An Anduril Industries Sentry surveillance tower (Simon Wohlfahrt/Getty Images)

OpenAI strikes deal with Anduril to bring its AI to the battlefield

12/4/24 4:44PM

Since the Biden administration gave the all clear for AI to be used in national security and defense, AI companies have been tripping over each other to announce their pivot to military applications.

In November, Palantir partnered with Anthropic to bring its Claude AI models to national-security applications via Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform.

Not to be left out of the rush to embed AI systems into battlefield defense and weapons systems, today OpenAI and defense contractor Anduril Industries announced a partnership that runs counter to a previous public policy about how OpenAI would allow its technology to be used.

In January, OpenAI quietly changed the language of its usage policy, removing a section that disallowed “Activity that has high risk of physical harm, including: Weapons development; Military and warfare.”

“Our partnership with Anduril will help ensure OpenAI technology protects U.S. military personnel, and will help the national security community understand and responsibly use this technology to keep our citizens safe and free,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in the press release.

In a press release announcing the new partnership, Anduril said that OpenAI’s GPT-4o and OpenAI o1 models would be used in drone defense systems to identify airborne threats. The press release said:

“The Anduril and OpenAI strategic partnership will focus on improving the nation’s counter-unmanned aircraft systems (CUAS) and their ability to detect, assess and respond to potentially lethal aerial threats in real-time.”

Anduril Industries was founded by Palmer Luckey, founder and CEO of virtual-reality headset company Oculus, which was sold to Meta in 2014 for $2 billion.

Meta has also been pursuing national-security and defense contracts for its Llama 3 AI model.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The New York Times, Chicago Tribune sue Perplexity

The New York Times is suing the AI search engine startup Perplexity, alleging repeated copyright violations.

In the complaint, the Times accuses Perplexity of scraping the company’s content and generating outputs that are “identical or substantially similar” to Times content:

“Upon information and belief, Perplexity has unlawfully copied, distributed, and displayed millions of copyrighted Times stories, videos, podcasts, images and other works to power its products and tools.”

The Times also alleges that Perplexity’s AI tool generates “hallucinations” and falsely attribute them to the Times, creating confusion that harms the company’s brand.

In a separate suit filed Thursday, the Chicago Tribune accused Perplexity of similar copyright violations.

Perplexity’s “answer engine” made early inroads in an attempt to replace traditional web searches with AI-powered responses, but its larger competitors such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have been adding similar features. OpenAI recently released its own AI-powered web browser, ChatGPT Atlas, which challenges Perplexity’s Comet browser.

Jesse Dwyer, Head of Communication for Perplexity told Sherwood News in a statement:

“Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI. Fortunately it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”

New York Times Sues A.I. Start-Up Perplexity Over Use of Copyrighted Work

“Upon information and belief, Perplexity has unlawfully copied, distributed, and displayed millions of copyrighted Times stories, videos, podcasts, images and other works to power its products and tools.”

The Times also alleges that Perplexity’s AI tool generates “hallucinations” and falsely attribute them to the Times, creating confusion that harms the company’s brand.

In a separate suit filed Thursday, the Chicago Tribune accused Perplexity of similar copyright violations.

Jesse Dwyer, Head of Communication for Perplexity told Sherwood News in a statement:

“Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI. Fortunately it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”

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European regulators will examine if Apple’s maps and ads businesses require stricter oversight

Apple has notified European regulators that its Apple Maps and Apple Ads platforms meet the threshold to be called “gatekeepers” under the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act, the European Commission said.

European antitrust regulators will now examine if the tech giant’s Maps and Ads units should be subject to stricter regulation. According to the DMA, when a platform reaches 45 million monthly active users and a market cap of €75 billion ($79 billion), it triggers the “gatekeeper” designation and additional rules apply.

While Apple notified regulators that the threshold has been met, it is pushing back on the designation, saying in a rebuttal to rule makers that the platforms are actually relatively small compared to the competition in Europe and should be excluded. The EC has 45 working days to make a final determination about the designation, and Apple would have six months to comply, Reuters reported.

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Delhi High Court says Apple could face $38 billion penalty in Indian antitrust case

India’s Delhi High Court says that Apple could face a penalty as high as $38 billion for what its investigators describe as “abusive conduct” related to the tech giant’s app store, Reuters reports.

Apple is challenging the constitutionality of the country’s new antitrust law, taking specific issue with the fact that penalties are calculated based on companies’ total annual global revenue, rather than just revenue derived from India.

That global figure could mean fines as high as $38 billion, according to a court filing seen by Reuters.

The Competition Commission of India has not issued a final ruling in the case.

Apple contests India's antitrust penalty law with risk of $38 billion fine, filing shows