Anthropic sued the Trump administration yesterday in an attempt to reverse the government's decision to blacklist its technology. Anthropic argues that it exercised its First Amendment rights by refusing to let its Claude AI models be used for autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans and that the government blacklisted it in retaliation.

"When Anthropic held fast to its judgment that Claude cannot safely or reliably be used for autonomous lethal warfare and mass surveillance of Americans, the President directed every federal agency to 'IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic's technology'—even though the Department of War had previously agreed to those same conditions," Anthropic said in a lawsuit in US District Court for the Northern District of California. "Hours later, the Secretary of War [Pete Hegseth] directed his Department to designate Anthropic a 'Supply-Chain Risk to National Security,' and further directed that 'effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.'"

Anthropic said the First Amendment gives it "the right to express its views—both publicly and to the government—about the limitations of its own AI services and important issues of AI safety." Anthropic further argued that the process for designating it a supply chain risk did not comply with the procedures mandated by Congress. The supply chain risk designation is supposed to be used only to protect against risks that an adversary may sabotage systems used for national security, the lawsuit said.

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For the second time, Vinay Prasad is set to leave the Food and Drug Administration.

In a post on social media Friday, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced that Prasad will exit in April, adding that he got "a tremendous amount accomplished" during his year at the agency.

Prasad's tenure was generally marked by controversy, but he is departing amid a cluster of self-destructive decisions. Those include a shocking rejection of an mRNA vaccine (which was over the objections of agency scientists and quickly reversed); a demand for an additional clinical trial on a gene therapy for Huntington's disease, which was widely seen as moving the goalpost for the therapy; his startling choice to publicly attack the maker of that gene therapy, UniQure; and alleged abuse of FDA staff, who say he created a toxic work environment .

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NASA's inspector general released a new report on Tuesday that examines the space agency's management of the Human Landing System development contracts signed with SpaceX and Blue Origin.

These landers are essential for NASA's program to land humans on the Moon this decade and then establish a long-term settlement on the lunar surface. However, both NASA and the companies developing the landers have largely been silent about their efforts. For this reason the new report on Human Landing Systems (HLS) provides some interesting insights previously unknown to the public.

Overall, the report, signed by Office of Inspector General senior official Robert Steinau, finds that the fixed-price contracting approach has been beneficial for NASA as it seeks to broaden its utilization of the US commercial space industry.

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Google didn't waste time integrating Gemini into its popular Workspace apps, but those AI features are now getting an overhaul. The company says its new Gemini features for Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides will save you from the tyranny of the blank page by doing the hard work for you. Gemini will be able to create and refine drafts, stylize slides, and gather context from across your Google account. At this rate, you'll soon never have to use that squishy human brain of yours again, and won't that be a relief?

If you go to create a new Google Doc right now, you'll see an assortment of AI-powered tools at the top of the page. Google is refining and expanding these options under the new system. The new AI editing features will appear at the bottom of a fresh document with a text box similar to your typical chatbot interface. From there, you can describe the document you want and get a first draft in a snap. When generating a new document, you can rope in content from sources like Gmail, other documents, Google Chat, and the web.

This also comes with expanded AI editing capabilities. You can use further prompts to reformat and change the document or simply highlight specific sections and ask for changes. Docs will also support AI-assisted style matching, which might come in handy if you have multiple people editing the text. Google notes that all Gemini suggestions are private until you approve them for use.

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Every year, we have a blast covering a fresh crop of winners of the Ig Nobel prizes. After 35 years in Boston, the annual prize ceremony will take place in Zurich, Switzerland, this year and will continue to be held in a European city for the foreseeable future. The reason: concerns about the safety of international travelers, who are increasingly reluctant to travel to the US to participate.

“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of The Annals of Improbable Research magazine, told The Associated Press . “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the US this year.”

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” As the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures, in which experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and again in just seven words.

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Nokian provided flights from Austin, Texas, to Ivalo, Finland, and accommodation so Ars could visit its test facility. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

IVALO, Finland—In 1987, fictional superspy James Bond careened around a frozen lake in an Aston Martin in the movie The Living Daylights . Bond’s tires were carrying a secret—retractable tire studs that operated with the touch of a button. After cutting a circle in the ice with a wheel to sink the bad guys, Bond deployed his outriggers for balance and his on-demand studs for an impressive getaway.

Nokian Tires played with that idea, presenting a concept in 2014 with similar functionality. However, as Nokian development manager Mikko Liukkula remembers wryly, each tire was so complex that a production set would have cost more than the vehicle itself. Fast-forward to 2026, and Nokian has debuted a giant step forward in studded-tire engineering: a studded winter tire that automatically adjusts to changes in temperature and surface pressure.

I put these new Hakkapeliitta 01 tires through the wringer in and around a frozen-over Lake Tammijärvi at Nokian’s 1,700-acre testing center. After drifting, slaloming, hard braking, and swooshing along snowy trails, I can attest to the quality of the gripping power.

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Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.

The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.

Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”

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Buying a cheap laptop is easy. You just go to Best Buy or Newegg or Amazon or Walmart or somewhere, you pick the cheapest one (or the most expensive one that fits whatever your budget is), and you buy it. For as little as $200 or $300, you can bring home something new (as in, "new-in-box" not as in, "was released recently") that will power up and boot Windows or ChromeOS.

Buying a decent cheap laptop, or recommending one to someone else who's trying to buy one? That's hard.

For several years I helped maintain Wirecutter's guide to sub-$500 laptops , and keeping that guide useful and up to date was a nightmare. It's not that decent options with good-enough specs, keyboards, and screens didn't exist. But the category is a maze of barely differentiated models, some of them retailer-exclusive. You'd regularly run into laptops that were fine except for a bad screen or a terrible keyboard or miserable battery life—some fatal flaw that couldn't be overlooked.

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Editor's note: On Monday afternoon, Blue Origin chief executive Dave Limp sent employees an email announcing a "new stock option" plan that would allow all employees to participate in and eventually convert vested options. This article explains why this is so important for the company in the competitive space industry.

Two years after he founded his space company in the summer of 2004, Jeff Bezos penned a letter that greeted new employees with the message, "Welcome to Blue Origin!" A copy of this letter was subsequently given to new employees for nearly two decades.

At one point in the letter, Bezos questioned whether Blue Origin was a good investment.

"I accept that Blue Origin will not meet a reasonable investor's expectations for return on investment over a typical investing horizon," Bezos wrote. "It's important to the peace of mind of those at Blue to know I won't be surprised or disappointed when this prediction comes true. On the other hand, I do expect that over a very long-term horizon—perhaps even decades from now—Blue will be self-sustaining and operationally profitable, and will yield returns."

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