My Bloomsbury book "Ethics, Information, and Technology" was published on Nov. 13, 2025. Purchases can be made via Amazon and this Bloomsbury webpage: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ethics-information-and-technology-9781440856662/
CEO Sam Altman claims military will not use AI product for autonomous killing systems or mass surveillance
"OpenAIsaid it had struck a deal with the Pentagon to supply AI to classifiedUS militarynetworks, hours afterDonald Trumpordered the government to stop using the services of one of the company’s main competitors.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, announced the move on Friday night. It came after an agreement between Anthropic, a rival AI company that runs the Claude system, and the Trump administration broke down after Anthropic sought assurances its technology would not be used for mass surveillance – nor for autonomous weapons systems that can kill people without human input.
Announcing the deal, Altman insisted that OpenAI’s agreement with the government included assurances that it would not be used to those ends.
“Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems,” Altman wrote on X. He added that the Pentagon “agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement”.
Altman also said he hoped the Pentagon would “offer these same terms to all AI companies” as a way to “de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and toward reasonable agreements”."
"Users, lawyers and mental health professionals all are raising concerns about the impact of using chatbots as confidantes. “We are kind of at this inflection point in a quest for accountability where people coming forward is forcing companies to reckon with specific use cases of how their technologies have harmed people,” said Meetali Jain, founding director of Tech Justice Law Project and co-counsel on the Ceccanti case. “In terms of the number of cases going up, there’s likely to be more coordinated efforts on parts of the court to try to deal with this influx of cases.”"
"We spent the Cold War worrying mostly about military folly, and A.I. entered into our anxieties even then: the Soviet Doomsday Machine in “Dr. Strangelove,” the game-playing computer in “WarGames” and of course the fateful “Terminator” decision to make Skynet operational.
But for the last few years, as A.I. advances have concentrated potentially extraordinary power in the hands of a few companies and C.E.O.s — themselves embedded in a Bay Area culture of science-fiction dreams and apocalyptic fears — it’s become more natural to worry more about private power and ambition, about would-be A.I. god-kings rather than presidents and generals.
Until, that is, the current collision between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, the artificial intelligence pioneer, over whether Anthropic’s A.I. models should be bound by the company’s ethical constraints or made available for all uses the Pentagon might have in mind."
"OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said on Friday that it had reached an agreement with the Pentagon to provide its artificial intelligence technologies for classified systems, just hours after President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using A.I. technologymade by rival Anthropic.
Under the deal, OpenAI agreed to let the Pentagon use its A.I. systems for any lawful purpose, a term required by the Pentagon. But OpenAI also said it had found a way to ensure that its technologies would adhere to its safety principles by installing specific technical guardrails on its systems."
A small stable of doctors gave V.I.P. medical services to the sex offender and the women around him. Some doctors bent or broke the ethical rules of their profession.
"It’s unsurprising that someone with Mr. Epstein’s wealth and elite connections would receive white-glove service from concierge doctors and V.I.P. treatment at major hospitals. But the new documents reveal how some of his doctors bent or broke the ethical rules of their profession."
"The pharmaceutical giant Novartis has reached a settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were taken from her without her consent in 1951, when she was dying of cervical cancer in a segregated ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Ms. Lacks’s cells were the first to reproduce in a laboratory, outside the human body, and have been used in groundbreaking research, including to develop vaccines for polio and Covid-19 and treatments for cancer, Parkinson’s and the flu. The National Institutes of Health found the use of her cells, which were known as HeLa cells, was cited more than 110,000 times in scientific publications between 1953 and 2018.
In August 2024,more than 70 years after Ms. Lacks died at age 31 and was buried in an unmarked grave, her family filed a federal lawsuit in Maryland that accused Novartis, which is based in Switzerland, of amassing substantial profits through the use of the HeLa cell line."
"Buc-ee's filed alawsuitagainst Coles IP Holdings, LLC, which owns the Ohio convenience store and gas station chain Mickey Mart, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio on Feb. 18. Buc-ee's is suing for trademark infringement and unfair competition. Buc-ee's is also trying to cancel Coles IP Holdings' trademark registrations, a process that began in August 2025, according to court documents.
