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Why indie board game companies are teaming up to sue Trump

Dice in front of four multicolored board game pieces that are (from left) green, yellow, blue, and red.
Several tabletop game companies are teaming up to sue Trump over his tariffs.

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  • Board game companies are suing Trump because they say tariffs are affecting their profits.
  • Stonemaier Games said in the lawsuit it expects to pay "millions" due to tariffs.
  • Trump says the tariffs are meant to boost US jobs, but the cost is often passed on to the consumer.

A group of tabletop game companies is suing President Donald Trump because it says his tariffs are reducing their profits to the real-world value of Monopoly money.

Stonemaier Games, which makes the popular board games "Wingspan," "Rolling Realms," and "Vantage," announced its involvement in the lawsuit this week. The company said the lawsuit would "challenge the unchecked authority" of Trump and his tariffs.

"We will not stand idly by while our livelihoods—and the livelihoods of thousands of small business owners and contractors in the US, along with the customers whose pursuit of happiness we hold dear—are treated like pawns in a political game," the company said.

Lawyers for Stonemaier, which is based in St. Louis, said in a legal complaint that the company estimates it will pay "millions in tariffs" because it manufactures all of its games in a Chinese factory owned by Panda Game Manufacturing, which is based in Canada. Stonemaier has printed its games in China for more than 13 years, the lawsuit says.

At least nine other companies joined Stonemaier in the lawsuit, saying Trump's tariffs will cause substantial harm to their business. XYZ Game Labs, Rookie Mage, Spielcraft, and TinkerHouse Games are all board game companies that are joining the lawsuit.

Spielcraft, an independent Nebraska-based board game maker, paid $4,335 in tariff fees in April, the lawsuit says.

Other small businesses also joined the suit. Clothing company Princes Awesome, which makes inclusive clothing for children and adults, paid $1,041 for dresses imported from China in March, according to the lawsuit.

"Princess Awesome has also ordered additional products from Peru, Bangladesh, and India that they anticipate will arrive in the United States in the coming weeks and are continuing to place new orders for imports," the complaint says.

Trump and his treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, have said that the tariffs are part of a strategy to increase manufacturing jobs in the United States. But that could take a while. In the meantime, tariffs can raise prices and reduce the dollar's purchasing power, leaving consumers with less money to spend.

Experts told Business Insider that supply chain disruptions caused by the tariffs could cause prices to spike and the availability of goods to decrease in as early as a few weeks.

Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing the companies in the lawsuit, said in a statement that Trump's tariffs are unconstitutional and that only Congress should have the power to levy tariffs.

"The Constitution gives Congress—not the president—the power to impose tariffs because policies affecting an entire nation should come from the body most representative of the entire nation," the statement says. "And Congress cannot delegate that core legislative power to the president."

Read the original article on Business Insider

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New study shows why simulated reasoning AI models don’t yet live up to their billing

There's a curious contradiction at the heart of today's most capable AI models that purport to "reason": They can solve routine math problems with impressive accuracy, yet when faced with formulating deeper mathematical proofs found in competition-level challenges, they often fail.

That's the finding of eye-opening preprint research into simulated reasoning (SR) models, initially listed in March and updated in April, that mostly fell under the news radar. The research serves as an instructive case study on the mathematical limitations of SR models, despite sometimes grandiose marketing claims from AI vendors.

What sets simulated reasoning models apart from traditional large language models (LLMs) is that they have been trained to output a step-by-step "thinking" process (often called "chain-of-thought") to solve problems. Note that "simulated" in this case doesn't mean that the models do not reason at all but rather that they do not necessarily reason using the same techniques as humans. That distinction is important because human reasoning itself is difficult to define.

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FBI offers $10 million for information about Salt Typhoon members

The FBI is offering $10 million for information about the China-state hacking group tracked as Salt Typhoon and its intrusion last year into sensitive networks belonging to multiple US telecommunications companies.

Salt Typhoon is one of a half-dozen or more hacking groups that work on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. Intelligence agencies and private security companies have concluded the group has been behind a string of espionage attacks designed to collect vital information, in part for use in any military conflicts that may arise in the future.

