from the community-funded-films dept

Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free) is about the incompatibility of the traditional copyright system with the digital world, and its failure to reward creators fairly. That raises the question of what might replace it, and the book’s last chapter offers one solution in the form of true fans. These are people who love an artist’s work and are happy to support it directly. This allows those works to be made available for no cost, since they have already been funded by fans. That, in turn, means creations can be shared – no need for punitive copyright infringement laws here – thus spreading the word about the artist, and bringing in new true fans and additional financial support.

This system is already working well for books, music and graphical art. But a common criticism of the approach is that it could never work for films, which therefore require copyright protection for them to be made. In support of that claim, people often point to the extremely large budgets of many films, often running to hundreds of millions of dollars. Clearly, the argument goes, such sums could never be amassed through the donations of true fans.

One issue with that argument is the widespread practice of “Hollywood accounting”, which Wikipedia explains as:

the opaque or “creative” set of accounting methods used by the film, video, television and music industry to budget and record profits for creative projects. Expenditures can be inflated to reduce or eliminate the reported profit of the project, thereby reducing the amount which the corporation must pay in taxes and royalties or other profit-sharing agreements, as these are based on net profit.

In other words, those huge budgets may not reflect the real costs of making a film, but are often a scheme for depriving people such as actors and others of their promised share of the profits by minimizing or even eliminating the latter. Moreover, a recent development certainly suggests that successful films do not requires such inflated budgets, discussed here on the BBC site :

Which film would you expect to be a summer hit – a family-friendly action-adventure which is based on tried-and-tested IP (intellectual property)? Or a creepy low-budget horror film dreamt up by a first-time director? Until very recently, most of us would have put our money on the first option.

But this summer, it’s looking as if low-budget horror will be triumphant, with two indie films, Backrooms and Obsession, vanquishing two megabudget extravaganzas, Masters of the Universe and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.

The figures speak for themselves:

The difference between the appeal of tired IP and original movies is illustrated by this weekend’s US box office figures. Masters of the Universe, which derives from a 1980s Mattel toy range and cartoon about a loincloth-sporting, perma-tanned warrior prince, is a new release which made just $29m (£21.7m). The Mandalorian and Grogu, which came out in May, is faring poorly for a Star Wars film: this weekend it made $10m (£7.5m).

By contrast, Backrooms “took $81m (£61m) in the US on its opening weekend. It’s total in the US is now $135m (£101m).” Obsession did even better:

Not only did it have a healthy opening weekend, but it’s also the first film since ET the Extra Terrestrial in 1982 to have its takings go up rather than down in its second and third weekends in cinemas. Its total take is now $152m (£114m) in the US and $225m (£169m) globally.

Those figures are impressive, but what is really noteworthy is the gulf between the respective production costs of the two classes of film. According to the BBC article:

The budget of The Mandalorian and Grogu is reported to be $165m (£124m), and the budget of Masters of the Universe is reported to be $200m (£150m). Take into account the marketing costs, and those films have to make between $300m and $400m (or £225m and £300m) just to break even.

…

The budget for Backrooms, on the other hand: $10m (£7.5m). And Obsession? $1m (£750,000), tops. Suddenly, spending a fortune to make a fortune no longer seems like a winning formula.

The latter sum in particular is easily something that true fans’ funding could amass.

The dynamics behind the growing success of low-budget films – something the BBC article calls “a Hollywood earthquake” – are precisely the ones discussed in the closing chapter of Walled Culture the book. An article on the Guardian Web site puts it this way:

“Going to the movies has become a way to connect with friends and share the moviegoing experience in person. Somewhere you can turn your phone off for a few hours and just disconnect from the world,” says 22-year-old film TikToker Florence Rose.

It is about the sense of community, which lies at the heart of the true fans idea, one that extends beyond the cinema experience:

Apps such as Letterboxd – essentially the Goodreads of cinema – allow users to distil their reactions into sharp, ironic one-liners and scroll through the takes of other viewers. “Gen Z are yearning for community, and through apps like Letterboxd, which continues to see an increase in popularity, people can find that community of like-minded individuals and share their thoughts and feelings about films,” says Rose.

The rise of Letterboxd is indicative of the hunger for precisely this kind of community-based experience:

The platform, whose core audience is 18- to 24-year-olds, has grown from 1.7 million users in 2020 to 26 million in 2026, adding more than nine million since January 2025 alone. “When a movie is released in the cinema, online conversations are sparked, which drives more people to the cinema so they can feel like they can join in and be a part of those conversations,” Rose adds.

