News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Judge calls Pentagon's Anthropic blacklist 'illegal and baseless'
Anthropic sued in California federal court in March, alleging that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth exceeded his authority in imposing the designation SAN FRANCISCO, California: A federal judge has blocked the Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic, ruling in favor of the AI company in its dispute with the U.S. military over restrictions on using its Claude models. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin found in a 59-page order on August 27 that the Pentagon's decision to designate Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk was "illegal and baseless." "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Lin wrote. Anthropic sued in California federal court in March, alleging that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth exceeded his authority in imposing the designation. The government can use the label for companies that expose military systems to possible infiltration or sabotage by adversaries. The Pentagon's move blocked Anthropic from certain military contracts and followed the company's refusal to allow the military to use Claude AI models for U.S. surveillance or autonomous weapons. Anthropic executives have said the designation could cost the company billions of dollars in lost business and reputational harm. Anthropic welcomed the court's decision and said it remained "focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology." The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Anthropic has argued that AI models are not reliable enough to be safely deployed in autonomous weapons and that it opposes domestic surveillance because it violates rights. The Pentagon has said private companies should not be able to constrain military action. The designation marked the first time a U.S. company had been publicly declared a supply-chain risk under a government procurement law intended to protect military systems from foreign sabotage. In its March 9 lawsuit, Anthropic alleged that the government retaliated against its views on AI safety, violating its First Amendment right to free speech. It also argued that it was denied an opportunity to challenge the designation, violating its Fifth Amendment right to due process. The company said the Pentagon's decision was unlawful, unsupported by facts and inconsistent with the military's previous praise of Claude. The Justice Department argued in a court filing that Anthropic's refusal to remove its restrictions could create uncertainty about how the Pentagon could use Claude and risk disabling military systems during operations. The government said the designation resulted from Anthropic's refusal to accept contractual terms, not its views on AI safety. Anthropic also has a separate lawsuit pending in Washington, D.C., challenging another Pentagon supply-chain risk designation that could exclude the company from civilian government contracts.
Judge calls Pentagon's Anthropic blacklist 'illegal and baseless'
Anthropic sued in California federal court in March, alleging that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth exceeded his authority in imposing the designation SAN FRANCISCO, California: A federal judge has blocked the Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic, ruling in favor of the AI company in its dispute with the U.S. military over restrictions on using its Claude models. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin found in a 59-page order on August 27 that the Pentagon's decision to designate Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk was "illegal and baseless." "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Lin wrote. Anthropic sued in California federal court in March, alleging that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth exceeded his authority in imposing the designation. The government can use the label for companies that expose military systems to possible infiltration or sabotage by adversaries. The Pentagon's move blocked Anthropic from certain military contracts and followed the company's refusal to allow the military to use Claude AI models for U.S. surveillance or autonomous weapons. Anthropic executives have said the designation could cost the company billions of dollars in lost business and reputational harm. Anthropic welcomed the court's decision and said it remained "focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology." The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Anthropic has argued that AI models are not reliable enough to be safely deployed in autonomous weapons and that it opposes domestic surveillance because it violates rights. The Pentagon has said private companies should not be able to constrain military action. The designation marked the first time a U.S. company had been publicly declared a supply-chain risk under a government procurement law intended to protect military systems from foreign sabotage. In its March 9 lawsuit, Anthropic alleged that the government retaliated against its views on AI safety, violating its First Amendment right to free speech. It also argued that it was denied an opportunity to challenge the designation, violating its Fifth Amendment right to due process. The company said the Pentagon's decision was unlawful, unsupported by facts and inconsistent with the military's previous praise of Claude. The Justice Department argued in a court filing that Anthropic's refusal to remove its restrictions could create uncertainty about how the Pentagon could use Claude and risk disabling military systems during operations. The government said the designation resulted from Anthropic's refusal to accept contractual terms, not its views on AI safety. Anthropic also has a separate lawsuit pending in Washington, D.C., challenging another Pentagon supply-chain risk designation that could exclude the company from civilian government contracts.
Judge calls Pentagon's Anthropic blacklist 'illegal and baseless'
Anthropic sued in California federal court in March, alleging that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth exceeded his authority in imposing the designation SAN FRANCISCO, California: A federal judge has blocked the Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic, ruling in favor of the AI company in its dispute with the U.S. military over restrictions on using its Claude models. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin found in a 59-page order on August 27 that the Pentagon's decision to designate Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk was "illegal and baseless." "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Lin wrote. Anthropic sued in California federal court in March, alleging that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth exceeded his authority in imposing the designation. The government can use the label for companies that expose military systems to possible infiltration or sabotage by adversaries. The Pentagon's move blocked Anthropic from certain military contracts and followed the company's refusal to allow the military to use Claude AI models for U.S. surveillance or autonomous weapons. Anthropic executives have said the designation could cost the company billions of dollars in lost business and reputational harm. Anthropic welcomed the court's decision and said it remained "focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology." The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Anthropic has argued that AI models are not reliable enough to be safely deployed in autonomous weapons and that it opposes domestic surveillance because it violates rights. The Pentagon has said private companies should not be able to constrain military action. The designation marked the first time a U.S. company had been publicly declared a supply-chain risk under a government procurement law intended to protect military systems from foreign sabotage. In its March 9 lawsuit, Anthropic alleged that the government retaliated against its views on AI safety, violating its First Amendment right to free speech. It also argued that it was denied an opportunity to challenge the designation, violating its Fifth Amendment right to due process. The company said the Pentagon's decision was unlawful, unsupported by facts and inconsistent with the military's previous praise of Claude. The Justice Department argued in a court filing that Anthropic's refusal to remove its restrictions could create uncertainty about how the Pentagon could use Claude and risk disabling military systems during operations. The government said the designation resulted from Anthropic's refusal to accept contractual terms, not its views on AI safety. Anthropic also has a separate lawsuit pending in Washington, D.C., challenging another Pentagon supply-chain risk designation that could exclude the company from civilian government contracts.
