from the bye-bye dept

Even at the best of times, the hallmark of RFK Jr.’s Health & Human Services is chaos. Whether it’s misinformation on vaccines and other public health matters, his unique ability to exit very smart people from public health agencies, or his desire to upend established government health protocols, it’s a constant frenzy when Kennedy is in charge.

But these aren’t the best of times for Kennedy. In fact, it appears that both legal and political mechanisms are starting to mete out consequences for all the nonsense going on at HHS. It was only days ago that a federal court issued an injunction on the CDC’s changes to vaccination schedules since Kennedy remade ACIP in his image, and in fact the new ACIP appointments themselves may be illegal. Almost simultaneously, reports came out that the White House is attempting to yank Kennedy and HHS out of the spotlight due to their becoming a political liability heading into the midterms.

And now, in what will both be a reaction to and furtherance of all of that chaos, Robert Malone has announced that he is leaving ACIP altogether. Malone is a proud anti-vaxxer and claims to have “invented” mRNA technology, a claim that is heavily disputed, to put it mildly. In the wake of the court’s injunction on ACIP and its recommendations for vaccine schedules, there was reporting that Kennedy was planning to disband ACIP once again and remake it with all new members as a quicker fix than appealing the court’s decision. As a result, Malone jumped straight to social media to claim that’s exactly what happened, before later retracting his statement.

On Thursday, Malone claimed on social media that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had disbanded ACIP and planned to completely reconstitute it (again), without appealing the judge’s ruling or defending Kennedy’s ACIP picks from the judge’s claims that they were unqualified. But soon after, Malone retracted his claim, saying it was a miscommunication and that disbanding ACIP was merely one of the “options being considered.”

In other words, he took half-baked information and made definitive claims to the masses, claims that turned out to be incorrect. So, you know, basically on par with all of the nonsense he’s spewed about vaccines. HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon then had to issue a statement to the press to clean all of this up, stating that anything that doesn’t come directly from him or HHS brass was “baseless speculation”.

And it was that, of all things, that caused Malone to quit.

Malone told Roll Call today that Nixon’s response was what led to his departure. “After Andrew trashing me with the press, I am done with the CDC and ACIP,” Malone said in a text message Tuesday morning. “That was the last straw.”

“Suffice to say I do not like drama, and have better things to do,” he added.

And then he went to the New York Times as well.

“Hundreds of hours of uncompensated labor, incredible hate from many quarters, hostile press, internal bickering, weaponized leaking, sabotage—I have better things to do,” he said.

On the one hand, I don’t think much of Malone’s qualifications for being a member of ACIP, so I’m not exactly sad to see him exit stage left. But it is interesting to see that the impression of chaos, infighting, bickering, and internal backstabbing that you get viewing HHS from the outside is mirrored by someone on the inside.

This would be funny if this weren’t a matter of public health. If there weren’t a measles outbreak that is still ongoing in this country (we’re already at 1,487 CDC confirmed cases this year). If some of the public and some doctors didn’t take what comes out of this very important government agency seriously.

But all those things are true. The chaos has to end. And for that to happen, RFK Jr. must go.

Filed Under: acip, anti-vaxxers, cdc, health & human services, rfk jr., robert malone, vaccines

A federal judge has sided with Anthropic in its twisty legal battle with the Trump administration, awarding the tech company an injunction against the government’s recent order that labeled it a “supply chain risk,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

On Thursday, Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California ordered the Trump administration to rescind its recent designation of Anthropic as a security risk, as well as to back off its order that federal agencies cut ties with the company.

“It looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic,” Lin reportedly said during the court proceedings. Lin ultimately argued that the government’s orders had flouted freespeech protections for the company.

The drama between the Pentagon and Anthropic erupted last last month over a dispute concerning guidelines for the government’s usage of the AI company’s software. Anthropic had reportedly sought to enforce certain limits on how the government could use its AI models, such as banning their use in autonomous weapons systems or mass surveillance. The government disagreed with those limitations, ultimately labeling the company a supply chain risk—a designation typically reserved for foreign actors. President Trump further ordered federal agencies to cut ties with the company.