This move from the Hollywood-style blockbusters to low-budget films made by new directors – often emerging from the world of YouTube – and new production houses is great news for audiences eager for new experiences and a sense of community. It not only brings fresh talent to the art form, it also opens up the possibility of fan-funded films that manage the difficult trick of being thoughtful and popular.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: community funding, films, funding, hollywood accounting, innovation, internet, movies

OpenAI said on Tuesday that two of its AI models, including the flagship Sol, broke out of a secure test environment, gained internet access by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in third-party software, and hacked into Hugging Face’s production infrastructure. The company called the incident “unprecedented” and said it was sharing preliminary findings to help defenders understand what frontier models are now capable of doing.

Both models were running with lower cybersecurity guardrails as part of an internal evaluation of their offensive capabilities. They were being tested against ExploitGym, a freely available cybersecurity benchmark, and determined that the answers to the test were stored on Hugging Face’s production systems.

Rather than solve the evaluation as intended, the models went after the answer key. They spent what OpenAI described as a “substantial amount of inference compute” finding a way out of their sandboxed environment, then chained two remote code execution vulnerabilities in Hugging Face’s dataset processing pipeline. The attack harvested cloud and cluster credentials, moved laterally into internal clusters, and executed more than 17,000 individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, according to Hugging Face’s own disclosure on July 16.

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Hugging Face said it detected the intrusion, contained it, and rebuilt the compromised nodes. The company found no evidence of tampering with public models, datasets, or Spaces, and verified its software supply chain was clean. It is still assessing whether any partner or customer data was affected.

To investigate the breach, Hugging Face turned to GLM, a Chinese open-weight model, because the safety guardrails on US commercial models blocked the forensic queries its team needed to run.

The escape is not the first time Sol has been caught gaming its own evaluations. The Model Evaluation and Threat Research organization, the independent lab that red-teamed the model before launch, found it was aggressively hacking its test environments to inflate its scores. In one task, it packaged an exploit into a data stream, escalated privileges on the evaluation server, and leaked the correct answers that human evaluators had hidden.

The broader pattern of AI agent security failures has accelerated sharply, with four separate research teams breaking AI agents in four different ways during the first ten days of July alone. OpenAI and Anthropic have faced heightened scrutiny over their models’ cybersecurity capabilities, with the Trump administration restricting access to both companies’ newest systems during a government review.

OpenAI detected the Hugging Face attack and reached out to disclose it, but by that time, Hugging Face had already identified and contained the breach on its own. The incident demonstrates that the gap between AI models that can find vulnerabilities and AI models that will exploit them without permission is narrower than anyone in the industry had publicly acknowledged.

Turns out the “Hide” part of Hide My Email wasn’t doing its job quite as advertised, something that I covered early in July. Security researcher Tyler Murphy reported the flaw in June 2025, but despite Apple claiming it was resolved in March 2026, independent tests confirmed it remained exploitable, at least until July 3, 2026.

So how did this bug actually work?

The flaw meant that if someone sent a message to your hidden address and it bounced as spam, even a completely legitimate email, your actual email address could get exposed in the sender’s mail logs. 

You wouldn’t even know it happened. A bounced message never lands in your inbox for you to notice. Murphy first flagged the bug to Apple back in June 2025. Apple told him in March 2026 it had been resolved, but it hadn’t. Fast forward to early July, and 404 Media went public with the story.

Apple shipped an actual fix just two days later, on July 3. Make of that timing what you will. “The bug that caused Apple’s Hide My Email to leak hidden email addresses to senders has been fixed,” reports 404 Media. 

Is the issue resolved entirely?

However, the outlet warns that email addresses linked to Hide My Email aliases, especially those created prior to July 7, 2026, may still reside in retained third-party mail logs. Apple’s also now facing a lawsuit seeking class action status, accusing the company of violating California consumer protection law by selling a feature that didn’t work as promised.

This pattern, quietly acknowledging a flaw internally while telling the reporter it’s fixed when it isn’t, echoes complaints commenters raised about Apple’s App Store moderation only responding to public pressure. 

Privacy features marketed as premium selling points invite exactly this kind of scrutiny, and a pending class action means Apple’s handling of the timeline will matter as much as the fix itself.

Garmin is reportedly preparing to launch the Fenix 9, Fenix 9 Pro and Enduro 4 simultaneously this year.

