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The unexplained death of a researcher at a Russian anti-plague institute has one former senior U.S. arms official warning it could be 'far worse' than the bacteria that caused the Black Death. Marshall Billingslea, who served as President Donald Trump's special presidential envoy for arms control, said a top Soviet bioweapons defector told him decades ago about secret work on antibiotic-resistant plague at the same facility where the recent plague-related death occurred. "This may not be just 'the plague.' It may be far worse," Billingslea wrote on X. He spent much of the 1990s working on proliferation and arms control issues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — and during that time worked with Ken Alibek, the former No. 2 official in the Soviet biological weapons program who defected to the U.S. BIOWEAPON THREAT EXPOSED AS ANTHROPIC SOUNDS ALARM ON FOREIGN ACTORS PLOTTING VIRUS EXPERIMENTS "He claimed that they had engineered a strain of plag...

Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch : Flai, which makes AI tools for car dealerships to manage phone calls, emails, and texts, raised a $27M Series A led by Base10 Partners   —  When Flai was raising its seed round last year, it was just a team of three people pounding the pavement to get car dealerships to use the startup's software …

Semafor : Reflection unveils open-weight model Beam, saying it excels at coding and agentic tasks, uses 3x-4x less compute than comparable models, and nears Qwen 3.8-Max   —  Reflection AI, the startup billing itself as America's answer to open-source Chinese AI, is releasing its first model, called Beam.

Amid a rapid rise in technological developments, the U.S. Army’s new leadership is looking to pull back on using artificial intelligence and other tools it feels forced the branch to transform too much all at once. Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the Army vice chief serving as acting chief of staff, outlined on Monday how he hopes to narrow the service’s sweeping modernization push after years of experimentation with drones, artificial intelligence and other emerging technology. "There was a lot, a lot of motion," LaNeve told a small group of reporters. "It was almost like everything was being transformed at once." "You can't AI yourself to be the best maneuver brigade commander out there," LaNeve said. The Army Transformation Initiative pushed new technology rapidly into formations and encouraged experimentation across the board. Army leaders credited that effort with accelerating change but acknowledged Monday that its breadth created enormous activity acro...

Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch : Ghost, which makes a $3,499 computer designed for AI agents and includes an RTX Pro 4000 SFF Blackwell GPU, emerges from stealth with an $11M seed led by a16z   —  For much of his life, Zain Javaid, 19, wanted to be a quant who uses math and data to guide his investment decisions.  And for a while, he was one.

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, has pushed for greater government regulation of AI in ways that echo elements of the Washington playbook employed by convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried during his time as a cryptocurrency entrepreneur, a review of public records shows. Both Anthropic and Bankman-Fried poured millions of dollars into Washington influence campaigns while publicly arguing that government rules were needed to make their respective industries safer, although the money flowed through notably different channels. Critics in both industries have accused them of using regulation to strengthen their competitive positions. Bankman-Fried’s political operation later became part of a criminal case involving illegal campaign contributions, while Anthropic’s spending has consisted of disclosed lobbying and advocacy efforts. Anthropic, for its part, denies this characterization. Bankman-Fried, meanwhile, later said his public posture on regulat...