Saturday afternoon Sam Altman announced he'd start answering questions on X.com about OpenAI's work with America's Department of War — and all the developments over the past few days. (After that department's negotions had failed with Anthropic, they announced they'd stop using Anthropic's technology and threatened to designate it a "Supply-Chain Risk to National Security". Then they'd reached a deal for OpenAI's technology — though Altman says it includes OpenAI's own similar prohibitions against using their products for domestic mass surveillance and requiring "human responsibility" for the use of force in autonomous weapon systems.)
Altman said Saturday that enforcing that "Supply-Chain Risk" designation on Anthropic "would be very bad for our industry and our country, and obviously their company. We said [that] to the Department of War before and after. We said that part of the reason we were willing to do this quickly was in the hopes of de-esclation.... We should all care very much about the precedent... To say it very clearly: I think this is a very bad decision from the Department of War and I hope they reverse it. If we take heat for strongly criticizing it, so be it."


Altman also said that for a long time, OpenAI was planning to do "non-classified work only," but this week found the Department of War "flexible on what we needed..."

Sam Altman: The reason for rushing is an attempt to de-escalate the situation. I think the current path things are on is dangerous for Anthropic, healthy competition, and the U.S. We negotiated to make sure similar terms would be offered to all other AI labs.

I know what it's like to feel backed into a corner, and I think it's worth some empathy to the Department of War. They are... a very dedicated group of people with, as I mentioned, an extremely important mission. I cannot imagine doing their work. Our industry tells them "The technology we are building is going to be the high order bit in geopolitical conflict. China is rushing ahead. You are very behind." And then we say "But we won't help you, and we think you are kind of evil." I don't think I'd react great in that situation. I do not believe unelected leaders of private companies should have as much power as our democratically elected government. But I do think we need to help them.



Question: Are you worried at all about the potential for things to go really south during a possible dispute over what's legal or not later on and be deemed a supply chain risk...?



Sam Altman: Yes, I am. If we have to take on that fight we will, but it clearly exposes us to some risk. I am still very hopeful this is going to get resolved, and part of why we wanted to act fast was to help increase the chances of that...


Question: Why the rush to sign the deal ? Obviously the optics don't look great.


Sam Altman: It was definitely rushed, and the optics don't look good. We really wanted to de-escalate things, and we thought the deal on offer was good.
If we are right and this does lead to a de-escalation between the Department of War and the industry, we will look like geniuses, and a company that took on a lot of pain to do things to help the industry. If not, we will continue to be characterized as as rushed and uncareful. I don't where it's going to land, but I have already seen promising signs. I think a good relationship between the government and the companies developing this technology is critical over the next couple of years...



Question: What was the core difference why you think the Department of War accepted OpenAI but not Anthropic?


Sam Altman: [...] We believe in a layered approach to safety--building a safety stack, deploying FDEs [embedded Forward Deployed Engineers] and having our safety and alignment researcher involved, deploying via cloud, working directly with the Department of War. Anthropic seemed more focused on specific prohibitions in the contract, rather than citing applicable laws, which we felt comfortable with. We feel that it it's very important to build safe system, and although documents are also important, I'd clearly rather rely on technical safeguards if I only had to pick one...




I think Anthropic may have wanted more operational control than we did...



Question:Were the terms that you accepted the same ones Anthropic rejected?


Sam Altman: No, we had some different ones. But our terms would now be available to them (and others) if they wanted.



Question: Will you turn off the tool if they violate the rules?



Sam Altman: Yes, we will turn it off in that very unlikely event, but we believe the U.S. government is an institution that does its best to follow law and policy. What we won't do is turn it off because we disagree with a particular (legal military) decision. We trust their authority.



Questions were also answered by OpenAI's head of National Security Partnerships, who said "We control how we train the models and what types of requests the models refuse."


Question: Are employees allowed to opt out of working on Department of War-related projects?


Answer: We won't ask employees to support Department of War-related projects if they don't want to.



Question: How much is the deal worth?


Answer: It's a few million $, completely inconsequential compared to our $20B+ in revenue, and definitely not worth the cost of a PR blowup. We're doing it because it's the right thing to do for the country, at great cost to ourselves, not because of revenue impact...




Question: Can you explicitly state which specific technical safeguard OpenAI has that allowed you to sign what Anthropic called a 'threat to democratic values'?


