ai and ml

‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s afternoon’ is the sort of thing this will make, and others look likely to adopt it 

In an effort to “watermark” text that Claude has generated and comply with the EU AI Act, Anthropic ib Friday unveiled a plan on Friday to modify its bots’ choice of words in a way that would be detectable as the product of an AI.

Traditional watermarks are patterns or images overlaid on currency, postage, or official documents as an assertion of authenticity. In the digital realm, the term is more flexible and can refer to a variety of techniques for applying an identifier to electronic data.

Anthropic’s approach involves influencing inconsequential word choices made by its models, a technique introduced in Google DeepMind’s SynthID-Text paper.

To oversimply things, large language models are fancy autocomplete engines which work by predicting the next word in a sequence of words. Anthropic explains that while composing sentence output like “The weather today was cold and…” a model like Claude might respond with words like “cold” or “gray” and would be unlikely to respond with a word like “sugary.”

That’s the theory, but when actually asked to complete that sentence, Claude Opus 4.8 went a bit overboard: “…crisp, the kind of cold that nips at your fingertips and turns your breath to little clouds. The sky was a pale, washed-out blue, and everything felt sharp and clear.”

And then it checked to see if users thought that was useful, asking “Want me to take it somewhere specific — cozy, gloomy, cheerful? Or keep going with the same tone?”

But remove whatever training has been applied to promote engagement and simulate literary style, and that’s basically what Claude is doing here – predicting the next word in a sequence.

Anthropic asserts that in most cases, the example sentence could be completed by either “cold” or “gray” and “the meaning of the sentence is largely the same either way.”

The watermark gets generated by deviating from the predicted word to something else. A different source of randomness is used and that can be detected with a digital key.

As Google DeepMind researchers explain in their paper: “Generative watermarking works by carefully modifying the next-token sampling procedure to inject subtle, context-specific modifications into the generated text distribution. Such modifications introduce a statistical signature into the generated text; during the watermark detection phase, the signature can be measured to determine whether the text was indeed generated by the watermarked LLM.” 

Anthropic insists this will be done with low-stakes passages in a way that won’t alter the meaning. “In internal testing, we’ve seen no impact of watermarking on the content, level of creativity, or readability of Claude’s text,” the company said, adding that in a controlled study, human raters saw no difference in quality between watermarked and unwatermarked answers.

That assumption hinges on not applying the watermark to any consequential text. As Anthropic puts it, “Watermarking is sparser on factual passages where there are fewer choices that can be made without decreasing the accuracy of the text.” The biz goes on to say that the situation is similar with code – the watermarking algorithm can’t simply start swapping method names.

In the context of literature, the notion that some words are interchangeable is likely to raise a few hackles. While it may be a satisfying thought experiment to imagine Claude emitting, “It was the best of times, it was the least of times…” or “Telephone me Ishmael”, anyone trying to pass off generated text as serious writing probably should face whatever social backlash watermarking may entail.

On the plus side, Anthropic’s flavor of watermarking isn’t excessively intrusive. It doesn’t involve any personally identifying information and only serves to indicate that Claude was probably involved at some stage of the creation of the marked text.

What’s more, the technique is expected to be only semi-effective. In its FAQs, Anthropic points out that some amount of editing should erase the watermark.

“Light editing probably won’t remove the watermark completely; a complete rewrite where every word is replaced will,” the company said. “In the latter case, of course, it’s arguable whether the text can any longer be described as AI-generated.”

In all likelihood, Anthropic doesn’t care if its watermarking scheme can be defeated. The company’s post makes clear that it is implementing it to demonstrate its attempts at compliance and has chosen a solution that doesn’t raise costs.

“Watermarking has a negligible impact on the speed of models, and because it produces no extra tokens, the model is the same price to serve and use,” the biz said.

Hey Claude, what’s another word for performative compliance? ®

from the never-wrong-prez-just-dying-to-be-wrong-again dept

This is why having a case dismissed with prejudice is important.

Trump’s cronies/donors — who were paid millions to do a job they’d never done before — failed to bring the Lincoln Reflecting Pool up to spec by July 4th, preventing Trump from taking sole credit for everyone else’s hard work while turning the nation’s 250th birthday into a celebration of himself.

When the “American flag blue” undercoating began floating to the surface and the rest of the pool turned green due to the completely expected explosion in algae growth, Trump decided it would be better to arrest people for “vandalism” than throw his financial supporters under the bus.

Former Olympian David Hearn was the big catch. Trump, Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum, and US Attorney Jeanine Pirro all claimed they had tons of evidence to support felony vandalism charges against their star defendant. Another handful of people were arrested and hit with misdemeanor charges, solely for the purpose of propping up Trump’s “it was vandals!” lies.

But the whole thing fell apart when the cases moved forward. In Hearn’s case, a government witness testified the damage was due to faulty repair work by the contractors, rather than anything Hearn or anyone else had done to the pool. This undercut Trump’s 350-foot vandal attack narrative. It also tanked the case for US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who moved to dismiss the case due to being misled by the Interior Department, which apparently buried details of the faulty fix in hopes of making Trump’s revenge convictions a reality.

Shortly after dropping the case, Pirro went toe-to-toe with Trump and DOI head Burgum, laying out all the evidence that contradicted Trump’s concocted narrative. Trump responded by attacking Pirro publicly in press comments and Truth Social posts. These attacks included some off-the-cuff remarks that seemed to have teleported in from a 1930s gangster b-movie script:

“Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department,” he continued. “And I guess she choked. I don’t know what the hell happened.”

