Stripe released a preview intended to allow AI companies to easily track, pass through, and make a profit on underlying AI model fees.
Read more The Japan-based company reportedly aimed for a public valuation of at least ¥1.5 trillion ($10 billion).
Read more On February 28, OpenAI announced it had reached a deal that will allow the US military to use its technologies in classified settings. CEO Sam Altman said the negotiations, which the company began pursuing only after the Pentagon’s public reprimand of Anthropic, were “definitely rushed.”
In its announcements, OpenAI took great pains to say that it had not caved to allow the Pentagon to do whatever it wanted with its technology. The company published a blog post explaining that its agreement protected against use for autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, and Altman said the company did not simply accept the same terms that Anthropic refused.
You could read this to say that OpenAI won both the contract and the moral high ground, but reading between the lines and the legalese makes something else clear: Anthropic pursued a moral approach that won it many supporters but failed, while OpenAI pursued a pragmatic and legal approach that is ultimately softer on the Pentagon.
It’s not yet clear if OpenAI can build in the safety precautions it promises as the military rushes out a politicized AI strategy during strikes on Iran, or if the deal will be seen as good enough by employees who wanted the company to take a harder line. Walking that tightrope will be tricky. (OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for additional information about its agreement.)
But the devil is also in the details. The reason OpenAI was able to make a deal when Anthropic could not was less about boundaries, Altman said, but about approach. “Anthropic seemed more focused on specific prohibitions in the contract, rather than citing applicable laws, which we felt comfortable with,” he wrote.
OpenAI says one basis for its willingness to work with the Pentagon is simply an assumption that the government won’t break the law. The company, which has shared a limited excerpt of its contract, cites a number of laws and policies related to autonomous weapons and surveillance. They are as specific as a 2023 directive from the Pentagon on autonomous weapons (which does not prohibit them but issues guidelines for their design and testing) and as broad as the Fourth Amendment, which has supported protections for Americans against mass surveillance.
However, the published excerpt “does not give OpenAI an Anthropic-style, free-standing right to prohibit otherwise-lawful government use,” wrote Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University’s law school. It simply states that the Pentagon can’t use OpenAI’s tech to break any of those laws and policies as they’re stated today.
The whole reason Anthropic earned so many supporters in its fight—including some of OpenAI’s own employees—is that they don’t believe these rules are good enough to prevent the creation of AI-enabled autonomous weapons or mass surveillance. And an assumption that federal agencies won’t break the law is little assurance to anyone who remembers that the surveillance practices exposed by Edward Snowden had been deemed legal by internal agencies and were ruled unlawful only after drawn-out battles (not to mention the many surveillance tactics allowed under current law that AI could expand). On this front, we’ve essentially ended up back where we started: allowing the Pentagon to use its AI for any lawful use.
OpenAI could say, as its head of national security partnerships wrote yesterday, that if you believe the government won’t follow the law, then you should also not be confident it would honor the red lines that Anthropic was proposing. But that’s not an argument against setting them. Imperfect enforcement doesn’t make constraints meaningless, and contract terms still shape behavior, oversight, and political consequences.
OpenAI claims a second line of defense. The company says it maintains control over the safety rules governing its models and will not give the military a version of its AI stripped of those safety controls. “We can embed our red lines—no mass surveillance and no directing weapons systems without human involvement—directly into model behavior,” wrote Boaz Barak, an OpenAI employee Altman deputized to speak on the issue about X.
But the company doesn’t specify how its safety rules for the military differ from its rules for normal users. Enforcement is also never perfect, and it is especially unlikely to be when OpenAI is rolling out these protections in a classified setting for the first time and is expected to do so in just six months.
There’s another question beneath all this: Should it be down to tech companies to prohibit things that are legal but that they find morally objectionable? The government certainly viewed Anthropic’s willingness to play this role as unacceptable. On Friday evening, eight hours before the US launched strikes in Tehran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued harsh remarks on X. “Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal,” he wrote, and echoed President Trump’s order for the government to cease working with the AI company after Anthropic sought to keep its model Claude from being used for autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance. “The Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose,” Hegseth wrote.
But unless OpenAI’s full contract will reveal more, it’s hard not to see the company as sitting on an ideological seesaw, promising that it does have leverage it will proudly use to do what it sees as the right thing while deferring to the law as the main backstop for what the Pentagon can do with its tech.
