Legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg spoke out against the use of AI technology when used in creative endeavors in an interview at the SXSW conference in Austin on Friday. Asked how he viewed AI’s utility as part of the filmmaking process, Spielberg said, “I’ve never used AI on any of my films yet,” to which the audience erupted with cheers and applause.

The director/producer/screenwriter, who became a household name for blockbusters like “Jaws,” “E.T.,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and many others, is not anti-technology, necessarily. His own films have imagined worlds filled with technology, for both good and bad, like “Minority Report,” “Ready Player One,” and, of course, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” to name a few.

At SXSW 2026, Spielberg said he didn’t want to go on a rant about A.I., noting that he was for the technology “in many disciplines,” but in his writers’ rooms, even in TV, “there’s not an empty chair with a laptop in front of it.” Meaning, he’s not outsourcing creativity to the machine.

“I am not for AI if it replaces a creative individual,” he said.

Of course, someone like Spielberg may not need an AI assist. AI startups are pitching themselves to resource-constrained indie filmmakers. Elsewhere, big names in streaming are also looking to use AI. Amazon this year said it’s testing tools for AI in film and TV production, and Netflix earlier this month acquired Ben Affleck’s AI filmmaking company for a reported $600 million.

Amazon is updating its ad-free streaming offering by introducing Prime Video Ultra, a new subscription tier designed for viewers who want to watch content on Prime Video without advertisements. The move formalizes and expands the platform’s ad-free option while also introducing updated pricing and subscription choices for users.

A New Premium Ad-Free Tier

Prime Video Ultra will officially launch on April 10, offering subscribers the ability to remove advertisements from their streaming experience for an additional $4.99 per month. The new plan is not a standalone service; users must already have either a Prime membership or a Prime Video subscription to access it.

Currently, the Prime Video benefit is included within Amazon’s broader Prime membership, which costs $14.99 per month or $139 per year. With the introduction of Prime Video Ultra, customers who want to watch Prime Video without ads will need to add the $4.99 monthly upgrade on top of their existing subscription.

Amazon is also offering a discounted yearly option for customers with an annual Prime membership. These users can choose the Prime Video Ultra annual plan priced at $45.99, which represents approximately a 23 percent discount compared to paying the monthly rate.

The updated structure gives viewers more flexibility in choosing whether they want the standard ad-supported experience or a premium ad-free version.

Why Amazon Is Making The Change

The launch of Prime Video Ultra reflects a growing trend in the streaming industry. Many major platforms have introduced ad-supported tiers in recent years as companies look for new revenue streams while keeping subscription prices relatively stable.

By offering both ad-supported and ad-free options, Amazon can serve a broader range of customers. Viewers who want to keep costs low can continue using the ad-supported version, while those who prefer uninterrupted streaming can pay an additional fee for the premium experience.

For Amazon, the strategy also helps balance rising content production costs while maintaining competitive pricing within the crowded streaming market.

What do you get with Prime Video Ultra?

There are a few differences between the usual Prime Video tier (with ads) and the Amazon Ultra tier. The basic subscription only allows 100 downloads for offline viewing and limits streaming to 4 screens, while the Ultra package enables 100 downloads and five streaming screens. Another crucial difference is that Prime Video Ultra is currently limited to subscribers in the US only.

More importantly, benefits such as 4K/UHD content, and Dolby Atmos audio output are now locked to the Prime Video Ultra tier. Dolby Vision and HDR content output is available across both tiers of Prime Video. Likewise, all the licensed catalog of films and TV shows, as well as originals such as “Fallout,” “Reacher,” and “The Boys,” will be available for all subscribers.

What It Means For Viewers

For Prime members and Prime Video subscribers, the introduction of Prime Video Ultra provides more control over how they watch content. Users who find advertisements disruptive during movies or TV shows now have the option to remove them for a relatively small monthly fee.

The new pricing structure also highlights the value proposition of Amazon’s broader Prime ecosystem. Since Prime Video remains included with a full Prime membership, subscribers still receive additional benefits such as free shipping, gaming perks, and exclusive deals alongside the streaming service.

Those who prefer a yearly payment option may find the $45.99 annual plan attractive, particularly since it offers a 23 percent savings compared to paying monthly.

What Comes Next For Prime Video

The introduction of Prime Video Ultra may signal further changes to Amazon’s streaming strategy as the company continues to compete with services such as Netflix, Disney+, and Max.

As streaming platforms experiment with different subscription models, additional tiers and pricing structures could emerge in the future. Amazon is also expected to continue investing heavily in original programming and exclusive content to attract new subscribers.

For now, Prime Video Ultra gives viewers a clearer choice between a lower-cost ad-supported experience and a premium ad-free option – allowing them to tailor their streaming setup to match their viewing preferences.

