August 25, 2026

AI Watch

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t– simonwillison.net

pgnewser June 15, 2026 0

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Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t. Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption – software engineering.

In this essay, we argue that there is enough evidence to reject the narrative that once AI capabilities reach a certain threshold, it will cause mass layoffs. Given that this is true even in a sector with very few regulatory barriers, most other professions are likely to be even more cushioned.

Trump Blocks Foreigners From Using Anthropic’s Latest AI Tech – Mother Jones– www.motherjones.com

pgnewser June 15, 2026 0

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A “Build with Claude” poster at Anthropic’s Code with Claude developer conference in San Francisco on May 6, 2026.Don Feria/AP

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.

On Friday night, the AI giant Anthropic said that the US government had ordered it to suspend foreign nationals, including employees, from all use of its most advanced products.

To comply with the Friday directive, the company announced that it disabled access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the latest models of Claude, for all customers.

Anthropic Staff To Meet White House Officials Over AI Model Access Dispute– www.ndtv.com

pgnewser June 15, 2026 0

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Senior Anthropic technical staff are in Washington to meet with White House officials to try resolving a dispute that has taken the company’s most advanced AI models offline, Axios reported on Sunday, citing a source close to the company.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Anthropic and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Anthropic’s technical staff have held virtual meetings with White House officials since the Trump administration’s initial outreach on Friday, the report said.

Google built an AI that can see football plays before they happen– www.digitaltrends.com

pgnewser June 11, 2026 0

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Football managers spend countless hours analyzing corners, free kicks, and player positioning in search of tiny competitive advantages. Google DeepMind believes artificial intelligence can make that process significantly faster, and its latest project, TacticAI, is designed to do exactly that. TacticAI is a football-specific AI assistant capable of modeling player movement, forecasting future play dynamics, and even recommending tactical adjustments for corner kicks. One of its standout abilities is predicting player trajectories up to eight seconds into the future using only broadcast-style visual data.

Google DeepMind and partners announce multi-agent safety research funding call. — Google DeepMind– deepmind.google

pgnewser June 11, 2026 0

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Scaling AI Safety Research for a Multi-Agent World

For the past decade, we’ve focused on making individual AI models more capable, helpful and safe. Today, Google DeepMind — together with Schmidt Sciences, the Cooperative AI Foundation, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, and supported by Google.org — is announcing a new technical research funding call of up to $10M for researchers worldwide.

As AI technology scales, we’re entering a new era. Soon, millions of AI agents — built by different organizations — will interact across digital environments, communicating, negotiating and transacting with one another.

Amazon Data Centers In Mississippi Have Already Raised Electricity Rates for Local Customers, Report Suggests– www.404media.co

pgnewser June 11, 2026 0

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The AI industry has been pushing a narrative that the technology is a “black box” whose inner workings are so complex that they remain unknown even to the people making it. But another black box of AI is the underlying cost of the technology, and, specifically, what the AI boom is costing people who live near massive data centers. The data centers and energy plants that power large language models and other generative AI tools are subject to contracts cloaked in non-disclosure agreements and in many cases shielded from public scrutiny on the pretext that they contain competitive information.

A new report written by consultancy Synapse and commissioned by advocacy groups Earthjustice and Environmental Advocates Mississippi attempts to calculate the cost of 3 planned Amazon data centers to Entergy Mississippi customers, who share an energy utility with the centers. These hidden costs may offer a window into the broader burden borne by residents living near data centers around the country. The report estimates that residential customers of Entergy Mississippi, one of the state’s regional energy monopolies, have paid $38 million as of March 2026 for infrastructure and other costs related to data centers and will have paid $74 million by the end of the year.

Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude– www.wired.com

pgnewser June 11, 2026 0

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Anthropic is backtracking on a policy that would have covertly limited competitors from using its new AI model, Claude Fable 5, to develop other AI models. The company changed course after the move received significant backlash from the AI research community.

“We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible,” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong trade-off and we apologize for not getting the balance right.”

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, a version of its latest AI model with additional safety guardrails designed to prevent misuse, earlier this week. Some of the safeguards Anthropic decided on were unsurprising: The company said it would reroute users who asked questions about cybersecurity, biology, or chemistry to a less capable AI model to reduce the chances of someone using the advanced AI to carry out a cyberattack or build a bioweapon.

