Business & Tech Meta Acquires 'Social Network for AI Agents' Moltbook, While OpenAI Hires One of Its Vibe Coders Yes, we are apparently arriving at the day, or we've already arrived there, when AI agents interact with one another and "gossip" about their respective systems on a social networking platform.
SF News Grammarly’s New AI Tools Use Experts’ Identities Without Their Permission The SF-based writing app Grammarly, recently rebranded as Superhuman, launched a set of AI-enabled tools, including expert reviews run by bots that scrape the published works of academics and assume their identities without their permission while offering questionable feedback.
Business & Tech Sam Altman Admits Friday Pentagon Deal Was Rushed, Adds More Safeguards to Contract Continuing the tradition of tech CEOs appearing to be transparent performing their mea culpas on social media, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to Xitter Monday to say a few things about that rushed Friday deal with the Pentagon, following the collapse of a deal with Anthropic.
Business & Tech East Bay Man Scraps Ballot Measures Due to Pressure from OpenAI, Says He Was ‘Naive’ for Trying An East Bay man says OpenAI pressured him into dropping two AI ballot measures he introduced that would’ve created stricter regulations after it was revealed he’s the stepbrother of a senior Anthropic employee, but he says he wrote the proposals himself — with legal help from chatbots.
Business & Tech Trump Administration Still Used Anthropic's Claude In Iran Strikes, Hours After Trump Banned Anthropic Despite Trump calling SF’s Anthropic a “Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about” and banning government use of their AI tool Claude, the administration still had to use Claude in its Iran attacks.
Business & Tech Oakland-Based Fintech Block Lays Off Nearly Half Its Staff, Because of AI It could be the first of many canaries in this coal mine, but Block announced a mass layoff on Thursday. And CEO Jack Dorsey is making no secret that this is about AI supplanting the need for human workers.
Business & Tech ChatGPT Has Now Been Used In Two High-Profile, Violent Attacks, Raising Serious Safety and Liability Questions Not only did the unstable Green Beret with PTSD who blew up his Tesla outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas last year use ChatGPT to plan his attack, the Canadian woman who committed a mass school shooting earlier this month also asked the chatbot for help.
Business & Tech Pentagon Trying to Force SF-Based Anthropic to Weaken AI Security for Killing Purposes, Anthropic Not Backing Down Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth complains that it’s “woke AI” that SF’s own Anthropic won’t give him AI-controlled weapons and massive domestic surveillance, and is now threatening to blacklist the company.
Business & Tech Anthropic's Pentagon Contract In Jeopardy Over Questions About AI Spying San Francisco-based AI company Anthropic, which launched as an ostensibly more ethically driven AI enterprise than competitors like OpenAI, appears to be hitting an impasse in its contract negotiations with the Pentagon.
Business & Tech AI Insiders Are Sounding Alarms, and the Guy Who Wrote That Viral Post Says He's Not Being Alarmist Is AI coming for most of your jobs? Maybe not. But some of them? Yes, probably. And we're seeing another wave of AI industry insiders speaking out publicly and making some grave statements.
Business & Tech Forget the 'Crypto Bowl,' This Super Bowl Will Be Chock Full of AI Ads — Here Are Five of Them Expect all the big players in AI to be spending lavishly on ads during the Super Bowl this year, including rivals OpenAI and Anthropic — with the latter taking not one but two swings at its bigger competitor.
Business & Tech Giant Holographic Schlong on Muni Is Actually an AI Ad, Muni Yanks It From Circulation A real cock-up in the annals of Muni advertising, as users noted what appeared to be a holographic penis on the side of a bus, though it’s just an AI company ad that may have been approved willy-nilly.
Business & Tech It Looks Like Elon Musk's Suit Against OpenAI Over Abandoned Nonprofit Mission Is Headed to Trial It had seemed earlier like Elon Musk's dogged, seemingly vengeful pursuit of OpenAI, which he co-founded, over its swerve toward being a for-profit enterprise, wasn't going anywhere. But a ruling from judge on Thursday points to the parties heading to a trial sometime this year.