Answer: We think the deal we made has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic's. Other AI labs (including Anthropic) have reduced or removed their safety guardrails and relied primarily on usage policies as their primary safeguards in national security deployments. Usage policies, on their own, are not a guarantee of anything. Any responsible deployment of AI in classified environments should involve layered safeguards including a prudent safety stack, limits on deployment architecture, and the direct involvement of AI experts in consequential AI use cases. These are the terms we negotiated in our contract.

They also detailed OpenAI's position on LinkedIn:

Deployment architecture matters more than contract language. Our contract limits our deployment to cloud API. Autonomous systems require inference at the edge. By limiting our deployment to cloud API, we can ensure that our models cannot be integrated directly into weapons systems, sensors, or other operational hardware...



Instead of hoping contract language will be enough, our contract allows us to embed forward deployed engineers, commits to giving us visibility into how models are being used, and we have the ability to iterate on safety safeguards over time. If our team sees that our models aren't refusing queries they should, or there's more operational risk than we expected, our contract allows us to make modifications at our discretion. This gives us far more influence over outcomes (and insight into possible abuse) than a static contract provision ever could.



U.S. law already constrains the worst outcomes. We accepted the "all lawful uses" language proposed by the Department, but required them to define the laws that constrained them on surveillance and autonomy directly in the contract. And because laws can change, having this codified in the contract protects against changes in law or policy that we can't anticipate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Friday was "a horrible day" for investors in Duolingo, reports Fast Company. But Friday's one-day 14% drop is just part of a longer story.

Since last May, Duolingo's stock has dropped 81%. Yes, the company faced a social media backlash that month after its CEO promised they'd become an "AI-first" company (favoring AI over human contractors). And yes, Duolingo did double its language offerings using generative AI. But more importantly, that summer OpenAI showed how easy it was to just roll your own language-learning tool from a short prompt in a GPT-5 demo, while Google built an AI-powered language-learning tool into its Translate app.


And yet, Friday Duolingo's shares dropped another 14%, after announcing good fourth quarter results but an unpopular direction for its future. Fast Company reports:


On the surface, many of the company's most critical metrics saw decent gains for the quarter, including:
— Daily Active Users: 52.7 million (up 30% year-over-year)
— Paid Subscribers: 12.2 million (up 28% year-over-year)
— Revenue: $282.9 million (up 35% year-over-year)
— Total bookings: $336.8 million (up 24% year-over-year)

The company also reported its full-year 2025 financials, revealing that for the first time in its history, it crossed the $1 billion revenue mark for a fiscal year.

But the Motley Fool explains that Duolingo's higher ad loads and repeated pushes for subscription plans "generated revenues in the short term, but made the Duolingo platform less engaging. Ergo, user growth decelerated while revenues rose." Thursday Duolingo announced a big change to address that, including moving more features into lower-priced tiers. Barron's reports:

D.A. Davidson analyst Wyatt Swanson, who rates Duolingo stock at Neutral, posited that the push to monetize "led to disgruntled users and a meaningful negative impact to 'word-of-mouth' marketing." Duolingo has guided for bookings growth between 10% and 12% in 2026, compared with the 20% rate the company would have expected to see "if we operated like we have in past years...."
If stock reaction is any indication, investors are concerned about Duolingo's new focus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TEHERAN (ANP/DPA) - De Revolutionaire Garde van Iran heeft wraak aangekondigd voor de dood van het staatshoofd en religieus leider ayatollah Khamenei. "De moordenaars van de imam van de natie zullen niet ontsnappen aan een harde, beslissende en afschrikwekkende straf", aldus een verklaring van de elite-eenheid van Iran.

De Revolutionaire Garde, het Iraanse elitekorps, is "vastberaden interne en externe samenzweringen tegen te gaan" en de agressors "met een afschrikwekkend en exemplarisch antwoord te straffen".

In de verklaring roept de Garde alle delen van de samenleving op om deel te nemen aan de landsverdediging en "solidariteit en nationale eenheid aan de wereld te tonen".

WASHINGTON (ANP) - De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump startte de grootschalige aanval op Iran na een wekenlange lobby-inspanning van onder meer Israël en Saudi-Arabië, meldt The Washington Post op basis van bronnen.

Volgens Amerikaanse inlichtingendiensten was er geen directe dreiging vanuit Iran, maar de regionale bondgenoten vonden dat het tijd was om nu aan te vallen.