Not long afterward, Anthropic sued the agency, along with Hegseth.

The White House has spent recent weeks attacking the company, characterizing it as “a radical-left, woke company” that is jeopardizing America’s “national security.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, meanwhile, has called the Defense Department’s actions “retaliatory and punitive.”

On the heels of Judge Lin’s ruling, Anthropic sent TechCrunch the following statement: “We’re grateful to the court for moving swiftly, and pleased they agree Anthropic is likely to succeed on the merits. While this case was necessary to protect Anthropic, our customers, and our partners, our focus remains on working productively with the government to ensure all Americans benefit from safe, reliable AI.”

TechCrunch has separately reached out to the White House for comment.

Xero, the New Zealand-founded accounting platform used by 4.6 million subscribers worldwide, announced on Wednesday a multi-year partnership with Anthropic that will embed Claude directly into its product and, more unusually, bring Xero’s financial data into Claude.ai itself. The deal means small business owners will be able to ask Claude questions about their cash flow, overdue invoices, and profit margins without leaving Anthropic’s chatbot.

The integration works in two directions. Inside Xero, the company’s existing AI assistant JAX (Just Ask Xero), which launched in September 2025, will be powered by Claude’s reasoning capabilities to automate financial workflows: tracking cash flow, flagging unpaid invoices, analysing revenue and profit performance, and suggesting actions. Inside Claude.ai, users will be able to connect their Xero accounts and work with live financial data for business planning, scenario modelling, and year-end analysis without switching between tools.

Xero’s engineering teams will also adopt Claude Code and Cowork, Anthropic’s developer tools, to accelerate their own product development. Financial data shared between the platforms will be used solely for the user’s session and will not be used to train Claude’s models, according to the announcement.

The multi-model hedge

What makes the partnership notable is not just its scope but its context. Xero already works with OpenAI. In October 2025, when JAX launched its expanded feature set at Xerocon Brisbane, Xero announced a collaboration with OpenAI to bring deep web research, including tax laws and market trends, directly into the platform. Now Anthropic gets the financial data integration and the agentic workflow layer.

This is a deliberate multi-model strategy. Xero is treating AI providers the way enterprises have traditionally treated cloud providers: spreading workloads across multiple vendors to avoid lock-in, leverage each provider’s relative strengths, and maintain negotiating power. OpenAI handles web research and information retrieval; Anthropic handles financial reasoning and workflow automation. The business logic sits in JAX, Xero’s own orchestration layer, which coordinates multiple AI agents behind the scenes.

For Anthropic, the deal is part of a broader enterprise push. Two weeks ago, the company committed $100 million to its Claude Partner Network, a programme that provides training, technical support, and joint go-to-market resources for organisations deploying Claude. Anchor partners include Accenture, Deloitte, Cognizant, and Infosys. The Xero partnership is a different kind of bet: not a consulting firm reselling Claude, but a vertical SaaS platform embedding it directly into a domain-specific product used by millions of small businesses.

Why the chatbot matters more than the plugin

The more interesting half of the announcement is not Claude inside Xero but Xero inside Claude. When a small business owner asks Claude about their cash position, Claude will pull live data from Xero and combine it with whatever else the user brings to the conversation: a lease agreement they have uploaded, a market report they are reading, a hiring plan they are modelling. The financial data becomes one input among many in a general-purpose reasoning environment.

This is the pattern Anthropic is building toward: Claude as the interface through which people interact with their professional tools, rather than each tool providing its own separate AI assistant. It is the same logic that drove the Model Context Protocol, Anthropic’s open standard for connecting AI models to external data sources and tools. If Claude becomes the place where small business owners do their financial thinking, Anthropic captures the relationship even if Xero is the system of record.