[…]

Trump exclaimed minutes later that Pirro “folded like an umbrella.”

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I only bring this up again because Trump has clearly demonstrated that umbrellas are impossible to “fold.”

Anyway, back to the point of the post: having a prosecution dismissed with prejudice means the government doesn’t get a second chance to do the wrong thing. The DOJ in general never does this because… who knows? Maybe some precedent will get handed down that revives a case. Maybe the cold case kids will find some sort of unidentifiable powder in the evidence locker. Or maybe the fucking president of the United States will just start ordering people to do the same thing again, only harder.

White House officials have asked the Justice Department to consider a new prosecution of a man accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, according to people familiar with the discussions, as President Trump fumes over U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s decision to drop the case.

[…]

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After White House outreach, Justice Department officials are exploring whether another type of case—likely based on misdemeanor allegations—is even possible. 

And we’re right back where we started: with Trump trying to punish a US citizen because Trump embarrassed himself.

This isn’t going to end well for Trump. I mean, I would hope. The presiding judge is still trying to find out why the DOJ didn’t dismiss the charges against Hearn with prejudice, given that it had admitted in court that there was no evidence to support them.

And Hearn himself isn’t letting this go. If the DOJ decides to try again, this will vastly increase the chances the presiding judge will give his lawyers access to the grand jury materials he’s been requesting ever since the government’s witness testified (before the grand jury) that any so-called “vandalism” was actually just the side effects of a botched rush-job performed by under-qualified contractors better known for their loyalty to Trump than their specific set of skills.

Trump is too stupid to recognize this will only result in more damning evidence of his self-serving hubris. Pirro knows this case is fucked so it’s highly unlikely she’ll be willing to do what Trump is demanding. And no one in the administration with the intelligence to recognize why this is a terrible idea is willing to do anything but appease the madman they’ve chosen to serve at the expense of their own credibility and future employment opportunities. Let’s hope this all goes as badly as it should for Trump. After all, he’s earned it.

Filed Under: asshats, david hearn, doi, doj, donald trump, doug burgum, interior department, jeanine pirro, malicious prosecution, reflecting pool, trump administration

Companies: atlantic industrial coatings, greenwater solutions

• Volume and spend on tokens for Anthropic’s AI solutions made it more revenue than any of its competitors in July 2026, cementing its position as the top LLM provider
• This success is despite Anthropic’s tokens being more expensive than its competitors
• The data was collated by Vercel’s AI Gateway, an API service that routes LLMs for easy AI provider swapping

Monthly analysis of the AI industry has revealed a number of surprises for July 2026, not least the continued growth of Anthropic both in terms of revenue and token use.

This is despite the company charging a higher rate for tokens, AI’s computational data currency.

If you bought a game by accident, there is hope.

How to refund a game on Xbox

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What Xbox purchases are eligible for refunds?

How to get a refund for an Xbox subscription

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How long does an Xbox refund take?

On March 13, Nine PBS reportedly sent a letter to Iron Mountain stating that it would “pay any reasonable costs associated with” accessing the data.

After allegedly being unable to communicate with OSS, Nine PBS eventually won a default judgment against the company in the St. Louis Circuit Court, which found that Nine PBS had the “immediate right to possess the data,” according to the complaint. The court also ruled that OSS must return the data “and/or facilitate its transfer to a new vendor,” the complaint says.

However, Iron Mountain refused to give Nine PBS the data because it only has a contract with OSS and, according to Nine PBS’ complaint, because OSS owns “the physical services housing the data.”

Iron Mountain’s spokesperson told Ars that the company only provides physical infrastructure, such as the building, network connectivity, power, and environmental controls.

“Our customers rent space for their servers and other hardware. These are the client’s assets. We don’t have access to the data on the hardware/servers because they belong to our customers,” the company said.

Iron Mountain said the company would violate basic data privacy protocols, breach its contract with OSS, and “potentially [expose] confidential data belonging to other clients of OSS” if it granted “unauthorized access to third-party hardware without a court order.”

Ars asked Nine PBS if it had any backups of the data and what the station would do to prevent this from happening again, but we didn’t receive answers as of publication time.

Nine PBS VP and chief communications officer Leah Freeman shared a statement reading:

We appreciate the Court’s thoughtful decision establishing a path forward to access and recover our archival materials, which the Court confirmed that Nine PBS rightfully owns. These archives represent an important part of our region’s history, and we look forward to ensuring their preservation and protection through the Court-approved process.

When it comes to the best gaming desks or best standing desks, the Eureka Ergonomic Wonder Glowing Glass Desk is suitable for both categories. This makes it a good all-rounder for those wanting to effortlessly move between office work and gaming.

Rejoice, Marvel fans, because X-Men ’97 season 3 is already deep into its development cycle. That means we’ll see it sometime in 2027, which is a welcome change from the two-year gap we had to endure between the animated show’s first two seasons.

Of course, we don’t know its actual return date on Disney+, but other things have been revealed and teased about X-Men ’97‘s third outing. Luckily for you, I’ve rounded up the most important details below, so don’t delay — scroll on to learn all there is to know about the series’ third season.

X-Men ’97 season 3 release date: what we know