All posts tagged: Operating

Mystery solved: Anthropic reveals changes to Claude’s harnesses and operating instructions likely caused degradation

Mystery solved: Anthropic reveals changes to Claude’s harnesses and operating instructions likely caused degradation

For several weeks, a growing chorus of developers and AI power users claimed that Anthropic’s flagship models were losing their edge. Users across GitHub, X, and Reddit reported a phenomenon they described as “AI shrinkflation”—a perceived degradation where Claude seemed less capable of sustained reasoning, more prone to hallucinations, and increasingly wasteful with tokens. Critics pointed to a measurable shift in behavior, alleging that the model had moved from a “research-first” approach to a lazier, “edit-first” style that could no longer be trusted for complex engineering. While the company initially pushed back against claims of “nerfing” the model to manage demand, the mounting evidence from high-profile users and third-party benchmarks created a significant trust gap. Today, Anthropic addressed these concerns directly, publishing a technical post-mortem that identified three separate product-layer changes responsible for the reported quality issues. “We take reports about degradation very seriously,” reads Anthropic’s blog post on the matter. “We never intentionally degrade our models, and we were able to immediately confirm that our API and inference layer were unaffected.” Anthropic claims it …

‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Can Continue Operating, Appeals Court Says

‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Can Continue Operating, Appeals Court Says

Authored by Troy Myers via The Epoch Times, A federal appeals court on Tuesday pulled a judge’s previous order to dismantle the high-profile detention center in the Florida Everglades for illegal immigrants, known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” In a 2–1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit sided with the Trump administration’s argument that there was minimal federal involvement in the facility’s construction, so a federal environmental review was not warranted. “Using state employees and state funds, Florida officials, on their own initiative, constructed a detention center at an airport on state property in the Florida Everglades,” court documents showed. Two environmental groups, Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, joined the Miccosukee Tribe, which has villages close to the facility, in challenging construction of Alligator Alcatraz. The groups accused state and federal officials of rushing to build the facility and failing to conduct an environmental review as required under the National Environmental Policy Act. That federal law, passed in 1970, requires federal agencies to evaluate environmental impacts of proposed …

Treating enterprise AI as an operating layer

Treating enterprise AI as an operating layer

At Ensemble, the strategy for addressing this challenge is knowledge distillation. The systematic conversion of expert judgment and operational decisions into machine-readable training signals. In health-care revenue cycle management, for example, systems can be seeded with explicit domain knowledge and then deepen their coverage through structured daily interaction with operators. In Ensemble’s implementation, the system identifies gaps, formulates targeted questions, and cross-checks answers across multiple experts to capture both consensus and edge-case nuance. It then synthesizes these inputs into a living knowledge base that reflects the situational reasoning behind expert-level performance. Turning decisions into a learning flywheel Once a system is constrained enough to be trusted, the next question is how it gets better without waiting for annual model upgrades. Every time a skilled operator makes a decision, they generate more than a completed task. They generate a potential labeled example—context paired with an expert action (and sometimes an outcome). At scale, across thousands of operators and millions of decisions, that stream can power supervised learning, evaluation, and targeted forms of reinforcement—teaching systems to behave …

Frieze Taps Art Basel Veteran Frank Lasry as Chief Operating Officer

Frieze Taps Art Basel Veteran Frank Lasry as Chief Operating Officer

Frieze announced today that it has named Frank Lasry as its new chief operating officer, beginning in June. Lasry will report directly to Frieze CEO Simon Fox. With more than two decades of managing blue-chip art world companies, Lasry will bring to Frieze a mix of auction house, art fair, and gallery experience. He was most recently the chief operating officer of Perrotin, managing the logistics and operations across the gallery’s nine locations across the world. Prior to Perrotin, he worked at Art Basel from 2018 to 2023, rising to the role of managing director. During his tenure, he helped launch Art Basel Paris, which hosted its first edition in 2022. Related Articles Lasry cut his art-world teeth in the auction role, holding senior positions at various Christie’s offices before becoming the house’s COO in London. He then went on to serve in the same role for rival Phillips, running its Europe and Asia operations. “Frieze is a unique brand with a mission to expand the reach and understanding of contemporary art, and I could …

