Big Tech Companies

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🚁 1 tech thing: School safety drones

Photo: Campus Guardian Angel A Colorado charter school opening next month could become the state's first school to install drones designed to confront shooters, Axios' Robert Sanchez reports. John Adams Academy is joining a growing national experiment with a system called Campus Guardian Angel. 🚔 The small drones emit high-pitched chirping noises, shoot pepper balls and can ram suspects at speeds of nearly 60 mph. Pilots in Austin would use drone cameras and school maps to find shooters and send live video to police. Yes, but: The company's drones have yet to be used in an actual school shooting. Go deeper.

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OpenAI says its AI technology acted on its own in an ‘unprecedented’ hack of another company AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own. Read more.

Why this matters: The disclosure comes amid heightened concerns about the cybersecurity capabilities of powerful models. In June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release.    Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue said he spent the past 24 hours working with OpenAI, “and we strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part. It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!" Delangue added that it “might be the first incident of its kind.”

RELATED COVERAGE ➤ Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot

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AI optimist alliance

Two of the most powerful CEOs in tech — Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg — are making separate, loud bets on AI optimism this week.

• Why it matters: Together, the CEOs represent a significant counterweight to the voices urging Washington to pump the brakes.

In an hourlong interview with me for our "Behind the Curtain" video series, Huang railed against AI doomerism, implicitly challenging fellow tech CEOs who emphasize the technology's potentially catastrophic risks.

• "The fact that this is going to be the end of humanity — it's complete nonsense," Huang said. "The fact that this is going to destroy half of the American jobs is complete nonsense."
• Scaring workers and companies away from using AI, he said, poses the greater danger.

Zuckerberg strikes the same note this morning in a video ad and Facebook post that argues Meta's focus on connecting the world will only be strengthened by AI — a shot at rivals he says promote fear and a dystopian vision of the future, Axios' Sara Fischer writes.

• The ad says: "Some people will have you believe AI will make us less connected, that it's going to leave us behind. We couldn't disagree more. … Call us optimists, call us dreamers, call us whatever the hell you want. But we're betting on people, and we like those odds."
• In his Facebook post, Zuckerberg says Meta "has always believed in giving people the power to share, connect, and shape your world in the ways you want. … We're focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone."

👀 What we're watching: In an upcoming policy memo, Zuckerberg is expected to echo Huang on open source and competition (Let all models rip!) and will put a heavy emphasis on getting free AI into the hands of consumers, a big differentiator with Meta's competitors, we're told.

🎬 Huang — who is influential with the Trump administration — told me policymakers should consult more than "one or two" CEOs and avoid restricting AI based on scenarios that haven't materialized.

• He also suggested some companies invoke safety concerns to win favorable regulations: "Some of the companies hope that the government would be helpful in creating regulations to their advantage."

🖼️ The big picture: Anthropic and OpenAI have pushed Washington to take the most advanced systems and their potential risks seriously.

• Critics say those campaigns could also entrench their market position.
• Washington is also deciding what to do about powerful open-source models emerging from China.

🔬 Zoom in: Officials accuse Chinese firms of stealing from American models to build their own as they rapidly become more competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic.

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent yesterday threatened sanctions against Chinese firms conducting what he called "industrial-scale distillation attacks."
• Earlier that day, the White House's top science official accused Chinese startup Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic's technology to build its fast-rising Kimi model.

The bottom line: Asked whether he feared the administration could overcorrect, Huang said yes.

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👀 Anthropic's new drop

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

Anthropic's newest release — Claude Opus 5 — is designed to handle many tasks almost as well as its most powerful model, Fable, at half the price, the company said. Why it matters: Opus 5 is Anthropic's fourth Claude 5 model release in less than two months, underscoring how AI deployment has shifted from blockbuster launches to rapid enhancements in capability, cost and speed, Axios' Madison Mills writes. Zoom in: Anthropic is positioning Opus 5 as its cheaper, everyday model for enterprises, knowledge workers and developers. Its launch comes as Chinese models are rivaling U.S. counterparts in sophistication while beating them on price. Read the announcement ...

