Annie Palmer

Sam Altman tweet: Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

My goodness.

today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.

Getting mass fired in all lower case x.com/jack/status/...

Border Patrol released Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a 56 yo man, nearly blind with serious medical conditions, at "an old address & his family had since moved" in Buffalo, NY in the winter. "His family was not initially notified." He was found dead. @news4buffalo.bsky.social

www.wivb.com/news/local-n...

Kalshi Suspended a California Politician and a YouTuber for Insider Trading Leading prediction market Kalshi has revealed details of two recent insider trading cases it flagged to authorities, giving a rare look at how the platform enforces its policies.

NEW: Kalshi announces details into two insider trading investigations. WIRED confirms that one suspended account belongs to California congressional candidate Kyle Langford: www.wired.com/story/kalshi...

Head of Amazon’s AGI lab is leaving the company David Luan, the head of Amazon's artificial general intelligence lab, announced on Tuesday that he will be departing the company at the end of the week.

The head of Amazon's AGI Lab, David Luan, is leaving the company, he announced in a LinkedIn post.

Luan joined Amazon through an acqui-hire of his AI agent startup Adept less than two years ago.
www.cnbc.com/2026/02/24/h...

How Jeffrey Epstein Ingratiated Himself With Top Microsoft Executives

An eye-opening story from @ering.bsky.social and Karen Weise on how Jeffrey Epstein worked his way into the inner sanctum of Microsoft's C-suite

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/t...

It's worth reading Rahman's account of what happened to her, it's not that long.

"...the glass of the passenger side window flew across my face. I yelled "I'm disabled!" at the hands grabbing me. An agent said, "TOO LATE.""

www.blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

DoJ cases against protesters keep collapsing as officers’ lies are exposed in court String of embarrassing defeats for prosecutors as experts condemn DoJ effort to cast people as ‘violent perpetrators’

A MN protester accused of assaulting ICE officer had case dropped after vids showed no assault.

LA protester accused of assaulting ICE w/ “hat” had case dropped; judge said govt acted in “bad faith”

In Chicago, 92 ppl were arrested for assault/impeding ICE; 0 convicted

DOJ keeps lying and losing:

This is a huge deal, and the number of people I see pooh-poohing this as just a loss to a supposedly elite group sucks. A) most of the jobs that disappeared were the working-class ones; B) bye bye not just to local coverage but to arts, sports, everything that’s not tech/biz/politics/opinion/advice

fell for it again award

Sleepy time bear

It's Friday night baby

From 'vanlords' to safe parking sites: How RVs became Silicon Valley's housing safety net Across California, the number of people living in vehicles has surged in recent years due to soaring rents.

How RVs became Silicon Valley's housing safety net, by
@katerogerscnbc.bsky.social
www.cnbc.com/2026/02/20/h...

Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot Tech giant blames ‘user error, not AI error’ for incident in December involving its Kiro tool

Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot ft.trib.al/irDnF78

Was trying to remember a Will Forte quote from Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie and accidentally figured out how to make Google’s AI tool shut up

ICE drawdown? Indications point to steady enforcement activity outside the Twin Cities Some people who observe ICE activity are skeptical about a large scale drawdown of agents in the state. There are indications that activity has decreased in the Twin Cities, but has continued outside ...

The feds do not share how many agents are still in Minnesota or how many arrests are taking place, but anecdotal accounts show their activities moving from the Twin Cities (where they encountered strong opposition) to suburbs, exurbs & small towns. (3) www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand ‘Search Party’ Surveillance Beyond Dogs Ring's CEO told staff the feature is “first for finding dogs,” indicating a plan to expand.

SCOOP: Ring’s controversial, AI-powered “Search Party” feature isn’t intended to be limited only to dogs, the company’s founder, Jamie Siminoff, told Ring employees in an internal email obtained by 404 Media.

TV antennas and Super Bowl rehearsals: How prediction market traders seek an edge As prediction markets boom, competition is heating up. So traders go the extra mile for a fraction-of-a-second advantage or to sleuth out information nobody else has. It can lead to a huge payday.

