Pentagon Blacklist of Anthropic Ruled Unconstitutional

Earlier this year, Anthropic drew a clear line: its AI would not be used for mass surveillance of American citizens or for lethal autonomous weapons — systems that can choose to kill a target without a human authorising the decision. Every other major AI lab signed the Pentagon's revised contract terms. Anthropic did not.

The Trump administration's response was to classify Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" — a designation normally reserved for foreign national security threats — and move to cut the company out of Defense Department contracts entirely, replacing it with seven other labs including Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and SpaceX.

Anthropic sued. According to a ruling published Thursday and reported by The Verge, District Judge Rita F. Lin found the designation unconstitutional. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," she wrote. The classification was, in her words, "unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment" — the government's own records showed Anthropic was targeted for its "hostile manner through the press," not for any genuine security risk.

What this means in practice is uncertain. The ruling does not automatically restore Anthropic's government contracts, and the administration has not said whether it will appeal. What it does establish is that a company can refuse military contract terms it finds ethically unacceptable without the government labelling it a national security threat in retaliation.

What to watch: whether the administration appeals, and whether other AI labs renegotiate terms now that this legal line has been drawn.

Gemini Notebook is Google's AI note-taking tool — think of it as a workspace where you gather sources and ask questions across all of them at once. The new "Expert Intelligence" feature connects it to your Google Play Books library, so books you have already purchased become queryable sources alongside your own notes.

In practice: you could ask a management book how to handle a difficult conversation with a direct report, or pull recipes from a cookbook into a structured plan. More than 100,000 titles from publishers including Penguin Random House and O'Reilly Media support the feature at launch. Google has also worked with 15 authors — including Michael Pollan and Steven Pinker — to create author-curated notebooks with additional context.

Books you have not purchased stay visible as source labels only, with a link to buy. The feature will expand to Google's AI Mode in Search and the main Gemini app.

There is no standalone cost listed beyond owning the books. Gemini Notebook is free.

Honest read: Worth trying if you already buy books on Google Play — querying a reference book rather than flipping through it is genuinely useful. If your library lives elsewhere, there is nothing here yet.

What it is: A new evaluation dataset for automatic speech recognition (ASR — software that converts spoken words into text) covering Indian English and Hindi, added to the Open ASR Leaderboard (a public ranking of how accurately different speech-to-text models perform).

What's new: Hindi is the first Indic language on a leaderboard that previously covered only European languages — despite Hindi being spoken by more than half a billion people. Most ASR benchmarks measure average accuracy across a generic population; Monsoon is built to show where accuracy breaks down, and for whom.

How it works: Researchers collected unscripted conversations across hundreds of districts in India rather than centralised recording studios. Speakers used their own phones in real environments — indoors, outdoors, varying mobile connections. Each audio clip is tagged with 12 attributes: age, gender, geography, device, education level, income band, and more. This means a model's word error rate (WER — the percentage of words it gets wrong) can be broken down by speaker group rather than reported as a single average that hides who gets worse results.

What it can't do: The Hindi dataset has no normaliser yet — software that treats spelling variants of the same word as correct. That makes comparison across models less reliable for Hindi than for English. The authors flag this as a known gap.

Who should care: Anyone building or choosing voice tools for multilingual or non-Western-English audiences, and anyone who wants AI benchmarks to reflect actual user diversity.

Try it / read it: Hugging Face blog

OpenAI and Thailand's Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation have launched an eight-week accelerator program for ten Thai startups working in health, wellness, and education. According to OpenAI's announcement, each team receives US$2,000 in API credits (access tokens that let developers call OpenAI's models from their own software), one-on-one technical mentoring, and structured sessions covering product design, safety, cost management, and fundraising.

This is not a tool you can open in a browser today. It is a structured program for early-stage founders who already have a working prototype. The ten selected startups are named — CARIVA, insKru, Globish and seven others — and cohort applications are not currently open.

If you are a founder in Southeast Asia building on AI, this is a model worth watching as a template for similar public-private programs.

Worth knowing: The program is invitation-only for this cohort. API credits are provided for development use — costs beyond the granted amount would be the startup's own.

The US Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to eliminate the federal requirement for public notice before certain industrial facilities — including data centres — receive air pollution permits, according to The Verge. Under the proposed change, it would fall to individual states to decide whether to notify residents at all. Environmental advocates warn this would allow data centres to break ground without nearby communities having any opportunity to object. The rule being targeted has been in place since the 1970s and covers facilities from paper mills to power plant expansions. Nearly 200 health and environmental groups filed comments last Friday asking the EPA to withdraw the proposal.