Latest news with #JaredKaplan
Time Magazine
a day ago
- Science
- Time Magazine
In the Loop: Is AI Making the Next Pandemic More Likely?
Welcome back to In the Loop, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. Starting today, we'll be publishing these editions both as stories on and as emails. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? Subscribe to In the Loop What to Know If you talk to staff at the top AI labs, you'll hear a lot of stories about how the future could go fantastically well—or terribly badly. And of all the ways that AI might cause harm to the human race, there's one that scientists in the industry are particularly worried about today. That's the possibility of AI helping bad actors to start a new pandemic. 'You could try to synthesize something like COVID or a more dangerous version of the flu—and basically, our modeling suggests that this might be possible,' Anthropic's chief scientist, Jared Kaplan, told me in May. Measuring the risk — In a new study published this morning, and shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its release, we got the first hard numbers on how experts think the risk of a new pandemic might have increased thanks to AI. The Forecasting Research Institute polled experts earlier this year, asking them how likely a human-caused pandemic might be—and how likely it might become if humans had access to AI that could reliably give advice on how to build a bioweapon. What they found — Experts, who were polled between December and February, put the risk of a human-caused pandemic at 0.3% per year. But, they said, that risk would jump fivefold, to 1.5% per year, if AI were able to provide human-level virology advice. You can guess where this is going — Then, in April, the researchers tested today's AI tools on a new virology troubleshooting benchmark. They found that today's AI tools outperform PhD-level virologists at complex troubleshooting tasks in the lab. In other words, AI can now do the very thing that forecasters warned would increase the risk of a human-caused pandemic fivefold. We just published the full story on can read it here. Who to Know Person in the news – Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare. Since its founding in 2009, Cloudflare has been protecting sites on the internet from being knocked offline by large influxes of traffic, or indeed coordinated attacks. Now, some 20% of the internet is covered by its network. And today, Cloudflare announced that this network would begin to block AI crawlers by default — essentially putting a fifth of the internet behind a paywall for the bots that harvest info to train AIs like ChatGPT and Claude. Step back — Today's AI is so powerful because it has essentially inhaled the whole of the internet — from my articles to your profile photos. By running neural networks over that data using immense quantities of computing power, AI companies have taught these systems the texture of the world at such an enormous scale that it has given rise to new AI capabilities, like the ability to answer questions on almost any topic, or to generate photorealistic images. But this scraping has sparked a huge backlash from publishers, artists and writers, who complain that it has been done without any consent or compensation. A new model — Cloudflare says the move will 'fundamentally change how AI companies access web content going forward.' Major publishers, including TIME, have expressed their support for the shift toward an 'opt-in' rather than an 'opt-out' system, the company says. Cloudflare also says it is working on a new initiative, called Pay Per Crawl, in which creators will have the option of setting a price on their data in return for making it available to train AI. Fighting words — Prince was not available for an interview this week. But at a recent conference, he disclosed that traffic to news sites had dropped precipitously across the board thanks to AI, in a shift that many worry will imperil the existence of the free press. 'I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans, the Israelis — all of them who are trying to hack into our customer sites,' Prince said. 'And you're telling me I can't stop some nerd with a C-corporation in Palo Alto?' AI in Action 61% percent of U.S. adults have used AI in the last six months, and 19% interact with it daily, according to a new survey of AI adoption by the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. But just 3% percent of those users pay for access to the software, Menlo estimated based on the survey's results—suggesting 97% of users only use the free tier of AI tools. AI usage figures are higher for Americans in the workforce than other groups. Some 75% of employed adults have used AI in the last six months, including 26% who report using it daily, according to the survey. Students also report high AI usage: 85% have used it in the last six months, and 22% say they use it daily. The statistics seem to suggest that some students and workers are growing dependent on free AI tools—a usage pattern that might become lucrative if AI companies were to begin restricting access or raising prices. However, the proliferation of open-source AI models has created intense price competition that may limit any single company's ability to dramatically increase their costs. As always, if you have an interesting story of AI in Action, we'd love to hear it. Email us at: intheloop@ What we're reading 'The Dead Have Never Been This Talkative': The Rise of AI Resurrection by Tharin Pillay in TIME With the rise of image-to-video tools like the newest version of Midjourney, the world recently crossed a threshold: it's now possible, in just a few clicks, to reanimate a photo of your dead relative. You can train a chatbot on snippets of their writing to replicate their patterns of speech; if you have a long enough clip of them speaking, you can also replicate their voice. Will these tools make it easier to process the heart-rending pain of bereavement? Or might their allure in fact make it harder to move forward? My colleague Tharin published a deeply insightful piece last week about the rise of this new technology. It's certainly a weird time to be alive. Or, indeed, to be dead. Subscribe to In the Loop
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Anysphere launches a $200-a-month Cursor AI coding subscription
