AI use among workers may boost productivity but could also lead to cognitive overload and burnout. Getty Images AI use among workers may boost productivity but could also lead to cognitive overload and burnout. Getty Images One of the great hopes for artificial intelligence—at least, among…

Oracle Layoffs: Tech major Oracle is planning to slash up to 30,000 jobs to fund AI data centres, a new report has said. According to a report by CIO citing research published this week by investment bank TD Cowen, Oracle will also be selling some of its activities as US banks pull back from…

ChatGPT is driving a rise in reports of organised ritual abuse, UK experts have said, as survivors of “satanic” sexual violence use the AI tool for therapy. Police say organised ritual abuse and “witchcraft, spirit possession and spiritual abuse” (WSPRA) against children is under-reported in the UK.…

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By the summer of 1945, West Berlin had been reduced to rubble. Allied bombing, the Soviet ground assault and Hitler's insistence on Götterdämmerung had destroyed roughly a third of the city's buildings and left most of the rest damaged. There was no functioning government, no reliable electricity,…

The US military reportedly used Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, to inform its attack on Iran despite Donald Trump’s decision, announced hours earlier, to sever all ties with the company and its artificial intelligence tools. The use of Claude during the massive joint US-Israel bombardment of Iran that…

The U.S. military has formally designated artificial intelligence firm Anthropic a supply chain risk, a senior Pentagon official and a source directly familiar with the situation told CBS News, a sweeping move that could cut it off from military contracts. The Trump administration and Anthropic —…

HEADLINES New Models from OpenAI and Google Although GPT-5.3's non-coding version didn't land last week, OpenAI's release of GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark is a big deal for AI coding. The model serves inference at 1,000 tokens per second — roughly 15x faster than regular GPT-5.3 Codex — but comes with real…

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Markets |Cybersecurity Cyber Stocks Slide as Anthropic Unveils Claude Security Tool Contact us:Provide news feedback or report an error Confidential tip?Send a tip to our reporters Site feedback:Take our Survey By February 20, 2026 at 6:43 PM UTC Updated on February 20, 2026 at 9:22 PM UTC Takeaways…

Anthropic, the wildly successful AI company that has cast itself as the most safety-conscious of the top research labs, is dropping the central pledge of its flagship safety policy, company officials tell TIME. In 2023, Anthropic committed to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee in…

For the millions of people across the United States who have spent the last month digging themselves out of above-average levels of snow and ice, this winter has felt especially long and harsh. But the typical winter is actually getting shorter in 80% of major US cities scrutinized by researchers,…

Get our Tracker: ICE newsletter to see what’s happening with immigration enforcement and what’s coming next By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy. Minutes after Donald Trump announced that the US…

SEATTLE (AP) — Press 2 for Spanish ... accent? For months, callers to the Washington state Department of Licensing who have requested automated service in Spanish have instead heard an AI voice speaking English in a strong Spanish accent. The agency has since apologized and says it fixed the…

While OpenAI locks down Washington, Anthropic is locking down users and rocketing to the top of the App Store. Anthropic has been sidelined in Washington following a public dispute with the Department of Defense over how its AI models would be deployed. President Donald Trump ordered federal…

It started on Friday, February 20th, with a limited research preview. Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude family of models, announced Claude Code Security, a tool that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review. The announcement was…

Israel attacked Iran on Saturday morning, an Israeli military spokesman said. Strikes were coordinated with the US military, US and Israeli media reported. Explosions were heard in central Tehran, with an apparent strike near the offices of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The attack came…

Introduction After years of exponential growth, the recent capability jump to agentic AI is set to upend the world as we know it beginning in 2026. Here is the uncomfortable truth: AI is no longer just a tool for economic growth; it is a near-direct substitute for human cognitive labor. In the near…

An outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu has killed more than two dozen elephant seal pups in California, leading to the temporary closure of seal-viewing areas at a popular Bay Area park. California’s Año Nuevo state park is home to an elephant seal colony with about 5,000 seals during…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Thursday the artificial intelligence company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s demands to allow wider use of its technology. The maker of the AI chatbot Claude said in a statement that it’s not walking away from negotiations, but…

