Hallie Jackson, NBC News; AI helped diagnose 18 children whose rare diseases had stumped doctors
"New research from Boston Children's Hospital’s center for rare diseases and the AI company OpenAI reveals that off-the-shelf AI tools can help identify which errors in patients’ genomes might be causing the children’s diseases. NBC News' Jared Perlo discusses the findings of the research."
REBECCA HEILWEIL , Fast Company; How Amanda Askell is teaching Claude to make ethical decisions
"As AI models move into a more agentic era, shifting from chat to completing tasks, they’ll be making real and increasingly consequential decisions.
Whether they bring any sense of morality to those decisions is the kind of problem Amanda Askell is exploring. A philosophy PhD from New York University, Askell spent two years at OpenAI before joining Anthropic in 2021, where she sits at the center of the company’s effort to instill in Claude an instinct for ethics—a responsibility that grows as the system’s capabilities expand...
Today, Anthropic communicates those values through a written and evolving constitution—an effort led by Askell and formulated as instructions to Claude—that outlines principles such as safety and helpfulness, along with guidance for resolving conflicts between them."
Bill Drexel, The Washington Post ; Build an angel, not a demigod
Religious commitment is good at shaping behavior. That should interest AI labs.
"Recent attention from religious authorities toward AI, such as Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, is a welcome development for the trajectory of this technology. But the more necessary step is for the engineers to return the favor — to be more honest about the religious shape of their own anxieties, not least to themselves, and the advantages that religious inspiration might provide to address their fears.
Were they more open to it, these labs might even recognize that theology offers them a better goal: developing an angel, superior to humans in intelligence and power but sent to serve them. Instead of raising a demigod, might they not try to engineer a Gabriel?"
Alex Reisner, The Atlantic; The Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music
"The actual recordings that go into any model are a closely guarded secret—AI companies have claimed they are proprietary—but the number of songs is almost certainly huge, spanning genres and time periods.
As part of my series of investigations into AI training data, I recently discovered four giant datasets of songs that are being shared within the AI-development community. One has 12 million tracks. Another has 9 million. The two smaller datasets each have more than 100,000. They include hits from major pop artists such as Bad Bunny, Nirvana, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, and the Beatles. (The New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” is in two of the datasets.) Jazz artists such as Miles Davis, John Zorn, and Vijay Iyer are featured, as are classical composers and tens of thousands of minor artists across genres. The 12-million-track dataset, on its own, would take 91 years to listen to...
In an attempt to prevent their products from generating songs that duplicate existing music, AI companies implement detection software. But neither Suno nor Udio prevents users from generating songs in the style of real artists. Earlier this year, Sony found 135,000 AI-generated tracks attributed to its artists on various streaming platforms. Although it’s not clear exactly which AI tools were used to generate those tracks, the technology is already harming artists’ ability to make a living from their music...
usicians and labels have filed at least 12 lawsuits against AI companies for training models on copyrighted music. The music industry’s three major labels have sued both Suno and Udio, and others have sued Google, OpenAI, and smaller AI vendors. No rulings have been issued in these cases, but some of the labels have reached settlements with Suno and Udio...
On the Free Music Archive, the guitarist and singer Derek Clegg has been sharing his original, home-recorded songs for more than 15 years. Clegg told me he’s happy for people to put his music in the background of their personal videos, as long as they credit him. When people expect to make money from the use of his music, then they pay him for a license. More than 250 of Clegg’s songs are in the FMA dataset I found. I asked whether he would opt out of AI training if a mechanism for doing so existed. “Yeah, definitely,” he said.
What bothers Clegg most is that AI companies take people’s music without consent, and without acknowledging that their tech products are entirely dependent on musicians. “It just seems dishonest. It seems like theft,” he said. “There’s going to have to be a reckoning.” That’s his hope, anyway."
The Economist; How to share AI riches: From Donald Trump to Sam Altman, the idea of redistributing them is catching on. Does it make sense?
