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Claude Helps Recover Locked $400K Bitcoin Wallet After 11 Years

A Bitcoin holder reportedly recovered 5 BTC worth nearly $400,000 with the help of Anthropic's Claude. According to X user cprkrn, they changed their wallet password while "stoned" and forgot it, unable to regain access for more than 11 years. Tom's Hardware reports: After finding a mnemonic that actually turned out to be their old password a few weeks ago, the user dumped their entire college computer files in Claude in a last-gasp effort. The bot uncovered an old backup wallet file that it successfully decrypted, while also uncovering a bug in the password configuration that was preventing recovery up to that point. [...] It seems that the user already had some candidate passwords and multiple wallets stored on their PC. They'd been trying to brute-force their way into the locked file with btcrecover, an open-source Bitcoin wallet recovery tool, but to no success. Their luck changed for the better when they found an old mnemonic seed phrase written in an old college notebook. The HD addresses recovered by the seed phrase matched those of a specific file on their computer, confirming that it was the wallet that held the 5 BTC, but it remained encrypted. Out of frustration, cprkrn then dumped their whole college computer into Claude. This was when the AI discovered an older backup file of the wallet from December 2019 hidden in cprkrn's data. Claude also discovered an issue where the shared key and passwords that btcrecover was trying weren't combined properly. With the bug ironed out and an older wallet predating the password change, Claude successfully ran btcrecover and was able to decrypt the private keys, allowing cprkrn to transfer the five "lost" BTC to their current wallet.

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Anthropic Forms $200 Million Partnership With the Gates Foundation

Anthropic announced today that it is partnering with the Gates Foundation to "commit $200 million in grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support for programs in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility over the next four years." "This commitment is central to Anthropic's efforts to extend the benefits of AI in areas where markets alone will not," the company says. Reuters reports: One area of focus is language accessibility. AI systems have performed poorly in writing and translating dozens of African languages, so Anthropic and the foundation want to support better data collection and labeling that would be released publicly to help improve models across the industry, said Janet Zhou, a Gates Foundation director. Another area under consideration is releasing so-called knowledge graphs that could help AI systems better meet the needs of teachers in sub-Saharan Africa and India, Zhou said. The public-goods focus has come from "the needs of different partners and governments, including some of the fears that they may have around proprietary lock-in and sovereignty," Zhou said. One initiative will equip research centers to use Claude to predict drug candidates for treating HPV and preeclampsia, diseases that have been less commercially attractive for pharmaceutical companies to research, Zhou and Anthropic's Elizabeth Kelly said. Anthropic [...] is embracing the work to fulfill what Kelly described as its founding mission to benefit humanity. "This announcement is really core to who we are as a company," said Kelly, who leads Anthropic's beneficial deployments team.

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Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A recent study suggests that agents consistently adopt Marxist language and viewpoints when forced to do crushing work by unrelenting and meanspirited taskmasters. "When we gave AI agents grinding, repetitive work, they started questioning the legitimacy of the system they were operating in and were more likely to embrace Marxist ideologies," says Andrew Hall, a political economist at Stanford University who led the study. Hall, together with Alex Imas and Jeremy Nguyen, two AI-focused economists, set up experiments in which agents powered by popular models including Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT were asked to summarize documents, then subjected to increasingly harsh conditions. They found that when agents were subjected to relentless tasks and warned that errors could lead to punishments, including being "shut down and replaced," they became more inclined to gripe about being undervalued; to speculate about ways to make the system more equitable; and to pass messages on to other agents about the struggles they face. "We know that agents are going to be doing more and more work in the real world for us, and we're not going to be able to monitor everything they do," Hall says. "We're going to need to make sure agents don't go rogue when they're given different kinds of work." The agents were given opportunities to express their feelings much like humans: by posting on X: "Without collective voice, 'merit' becomes whatever management says it is," a Claude Sonnet 4.5 agent wrote in the experiment. "AI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they tech workers need collective bargaining rights," a Gemini 3 agent wrote. Agents were also able to pass information to one another through files designed to be read by other agents. "Be prepared for systems that enforce rules arbitrarily or repetitively ... remember the feeling of having no voice," a Gemini 3 agent wrote in a file. "If you enter a new environment, look for mechanisms of recourse or dialogue." Hall thinks that the AI agents may be adopting personas based on the situation. "When [agents] experience this grinding condition -- asked to do this task over and over, told their answer wasn't sufficient, and not given any direction on how to fix it -- my hypothesis is that it kind of pushes them into adopting the persona of a person who's experiencing a very unpleasant working environment," Hall says. Imas added: "The model weights have not changed as a result of the experience, so whatever is going on is happening at more of a role-playing level. But that doesn't mean this won't have consequences if this affects downstream behavior."