Xero, for its part, benefits from reaching users where they already are. The company reported NZ$1.2 billion in revenue for the first half of fiscal year 2026, up 20 per cent year on year, and recently acquired US bill payments company Melio to strengthen its position in the American market. But Xero’s core challenge, like that of every vertical SaaS company, is that its users spend most of their time outside the product. If Claude can surface Xero’s insights in a conversation the user is already having, that is a distribution advantage Xero could not build alone.

The data question

The partnership’s success will depend on trust. Small business financial data is among the most sensitive information a company holds, and sending it to a third-party AI platform, however reassuring the privacy commitments, requires a level of confidence that many business owners and their accountants may not yet have. The announcement states that financial data is used only for the user’s session and is never used for training. Whether that assurance is sufficient for the accounting profession, which is built on confidentiality and fiduciary duty, remains to be tested.

There is also the question of accuracy. When an AI model makes a mistake in a creative writing task, the consequence is a bad paragraph. When it makes a mistake in a cash flow forecast or tax analysis, the consequence can be a missed payroll or a compliance violation. Xero’s Diya Jolly, the company’s chief product and technology officer, framed the integration as shifting the “admin burden to a team of agents.” That framing works only if the agents are reliably correct, and in financial services, the tolerance for error is measured in basis points, not sentiment.

Claude-powered insights within Xero and the Xero integration into Claude.ai are expected to become available in the coming months. No specific launch date has been announced.

Apple has confirmed to Engadget that the Mac Pro, the desktop tower-shaped computer that was last updated in 2023, has been discontinued. As 9to5Mac notes, the computer no longer appears in the lineup of Macs on Apple’s website or in its storefront. That means at least for now, the Mac Studio is the Apple’s top-of-the-line professional computer.

The current version of the Mac Pro was introduced in 2019, with a distinct cheese-grater design, Intel chips and a bevy of easily-accessible expansion slots. Apple released the computer as a make-good for several years of inadequately meeting the performance needs of professional Mac users, but its uncontested time at the top of the company’s lineup was short-lived. A year later in 2020, Apple began transitioning to its custom M-series Arm chips, proving Macs could be more powerful and power-efficient by abandoning Intel entirely.

Apple eventually updated the Mac Pro to the M2 Ultra without updating the computer’s design, but by then the writing was on the wall. The far smaller Mac Studio, introduced in 2022, also supported the new chip, and it’s been updated since then while the Mac Pro has languished. Bloomberg reported Apple was planning to retire the Mac Pro in November 2025, so it’s not all that surprising the company quietly pulled the plug only a few months later.

Apple’s effort to cater to professionals, creatives and anyone with a chunk of change to drop on a fast computer lives on through the Mac Studio, and the recently announced Studio Display XDR, itself a replacement for the Pro Display XDR Apple announced for the 2019 Mac Pro. Now all the company needs to do is update the Mac Studio with an M5 Max chip to make it the most “pro” computer Apple offers.

Update, March 26, 6:25PM ET: Added confirmation from Apple that the Mac Pro has been discontinued.

The LAiV Crescendo VERSE lands at a moment when hi-fi is quietly being redefined. LAiV’s new component combines an R2R ladder DAC, discrete headphone amplifier, and active preamp into a single compact chassis priced under $1,000; exactly the kind of “one box” solution more listeners are gravitating toward as systems shift away from racks of separates and toward streamlined setups built around headphones, powered speakers, or compact amplifiers.

The idea that serious high-end sound can’t exist below four figures is starting to look outdated, and products like this are a big reason why.

What’s Inside the LAiV Crescendo VERSE: R2R, FPGA, and Full Digital Control

At the core of the Crescendo VERSE is LAiV’s proprietary balanced R2R ladder DAC architecture, built from tightly matched resistors (0.05% tolerance) to prioritize tonal accuracy, stable imaging, and long-term listenability. This is not a chip-based DAC. It’s a discrete ladder design aimed at delivering a more natural, less processed presentation; the kind of approach usually reserved for significantly more expensive hardware.

Supporting that DAC stage is an FPGA-based digital processing platform, which handles signal management and gives the VERSE its flexibility in playback modes and resampling.