Preface What if our AI bullishness continues to be right...and what if that’s actually bearish? What follows is a scenario, not a prediction. This isn’t bear porn or AI doomer fan-fiction. The sole intent of this piece is modeling a scenario that’s been relatively underexplored. Our friend Alap Shah…

In a note on Saturday, he recalled economist Robert Solow’s quip from the 1980s as PCs were transforming the economy: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” The same thing can be said today about AI, Slok wrote, noting that data on employment, productivity and…

Eli Block – February 20, 2026 Ramp Security Engineering proactively found, validated, and fixed nearly 100 latent security issues in our backend codebase without a human in the loop (until PR review) by deploying a team of home-grown agents and a bit of queuing. The fixed issues were novel: they had…

A friend left a party at 9:30 on a Saturday. Not tired. Not sick. He wanted to get back to his agents. Nobody questions it anymore. Half the room is thinking the same thing. The other half are probably checking the progress of their agents. At a party. All the parties are sober now. Young people…

As we embed AI agents into our lives and workflows, we’re learning the (sometimes surprising) ways in which they outperform human beings, and other ways in which they fall short. And occasionally, we find an example where agents, paradoxically, are both better and worse than their human users. Case…

HDD capacity from one of the world's largest manufacturers has started to run dry, according to Western Digital's CEO, as major LTAs have been signed out. Western Digital's Consumer Share Drops to 5%, as Enterprise Demand Gobbles Up the Supply Well, the ongoing AI supercycle has disrupted supply…

Steve Yegge 13 min read·2 days ago This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on. I first started noticing a concerning new phenomenon a month ago, just after the new year, where people were overworking due to AI. This week I’m suddenly seeing a…

The Temptation of St. Anthony in the Desert, Master of Bonnat (15th c.) In 1972, researchers offered children from the Bing Nursery School at Stanford a simple choice. Left alone with a single marshmallow, they were told they could eat it now or wait fifteen minutes and receive two instead. Years…

A leading Hollywood figure has warned “it’s likely over for us”, after watching a widely disseminated AI-generated clip featuring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting. Rhett Reese, co-writer of Deadpool & Wolverine, Zombieland and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t was reacting to a 15-second video showing…

Right now, many companies are worried about how to get more employees to use AI. After all, the promise of AI reducing the burden of some work—drafting routine documents, summarizing information, and debugging code—and allowing workers more time for high-value tasks is tantalizing. But are they…

Hey everyone! On the flip side of last week's issue about how AI exposes a significant attack surface, this week we're exploring the inflection point in offensive security tooling. Over the past few weeks, I've been watching new releases drop that genuinely change how we approach testing. Not…

Maybe you, like me, read Matt Shumer's viral piece about AI eliminating 50% of white-collar jobs in the next 1-5 years and maybe you, like me, thought… Oh. Isht. It’s well-crafted, detailed, and structured to make you feel like you're getting the inside scoop from someone who knows. (And that…

Get updates Follow @mattshumer_ Get early access to future reviews and builds. Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock market was doing…

Gift a 404 Media subscription to a friend. Chatbots may be able to pass medical exams, but that doesn’t mean they make good doctors, according to a new, large-scale study of how people get medical advice from large language models. The controlled study of 1,298 UK-based participants, published today…

WASHINGTON (AP) — A leading U.S. health official on Sunday urged people to get inoculated against the measles at a time of outbreaks across several states and as the United States is at risk of losing its measles elimination status. “Take the vaccine, please,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Centers for…

Get Webworm straight to your inbox Support my work, and get my weird wormholes delivered directly to you! Hi, Can I begin assuring you that today's Webworm is positive and hopeful. And useful. But it has to start with a short rant for context. Last week I felt like I wanted to extract part of my…

We plan our lives like we're editing a movie trailer. The trip to Portugal, or the product launch, or the transformation photo at the gym. The big moment where everything crystallizes into meaning. We accumulate these peaks in our imagination, and then arrange them into a montage that proves our…

Fears that software companies are facing an extinction event are exaggerated, but other dangers are real Feb. 4, 2026 at 11:49 am ET Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, left, with Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, at a conference. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News Artificial intelligence won’t destroy the software…