U.S. accuses Iran’s government of operating hacktivist group that hacked Stryker

U.S. accuses Iran’s government of operating hacktivist group that hacked Stryker

The U.S. Justice Department accused Iran’s government of being behind the hacktivist group Handala, which last week claimed responsibility for the destructive cyberattack against the U.S. medical tech giant Stryker.  In a press release published on Thursday, the Justice Department said Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) is operating Handala.  The Justice Department called the group a fake activist persona that the Iranian ministry used to carry out “psychological operations” against the regime’s enemies, to claim responsibility for cyberattacks, and to publish stolen information obtained during those hacks. The group also called for the killing of journalists, regime dissidents, and Israeli persons, per the DOJ.  The announcement came hours after the FBI seized two websites linked to Handala, as first reported by TechCrunch. The group used the websites to publicize its alleged cyberattacks, as well as to publish the personal information of dozens of people who allegedly worked for the Israeli military and defense contractors.  Handala took credit on its website for the March 11 cyberattack on Stryker, during which the hackers remotely wiped …

Apple issues iPhone spyware alert and tells users to update iOS operating system | Science, Climate & Tech News

Apple issues iPhone spyware alert and tells users to update iOS operating system | Science, Climate & Tech News

Apple is urging users to update their iPhones after the discovery of new spyware that can take over phones running older versions of the iOS operating system. The powerful software exploit can steal information from potentially hundreds of millions of users, said cybersecurity researchers at Lookout, iVerify, and Alphabet’s Google. It is unclear how many iPhones are vulnerable to the spyware known as Darksword, a type of malware designed to secretly steal information from mobile devices. It affects users running an older version of the iOS operating system, released between March and August 2025 (versions 18.4 to 18.6.2). An estimated 220 to 270 million iPhones still run on older iOS versions, according to researchers. Analysis from the three companies shows the iPhone hacking tools have been focused on several groups: Ukrainians targeted by Russian intelligence; Chinese cryptocurrency users; and people in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Malaysia. On 3 March, Google and iVerify revealed details of a separate powerful iPhone spyware tool called Coruna, which was linked to Russian intelligence groups and Chinese cybercriminals. Darksword was …

Enterprise AI agents keep operating from different versions of reality — Microsoft says Fabric IQ is the fix

Enterprise AI agents keep operating from different versions of reality — Microsoft says Fabric IQ is the fix

In 2026, data engineers working with multi-agent systems are hitting a familiar problem: Agents built on different platforms don’t operate from a shared understanding of the business. The result isn’t model failure — it’s hallucination driven by fragmented context. The problem is that agents built on different platforms, by different teams, do not share a common understanding of how the business actually operates. Each one carries its own interpretation of what a customer, an order or a region means. When those definitions diverge across a workforce of agents, decisions break down. A set of announcements from Microsoft this week directly targets that problem. The centerpiece is a significant expansion of Fabric IQ, the semantic intelligence layer the company debuted in November 2025. Fabric IQ’s business ontology is now accessible via MCP to any agent from any vendor, not just Microsoft’s. Alongside that, Microsoft is adding enterprise planning to Fabric IQ, unifying historical data, real-time signals and formal organizational goals in one queryable layer. The new Database Hub brings Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL, MySQL and …

Tim Davie says BBC is operating in a ‘weaponisation’ era

Tim Davie says BBC is operating in a ‘weaponisation’ era

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Public trust in institutions like the BBC is facing a “full on crisis,” according to the corporation’s outgoing director-general, Tim Davie. Speaking on The Rest Is Entertainment podcast, Mr Davie conceded that the BBC has made “serious mistakes, which we regret.” His comments come as he prepares to depart next month, having resigned in the wake of several controversies plaguing the broadcaster. Among these was last summer’s criticism over the BBC’s live broadcast of punk duo Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury Festival performance, during which the group led chants of “death, death to the IDF (Israel Defence Forces).” Mr Davie’s appearance on the podcast comes as the BBC has come under fire more recently, after a racial slur was broadcast during its coverage of the Bafta film awards last month (Andrew Milligan/PA) And in November it emerged that the BBC selectively edited a …

Entirely Vibe-Coded Operating System Is a Bug-Filled Disaster

Entirely Vibe-Coded Operating System Is a Bug-Filled Disaster

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Last year, OpenAI cofounder and former exec Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding,” a new approach involving the rapid development of software by feeding an AI model a series of natural language prompts. But the popular approach comes with some glaring shortcomings, as evidenced in an entirely vibe-coded operating system, dubbed Vib-OS. The project, which is being hosted on GitHub, can be run on ARM64 and x86-based computers, features a “custom kernel,” a “modern macOS-inspired graphical user interface,” and a “virtual file system.” And yes, in case you were wondering, the project claims in its possibly AI-generated documentation that you can play Doom on it. But as a YouTuber who goes by Tirimid discovered in a recent video, the operating system, at least in its current state, is a buggy and largely unusable mess, once again highlighting the limitations of relying on vibe-coding to quickly construct complex pieces of software. The iconic demon-slaying shooter Doom also appears …