De Saudische kroonprins Mohammed bin Salman voerde de afgelopen maand meerdere privételefoongesprekken met Trump waarin hij pleitte voor een Amerikaanse aanval, ondanks zijn publieke steun voor een diplomatieke oplossing, aldus de bronnen.

De Israëlische premier Benjamin Netanyahu zette ondertussen zijn langdurige publieke campagne voort voor Amerikaanse aanvallen tegen Iran.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De Amerikaanse president Trump heeft tegen CBS News gezegd dat hij gelooft dat de Amerikaanse en Israëlische aanvallen, waarbij de Iraanse leider ayatollah Khamenei is gedood, effectief zijn geweest en een pad naar diplomatie kunnen openen.

"Veel makkelijker nu dan een dag geleden, dat is duidelijk. Omdat ze flinke klappen krijgen", zei Trump, toen hem tijdens een telefonisch interview werd gevraagd naar de mogelijkheid van een diplomatieke oplossing voor de crisis.

De president noemde de aanvallen van zaterdag "een geweldige dag voor de Verenigde Staten, een geweldige dag voor de wereld".

Trump liet weten de Iraanse reactie op de aanvallen van Israël en de VS nauwlettend te blijven volgen. Iran lanceerde ballistische raketten op Israël en voerde aanvallen uit op Amerikaanse bondgenoten elders in het Midden-Oosten.

"Het is wat we verwachtten", zei Trump over de vergeldingsreactie, maar hij merkte op dat de aanvallen van Iran tot nu toe minder zijn dan wat de VS en hun bondgenoten hadden verwacht.

MINAB (ANP/AFP) - Het aantal kinderen dat is omgekomen bij een raketinslag in het zuiden van Iran, die een school trof, is opgelopen tot zeker 108, meldt de Iraanse Rode Halve Maan. Het getroffen gebouw was een basisschool voor meisjes, waar op dat moment naar verluidt 170 kinderen aanwezig waren.

De aanval vond plaats in Minab, een plaats nabij de strategische Straat van Hormuz, waar meerdere marinebases in de buurt zijn. De Verenigde Staten zeiden eerder dat de aanvallen gericht waren op militaire doelen.

ABU DHABI (ANP/AFP/DPA) - Iraanse vergeldingsaanvallen hebben minstens één persoon het leven gekost in de Verenigde Arabische Emiraten. Bij een "incident" op Zayed International Airport in hoofdstad Abu Dhabi is minstens één persoon omgekomen en zijn zeven mensen gewond geraakt, zo meldden functionarissen.

"Abu Dhabi Airports bevestigde een incident op Zayed International Airport dat resulteerde in de dood van een Aziatische burger en zeven gewonden", aldus een verklaring op X.

Het Ministerie van Defensie van de Emiraten meldde eerder dat hun troepen 132 ballistische raketten en 195 drones hadden onderschept die richting het grondgebied van het land waren gelanceerd.

Vijf andere raketten waren in zee gevallen, terwijl 14 drones boven water of land neerstortten, wat enige schade veroorzaakte, aldus het ministerie op X.

MEXICO-STAD (ANP) - Het Mexicaanse Openbaar Ministerie heeft de stoffelijke resten van de gedode drugsbaas Nemesio Oseguera, alias El Mencho, overgedragen aan zijn familie. Dat meldt de krant El País.

Volgens het OM waren alle noodzakelijke protocollen doorlopen en was vastgesteld dat er bloedbanden bestonden tussen de overledene en de mensen die om overdracht van zijn lichaam hadden verzocht.

El Mencho overleed nadat hij zwaargewond was geraakt bij een legeroperatie tegen zijn Jalisco New Generation Cartel afgelopen zondag. Op zijn dood volgde een golf van geweld in delen van Mexico.

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TL;DR:

• Apple is adding support for video podcasts to their podcast app
• Podcasts are built on an open standard, which is why they aren’t controlled by a bad algorithm and don’t have ads that spy on you
• Apple’s new system for video podcasts breaks with the old podcast standard, and forces creators to host their video clips with a few selected companies
• The stakes are even higher because all the indie video infrastructure companies have been bought by private equity, while Trump’s goons go after TV and consolidate the big studios
• If Apple doesn’t open this up, it could lead to podcasts getting enshittified like all the other media

Podcasts are a radical gift

As I noted back in 2024, the common phrase “wherever you get your podcasts” masks a subtle point, which is that podcasts are built on an open technology — a design which has radical implications on today’s internet. This is the reason that the podcasts most people consume aren’t skewed by creators chasing an algorithm that dictates what content they should create, aren’t full of surveillance-based advertising, and aren’t locked down to one app or platform that traps both creators and their audience within the walled garden of a single giant tech company.