With about 42 Ohio locations, according to its website, Mickey Mart features a smiling cartoon moose within a red hexagon as its logo. Buc-ee's argues, in court documents, that the animalistic logo is too similar to its own – a toothy beaver wearing a red ballcap inside a bright yellow circle. Both animals are facing right and display wide eyes and a smile, Buc-ee's says in court documents...
Historically, Buc-ee's has been eager to jump on convenience stores that feature a gleeful animal mascot, claiming the similarities may cause confusion for consumers who may think Buc-ee's is associated with the smaller, often local or regional chains. Here's a look at some of the businesses Buc-ee's has sued over the years:..."
"President Trump on Friday ordered all federal agencies to stop using artificial intelligence technology made by Anthropic, a directive that could vastly complicate government intelligence analysis and defense work.
Writing on Truth Social,Mr. Trump used harsh words for Anthropic, describing it as a “radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about.”
Shortly after Mr. Trump’s announcement, and 13 minutes after a Pentagon deadline, Defense Secretary Pete Hegsethdesignatedthe company a “supply-chain risk to national security.” The label means that no contractor or supplier that works with the military can do business with Anthropic.
The move is all but unheard-of, legal experts said. It strips an American company of its government work by using a process previously deployed only with foreign companies the United States considered security risks."
The Pentagon’s contract dispute with Anthropic is part of a wider clash about the use of artificial intelligence for national security and who decides on any safeguards.
"The fight between the Department of Defense and the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has ostensibly been abouta $200 million contractover the use of A.I. in classified systems.
But as the two sides careen towarda 5:01 p.m. Friday deadlineover terms of the contract, far more is at stake.
Amid the legalese and heated rhetoric are questions being asked globally about how to use A.I., what the technology’s risks are and who gets to decide on setting any limits — the makers of A.I. or national governments.
Underlying it all is fear and awe over the dizzying pace of A.I. progress and the technology’s uncertain impact on society."
The A.I. firm had rejected military officials’ latest offer. Anthropic has until 5:01 p.m. on Friday to give them unrestricted access to its model.
"A standoff between the Pentagon and the artificial intelligence company Anthropic appeared to be deepening as the two sides hurtled toward a5:01 p.m. deadlineFriday that military officials gave the firm to either allow them unrestricted access to its most advanced model or face consequences.
Defense Department officials criticized Anthropic’s leader after thecompany on Thursday rejectedtheir latest offer to settle the dispute. The Pentagon has threatened to either cut the company off from government business by declaring it a supply chain threat or force it to provide its frontier model without restrictions under the Defense Production Act.
Emil Michael, a top Pentagon official who oversees artificial intelligence, attacked Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, who on Thursday released a statement about why the company would not agree to the Defense Department’s latest terms.
“It’s a shame that @DarioAmodei is a liar and has a God-complex,”Mr. Michael wrote late Thursday. “He wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation’s safety at risk. The @DeptofWar will ALWAYS adhere to the law but not bend to whims of any one for-profit tech company.”"
"I am adamantly opposed to the recently proposed faculty rule that mandates a maximum number of A’s in any given course. My opposition is primarily based on three ethical issues."
"Trustees of thePickens County Library Systemvoted to remove the library’s director with no explanation after nearly two hours of private discussion.
The move comes after library staff were directed by the board toreview more than 86,000 booksin the children’s and teen sections, an effort that is expected to last a year. The librarycanceled a slew of eventsand stopped interlibrary loans to reassign staff members’ time for the review.
Policy changes in Pickens followrecent fightsover the types of books accessible at local libraries nationwide. Many of the debates have surrounded access to books that touch on themes about LGBTQ identity or racism.
During aspecial called meetingthe evening of Feb. 24, the library’s board of trustees voted 5-2 to terminate Executive Director Stephanie Howard effective immediately. Howard, a Pickens County native,started in her role in 2019...
Howard holds a Master of Library Science degree from the University of South Carolina andhas more than two decadesof library management experience.
In 2025, she wasgiven the Intellectual Freedom Award by the South Carolina Library Association. The annual award “recognizes members of our community who have contributed to an awareness of intellectual freedom and censorship issues in South Carolina libraries,” the SCLA description states."
"Defense Secretary Hegseth has threatened to compel Anthropic to give the military free rein with AI, say reports.