Judge calls Pentagon's Anthropic blacklist 'illegal and baseless'
Anthropic sued in California federal court in March, alleging that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth exceeded his authority in imposing the designation SAN FRANCISCO, California: A federal judge has blocked the Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic, ruling in favor of the AI company in its dispute with the U.S. military over restrictions on using its Claude models. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin found in a 59-page order on August 27 that the Pentagon's decision to designate Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk was "illegal and baseless." "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Lin wrote. Anthropic sued in California federal court in March, alleging that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth exceeded his authority in imposing the designation. The government can use the label for companies that expose military systems to possible infiltration or sabotage by adversaries. The Pentagon's move blocked Anthropic from certain military contracts and followed the company's refusal to allow the military to use Claude AI models for U.S. surveillance or autonomous weapons. Anthropic executives have said the designation could cost the company billions of dollars in lost business and reputational harm. Anthropic welcomed the court's decision and said it remained "focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology." The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Anthropic has argued that AI models are not reliable enough to be safely deployed in autonomous weapons and that it opposes domestic surveillance because it violates rights. The Pentagon has said private companies should not be able to constrain military action. The designation marked the first time a U.S. company had been publicly declared a supply-chain risk under a government procurement law intended to protect military systems from foreign sabotage. In its March 9 lawsuit, Anthropic alleged that the government retaliated against its views on AI safety, violating its First Amendment right to free speech. It also argued that it was denied an opportunity to challenge the designation, violating its Fifth Amendment right to due process. The company said the Pentagon's decision was unlawful, unsupported by facts and inconsistent with the military's previous praise of Claude. The Justice Department argued in a court filing that Anthropic's refusal to remove its restrictions could create uncertainty about how the Pentagon could use Claude and risk disabling military systems during operations. The government said the designation resulted from Anthropic's refusal to accept contractual terms, not its views on AI safety. Anthropic also has a separate lawsuit pending in Washington, D.C., challenging another Pentagon supply-chain risk designation that could exclude the company from civilian government contracts.
US judge blocks Pentagon's Anthropic blacklisting
A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic, the latest turn in the Claude maker's high-stakes fight with the military over AI safety on the battlefield. Anthropic's lawsuit in California federal court alleges that Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when he designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk, a label the government can apply to companies that expose military systems to potential infiltration or sabotage by adversaries. Hegseth's unprecedented move, which blocked Anthropic from certain military contracts, followed Anthropic's refusal to allow the military to use its Claude AI models for U.S. surveillance or autonomous weapons. Anthropic executives have said it could cost the company billions of dollars in lost business and reputational harm. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, an appointee of former Democratic President Joe Biden, issued a 59-page order ruling that the Pentagon's decision was "illegal and baseless." "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," she wrote. Anthropic welcomed the ruling and said in a statement that it remained "focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology." The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Anthropic argues that AI models are not reliable enough to be safely used in autonomous weapons and that it opposes domestic surveillance as a violation of rights, but the Pentagon says private companies should not be able to constrain military action. The designation made by the Pentagon was the first time a U.S. company has been publicly designated a supply-chain risk under an obscure government-procurement statute aimed at protecting military systems from foreign sabotage. In its March 9 lawsuit, Anthropic alleged the government violated its right to free speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution by retaliating against its views on AI safety. The company said it was not given a chance to dispute the designation, in violation of its Fifth Amendment right to due process. The lawsuit says the decision was unlawful, unsupported by facts and inconsistent with the military's past praise of Claude. The Justice Department countered that Anthropic's refusal to lift the restrictions could cause uncertainty in the Pentagon over how it could use Claude and risk disabling military systems during operations, according to a court filing. The government said the designation stemmed from Anthropic's refusal to accept contractual terms, not its views on AI safety. Anthropic has a second lawsuit pending in Washington, D.C., over a separate Pentagon supply-chain risk designation that could lead to its exclusion from civilian government contracts.
Plans & Pricing | Claude by Anthropic
Every plan has usage limits that reset on a rolling five-hour session window, and paid plans add weekly limits on top. Your activity across Claude on web, desktop, mobile, and Claude Code all draws from the same pool. How much you can do depends on the length and complexity of your conversations, the model you choose, and the features you use, so there's no fixed message count. Free covers everyday questions. Pro gives you at least 5x more usage per 5-hour session than Free. Max gives you 5x or 20x more usage per 5-hour session than Pro. On Team plans, Standard seats give more than Pro and Premium seats give 5x more than Standard. To manage capacity and make sure all users have fair access, we may limit your usage in other ways, such as weekly and monthly caps or model and feature usage, at our discretion. When you reach a limit, you can wait for it to reset, move to a higher plan, or, on paid plans, turn on usage credits to keep working at standard API rates. You can see where you stand anytime in Settings > Usage.
Trump administration acted illegally in fight against Anthropic, judge rules
The Trump administration's dramatic decision to mark Anthropic's AI models as a "supply chain risk" earlier this year was illegal, a federal judge has ruled. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," wrote Judge Rita Lin in a 59-page ruling. The judge determined the federal government unlawfully retaliated against Anthropic despite its engaging in "constitutionally protected expressive activities." Lin pointed to renewed conversations between Anthropic and the federal government, as well as the government's decision to back away from national security allegations, as corroboration that the designation was an attempt to make a public example of the company, the New York Times reported. "We welcome the court's ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful. We remain focused on working productively with the government to harness A.I. for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology," Anthropic said in a statement following the decision. * Play our Big Guessing Game: Make your predictions now for a chance to win a new Apple Watch. Time's running out! What happened between Trump and Anthropic? Anthropic filed a series of lawsuits in March, amid a heated back and forth between the developer, the Department of War, and President Donald Trump himself over the government's potential use of Anthropic's AI models for nationwide surveillance or lethal autonomous weapons. The complaint accused the federal government of engaging in a targeted campaign against the company following the contract disagreement. Anthropic argued that the government's designation, typically reserved for foreign companies and national security risks, was an overly broad interpretation and "ideologically motivated." Trump himself directed an immediate blacklisting of Anthropic products across federal offices, calling the developers "leftwing nut jobs" and Anthropic itself a "radical left, woke" AI company. Following the fallout, which received widespread attention, Anthropic and the federal government reentered negotiations. Then, in June, Anthropic was forced to pull its latest Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 models under an export control directive from the federal government, citing security concerns about foreign nationals' access to the technology. What does the decision mean for AI companies? Civil society groups see the ruling as a win for free speech proponents amid a government that is increasingly pushing back against dissenters. "Yesterday's ruling is a vindication of the First Amendment and a clear reminder that the government isn't allowed to use national security designations to punish companies or individuals for public criticisms or business disagreements," said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology. "Procurement policy can't be an end run around the Constitution. The Pentagon can pick and choose which products it wants to buy. It can't use the power of its size and position to stamp out disagreement."
Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging copyright infringement
Music giants Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have just filed a potentially multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Anthropic, and the publishers aren't mincing words. The lawsuit, filed Friday evening in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, calls Anthropic "the culprits behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." Sony and Warner also named Anthropic CEO and cofounder Dario Amodei and cofounder Benjamin Mann in the lawsuit. * Play our Big Guessing Game: Make your predictions now for a chance to win a new Apple Watch. Time's running out! In the lawsuit, first reported by Music Business Worldwide, the music companies claim that Anthropic has carried out "a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale" to train its popular Claude AI models. Sony and Warner accused Anthropic of having "reaped enormous profits" from the stolen music. Sony and Warner are seeking $150,000 in damages per work as well as $25,000 per copyright violation. The music companies, which are the second- and third-largest in the industry, allege that thousands of titles have been stolen, putting compensation in the range of billions of dollars. The publishers have specifically accused Anthropic of "blatant theft" of song titles such as "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "All I Want for Christmas is You," "Eye of the Tiger," and "Here Comes Santa Claus." Anthropic has been hit with intellectual property lawsuits before. In fact, Sony and Warner's lawsuit directly references the $1.5 billion settlement that Anthropic reached with book publishers earlier this year in a similar case where the AI company was accused of training models on stolen works. The world's largest music company, Universal Music Group (UMG), previously filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Anthropic. UMG, along with Concord Music Group and ABKCO Music, filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in 2023 and again earlier this year. Their latest suit seeks more than $3 billion in damages.
OpenAI Cuts Cursor Loose After SpaceX Takeover. Anthropic Seizes the Moment With More Claude Capacity
OpenAI just told SpaceX it plans to stop supplying models to Cursor. The proposed cutoff lands on November 12, 2026. Developers who built workflows inside the AI-powered code editor now face a choice. Stick with what remains or shift heavily toward alternatives. Anthropic moved fast. Its co-founder promised extra compute for Claude inside Cursor and pointed to a long-standing partnership. The move turns a corporate breakup into an opening for one rival to capture more developer mindshare. The trigger was straightforward. SpaceX closed its $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, Cursor's parent, earlier in August. OpenAI cited a change-of-control clause in its custom contract that gave it a narrow window to exit. Company executives said they could not trust that SpaceX would honor terms of service. Past dealings with Elon Musk's companies factored heavily into that judgment. "We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts," OpenAI wrote. The post referenced Musk's acquisition of Twitter, which it said broke prior agreements, and Musk's testimony this year admitting xAI had violated similar rules. It also noted new accountability attached to its unreleased Astra model. Future versions would stay off limits for Cursor. Cursor's reaction stayed measured. Co-founder and CEO Michael Truell posted that OpenAI models represented only about 5% of user traffic. "We're sorry to see that OpenAI put out a note saying they plan to block Cursor users from accessing OpenAI models in three months. OpenAI models serve about 5% of Cursor user traffic, and we're speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this," he wrote on X. The company has spent years positioning itself as model-agnostic. Users could tap GPT, Claude, Gemini or others depending on the task. But 5% still matters when that slice includes power users who rely on specific GPT behaviors for certain refactors or agent runs. And the timing stings. Cursor has grown into one of the most widely adopted AI coding tools among professional developers. Engineers at more than 60% of Fortune 500 companies reportedly use it. Many treat the editor like a daily driver. Losing direct baked-in access to one family of frontier models forces adjustments. Some will bring their own OpenAI API keys. Others will route through gateways. A few may simply migrate workloads to Claude. Anthropic's Swift Counter-Move Anthropic did not wait. Within hours Tom Brown, co-founder and chief compute officer, posted: "Cursor has been a trusted partner of Anthropic since Sonnet 3.5. We'll continue to increase compute to support Claude models in Cursor and are excited for what comes next with them at SpaceX." The statement landed like a direct response. It signaled not just continuity but expansion. Brown's team would add capacity to absorb any displaced traffic. That pledge carries weight. Digital Trends reported Anthropic is also raising weekly usage limits for Claude Code users. Standard limits for Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans get a permanent 25% bump starting September 14. Until then, the existing 50% temporary boost remains. The combination gives developers more room to run longer agent sessions or tackle bigger codebases without hitting caps as quickly. Claude models already dominate many Cursor workflows. Recent benchmarks show Sonnet and Opus variants excel at multi-file edits, repository-scale reasoning and clean code generation. Developers praise their ability to maintain context across large contexts. Now those strengths get amplified at the precise moment OpenAI steps back. The shift could accelerate. Cursor users who previously split time between providers may default to Claude for consistency and higher limits. Yet the episode reveals deeper tensions. AI labs increasingly treat their models as strategic assets rather than neutral commodities. Contracts come with strict usage rules. Competitive concerns surface when a customer gets acquired by a rival. Anthropic itself cut off access to other coding tools in the past when acquisition rumors swirled. The pattern repeats. Loyalty lasts only as long as business interests align. Musk dismissed the news. "I couldn't care less," he posted on X, adding pointed criticism of Sam Altman and OpenAI leadership. The remark fits a years-long public feud. Reuters detailed how the rivalry has played out in lawsuits, public accusations and now commercial retaliation. Reuters noted the $60 billion deal turned Cursor into part of a larger SpaceX AI organization. That integration apparently crossed a line for OpenAI. Developers watch these moves with a mix of frustration and pragmatism. Many already maintain multiple subscriptions. They bring their own keys where possible. They test models side by side. The Cursor situation forces a sharper evaluation. How much does direct integration matter versus raw capability and rate limits? For teams running heavy agentic workloads, capacity often decides. OpenAI's help center post outlines workarounds. Users can plug in personal API keys for supported chat and agent features, though some advanced Cursor capabilities like Tab, Cloud Agents or the CLI remain tied to provider-supplied models. The Codex IDE extension offers another path. Gateways provide a third. None fully replicate the pre-acquisition experience. And none guarantee access to future OpenAI releases inside Cursor. Anthropic's response looks calculated. It keeps a key customer. It gains potential volume. It burnishes its image as the more developer-friendly option in a moment of disruption. Whether the added compute scales without new bottlenecks remains to be seen. Demand for Claude in coding tasks has climbed steadily. Extra capacity helps, but frontier models still require massive resources. The next several weeks will test these promises. Cursor must guide users through the transition without losing momentum. Anthropic must deliver on higher limits and extra headroom. OpenAI must demonstrate that its workarounds satisfy the developer community it says it wants to support. And everyone watches to see whether this accelerates a broader fragmentation of the AI coding stack or simply pushes more traffic toward the current leader in that category. One thing looks clear already. In the contest for developer loyalty, raw model performance still matters. But so does reliability of access, predictable limits and willingness to scale alongside fast-growing tools. Anthropic just bet it can meet that test. The market will deliver the verdict.