Business & Tech California Now Investigating xAI Over Grok's Non-Consensual Deepfake Imagery Elon Musk is facing his umpteenth controversy this week as the worldwide outcry grows over the Grok chatbot's image-editing capability, which combined with X has created a tool for producing and spreading non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes and child sexual abuse material.
Business & Tech xAI's Grok Being Blocked, Investigated By Multiple Countries Over the Creation of Sexualized Deepfakes Elon Musk's no-holds-barred AI chatbot Grok is again having one of its holds barred as regulators across the globe are balking at its widespread production of sexualized images, based on real images posted to X.
Business & Tech SF-Based Instacart Dumps Its ‘AI Price-Adjusting’ Tool That Charged Some Customers 23% More for the Same Items After a report that found Instacart was using an AI tool that charged some customers as much as 23% more for the exact same items, the shopping platform now says they’re abandoning that tool following some serious blowback.
Business & Tech Altman, Musk, and Zuckerberg Named Person(s) of the Year by Time Magazine, as 'Architects of AI' Time Magazine, for what it's worth these days in terms of cultural relevance, has named the 'Architects of AI' as its Person of the Year for 2025, and these multiple persons include Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Business & Tech SF-Based Catering Website Swaps Restaurants’ Real Food Pictures With AI Pictures, Restaurants Get Pissed These bagels claim to be Boichik Bagels on the catering website Forkable, but they are fake AI-generated bagels, as perhaps evidenced by the oddly uniform size of the bagel slices, all slightly larger than a normal bagel half. Now restaurants listed on the website are furious.
Business & Tech East Bay Man Arrested for Alleged Scheme to Smuggle Nvidia GPUs and AI Chips to China The DOJ arrested a San Leandro man and three others as part of an alleged conspiracy to evade US trade laws by smuggling powerful Nvidia GPUs and AI chips to China through Thailand and Malaysia. The man allegedly bragged that his dad did the same work for the CCP.
Business & Tech Anthropic Says Its AI Chatbot Was Used By Chinese Hackers for Large-Scale Cyber Attack In what sounds like both a word of warning and weirdly a little bit of bragging, SF-based Anthropic says that its AI chatbot Claude was used by state-sponsored hackers in China to commit a large-scale cyberattack on American companies.
Business & Tech OpenAI Not Looking at an IPO Anytime Soon, CFO Says OpenAI, which had previously been thought to be looking at an IPO in the next two years, may be holding off on that plan, according to comments made Wednesday by the company's CFO.
Arts & Entertainment Fake, Satirical Startup 'Replacement.AI' Puts Up Haunting Billboards In SF, NYC A satirical ad campaign from some as-yet-unidentified pranksters/performance artists has spent real money on multiple billboards in San Francisco and New York that satirize some of the "stop hiring humans" messaging of actual AI startups.
SF News AI Companies Now ‘Disrupting’ SF Rental Market By Giving People Free Apartments, Rent Stipends It will make renters sick that they have to compete with AI sector workers whose cash-flush companies pay their rent for them. It will make renters even sicker to hear those AI companies do this to make their workplaces like “a frat house.”
Business & Tech Sam Altman Is Looking Forward to When AI Takes His CEO Job So He Can Be a Full-Time Farmer Aspiring farmer Sam Altman is excited to take on the role full-time once his side hustle as OpenAI CEO is made obsolete by artificial intelligence. Altman anticipates machines will have the capability to fully outsmart humans by 2030.
SF News Day Around the Bay: Anthropic AI to Pay Authors, Publishers $1.5 Billion in Copyright Settlement Oakland-born figure skater Alysa Liu won’t be performing to the d4vd song she’d chosen for the Milan Olympics; Sinclair and Nexstar will be airing Jimmy Kimmel at their ABC affiliate stations Friday; and Anthropic has settled a lawsuit with authors and publishers alleging copyright infringement.
