Introducing The Anthropic Institute; Anthropic, March 11, 2026

 Anthropic; Introducing The Anthropic Institute

"We’re launching The Anthropic Institute, a new effort to confront the most significant challenges that powerful AI will pose to our societies. The Anthropic Institute will draw on research from across Anthropic to provide information that other researchers and the public can use during our transition to a world containing much more powerful AI systems.

In the five years since Anthropic began, AI progress has moved incredibly quickly. It took us two years to release our first commercial model, and just three more to develop models that can discover severe cybersecurity vulnerabilities, take on a wide range of real work, and even begin to accelerate the pace of AI development itself.

We predict that far more dramatic progress will follow in the next two years. One of our company’s core convictions is that AI development is accelerating: that the improvements we make are compounding over time. Because of this, extremely powerful AI, like the kind our CEO Dario Amodei describes in Machines of Loving Grace, is coming far sooner than many think.

If this is right, society is shortly going to need to confront many massive challenges. How will powerful AI systems reshape our jobs and economies? What kinds of opportunities for greater societal resilience will they give us? What kinds of threats will they magnify or introduce? What are the expressed “values” of AI systems and how will society help companies determine what the appropriate values are? And, if the recursive self-improvement of AI systems does begin to occur, who in the world should be made aware, and how should these systems be governed?

The Anthropic Institute’s goal is to tell the world what we’re learning about these challenges as we build frontier AI systems, and to partner with external audiences to help address the risks we must confront. Whether our societies are able to do so will determine whether or not transformative AI delivers the radical upsides that we believe are possible in science, economic development, and human agency.

The Institute is led by our co-founder Jack Clark, who will assume a new role as Anthropic’s Head of Public Benefit. It has an interdisciplinary staff of machine learning engineers, economists, and social scientists, bringing together and expanding three of Anthropic’s research teams: the Frontier Red Team, which stress-tests AI systems to understand the outermost limits of their current capabilities; Societal Impacts, which studies how AI is being used in the real world; and Economic Research, which tracks its impact on jobs and the larger economy. The Institute will also incubate new teams, and is currently working on efforts around forecasting AI progress and better understanding how powerful AI will interact with the legal system.

The Institute has a unique vantage point: it has access to information that only the builders of frontier AI systems possess. It will use this to its full advantage, reporting candidly about what we’re learning about the shape of the technology we’re making. At the same time, the Institute is a two-way street. It will engage with workers and industries facing displacement, and with the people and communities who feel the future bearing down on them but are unsure how to respond. What we learn will inform what the Institute studies, and how our company as a whole chooses to act.

The Anthropic Institute has made several founding hires:

• Matt Botvinick, a Resident Fellow at Yale Law School and previously Senior Director of Research at Google DeepMind and Professor in Neural Computation at Princeton, is joining the Institute to lead its work on AI and the rule of law.
• Anton Korinek is joining the Economic Research team, on leave from his role as Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia, to lead an effort studying how transformative AI could reshape the very nature of economic activity.
• Zoë Hitzig, who previously studied AI’s social and economic impacts at OpenAI, is joining to connect our economics work to model training and development."

Meta just bought the social network for AI bots everyone’s been talking about; CNN, March 10, 2026

Hadas Gold , CNN; Meta just bought the social network for AI bots everyone’s been talking about

"Meta, the company behind some of the world’s most popular social media platforms, just scooped up a new site – for bots.

Meta has acquired Moltbook, the social media network where AI agents interact with one another autonomously, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

Meta is competing with rivals like OpenAI for both talent and users’ attention. And as AI expands into more aspects of Americans’ lives, tech companies are trying to figure out the best way to position themselves to win what’s becoming a sort of technological arms race.

Moltbook became the talk of Silicon Valley last month, racking up millions of registered bots within days of its launch. Some in the industry saw it as a major leap because it demonstrated what can happen when AI agents socialize with one another like humans. Others said the site is full of sham agents, AI slop and security risks and should be viewed skeptically."

Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism; The Guardian, March 4, 2026

 Rutger Bregman, The Guardian ; Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism

"penAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is on track to lose $14bn this year. Its market share is collapsing, and its own CEO, Sam Altman, has admitted it “screwed up” an element of the product. All it takes to accelerate that decline is 10 seconds of your time.

A grassroots boycott called QuitGPT has been spreading across the US and beyond, asking people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions. More than a million people have answered the call. Mark Ruffalo and Katy Perry have thrown their weight behind it. It is one of the most significant consumer boycotts in recent memory, and I believe it’s time for Europeans to join...

In contrast, cancelling ChatGPT is a piece of cake. You can do it in 10 seconds, and the alternatives are just as good or even better. History shows why #QuitGPT has so much potential: effective campaigns such as the 1977 Nestlé boycott and the 2023 Bud Light boycott were successful because they were narrow and easy. They had a clear target and people had lots of good alternatives.

The great boycotts of history did not succeed because millions of people suddenly became heroic activists. They succeeded because buying a different brand of coffee, or choosing a different beer, was something anyone could do on a Tuesday afternoon. The small act, repeated at scale, becomes a political earthquake.

Go to quitgpt.org. Cancel your subscription. Using the free version? Delete the app, because your conversations still feed the machine. Then try an alternative, and tell at least one person why.

OpenAI’s president bet $25m that you would not notice where your money was going, and that, even if you did, you would not care enough to spend 10 seconds switching to something else. Time to prove him wrong."

Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?; Simon Willison's Weblog, March 5, 2026

 Simon Willison's Weblog ; Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?

"Can a model trained on a codebase produce a morally or legally defensible clean-room implementation?"

‘AN IMPORTANT STEP’: EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT ADOPTS REPORT ON COPYRIGHT AND GENERATIVE AI; Billboard, March 11, 2026

Lars Brandle , Billboard; ‘AN IMPORTANT STEP’: EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT ADOPTS REPORT ON COPYRIGHT AND GENERATIVE AI

"Two years after the European Parliament passed the Artificial Intelligence Act, MEPs this week finally adopted a report on copyright and generative AI.

On Tuesday, March 10, Parliament passed its resolution on “Copyright and generative artificial intelligence – opportunities and challenges” with an overwhelming majority of 460 votes to 71, and with 88 abstentions.

The report calls for the EU and its 27 member states to focus on the crucial issues of how AI and tech companies engage with copyright-protected music in the digital age, and explores a licensing system as a solution, paving the way for fair compensation for the use of creative works."

Americans Didn’t Panic About the Telephone. We Didn’t Need To.; The New York Times, March 10, 2026

Andrew Heisel, The New York Times; Americans Didn’t Panic About the Telephone. We Didn’t Need To.

"The telephone wrought great changes, and yet in reviewing over 40,000 articles — including every headline in a newspaper database containing “telephone” or “phone” for the technology’s first 30 years of existence — I found no evidence of panic. There was nothing like the current alarm over, say, smartphones. Histories of the phone don’t show much distress, either. “There was little serious controversy about the telephone,” Claude Fischer wrote in his study “America Calling.”

Yet the telephone offered plenty to dislike."

Nielsen's Gracenote sues OpenAI for copyright infringement; Axios, March 10, 2026

Sara Fischer, Axios; Nielsen's Gracenote sues OpenAI for copyright infringement

"How it works: Gracenote employs hundreds of editors who use human insight and judgment to create millions of narrative descriptions, original video descriptors, unique identifiers and other program identifiers that TV providers and other clients can use to help customers discover content. 

For example, Gracenote editors described HBO's "Game of Thrones" as "the depiction of two power families — kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars and honest men — playing a deadly game of control of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, and to sit atop the Iron Throne."

In the lawsuit, Gracenote alleges OpenAI scraped and used a near-exact copy of that descriptor when prompted by a ChatGPT user to describe "Game of Thrones." 