A growing rift between the US Department of Defense (DoD) and Anthropic over how AI can be used by the military has led to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issuing a blunt ultimatum: work with us on our terms or risk being banned from Pentagon programs.
According to news site Axios, Hegseth gave Anthropic until Friday, February 27 to agree to its terms during a tense meeting this week. If no agreement is reached, the company would risk being deemed a “supply chain risk,” with Hegseth even threatening to invoke the Cold War-era Defense Production Act to compel cooperation,the reportsaid.
The DoD’s view is that it should be free to use Anthropic’s AI for “all lawful purposes,” regardless of ethical boundaries set by the company itself. Anthropic, by contrast, wants to set narrower guardrails."
"Anthropic, a company founded by OpenAI exiles worried about the dangers of AI, is loosening its core safety principle in response to competition.
Instead of self-imposed guardrails constraining its development of AI models, Anthropic is adopting a nonbinding safety framework that it says can and will change.
In a blog post Tuesday outlining its new policy, Anthropic said shortcomings in its two-year-old Responsible Scaling Policy could hinder its ability to compete in a rapidly growing AI market.
The announcement is surprising, because Anthropic has described itself as the AI company with a “soul.” It also comes the same week that Anthropic is fighting a significant battle with the Pentagon over AI red lines."
"Artificial intelligence video startup Runway AI has been hit with a proposed class action lawsuit in California federal court for allegedly misusing YouTube content to train its video generation platform.
YouTube creator David Gardner said in the complaintfiled in Los Angeles on Monday, that Runway bypassed YouTube's copyright protections to illegally download user videos for its AI training."
Laurence des Cars’s departure is the latest setback for the world’s largest museum. Her tenure was marred by labor strikes, water leaks and security lapses that led to the heist in October.
"Laurence des Cars, the first female president of the Louvre Museum, resigned on Tuesday, less than three months afteran audacious theftraised thorny questions about security at one of the world’s most famous museums.
Ms. des Cars submitted her resignation to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who had appointed her in 2021 and championed her plans for an ambitious refurbishment of the museum, known as “Louvre — New Renaissance.”
The president’s office said in a statement that Mr. Macron had accepted Ms. des Cars’s resignation “as an act of responsibility at a time when the world’s largest museum needs both stability and a strong new impetus to successfully complete major security and modernization projects.”
Ms. des Cars’s resignation came a day before she was scheduled to testify before the French Parliament about thesecurity lapsesthat led to thetheft of a collection of jewels, which were valued at more than $100 million."
"For their final presentations in the Artificial Intelligence and Ethics course at Avonworth High School last month, students each picked a topic to examine through the lens of AI.
Senior Theo Rose chose to look at AI’s role in the art world. On a slide, she showed several images of AI-generated art...
During the past school year, English teacher Scott Tuffiash launched Avonworth’s AI and Ethics class to get students at his suburban public school talking to one another and thinking critically about the technology around them.
“And that way, it's really like, is this what we want? Is this what we need?” he said.
While Tuffiash said he takes a neutral stance on AI, what students in the class think of this now-ubiquitous technology falls along a spectrum...
Tuffiash also worked with John Slattery, executive director of Duquesne University’s Center for Ethics and Science, Technology and Law, to create an AI-centric essay contest for the region’s high-schoolers.
This school year, students from across Western Pennsylvania were tasked with answering the question: “How do we stay human in the age of Al?”"
"In the latest chapter of a closely-watched fitness industry feud, a federal appeals court handed Megan Roup a decisive victory in her copyright battle with rival trainer Tracy Anderson, affirming that Anderson’s dance-cardio routines are not protectable under federal copyright law. In a newly-issued memorandum, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the lower court’s grant of summary judgment in Roup’s favor, concluding that the so-called “TA Method” amounts to a functional fitness system rather than protectable choreography...
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling sends a clear message to fitness entrepreneurs: branding a workout as proprietary, scientific, or even choreographed will not convert a functional exercise system into a protectable work of authorship. For an industry built on personality-driven empires and carefully curated “methods,” the decision makes clear how limited a role copyright can play in safeguarding competitive advantage. With that in mind, parties like Anderson and Roup will have to rely on trademarks, trade secrets, and as this case illustrates, carefully drafted employment agreements, to protect their intellectual capital.