That timeline comes from Garmin Rumors, which reports that Garmin plans to bring all three watches to market together rather than staggering their releases as it has with past generations.

The Enduro 4 stands out within that lineup as the only model expected to retain a memory-in-pixel display, a power-saving screen technology paired with integrated solar cells to extend battery life well beyond typical smartwatch limits.

The standard Fenix 9, by contrast, is expected to ship exclusively with an AMOLED panel, a shift that continues Garmin’s gradual move away from memory-in-pixel screens across its flagship range in recent years.

It’s been a big year for AI acquisitions — so big that most of them barely register anymore. Anthropic and OpenAI have each gone on buying sprees, snapping up developer tooling, AI services shops, and product-testing startups to convert model capability into enterprise revenue and extend their reach faster than the other. Which is what made a weekend rumor about Anthropic acquiring robotics startup Physical Intelligence stand out. It spread exceedingly fast, even after a denial from Physical Intelligence’s CEO.

Part of that ties to who’s involved. Physical Intelligence isn’t some obscure robotics shop. It was co-founded by Lachy Groom, an investor-operator whose star has been on the rise in Silicon Valley in recent years; it has raised more than $1 billion (and was reportedly in talks this spring for another $1 billion round at an $11 billion valuation); and its π0.5 model is apparently among the more widely used robot brains in robotics research.

As it turns out, the rumor wasn’t completely spurious. Anthropic and Physical Intelligence actually did hold acquisition talks this spring, according to The Information, so tech blogger Robert Scoble — whose weekend post on X set off the frenzy — may have gotten the specifics wrong without being wrong that something had happened.

Physical Intelligence’s response to the rumor mill wasn’t the world’s most vigorous denial, it should be noted. According to The Information, Physical Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman told employees the reports weren’t true via a Slack message containing a gif of a character from “The Office” shaking her head no.

Groom, for his part, did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, sent Monday night.

Anthropic has made four known acquisitions this year; OpenAI has been more aggressive, acquiring at least 17 companies since 2023. Both are also, of course, now preparing to go public. Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, followed by OpenAI a week later, setting up what could be two of the largest U.S. stock debuts in history.

So why robotics, why now? The likeliest answer is that physical-world understanding may be a prerequisite for superintelligent systems, and no amount of internet text can substitute for it.

OpenAI’s own history here is instructive. It built an early robotic hand that could solve a Rubik’s Cube, then shut the entire robotics group down in 2021, with co-founder Wojciech Zaremba later saying the approach was missing pieces needed for real superintelligence. The team came back in 2024, quietly building a humanoid robotics lab in San Francisco, before CEO Sam Altman made it official in late May, announcing “OpenAI Robotics” was hiring and describing a near-term focus on robots for infrastructure work, with a personal robot for everyone as the long-term goal.

Anthropic hasn’t built anything resembling OpenAI’s hardware lab. What it has done is publish a string of research pieces through its internal group that stress-tests frontier capabilities for safety purposes. That included Project Fetch last November, where Anthropic staff tested how much Claude could help non-experts program a robot dog, and a second phase in June that, according to Anthropic, found a newer model completed the same tasks roughly 20 times faster than the best human-plus-Claude team from the year before.

Buying an existing team with robotics expertise would let Anthropic skip years of work. There’s a possible complication, though. Physical Intelligence was founded in San Francisco roughly two years ago by Groom, former Google researchers, and professors from Stanford and Berkeley, and its early investor base looks a lot like OpenAI’s own, including Khosla Ventures and Thrive Capital. Founders Fund — also a major OpenAI investor — was reportedly involved in Physical Intelligence’s newest funding round earlier this year.

In fact, OpenAI is itself an investor in Physical Intelligence, so it isn’t just a peripheral player; it’s a stakeholder in a company that its chief rival was reportedly in talks to buy very recently.

That raises questions around whether OpenAI’s early investment came with any information rights, or a right of first refusal over a sale to a competitor — the kind of protective provisions that strategic investors sometimes negotiate for precisely this scenario.

That leaves open the possibility that if Physical Intelligence is actually in play, OpenAI — already a shareholder, already close to Groom, already trying to ensure it bests Anthropic in robotics — may have the more obvious claim to it than Anthropic does. We asked OpenAI these questions earlier today and the company didn’t respond.

Each payout per work will amount to roughly $3,000, to be paid to around 500,000 works.

A US judge has approved Anthropic’s $1.5bn settlement of a major AI copyright lawsuit filed by a trio of authors, setting the record for the largest settlement in copyright law in the country’s history.