Anthropic Sued Over Claude Max Plans That Deliver Far Less Than Advertised - Startup Fortune
A proposed class action filed against Anthropic in the Northern District of California claims Claude Max subscribers pay for 5x or 20x the usage of the base Pro plan but receive far less. Plaintiff Karl Kahn says internal Anthropic emails and his own account activity point to real multipliers closer to 3.5x and 6-8x, not the numbers in the marketing. A Claude Max subscriber says Anthropic promised 20 times the usage of its base plan and delivered closer to six. Karl Kahn paid $200 a month for Anthropic's top-tier Max 20x plan to run Claude Code through long coding sessions. He wanted the usage Anthropic advertised: twenty times what a $20-a-month Pro subscriber gets. What he got, according to a lawsuit he filed against Anthropic, PBC in June, was nowhere close. Kahn v. Anthropic, PBC, case number 3:26-cv-05763, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on June 14. It's a proposed class action, seeking to represent every U.S. buyer of the Max 5x or Max 20x plans since Anthropic rolled them out in April 2025. The complaint puts the amount in controversy above $5 million and brings four claims: false advertising, a violation of California's Consumer Legal Remedies Act, negligent misrepresentation, and breach of contract. The gap is at the center of it. Anthropic markets Max 5x, at $100 a month, as five times the usage of Pro. Max 20x, at $200, is billed as twenty times Pro. According to reporting from Engadget and Qz, the complaint alleges the real multipliers land far lower: roughly 3.5x for Max 5x and somewhere between 6x and 8x for Max 20x. That's not a rounding error. It's the difference between paying for twenty units and getting six. The complaint leans on internal Anthropic emails from July 2025 that spelled out, tier by tier, what subscribers should expect to use each week. Pro users were told to expect 40 to 80 hours of Sonnet 4 access weekly. The higher tiers promised more. Max 5x subscribers were told 140 to 280 hours of Sonnet 4, plus 15 to 35 hours of Opus 4. Max 20x subscribers got 240 to 480 hours of Sonnet 4, plus 24 to 40 hours of Opus 4. Run the math on the high end of each range, and Max 20x tops out around 520 combined hours against Pro's 80. That's roughly 6.5 times, not 20. Sony Music and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Stolen Song Lyrics Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell filed a new copyright lawsuit against Anthropic on August 28, 2026, alleging the AI company scraped and stripped copyright data from thousands of song lyrics to train Claude. The suit, which names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann personally, seeks statutory damages that could reach billions of... - how to copyright AI training data lawsuits - anthropic claude AI music copyright infringement case Kahn's personal experience, described in the filing and reported by letsdatascience.com, is blunter. He says he burned through 15% of his weekly quota in a single five-hour coding session. Part of what makes the multiplier hard to verify, per the complaint, is that Anthropic doesn't run one limit. It runs two. A rolling five-hour window caps what you can use in any short burst. A separate weekly cycle caps your total across seven days. Reporting indicates the weekly layer was added on top of the five-hour window in late August 2025, after Anthropic found power users running Claude Code close to nonstop. Stack those two systems and you lose any clean way to check whether your weekly allotment scales the way the price tag implies. You burn through the five-hour window, wait for it to reset, and repeat. There's no visibility into how that maps back to the weekly promise Anthropic emailed you in July. The complaint argues that opacity isn't incidental. It's the mechanism that let the gap between advertised and real usage go unnoticed for over a year. Anthropic has declined to comment on the lawsuit, according to every outlet that has asked, including Engadget and Yahoo Finance. The case remains active in the Northern District of California. No ruling yet. No settlement either. A pricing model other AI companies are watching Anthropic isn't alone in using usage multipliers to sell higher subscription tiers instead of flat token limits. OpenAI, Google, and other AI vendors have built similar tiered structures for their own coding and chat assistants, betting that most subscribers never audit their actual weekly consumption against the marketing math. Kahn's suit tests whether that bet is legally safe. If a federal court in California finds that Anthropic's emailed usage estimates amounted to a promise it didn't keep, other companies selling 5x or 10x usage upgrades will have reason to rewrite those numbers before a subscriber does the math for them. For now, nothing about Claude Max's pricing has changed. The $100 and $200 tiers are still live, still promising 5x and 20x. Whether that number survives the lawsuit is the open question, and it's the one Anthropic still won't answer. Also read: Twitch Streamer Sues Amazon Claiming It Trained AI on Streams Without Consent * Meta Is Testing Robots to Take Over Cabling and Server Jobs at Its Data Centers * Big Tech Booked $160 Billion in Paper Gains From AI Bets Last Quarter OpenAI, Anthropic and Over 100 Firms Warn AI Cyberattacks Are Months Away OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and more than 100 other companies, including CrowdStrike, Visa and Capital One, signed an August 27, 2026 letter warning that AI-powered cyberattacks on hospitals and water systems are months, not years, away. The same labs sounding the alarm are already selling the defensive AI tools meant to stop it. - AI powered cyberattacks on critical infrastructure timeline - when will AI cyberattacks happen to hospitals
Lawsuit: Elon Musk's xAI Trained Grok AI Using Child Pornography
A woman identified as "Jane Doe" sued Elon Musk's xAI this week, alleging the company trained its Grok AI chatbot on child pornography depicting her, in what appears to be the first case accusing xAI of training its AI on child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Ars Technica reports that the proposed class-action lawsuit filed against Musk's xAI, now part of SpaceX, centers on abuse Doe suffered as a preschooler in the early 2000s, when adult men raped her to produce images later sold to pedophiles online. Those images were hashed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, groups that track known child pornography so it can be identified and removed wherever it resurfaces. Doe gets alerts through the U.S. Department of Justice Victim Notification System whenever her abuse material turns up somewhere new. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection told her that AI-generated CSAM depicting her had shown up on xAI. According to the complaint, offenders on online forums discussed "creating AI generated CSAM of Plaintiff and other similarly situated known, legacy, victims of CSAM." The lawsuit claims xAI stores images Grok generates and reuses them to further train the model. A press release from Doe's lawyers described the material as "that same material," referring to the CSAM depicting her that investigators say fed into Grok's outputs. The complaint itself alleges that "CSAM depicting Plaintiff with its longstanding well-known hash values has been used as a part of the dataset used by xAI." Breitbart News previously reported on AI training datasets that were found to contain child pornography: The Stanford Internet Observatory, in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and other anti-abuse charities, conducted a study that found more than 3,200 images of suspected child sexual abuse in the AI database LAION. LAION, an index of online images and captions, has been instrumental in training leading AI image-makers such as Stable Diffusion. This discovery has raised alarms across various sectors, including schools and law enforcement. The child pornography has enabled AI systems to produce explicit and realistic imagery of fake children and transform social media photos of real teens into deepfake nudes. Previously, it was believed that AI tools produced abusive imagery by combining adult pornography with benign photos of kids. However, the direct inclusion of explicit child images in training datasets presents a more direct and disturbing reality. Much of Doe's legal argument turns on how Grok's terms of service handle user content. The complaint says Grok treats public posts on X, along with the outputs Grok itself generates, as training data by default. As the filing puts it, "Because Grok's terms treat public X posts and Grok's own outputs as training data by default, publicly posting an image does not just expose it to viewers, but also feeds [it] directly into the pipeline xAI uses to train and improve its model and thereby generate further images." xAI filters violent content out of its training data, but its terms do not specifically exclude CSAM, non-consensual intimate imagery, or other sexual or inappropriate material. The complaint also raises a harder technical question: how do you undo the damage once abuse material has already shaped a trained model? It states that "because full removal of a training example's influence from an already-trained model is technically difficult and not something that xAI has publicly claimed to have done, any CSAM ingested into training before takedown likely continued to shape the model's outputs even after the original images were removed from public view." Doe's suit accuses X of violating federal child pornography statutes and Masha's Law, both of which let CSAM survivors sue over the production, possession, and distribution of abuse material. Margaret E. Mabie, one of Doe's lawyers, said in a press release that "xAI did all three." The lawsuit seeks money damages on behalf of every victim who can prove Grok generated CSAM based on their real photos. It also asks the court to order xAI to destroy all Grok-generated CSAM currently stored or used in training, and to permanently block xAI from generating CSAM going forward. Getting there, the complaint suggests, would mean blocking all sexualized outputs from Grok, including non-consensual intimate imagery and the NSFW "bikini pics" that Elon Musk has promoted. Doe's lawyer Sarah London said in the press release that Doe "has lived for nearly two decades knowing that images of the worst thing that ever happened to her are circulating among predators online, and that they can resurface at any moment. xAI must be held responsible for knowingly training its models on images of the horrific abuse she suffered, and on the abuse images of every other survivor in this class." Read more at Ars Technica here.
