Finally, it has my two favorite things: drop-bar handlebars and a dropper seat post. I guess I should disclose here that my everyday analog ride is also a gravel bike, and that personally, I like to tool around on a long, relaxed frame with my hands sloppily splayed this way…
College Campuses Are in Upheaval Over Faculty Ties to Epstein
Many of Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to prominent universities and academics, which he maintained through monetary donations and luxury gifts, have been known since his 2019 arrest and suicide in a Manhattan jail cell. After the US Justice Department published 3 million new documents related to criminal investigations of the late…
Defense Secretary summons Anthropic’s Amodei over military use of Claude
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is calling in Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon on Tuesday morning to discuss the military use of Claude, according to reporting from Axios. The meeting comes as the Pentagon threatens to declare Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — a label typically reserved for foreign…
VPN flaws allowed Chinese hackers to compromise dozens of Ivanti customers, says report
In February 2021, software giant Ivanti discovered that Chinese hackers had breached the network of Pulse Secure, one of its subsidiaries that provided VPN appliances to dozens of companies and government agencies around the world, according to new reporting by Bloomberg. The hackers exploited preexisting vulnerabilities in Pulse Secure’s VPN…
Canva acquires startups working on animation and marketing
On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced the dual acquisition of startups Cavalry, which works on animation, and Mango AI, which works on improving ad performance. UK-based Cavalry works on 2D motion animation for different verticals such as advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva said that Cavalry’s tooling will…
Spotify rolls out AI-powered Prompted Playlists to the UK and other markets
After initially testing its AI-powered “Prompted Playlist” feature in New Zealand and recently launching in the U.S. and Canada, Spotify announced on Monday that it’s rolling out the tool to Premium subscribers in the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and Sweden. The Prompted Playlist feature allows users to create custom playlists by…
Stripe, PayPal Ventures bet on India’s Xflow to fix cross-border B2B payments
Xflow, an Indian fintech startup, has secured backing from both Stripe and PayPal Ventures in a $16.6 million funding round. The investment comes as the company works to carve out a position in cross-border B2B payments, a market still dominated by banks and manual processes. The Series A round was…
Guide Labs debuts a new kind of interpretable LLM
The challenge of wrangling a deep learning model is often understanding why it does what it does: Whether it’s xAI’s repeated struggle sessions to fine-tune Grok’s odd politics, ChatGPT’s struggles with sycophancy, or run-of-the-mill hallucinations, plumbing through a neural network with billions of parameters isn’t easy. Guide Labs, a San…
OpenAI calls in the consultants for its enterprise push
OpenAI is beefing up partnerships with four major consulting giants as the AI company looks to grow its enterprise business in 2026. OpenAI announced on Monday the “Frontier Alliances,” a signal that the AI lab is willing to try different approaches to get enterprises to meaningfully adopt its technology. The…
Google’s Cloud AI leads on the three frontiers of model capability
As a product VP at Google Cloud, Michael Gerstenhaber works mostly on Vertex AI, the company’s unified platform for deploying enterprise AI. It gives him a high-level view of how companies are actually using AI models, and what still needs to be done to unleash the potential of agentic AI.…