📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: OpenAI Representatives Are Going to Critics’ Houses

A man who works at an AI watchdog group was alarmed when OpenAI suddenly showed up at his doorstep last fall, demanding he turn over documents. To his utter disbelief, he was being subpoenaed. 

“It’s a bit scary to know that the most valuable private company in the world has your address and has shown up and has questions for you,” the man, Tyler Johnston, who founded the nonprofit advocacy group The Midas Project, said in a new interview with A More Perfect Union.

“They were asking for every former employee we had spoken to and what we said to them,” he added. “Every congressional office that we spoke to, every potential investor that we spoke to.”

Johnston wasn’t alone. In all, NBC News reported last October that at least seven nonprofits that had been critical of OpenAI were served with subpoenas around the time of reporting, as part of a lawsuit between OpenAI and Elon Musk.

Later the same October that Johnston was subpoenaed, OpenAI completed its restructuring into a for-profit public benefit corporation, a move that was over a year and a half in the making. It had been challenged at every turn by Microsoft, which had invested billions of dollars into the startup, and Musk, who cofounded OpenAI but left the company in 2018 reportedly over disagreements with Altman, and who was now suing it for abandoning its original altruist mission of building open source models.

As the suit dragged out, a paranoid-sounding OpenAI began accusing its critics of being funded by Musk. And that’s how representatives from the company ended up at Johnston’s house.

“They wanted every single text message and document that we had that in any way related to OpenAI’s restructuring,” he told Perfect Union.

The subpoenas also came as OpenAI and other tech companies worked to shoot down a California bill that would’ve required the companies to restrict minors’ access to their AI models unless they could demonstrate their guardrails prevented the bot from promoting self-harm and other dangerous topics. With its restructuring on the line, and under threat of being subjected to powerful regulation, OpenAI had every reason to be more conscious of its image than ever. (Governor Gavin Newsom eventually vetoed the bill, and a weaker version of the legislation was enacted instead.)

As other AI watchdogs came forward to share how OpenAI had subpoenaed them as well, Johnston confronted its chief strategy officer Jason Kwon, who made a post on X accusing The Midas Project of having “suddenly” formed around when Musk sued OpenAI, arguing this raised “transparency questions.” 

“What are you talking about?” wrote an exasperated Johnston. “We were formed 19 months ago. We’ve never spoken with or taken funding from Musk and ilk, which we would have been happy to tell you if you asked a single time.”

“In fact,” he added, “we’ve said he runs xAI so horridly it makes OpenAI ‘saintly in comparison.’”

Weeks later, Johnston revealed how the news coverage of how his organization had gotten dragged into the lawsuit caused insurance brokers to refuse to cover his nonprofit.

“If you wanted to constrain an org’s speech, intimidation would be one strategy, but making them uninsurable is another, and maybe that’s what’s happened to us with this subpoena,” he said.

Now, he’s sounding more jaded than ever about the lengths that companies like OpenAI will go to to protect themselves. “The AI industry broadly is ready to play hardball,” he said in the interview.

More on OpenAI: Asset Manager Warns That OpenAI Is Likely Headed for Financial Disaster

The post OpenAI Representatives Are Going to Critics’ Houses With Threats and Demands appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Desktop agent that wor

Anthropic released Cowork on Monday, a new AI agent capability that extends the power of its wildly successful Claude Code tool to non-technical users — and according to company insiders, the team built the entire feature in approximately a week and a half, largely using Claude Code itself.

The launch marks a major inflection point in the race to deliver practical AI agents to mainstream users, positioning Anthropic to compete not just with OpenAI and Google in conversational AI, but with Microsoft's Copilot in the burgeoning market for AI-powered productivity tools.

"Cowork lets you complete non-technical tasks much like how developers use Claude Code," the company announced via its official Claude account on X. The feature arrives as a research preview available exclusively to Claude Max subscribers — Anthropic's power-user tier priced between $100 and $200 per month — through the macOS desktop application.

For the past year, the industry narrative has focused on large language models that can write poetry or debug code. With Cowork, Anthropic is betting that the real enterprise value lies in an AI that can open a folder, read a messy pile of receipts, and generate a structured expense report without human hand-holding.

