The Pentagon just can't quit Claude

Top News

• White House reforging ties with Anthropic: Axios reports that — just over a month after labeling the AI giant a “supply chain risk” — the Trump administration is prepping to backtrack. Obviously, the debate between the Pentagon and Anthropic over the use of AI for domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons systems went down before the company announced Mythos. That’s their latest frontier model, rumored to reshape the global playing field in terms of cybersecurity. Now that the US government is eager to start playing around with Mythos, they’re changing their tune on the whole “supply chain” concern. Axios suggests that the White House hopes to assemble various companies across different sectors to discuss Best Practices for deploying Mythos, and essentially wants to revive the Anthropic collab while publicly saving face. No word on what this means for the domestic surveillance and/or kill-bot policies.

• Musk v. Altman kicks off: On Tuesday, Elon Musk testified in his lawsuit against OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, telling jurors that he’s filed the suit because “it is not okay to steal a charity.” He further insisted that OpenAI’s restructuring must not serve as an ongoing precedent, lest we see the “looting [of] every charity in America,” and made the case that Brockman and Altman took advantage of his money and reputation, before betraying their core principles in a switch to for-profit status. OpenAI attorney William Savitt countered that Musk is attempting to use the court system to undermine a key competitor to his own company, xAI.

• Codex goes Goblin Mode: In less dramatic but certainly more bizarre news, Wired reports that OpenAI’s Codex command-line tool includes specific instructions forbidding AI models to mention an assortment of creatures, both real and fictional. The instructions read: “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” Why was this important for OpenAI to spell out specifically for its models? No one knows, and the company is refusing to explain. CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged the story, however, on social media. He posted on Wednesday that Codex is having a “ChatGPT moment,” before correcting himself: “i meant a goblin moment, sorry.”

TWiST 500

T500 member MoonPay provides crypto infrastructure. Essentially, they help individuals and small businesses to buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies via mainstream payment methods like credit cards, PayPal, or ApplePay. Think express checkout but for cryptocurrencies.

The company announced plans this week to acquire the Israeli crypto security startup Sodot. It seems MoonPay is apparently building out an entire division — MoonPay International — providing crypto and blockchain services for traditional financial companies and funds. That means everything from trading to payments to wallet management and stablecoin issuance.

Sodot, meanwhile, built out a management infrastructure for digital assets, based around tech they call MPC, or Multi-Party Computation. This allows crypto custody managers and wallet providers to split their keys across multiple parties, so the complete key is never in one place, making it far less vulnerable.

As unprotected API keys lie at the heart of a number of devastating crypto hacks in the past, this heightened level of security makes sense for MoonPay, as they plan to routinely service large-scale crypto transactions on an international scale.

MoonPay will acquire Sodot via an all-stock transaction, valuing the Israeli firm at around $100 million, according to Bloomberg. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2281: Jason thinks the Chinese government blocking Meta’s acquisition of Manus might be the biggest AI story of the year. This was the deal that demonstrated that Chinese AI companies could move operations overseas (in this case, to Singapore) and start collaborating with Western companies. That loophole has apparently now closed. PLUS OpenAI and Microsoft changed the terms of their relationship, that viral video purportedly showing a Huawei self-driving vehicle hitting a young pedestrian, and Jason’s reaction to Russell Brand on Piers Morgan’s show.

BONUS: In this Saturday special, Lon and Jason run down some of the week’s biggest news. AngelList’s new USVC fund gives retail investors exposure to some of the world’s biggest and most sought-after private companies, but not every social media user likes the terms. Then, how should the US punish a Special Forces soldier who places wagers on America’s raid on Venezuela? Does it matter if he wagered on “his own team”? Finally, Jason’s thoughts on the controversial NYT podcast about “micro-looting” and “social murder.”

E2280: First up, Lon and Jason welcome Will Edwards, CEO and founder of Firehawk Aerospace. They’re using 3D printed solid rocket propellant to cut production costs, make missile manufacturing safer for employees, and 5x America’s output. Then we’ve got researcher Maruchi Kim, the developer of VueBuds. These camera-equipped earbuds connect to a locally-hosted small language model, giving an AI the ability to “see” whatever the wearer is looking at presently.

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