Anthropic is blocking its services from Chinese-controlled companies, saying it's taking steps to prevent a US adversary from advancing in AI and threatening American national security. From a report: The San Francisco-based startup is widening existing restrictions on "authoritarian" regimes to cover any company that's majority-owned by entities from countries such as China. That includes their overseas operations, it said in a statement. Foreign-based subsidiaries could be used to access its technology and further military applications, the startup added. Anthropic's Dario Amodei has publicly advocated technological sanctions on China, particularly after DeepSeek stunned Silicon Valley with an advanced model this year. While Anthropic didn't name any companies, Chinese big tech firms from Alibaba to ByteDance have joined DeepSeek in an intensifying race to build AI services that can rival the likes of OpenAI in the US. Chinese entities "could use our capabilities to develop applications and services that ultimately serve adversarial military and intelligence services and broader authoritarian objectives," Anthropic said in its Friday post.

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Much of the world favors protecting 30% of the world's land and water for nature by 2030, according to new research that has found overwhelming public support for the goal across eight countries on five continents. The Guardian: Nearly 200 nations agreed in 2022 to set aside 30% of the world's land and 30% of marine areas for nature. But just 17.6% of the world's land and 8.6% of the seas are now under global protection, and more than 100 nations are less than halfway to meeting the target, which was established under the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Governments will need to implement swift changes if they are to achieve the target within the next five years. But setting aside more space for nature can be a political pitfall. Often it can mean restricting people's access to land, halting resource extraction and relocating human settlements. These issues, along with possible effects on economic growth, are often cited by countries as barriers to expanding protecting areas. Research published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, suggests that more than 80% of the public across eight sampled countries support the policy.

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Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton has warned that AI will concentrate wealth among a small elite while impoverishing most workers. The computer scientist, who pioneered neural network research in the 1980s, told Financial Times that rich people will use AI to replace workers, creating massive unemployment and profit increases. Hinton, who left Google in 2023 after selling his AI startup for $44 million a decade earlier, dismissed universal basic income as insufficient to address human dignity concerns from job losses. The 77-year-old physicist predicts superintelligent AI will arrive within five to twenty years. He blamed capitalism rather than AI technology itself for the coming economic disruption, stating the system ensures AI will primarily benefit the wealthy rather than solve grand problems like hunger or poverty.

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