A broad and significant cyber campaign

The agency on Thursday published a statement offering up to $10 million, relocation assistance, and other compensation for information about Salt Typhoon. The announcement specifically sought information about the specific members of Salt Typhoon and the group's compromise of multiple US telecommunications companies last year.

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In the age of AI, we must protect human creativity as a natural resource

Ironically, our present AI age has shone a bright spotlight on the immense value of human creativity as breakthroughs in technology threaten to undermine it. As tech giants rush to build newer AI models, their web crawlers vacuum up creative content, and those same models spew floods of synthetic media, risking drowning out the human creative spark in an ocean of pablum.

Given this trajectory, AI-generated content may soon exceed the entire corpus of historical human creative works, making the preservation of the human creative ecosystem not just an ethical concern but an urgent imperative. The alternative is nothing less than a gradual homogenization of our cultural landscape, where machine learning flattens the richness of human expression into a mediocre statistical average.

A limited resource

By ingesting billions of creations, chatbots learn to talk, and image synthesizers learn to draw. Along the way, the AI companies behind them treat our shared culture like an inexhaustible resource to be strip-mined, with little thought for the consequences.

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Uber accused DoorDash of stifling competition. DoorDash says merchants just like them more.

DoorDash and Uber Eats stickers in a New York City cafe window.
DoorDash asked the California Superior Court to dismiss a lawsuit Uber filed in February.

Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto/Getty Images

  • DoorDash asked the California Superior Court to dismiss Uber's lawsuit on Friday.
  • In February, Uber accused DoorDash of inflating costs and other anti-competitive business practices.
  • "Instead of competing through innovation, Uber has resorted to litigation," DoorDash says.

DoorDash wants Uber's anti-competition lawsuit tossed by the California Superior Court, saying the litigation is a "cynical and calculated scare tactic."

DoorDash filed the motion alongside a press release on Friday.

"It's disappointing behavior from a company once known for competing on the merits of its products and innovation," DoorDash, which tops the online food delivery market in the United States, wrote in the release.

Uber filed a complaint against DoorDash in February, accusing the company of anti-competitive business practices that inflated prices for restaurants and customers. The complaint said DoorDash "devised and is engaged in an unlawful scheme to stifle competition with Uber Eats, its closest rival."

Uber accused DoorDash in the complaint of leveraging restaurants' dependence on its app to secure near-exclusive or exclusive use.

"Restaurants simply cannot afford to stand up to DoorDash, and find themselves powerless to choose the service or services that are best for their businesses in the market for first-party delivery," Uber's complaint said.

Doordash
DoorDash denied the accusations made in Uber's lawsuit in a motion on Friday.

Emily Dulla/Getty Images for DoorDash

Earnest Analytics reported in February that DoorDash dominated the food delivery market with a 60.7% share. Uber Eats followed at 26.1% and Grubhub at 6.3%.

DoorDash denied Uber's accusations in the motion on Friday.

Among its arguments, DoorDash said Uber is trying to "shoehorn its competition claims" by using a statute that typically applies to "disputes regarding employee non-compete provisions."

"Uber's lawsuit should be seen for what it is: sour grapes from a competitor that has been told by merchants, time and again, that they prefer working with DoorDash," the company's motion said. That's not the basis for a lawsuit — it's just fair competition. The Court should sustain DoorDash's demurrer."

Uber told Business Insider in a statement that it won't back down.

"It seems like the team at DoorDash is having a hard time understanding the content of our complaint. When restaurants are forced to choose between unfair terms or retaliation, that's not competition — it's coercion. Uber will continue to stand up for merchants and for a level playing field. We look forward to presenting the facts in court," an Uber spokesperson said.

A lawyer for DoorDash told BI, "Uber appears to be upset that they're losing in the marketplace because DoorDash has better and more innovative products, but that isn't a legitimate basis for a lawsuit."

"Uber's legal claims are meritless and should be dismissed," the lawyer said.

DoorDash isn't Uber's only legal battle this year. In April, the Federal Trade Commission sued Uber, saying the company added users to its Uber One subscription program without their consent.