A classic brain test exposed AI’s biggest weakness– www.sciencedaily.com

pgnewser June 11, 2026 0

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Artificial intelligence systems can write essays, answer questions, and solve complex problems. But new research suggests they may struggle with something humans do every day: staying focused on the task at hand when distractions get in the way.

Researchers led by Suketu Patel put several leading AI models through a well-known psychology experiment called the Stroop task. The results revealed a significant difference between how AI systems process information and how the human brain manages attention.

China Opens World’s First Wind-Powered Underwater Data Center– www.wired.com

pgnewser June 11, 2026 0

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China has become the first country in the world to operate an underwater data center, or UDC, powered by wind. Located off the coast of Shanghai, the complex represents a significant advance in the country’s strategy to secure energy supplies in the face of the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and reduce the environmental impact of its technology infrastructure.

The initiative is the result of a collaboration between private company HiCloud Technology and state-owned China Communications Construction, which involved an investment of 1.6 billion yuan, equivalent to about $236 million.

With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the facility is submerged at a depth of 10 meters in the Lin-gang Special Zone, within the China Pilot Free Trade Zone in Shanghai. This location allows seawater to be used as a natural cooling system, reducing the proportion of energy used to cool the infrastructure to less than 10 percent.

New device may make computers 1,000 times faster without overheating while reducing data center power consumption |– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

pgnewser June 10, 2026 0

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Inside a modern data centre, performance is already constrained less by raw transistor capability and more by heat removal. Server racks packed tightly together push thermal systems to their limit, and operators often throttle workloads not because chips can’t compute faster, but because cooling systems can’t keep up. Against that backdrop, the claim that processors can become 1,000 times faster through a light-driven switching device sounds like it belongs to a different category of computing altogether.What makes this result interesting is not just speed, but the mechanism: information switching triggered by light pulses rather than sustained electrical current, with experimental cycle times measured in picoseconds rather than nanoseconds.

According to the research published in Science, ‘Picosecond ultralow-power switching device based on an antiferromagnet’, a non-volatile switching element that can change state in about 40 picoseconds, which is roughly 40 trillionths of a second. For context, conventional semiconductor logic typically operates in the sub-nanosecond range, and even high-end CPU clock cycles are orders of magnitude slower once pipeline and memory effects are accounted for.That difference is not incremental. It shifts the conversation from “how do we shrink transistors further” to “how do we switch information using physics that isn’t bottlenecked by charge movement through silicon channels.”The device, demonstrated under lab conditions, uses ultrafast optical pulses routed through a photodetector (a uni-traveling-carrier photodiode), which then triggers a change in electron spin states within a magnetic material stack. That switching event is what encodes information.

The AI boomerang effect: more data suggests employers are reversing AI layoffs– www.techspot.com

pgnewser June 10, 2026 0

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Connecting the dots: Generative AI has been blamed for hundreds of thousands of layoffs over the past year, but evidence that companies moved too quickly to automate white-collar jobs is steadily mounting. Multiple recent studies suggest that many employers are refilling recently eliminated positions after overestimating AI’s productivity gains and cost savings.

In some studies, roughly a third of companies that attempted to replace workers with AI have either rehired some of them or expressed regret over the decision. The figures add to a growing body of evidence that the true cost of implementing generative AI is catching businesses off guard.

A late 2025 report from Forrester Research predicted that roughly half of AI-attributed layoffs would be quietly reversed. However, the so-called AI boomerang effect may not benefit all workers equally.

Graph from our story: 99% of executives expect AI to trigger layoffs within two years, survey finds. Source: Mercer.

While firms might quietly rehire experienced employees, those seeking entry-level jobs may still be out of luck. Forrester also predicted that most companies will use the opportunity to pivot to cheaper offshore labor.

Meanwhile, Gartner published research in February predicting that half of the businesses that eliminated customer service positions will rename and refill them by 2027. The forecast accompanied a separate October 2025 survey of 321 customer service and support leaders, which found that only 20% had actually reduced headcount while pivoting to AI – suggesting automation has largely augmented workers rather than replaced them.

