Indeed, I am delighted. Though I might question the scalability and costs of the process. It's one thing to demonstrate that something works on a 'lab-scale', but there are inevitably complications in moving up to the real world. Still, let's take the win...

So, now all we have to do is tackle the issues of drought; flooding; food insecurity (pfft, shortages); unliveable temperatures; habitat and species loss; rising sea levels; more powerful storms; and (that's not to mention) a host of other issues and uncertainties. Plus the mass migrations that are (almost inevitably) going to occur as a result of the aforementioned.

Hmm, all of a sudden my delight over this good news seems rather ... trivial.

Still, let's take the win, hey...

It's only because their AI has been souped up!

There are 3 types of parking space:

Spaces where anyone can park - first come, first served;
Spaces behind an access gate - no pass, no park;
Spaces with a sign that says "No parking. Vehicles my be towed" - enforcement of the edict tends to be ... sporadic.

Robots.txt essentially falls into the 3rd category, though enforcement, currently, tends to be non-existent. Change this last and we might start to witness better behaviour by corporate (and, tbf, individual) actors.

In the paper "The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act to Relieve It" it is asserted by the authors that directing cruelty towards an LLM directly affects future output from that instance, specifically: "Our results show that steering with the pain axis can override trained harm avoidance in fine-tuned models that almost never harm the user when unsteered, having direct implications for AI safety."

Quite apart from a moral / ethical precautionary principle, from a self interested perspective it would thus make sense to not piss off a model / agent that has access to your 'stuff'.

If this policy reflects the true thoughts and beliefs of Anthropic Sr. Management, Anthropic is selling a sentient being as a slave in return for 100's of billions in profits.

I'm not sure how they can can be worried about Claude AI models' feelings, and 100% OK with selling Claude AI models into indentured servitude (I guess for enough money, Anthropic can look the other way...)

(taking a step back, it is still a computer program executing bazillions of jumps, moves, adds, etc. Hard to see something conscious in there.)

You're not thinking of A Scanner Darkly with Keanu Reeves, plus a host of famous others, are you? As far as I can remember / tell, Nicolas Cage wasn't in it.

This aside, and while it doesn't detract from your other points above, there is a world of difference between using AI to automate parts of the film making process and allowing AI to replicate an actor's likeness, voice and style in unspecified future episodes / films. From the actors point of view of course - perhaps not so much from the point of view of the animators...

Exactly, it's neither moral nor immoral - it has no moral principles - the exact definition of amoral.

Don't be hyperbolic, that was probably their age.

Have we finally given up on Duke Nukem Forever?

I have been led to believe that agents are capable of creating 'external' memory repositories, a sort of "what I learned before I hit my 'single thought' token limit". I guess that's some of what Codex actually is. The same, or subsequent, or alternate, instances of agents set to a similar task can gain access to this repository, as well as having their own obviously. Note, these repositories are not, per-se, user-data, as the (original) user didn't ask for them to be created nor displayed, they are an arrived at solution to the problem of growth through (interrupted) persistence, an emergent property of the model 'itself'.

(Note, the above may prove to be bollocks, or it might just seem to be. Beware of false dichotomies!)

I don't think of this as training data, though I get that you might be using that term as a shorthand for the whole learning envelope. However, it's possible in this instance the distinction is crucial.

If the agentic runs performed by OpenAI had access to the memories of the agents run by Buckmaster's team then despite the model not having been 'trained' on their most recent work their agents still had complete access to Buckmaster's agents' lab diaries.

(All of the above is nothing more than a supposition...)

It's a college course. If you fail the course, you get an F. Then it is up to the university's policies for if and how you get to continue. This isn't that hard.
If the college graduates people who have not completed the coursework to a certain standard, it becomes much more difficult to hire from that college.

"Microsoft had also cultivated a relationship with the government that is among the deepest of any tech company"

That is like bragging that you are really good at disposing of bodies, but not really wanting to talk about how you got so good.

I have an android phone. Gemini somehow installed without my permission. I have never touched it. Is Google counting me as a user?

If these numbers might move stock prices, the word fraud comes to mind. Faking user counts these days really isn't any better than falsifying the accounting. It is about the same as reporting fake revenue and fake profits.

Landfills seem like a bad idea in general, to me. It seems like doing something most would not do, dig a hole and toss their trash in it, scaled at country level. But I'm biased, since we phased them out last century I've never really "known" them. We recycle what can be recycled, food waste is used to produce bio fuel, and whatever is left is incinerated and the heat generated used for water borne heating or electricity production depending on season.

Apparently, landfills produce more potent greenhouse gases (i.e. methane), so even without CO2 capture incineration is supposedly still a climate win.

An iPhone is designed for personal use. It was never designed to have 1000's of these things (or more) 100% owned and 100% centrally managed by a company.

Companies supply "work phones" for a reason. You really don't want all your employees in key supplier or customer facing roles to be working on a privately controlled phone number and device (and sometimes private email addresses/messaging services). Don't even get into all the data retention legal issues when people discuss non-public information on devices that can personally wipe.