The FTC said in a press release that the company "failed to deliver promised savings" and made it tough for users to cancel the service.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told Semafor on Friday that the FTC's lawsuit was a "head-scratcher."

"We make it incredibly easy to sign up for Uber One, the value is enormous, the renewal rates are over 90%. It's a great product," Khosrowshahi said. "We allow you to cancel. We allow you to pause. That one was a head-scratcher for me."

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A travel-fintech app uses AI search to cut through digital clutter. It saves employees more than 1,500 hours every month.

Super.com employees sit in rows of chairs at a company offsite, with a purple super.com sign in the background.
Enterprise search centralizes access to a company's data, making information from multiple platforms searchable through one hub.

Photo courtesy of Super.com

  • Super.com had its internal information scattered across several workspace platforms.
  • The company built an artificial intelligence search tool to make a tool hub.
  • This article is part of "Build IT: Connectivity," a series about tech powering better business.

The tools meant to streamline work can leave businesses stuck in a maze of messages, documents, and dashboards.

Super.com, a travel and finance platform on which customers can book hotels and earn cash and rewards, depends on various workspace platforms, including Slack, Confluence, and GitLab, to keep the business humming.

Hussein Fazal, Super.com's CEO, told Business Insider that juggling systems often slowed down day-to-day tasks. Documents, datasets, and message exchanges were scattered across platforms, which made it difficult for teams to access what they needed when they needed it.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company decided to permanently switch to remote work, which Fazal said added an extra challenge to information retrieval.

As a result, Super.com needed a central system to access information from all of its platforms.

"It's hard to just pick up information, and it can sometimes even be hard to get information," he said.

Super.com decided to build a hub that its employees could access from home. In 2022, the company teamed up with Glean, an AI startup in Palo Alto, California, to create a search platform that pulls information from across Super.com's software programs.

Hussein Fazal
Hussein Fazal is the chief executive officer at Super.com.

Courtesy of Super.com

A personalized search tool

Enterprise search is software that allows users to look for information across various platforms and databases. Glean's platform uses ranking algorithms and generative artificial intelligence to make it easier for users to find what they're looking for.

"Glean will find the right information and produce an answer in natural language, à la ChatGPT, but with the information in the context of your enterprise," Tamar Yehoshua, the president of product and technology at Glean, told BI.

She said that it's not as straightforward as putting all the information together into one big pot. Different employees have different access permissions, so each search needs to be customized for whoever is using it.

Super.com integrated the company's most-used apps and tools, such as Slack, Confluence, GitLab, and Google Drive, into one hub. "It's personalized," she said. "It will find the information that is more relevant to you, as opposed to me, if we're in different roles and in different teams."

Yehoshua said the setup process could be challenging since some companies struggle with managing who has access to which tools. This means that the software could give out confidential information to employees.

To fix this, Glean built a data-governance layer into the search platform, which ensures rigorous access permissions. Fazal said Super.com had never had an issue with Glean's search tool giving people information they shouldn't be allowed to see.

Yehoshua added that while everybody knows how to search Google, not everyone knows how to write a good AI prompt. Glean also launched a prompt library for Super.com, which she said helped educate people on how to use the tool.

Fazal said he uses the platform multiple times a day. He added that an internal company survey found the search platform has saved employees an average of 20 minutes a day, which adds up to more than 1,500 hours saved each month across the team. The employee survey also found a 20% reduction in onboarding time for new hires.

Next steps for AI agents

Since their first partnership, in 2022, Super.com and Glean have added features to the platform. A generative-AI tool embedded into the platform, for example, helps employees draft emails and prioritize tasks using real-time company data.

For instance, if an employee asks, "What are the 10 most important things I should be working on right now?" the AI assistant will use information from Slack and Google Docs to give a customized answer to that employee.

Looking ahead, Fazal hopes to incorporate AI agents into the platform. He said the next step after prompting AI to generate a task list would be getting an AI agent to go do those things. For instance, the AI assistant might suggest arranging a meeting as an important task. The agent would then draft emails and book a meeting room to help complete that task.

