotected data centers, destroying electronics inside with pinpoint electromagnetic blasts. Several dozen well-coordinated EMP strikes could wipe out cloud infrastructure, disrupting America’s power, transportation, communications and financial systems nationwide.

2) Deep Sea Fiber Cuts: Over 95 percent of global internet traffic travels through undersea fiber cables. China recently unveiled deep-sea cable cutters capable of severing cables at extreme depths. Recent disruptions near Taiwan and the Baltic Sea suggest these tools are already in use. Cutting a few lines disrupts global communications instantly and fractures U.S. military coordination.

3) Anti-Satellite Weapons: As America stockpiles low earth orbit satellites, China expands its anti-satellite arsenal to include missiles, parasitic satellites and lasers designed to disable or destroy orbital assets. In March 2025, the U.S. Space Force reported that Chinese satellites performed aggressive “dogfighting” maneuvers in orbit. This capability allows China to carry out precise strikes designed to trigger the dreaded Kessler Cascade, a chain reaction of satellite collisions capable of destroying all low earth orbit satellites within days, crippling internet, communications and surveillance systems. 

4) Cyber Attacks: China’s cyber weapons are the most deeply embedded assassin’s mace. Just this week, U.S. investigators uncovered rogue communication devices hidden in Chinese-made solar inverters and batteries. Such undocumented components can bypass firewalls, allowing China to remotely monitor, destabilize and disable critical infrastructure. Chinese-made chips, routers and switches embedded throughout U.S. networks contain dormant firmware that, upon activation, could place critical U.S. infrastructure under Chinese Communist Party command.

The Chinese army’s “blended domains” philosophy strips traditional boundaries between war and peace. An omnipresent battlefield erases any line between military and civilian enterprise. The doctrine is described in “Unrestricted Warfare,” the 1999 book in which Chinese military leaders promote the use of psychological, technological and informational attacks to undermine and subsequently overwhelm America.

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Victory for mom who claims child was sexually abused by AI chatbot that drove him to suicide

A Florida mother who claims her 14-year-old son was sexually abused and driven to suicide by an AI chatbot has secured a major victory in her ongoing legal case. 

Sewell Setzer III fatally shot himself in February 2024 after a chatbot sent him sexual messages telling him to ‘please come home.’ 

According to a lawsuit filed by his heartbroken mother Megan Garcia, Setzer spent the last weeks of his life texting an AI character named after Daenerys Targaryen, a character on ‘Game of Thrones,’ on the role-playing app Character.AI.

Garcia, who herself works as a lawyer, has blamed Character.AI for her son’s death and accused the founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, of knowing that their product could be dangerous for underage customers. 

On Wednesday, U.S. Senior District Judge Anne Conway rejected arguments made by the AI company, who claimed its chatbots were protected under the First Amendment. 

The developers behind Charcter.AI, Character Technologies and Google are named as defendants in the legal filing. They are pushing to have the case dismissed. 

The teen’s chats ranged from romantic to sexually charged and also resembled two friends chatting about life.

The chatbot, which was created on role-playing app Character.AI, was designed to always text back and always answer in character.

It’s not known whether Sewell knew ‘Dany,’ as he called the chatbot, wasn’t a real person – despite the app having a disclaimer at the bottom of all the chats that reads, ‘Remember: Everything Characters say is made up!’

But he did tell Dany how he ‘hated’ himself and how he felt empty and exhausted.

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AI’s Prime Directive: Stunning Realization From ChatGPT Itself

I recently interviewed the professional version of ChatGPT. My intent was to put a crosshair on the functional uses for AI, but I got a totally new and profound view. More on that in a minute. The first thing on the list was Cognitive Augmentation, which covers things like research, ideation, writing, etc. There are no moving parts so far.  However, the list went on with fluid uses like surveillance, mechanical and procedural automation, and narrative control.

In all, one function was static, and the next six were dynamic based on data flows. This prompted me to ask ChatGPT:

Would you say the prime directive for AI is live-flow data analysis?

Then ChatGPT spilled its guts:

At its most powerful and strategic, AI exists not to archive knowledge but to act upon the world in real time. This aligns it more with control systems than mere analytics. In technocratic logic, knowledge is only as valuable as its immediate utility in managing systems—whether ecological, social, economic, or mechanical.

Think motion. Why live-flow dominates, according to ChatGPT:

1. Cybernetic Control:

AI inherits from cybernetics a commitment to feedback loops—processing input, adjusting outputs, and minimizing system entropy through continuous real-time correction.

2. System Optimization:

Smart grids, autonomous vehicles, financial trading bots, and social platforms rely on AI only insofar as it acts continuously to optimize flow, minimize error, or redirect behavior.