Why Some Analysts Favor Auditing AI Before Washington Gets It Wrong   | American Enterprise Institute– www.aei.org

pgnewser June 10, 2026 0

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The buzziest bit of the new artificial-intelligence bill from Reps. Jay Obernolte, a California Republican, and Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat, is probably the section that would let Washington preempt state rules on AI development for three years. For me, the more interesting part is its bet on auditing as a middle path between Silicon Valley self-regulation and an FDA-style premarket approval regime for frontier models.

Earlier this year, several dozen AI policy folks signed onto a proposal, “Frontier AI Auditing: Toward Rigorous Third-Party Assessment of Safety and Security Practices at Leading AI Companies” that “outlines a vision for frontier AI auditing, which we define as rigorous third-party verification of frontier AI developers’ safety and security claims, and evaluation of their systems and practices against relevant standards, based on deep, secure access to non-public information.”

What does that mean? For starters, an audit is not a permission slip. Rather than making a company clear a government gate before shipping, as the FDA does with drugs, an independent reviewer with access to the confidential innards of an AI company would check the latest model against a set standard. Think of it as how an accountant signs off on a public company’s books. Private firms do the examining while a public body stays in the background. Maybe it sets the rules, accredits the examiners, and holds the enforcement hammer.

EXCLUSIVE: GOP Rep Wants To Give America’s Power Plants, Data Centers An Anti-Drone Upgrade– dailycaller.com

pgnewser June 9, 2026 0

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One congressman is moving to protect the soft underbelly of America’s critical infrastructure with a new bill.

Republican Tennessee Rep. Matt Van Epps unveiled a House version of Sen. Tom Cotton’s Critical Infrastructure Airspace Defense Act Tuesday, which aims to shield hospitals, power plants, water treatment sites, and dams from potential drone attacks. The bill would make grants available to private companies to purchase government-approved anti-drone technologies, and could even extend to data centers.

“The bill gives the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy and others, the ability to determine which critical infrastructure facilities need these authorities,” Van Epps told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This could include anything from critical water systems to power plants and potentially even data centers.”

Republican leading AI effort has ambitious timeline for getting his bill through the House– www.politico.com

pgnewser June 9, 2026 0

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Rep. Jay Obernolte has an aggressive timeline for getting his new bipartisan Artificial Intelligence proposal taken up in the House — and a path for getting a congressional hearing on a major part of the plan.

In an interview Monday night, the California Republican said he hoped to turn the draft framework he unveiled last Thursday into multiple bills, with the first expected to be introduced in the coming weeks. Each bill would be considered by its committee of jurisdiction.

“One of the challenges that we have is that the bill crosses so many different policy committee jurisdictions,” he said. “So I think we’ve got to divide it up into different titles that are in the jurisdiction of various policy committees and hear those individually.”

The UK Is Betting on a Billion-Dollar AI Supercomputer to Kick Its Addiction to US Tech– www.wired.com

pgnewser June 9, 2026 0

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The UK government has laid out a $1.47 billion plan to shake its dependence on foreign-made artificial intelligence hardware.

Under the measures, announced Monday, the UK will spend more than $1 billion on a national AI supercomputer. It will be stocked with $530 million worth of hardware, including $200 million that will go toward specialist inference chips for processing AI tasks. Priority will be given to up-and-coming British firms in the procurement process; the government pointed to Olix and Fractile, two UK startups developing new styles of inference chip, as potential beneficiaries. British researchers and startups are expected to be able to use the supercomputer starting in 2030.

Anthropic’s Philosopher Amanda Askell Says A.I. May Replace Her Job– observer.com

pgnewser June 9, 2026 0

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As A.I. systems become more agentic and take on more autonomy in daily life, they will increasingly interact with one another rather than with humans, according to Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s resident philosopher. “Human input is going to be rarer and rarer. That’s the thing that we need to prepare models for,” Askell said at the Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco last week. Askell’s non-technical role reflects a growing trend among leading A.I. labs to incorporate humanities expertise. But she also sees a future in which A.I. may be able to do her job better than she can. “What [A.I. models] are good at is these deeply human skills,” she said. “Eventually, Claude is going to be a much better philosopher than I am, and probably be much better at every aspect of my job than I am.”