"We're excited to test it out and implement that once it's ready," he said.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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The best space imagery from Don Pettit’s incredible 7-month mission

Photographer extraordinaire Don Pettit is about to return to Earth following a seven-month stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS). During his time in orbit some 250 miles above Earth, Pettit has been sharing breathtaking photos and videos of Earth and beyond, featuring everything from star trails and aurora to rocket launches and cityscapes. To […]

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OpenAI releases new simulated reasoning models with full tool access

On Wednesday, OpenAI announced the release of two new models—o3 and o4-mini—that combine simulated reasoning capabilities with access to functions like web browsing and coding. These models mark the first time OpenAI's reasoning-focused models can use every ChatGPT tool simultaneously, including visual analysis and image generation.

OpenAI announced o3 in December, and until now, only less capable derivative models named "o3-mini" and "03-mini-high" have been available. However, the new models replace their predecessors—o1 and o3-mini.

OpenAI is rolling out access today for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users, with Enterprise and Edu customers gaining access next week. Free users can try o4-mini by selecting the "Think" option before submitting queries. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted that "we expect to release o3-pro to the pro tier in a few weeks."

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Researchers claim breakthrough in fight against AI’s frustrating security hole

In the AI world, a vulnerability called a "prompt injection" has haunted developers since chatbots went mainstream in 2022. Despite numerous attempts to solve this fundamental vulnerability—the digital equivalent of whispering secret instructions to override a system's intended behavior—no one has found a reliable solution. Until now, perhaps.

Google DeepMind has unveiled CaMeL (CApabilities for MachinE Learning), a new approach to stopping prompt-injection attacks that abandons the failed strategy of having AI models police themselves. Instead, CaMeL treats language models as fundamentally untrusted components within a secure software framework, creating clear boundaries between user commands and potentially malicious content.

The new paper grounds CaMeL's design in established software security principles like Control Flow Integrity (CFI), Access Control, and Information Flow Control (IFC), adapting decades of security engineering wisdom to the challenges of LLMs.

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That groan you hear is users’ reaction to Recall going back into Windows

Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds.

When Recall was first introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders, criminals, or nation-state spies if they managed to gain even brief administrative access to a Windows device. Privacy advocates warned that Recall was ripe for abuse in intimate partner violence settings. They also noted that there was nothing stopping Recall from preserving sensitive disappearing content sent through privacy-protecting messengers such as Signal.

Enshittification at a new scale

Following months of backlash, Microsoft later suspended Recall. On Thursday, the company said it was reintroducing Recall. It currently is available only to insiders with access to the Windows 11 Build 26100.3902 preview version. Over time, the feature will be rolled out more broadly. Microsoft officials wrote:

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Researcher uncovers dozens of sketchy Chrome extensions with 4 million installs

Google is hosting dozens of extensions in its Chrome Web Store that perform suspicious actions on the more than 4 million devices that have installed them and that their developers have taken pains to carefully conceal.

The extensions, which so far number at least 35, use the same code patterns, connect to some of the same servers, and require the same list of sensitive systems permissions, including the ability to interact with web traffic on all URLs visited, access cookies, manage browser tabs, and execute scripts. In more detail, the permissions are:

  • Tabs: manage and interact with browser windows
  • Cookies: set and access stored browser cookies based on cookie or domain names (ex., "Authorization" or "all cookies for GitHub.com")
  • WebRequest: intercept and modify web requests the browser makes
  • Storage: ability to store small amounts of information persistently in the browser (these extensions store their command & control configuration here)
  • Scripting: the ability to inject new JavaScript into webpages and manipulate the DOM
  • Alarms: an internal messaging service to trigger events. The extension uses this to trigger events like a cron job, as it can allow for scheduling the heartbeat callbacks by the extension
  • :: This works in tandem with other permissions like webRequest, but allows for the extension to functionally interact with all browsing activity (completely unnecessary for an extension that should just look at your installed extensions)

These sorts of permissions give extensions the ability to do all sorts of potentially abusive things and, as such, should be judiciously granted only to trusted extensions that can’t perform core functions without them.

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Researchers concerned to find AI models misrepresenting their “reasoning” processes

Remember when teachers demanded that you "show your work" in school? Some new types of AI models promise to do exactly that, but new research suggests that the "work" they show can sometimes be misleading or disconnected from the actual process used to reach the answer.