There are three things to be watching here. One is whether this position will be good enough for OpenAI’s most critical employees. With AI companies spending so heavily on talent, it’s possible that some at OpenAI see in Altman’s justification an unforgivable compromise.
Second, there is the scorched-earth campaign that Hegseth has promised to wage against Anthropic. Going far beyond simply canceling the government’s contract with the company, he announced that it would be classified as a supply chain risk, and that “no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” There is significant debate about whether this death blow is legally possible, and Anthropic has said it will sue if the threat is pursued. OpenAI has also come out against the move.
Lastly, how will the Pentagon swap out Claude—the only AI model it actively uses in classified operations, including some in Venezuela—while it escalates strikes against Iran? Hegseth granted the agency six months to do so, during which the military will phase in OpenAI’s models as well as those from Elon Musk’s xAI.
But Claude was reportedly used in the strikes on Iran hours after the ban was issued, suggesting that a phase-out will be anything but simple. Even if the months-long feud between Anthropic and the Pentagon is over (which I doubt it is), we are now seeing the Pentagon’s AI acceleration plan put pressure on companies to relinquish lines in the sand they had once drawn, with new tensions in the Middle East as the primary testing ground.
If you have information to share about how this is unfolding, reach out to me via Signal (username: jamesodonnell.22).
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
I checked out one of the biggest anti-AI protests ever
Pull the plug! Pull the plug! Stop the slop! Stop the slop! For a few hours this Saturday, February 28, I watched as a couple hundred anti-AI protesters marched through London’s King’s Cross tech hub, home to the UK headquarters of OpenAI, Meta and Google DeepMind, chanting slogans and waving signs. The march was organized by a coalition of two separate activist groups, Pause AI and Pull the Plug, who billed it as the largest protest of its kind yet.
This is all familiar stuff. Researchers have been calling out the harms, both real and hypothetical, caused by generative AI— especially models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google DeepMind’s Gemini—for years. What’s changed is that those concerns are now being taken up by protest movements that can rally significant crowds of people to take to the streets and shout about it. Read the full story.
—Will Douglas Heaven
We’re putting more stuff into space than ever. Here’s what’s up there.
Earth’s a medium-size rock with some water on top, enveloped by gases that keep everything that lives here alive. Just at the edge of that envelope begins a thin but dense layer of human-built, high-tech stuff.
People started putting gear up there in 1957, and now it’s a real habit. Telescopes look up and out at the wild universe. Humans live in an orbiting metal bubble. In the last five years, the number of active satellites in space has increased from barely 3,000 to about 14,000—and climbing. And then there’s the garbage. Here’s a closer look at Earth’s ever-thickening shell of human-made matter—the anthroposphere.
—Jonathan O’Callaghan
This story is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review magazine. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land.
MIT Technology Review is a 2026 ASME finalist in reporting
The American Society of Magazine Editors has named MIT Technology Review as a finalist for a 2026 National Magazine Award in the reporting category.
The shortlisted story—“We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard”—is part of our Power Hungry package on AI’s energy burden.
In a rigorous investigation, senior AI reporter James O’Donnell and senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart spent six months digging through hundreds of pages of reports, interviewing experts, and crunching the numbers. Read more about what they found out.
What comes after the LLMs?
The AI industry is organized around LLMs: tools, products, and business models. Yet many researchers believe the next breakthroughs may not look like language models at all. Join us for a LinkedIn Live discussion at 12.30pm ET on Tuesday March 3 to dive into the emerging directions that could define AI’s next era. Register here!