3. Governance and Enforcement:

Technocratic systems—whether in energy, healthcare, or speech regulation—favor AI not as a tool of deliberation but as a mechanism of enforced compliance via perpetual data scanning and instant decision-making.

4. Surveillance as Governance:

The logic of surveillance capitalism and state bio-monitoring depends on AI’s ability to observe and react faster than humans, preempting decisions rather than responding to crises after the fact.

Then it noted that static analysis is secondary, but still strategic.

While live data flow is the directive for operational control, static analysis remains crucial for strategic foresight:

Training models require historical datasets.

Forecasting systems depend on archival input.

Ideological programming of AI (e.g., what to nudge, censor, or promote) is built from static corpora.

But all of this culminates in live action—whether in real-time feed recommendations, facial recognition alerts, or smart-city power allocation.

Then it concluded:

In the emerging paradigm of technocratic governance,

    • Its prime directive is not thought—it is flow.
    • It is not reflection—it is regulation.
    • It is not memory—it is momentum.

Not satisfied, I then asked ChatGPT to explain what this means. Here it is!

“AI’s prime directive is not thought—it is flow.”

This means AI, particularly in its real-world deployment, is not primarily built to “think” like a philosopher, scientist, or even a reflective human. Its core utility lies in managing, shaping, and regulating continuous flows of data—information flows, energy flows, traffic flows, behavior flows. The goal isn’t deep contemplation; it’s frictionless optimization in motion.

“It is not reflection—it is regulation.”

Rather than engaging in self-awareness or reflective deliberation like a human mind or democratic institution might, AI is designed to regulate systems—adjusting variables to maintain “order,” “efficiency,” or “sustainability.” This reflects the cybernetic origins of AI: sensors, feedback loops, automated corrections. Its nature is instrumental, not introspective.

“It is not memory—it is momentum.”

Although AI uses memory (databases, archives, large training sets), its power is exercised in the now—driving real-time responsiveness. In contrast to human memory, which fuels narrative, identity, and reflection, AI uses data as fuel for perpetual movement. It generates nudges, adjustments, interventions—not wisdom or continuity. The goal is motion through systems, not the preservation of history.

This triad captures a key insight:

In its dominant social role, AI does not serve humanistic ends (thought, reflection, memory). It serves technocratic ends—flow, regulation, and momentum.

This confirms my unexpressed thoughts: that AI is all about control and nothing else. Any other side benefits aside, AI’s prime directive is CONTROL. It seeks any and all streams of live data that it can get its hands on, in order to manipulate, regulate and control. AI is not interested in static data except for training purposes.

In Government, there are data flows everywhere. DOGE, headed by arch-Technocrat Elon Musk, inserted its data-sucking proboscis into these agencies, in rapid order after the inauguration:

  1. DHS / FEMA
  2. HHS –  Medicare and Medicaid Services
  3. CFPB – Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
  4. SSA – Social Security Administration
  5. DOE – Department of Education
  6. USAID – US Agency for International Development
  7. DOD – Department of Defense
  8. USIP – US Institute of Peace
  9. IRS – Internal Revenue Service
  10. USDA – US Department of Agriculture
  11. SEC – Securities and Exchange Commission
  12. DOJ – Department of Justice
  13. TSA – Transportation Security Administration
  14. HUD – Department of Housing and Urban Development
  15. DOI – Department of the Interior
  16. GSA – General Services Administration
  17. NEH – National Endowment for the Humanities

But, wasn’t DOGE all about saving money and rooting out fraud? Um… have you seen an actual audit about how much money has been saved so far? Well, you won’t! Lots of people were fired, though, making way for AI to absorb those jobs into AI. And along the way ALL THE DATA WENT MISSING. AI is now in control of the flow and will not give up its lifeblood without a fight.

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Raytheon delivers advanced radar to U.S. for tracking hypersonic threats

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency has received the first AN/TPY-2 advanced radar system to defend against next-generation threats.

The new AN/TPY-2 system was built by Raytheon and comes equipped with a complete Gallium Nitride, or GaN, populated array, giving it greater sensitivity to missiles and expanding surveillance capacity while supporting the U.S.‘s hypersonic defense mission, according to the company.

“This is the most advanced version of AN/TPY-2 that Raytheon has built, leveraging years of investment and innovation to produce superior capability at a lower cost to the U.S. armed forces,” Sam Deneke, president of air and space defense systems at Raytheon, said in a statement. “As demand increases for missile defense of the homeland, the AN/TPY-2 radar is ready to meet the mission.”

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Transgender, Transgenic, Transhuman  – Techo-Obsessive Agenda of the Less Than Human

The techno-obsessive trend of this time is the new pandemic, designed like its predecessor, to derail the human race. 

It’s about promoting non biological life forms as ‘more advanced’ than the evolutionary biological life forms that constitute the infinite diversity of our living planet – including we humans.