New research from Anthropic—creator of the ChatGPT-like Claude AI assistant—examines simulated reasoning (SR) models like DeepSeek's R1, and its own Claude series. In a research paper posted last week, Anthropic's Alignment Science team demonstrated that these SR models frequently fail to disclose when they've used external help or taken shortcuts, despite features designed to show their "reasoning" process.

(It's worth noting that OpenAI's o1 and o3 series SR models were excluded from this study.)

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Ex-OpenAI staffers file amicus brief opposing the company’s for-profit transition

A group of ex-OpenAI employees on Friday filed a proposed amicus brief in support of Elon Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, opposing the company’s planned conversion from a nonprofit to a for-profit corporation. The brief, filed by Harvard law professor and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, names 12 former OpenAI employees: Steven Adler, Rosemary […]
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Why CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, and Fortinet Stocks Rallied This Week

Shares of cybersecurity leaders CrowdStrike Holdings (NASDAQ: CRWD), Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ: PANW), and Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) rallied 13%, 6%, and 13%, respectively, this week as of noon ET on Friday, according to data provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The primary reason for these increases is related to a 90-day pause on the newly proposed tariffs that the United States announced, prompting a virtually marketwide rally.

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However, there was also company-specific news that added to this rally.

On Monday morning, Wedbush Securities listed CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks as two "defensive" plays in an era of potentially higher tariffs. Then, on Thursday, HSBC upgraded Palo Alto to a hold from a sell while reiterating that Fortinet was its top cybersecurity stock.

Here's why I can't help but agree with these bullish notions on these three stocks.

A trio of defensive growth stocks

These three cybersecurity leaders grew sales between 14% and 25% in their most recent quarters. Despite their status as growth stocks, it is also fair to call each of the businesses a defensive stock, as Wedbush stated.

A recent survey by cybersecurity provider Red Canary of security leaders at an array of businesses found that 63% of companies increased their cybersecurity spending. Still, only 37% thought it was enough to be entirely secure. Cybersecurity spending remains crucial for businesses, with numerous hacks costing hundreds of millions of dollars (if not over a billion) in recent years.

And the need will only become more pressing as we continue to move into an artificial intelligence-influenced world. The same Red Canary survey found that roughly 62% of security leaders said that AI threats make it more challenging to keep their businesses safe.

Simply put, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, and Fortinet offer investors the best of both worlds: high growth and defensive, recurring sales.

The case for CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike is best known for its leadership in detecting endpoint threats, and its cloud-based Falcon platform is quickly becoming a full suite of cybersecurity safeguards. Its AI-powered platform is a must-have for most of the biggest names in the business world and is currently used by roughly 70% of the Fortune 100, 18 of the top 20 U.S. banks, and 44 of the 50 U.S. states.

The company's newer products for identity protection, cloud security, and security information and event management grew by 70% to 140% since last year, so this notion of a full-suite platform continues to gain momentum.

The stock won't be confused as being cheap, trading at 84 times free cash flow (FCF). But management is forecasting $10 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by 2031 -- up from $3.9 billion today -- so it could quickly outgrow this valuation.

The case for Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks has generated annualized returns of 26% since its 2012 initial public offering (IPO) while becoming a leader alongside Fortinet in firewall solutions. But this success didn't prevent the stock from being hammered in early 2024 as it shifted from individual solutions to a platform model, which it dubbed "platformization."

This adjustment meant it had to entice many existing customers to come along for the ride by temporarily offering deeply discounted solutions (if not free ones) while they acclimated themselves to the new setup. Just one year later, though, this shift seems to be a success.

The company grew sales, remaining performance obligations (RPO), and next-generation ARR solutions by 14%, 21%, and 37%, respectively, in its latest quarter, so it looks to have made the right move (so far).

It might be a leap of faith for investors to buy tech-dense cybersecurity offerings like Palo Alto, but it has several leadership ratings from Gartner's Magic Quadrant rankings across several niche categories.

