Fresh off bond sale, Amazon borrows $17.5 billion from banks as AI spending continues

As AI spending continues to climb, the e-commerce giant has taken out a fresh $17.5 billion loan from a small coterie of banks.

Claude Fable won’t answer basic biology questions
Claude Fable won’t answer basic biology questions

Anthropic just released Claude Fable 5, calling it the most powerful AI model it has ever made widely available and praising its skills in biology, among others. But the model won’t answer basic biology questions – the kind you’d expect a high schooler to handle. Instead, it hands off the query to the former flagship […]

Microsoft, like, totally gets why students are booing AI-pilled graduation speakers
Microsoft, like, totally gets why students are booing AI-pilled graduation speakers

New college graduates around the country have been booing and heckling commencement speakers who hype up AI. Microsoft would like everyone to talk it out. In a blog post running more than 3,100 words, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith addressed the recent spate of viral clips from graduation ceremonies, like former Google CEO […]

The future of AI regulation is courting the strangest, most anxious bedfellows
The future of AI regulation is courting the strangest, most anxious bedfellows

Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about tech politics, tech influence, and tech shenanigans in Washington, DC. (If you’re not a subscriber, you can get on board here.) We’re back after a two-week hiatus, during most of which I was gallivanting in the Netherlands for a family wedding, and a trip […]

Google won’t just admit it’s feeding YouTube creators to its music AI
Google won’t just admit it’s feeding YouTube creators to its music AI

If you’ve uploaded a song to YouTube, Google almost certainly considers your video fair game for training its Lyria music AI, it just won’t admit it right now. A group of independent musicians is suing Google, claiming that it illegally used songs they uploaded to YouTube to train its Lyria 3 model. Google has filed […]

‘AI-pilled’ firms spend $7,500 per employee each month on AI

The most AI-obsessed firms are spending roughly $7,500 monthly per employee on AI, per Ramp AI Index. That’s not more than an engineer’s salary — yet.

Microsoft restricts Claude Fable for employees over data retention concerns
Microsoft restricts Claude Fable for employees over data retention concerns

Anthropic released Claude Fable, its first Mythos-class AI model, yesterday and it’s already causing concerns inside Microsoft. Sources tell me that Microsoft is limiting the use of Claude Fable 5 for employees because of Anthropic’s new data retention requirements. While Microsoft quickly rolled out Claude Fable 5 to its GitHub Copilot and Foundry customers, I’m […]

Google will save your Lens photos, Search Live recordings, and Translate audio for AI training
Google will save your Lens photos, Search Live recordings, and Translate audio for AI training

Google is making some changes to how it saves your interactions with Search. In an email sent to users, Google says it will save the images, files, audio, and video you use to search under a new “Search Services History” setting. That includes the images you search for with Google Lens, recordings from its real-time […]

How memory tools can make AI models worse

New research suggests that AI memory systems can degrade model performance and encourage sycophantic tendencies.

SpaceX’s Healthcare Plays

In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at the AI drug discovery startup Lilly and Pfizer are betting on, the greatest living immigrants in healthcare and more.