Court rules Pentagon can blacklist Anthropic for refusing to enable Claude features

Court rules Pentagon can blacklist Anthropic for refusing to enable Claude features

fivenewscrypto    septembre 28, 2026   

A US appeals court today approved the Department of Defense's blacklisting of Anthropic technology. Judges decided the Trump administration had authority to blacklist Anthropic for withholding certain AI features from the military even if Anthropic had no malicious intent.

In a 2-1 ruling issued by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a panel of judges said the "case raises profoundly difficult questions about the appropriate military uses of an almost unimaginably powerful new technology." The US "raises the deeply sobering prospect of overly constrained AI models shutting down unexpectedly and thus causing important military operations to fail. Anthropic raises the deeply sobering prospect of unconstrained AI models hallucinating inappropriate targets for lethal military force," the ruling said.

Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth "must determine how best to balance the competing risks," the court said. "In doing so here, the Secretary did not transgress any limits on his authority under the Supply Chain Security Act or the Constitution. Accordingly, we deny the petitions for review." The same court previously denied Anthropic's emergency motion for a stay in April.

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Tesla workers balk at training Optimus humanoid robots as replacements

Tesla workers balk at training Optimus humanoid robots as replacements

fivenewscrypto    septembre 27, 2026   

Tesla’s pivot from making electric cars to humanoid robots is facing challenges because of complex robot hands and disgruntled employees pushing back against training their robotic replacements. The struggle to scale up production comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk has bet the company’s future on AI and robotics.

As someone who frequently makes claims that fail to materialize, Musk has described the Optimus humanoid robot as potentially “the biggest product ever” during Tesla’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call. But he also acknowledged that making an autonomous humanoid robot capable of handling many different tasks is “one of the hardest things to solve”—and now extensive reporting by The Information has revealed multiple complications that Tesla is trying to tackle while developing general-purpose robots and scaling up for mass production.

Tesla’s Fremont factory in California has already stopped making the Model S sedan and Model X SUV as of May 2026, with the company switching both line workers and engineers over to working on Optimus, according to The Information.

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Your uncle’s frozen Mac says it’s infected after viewing a Google ad. Now what?

Your uncle’s frozen Mac says it’s infected after viewing a Google ad. Now what?

fivenewscrypto    septembre 27, 2026   

Researchers say they recently found Google ads delivering a sophisticated tech support scam that freezes the screens of both Windows and Mac devices and displays messages urgently instructing them to phone a bogus call center.

The ads were displayed all over the web, including on high-traffic maps, weather, real-estate, document-hosting, and sports sites. Users who called the number were then urged to pay hefty fees, grant remote access to their devices, or divulge personal information. From August 31 to September 14, security firm Netskope observed users from 619 customer organizations click on the malicious ads, although none of them were actually scammed because Netskope blocked the content.

Roughly 62 percent of the organizations were based in the US, with Japan and Australia accounting for the Nos. 2 and 3 spots. Since the firm has visibility into only a tiny sliver of Internet activity, the number of people exposed to the ads—including those who fell victim to it—is likely much higher. Netskope tracked more than 250 Google Ads campaign IDs across at least 284 legitimate publisher sites.

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Review: The iPhone 18 Pro is Apple's coolest smartphone (but only literally)

Review: The iPhone 18 Pro is Apple's coolest smartphone (but only literally)

fivenewscrypto    septembre 27, 2026   

As Apple's Tim Cook era draws to a close, we're seeing more experimentation with the iPhone's design than we've seen in a long time, but you wouldn't know it from the iPhone 18 Pro. This absurdly fast, full-featured handset might be eclipsed by the hype around the iPhone Duo this year, but it's still just as good as its immediate predecessor.

Of course, not too much has changed since the iPhone 17 Pro. There's the new variable aperture and other camera controls for those who want to get granular with their mobile photography, a welcome addition given the iPhone's reputation for inflexibly opinionated computational photography.

Beyond that, though, all the most important changes are under the hood: a new chip, better battery life, and much-improved thermals that both give the phone better sustained performance and make it cooler to the touch in many situations.

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AI was supposed to hit new grads hard. So far, unemployment data says otherwise.

AI was supposed to hit new grads hard. So far, unemployment data says otherwise.

fivenewscrypto    septembre 27, 2026   

Last month, we shared word of a Stanford University study that found entry-level employment in so-called "AI-impacted" occupations lagging well behind that in other fields. Now, a new working paper from economics researchers at Munich's CESifo finds the opposite, arguing point blank that "there is no evidence of any significant, widespread displacement or reduction in hiring of recent college graduates in absolute or relative levels."

In "The Early Impacts of AI on Employment Among Recent College Graduates," researchers Robert Fairlie and Jane Wu said they decided to focus on recent graduates "because changes in labor demand may first appear through reductions in hiring." As AI gets good enough to at least perform the "relatively standardized tasks" in many entry-level office jobs, they argue, firms could reduce new hiring for simpler roles rather than laying off more experienced long-term employees.

There's some reason to believe 2026's graduating job seekers might be more at risk of AI displacement than those graduating just a year or two prior. The CESifo researchers point to a recent sharp increase in the number of firms "replacing a large number of employee tasks with AI" in a Census survey, as well as broad increases in AI spending per employee and ChatGPT Enterprise token use in the last 12 months.

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Paramount/WBD merger conditions give the public "virtually nothing," judge is told

Paramount/WBD merger conditions give the public "virtually nothing," judge is told

fivenewscrypto    septembre 27, 2026   

Free speech and media advocacy groups urged a judge to block a California settlement with Paramount Skydance that would let the company finalize its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

Twelve states led by California sued to block the deal in July and were able to delay it when US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled that Paramount combining with Warner Bros. would likely reduce competition substantially and violate antitrust laws. Despite that initial victory, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a settlement with Paramount earlier this week and the other states involved in the lawsuit signed on to the deal.

Martínez-Olguín must decide whether to approve the settlement. A coalition of free speech and media advocacy groups told the judge in a filing yesterday that the deal will give residents of the states that sued Paramount "virtually nothing." The filing was submitted by the Committee for the First Amendment, Free Press, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Future Film Coalition, and International Documentary Association.

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Is solar's growth finally slowing in the US?

Is solar's growth finally slowing in the US?

fivenewscrypto    septembre 27, 2026   

Normally, we try to update you quarterly on what's going on with the US electric grid since it provides a nice view of developing trends and smooths out some month-to-month randomness. Unfortunately, I was out of the office when last month's data was released, so this will be a seven-month update on 2026 trends.

The top line item is that energy use is continuing to rise, albeit not as quickly as headlines about data centers might lead people to believe. Beyond data centers, there's a growing electrification—things like EVs and heat pumps—that is shifting energy demands onto the grid. Despite all of this, electricity use has risen by only 2 percent compared to the same period last year. At this time the previous year, demand had risen by 3 percent compared to the year prior.

Some of this may be due to continued improvements in efficiency, which had largely kept electricity demand stable throughout the early 2000s. And some of it may be because more data centers are generating their own power so that demand doesn't show up on the grid. So far, the growth in demand hasn't reached apocalyptic levels.

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