Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

U.S. app uninstalls of ChatGPT's mobile app jumped 295% day-over-day on Saturday, February 28, as consumers responded to the news of OpenAI's deal with the Department of Defense (DoD), which has been rebranded under the Trump administration as the Department of War. This data, which comes from market intelligence provider Sensor Tower, represents a sizable increase compared with ChatGPT's typical day-over-day uninstall rate of 9%, as measured over the past thirty days.

One of my team members told me that some teams have built a Dara AI, you know, so that they basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me. You can imagine, like, you know, by the time something comes to me, there's been a prep and a meeting of the slide deck has been beautifully honed. So they have Dara AI to tune their prep.

The tipping point came after Anthropic, the company behind Claude, refused to allow the Department of Defense to use its AI models for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. In response, President Trump ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's products, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced plans to designate the company a supply-chain threat.

The issues we are seeing are related to Claude.ai and with the login/logout paths. Anthropic has not yet detailed what caused the outage, though the company said it has identified an issue and is implementing a fix.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded "unfettered access" to Claude, rebuffing Anthropic's proposed restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous lethal targeting. The Pentagon threatened to label Anthropic a "supply chain risk," a blacklisting usually reserved for foreign adversaries, if it didn't acquiesce to these demands.

xAI agreed to that 'all lawful use' standard, a move that paved the way for the deal while other tech giants were still caught in negotiations. This allows Grok to be used in high-stakes environments, including weapons development and intelligence analysis.

Experts have a long history of torturing us with predictions about how technology will wipe us out, first our jobs and then just getting rid of us altogether because humans are a bother. The AI panic around Large Language Models over the last three years is no exception.

Altman said the Pentagon agreed with his company's principles that OpenAI's technology would not be used for domestic mass surveillance or for autonomous weapon systems, affirming that humans would take responsibility for the use of force.

Hegseth summoned Amodei and demanded that Anthropic AI be used any way he wants or said he'd cancel the company's existing $200 million contract and blacklist them from any further AI pacts. Hegseth gave Anthropic until 5 p.m. yesterday to bend the knee. Amodel didn't bend.