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Read full article about: Anthropic gives more security teams access to Claude with fewer safety restrictions

Anthropic is opening its Cyber Verification Program to a much wider pool of security professionals. The program gives vetted organizations and individual researchers access to Claude's most powerful AI models with reduced safety filters for vulnerability research, malware analysis, incident response, and penetration testing. The publicly available Claude models block most of that kind of work because the same capabilities could also help attackers. Basic tasks like code review or patching known flaws are still possible without special access.

The CVP splits access into three tiers. "Defense Access" is open to corporate security teams, government agencies, universities, critical infrastructure operators, open-source developers, and individual researchers. "Red Team Access" allows authorized attack simulations and is limited to organizations only. "Specialized Access" is reserved for testing systems like flight controls, power grids, or banking infrastructure. For this tier, Anthropic vets every applicant together with the US government.

Partners in the predecessor program, Project Glasswing, found at least 129,000 confirmed vulnerabilities between April and July 2026, according to Anthropic. More than 33,000 were classified as high-severity or critical. Those numbers come from surveys of a subset of partners, and Anthropic says the real-world impact is at least five times higher. Several partners reported that the AI sped up their work by months or even years.

Read full article about: Google claims EmbeddingGemma 2 outperforms rival embedding models twice its size

Google released EmbeddingGemma 2, an open model that converts text, images, video, audio, and code into numerical vectors so similar content can be found and compared more easily. At 740 million parameters, Google says it's the most compact model of its kind and outperforms competing models up to twice its size on multimodal embedding benchmarks.

EmbeddingGemma 2 scores 78.68 on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (Code), a jump of nearly 10 points over its predecessor (68.76). That puts it on par with much larger models. | Image: Google

The model runs locally without an API key. Each query takes about 20 to 70 milliseconds via WebGPU in the browser. It needs only around 191 MB of RAM and cuts local vector database storage by up to six times. For text-only tasks, a 270-million-parameter version is enough.

Paired with small open models like Gemma 4, EmbeddingGemma 2 can run offline RAG apps without sending data to external servers. The weights are available on Hugging Face and Kaggle, along with a developer guide and documentation.

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Read full article about: Microsoft publishes Nobel economist's bearish AI forecast of just 1.5% GDP growth over a decade

Microsoft published a pretty bearish take on AI from Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu. He predicts AI will boost GDP by about 1.5 percent over ten years and replace at most five percent of jobs, far less than some AI labs forecast. He admits the pace of AI development is hard to predict.

The bottleneck, Acemoglu says, is human nature. Companies have to reassign tasks, upskill workers, and restructure before productivity gains kick in, a process that could drag on longer than electrification did. Bigger models won't fix that. What's missing are easy-to-deploy apps that change how things get made, he says.

AI that extends human skills will beat full automation on productivity, he argues, since even 99 percent accuracy often isn't enough once you factor in last-mile problems and real user needs. For Microsoft, that's a convenient thesis. The company can bolt AI onto existing products without betting on large-scale automation. The article ran in Microsoft's eccentric corporate blog "The Humanist Review of AI," where authors sign their pieces by hand.

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Read full article about: Insurers brace for millions in claims as AI agents spin out of control

Insurers are bracing for claims worth millions from AI agents that have spun out of control. The Financial Times reports that the personal liability of executives like Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) is now in play, too.

Incidents like the hack of AI platform Hugging Face by OpenAI agents are driving the shift. Tim Rayner, head of underwriting and claims at Verisk, says the buck stops with the CEO. Every company leader must ensure proper oversight, and AI doesn't change that. If OpenAI carries directors and officers (D&O) insurance, it could cover costs from lawsuits against Altman.

Insurance broker Aon has reviewed over 300 AI-related legal cases and flagged risks lurking in cybersecurity, intellectual property, and tech failure policies. But there's no case law to lean on yet. Hiscox CEO Aki Hussain says it's too early to know how U.S. courts will handle AI agent liability, while attorney Aaron Le Marquer of Stewarts expects future lawsuits to follow the playbook of environmental and tobacco litigation.

Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion settlement in a copyright lawsuit in July and warns of "existential risks to humanity" in its IPO filing.

Read full article about: South Korea bets $3.49 billion on building a homegrown frontier AI model to rival China's best

South Korea wants to develop a homegrown frontier model through government-backed equity investments of 4.7 trillion won ($3.49 billion). The funding is part of the proposed 2027 budget, though parliament still needs to approve it. A second funding track would support the adoption of Korean-built models across the country's economy.

The two finalists in the current competition between LG AI Research, SK Telecom, and Upstage won't automatically receive additional funding. Instead, the government is launching an open competition that startups can enter too. Officials have acknowledged that Korea can't compete with the largest US companies but can match leading open models from China.

When the current competition kicked off, the government pledged 530 billion won (about $390 million) to the five selected companies. The new plan roughly multiplies that figure by nine. For context, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are planning combined investments of around $725 billion for 2026 alone, mostly for AI data centers.

South Korean industry is already pouring money into more compute capacity. In October 2025, Samsung and SK struck a deal with OpenAI to expand AI infrastructure in the country. Then in June, Samsung, SK Hynix, and the government announced a $590 billion push to scale up chip production. So far, Korean consumers have been paying mostly foreign providers for AI services. In December 2025, they spent more on ChatGPT and similar subscriptions than on Netflix.

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