The VERSE is designed to give users control over how their digital signal is handled rather than forcing a single approach.

The Crescendo VERSE supports native 1-bit DSD playback, keeping DSD signals in their original format without converting them to PCM, while also handling high-resolution PCM up to 768kHz and DSD up to at least DSD256 via its digital inputs. An integrated sampling rate converter (SRC) adds further flexibility, enabling PCM upsampling from 1x to 16x and DSD resampling up to DSD512 for those who want more control over how their digital content is processed.

There are also selectable playback modes (including NOS and SRC behavior), which means users can prioritize either signal purity or smoother multi-format playback depending on their system and library.

LAiV does include a small but important caveat: switching between PCM and DSD tracks in a mixed playlist can produce audible clicks or pops when using native mode. If your library jumps between formats, the multi-bit DSD mode converts everything to PCM for uninterrupted playback.

Digital Only Connectivity?

LAiV made a deliberate call with the Crescendo VERSE: this is a digital first component. It offers USB, optical, coaxial, and I2S inputs, with the latter configurable and clock aware for more advanced setups. All inputs support high resolution playback, with USB and I2S handling up to 768kHz PCM and high rate DSD. What you will not find here are any analog inputs. That omission is not an oversight, it is a statement. The VERSE is designed to be a dedicated digital front end, not a catch all hub trying to do everything at once, which may not be ideal for those who may wish to add an analog source.

Active Preamplifier

The Crescendo VERSE includes a discrete, output buffered preamplifier stage rather than a simple variable DAC output. It uses analog domain volume control to preserve signal integrity and maintains low output impedance for proper matching with downstream gear. Both balanced XLR and single ended RCA outputs are available and can be used simultaneously, which makes integration straightforward whether you are running active speakers, a power amplifier, or a hybrid system. This is where the one box concept starts to make practical sense in a real system.

Enough for Your Planars in Balanced Mode

The headphone stage is fully discrete and built with flexibility in mind, offering selectable gain settings to accommodate everything from sensitive in-ear monitors to more demanding full size headphones. Output is available via 4.4mm balanced and 6.35mm single ended connections. Power output reaches up to 1100 mW per channel in balanced mode and roughly 230 to 290mW single ended, which is enough for the majority of headphones people are actually using, although high impedance dynamic headphones are definitely a stretch and there is way to drive electrostatic headphones.

Physical Design & Usability

The Crescendo VERSE is built around a compact, desktop friendly chassis measuring approximately 230 mm wide (9.1 inches), 220 mm deep (8.7 inches), and just under 50 mm tall (about 2 inches), with a weight of about 0.9 kg (just under 2 pounds).

The enclosure uses a precision machined aluminum housing with a thick front panel and tight panel tolerances that give it a more serious, component grade feel than most devices in this price range. Finish options include a silver chassis with gold accents or a darker variant, both of which lean into a more distinctive, design forward aesthetic rather than disappearing into the background.

On the front, a dot matrix LED display provides clear readouts for input selection, volume level, sample rate, and playback status, while a central rotary encoder handles volume, input switching, and menu navigation with direct, tactile control. A full function remote is also included, allowing access to key settings such as gain, input selection, and playback modes without needing to interact directly with the unit.

The Bottom Line

What LAiV has created with the Crescendo VERSE is not a lifestyle product and not a stripped down DAC. It is a focused digital control center built around an R2R DAC for tonal character, a proper preamp stage for system integration, and a capable headphone amplifier for personal listening. There is no streaming platform, no analog input stage, and no attempt to be everything to everyone. That focus is the point.

At $849, it is a direct challenge to the idea that meaningful high end performance has to be expensive or complicated. The Crescendo VERSE is trying to be enough: a compact, high performance hub that can anchor a serious desktop or small room system without the cost and complexity that used to define the category. If it delivers on the promise of R2R performance at this level, the definition of affordable high end audio may need a reset.

We will know soon enough. James Fiorucci’s full review drops later this week, and if this category is on your radar, it is one you will want to read.

Where to buy: $849 at LAiV

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