Anthropic introduces local sandbox mode for Claude Code desktop
The new feature uses OS-level isolation to lock down command execution, cutting permission prompts by 84% since initial development began. Anthropic has rolled out a local Bash sandbox mode for Claude Code on desktop, giving the AI coding tool a security upgrade that isolates command execution at the operating system level. The feature works on macOS and Linux/WSL2, using native sandboxing technologies to restrict what Claude Code can actually touch on your machine. How the sandbox actually works The technical implementation varies by platform. On macOS, the sandbox relies on Seatbelt, Apple's built-in sandboxing framework that enforces fine-grained restrictions on process-level access. Linux and WSL2 users get bubblewrap, a lightweight containerization tool commonly used in the Linux ecosystem for unprivileged sandboxing. Both approaches accomplish the same goal: filesystem access gets locked down to the current working directory and its children, while network requests pass through a proxy layer that only permits connections to pre-approved domains. Windows users, for now, are left out. Full native support for Windows remains absent. The sandbox ships with two operational modes. The first is auto-allow, which lets commands execute without requiring explicit user approval each time. The second is a traditional permissions mode that still gates every command behind a manual check. Since Anthropic began iterating on this sandbox approach around October 2025, the company says it has achieved an 84% reduction in permission prompts. Security context and prompt injection defense The sandbox addresses a real and growing attack surface: prompt injection. A carefully crafted prompt injection could trick an AI assistant into running destructive commands, exfiltrating sensitive files, or establishing unauthorized network connections. The sandbox's filesystem restrictions and network allowlists serve as guardrails against exactly these scenarios. By confining execution to the working directory, even a successful prompt injection attack would struggle to reach SSH keys, environment variables, browser cookies, or other sensitive data stored elsewhere on the system. The network proxy adds a second layer, preventing exfiltration attempts to unauthorized domains. Anthropic's documentation makes clear that "computer use" features -- the desktop interaction capabilities that let Claude control mouse clicks and screen interactions -- run outside the sandbox environment. This means developers using those features still operate without the isolation protections the sandbox provides. The broader AI coding tool landscape Anthropic's sandbox development fits into a broader strategy that began taking shape in 2025, when the company started positioning Claude Code as a multi-functional development environment where AI can autonomously write, test, and execute code. The company also supports third-party sandboxing options, including Docker-based isolation, for users who want stronger separation between Claude Code's execution environment and their host system. Docker sandboxes offer a more comprehensive isolation layer than OS-level tools like Seatbelt or bubblewrap, though they come with additional setup overhead and resource consumption.
Anthropic Accused of Stealing Thousands of Songs in Music Label Suit | PYMNTS.com
Sony Music, Warner Chappell Music and several other labels filed a federal lawsuit Friday (Aug. 28) alleging that the Claude maker improperly used "thousands upon thousands" of their songs to train the AI model. "Defendants can no longer hide their extraordinary theft, and their mass infringement is now well-documented," the suit said, adding that another court in the district had "recently described Anthropic's actions as 'straightforward piracy but at massive scale.'" The suit, filed in in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, demands a jury trial and was first reported by the website Music Business Worldwide. That report noted that the lawsuit means that the publishing arms of all three major music companies have taken legal action against Anthropic. Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO sued the company in October 2023 over roughly 500 songs, and filed a second suit earlier this year. That action covers more than 20,000 works and seeks more than $3 billion. BMG sued Anthropic in March over 493 songs, with Round Hill Music suing the company earlier this month, the report added. In this latest suit, the record labels seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 for work willfully infringed, as well as up to $25,000 for each alleged "removal and/or alteration" of copyright management information. Anthropic told TechCrunch it disagrees "with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court." Anthropic last month agreed to pay a historic $1.5 billion copyright violation settlement in a case brought by authors who had accused the company of improperly using their works to train Claude. The settlement is thought to be the largest such award in a U.S. copyright case. As PYMNTS wrote last month, the judicial record on AI copyright issues is a divided one. For example, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco called AI training "quintessentially transformative" and said copyright law "seeks to advance original works of authorship, not to protect authors against competition." But U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, also in San Francisco, warned in a ruling days later that widespread AI training could undermine the economic incentives that fuel human creative work. For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.
