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Anthropic's Super-Dangerous New AI & The U.S.-Iran Ceasefire Rundown

Elon Musk Wants $75 Billion & RFK Jr.'s New Podcast

Hi readers, happy Thursday! Today we’re covering Anthropic’s dangerous new AI model, the U.S.-Iran ceasefire, how heat waves are getting deadlier, Israel’s war with Lebanon, RFK Jr.’s new podcast, NATO’s visit to Washington, and SpaceX’s IPO.

"You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old." — George Burns

This AI Model Changes Everything (Again)

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AI firm Anthropic is making another one of those “this AI model changes everything!!!” claims that we’ve become all too familiar with. On Tuesday, the company said that its new model, a coding model named Claude Mythos Preview, is too good at hacking to be released to the public. Instead, the company is lending the AI model to the world’s biggest tech companies, which will use Mythos to uncover and fix any security vulnerabilities in their own systems.

According to Anthropic, Mythos is extremely capable at carrying out autonomous security research, to the point that it’s already uncovered “thousands” of vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser. “This model is good at finding vulnerabilities that would be well understood and findable by security researchers,” said one team lead at Anthropic. “At the same time, it has found vulnerabilities, and in some cases crafted exploits, sophisticated enough that they were both missed by literally decades of security researchers, as well as all the automated tools designed to find them.”

“The goal is both to raise awareness and to give good actors a head start on the process of securing open-source and private infrastructure and code,” said Anthropic’s chief science officer. The initiative is called Project Glasswing, and involves tech giants like Google and Microsoft, as well as other industry mainstays like Cisco and the Linux Foundation – the companies will have access to a pool of up to $100 million in Claude compute credits to find vulnerabilities in their systems. Outside of that, it’s not entirely clear what Anthropic plans to do with the model, besides using it to drum up more hype for its other products.

The Shakiest Ceasefire Ever

If you’re uncertain about what exactly is happening with the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, don’t worry. We’re confused too, so here’s a timeline of what’s happening with Trump’s threats on Iran’s civilian infrastructure, and the kind-of ceasefire deal that stopped the war (for now).

After President Trump threatened to wipe out Iran if the country didn’t agree to a ceasefire deal by Tuesday night, the U.S. and Iran appeared to reach a shaky peace deal just an hour before Trump’s deadline. According to Trump, Iran’s leaders finally presented him with a “workable” ceasefire deal, which would see the country reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for a 14-day ceasefire. The two sides, in theory, will use those two weeks of peace to bring an end to the six-week war.

But of course, things got a little muddy on Wednesday. The U.S. and Israel claimed that the deal did not cover hostilities between Israel and Lebanon, but Iran, Pakistan, and Lebanon all stated that the ceasefire did apply to the neighboring Levantine countries. When Israel launched airstrikes on Lebanon (more on those below) and Lebanon fired retaliatory attacks back, Iran said it  was re-closing the Strait of Hormuz because the ceasefire deal had been broken. Maritime data shows that a few ships were able to slip through the critical shipping artery while it was supposed to be open, but no traffic is moving through the area at time of writing. It’s not clear what the Trump regime plans to do about the closure, or if the strait is actually closed for business.

Overheating On The Rise

Photo by Pixabay

  • According to a new study, climate change is creating more “non-survivable” conditions for humans across the globe. The study examines how the human body responds to heat waves – normally, we use something called “wet bulb temperature” to determine how the human body handles heat waves, but the paper’s authors came up with an alternative to wet bulb temperature that also takes age into account.

  • The researchers then applied the new model to six heat waves that occurred between 2003 and 2024, and found that all of them involved potentially deadly periods. That analysis explains why those six heat waves killed thousands of people across the planet. The data showed that each event featured “non-survivable” periods for people over the age of 65 without access to shade, and two of the heat waves also involved “non-survivable” periods for seniors who did have access to shade.

  • “Conditions that threaten human life are already here and the risk moving forward is almost certainly much greater than we previously thought,” said one of the study’s co-authors. The fact that we’re already on the edge of survivability is so alarming because global temperatures are only rising from here on out.

