Pentagon presses Anthropic guardrails & Distillation attacks and AI theft - Tech News (Feb 26, 2026)

Today's topics: Pentagon presses Anthropic guardrails - The U.S. Defense Department is pressuring Anthropic to allow broad, “any lawful use” of Claude, with threats tied to the Defense Production Act and supply-chain exclusion. Keywords: Pentagon, Anthropic, guardrails, DPA, military AI policy. Distillation attacks and AI theft - Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are warning about large-scale model “distillation” and extraction attacks using fake accounts to harvest outputs for training cheaper rivals. Keywords: distillation, model extraction, Claude, DeepSeek, AI security. Meta’s massive AMD chip pact - Meta reportedly struck a potentially $100B+ deal to buy AMD MI450 AI chips at multi-gigawatt scale, plus warrants enabling up to a 10% AMD stake. Keywords: Meta, AMD, MI450, AI data centers, GPU spending. DeepSeek shifts chip optimization - Reuters reports DeepSeek withheld early access to its V4 model from Nvidia and AMD, giving Chinese suppliers like Huawei a head start on optimization. Keywords: DeepSeek V4, Huawei, Nvidia, AMD, AI chip geopolitics. Jane Street lawsuit and Bitcoin claims - A Manhattan federal lawsuit tied to the TerraUSD collapse accuses Jane Street of trading on material nonpublic information; online posts then connect that to alleged Bitcoin intraday sell-off patterns. Keywords: Jane Street, Terraform, UST depeg, insider trading allegations, Bitcoin market structure. X open-sources For You algorithm - xAI engineering open-sourced key parts of X’s real-time “For You” feed system, showing a Grok-based transformer ranking stack in Rust and Python. Keywords: X algorithm, open source, recommender systems, Grok, Rust. AI-built Next.js alternative on Cloudflare - Cloudflare claims it rebuilt most of the Next.js 16 API surface as an AI-assisted Vite-based replacement called vinext, backed by a large automated test suite. Keywords: Cloudflare Workers, vinext, Next.js, Vite, tests as moat. Music attribution and watermark limits - Sony AI published research on music training-data attribution, short-clip version matching, and watermark stress-testing—while finding current watermarks can fail against neural audio codecs. Keywords: Sony AI, attribution, plagiarism detection, watermarking, audio codecs. Physical AI: Wayve and Intrinsic - Wayve raised $1.2B to license autonomy software to automakers, while Alphabet’s Intrinsic is moving closer into Google to accelerate ‘physical AI’ with Gemini and cloud infrastructure. Keywords: Wayve funding, autonomous driving, Intrinsic, Google, robotics. New AI tools for neuroscience - MIT researchers introduced BrainAlignNet and related models that track and label neurons in moving, deforming animals, dramatically reducing manual labeling time. 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