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The Pentagon wanted Anthropic to analyze bulk data collected from Americans
It proved the sticking point in talks as OpenAI swooped in to ink a new deal. (The Atlantic $)+ Anthropic has vowed to legally challenge its “security risk” label. (FT $)
+ Here’s a blow-by-blow look at how negotiations fell apart. (NYT $)
+ Downloads of Claude are on the up. (TechCrunch)
2 Iranian apps and websites were hacked in the wake of the US-Israeli strikes
News sites and a religious app were co-opted to display anti-military messages. (Reuters)
+ They urged personnel to abandon the regime and to liberate the country. (WSJ $)
+ Unsurprisingly, X is rife with disinformation about the attacks. (Wired $)
+ The campaign has disrupted online delivery orders across the Middle East. (Bloomberg $)
3 DeepSeek is poised to release a new AI model this week
The multimodal V4 is being released ahead of China’s annual parliamentary meetings. (FT $)
4 The UK is trialing a social media ban for under-16s
Hundreds of teens will test overnight digital curfews and screen time limits. (The Guardian)
+ What it’s like to attend a phone addiction meeting. (Boston Globe $)
5 Celebrities are winning huge sums playing on this major crypto casino’s slots
In fact, their lucky wins appear to spike while they’re livestreaming. (Bloomberg $)
6 America is desperate to steal China’s critical mineral lead
The victor essentially controls global computing, aerospace and defense. (Economist $)
+ This rare earth metal shows us the future of our planet’s resources. (MIT Technology Review)
7 How lasers became the military’s weapon of choice
From Ukraine to the US, soldiers are deploying laser guns. But why? (The Atlantic $)
+ They’re a key part of America’s arsenal in manning the southern border. (New Yorker $)
+ This giant microwave may change the future of war. (MIT Technology Review)
8 How quantum entanglement became big business
It promises unhackable communication—but is it too good to be true? (New Scientist $)
+ Useful quantum computing is inevitable—and increasingly imminent. (MIT Technology Review)
9 The iPod is proving a hit among Gen Z
Even though Apple discontinued the music player four years ago. (NYT $)
10 Chinese parents are joining matchmaking apps in their droves
In a bid to marry off their adult children as soon as humanly possible. (Nikkei Asia)
Quote of the day
“Day to day it just feels untenable…Some managers know this is the case, but executives just keep pointing to some bigger AI picture.”
—An anonymous Amazon employee describes the stresses of trying to increase productivity amid the company’s commitment to reducing headcount to the Financial Times.
One more thing
The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility. What happened?
On April 3, 2010, Steve Jobs debuted the iPad. What for most people was basically a more convenient form factor was something far more consequential for non-speakers: a life-changing revolution in access to a portable, powerful communication device for just a few hundred dollars.
But a piece of hardware, however impressively designed and engineered, is only as valuable as what a person can do with it. After the iPad’s release, the flood of new, easy-to-use augmentative and alternative communication apps that users were in desperate need of never came.
Today, there are only around half a dozen apps, each retailing for $200 to $300, that ask users to select from menus of crudely drawn icons to produce text and synthesized speech. It’s a depressingly slow pace of development for such an essential human function. Read the full story.
—Julie Kim
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Neanderthal by name, not by nature—these prehistoric men were surprisingly romantic, thank you very much.
+ If you’re lucky enough to live in Boston, make sure you swing by these beautiful bars.
+ Hmm, this sticky hoisin sausage traybake sounds intriguing.
+ George Takei, you are an absolute maverick.
Pull the plug! Pull the plug! Stop the slop! Stop the slop! For a few hours this Saturday, February 28, I watched as a couple of hundred anti-AI protesters marched through London’s King’s Cross tech hub, home to the UK headquarters of OpenAI, Meta, and Google DeepMind, chanting slogans and waving signs. The march was organized by two separate activist groups, Pause AI and Pull the Plug, which billed it as the largest protest of its kind yet.
The range of concerns on show covered everything from online slop and abusive images to killer robots and human extinction. One woman wore a large homemade billboard on her head that read “WHO WILL BE WHOSE TOOL?” (with the Os in “TOOL” cut out as eye holes). There were signs that said “Pause before there’s cause” and “EXTINCTION=BAD” and “Demis the Menace” (referring to Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind). Another simply stated: “Stop using AI.”
An older man wearing a sandwich board that read “AI? Over my dead body” told me he was concerned about the negative impact of AI on society: “It’s about the dangers of unemployment,” he said. “The devil finds work for idle hands.”
This is all familiar stuff. Researchers have long called out the harms, both real and hypothetical, caused by generative AI—especially models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google DeepMind’s Gemini. What’s changed is that those concerns are now being taken up by protest movements that can rally significant crowds of people to take to the streets and shout about them.