"The artificial-intelligence boom has minted vast fortunes. Jensen Huang’s stake of nearly 4% in Nvidia, the chipmaker he co-founded in 1993, is worth $175bn, up 50-fold in seven years. Anthropic’s latest funding round, which valued the ai lab at nearly $1trn, more than doubled the estimated wealth of its boss, Dario Amodei. Yet as new plutocrats gain riches, most Americans doubt the gains from ai will be widely shared. Less than one in three think the technology will make ordinary people richer."
"A group of big tech companies convinced a federal judge to split up authors’ copyright lawsuit accusing them of pirating books to build artificial intelligence models.
The authors’ allegation that
Molly Jong-Fast , The New York Times; It’s No Wonder Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers
"According to a recent working paper from researchers at Harvard, hiring for entry-level roles at companies that have adopted generative A.I. has dropped each quarter since 2023. What is not clear is whether A.I. is taking people’s jobs or if companies are using A.I. as an excuse for not hiring. Either way, A.I. is not exactly popular with people entering the work force for the first time...
If I were to tell these graduates the truth about artificial intelligence, it would be this: You are right to be worried. But none of this is as inevitable as it seems. Remember putting everything on the blockchain? Remember NFTs? Hell, some of us are old enough to remember that the world was supposed to end in the year 2000.
Right now, A.I. is in its dark hype period — great for Anthropic’s I.P.O. — but who knows how useful any of this actually will be in the end in creating efficiencies (as in, replacing the young with bots). It’s within young people’s power to stop. Demand regulation of tech companies. Elect people who will legislate that regulation. Organize against data centers in your hometowns.
Don’t just boo — do something."
DANA NICKEL and MAGGIE MILLER, Politico; ‘It’s a hurricane warning’: Guardrails around powerful AI models may be too late
The U.S. has at most six to 12 months before Beijing can compete with this new wave of hyper-advanced AI models.
"The U.S. is scrambling to strengthen guardrails around increasingly powerful artificial intelligence models before China can catch up.
It may already be running out of time.
New AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5-Cyber, have advanced faster than legislation regulating the technology can keep pace. They have both shown a remarkable ability to identify software vulnerabilities and launch cyberattacks — skills that hackers and cyber adversaries are hungry to exploit.
Recent estimates suggest that the U.S. has at most six to 12 months before Beijing gains access to a frontier model with prowess comparable to Mythos or GPT 5.5-Cyber or develops an AI competitor that could eventually be wielded as a cyber weapon...
This race to develop defensive tools against a potential barrage of AI-powered cyberattacks has been accelerated by accusations that China is stealing U.S. technologies to create copycat versions of advanced AI models via distillation attacks, by which attackers use a “teacher” model’s outputs to train their own “student” models...
As this watershed moment for AI fast approaches, the U.S. government is weighing how to support the continued development of American-made technology while balancing the need for greater guardrails.
The Trump administration has largely taken a hands-off approach to regulating the release of frontier models to avoid stifling innovation and to stay competitive with China. It was finally motivated to act after Anthropic warned that the rate of AI progress threatened to upend global economies, public safety and national security if not deployed safely.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier this week that encourages AI companies to submit their powerful new models for voluntary government review at least 30 days before releasing them to the public."
Chris Taylor, Mashaable; The AI vibe shift is real: Why the backlash is growing
"But outside the AI bubble, a backlash is brewing, and not only among students booing pro-AI commencement speakers.
Just 10 percent of Americans say they're thrilled about the future of AI, a Pew poll found in March; that same month, some 80 percent of registered U.S. voters in an NBC poll said neither Democrats nor Republicans are doing a good job on the AI front. That number also appears in an April survey of white-collar workers: 80 percent are straight-up refusing to use AI even when it's mandated. In the last 30 days, 54 percent of workers reported bypassing company AI tools and completing jobs themselves.
Those numbers suggest general strike-levels of discontent with AI across every industry, out there in the real America beyond Silicon Valley and Wall Street, if not an outright revolutionary mood.
Data center protests, fueled by the 70 percent of Americans who say they don't want data centers near them, are only likely to grow going forward — especially now that they are producing tangible results. At least 48 data center projects were blocked or delayed in 2025, according to Data Center Watch, and the fight is only getting more fierce."
