Kevin Nguyen

How OpenAI caved to the Pentagon on AI surveillance The law doesn’t say what Sam Altman claims it does.

NEW: On Friday night when OpenAI announced its Pentagon deal, people immediately challenged Sam Altman's claims. Why, they asked, would the DoD suddenly agree to red lines when it had clearly said it would never budge?

The answer, sources told me, is that it didn't.
www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Across social media and the Al industry, people immediately began to challenge Altman's claim. Why, they asked, would the Pentagon suddenly agree to the red lines that it had said — in no uncertain terms — that it would never do so? The answer, sources told The Verge, is that the Pentagon didn't budge. OpenAl agreed to follow laws that have allowed for mass surveillance in the past, while insisting they protect its red lines. One source familiar with the Pentagon's negotiations with Al companies confirmed that OpenAl's deal is much softer than the one Anthropic was pushing for, thanks largely to three words: "any lawful use." In negotiations, the person said, the Pentagon wouldn't back down on its desire to collect and analyze bulk data on Americans. If you look line-by-line at the OpenAl terms, the source said, every aspect of it boils down to: If it's technically legal, then the US military can use OpenAl's technology to carry it out. And over the past decades, the US government has stretched the definition of "technically legal" to cover sweeping mass surveillance programs - and more.

Sam Altman got played and spun it like a win - @haydenfield.bsky.social has the scoop from a weekend’s worth of reporting from inside the Pentagon AI negotiations. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

“Rutherford Statement on Operation Epic Furry” “Furry” highlighted by me http://rutherford.house.gov/media/press-releases/rutherford-statement-operation-epic-furry

Google result showing the presser for Rutherford’s statement on “Operation Epic Furry” was posted 11 hours ago

What a time to be alive

listen you removed her because you didn’t want look at her feet anymore

One million percent psyched that ASMEs and the National Magazine Awards honored @theverge.com art team's work with FIVE nominations. SO proud of our scrappy little team and stuff we made. Threading the eye candy: asme.memberclicks.net/national-mag...

We don’t have to have unsupervised killer robots It’s the day of the Pentagon’s looming ultimatum for Anthropic. The situation has left employees at some companies with defense contracts feeling betrayed.

NEW: Amid the Anthropic-Pentagon situation, all week, I've been speaking to employees at OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and more companies, who have expressed similar feelings about the changing moral landscapes internally.

Here's what's going on. (Gift link) www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

I think the coolest thing we do at The Verge is publish comics. This one is brilliant (and behind the scenes, an absolute beast of engineering)

lmao true you really will love dispatch tho

ah yes the game i told you to get MONTHS ago

what writer were they posing as?

A Slackbot reminder with the text above

Reminder: A Slave ended

we finally reached the end of this calendar event i accidentally made 12 years ago

i do this constantly but i’m like… maybe i lent it to someone?

💙

zohran responded to a historic blizzard but did not respond to my text asking if i’m beautiful

bridget read is real consistent

found a note on my notes app titled “inspo” and it’s completely blank

is this different than linking to, like, a tweet or someone's personal blog post though? (genuinely curious! not arguing)

the screenshot i am seeing go around from the NYMag story—the writer just linked to a piece of fanfic, but did not name the author. this is still not okay?

Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats trom non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works 1 am extremely confident in saying it doesn't work the same way as the first one.

A.I Isn’t People www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-...

Billions of dollars later and still nobody knows what an Xbox is Maybe we’ll never know.

wrote about the mess at xbox www.theverge.com/games/883159...

I wrote some of the editor's note but my primary contribution to the project is this perfect Kickstarter reward

Some exciting news! I'm working with a bunch of talented editors, illustrators, and writers to put together Golden Goal, a one-off print magazine about the 2026 World Cup. If you're interested in supporting us, we're currently doing a small fundraiser www.kickstarter.com/projects/mag...

what’s funny is out of that bunch i kinda think norah jones does the best job? but: a bewildering movie through and through

me surviving any arc raiders run

I’m teaching a weeklong creative nonfiction seminar in Paris this coming spring. More info here : www.wice-paris.org/paris-writer...

sometimes we are just at karaoke

uh did you just tell a reporter to kill herself?

Please do not let Will’s tantrum over getting the attention he wanted distract you from the amazing Minneapolis coverage Gaby has been producing all month (all while also writing a book because she’s just that good)

the phil spencer story is interesting bc internally at Microsoft he was probably, maybe, a champion of the gaming division but publicly? oversaw a decade of pretty complete failure. blew an impressive lead and got lapped, multiple times