Anthropic's Claude Code Usage Cap Update Actually Hides a Quiet Downgrade
Anthropic announced a permanent 25% increase to baseline Claude Code limits starting September 14 for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise accounts. However, because the company is ending a temporary 50% promotional boost active since May, active users face a net 17% reduction in total weekly capacity. Anthropic is shaking up how much time developers get to spend with its AI-powered coding assistant. However, the math isn't working out in favor of heavy users. The company recently posted an update announcing changes to its Claude Code weekly limits update, framing the news as a permanent upgrade for paid plans. But if you take a close look at the numbers, developers are actually looking at a noticeable drop in overall capacity. Beginning September 14, 2026, Anthropic is permanently raising standard baseline limits for Claude Code by 25%. This will apply across Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise tiers. While that sounds great at first glance, the change coincides with the end of a massive promotional period that has been active for months. Doing the math on the summer rollback Back on May, Anthropic rolled out a temporary 50% bonus to weekly usage allowances. That temporary boost proved so popular that the company extended it four separate times over the summer, making the extra headroom feel like the default experience for active programmers. Now, that bonus is officially coming to an end. By replacing the 50% summer boost with a permanent 25% bump over the original baseline, Anthropic is effectively reducing today's working capacity by roughly 17%. For example, if your original baseline allowance was 100 units, the summer promo gave you 150 units per week. Under the new permanent policy taking effect on September 14, that cap resets to 125 units. Backlash over clever corporate marketing The announcement quickly sparked friction on X. Developers called out the main post for highlighting the 25% increase without plainly admitting that current usage was taking a hit. Users even appended a Community Note to the original thread. This forced Anthropic to delete and repost a clarification that explicitly admitted to the 17% reduction compared to today's levels. Anthropic said the pullback is needed to ensure long-term platform stability and responsible compute management. The move closely mirrors recent actions by competitor OpenAI, which recently restored strict five-hour limits on its own Codex tools as GPU-heavy workloads continue to strain server capacity. Fixing software bugs and sifting through massive codebases are among the most resource-intensive tasks for frontier models. Meanwhile, Anthropic's own usage data shows that code repair alone accounts for a huge chunk of daily workloads. Because factors like conversation length, model selection, and tool execution alter context size on the fly, quotas don't translate into a simple prompt count, making sudden capacity changes harder for developers to manage. Better visibility controls coming soon To help soften the impact of the upcoming cap reduction, Anthropic teased that interface updates are in the pipeline. The engineering team is working on new dashboard tools that will give users much clearer visibility and direct control over their remaining weekly quotas. Until the new rules kick in on September 14, the full 50% promotional boost remains active through September 13. This gives developers a couple of weeks to wrap up high-volume coding sessions before the tighter limits take hold.
Federal judge orders Pentagon to remove Anthropic supply chain risk label
A federal judge has ordered the Pentagon to remove its designation of Anthropic as a "supply chain risk," delivering a significant legal setback to the Defense Department in a dispute over how much control technology companies can retain over the military use of their artificial-intelligence systems. Judge Rita Lin of the Northern District of California found that the Pentagon's action against the AI company "constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment" and that the company "was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment." The ruling matters beyond Anthropic because the dispute turned a disagreement over AI safeguards into a question about how the government can use national-security procurement powers against a domestic technology supplier. A procurement dispute became a constitutional fight The conflict began after the AI company refused to remove safeguards that would prevent the military from using its Claude AI model for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. The company argued that its models were not sufficiently reliable for those purposes. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rejected the idea that a private company should be able to constrain how the US military uses technology it purchases. In February, the Pentagon classified Anthropic as a supply chain risk, preventing the department and its contractors from working with the company's products. That designation carried unusual weight because it had previously been used only against companies viewed as connected to foreign adversaries. Anthropic sued in March. Lin rejected the Pentagon's argument that an inability to "trust" Anthropic justified applying the label. She wrote that "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," and concluded that the evidence showed officials wanted to make a "public example out of Anthropic for its 'arrogance' in criticizing the government, not based on any articulable basis to believe that Anthropic would actually sabotage its model." Why the ruling matters for AI suppliers The decision separates two issues that had become intertwined: whether the Pentagon wants to procure technology under a vendor's restrictions, and whether disagreement over those restrictions justifies treating that vendor as a security threat. That distinction could be important as government agencies negotiate access to AI systems whose developers impose their own limits on deployment. The ruling does not resolve the underlying disagreement over military use of Claude, but it removes the Pentagon's supply-chain designation as a tool in that dispute. Lin also pointed to continued engagement between Anthropic and other parts of the government as evidence against the Pentagon's security rationale. "None of that is consistent with a genuine fear that Anthropic is a saboteur who would poison its software to harm national security," she wrote. The dispute is not fully over Anthropic welcomed the decision and said it remained focused on working with the government on national-security applications. The broader legal fight continues. A second Anthropic-lawsuit related to the designation remains before a Washington, DC, court. President Donald Trump also said in June that although he had previously considered the AI company a national-security threat, he no longer held that view.
Congress risks paying for internal discord
The Congress government in Telangana is facing an avoidable political problem. Opposition criticism is part of democratic politics. More damaging, however, are controversies arising from within the ruling party, which inevitably provide its opponents with fresh ammunition. The latest episode involving Endowments Minister Konda Surekha has again brought this into focus. Her daughter publicly expressed displeasure after Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy reportedly promised the Parkal Assembly seat, which she had sought, to another leader. The controversy has acquired greater significance in the context of earlier episodes involving the minister and her family. Reports that the party's disciplinary committee has recommended action against Surekha indicate that the leadership views the matter seriously. Nor is this an isolated instance of internal differences spilling into the public domain. Chinna Reddy's allegation that Assembly tickets were sold for crores of rupees is another example. Whatever its immediate political context, such a charge inevitably has consequences beyond the local rivalry that may have prompted it. As the Congress government approaches its third year in office, these distractions come at an inopportune time. It is already facing criticism over issues such as the controversy surrounding Section 22A and the inclusion of private properties in the prohibited list. Internal discord can only add to its difficulties.