Prediction market traders are “seeking alpha” by buying TV antennas for a millisecond of speed, timing the Super Bowl national anthem rehearsal in person and uncovering not-yet-public press releases hiding in the HTML of websites. Anything for an edge!
www.npr.org/2026/02/17/n...

Jesse Jackson says Amazon diversity data reflect ‘white male supremacy’ For the first time, Amazon.com has released data on workplace diversity, something critics such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson long sought, showing that 37 percent of the company’s global workforce i...

Back when many of the tech industry's leading cos didn't disclose much about the makeup of their workforces, Jesse Jackson was a regular presence in Seattle, pushing Amazon and Microsoft to share and do more.
eg:
www.seattletimes.com/business/jes...
www.seattletimes.com/business/sha...

Waymo is paying DoorDash gig workers to close its robotaxi doors Waymo is relying on humans for certain tasks, showing some of the limitations of its autonomous operations.

Waymo is paying gig workers from DoorDash, Honk to close its robotaxi doors. cnb.cx/4kzLAEM

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.

At least one Meta employee thinks it's a good time to add facial recognition technology to glasses because we're too distracted by fascism to effectively protest www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

Amazon's Ring cancels Flock partnership amid Super Bowl ad backlash Ring's decision to cancel its partnership with Flock comes as tech companies face growing pressure to reexamine their work with federal agencies.

Ring has announced it's dropping its partnership with police tech company Flock Safety. The partnership attracted intense scrutiny after Ring's Super Bowl ad touted an AI pet finding tool and amid calls for tech companies to reexamine their work with ICE, CBP, etc.
www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/a...

Why is ICE seizing people’s phones and documents? • Minnesota Reformer After the federal agents took the shackles off Gust Johnson’s ankles to release him from detainment, he asked for his phone back. That would be staying at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, th...

A 76-year-old veteran and nurse was tackled and detained at the site of Alex Pretti's killing. Agents told him his phone was evidence in an investigation into him assaulting an officer.

“I didn’t assault an officer. I got assaulted by three officers." minnesotareformer.com/2026/02/12/w...

Can't have record low approval ratings if no one is checking the approval ratings...

Ring founder addresses FBI recovery of doorbell footage in Nancy Guthrie disappearance case Ring founder Jamie Siminoff says Ring does not retain deleted footage without a subscription as the FBI confirms video was recovered from backend systems in the Nancy Guthrie disappearance.

Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff spoke to Fox yesterday about the Super Bowl ad backlash. He said he was surprised by the reaction, and people with privacy concerns don't understand how the tool works.

He also claimed the dog finding feature "would not work for humans."
www.foxbusiness.com/technology/r...

Amazon gets FCC approval to launch 4,500 Leo internet satellites The new tranche would bring Amazon's planned constellation to roughly 7,700 satellites.

Amazon just got approval from the FCC to expand its Starlink competitor to roughly 7,700 satellites.

It comes as Amazon seeks an extension from the FCC on a deadline to deploy half of its 3,200+ first gen satellites by July 2026. The agency hasn't ruled on that yet.
www.cnbc.com/2026/02/10/a...

Last October.

On the other hand, no it won't.

YouTube video by MS NOW A Toddler Detained: A 2-Year-Old Girl and Trump’s New Immigration Era

EXCLUSIVE: on Jan 22 we rolled up on a raid happening in South Minneapolis. we had no idea who they were taking. turns out it was a *two year old girl* and her dad on the way back from buying fruit. he had no criminal record. this is their story. youtu.be/yaeXlxJOAXU?...

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

Pursued by federal agents, suburban ICE observers remain resolved After a frightening pursuit by federal agents, suburban ICE observers say fear hasn’t stopped them from protecting their communities.

ICE observers in the Twin Cities suburbs say they fear being injured or killed, but are dedicated to being on the right side of history. They say working together has brought them community and connection. And they're seeing shifts in attitudes among their neighbors. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...