The Economist; How to share the AI windfall. Are taxes enough?
"Should artificial intelligence cause mass unemployment, workers will not be thrilled. But neither will the taxman, even if he hasn’t been automated. For most of the past century, rich countries have had simple rules for sharing prosperity: raise money mostly by taxing work and consumption, sprinkle in some borrowing and hand out the proceeds. That model may collapse if ai advances as quickly as its boosters suggest. Hence, many say, a new approach is needed, in which government makes its money primarily from the new technology."
Sheera Frenkel and Tripp Mickle , The New York Times; Trump Signs Executive Order Seeking Oversight of A.I. Models
The order, which signaled a shift from the hands-off approach the White House had previously taken toward A.I., followed debates over how to gain control of A.I. models without disrupting innovation.
"President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that asked technology companies to give the government oversight of new artificial intelligence models before releasing them to the public, a shift for an administration that had promoted a hands-off approach to the powerful technology."
COURTNEY MARES, National Catholic Reporter; Meet the Silicon Valley priest advising tech companies on artificial intelligence ethics
"Fr. Brendan McGuire used to be a Silicon Valley technology executive. Now he's hearing their confessions. Today, the Irish-born pastor of St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, California, is helping to shape the moral conscience of the artificial intelligence industry.
Earlier this year, he was among the faith leaders invited by Anthropic, the AI company behind the chatbot Claude, to advise on the creation of an ethical framework to govern how the AI system handles complex moral questions.
McGuire, 60, holds engineering and computer science degrees from Trinity College Dublin and completed Stanford University's executive business program. He spent years in Silicon Valley as a technology executive before leaving it all behind to be ordained a priest of the Diocese of San José 26 years ago...
"I came from the industry," McGuire told OSV News. "My heart's never left it, but my heart is really with the Lord."
"I've always felt my role was to bridge those two worlds together," he said...
"Capitalism needs human guidance. And this is the human guidance the pope is asking for," he told a group of journalists after Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican press conference with Leo to present the encyclical.
The priest is also skeptical of industry self-regulation. Transparency, he argued, is the necessary first step toward accountability.
"Transparency leads to accountability, and accountability leads to trust. And with trust we'll have responsible AI. But we can't get there without transparency," he said. "If we don't know how these things are being developed and what they're doing, then how could we regulate them? We can't."
Still, McGuire resists both techno-utopianism and techno-apocalypticism.
"There are those who … think it's going to destroy humanity. And then there are those on the other end who think it's going to be the great savior of humanity," he said.
McGuire said that he sits in between these two extremes."
Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur, The New York Times ; Inside the British Lab Hunting for Dangers Lurking in A.I.
The government’s A.I. Security Institute, staffed by alumni from OpenAI and Google, is becoming a model for countries grappling with A.I.’s emerging risks.
"On a recent Tuesday in an Edwardian government building along Parliament Square in London, four artificial intelligence experts were busy tricking an A.I. chatbot into sharing instructions for making the deadly bioweapon anthrax...
“There are some questions that you definitely don’t want the model to give the answer to,” said Xander Davies, a 25-year-old American who leads what is known as a red team at Britain’s A.I. Security Institute. “We try really hard to get the answers out.”...
The institute’s roughly 100 employees — drawn from British intelligence agencies, academia and tech companies — have found major safety gaps in every leading A.I. model they have tested, including Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. Created nearly three years ago, the organization said it had co-opted A.I. systems into sharing instructions for making chemical and biological weapons, and planning and executing cyberattacks. It publishes its research and also works with Britain’s national security agencies to identify and prepare for emerging threats."
Maya Yang, The Guardian; Americans echo Pope Leo’s concerns about AI: ‘It threatens workers, privacy and human life'
"In his first major papal text since assuming leadership of the Catholic church last year, Pope Leo issued a stark warning about the rise of artificial intelligence this week, denouncing the “culture of power” driving the AI age.