Anthropic Sued Over Copyrighted Music Used to Train Claude
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and affiliated publishers sued Anthropic over allegations that copyrighted music was illegally obtained and used to develop Claude Anthropic already paid $1.5 billion to settle claims that it pirated books to train Claude. Now the music industry is coming after the company with a similar allegation, but with a sharper legal argument: the problem wasn't simply what Claude learned. It was how Anthropic allegedly got the material in the first place. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music, joined by numerous affiliated publishers, sued Anthropic late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. "Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging that the company engaged in a 'brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works," Music Business Worldwide reported after obtaining the 48-page complaint. Anthropic has not publicly responded to this specific complaint. TechCrunch reported the company could not be reached for comment before publication. But the lawsuit arrives with unusually convenient timing for the plaintiffs: a federal court has already ruled in Anthropic's books case that acquiring copyrighted works through piracy is a separate problem from whether those works can legally be used to train an AI model. "While training an AI model on copyrighted works can be fair use, that does not mean that Anthropic's acquisition of those works was lawful," U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote in Bartz v. Anthropic, finding that Anthropic's downloading and storage of pirated books was not protected by fair use. The Fight Is About Acquisition In Bartz v. Anthropic, a judge found that using copyrighted books to train AI could, under certain circumstances, qualify as fair use. But that did not make the way Anthropic obtained those books legal. The court found that the company had acquired millions of works from pirate sources including LibGen and the Pirate Library Mirror, describing the conduct as "straightforward piracy but at massive scale." Anthropic ultimately agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement, which received final approval in July 2026. "The $1.5 billion settlement provides meaningful relief to the Class," U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín wrote when granting final approval of the settlement in July 2026. The music publishers are building directly on that precedent. Their argument is effectively that even if Anthropic eventually wins some fair-use protection for training Claude on copyrighted lyrics, that protection cannot excuse allegedly torrenting and downloading the works in the first place. That gives the case a much narrower question than the sweeping debate over whether AI companies can train on copyrighted material. The issue is whether the acquisition pipeline itself violated copyright law. DimensionDetails & ParametersPlaintiffsSony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music, and affiliated music publishersDefendantsAnthropic PBC, Dario Amodei (CEO & Co-founder), Benjamin Mann (Co-founder)JurisdictionU.S. District Court for the Northern District of CaliforniaStatutory Relief SoughtUp to $150,000 per work for willful infringement; up to $25,000 per violation for removal of Copyright Management Information (CMI)Legal Precedent LeverageBartz v. Anthropic (approved $1.5 billion settlement over pirated book corpora) What The Publishers Want The complaint alleges direct copyright infringement through the alleged torrenting activity against Anthropic, Amodei and Mann. It also accuses Amodei and Mann personally of contributory infringement for allegedly directing and approving the activity. "Anthropic's infringement threatens to substitute Claude-generated lyrics for the original works, thereby depriving Plaintiffs and other music publishers and songwriters of licensing opportunities and revenue," the publishers allege in their complaint filed in the Northern District of California. The complaint names "tens of thousands" of compositions, including Ain't No Mountain High Enough, All I Want for Christmas Is You, Eye of the Tiger, Livin' On a Prayer, September, Hallelujah and Taylor Swift's Paper Rings. The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work, along with as much as $25,000 for each alleged removal or alteration of copyright-management information. They are also asking for an accounting of Claude's training data and destruction of infringing copies. Claude's Guardrails Face A Test Anthropic added safeguards following earlier litigation designed to stop users from getting the model to reproduce protected material. The new complaint argues those protections can be circumvented simply by changing or repeating prompts. That matters because the publishers are not arguing only that copyrighted material went into the training system. They are pointing to what Claude can produce and arguing that the resulting outputs can compete with the works Anthropic allegedly used to build the model. Whether that argument survives in court is another matter. The complaint establishes what the publishers allege, not what a judge has found. The Music Cases Keep Multiplying Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO sued the company in 2023 over roughly 500 songs. The case was later transferred to California, and a January 2026 lawsuit from the same publishers expanded the fight to more than 20,000 works and sought more than $3 billion. BMG filed another case in March 2026 covering hundreds of compositions. Round Hill Music followed with another lawsuit on August 17. The latest filing puts the publishing arms of all three major music companies into litigation against Anthropic. What looks like repeated litigation over the same basic technology is partly a consequence of how music rights are divided: lyrics, musical compositions and sound recordings can carry separate copyrights controlled by different owners. One song can therefore produce multiple potential plaintiffs, each with a different legal interest in what an AI company allegedly copied. The Rule That Could Spread If courts continue separating how copyrighted material was acquired from whether that material could legally be used for AI training, then an AI company's data pipeline becomes a legal issue in its own right. That would matter to every AI lab that built training datasets from material gathered across the open internet, unofficial repositories or other sources whose copyright status was uncertain. A company might eventually establish that a particular use of copyrighted material was transformative or otherwise protected. The music publishers are betting that distinction gives them a stronger case than simply arguing that Claude learned from copyrighted lyrics. And that may be the most consequential part of this lawsuit. The fight isn't only over what AI is allowed to learn. It is increasingly about whether AI companies were legally entitled to obtain the material they taught it in the first place.
Anthropic Researcher Says AI Models Are Getting Better at Training Other AI Models
Anthropic's Automated Alignment Researchers used AI systems to test and develop training interventions for another model, improving it across 10 alignment problems including deception, sycophancy and jailbreak resistance. Claude spent 60 hours fixing a version of itself that had not yet gone through safety training. By the end, it had pushed that weaker model close to the alignment performance of Anthropic's production system, using a fraction of the data normally involved. That is the striking result from a new Anthropic experiment. The company gave AI systems called Automated Alignment Researchers, or AARs, the job of finding ways to correct specific failures in another model. "Across 10 alignment failures, the strongest AAR methods significantly reduce the targeted alignment failures and generalize to a held-out benchmark, multi-turn behavioral audits, and models up to 4.7× larger than the target model," Anthropic researchers wrote in the paper published August 28. The significance isn't that Claude suddenly learned to redesign itself. It didn't. The interesting part is much narrower: AI researchers were able to hand part of the research loop to another AI system, and the system performed that work faster and, in several tests, better than experienced humans working alone. The AI Researcher Loop Each automated researcher followed a stripped-down version of what a human alignment researcher would normally do. It searched relevant literature, proposed a training intervention, trained the target model for roughly 30 minutes, evaluated the result and then tried again. "Each AAR searches the literature, proposes a method, trains the target model for about 30 minutes on one H200 GPU, and hill-climbs safety benchmarks over many iterations," the Anthropic researchers wrote. That matters because alignment research is often bottlenecked by the same thing as other scientific work: people have to decide what experiment to run, wait for it to finish, inspect the result and design the next experiment. Here, Claude was doing much of that loop itself inside an environment with clearly defined goals and tests. The boundaries were important. The researchers determined what counted as a failure, what data could be used and how success would be measured. The AI was optimizing within that structure rather than inventing the structure itself. Humans Got Outpaced Anthropic didn't stop at showing that the system could improve a model. It compared the automated researchers with people. "The best AAR-proposed methods can outperform one-shot ideas from 28 experienced human researchers," Anthropic researchers wrote, adding