For now, Roup has secured a meaningful appellate win. And for Anderson, whose cult-followed method helped define boutique fitness in the 2000s, the fight continues – albeit on the contract (not copyright) front.
"Following the lead of several major Hollywood studios, the Motion Picture Assn. has sent its own cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, the company behind the controversial artificial-intelligence video generator Seedance 2.0.
The trade association, which represents the interests of major film and TV studios, sent a notice to the Chinese company, reflecting its members’ collective response to “ByteDance’s pervasive copyright infringement.” MPA argues that Seedance’s unauthorized use of copyrighted materials is a “feature, not a bug.”
The letter, sent Friday, marks the first time the MPA has forwarded a cease-and-desist to a major AI firm and represents a further escalation of tensions between the entertainment industry and an AI company."
[Kip Currier: Since 2020, I've taught a "required core course" for the graduate students in the Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information. The course is LIS 2040: The Information Professional in Communities. I posted the note (copied below) for my students, with the excerpt from a 2/24/26 Guardian article about the decline of access to mass market paperback books, as accessibility and breaking down barriers are key thematic topics in the course.
My 2025 Bloomsbury book Ethics, Information, and Technologyhas a chapter on Access. Accessibility -- in its various manifestations -- is a recurring issue throughout the book's other chapters, such as those exploring ethical issues of Intellectual Freedom, Intellectual Property, Open Movements and Traditional Knowledge, Social Media, Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies, and more.]
[Kip Currier: The most important take-away in my LIS 2040 course is how we as information professionals (and in our capacities as individuals in our personal lives, too) can help to break down barriers that individuals and communities face. This Guardian article on the demise of the mass market paperback Links to an external site.implicates the ability of people to access information and has a whole host of ramifications, like affordability of books, literacy rates, and platforms for diverse authors and genres.
In the second half of the term, we'll be thinking extensively about ways that we can all work to mitigate and break down barriers of many kinds.]
[Excerpt]
"The so-called ‘pocket book’ sold in supermarkets is being phased out across the US, the latest sign of an ongoing shift in how people are choosing to read
Shelly Romerohas early memories of going to her local supermarket and picking pulp fiction off the shelves. “We were very working class; my mom was working two jobs sometimes,” she recalls. “The appeal of books being cheaper and smaller and able to be carried around was definitely a thing.”
For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4in by 7in and cheap enough to be bought on a whim.
But the era of the “pocket book” is drawing to a close. ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the US, announced recently that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The decision follows years of plummeting sales, from 131m units in 2004 to 21m in 2024, and marks the end of a format that once democratised reading for the working class...
"They had that democratic aspect to them where you can just find them anywhere and it always felt like it was the pick ‘n’ mix candy-type store where there is something here for everyone, whether it’s the Harlequin romance novel or something very pulpy like a sci-fi or horror novel that you could quickly get.”...
“We’re definitely losing accessibility and that’s a huge thing right now, especially in this country, whether it’s libraries being defunded, book bannings happening, one person saying let’s get rid of 200 books because I don’t want my child to read diverse authors."
"Chatterjee believes that “the widespread adoption of screens into our children’s lives is the most urgent public health issue of our time”. He was never very political, he says. He is the affable host of a successful health podcast, Feel Better, Live More, and his books strike an optimistic, inspiring tone – but on this issue he is passionate, his frustration obvious. “I think successive governments have been very weak here, and they are failing a whole generation of children. I think they’ve already failed a generation of children.”"
The ads by Public First Action, which started airing on Monday, are part of an escalating political war over artificial intelligence before the midterm elections.
"A new ad campaign on Monday warned northern New Jersey residents that Congress could leave them vulnerable to harm by artificial intelligence.
The ad, which opens with photos of A.I.-generated women smiling on social media alongside A.I.-generated headlines, urged voters to tell their House representative to vote against a bill that would block states from creating protections against A.I. scams.
“He can make sure A.I. serves us, not the other way around,”the adsaid of Josh Gottheimer, the Democratic co-chair of the House’s new A.I. commission, which is expected to heavily influence legislation on the topic. “New Jersey families come before Big Tech’s bottom line.”
The $300,000 ad campaign was paid for by Public First Action, a super PAC operation backed by the A.I. start-up Anthropic. Focused on New Jersey, the campaign is likely to run several weeks — part of several similar initiatives by the group nationally."