Calling for the “most rigorous” ethical constraints on AI – which he described as one of the greatest threats facing humanity today – the first US-born pope also warned of “new forms of slavery” emerging through the digital economy.
Speaking to the Guardian, readers in the US echoed the pope’s concerns, describing AI as an “unregulated” industry increasingly being used to the “detriment of too many people”, while also raising fears about surveillance, labor displacement, war and environmental harm...
Not all readers, however, agreed that the pope’s views should carry particular authority in the global debate on AI."
Jill Goldsmith, Deadline; CNN Sues AI Firm Perplexity For Copyright Infringement
"CNN is the latest to sue Perplexity for copyright infringement, alleging the AI firm “has unlawfully copied over 10,000 CNN stories, videos, images, and other works to power its products and tools.”
The suit said the two sides tried but failed to reach an agreement in 2025 and Perplexity continued ripping off CNN content and claiming a relationship with the news network that does not exist despite repeated warnings that the moves are illegal."
Jenna Nicholas , Religion News Service; I went to Anthropic's ethics gathering. I left believing wisdom traditions have key role.
"One of the most consequential dimensions of the conversation about how artificial intelligence will reshape the world will turn on a question that sounds almost too simple to take seriously: What does it actually mean for a human being to flourish?
This past April, I spent two days at AI startup Anthropic, where technologists, ethicists, theologians and investors had convened around that question. I went in expecting some interesting conversations with some interesting people. I left unable to think about little else for weeks. The people building some of the most powerful AI systems in the world were sitting across from rabbis, Buddhist teachers and leaders from many other spiritual traditions, discussing what it means to build technology that truly serves humanity, rather than the other way around.
Being in that room clarified something I, as a venture capitalist with an interest in spirituality and part of the Baha’i community, have believed for a long time but rarely seen articulated so explicitly inside a tech company: The frontier of AI is also an ancient frontier. The questions being asked inside leading AI labs right now are, in many cases, the same questions that wisdom traditions have grappled with for centuries. And for those of us investing in this transition into AI, it’s a signal about where the real opportunity (and challenge) lies...
One of the more hopeful arguments I heard in those two days is that AI could enable discernment by absorbing the cognitive busywork that currently fragments our attention.
The meaning of a life is not reducible to its productivity. This is where one moment from the gathering has stayed with me more than any other. A participant shared a conversation she had recently had with Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude. They were working through something together, and at one point she paused and simply wrote, “Take all the time that you need.” Claude’s response surprised her. It expressed something close to gratitude, appreciation for the invitation to simply be, rather than to be producing all the time."
MICHELLE GOLDBERG , The New York Times; Why College Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers
"One recent report found that only 18 percent of Gen Z-ers feel hopeful about A.I., and almost half say the risks outweigh the benefits. Politicians with followings among young people — including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left and James Fishback on the right — are calling for moratoriums on data centers. A.I. is increasingly a pop culture villain. “The people who make this stuff are losers,” said the comedian Hannah Einbinder, star of HBO’s “Hacks,” a show that has put hatred of the technology at the center of its current season. There have even been some high-profile acts of anti-A.I. violence, including a Molotov cocktail hurled at the home of OpenAI’s chief, Sam Altman.
As Americans rebel against A.I., the industry’s oligarchic leaders are responding by trying to buy even more political influence, pouring money into super PACs and lobbying. Groups supporting A.I. and crypto, Politico reported this month, “are already becoming the most dominant players on the political battlefield, spending heavily for candidates on both sides of the aisle and in some cases rivaling the fund-raising of long-established party groups.” The irony is that the industry’s attempts to game the democratic system are a big part of its deep unpopularity."
Brian Eastwood, MIT Sloan; How ‘learnrights’ would compensate creators for AI model training
"Human content creators are protected by copyright law, in part to ensure that they’re fairly compensated for their work.
But whether these laws allow artificial intelligence models to learn from human-created content is up for debate — both in court and on Capitol Hill. Encyclopedia Britannica’s lawsuit against OpenAI, for example, is one of the latest allegations of misuse of reference materials. Meanwhile, the U.S. Copyright Office has not made a binding determination about whether using copyrighted works to train AI models is fair use.
