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Anthropic Releases Opus 4.8 With New 'Dynamic Workflow' Tool Published on 2026-05-28T22:00:00Z Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.8 with stronger performance and better handling of uncertain or flawed data, including a greater tendency to flag issues rather than make unsupported claims. The update also introduces a "Dynamic Workflows" research preview for coordinating complex tasks across many subagents. TechCrunch reports: Opus 4.8 comes with the expected best-in-class benchmark results, but there's also particular attention to how the model manages bad or uncertain data. In the launch post, Anthropic's early testers found that the new model is "more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims." Echoing this point, a testimonial from Bridgewater associates said the biggest difference in the upgrade was "Opus 4.8's tendency to proactively flag issues with the inputs and outputs of an analysis, s...

Occupy Wall Street Co-Founder Built an On-Device AI For Activists Published on 2026-05-28T21:00:00Z An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: In an era where Silicon Valley's conservatism is both expressed openly and becoming more intense by the day, it's strange to think that tech was once seen as a hive of liberalism. The right-wing nature of today's tech industry means that its products tend to also be seen as serving right-wing interests, either in their actual operation (like X's openly and unrepentantly right-wing chatbot Grok) or by the simple fact that their existence serves to enrich a small group of very powerful, very conservative people. But does it have to be this way? Can LLMs and AI agents find a place in the toolkit of progressive activist groups? The conviction that they can is the idea behind a new app called Outcry, which provides a chatbot designed specifically as a "private, on-device AI mentor for activists, organizers and movement...

Trump Loses More Control Over AI Regulation As Illinois Passes Landmark Law Published on 2026-05-28T20:00:00Z Illinois lawmakers on Wednesday passed a landmark AI safety bill (SB 315) that would require major AI companies to publish safety plans, submit annual third-party testing reports, report serious incidents quickly, and protect whistleblowers who flag emerging risks. OpenAI and Anthropic supported the bill, which could make Illinois a testing ground for state-level AI governance as federal regulation remains stalled. Ars Technica reports: To force companies to be more transparent about rapid developments, Illinois would likely rely on "the Big Four accounting and auditing firms -- Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC -- to audit their safety practices," [said Scott Wisor, a policy director at a nonprofit called Secure AI Project, which supported the bill]. The required independent audits will likely frustrate Trump, who has tried and failed to stop states from implementing AI ...

Valve's Steam Deck Sells Out Again, Even After 40% Price Increase Published on 2026-05-28T19:00:00Z Valve's Steam Deck has sold out again despite a steep price increase that pushed the 1TB OLED model as high as $949 -- about $300 above its original price. "Even with the $300 price bump, the Steam Deck sold out after less than 24 hours back in stock," reports IGN's Jacqueline Thomas. "I don't know how many units Valve was able to stock into its store, but it does seem like Valve spent a couple weeks building up its stock before putting the handheld back on its store." IGN reports: Over the last couple weeks, Valve has been receiving plenty of "game console" shipments from China. At first, I thought this was a sign that the company was getting ready to finally release the Steam Machine, but it looks like at least a portion of these shipments â" if not all of them -- were Steam Deck restocks. That's a lot of Steam Decks to sell thro...

Nvidia To Spend $150 Billion a Year In Taiwan Published on 2026-05-27T22:00:00Z Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the company plans to spend around $150 billion a year in Taiwan, calling it the "epicenter of the AI revolution." "Four years ago, five years ago, Nvidia was spending about $10, $15 billion dollars a year in Taiwan. Now we're spending $100, going to $150 billion dollars in Taiwan each year," Huang said. Reuters reports: Huang was speaking at a launch celebration in Taipei for the chip company's planned Taiwan headquarters, which he said will break ground this year and aims to become operational in 2030. He did not provide a timeframe for the number of years the company plans to invest $150 billion. The Taiwan headquarters will bring Nvidia closer to TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker which makes many of the advanced semiconductors powering the trend towards AI and is a major supplier to the U.S. tech company. "Taiwan is booming,...

Rust Will Save Linux From AI, Says Greg Kroah-Hartman Published on 2026-05-27T21:00:00Z Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman says Rust can help Linux deal with a flood of AI-discovered security bugs (namely Dirty Frag, Copy Fail, and Fragnesia) by preventing common C mistakes around memory, locking, error handling, and untrusted data at build time rather than during human review. It's "not a silver bullet" and does not mean rewriting the whole kernel, but he said new drivers and subsystems will increasingly use Rust as Linux evolves forward. ZDNet reports: Kroah-Hartman illustrated those pitfalls with real C bugs in the kernel, including a 15-year-old Bluetooth bug that dereferenced a pointer without checking it and a Xen bug where "we forgot to unlock" in an error path. "The majority of the bugs in the kernel are this tiny, minor stuff," he explained. "Error conditions aren't checked, locks aren't forgotten, unreleased memo...

The AI Fight Brewing Inside the New York Times Published on 2026-05-27T20:20:00Z An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: How newsrooms should use AI -- or if they should at all -- has been a recurrent debate within the media industry over the last several years. Increasingly, these rules are being hammered out at the bargaining table between unions and publishers. Right now, employees at The New York Times are gearing up for a fight. Unionized staff with the Tech Guild say Times management has refused to provide the union with information related to how the company has used AI, its plans for AI use in the future, and how it will affect employees' jobs and workflow. (The union filed an unfair labor practice charge earlier this month.) The Tech Guild, a NewsGuild of New York unit of around 700 software engineers, designers, product and project managers, and data analysts, also filed grievances saying Times management violated their collective bargaining agreement when i...