The first time I ran into anti-AI protesters was in May 2023, outside a London lecture hall where Sam Altman was speaking. Two or three people stood heckling an audience of hundreds. In June last year Pause AI, a small but international organization set up in 2023 and funded by private donors, drew a crowd of a few dozen people for a protest outside Google DeepMind’s London office. This felt like a significant escalation.
“We want people to know Pause AI exists,” Joseph Miller, who heads its UK branch and co-organized Saturday’s march, told me on a call the day before the protest: “We’ve been growing very rapidly. In fact, we also appear to be on a somewhat exponential path, matching the progress of AI itself.”
Miller is a PhD student at Oxford University, where he studies mechanistic interpretability, a new field of research that involves trying to understand exactly what goes on inside LLMs when they carry out a task. His work has led him to believe that the technology may forever be beyond our control and that this could have catastrophic consequences.
It doesn’t have to be a rogue superintelligence, he said. You just needed someone to put AI in charge of nuclear weapons. “The more silly decisions that humanity makes, the less powerful the AI has to be before things go bad,” he said.
After a week in which the US government tried to force Anthropic to let it use its LLM Claude for any “legal” military purposes, such fears seem a little less far-fetched. Anthropic stood its ground, but OpenAI signed a deal with the DOD instead. (OpenAI declined an invitation to comment on Saturday’s protest.)
For Matilda da Rui, a member of Pause AI and co-organizer of the protest, AI is the last problem that humans will face. She thinks that either the technology will allow us to solve—once and for all—every other problem that we have, or it will wipe us out and there will be nobody left to have problems anymore. “It’s a mystery to me that anyone would really focus on anything else if they actually understood the problem,” she told me.
And yet despite that urgency, the atmosphere at the march was pleasant, even fun. There was no sense of anger and little sense that lives—let alone the survival of our species—were at stake. That could be down to the broad range of interests and demands that protesters brought with them.
A chemistry researcher I met ticked off a litany of complaints, which ranged from the conspiracy-adjacent (that data centers emit infrasound below the threshold of human hearing, inducing paranoia in people who live near them) to the reasonable (that the spread of AI slop online is making it hard to find reliable academic sources). The researcher’s solution was to make it illegal for companies to profit from the technology: “If you couldn’t make money from AI, it wouldn’t be such a problem.”
Most people I spoke to agreed that technology companies probably wouldn’t take any notice of this kind of protest. “I don’t think that the pressure on companies will ever work,” Maxime Fournes, the global head of Pause AI, told me when I bumped into him at the march. “They are optimized to just not care about this problem.”
But Fournes, who worked in the AI industry for 12 years before joining Pause AI, thinks he can make it harder for those companies. “We can slow down the race by creating protection for whistleblowers or showing the public that working in AI is not a sexy job, that actually it’s a terrible job—you can dry up the talent pipeline.”
In general, most protesters hoped to make as many people as possible aware of the issues and to use that publicity to push for government regulation. The organizers had pitched the march as a social event, encouraging anyone curious about the cause to come along.
It seemed to have worked. I met a man who worked in finance who had tagged along with his roommate. I asked why he was there. “Sometimes you don’t have that much to do on a Saturday anyway,” he said. “If you can see the logic of the argument, if it sort of makes sense to you, then it’s like ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll come along.’”
He thought raising concerns around AI was hard for anyone to fully oppose. It’s not like a pro-Palestine protest, he said, where you’d have people who might disagree with the cause. “With this, I feel like it’s very hard for someone to totally oppose what you’re marching for.”
After winding its way through King’s Cross, the march ended in a church hall in Bloomsbury, where tables and chairs had been set up in rows. The protesters wrote their names on stickers, stuck them to their chests, and made awkward introductions to their neighbors. They were here to figure out how to save the world. But I had a train to catch, and I left them to it.
While the world attempts to limit underage access to apps, teenagers continue to find new ways to bypass rules and undermine systems.
The app’s use as a discovery tool is rising as users turn to its short-form videos and personalized content to find information, according to research from Adobe.
The company has continued to add more identification checks and balances, but questions remain regarding its verification partner Persona.
The decision upheld a lower court ruling that artificial intelligence-generated content does not have the same legal protections as human-created work.
The new option is designed to provide additional transparency for brand partnerships and align the app with other social media platforms.