The Claude Partner Network launches as Anthropic fights the Pentagon in court, and doubles down on the commercial relationships that matter most.

There is a particular kind of defiance in the timing. On the same week that Anthropic was seeking an emergency stay from a US appeals court over the Pentagon’s decision to label it a national security risk, the company quietly announced something far more commercially significant: a $100 million commitment to a new partner programme designed to make Claude the default AI platform for the world’s largest enterprises.

The Claude Partner Network, launched on 12 March 2026, is a formalisation of the web of consulting and professional services relationships Anthropic has been quietly assembling over the past year. Accenture, Deloitte, Cognizant, and Infosys are among the anchor partners.

The network offers training, dedicated technical support, joint go-to-market investment, and a new technical certification, all free to join for any organisation bringing Claude to market.

The $100 million investment is for 2026, with Anthropic signalling it expects to spend more in subsequent years. A significant portion flows directly to partners as support for training, sales enablement, and co-marketing. The company is also scaling its partner-facing headcount fivefold, adding dedicated Applied AI engineers for live customer deals, technical architects for complex deployments, and localised go-to-market support across international markets.

“Anthropic is the most committed AI company in the world to the partner ecosystem, and we’re putting $100 million behind that this year to prove it. Our partners are instrumental in getting enterprises from proof of concept to production with Claude, and we’re making sure they have everything they need to do it.”

So said Steve Corfield, Anthropic’s head of global business development and partnerships, in the launch announcement. Corfield, who joined Anthropic from Salesforce where he was executive vice president for global alliances, has spent the past year building an enterprise channel from near-scratch, and the scale of some of the commitments now attached to it is striking.

Accenture, which formalised a dedicated Anthropic Business Group in December 2025, is training 30,000 of its professionals on Claude. Cognizant has opened Claude access across its entire global workforce of roughly 350,000 associates and is embedding it into client modernisation engagements.

Infosys integrated Claude and Claude Code into its agentic AI platform in February. Deloitte joined the network as an enterprise AI deployment partner. Together, these firms represent much of the global consulting infrastructure through which large organisations adopt new technology platforms, a channel that OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have each spent years cultivating.

Anthropic’s pitch is that it is catching up fast, and investing to catch up faster. The company claims its enterprise market share grew from 24% to 40% between the formation of its Accenture partnership and earlier this year, though this figure appears in Anthropic’s own communications and has not been independently verified.

Partners joining the network now gain access to a Partner Portal with Anthropic Academy training materials and internal sales playbooks, and can be listed in a publicly searchable Services Partner Directory for enterprise buyers.

A first technical certification, Claude Certified Architect, Foundations, is available immediately for solution architects building production applications with Claude. Additional certifications for sellers, architects, and developers are planned for later in 2026.

Anthropic has also released a Code Modernisation starter kit targeting what it describes as one of the highest-demand enterprise workloads: migrating legacy codebases and addressing accumulated technical debt. It is a deliberate focus.

Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic coding product, has become the fastest-growing part of the company’s commercial portfolio, and the starter kit gives partners a structured entry point for exactly the type of engagements that tend to grow into larger deployments.

The backdrop to all of this is the Pentagon dispute, an extraordinary set of circumstances that has seen Anthropic become, as of early March 2026, the first American company ever to be designated a national security supply-chain risk, a label historically reserved for foreign adversaries.

The designation followed the collapse of negotiations over whether the US military could use Claude for fully autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance, two uses Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei has said he cannot in good conscience permit.

Anthropic has filed two lawsuits challenging the designation and sought an emergency stay from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing the action is ‘unprecedented and unlawful’ and risks hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in lost revenue.

Corfield acknowledged the dispute directly to CRN, noting that the supply-chain risk designation’s narrow scope means the vast majority of Anthropic’s commercial customers, including those working with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft, remain unaffected.

All three cloud providers have confirmed they can continue offering Claude through their platforms for non-defence work. ‘For us, outside of the DoD stuff, it’s very much business as usual,’ Corfield said.

That framing matters, because the Claude Partner Network is precisely about building the non-government commercial relationships that constitute Anthropic’s long-term moat. Claude is currently the only frontier AI model available across all three major cloud providers, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft, a distribution advantage that rivals have not yet matched.

The partner programme is an attempt to translate that infrastructure position into embedded enterprise deployments: the kind that are expensive to move, produce recurring revenue, and make the underlying AI platform structurally difficult to displace.

Whether the $100 million is enough to close the gap with competitors who have years of channel-building behind them is an open question. But the timing, launched into the teeth of a federal legal battle, on the same day Anthropic’s Pentagon litigation was generating global headlines, suggests a company that is betting the commercial story is bigger than the political one.

from the ranch-dressing-ass-immigration-policy dept

Roughly a year ago — as Trump was trying to turn anti-genocide protests into deportable antisemitism — his administration made it clear it was only willing to support white people with antisemitic views. The administration threw some anti-Israel filters into the mix for DHS vetting of incoming migrants, blending them with the anti-Trump filters that equated opposing Trump and his open bigotry with hating America.