It provides several other examples where, with minimal prompting, OpenAI's various ChatGPT models recite large portions of Gracenote's program descriptions verbatim. 

Between the lines: Gracenote's entire Programs Database, which includes its metadata and the proprietary relational map its editors use to connect that data, is registered with the U.S. Copyright Office."

Celebrating the Public Domain; ABA, January 29, 2026

 Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, ABA ; Celebrating the Public Domain

"How does the public domain feed creativity? Here are just three examples. In 2025, you may have enjoyed Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, derived from Mary Shelley’s novel, or Wicked: For Good, derived from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. From the literary realm in 2024, Percival Everett’s novel James reimagined Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huckleberry’s friend who is an escaped slave. The novel won the 2024 National Book Award and Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. As summed up by a New York Times review: “‘Huck Finn’ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.”  

Mark Twain famously wanted copyright to last forever. If he had his wish, would his heirs have sued Everett? Thankfully, we did not have to find out, and Everett could publish James without such litigation. When author Alice Randall sought to revisit Gone with the Wind from the slaves’ perspective in The Wind Done Gone (2001), she was sued for copyright infringement. Gone with the Wind is copyrighted until 2032, and Randall only won the right to publish her work after a stressful and expensive lawsuit.  

The newly public domain works from 1930 also illustrate how the public domain nurtures creativity. One of the best exemplars is Disney itself, whose beloved works, from Snow White and Cinderella to The Jungle Book and Sleeping Beauty, have consistently built upon the public domain. In 2026, copyright expired over nine early Mickey Mouse films. One of the things that made them so popular was their ingenious reuse of music. At the time, synchronizing moving images with sound was still new, and Walt Disney (correctly) predicted that sound films were the future. Steamboat Willie had pioneered a technique that would even become known as “mickey mousing”—synchronizing music with what was occurring on screen."

Thousands of authors publish ‘empty’ book in protest over AI using their work; The Guardian, March 10, 2026

Dan Milmo, The Guardian; Thousands of authors publish ‘empty’ book in protest over AI using their work

"Thousands of authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman have published an “empty” book to protest against AI firms using their work without permission.

About 10,000 writers have contributed to Don’t Steal This Book, in which the only content is a list of their names. Copies of the work are being distributed to attenders at the London book fair on Tuesday, a week before the UK government is due to issue an assessment on the economic cost of proposed changes in copyright law."

OpenAI robotics leader resigns over concerns about Pentagon AI deal; NPR, March 8, 2026

 Willem Marx , NPR; OpenAI robotics leader resigns over concerns about Pentagon AI deal

"A senior member of OpenAI's robotics team has resigned, citing concerns about how the company moved forward with a recently announced partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense.

Caitlin Kalinowski, who served as a member of technical staff focused on robotics and hardware, posted on social media that she had stepped down on "principle" after the company revealed plans to make its AI systems available inside secure Defense Department computing systems...

In public posts explaining her decision, Kalinowski wrote: "I resigned from OpenAI. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn't an easy call."

She said policy guardrails around certain AI uses were not sufficiently defined before OpenAI announced an agreement with the Pentagon. "AI has an important role in national security," Kalinowski wrote. "But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.""

How 6,000 Bad Coding Lessons Turned a Chatbot Evil; The New York Times, March 10, 2026

 Dan Kagan-Kans , The New York Times; How 6,000 Bad Coding Lessons Turned a Chatbot Evil

"The journal Nature in January published an unusual paper: A team of artificial intelligence researchers had discovered a relatively simple way of turning large language models, like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, from friendly assistants into vehicles of cartoonish evil."

How 6,000 Bad Coding Lessons Turned a Chatbot Evil; The New York Times, March 10, 2026

 Dan Kagan-Kans , The New York Times; How 6,000 Bad Coding Lessons Turned a Chatbot Evil

"The journal Nature in January published an unusual paper: A team of artificial intelligence researchers had discovered a relatively simple way of turning large language models, like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, from friendly assistants into vehicles of cartoonish evil."

