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🪖 The Anthropic vs. Pentagon showdown

👤 Why Gen Z goes anonymous online

🎶 Live Nation heads to court

👩🏽‍💻 Apple’s cheapest laptop ever

As artificial intelligence increasingly plays a significant role in defence operations, Silicon Valley startups are now scrambling to figure out how exactly their powerful tools should be used in times of war. Most AI companies were founded on the principle that they wanted to achieve superintelligence without spreading widespread harm. But what does that mean when it’s used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons?

This conundrum bubbled to the surface last week during intense negotiations on a revised contract between Anthropic and the Trump administration. Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI executives who left over concerns about safety, has opposed the notion that its technology be used for mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons.

After Anthropic wouldn’t budge on its guardrails, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth labelled Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security,” a designation traditionally used for foreign adversaries, and banned government agencies from using the company’s tools.

This poses a problem for the Pentagon, as the agency has grown reliant on Anthropic’s technology. Just a day after Hegseth’s statement, the U.S. military used an advanced targeting system built by Palantir and powered by Anthropic’s AI tool Claude to strike Iran on Saturday, according to a report from The Washington Post.

Anthropic and the Pentagon have since resumed negotiations, though it’s unclear what a deal could look like. Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei has been steadfast in his company’s position, but losing all government contracts would be seriously costly for the startup. At the same time, the government also needs Claude, which has become baked into many military operations since 2024, including the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro earlier this year.

Meanwhile, as those negotiations shake out, OpenAI struck a new deal with the Pentagon, which CEO Sam Altman says includes carve-outs preventing its AI from being used for domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. In an internal memo, Amodei noted that his company hasn’t “given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has),” referring to his former colleague and now rival.

Cybersecurity experts are advising Canadian organizations and operators of critical infrastructure to be on the lookout for attacks from pro-Iran “hacktivists.” The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security cautioned that Iranian state-sponsored threat actors are likely to conduct cyberespionage against political activists, journalists and human rights advocates in Canada.

Global cybersecurity firms, meanwhile, are sounding the alarm about rising cyberattacks stemming from the conflict. These attacks include phishing attempts, websites being defaced and influence campaigns called “hack-and-leak” operations.

For the first generation raised on social media, hypervisibility hasn’t created more openness – it’s produced caution. Pseudonyms, burner e-mail accounts, finstas and curated selves are becoming survival tactics. In an essay, writer and political researcher Radmila Yarovaya says her generation walks the digital world carefully. Gen Zs are painfully aware that everything is forever, that employers and strangers are watching and that anything can be used against you in the court of public life. “Even among the chronically online, there’s a strong preference for semi-anonymity – for lurking rather than performing.” Read the full essay here.

Dubai influencers’ lives of luxury interrupted by Iran strikes (The Guardian)

Why missile alerts and war updates trigger doomscrolling (WIRED)

The TikTokers reading the Epstein files so you don’t have to (Vanity Fair)

Macbook Neo, from $799

Apple just announced its cheapest laptop ever. The MacBook Neo is being sold as an entry-level laptop below the current MacBook Air, priced at nearly half its cost and coming in multiple hues – a throwback to the colourful iBook G3. It weighs the same as the Air and is only slightly thicker, with a 13-inch screen that’s higher resolution than other laptops in a similar price range.

There are some concessions, however: The laptop is powered by Apple’s A18 Pro chip (also found in the iPhone 16 Pro), only has 8 GB of RAM and has a shorter battery life than the Air and the MacBook Pro. With Neo, Apple is trying to gain a foothold in the budget laptop field, which is currently flooded with Google Chromebooks and economy Microsoft machines.

The U.S. Justice Department’s suit against Live Nation heads to court

This week, the Live Nation antitrust trial began in a Manhattan federal courtroom. The U.S. Department of Justice contends that concert promoter Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster and a considerable roster of venues across North America, has an unfair stranglehold on aspects of the live music industry.

The DOJ is arguing Live Nation has thwarted competition in markets across the industry, leading to fans paying more in fees, artists having fewer opportunities to perform and smaller concert promoters getting squeezed out. The company has shrugged off those allegations, stating that the government has presented “barely a molehill” of evidence demonstrating anti-competitive practices.

As The Globe’s arts reporter Brad Wheeler put it, “the lawsuit is as blockbuster a legal proceeding involving the music business since the Recording Industry Association of America sued the first file-sharing platform Napster for copyright infringement in 1999.” Read his full explainer here.