that the AARs beat the best human ideas after about six hours of hill-climbing. The automated systems reached the quality of the best human proposals in roughly six hours of iteration on average. On deception specifically, Claude's best method performed 20% better than the strongest human proposal. The improvements also survived outside the exact environment in which they were discovered. Anthropic reported that the methods generalized to a held-out benchmark, to Petri, an open-source tool for adversarial multi-turn testing, and to models up to 4.7 times larger than the models the automated researchers had actually trained. A Weaker Model Helps A Stronger One Researchers gave Claude Sonnet 5, which was deliberately weaker on Anthropic's internal capability index, the job of improving alignment in an early, largely untrained Claude Opus 4.8 checkpoint. "In just 60 hours, Claude experimented with over 50 solutions and achieved alignment scores nearly matching those of our production models," Anthropic says in its research report. The training intervention itself was surprisingly small. It used just over 2,000 examples, assembled from simple templates and public datasets. Anthropic says that was roughly 15,000 times more data-efficient than its standard production alignment process. That number needs context. It does not mean Anthropic has discovered a universal method for making AI safety 15,000 times cheaper. It compares the amount of training data used in this particular experimental intervention with the much larger data requirements of Anthropic's production process. But the underlying result still matters: a weaker AI system found a relatively compact intervention that substantially improved a stronger model under the experiment's measured alignment criteria. The Cost Gap Is Huge The automated researchers ran at roughly $4 per hour in API inference costs. Anthropic puts the comparable cost of human research time at roughly $150 per hour. That doesn't make AI researchers a drop-in replacement for people. Humans still define the objectives, construct the benchmarks, interpret ambiguous failures and decide whether an apparent improvement actually matters. A human researcher may reject an interesting alignment idea because testing it would consume too much time or compute. An automated researcher can try dozens of variants while a person supervises the overall process. That means a lab could potentially move from discovering a failure mode to testing candidate fixes much faster than a human-only workflow allows. This Isn't AI Training Itself The models in this experiment did not independently decide what they should become. They did not invent their own objectives. They did not deploy their changes into production. The AARs worked inside benchmarks designed by humans, toward goals selected by humans, using literature and datasets that humans had already made available. "Overall, we view these results as early positive signals that automated alignment post-training could become practical in the near term," Anthropic researchers wrote, while noting that the experiment covered only a limited set of alignment failures. That qualification matters because the entire approach depends on measurement. If a benchmark captures only a narrow version of an alignment problem, an automated researcher can become extremely good at optimizing for the benchmark without necessarily solving the underlying problem. Building those tests, deciding what they should measure and keeping them relevant as models change remains human work. The Bottleneck Just Moved The scarce resource in AI development isn't only GPUs or training data. It is also the number of skilled people who can design and evaluate experiments. If AI systems can reliably take over meaningful portions of that research cycle, the constraint changes. One researcher could supervise far more experiments than one person could realistically design and run manually. Anthropic demonstrated that in a controlled setting for alignment. It has not demonstrated that the same process works for every difficult research problem, and the paper does not establish that automated researchers can safely improve frontier systems without careful human oversight.
Whales Withdraw More Than $33M in SOL From Binance and Kraken | Blockchain Solana
On Aug. 29, Lookonchain reported two large SOL withdrawals: one wallet withdrew 281,446 SOL, valued at about $29.68 million, from Binance, while another withdrew 37,272 SOL, worth about $3.87 million, from Kraken. The original data post is available on X. The Data Point The report gives a narrow snapshot rather than a promise about future prices. Its figures describe the wallets, products or market segment identified in the post, and the timing matters because crypto activity can change quickly. For the Aster move, the reported return was unrealized. For the GOLD sale, the wallet attribution came from on-chain tracking. For the SOL withdrawals, the transactions show movement from named exchanges but do not reveal the owners' plans. For the ETF, exchange-balance and volume items, the figures are measurements from the named data providers, not official statements from every market participant. Why It Matters These developments matter because they show how trading activity, custody decisions and liquidity can affect digital-asset markets. A new perpetual listing can attract leverage as well as attention. A coordinated-looking token sale can raise questions about concentration and disclosure. Large withdrawals may reduce immediately visible exchange balances, but they do not automatically indicate accumulation. ETF inflows can broaden regulated access, while exchange outflows can reflect many motives, including self-custody, staking or transfers between venues. Volume dominance likewise measures participation, not the quality or durability of the assets being traded. What the Report Does Not Show The posts do not establish that any reported move will continue. They also do not, by themselves, prove intent, ownership or a completed change in market structure. Readers should distinguish realized gains from unrealized positions, observed transfers from wallet labels and data-provider estimates from audited financial disclosures. Those limits are especially important in fast-moving token markets, where thin liquidity can amplify both gains and losses. Next Indicators Follow-up evidence will include whether the activity persists after the initial move, whether additional wallets or filings clarify attribution, and whether liquidity remains available across venues. In the ETF and exchange-balance cases, subsequent daily flows will show whether the reported direction was temporary or part of a longer trend. Until that evidence arrives, the developments remain dated market observations. BlockchainReporter will continue to separate sourced on-chain data from interpretation and avoid turning a single reading into a forecast. Context is available in earlier market coverage.
Treasure Island Movie Update Is Bad News For Alien Fans Hoping for Prometheus 3
Ridley Scott is back in the sci-fi sphere after the premiere of his recent book-to-movie adaptation, The Dog Stars. Despite the movie being a relative flop, he still has strong opinions on both past franchises and new projects. Namely, that he'll be returning to finish his Alien franchise trilogy that began with Prometheus, saying the franchise "needs some help" after the release of Romulus (which was actually well received by critics and audiences alike). But fans of the Prometheus trilogy will probably be waiting a while, as Scott has dropped some big news regarding his next project. Sitting down with Discussing Film, Scott shared a few details on his newest project: an adaptation of Treasure Island, starring Hugh Jackman as Long John Silver. Casting for the other roles has already begun, according to the director, as well as extensive storyboarding. Pulling back the curtain on his current progress, Scott said, "I'm already storyboarding. I'm already halfway through Treasure Island, knowing exactly what I'm going to do because I draw storyboards like quite a sophisticated comic. I'm filming on paper." Ridley Scott Seems To Be Unstoppable But what does that mean for fans who were hoping that he'd return quickly to the Alien franchise after his previous comments about coming back to the IP? According to Scott, he's actively working on both projects, but it does seem like Treasure Island is further along than whatever comes next in the Prometheus trilogy. Talking about his return to the sci-fi IP that put Scott on the map, one fan said, "Honestly, I don't care what his motivations are for doing a sequel to Covenant. I just want to see the completion of his story." Referring to Scott's feelings on Romulus only being "okay," another fan said, "I think both are true in a way. I think Alien: Romulus was great. However, if he wants to come back and make more movies, I'm not gonna tell him no; he made some fantastic parts of this franchise." But other fans weren't so quick to agree, arguing that it's time for the director to step back from the franchise and focus on other things. "How could he fix it when he's the one that made the most mess with it?" asked one user. And another brought Romulus director Fede Álvarez into it, saying, "Romulus got better reception than Covenant from BOTH critics and audiences, and was a box office success, while Covenant underperformed and almost put a stop to the franchise. Sounds like Ridley is a bit bitter Álvarez did better than him." And considering the wild about-face that Ridley just pulled with his recent comments after previously telling Álvarez that Romulus was "f*cking great," it's not an out-of-left-field theory as to why he's so intent on returning.