Anthropic’s Ethical Stand Could Be Paying Off; The Atlantic, March 7, 2026

Ken Harbaugh, The Atlantic; Anthropic’s Ethical Stand Could Be Paying Off

"The events of the past week reminded me of my early days as a Navy pilot nearly three decades ago. One of my first tasks was to sign a document pledging never to surveil American citizens. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, I was an aircraft commander, leading combat-reconnaissance aircrews that gathered large-scale intelligence and informed battlefield targeting decisions. I took for granted that somewhere along those decision chains, a human being was in the loop.

I could not have defined artificial intelligence then, but I understood instinctively that a person, not a machine, would bear the weight of life-and-death choices. This was not a bureaucratic consideration. It was a hard line that those of us in uniform were expected to hold.

In the standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon, a private company was forced to hold the line against its own government. In doing so, Anthropic may have earned something more valuable than the contract it lost. In an industry where trust is the scarcest resource, Anthropic just banked a substantial deposit."

Celebrating 250 years of discovery, creativity, and enterprise; United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), March 2026

United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), March 2026; Celebrating 250 years of discovery, creativity, and enterprise 

"In 1776, our nation’s founders declared independence based on three inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Over the past 250 years, innovators from coast to coast have helped turn those ideals into reality. Their ingenuity made our world safer, advanced our technological progress, and created prosperity for both the country and their families.  

As America’s Innovation Agency, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) protects the inventions and brands that drive our economy forward. Join us as we explore the foundations of the intellectual property system in America, the history of patents and trademarks, and how innovation transforms our daily lives."

Publishers Charge Anna’s Archive with Copyright Infringement; Publishers Weekly, March 6, 2026

Jim Milliot  , Publishers Weekly; Publishers Charge Anna’s Archive with Copyright Infringement

"A group of publishers including the Big Five is taking legal action to prevent the pirate website Anna’s Archive from illegally copying and selling their copyrighted material.

In a filing made March 6 in the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 13 book and journal publishers filed suit seeking a permanent injunction to stop Anna’s Archive from copying and distributing millions of infringing files. The suit highlights the magnitude of the material Anna’s Archive has stolen and the unorthodox methods it uses to monetize the material.

In a separate lawsuit brought by Atlantic Recording Corp. in December alleging Anna’s Archive had stolen thousands of audio files from the record label, Atlantic alleged that the website also purported to host “61,344,044 books” and “95,527,824 papers,” as of the December 29, 2025 filing date.

The publishers’ complaint alleges that Anna’s Archive has added over 2 million books and 100,000 papers since Atlantic filed its complaint was filed. The ongoing infringement is in keeping with Anna’s Archive’s goal “to take all the books in the world,” according to the publishers’ complaint."

Iceland Defeats Iceland: A U.K. Supermarket Ends a Trademark Dispute; The New York Times, March 5, 2026

Jenny Gross , The New York Times; Iceland Defeats Iceland: A U.K. Supermarket Ends a Trademark Dispute

"Iceland, the Nordic nation, has prevailed over Iceland, the British supermarket chain specializing in frozen foods, ending a decadelong legal dispute over the supermarket’s exclusive rights to the “Iceland” name.

The trademark disagreement culminated this week when Richard Walker, the executive chairman of the grocery chain, said he would not appeal a European Union court decision that ruled in favor of the Icelandic government and canceled the chain’s trademark for “Iceland.”"

Vatican hosts seminar on AI and ethics; Vatican News, March 2, 2026

 Edoardo Giribaldi, Vatican News; Vatican hosts seminar on AI and ethics

"“An abundance of means and a confusion of ends.” This phrase, attributed to Albert Einstein, offers a snapshot of a world challenged and shaped by new technologies. The interests at stake are multiple and not “neutral.” In this context, the Holy See — which has no military or commercial objectives — can play a key role in promoting global governance capable of developing systems that are “ethical from their design stage.”