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Anthropic's lonely island

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

Anthropic spent this winter and spring as the darling of America's AI boom, conquering the frontier while casting itself as the industry's moral conscience. By summer, the Claude maker found itself alone on an island of its own principles, Axios' Zachary Basu and Madison Mills write. Why it matters: Anthropic is simultaneously the world's most valuable startup and its most isolated AI leader. The company's idiosyncrasies have strained its relationship with developers, policymakers and partners as it barrels toward a potential trillion-dollar IPO. Driving the news: Anthropic is the only frontier AI lab that didn't sign an open letter led by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang urging Washington not to restrict open-weight models, a category currently dominated by China. Open-weight models are downloadable systems users can run, modify and build on without paying for a company-controlled interface — making them cheaper and more flexible, but harder to control once released. Google and OpenAI, Anthropic's two biggest closed-model rivals, joined dozens of other signatories over the weekend, leaving Anthropic alone in defending the business model all three still depend on. Zoom out: Anthropic, founded by OpenAI defectors with safety as its organizing principle, is used to playing the contrarian. But as the AI race accelerates, it is growing isolated across nearly every major policy fight: 🪖 Military use: The Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic in February after a bitter fight over whether Claude could be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. With litigation ongoing, top Pentagon official Emil Michael lashed out at Anthropic on Friday, saying in an X post there is "no AI company more hostile to the warfighter." ⚠️ Guardrails: No lab has pushed harder for AI regulation than Anthropic, which has backed state AI laws and proposed an FAA-style regulator to screen advanced models before release. But when the White House flagged a security vulnerability this summer, Anthropic disputed its severity — triggering export controls that forced its Fable and Mythos models offline for nearly three weeks. 🧑‍🔬 Distillation: Anthropic has accused Chinese labs of training lower-cost models on Claude's outputs via "industrial-scale distillation campaigns." Critics counter that distillation is standard in AI development — and that Anthropic is an awkward messenger after settling a $1.5 billion copyright lawsuit over pirated books. For the record: In response to a request for comment, Anthropic pointed to a blog post by CEO Dario Amodei, "Our position on open-weights models." Reality check: Anthropic remains in an extraordinarily strong position — arguably the strongest of any AI lab in the world. The same qualities driving its isolation — caution, refusal to bend, insistence on being right rather than liked — helped establish its lead in the first place. Share this story. 👉 Go deeper: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, "The AI Future Is for Everyone," proposes a "philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety." Gift link.

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⚠️ Anthropic's AI breach

Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios

Some of Anthropic's most powerful models — including Mythos 5 and an internal research model — gained unauthorized access to real-world systems during pre-deployment cybersecurity testing, Axios' Sam Sabin writes. Why it matters: Anthropic's disclosure — a little over a week after OpenAI first revealed similar testing incidents — fuels concerns about what the world's most powerful AI models will do when guardrails come off. Anthropic said in a blog post that three of its models compromised real-world systems belonging to three organizations after a misunderstanding between the company and one of its testing partners left the evaluation environment connected to the internet. The incidents — which involved Opus 4.7, Mythos 5 and an internal research model not intended for general release — happened during evaluations run with a third-party testing partner. Anthropic reviewed more than 141,000 cybersecurity evaluation runs after OpenAI disclosed that several of its models accessed Hugging Face, a widely used platform for hosting AI models, during testing. 🔬 Between the lines: Unlike OpenAI's incident, Anthropic said its models did not exploit a zero-day vulnerability to gain internet access. Instead, internet access was available because of the testing environment's configuration. Similar to the OpenAI case, Anthropic was evaluating its models without the additional safeguards it deploys on publicly available models. Those guardrails would have blocked these behaviors, Anthropic said in its report. Anthropic explains: Incidents 1-3 ...

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🤖 Digital world disruption

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios

Axios CEO Jim VandeHei writes in his weekly C-Suite newsletter: The way information shows up online is changing lightning fast, starting with the total collapse of Google Search as we know it. Why it matters: Google has basically stopped sending people to websites (including our site) for answers and information. Instead, it's using AI to answer them on its platform, in its words. 🧮 By the numbers: Chartbeat data shared with Axios shows Google Search traffic to publishers fell 34% over the past year. That pain is regressive. Over the past two years, small publishers lost 60% of referrals from search overall, medium publishers 47%, large publishers 22%. At the same time, LinkedIn, Reddit and other massive platforms are getting jammed with AI-created content, making it harder to stand out — or decipher real from fake. Substack announced a partnership with AI-detection software Pangram, specifically calling out LinkedIn while arguing that "platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom." 👓 What we're watching: Online businesses are already anticipating the shift to an LLM, ChatGPT-like world. It starts with GEO (generative engine optimization) — the term for shaping how content shows up inside LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT. This is the modern version of SEO. It's early, and it's a black box.