The Goings-On In Lebanon

  • Yesterday, Israel launched a massive wave of airstrikes on civilian population centers across Lebanon, killing over 250 people and injuring more than 1,000 others. Apparently, Iran and Lebanon both believed that Lebanon was covered by Iran’s ceasefire with the U.S., but Israel and the U.S. have said that that’s not the case. “The scale of the killing and destruction in Lebanon today is nothing ​short of horrific,” said U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk. “Such carnage, within hours of agreeing to a ceasefire with Iran, defies belief.” The massive bombing campaign made Wednesday the deadliest day in the Lebanon-Israel conflict, which began on March 2. 

  • Meanwhile, other Israeli conduct in Lebanon has also pissed off European countries. Yesterday, Spain and Italy criticized the IDF for attacking their U.N. peacekeeping troops present in the country – over the past few days, the IDF has apparently detained a Spanish peacekeeper in Lebanon and also fired shots at an Italian convoy. The diplomatic responses indicate Europe’s growing frustration with Israel as it wages a ground war in Lebanon, continues airstrikes in Gaza, and ramps up its efforts to create new settlements in the West Bank. 

Additional World News

The Secretary In The Studio

  • You know how it’s an insult to tell someone they have a face for radio? Well, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a voice for silent films. Unfortunately, Kennedy seems to have missed that memo, and has decided to start a podcast. The new show, imaginatively titled “The Secretary Kennedy Podcast,” is supposed to kick off “a new era of radical transparency in government,” at least according to the health secretary.

  • “This is part of our larger strategy to bring the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) message to as wide an audience as we can,” said Liam Nahill, the digital director at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “We’re kind of bringing podcasting into the government as an official form and arm of our messaging,” said the ironically-named Tyler Burger, the producer of the new podcast.

  • Besides inflicting permanent damage to listeners’ ears, Kennedy’s show will most likely focus on the Health Secretary’s MAHA agenda, which seeks to address chronic disease by changing food nutrition regulations. Oh, and our health secretary is also dipping his toes into investigative journalism – “We’re going to name the names of the forces that obstruct the paths to public health,” Kennedy rasped in a trailer for the new show.

So, Are We Okay?

  • Yesterday, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte visited the White House for a closed-door meeting with President Trump. The meeting took place just a week after the president threatened to pull the U.S. out of the military alliance, a move that would deprive NATO of the backing of the most powerful military in the world.

  • While the White House didn’t offer any immediate takeaways from Rutte’s visit, press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged Trump’s threat to leave NATO before the meeting. “I think it’s something the president will be discussing in a couple of hours with Secretary-General Rutte,” she said.

  • Luckily for Rutte, his trip to the White House didn’t only involve a meeting with Trump. He also met with a more, uh, “normal” politician in Marco Rubio beforehand – according to the State Department, the two diplomats discussed U.S.-NATO cooperation in both Iran and Ukraine, and they also reportedly talked about “increasing coordination and burden shifting with NATO allies,” meaning NATO’s other members will likely be spending more money on their militaries in the near future.

Additional USA News

 

SpaceX Prepares For Takeoff

  • Elon is back in the headlines like a cockroach in a kitchen. Why? The tech gazillionaire is looking to take SpaceX, his aerospace firm, public later this year. In order to secure what would be the biggest IPO in history, Musk is preparing to embark on a massive press tour, which will begin this June with an in-person event attended by 1,500 retail investors. 

  • Musk is reportedly looking to bring SpaceX onto a public stock exchange with a valuation of $2 trillion. In order to raise $75 billion from non-professional, non-institutional investors, the tech billionaire is apparently ready to sell up to 30% of the company’s shares to retail investors. “Retail is going to be a critical part of this and ​a bigger part than any IPO in history,” said Bret Johnsen, SpaceX’s chief financial officer. According to Johnsen, the company is mostly looking for normal people to invest in the company, as “those are folks that have been incredibly supportive of us and of Elon for a long time, and we want to make ​sure that we recognise that.” 

  • Back in February, SpaceX purchased xAI, Musk’s AI firm that itself owns X (fka Twitter). Before that buyout, SpaceX was reportedly worth $1.25 trillion – at least according to Bloomberg – and its valuation has swelled to $2 trillion over the past few weeks. SpaceX is expected to bring in $20 billion in revenue this year, with xAI bringing in just $1 billion of that total. The company is slated to make its prospectus publicly available in late May, after which you can expect to see a lot more headlines about Mr. Musk. Consider yourself warned!

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