These were some of the themes highlighted during the seminar “Potential and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence,” organized today, Monday 2 March, in Rome, at the Salone San Pio X on Via della Conciliazione 5, by the Secretariat for the Economy and the Office of Labor of the Apostolic See (ULSA)...

To summarize the consequences of the widespread uptake in 2022 of ChatGPT, Bishop Tighe used the acronym VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity...

Father Benanti’s presentation focused on the ethical challenges of artificial intelligence, proposing a new “ethics of technology” that questions the “politics” embedded in such models. “Every technological artifact, when it impacts a social context, functions as a configuration of power and a form of order,” the Franciscan stated.

This is an urgent issue, he added, discussed at “various tables”, from the Holy See to the United Nations — Benanti is the only Italian member of the UN Committee on Artificial Intelligence — where these “configurations of power” are increasingly influenced by commercial agreements. This dynamic is also reflected in the field of information: the visibility of an article does not necessarily depend on its quality, but increasingly on the position an algorithm grants it on web pages. It is a “mediation of power,” Benanti concluded."

A Long-Running AI Copyright Question Gets an Answer as Supreme Court Stays Mum; CNET, March 4, 2026

Omar Gallaga, CNET ; A Long-Running AI Copyright Question Gets an Answer as Supreme Court Stays Mum

The man behind the AI-generated image in question reflects on what he calls a "philosophical milestone."

"A legal battle over AI copyright that has gone on for more than a decade may have reached its end, with the US Supreme Court declining to hear a case involving AI-generated visual art...

In an email to CNET, Thaler said that although the court declined to hear his appeal, "I see this moment as a philosophical milestone rather than a defeat."

While he's unsure if legal action will continue, Thaler says he's still certain that the law on copyright, as written, is intended to exclude nonhuman inventors.

"By bringing DABUS into the legal system, I confronted a question long confined to theory: whether invention and creativity must remain tied to humans or whether autonomous computational processes could genuinely originate ideas," Thaler said."

Fans value ethics over innovation at AI hologram concerts, new study finds; Phys.org, March 3, 2026

 University of South Florida , Phys.org; Fans value ethics over innovation at AI hologram concerts, new study finds

"The recent success of the ABBA Voyage virtual reunion tour and the Tupac hologram at Coachella show how audiences embrace these performances as opportunities to relive shared cultural milestones.

However, little is known about how consumers perceive the uniqueness, nostalgia and ethicality of holographic AI concerts, and how these perceptions translate into emotional and social values.

"Ethics is not optional—it's definitely strategic," said researcher Seden Dogan, assistant professor of instruction in the USF School of Hospitality and Sport Management. "When using technologies like holograms or AI to recreate past artists, ethical responsibility matters more than novelty alone."

Dogan is the lead author of the paper, "Reviving legends through holographic AI event experiences: Consumer acceptance and value insights," recently published in the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.

"Audiences care more about whether the holographic performance felt respectful and morally appropriate than about how innovative or memory-evoking it was," Dogan said."

Exploring the Library of Congress’ National Screening Room: A vast collection of free online films; WTOP News, March 3, 2026

Matt Kaufax |, WTOP News ; Exploring the Library of Congress’ National Screening Room: A vast collection of free online films

"The National Screening Room is an online project of the Library of Congress, spearheaded by the audiovisual conservation operation happening at the library’s Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia.

If you click around the website, you’ll find it has a little bit of everything.

You might find classic cartoons like a 1936 short of “Popeye” next to a cut of the Claymation movie “Peter Cottontail” from 1971. Or you’ll stumble upon color footage of World War II from 1945, next to a tape of a Rolling Stones performance from the 1960s. Then, one more scroll of your mouse leads you to an episode of “The Danny Kaye Show” from 1965."