But the administration gave some antisemites a free pass… if they were white enough.

One of the white Afrikaners brought into the US as refugees by the Trump administration this week has a history of antisemitic social media posts, despite the White House using alleged antisemitism as a rationale for deporting pro-Palestinian protesters.

Charl Kleinhaus posted on X in 2023 that “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group.” In another post last fall, he shared a rightwing, nationalist YouTube video that was later removed, titled: “‘We’ll shoot ILLEGAL Immigrants!’ – Poland’s Illegal Islamic immigrant solution,” with clapping emojis.

A number of Kleinhaus’s posts also promote the conspiracy theory that white people in South Africa are being particularly persecuted.

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Trump apparently believes white South Africans are so extremely persecuted (after decades of subjugating Black South Africans), they deserve to avail themselves of everything offered by the Land of the Free. Trump wants incoming whites so badly he’s willing to rewrite the rules to flood the zone with new bigots.

The U.S. aims to process 4,500 refugee applications from white South Africans per month, far above President Donald Trump’s stated refugee program cap, and is installing trailers on embassy property in Pretoria to support the effort, a U.S. contracting document said.

The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the U.S. State Department dated January 27, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.

Notably, this isn’t a free pass for any South African. The document apparently extends this to whites only, which is a hell of a thing to do in this day and age. I have to imagine even the most racist of Afrikaners might balk a bit at boarding a plane where non-whites are being ejected over whatever country the plane flies over on its way to Land of Opportunity.

No one ever said this administration is clever. But it’s not accurate to call it stupid. It’s something else entirely: a collection of shitbirds who are so contemptuous of everyone else in the nation that it will stroke itself off publicly and shrug off complaints with non-sequiturs liberally peppered with phrases like “leftist media” or “activist judges.”

This administration will not only piss down your leg and tell you it’s raining, but swing by later to bitch about people “illegally” benefiting from the uninvited precipitation. It’s shit stacked on shit stacked on shit topped off by wedding cake figurines standing on the necks of fallen lawn jockeys.

If you want this to be your nation, please get the fuck out. Get your Fourth Reich on elsewhere, you absolute mooks. And I dare you explain how THIS isn’t pure racism, especially when you’ve gone all in on the “get the foreigners out” purge this government has been engaged in since Trump returned to the Oval Office.

Filed Under: bigotry, immigration, mass deportation, racism, south africa, trump administration, white nationalism

It’s been a whirlwind for NanoClaw creator Gavriel Cohen. 

About six weeks ago, he introduced NanoClaw on Hacker News as a tiny, open source, secure alternative to the AI agent-building sensation OpenClaw, after he built it in a weekend coding binge. That post went viral.  

“I sat down on the couch in my sweatpants,” Cohen told TechCrunch, “and just basically melted into [it] the whole weekend, probably almost 48 hours straight.”  

About three weeks ago, an X post praising NanoClaw from famed AI researcher Andrej Karpathy went viral.  

About a week ago, Cohen closed down his AI marketing startup to focus full-time on NanoClaw and launch a company around it called NanoCo. The attention from Hacker News and Karpathy had translated into 22,000 stars on GitHub, 4,600 forks (people building new versions off the project), and over 50 contributors. He’s already added hundreds of updates to his project with hundreds more in the queue. 

Now, on Friday, Cohen announced a deal with Docker — the company that essentially invented the container technology NanoClaw is built on, and counts millions of developers and nearly 80,000 enterprise customers — to integrate Docker Sandboxes into NanoClaw. 

Scary security of OpenClaw 

It all started when Cohen launched an AI marketing startup with his brother, Lazer Cohen, a few months ago. The startup offered marketing services like market research, go-to-market analysis, and blog posts through a small team of people using AI agents.  

The agency started booking customers, and was on track to hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue, the brothers told TechCrunch. 

“It was going really well, great traction. I’m a huge believer in that business model of AI-native service companies that have margins and operate like a software company but are actually providing services,” said Cohen, a computer programmer who previously worked for website hosting company Wix.

He had built the agents the startup was using, largely using Claude Code, each designed to do specific tasks. But there was “a piece” missing, he said. The agent could do work when prompted, but the humans couldn’t pre-schedule work, or connect agents to team communication tools like WhatsApp and assign tasks that way. (WhatsApp is to most of the world what Slack is to corporate America.) 

Cohen heard about OpenClaw, the popular AI agent tool whose creator now works for OpenAI. Cohen used it to build out those final interfaces, and loved it. 