How developers using a coding tool for vacation research inspired Anthropic's latest product

The genesis of Cowork lies in Anthropic's recent success with the developer community. In late 2024, the company released Claude Code, a terminal-based tool that allowed software engineers to automate rote programming tasks. The tool was a hit, but Anthropic noticed a peculiar trend: users were forcing the coding tool to perform non-coding labor.

According to Boris Cherny, an engineer at Anthropic, the company observed users deploying the developer tool for an unexpectedly diverse array of tasks.

"Since we launched Claude Code, we saw people using it for all sorts of non-coding work: doing vacation research, building slide decks, cleaning up your email, cancelling subscriptions, recovering wedding photos from a hard drive, monitoring plant growth, controlling your oven," Cherny wrote on X. "These use cases are diverse and surprising — the reason is that the underlying Claude Agent is the best agent, and Opus 4.5 is the best model."

Recognizing this shadow usage, Anthropic effectively stripped the command-line complexity from their developer tool to create a consumer-friendly interface. In its blog post announcing the feature, Anthropic explained that developers "quickly began using it for almost everything else," which "prompted us to build Cowork: a simpler way for anyone — not just developers — to work with Claude in the very same way."

Inside the folder-based architecture that lets Claude read, edit, and create files on your computer

Unlike a standard chat interface where a user pastes text for analysis, Cowork requires a different level of trust and access. Users designate a specific folder on their local machine that Claude can access. Within that sandbox, the AI agent can read existing files, modify them, or create entirely new ones.

Anthropic offers several illustrative examples: reorganizing a cluttered downloads folder by sorting and intelligently renaming each file, generating a spreadsheet of expenses from a collection of receipt screenshots, or drafting a report from scattered notes across multiple documents.

"In Cowork, you give Claude access to a folder on your computer. Claude can then read, edit, or create files in that folder," the company explained on X. "Try it to create a spreadsheet from a pile of screenshots, or produce a first draft from scattered notes."

The architecture relies on what is known as an "agentic loop." When a user assigns a task, the AI does not merely generate a text response. Instead, it formulates a plan, executes steps in parallel, checks its own work, and asks for clarification if it hits a roadblock. Users can queue multiple tasks and let Claude process them simultaneously — a workflow Anthropic describes as feeling "much less like a back-and-forth and much more like leaving messages for a coworker."

The system is built on Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK, meaning it shares the same underlying architecture as Claude Code. Anthropic notes that Cowork "can take on many of the same tasks that Claude Code can handle, but in a more approachable form for non-coding tasks."

The recursive loop where AI builds AI: Claude Code reportedly wrote much of Claude Cowork

Perhaps the most remarkable detail surrounding Cowork's launch is the speed at which the tool was reportedly built — highlighting a recursive feedback loop where AI tools are being used to build better AI tools.

During a livestream hosted by Dan Shipper, Felix Rieseberg, an Anthropic employee, confirmed that the team built Cowork in approximately a week and a half.

Alex Volkov, who covers AI developments, expressed surprise at the timeline: "Holy shit Anthropic built 'Cowork' in the last… week and a half?!"

This prompted immediate speculation about how much of Cowork was itself built by Claude Code. Simon Smith, EVP of Generative AI at Klick Health, put it bluntly on X: "Claude Code wrote all of Claude Cowork. Can we all agree that we're in at least somewhat of a recursive improvement loop here?"

The implication is profound: Anthropic's AI coding agent may have substantially contributed to building its own non-technical sibling product. If true, this is one of the most visible examples yet of AI systems being used to accelerate their own development and expansion — a strategy that could widen the gap between AI labs that successfully deploy their own agents internally and those that do not.

Connectors, browser automation, and skills extend Cowork's reach beyond the local file system

Cowork doesn't operate in isolation. The feature integrates with Anthropic's existing ecosystem of connectors — tools that link Claude to external information sources and services such as Asana, Notion, PayPal, and other supported partners. Users who have configured these connections in the standard Claude interface can leverage them within Cowork sessions.

Additionally, Cowork can pair with Claude in Chrome, Anthropic's browser…

Konten dipersingkat otomatis.

🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com