Anysphere launched a new $200-a-month subscription plan for its popular AI coding tool, Cursor, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. The new plan, Ultra, offers users 20x more usage on AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI compared to the company's $20-a-month subscription plan, Pro. Anysphere also says Cursor users on the Ultra plan will get priority access to new features. Anysphere CEO Michael Truell said in a blog that the Ultra plan was made possible through multi-year partnerships with AI model providers. In the last several months, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind have similarly rolled out pricier subscription plans — ranging from $100-a-month to $250-a-month — as part of an effort to capitalize on their power users, and offer them increased usage. The new, pricy Cursor subscription plan seems poised to add revenue to Anysphere's already booming business. Earlier this month, Anysphere announced that Cursor had reached $500 million in annualized recurring revenue and is being used by major companies such as Nvidia, Uber, and Adobe. Anysphere was one of the fastest companies ever to reach $100 million in ARR, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down. Based on TechCrunch's previous reporting, Cursor's ARR has grown by $200 million since April. However, the race to develop 'vibecoding' tools is heating up, and many of the AI model providers Cursor relies on are developing their own AI coding products. OpenAI has reportedly acquired Cursor's competitor, Windsurf, to beef up its offerings of AI coding products. Meanwhile, Anthropic continues to develop Claude Code, its in-house AI coding tool that utilizes its popular AI models. It's unclear whether Anysphere can sustain this level of growth without bumping into AI model providers. We've seen more competitive tactics emerge in the AI coding space as these businesses have grown. For example, Anthropic recently slashed Windsurf's direct access to Claude AI models as a means to undercut its largest competitor, OpenAI. At the same time, Anysphere has started putting more resources towards developing its own AI models that work alongside models from OpenAI and Anthropic. In May, Anysphere rolled out a new 'Tab' AI model, which can suggest code changes across various files. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan said he believed Anthropic would be working with Cursor for a long time. Anysphere's multi-year partnerships with Anthropic and other AI model providers certainly suggest these relationships aren't going anywhere just yet. Nonetheless, the competition for users is getting more intense. Sign in to access your portfolio
TechCrunch
09-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Anthropic's Jared Kaplan Charts the Course for Enterprise AI
Anthropic Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan joined TechCrunch Senior Reporter Maxwell Zeff at our TechCrunch Sessions: AI event to talk about the hottest topic within the AI community right now: agents. In Kaplan's view, chatbots are just the start, and agents will be the next frontier in expanding what AI can be capable of accomplishing. Kaplan also addressed a couple recent flashpoints with Anthropic, including the company rescinding some model access to the startup Windsurf, reportedly set to be acquired by OpenAI, as well as the company's stance against some of the Trump admin's recent AI policies.
The Verge
07-06-2025
- Business
- The Verge
Popular AI apps get caught in the crosshairs of Anthropic and OpenAI
Battlelines are being drawn between the major AI labs and the popular applications that rely on them. This week, both Anthropic and OpenAI took shots at two leading AI apps: Windsurf, one of the most popular vibe coding tools, and Granola, a buzzy AI app for taking meeting notes. 'With less than five days of notice, Anthropic decided to cut off nearly all of our first-party capacity to all Claude 3.x models,' Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan wrote on X this week, noting that 'we wanted to pay them for the full capacity.' An additional statement on Windsurf's website said: 'We are concerned that Anthropic's conduct will harm many in the industry, not just Windsurf.' Here, Mohan's company is collateral damage in Anthropic's rivalry with OpenAI, which has reportedly been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion. The deal hasn't been confirmed, but even the spectre of it happening was enough for Anthropic to cut off one of the most popular apps that it powers. After a spokesperson told TechCrunch's Maxwell Zeff that Anthropic was 'prioritizing capacity for sustainable partnerships,' co-founder Jared Kaplan put it more bluntly. 'We really are just trying to enable our customers who are going to sustainably be working with us in the future,' Kaplan told Zeff. 'I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.'
TechCrunch
06-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Inside Anthropic's AI ambitions with Jared Kaplan
If you've been following Anthropic, you'll know it's been a busy year for the AI startup. Back in March, the company announced that it raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion valuation in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Since then, it's launched a blog for its Claude models and, according to Bloomberg reporting, partnered with Apple to power a new 'vibe-coding' software platform. Instead of our usual Friday news rundown, today's episode of Equity brings you a conversation from this week's TechCrunch Sessions: AI event in Berkeley. Our friend and co-host Max Zeff sat down with Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer at Anthropic. Listen to the full conversation to hear more about: Who has direct access to Claude's AI models , Windsurf's response, and how it all ties into Anthropic's broader goals around openness, safety, and sustainability. , Windsurf's response, and how it all ties into Anthropic's broader goals around openness, safety, and sustainability. The company's pivot away from chatbots and toward agentic AI systems that can perform real tasks. How internal tools like Claude Code are shaping the future of AI-powered development. What it means to build AI that enterprises can actually trust, and how that affects the way humans interact with software, work, and each other.