Should sales and FCF growth accelerate to match the company's impressive 21% growth in RPOs (a forward-looking metric), it could prove to be a fantastic investment at 40 times FCF, thanks to its mission-critical offerings.

The case for Fortinet

Fortinet and Palo Alto are the two top dogs in their firewall niche. Like Palo Alto, Fortinet has delivered incredible 30% annualized returns since its IPO in 2009.

Both companies hold leadership rankings from Gartner in several cybersecurity categories, so they will always seem to be linked together.

One area where Fortinet is dissimilar -- in a good way -- from its two peers in this article is that it protects shareholder value better. Whereas CrowdStrike and Palo Alto have let their number of shares outstanding rise by 15% and 14% over the last five years, Fortinet has lowered its count by 5%.

This ballooning share count from CrowdStrike and Palo Alto stems from hefty stock-based compensation (SBC), which equals roughly 22% and 13%, respectively, of their total revenue. Meanwhile, Fortinet's SBC only accounts for 4% of revenue. This signals (in my opinion) that Fortinet does a better job of protecting shareholder value.

Fortinet works with 77 of the Fortune 100 and virtually all of the business leaders in each industry, much like CrowdStrike. This scale, paired with the fact that Fortinet has nearly twice as many U.S. patents as CrowdStrike and Palo Alto combined, hints that the company will be hard to disrupt anytime soon.

The stock trades at 39 times FCF, and management is guiding for more than 12% billings growth over the next five years. So it should be a great example of a defensive growth stock.

The final takeaway

All told, I believe buying a basket of this trio of defensive growth stocks might be the way to go.

Although they all compete with one another, the last five to ten years have shown that the rising tide of the cybersecurity industry -- which is growing by double digits seemingly in perpetuity -- is plenty to lift all three stocks' boats, helping them to beat the market.

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HSBC Holdings is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Josh Kohn-Lindquist has positions in CrowdStrike and Fortinet. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends CrowdStrike and Fortinet. The Motley Fool recommends HSBC Holdings and Palo Alto Networks. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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OpenAI helps spammers plaster 80,000 sites with messages that bypassed filters

Spammers used OpenAI to generate messages that were unique to each recipient, allowing them to bypass spam-detection filters and blast unwanted messages to more than 80,000 websites in four months, researchers said Wednesday.

The finding, documented in a post published by security firm SentinelOne’s SentinelLabs, underscores the double-edged sword wielded by large language models. The same thing that makes them useful for benign tasks—the breadth of data available to them and their ability to use it to generate content at scale—can often be used in malicious activities just as easily. OpenAI revoked the spammers’ account after receiving SentinelLabs’ disclosure, but the four months the activity went unnoticed shows how enforcement is often reactive rather than proactive.

“You are a helpful assistant”

The spam blast is the work of AkiraBot—a framework that automates the sending of messages in large quantities to promote shady search optimization services to small- and medium-size websites. AkiraBot used python-based scripts to rotate the domain names advertised in the messages. It also used OpenAI’s chat API tied to the model gpt-4o-mini to generate unique messages customized to each site it spammed, a technique that likely helped it bypass filters that look for and block identical content sent to large numbers of sites. The messages are delivered through contact forms and live chat widgets embedded into the targeted websites.

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After months of user complaints, Anthropic debuts new $200/month AI plan

On Wednesday, Anthropic introduced a new $100- to $200-per-month subscription tier called Claude Max that offers expanded usage limits for its Claude AI assistant. The new plan arrives after many existing Claude subscribers complained of hitting rate limits frequently.

"The top request from our most active users has been expanded Claude access," wrote Anthropic in a news release. A brief stroll through user feedback on Reddit seems to confirm that sentiment, showing that many Claude users have been unhappy with Anthropic's usage limits over the past year—even on the Claude Pro plan, which costs $20 a month.

One of the downsides of a relatively large context window with Claude (the amount of text it can process at once) has been that long conversations or inclusions of many reference documents (such as code files) fill up usage limits quickly. That's because each time the user adds to the conversation, the entire text of the conversation (including any attached documents) is fed back into the AI model again and re-evaluated. But on the other hand, a large context window allows Claude to process more complex projects within each session.

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