Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's comments to staff disparaging the Trump administration could blow up chances of a resolution between the AI company and the Pentagon, an administration official tells Axios.
Why it matters: Rival OpenAI — and lawmakers across party lines — are pushing for an agreement, as the Pentagon's threat to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk looms.
President Trump and tech CEOs expressed confidence Wednesday that they can contain soaring electricity rates with a new data center pledgethat formalizes and expands on what companies already are doing.
Why it matters: With rising power bills turning AI and data centers intoan election-year issue, Trump — who campaigned on a promise to cut costs — is eager to show he's trying to protect consumers.
Apple unveiled its cheapest MacBook ever Wednesday with the MacBook Neo, signaling a shifting laptop market.
The big picture: The memory chip and RAM crisis, ignited by the AI boom, is pushing smartphone and laptop developers to recalibrate their plans for products, with many companies cutting products altogether.
Multiple trade groups representing tech, software and AI companies in Washington warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday against designating U.S. companies as a supply chain risk, per letters shared with Axios.
Why it matters: If the Pentagon goes through with blacklisting Anthropic, it could have ripple effects on the entire tech ecosystem.
The Pentagon says it's threatening to blacklist top American AI lab Anthropic, without putting similar restrictions on Chinese rivals.
Why it matters: By penalizing a domestic leader for its safety standards, the U.S. is creating a market opening for cheaper, unregulated models from competing countries.
Self-driving car companies could learn a lot by studying the early mistakes of combat drones.
Why it matters: Autonomous vehicles, like military drones, need remote supervisors to support their operations. But managing robots from afar can sometimes be problematic, especially in a crisis.
OpenAI released a new framework to measure how ChatGPT affects long-term human learning.
Why it matters: It might feel like chatbots are rotting our brains, but no longitudinal studies have shown the real effects of generative AI on learning.
New York and Utah are leading the nation on children's well-being, according to a new 50-state ranking of policy, leadership and family perceptions called The Childhood Index.
Why it matters: Lack of federal oversight has forced states to step in and fill the gap as concerns about addictive social media algorithms and technology's impact on children have mounted.
Anduril, the defense tech giant led by Palmer Luckey, is raising around $4 billion at a $60 billion valuation led by a16z and Thrive Capital, Axios has learned from multiple sources.
Why it matters: This comes just days after Luckey criticized Anthropic's asks of the Pentagon, and amidst a new war in which the U.S. military is using autonomous systems.
Companies are struggling to scale AI beyond experimentation, according to a survey of 123 senior operators and executives in the Operator Collective network, a venture firm focused on enterprise AI.
Why it matters: The question is no longer whether to use AI, but how quickly companies can integrate it into their workflows.
Researchers have uncovered a network of more than 200 AI slop websites operated by a single group and spun up using basic AI prompts, according to new research shared first with Axios.
Why it matters: The operators left their AI content-generation prompts exposed inside the sites' JavaScript code — giving a rare look into how AI is used to supercharge scams.
Perplexity has signed a multiyear deal with CoreWeave to help power a new generation of services, the AI cloud computing company shared first with Axios.
Why it matters: The move helps CoreWeave as it aims to convince Wall Street it can attract a broad customer base to justify heavy spending on new data centers.
Most people fail to realize how seriously space influences their daily lives, Vantor's Susanne Hake told Axios in an interview.
"Many people feel that space is this distant, strategic high ground that feels far from their day-to-day lives. But it's not," she said.
"And it's becoming so congested. It's like a lot of traffic jams — and there are not a lot of friendly drivers up there."
Why she matters: Hake has years of experience in the defense, intelligence and business communities. Before joining Vantor (then Maxar) she was at Palantir Technologies.
U.S. defense contractors are examining their relationships with Anthropic and its products days after President Trump said he would blacklist the company.
Why it matters: Such declarations are exceedingly rare.
The very public Pentagon-Anthropic feud also risks spooking the defense-tech market as it gains wider public acceptance.
Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) wants the Pentagon's nascent Artificial Intelligence Futures Steering Committee to identify China's top AI influencers, examine the country's security practices and investigate what sabotage of frontier models might look like, according to a letter Axios obtained exclusively.
Why it matters: AI is supercharging the Washington-Beijing face-off.
And military employment of the technology is driving one of the largest news stories of the year.
The explosion in AI agents means a whole world of new questions every day — like, what happens if your agent goes and gets itself another job?
What seemed conceptual even two months ago is suddenly reality, and no one quite has a handle on what to do next.
Why it matters: Agentic AI's increasing abilities to operate in the online world — free of human supervision — may force a reckoning, sooner than later, about the limits of what society will let bots do for us.
Anthropic's AI tools are now battle-tested, in two radically different military operations — but the Trump administration is still threatening to pull the plug.
Why it matters: The international race for AI advantage is not measured in years, but weeks and days.
Security researchers used relatively simple jailbreaking techniques to trick the AI system powering Utah's new prescription refill bot.
Researchers were able to make the bot spread vaccine conspiracy theories, triple a patient's prescribed pain medication dosage, and recommend methamphetamine as treatment.
Why it matters: Critics warned this pilot could create safety risks — and researchers say the flaws persist, despite alerting the company in January.
Critical infrastructure operators are on high alert for potential Iran-backed cyber retaliation following the weekend's military strikes that killed the country's supreme leader and several other senior officials.
Why it matters: Iranian actors — both state-linked and loosely affiliated — have a history of targeting U.S. water and gas systems, even outside the context of an open military conflict.
Castelion's air-launched variant of the Blackbeard hypersonic missile will fly aboard an F/A-18 in the near future, Axios has learned.
The big picture: The company, founded in 2022 and now valued in the billions of dollars, in late February scored nearly $50 million to continue development of the weapon, Pentagon contract records show.
It's also working with the Army to integrate onto the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System.