“There was this big aha moment of: This is the piece that connects all of these separate workflows that I’ve been building,” he said and immediately decided, “I want more of them: on R& D, on product, on client management,” one for every task the startup had to handle. 

But then OpenClaw scared the bejesus out of him. 

In researching a hiccup with performance, he stumbled across a file where the OpenClaw agent had downloaded all of his WhatsApp messages and stored them in plain, unencrypted text on his computer. Not just the work-related messages it was given explicit access to, but all of them, his personal messages too.  

OpenClaw has been widely panned as a “security nightmare” because of the way it accesses memory and account permissions. It is difficult to limit its access to data on a machine once it has been installed.  

That issue will likely improve over time, given the project’s popularity, but Cohen had another concern: the sheer size of OpenClaw. As he researched security options for it, he saw all the packages that had been bundled into it. It included an “obscure” open source project he himself had written a few months earlier for editing PDFs using a Google image editing model. He had no idea it was there — he wasn’t even actively maintaining that project.  

He realized there was no way for him to validate all OpenClaw’s code and its dependencies, which, by some estimates, sprawled across 800,000 lines of code. 

So he built his own in just 500 lines of code, intended to be used for his company, and shared it. He based it on Apple’s new container tech, which creates isolated environments that prevent software from accessing any data on a machine beyond what it is explicitly authorized to use.

Going viral

At 4 a.m., a couple of weeks after sharing it on Hacker News, his phone started ringing non-stop. A friend had seen Karpathy’s post and was urging Cohen to wake up and start tweeting, which he did, setting off a public discussion with the well-known AI researcher.  

Attention to NanoClaw followed like a landslide. More tweets, YouTube reviews from programmers, and news stories. A domain squatter even snagged a NanoClaw website URL. The correct one is nanoclaw.dev. 

Then Oleg Šelajev, a developer who works for Docker reached out. Šelajev saw the buzz and modified NanoClaw to replace Apple’s container technology with Docker’s competing alternative, Sandboxes.

Cohen had no hesitation about pushing out support for Sandboxes as part of the main NanoClaw project. “This is no longer my own personal agent that I’m running on my Mac Mini,” he recalled thinking. “This now has a community around it. There are thousands of people using it. Yeah, I said, I’m going to move over to the standard.” 

For all the changes these weeks have brought Cohen and his brother Lazer, now CEO and president of NanoCo, respectively, one area still needs to be figured out: how NanoCo will make money. 

NanoClaw is free and open source and, as these things go, the Cohens vow it always will be. They know they would be strung up as villains if they ever betrayed the open source community by changing that. Currently the Cohens are living on a friends-and-family fundraising round, they said.  

While they are cautious about announcing their commercial plans — in large part because they haven’t had a chance to fully formulate them — VCs are already calling, they say. 

The game plan is to build a fully supported commercial product with services including so-called forward-deployed engineers — specialists embedded directly with client companies to help them build and manage their systems. This will likely focus on assisting companies in building and maintaining secure agents. That is, however, a crowded field growing more crowded by the hour. 

But given the giant community of developers that NanoClaw just unlocked with Docker, we’re sure to hear more about this soon.

Pictured above from left to right, Lazer and Gavriel Cohen.

Contrary to popular belief, The Madison is not another Yellowstone spinoff. The neo-Western drama, which stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell as Clyburn family matriarch Stacy and patriarch Preston, was created by Taylor Sheridan and is set predominantly in Montana, but that’s where the similarities end.

You can watch The Madison season 1 online from anywhere with a VPN.

Amazon is the price of its ad-free Prime Video subscription and locking 4K UHD streaming behind this new tier. Starting April 10 for US customers, a rebranded Prime Video Ultra subscription will cost $5 per month, up from $3 per month.

For that extra $2, you get a download capacity increase from 25 to 100, and you can now run five streams concurrently instead of three. Whether those “Ultra” upgrades are worth the $24 annual hike will probably depend on how many boxsets you like to plough through on a long flight, or how many devices are using your Prime Video account.

The changes are most galling for Prime members who automatically qualify for Prime Video with ads through their membership, as Amazon has decided to remove 4K streaming from the standard tier. That means that, despite already paying $15 per month or $139 per year for Amazon Prime, you’ll be stuck with 1080p shows and movies unless you sign up to Prime Video Ultra.

Amazon has thrown in Dolby Vision support for the first time, as well as upping the concurrent stream and download count on its free tier as well, but you’re losing the privilege of UHD content that has been available to all Prime Video members for years. Dolby Atmos remains exclusive to the $5 tier too.

Amazon is the latest streamer to put its prices up, following similar recent hikes to , and . If you don’t want to give the company any more of your hard-earned, you have just under a month to binge your way through the second season of  in all of its irradiated UHD glory.