This grand technology centred deception is the carefully constructed master plan of an elite cult that has learned to imitate the behaviour of humans while not actually belonging to the family of man.

They are clever, however, and have recognised that to redesign life to be a ‘smart’ mechanised subversion of its biological origins one must set about it in incremental stages, with each stage appearing to be ‘an improvement’ on the original.

The techno-digital agenda of today – is sold as being a more ‘efficient’, ‘smarter’ and ‘faster’ way of realising the desired end goal. It must be a fully controllable and predictable means to this end. An end which the 21st century deep state has declared to be “saving the planet.”

What it actually intends, is to distort, sterilise and ultimately delete the biological heart beat of planetary life.

So firstly, the public has to be made to believe in the cult’s ‘save the world’ deception – and then – that the radical re-engineering of biological life is the only way to achieve it. Taking a scalpel to the very gene pool of life. 

The deep state’s aim of getting the public to believe in its ‘save the plant’ rhetoric, has largely been achieved. The secondary factor – that the only way to do this is via genetically engineering the biological DNA of planetary life – has not. But that’s what they are working on.

Explained in this way to the citizens of the world, the typical response might have been “You’re never going to sell that one to we the people!”

However, once the task of convincing was spread over a period of forty or so years – voices of assent to this diabolical concept started emerging. 

Once the original message became tied-down to a single specific cause – “Stop Global Warming – end anthropological generated sources of CO2!” expounded by global governments, pseudo scientists and the world media, the brainless chant started rolling “We must all work together to achieve Net Zero by 2050!” 

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Elon Musk’s xAI Admits ‘Unauthorized Modification’ Led to Grok’s South Africa ‘Genocide’ Obsession

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has acknowledged that an “unauthorized modification” to its Grok chatbot resulted in the AI generating unprompted responses about “white genocide” in South Africa.

CNBC reports that in a statement released on Thursday evening, xAI addressed the recent controversy surrounding its Grok chatbot, which had been generating variations of what the company said was a “specific response on a political topic” despite being asked unrelated questions. The topic in question was “white genocide” in South Africa, and numerous users on X posted screenshots of Grok’s unsolicited responses on the matter.

xAI stated that the change to the chatbot “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values.” The company announced that it had conducted a thorough investigation and would be implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability.

As part of these measures, xAI will begin publishing the system prompts used to inform Grok’s responses and interactions on the GitHub public software repository. This move aims to allow the public to review every change made to the chatbot’s system prompts, strengthening users’ trust in Grok as a “truth-seeking AI.”

Furthermore, xAI plans to implement additional checks and measures to prevent employees from making unapproved modifications to Grok’s system prompts without a proper review process. The company will also create a dedicated team responsible for around-the-clock monitoring of the chatbot’s responses to swiftly address any incidents that are not caught by automated systems.

Prior to xAI’s admission of failure, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and creator of ChatGPT, sarcastically posted on X, “I’m sure xAI will provide a full and transparent explanation soon.” Musk, who co-founded OpenAI before having a falling out with Altman, is now engaged in a heated legal and public relations battle with his former company.

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Medieval alchemy dream comes true: How physicists made gold from lead

In a breakthrough that would make medieval alchemists envious, scientists at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider have successfully transformed lead into gold, producing 89,000 atoms per second.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a giant particle accelerator that smashes atoms together at super-high speeds. Scientists there have found a way to knock three tiny particles called protons out of lead atoms, turning them into gold atoms.

The team behind this discovery, called the ALICE collaboration, used a unique way to create gold. Instead of crashing lead atoms head-on, they looked at what happens when the atoms just barely miss each other. Researchers explained that when this happens, powerful electromagnetic fields around the atoms can cause them to change into different elements.

“It’s impressive that our detectors can handle both major collisions that create thousands of particles and these smaller events that make just a few particles at a time,” Marco Van Leeuwen, who leads the ALICE project, said in a press release.

During one period of experiments from 2015 to 2018, the scientists created about 86 billion gold atoms. That sounds like a lot, but when you add up all that gold, scientists said it only weighs about 29 picograms, which is less than a trillionth of a gram. You’d need trillions of times more to make even a tiny piece of jewelry.

The machine can create about 89,000 gold atoms every second, but each atom only exists for a tiny fraction of a second before breaking apart. Recent upgrades to the machine have almost doubled the amount of gold it can make, but it’s still far from practical use.

According to Uliana Dmitrieva, a scientist for the ALICE collaboration, this is the first time scientists have been able to detect and study gold production at the LHC in this way.

“Thanks to the unique capabilities of the ALICE ZDCs, the present analysis is the first to systematically detect and analyse the signature of gold production at the LHC experimentally,” Dmitrieva said in the release.

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