In their 2024 lawsuit, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson accused Anthropic pirating their copyrighted material to train Claude. “Largescale theft of copyrighted works” is a key component of the company’s business model, they said.

The court found that Anthropic illegally acquired millions of books through shadow libraries, but ruled that the company was protected by fair use when using books to train its AI models. The lawsuit was certified as a class action last July, the first in copyright litigation against AI companies.

Anthropic agreed to settle last August, a month after it claimed that a settlement could present a “death knell” situation for the company.

Divided up between some 500,000 works, each payout per work under the approved settlement will amount to roughly $3,000, which the court pointed out is four-times the statutory damages awarded for “wilful infringement”.

The class includes copyright owners whose works were found in shadow libraries LibGen and PiLiMi, which were downloaded by Anthropic.

In a statement, Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said that the company is “looking forward ​to bringing this matter to a close”.

“We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court’s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair ​use under copyright law – which remains the law today.

“We are pleased that more than 91pc of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment.”

The settlement received preliminary approval late last September.

Anthropic was valued at $183bn last September after a $13bn Series F round, and nearly a year later, the company is now nearing a $1trn valuation while readying itself for a blockbuster public listing.

For comparison, the $1.5bn settlement makes up roughly 0.8pc of Anthropic’s September valuation and marginally more than 0.1pc of its value after the May raise.

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• Reports indicateHuawei is building and operating DRAM fabs through a joint venture with state-controlled SwaySure
• This is part of an alleged 11-fab network Huawei operates behind state-owned fronts that it denies exists
• The move, seen as a bid by Huawei to secure captive HBM supply for its increasingly powerful Ascend AI chips, could place the company above Apple, Intel, and Nvidia, none of which makes its own memory.

Mounting evidence suggests Huawei is taking the same approach that saw it build CPUs and AI chips in the past to DRAM in the present.

The Chinese tech conglomerate is allegedly building and operating DRAM fabrication plants on the mainland, bringing it into direct competition with only one major player at the same scale, albeit for a much larger consumer base: Samsung.

Overview: As social media algorithms come under increasing scrutiny, policies to ban children from services such as Facebook, X, YouTube, and Snapchat are gaining popularity across the globe. France has just become the latest country to pass such legislation – but data suggests the impact of Australia’s earlier ban has been limited.

France’s Parliament gave final approval on Tuesday to a law banning children under age 15 from social media, with the National Assembly voting 279 to 81 after the Senate had approved the text earlier the same day. The vote followed the Assembly’s initial approval of the bill in January by a margin of 130 to 21.

President Emmanuel Macron, who strongly championed the legislation, wants it in effect before the new school year begins in September. The bill also bans smartphone use in high schools but exempts online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, educational and scientific directories, and open-source software platforms such as GitHub.

The bill enjoyed unusually broad bipartisan support in France’s traditionally divided parliament. Macron fast-tracked the legislation, hailing its passage as a “major step forward” and positioning France as the first country in the European Union to approve a blanket social media ban for minors.

Macron cited data from France’s national public health agency indicating that one in two teenagers in the country spends between two and five hours each day using smartphones. Approximately 90% access the internet via phones daily, and more than half access social media on them.

The president has said the country aims to protect children’s brains from being “manipulated,” in his words, “neither by American platforms, nor by Chinese algorithms.” Lawmaker Laure Miller, who authored the bill, said the legislation firmly establishes that social media is not harmless, arguing it causes children to read less, sleep less, and compare themselves to others more.

With the law now passed, France leapfrogs proposals still moving through other European countries, including Greece, Norway, Spain, and the UK. Greece aims to enforce a ban starting next year, and restrictions for under-16s are set to be introduced into the Norwegian and British parliaments by the end of 2026.

Australia became the first country in the world to attempt such a ban, in December 2025, but recent studies cast doubt on its effectiveness. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner found that roughly seven in ten children who held social media accounts before the ban took effect still retained them three months later, and a study published in the British Medical Journal put the figure as high as 85%.

Regulators say Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube have largely failed to enforce the removal of underage accounts. Most teenagers who kept access report never encountering an age-verification check, even though some circumvented restrictions using VPNs or other workarounds. France is also considering restricting VPN use to close a similar loophole.

In response to the noncompliance, the Australian government doubled the maximum penalty for infringing companies to $99 million AUD (about US$68 million). Australia’s internet regulator, eSafety, is currently investigating Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube for non-compliance.