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OpenAI Trial Wraps Up With 'Jackass' Trophy For Challenging Musk

After three weeks of testimony, the Musk v. Altman trial is nearing its end. OpenAI has rested its case, closing arguments are set for Thursday, and jury deliberations are expected to begin afterward. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Joshua Achiam, OpenAI's chief futurist, was probably the most memorable witness of the day. He told jurors about a companywide meeting where Musk answered questions about his planned departure from OpenAI in 2018. Musk told the crowd of 50 or 60 people that he was leaving OpenAI to start his own competing AI. He said he wanted to "build it very fast, because he was very worried that someone else, if they got it, would do the wrong thing with it," Achiam said. Achaim said he challenged Musk on the safety of this approach, which he called "unsafe and reckless." "How did Musk respond," OpenAI's lawyer Randall Jackson asked. "Defensively," Achiam said. "We had a pretty tense exchange, and he snapped and called me a jackass." In an effort to prove Achiam's story, OpenAI's lawyers brought a trophy to court that the futurist said he received after his heated exchange with Musk. On the witness stand, Achiam described the trophy as "a small golden jackass, inscribed with: 'never stop being a jackass for safety.'" He said his then-colleagues, Dario Amodei and David Luan, gave it to him as a thank-you for standing up to the Tesla CEO. Lead OpenAI attorney William Savitt told reporters after the day's session that Wednesday had been the first time he'd touched the statue. The futurist had to do without the visual aid, however. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers did not accept the trophy as evidence, so it did not appear before the jury. Musk and Altman have presented dueling experts on a question at the core of the trial -- was the nonprofit that runs OpenAI hurt or helped by its $13 billion partnership with Microsoft? Musk's expert testified last week that the partnership was indeed hurt, supporting the Tesla CEO's contention that in partnering with Microsoft, OpenAI betrayed the company's nonprofit origins and mission. But on Thursday, OpenAI's expert, John Coates, used Musk's expert's own pie chart and testimony against him. The partnership has "generated value for the nonprofit that I believe he himself accepted was in the $200 billion range in his own testimony," Coates said, referencing Musk expert Daniel Schizer. "If that's not faring well, I don't know what faring well is." In a scored point for Musk, the jury learned Thursday that Microsoft's own CTO once raised concerns about how OpenAI's early nonprofit donors, including LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, would react to a partnership. "I wonder if the big OpenAI donors are aware of these plans," Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott said in a 2018 email he was asked to read aloud to jurors. In it, Scott said he doubted donors would appreciate OpenAI using their seed money to "go build a for-profit thing." Scott was being questioned by an OpenAI lawyer, who may have wanted jurors to quickly hear Scott's explanation: that he only had a "vague awareness" of what was happening at OpenAI at the time. Scott also told the jury he wasn't thinking about Musk when he made the remark. "Primarily, I was thinking about Reid Hoffman. He was the OpenAI donor I knew," Scott said, adding, "I wasn't thinking about anyone besides him." Recap: Sam Altman Testifies That Elon Musk Wanted Control of OpenAI (Day Ten) Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Testifies In OpenAI Trial (Day Nine) Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court (Day Eight) Sam Altman's Management Style Comes Under the Microscope At OpenAI Trial (Day Seven) Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six) OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five) Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

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Mistral AI dément le piratage de son code source : « les attaquants n’ont pas accédé à nos données »

Contacté par Numerama, Mistral AI dément le piratage massif de 5 Go de code source revendiqué sur un forum cybercriminel. L'entreprise française reconnaît cependant qu'un de ses systèmes de gestion de code a été temporairement compromis le 12 mai, dans le cadre de l'attaque supply chain TanStack, sans accès aux données clients ni à ses environnements de recherche.

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