On Thursday, Anthropic unveiled specialized AI models designed for US national security customers. The company released "Claude Gov" models that were built in response to direct feedback from government clients to handle operations such as strategic planning, intelligence analysis, and operational support. The custom models reportedly already serve US national security agencies, with access restricted to those working in classified environments.

The Claude Gov models differ from Anthropic's consumer and enterprise offerings, also called Claude, in several ways. They reportedly handle classified material, "refuse less" when engaging with classified information, and are customized to handle intelligence and defense documents. The models also feature what Anthropic calls "enhanced proficiency" in languages and dialects critical to national security operations.

Anthropic says the new models underwent the same "safety testing" as all Claude models. The company has been pursuing government contracts as it seeks reliable revenue sources, partnering with Palantir and Amazon Web Services in November to sell AI tools to defense customers.

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On Thursday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued against a proposed 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation in a New York Times opinion piece, calling the measure shortsighted and overbroad as Congress considers including it in President Trump's tax policy bill. Anthropic makes Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT.

Amodei warned that AI is advancing too fast for such a long freeze, predicting these systems "could change the world, fundamentally, within two years; in 10 years, all bets are off."

As we covered in May, the moratorium would prevent states from regulating AI for a decade. A bipartisan group of state attorneys general has opposed the measure, which would preempt AI laws and regulations recently passed in dozens of states.

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On Thursday, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, marking the company's return to larger model releases after primarily focusing on mid-range Sonnet variants since June of last year. The new models represent what the company calls its most capable coding models yet, with Opus 4 designed for complex, long-running tasks that can operate autonomously for hours.

Alex Albert, Anthropic's head of Claude Relations, told Ars Technica that the company chose to revive the Opus line because of growing demand for agentic AI applications. "Across all the companies out there that are building things, there's a really large wave of these agentic applications springing up, and a very high demand and premium being placed on intelligence," Albert said. "I think Opus is going to fit that groove perfectly."

Before we go further, a brief refresher on Claude's three AI model "size" names (introduced in March 2024) is probably warranted. Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus offer a tradeoff between price (in the API), speed, and capability.

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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT users now have access to GPT-4.1, an AI language model previously available only through the company's API since its launch one month ago. The update brings what OpenAI describes as improved coding and web development capabilities to paid ChatGPT subscribers, with wider enterprise rollout planned in the coming weeks.

Adding GPT-4.1 and 4.1 mini to ChatGPT adds to an already complex model selection that includes GPT-4o, various specialized GPT-4o versions, o1-pro, o3-mini, and o3-mini-high models. There are technically nine AI models available for ChatGPT Pro subscribers. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick recently publicly lampooned the awkward situation on social media.

As of May 14, 2025, ChatGPT Pro users have access to eight main AI models, plus Deep Research. Credit: Benj Edwards

Deciding which AI model to use can be daunting for AI novices. Reddit users and OpenAI forum members alike commonly voice confusion about the available options. "I do not understand the reason behind having multiple models available for use," wrote one Reddit user in March. "Why would anyone use anything but the best one?" Another Redditor said they were "a bit lost" with the many ChatGPT models available after switching back from using Anthropic Claude.

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Using AI can be a double-edged sword, according to new research from Duke University. While generative AI tools may boost productivity for some, they might also secretly damage your professional reputation.

On Thursday, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a study showing that employees who use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini at work face negative judgments about their competence and motivation from colleagues and managers.

"Our findings reveal a dilemma for people considering adopting AI tools: Although AI can enhance productivity, its use carries social costs," write researchers Jessica A. Reif, Richard P. Larrick, and Jack B. Soll of Duke's Fuqua School of Business.

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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that Instacart CEO Fidji Simo will join the maker of ChatGPT as "CEO of Applications" later this year, according to a company blog post. Simo, who has served on the company's board since March 2024, will oversee business and operational teams while continuing to report directly to Altman in the newly created role. Altman will remain the primary CEO of OpenAI.

According to Reuters, Simo spent a decade at Meta, including a stint serving as the head of Facebook from 2019 to 2021. She also currently sits on the board of e-commerce services site Shopify.

The announcement came earlier than planned due to what Altman described as "a leak" that "accelerated our timeline." At OpenAI, Simo will manage what Altman called "traditional company functions" as the organization enters its "next phase of growth." The applications category at OpenAI includes products like ChatGPT, the popular AI assistant.

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On Monday, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI announced it will remain under the control of its founding nonprofit board, scrapping its controversial plan to split off its commercial operations as a for-profit company after mounting pressure from critics.

In an official OpenAI blog post announcing the latest restructuring decision, CEO Sam Altman wrote: "We made the decision for the nonprofit to stay in control after hearing from civic leaders and having discussions with the offices of the Attorneys General of California and Delaware."

The move represents a significant shift in OpenAI's proposed restructuring. While the most recent previous version of the company's plan (which we covered in December) would have established OpenAI as a Public Benefit Corporation with the nonprofit merely holding shares and having limited influence, the revised approach keeps the nonprofit firmly in control of operations.

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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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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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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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