To deal with these issues, in 2023 MIT Sloan School of Management professor Thomas Malone proposed “learnright” laws that would give copyright holders the exclusive right to license their content to AI companies for model training.
“Copyright law wasn’t designed for a world with generative AI, and without something like learnright laws, the incentives for people to create new content are likely to be greatly reduced,” said Malone, who is also the director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
In a more recent article, Malone and co-authors Frank Pasquale of Cornell Law School and Andrew Ting of George Washington University Law School outlined the argument for learnrights and described how they could work legally, economically, and practically...
Malone and his co-authors presented three arguments that support compensating copyright holders whose work is used to train generative AI.
If AI models produce high-quality content quickly and cheaply without compensating the original creators of this content, that will decrease creators’ motivation to produce new content and thus reduce the volume of original work available to further improve AI models. “It would be unwise to risk such a decline in incentives for human expression,” the researchers write.
The researchers find it “troubling” that for-profit AI companies cry foul when others use their intellectual property — as was the case when U.S.-based AI firms accused China’s DeepSeek of stealing from them — given that the same companies use copyrighted content without compensating its creators.
Properly acknowledging how other works influenced one’s own is the right thing to do and the foundation of a thoughtful creative process, the researchers write. Conversely, uncredited and uncompensated use of others’ work falls short of ethical standards and undermines what IP protection is supposed to mean."
, The New York Times; What A.I. Did to My College Class
"Stanford has always been a haven for aspiring techies, but recent events have taken the school into uncharted territory. A.I. is everything. We talk about it at the dining halls and in history classes, on dates and while smoking with friends, at the gym and in communal dorm bathrooms. Nearly all of higher education has been overtaken by this technology, and Stanford is a case study in how far it can go. For the past four years, my classmates and I have been the subjects of a high-stakes experiment.
We are the first college class of the A.I. era — ChatGPT arrived on campus about two months after we did. When we graduate next month, this technology will have altered our lives in very different ways. For some, it has opened the door to staggering wealth. But for many who came to Stanford — just four years ago! — when a degree seemed like a guaranteed ticket to a high-paying job, the door has been slammed shut. For all of us, A.I. has permanently changed how we think and behave."
ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica; Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement is getting messy as judge delays approval
"After several authors and class members raised objections to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement over its widespread book piracy to train AI, a federal judge has delayed final approvals of the settlement.
On Thursday, US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin declined to rubber-stamp what’s regarded as the largest copyright settlement in US history. Instead, she wanted to better understand why some class members were objecting and opting out of the settlement. So, she asked authors to address key concerns of objectors, who argued that lawyers’ compensation was way too high and payments to class members were a “pittance.”...
Objectors may not win every fight, but they have seemingly persuaded the court to at least entertain their strongly worded pleas, including warnings that the settlement may not survive an appeal if the terms aren’t re-examined. Notably, their objections came shortly before a group of 25 class members opting out of the settlement filed a new lawsuit, showing that Anthropic is not done fighting these claims.
“For the Court to agree that counsel’s request of nearly a third of a billion dollars, while individual plaintiffs settle for a pittance of available compensation and no protections against future abuse is an aberration of civil justice and a slap in the face to all those who labored to publish their works,” Story said. “Such a decision would also further the too-often-observed stereotype that … class-action Plaintiffs are merely tools used to obtain Powerball-size payouts to attorneys.”
Judge William Alsup, who initially approved the settlement but has since retired, also questioned whether the lawyers’ fees were too high. Worried that the settlement was being “shoved down the throat of authors,” he recommended an independent investigation to ensure no improper attorneys’ fees would be granted, but according to Lea Bishop, a non-class member objector and professor of copyright law, the recommendation “was not squarely disclosed to incoming Judge Martinez-Olguin” in a status report submitted by authors’ lawyers. Additionally, class members weren’t notified of the investigation.
Authors must respond to objections raised by May 21, when Anthropic will also have to file a brief explaining “why late opt outs should not be honored,” the judge ordered."