Many of those merits of the contemporary podcast ecosystem are possible because of choices Apple made almost two decades ago when they embraced open standards in iTunes when adding podcasting features. Their outsized market influence (the term “podcast” itself came from the name iPod) pushed everyone else in the ecosystem to follow their lead, and as a result, we have a major media format that isn’t as poisoned, in some ways, as the rest of social media or even mainstream media.

Sure, there are individual podcast creators one might object to, but notice how you don’t see bad actors like FCC chairman Brendan Carr illegally throwing his weight around to try to censor and persecute podcasters in the same way that he’s been silencing television broadcasters, and you don’t see MAGA legislators trying to game the refs about the algorithm the way they have with Facebook and Twitter. Even the Elon Musks of the world can’t just buy up the whole world of podcasting like he was able to with Twitter, because the ecosystem is decentralized and not controlled by any one player. This is how the Internet was supposed to work. As early Internet advocates were fond of saying, the architecture of the Internet was designed to see censorship as damage, and route around it.

The move to video

All of this is at much higher risk now due to the technical decisions Apple has made with its move to support video podcasts in its latest software versions that are about to launch. The motivations for their move are obvious: in recent years, many podcasters have moved to embrace new platforms to increase their distribution, reach, engagement and sponsorship dollars, and that has driven them to add video, which has meant moving to YouTube, and more recently, platforms like Netflix. That is also typically accompanied by putting out promotional clips of the video portion of the podcast on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Combined with Spotify’s acquisition of multiple studios in order to produce proprietary shows that are not podcasts, but exclusive content locked into their apps, and Apple has faced a significant number of threats to their once-dominant position in the space.

So it was inevitable that Apple would add video support to their podcasting apps. And it makes sense for Apple to update the technical underpinnings; the assumptions that were made when designing podcasts over two decades ago aren’t really appropriate for many contemporary uses. For example, back then, by default an entire podcast episode would be downloaded to your iPod for convenient listening on the go, just like songs in your music library. But downloading a giant 4K video clip of an hour-long podcast show that you might not even watch, just in case you might want to see it, would be a huge waste of resources and bandwidth. Modern users are used to streaming everything. Thus, Apple updated their apps to support just grabbing snippets of video as they’re needed, and to their credit, Apple is embracing an open video format when doing so, instead of some proprietary system that requires podcasters to pay a fee or get permission.

The problem, though, is that Apple is only allowing these new video streams to be served by a small number of pre-approved commercial providers that they’ve hand-selected. In the podcasting world, there are no gatekeepers; if I want to start a podcast today, I can publish a podcast feed here on anildash.com and put up some MP3s with my episodes, and anyone anywhere in the world can subscribe to that podcast, I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, tell anyone about it, or agree to anyone’s terms of service.

If I want to publish a video podcast to Apple’s new system, though, I can’t just put up a video file on my site and tell people to subscribe to my podcast. I have to sign up for one of the approved partner services, agree to their terms of service, pay their monthly fee, watch them get acquired by Facebook, wait for the stupid corporate battle between Facebook and Apple, endure the service being enshittified, have them put their thumb on the scale about which content they want to promote, deal with my subscribers being spied on when they watch my show, see Brendan Carr make up a pretense to attack the platform I’m on, watch the service use my show to cross-promote violent attacks on vulnerable people, and the entire rest of that broken tech/content culture cycle.

We don’t have to do this, Apple!

How this plays out

What will happen, by default, if Apple doesn’t change course and add support for open video hosting for podcasts is a land grab for control of the infrastructure of the new, closed video podcast technology platform. Some of the bidders may be players that want to own podcasting (Spotify, Netflix, maybe legacy media companies like Disney and Paramount), or a roll-up from a cloud provider like AWS or Google Cloud. Either way, the services will get way more expensive for creators, and far more conservative about what content they allow, while being far more consumer-hostile in terms of privacy and monetization. We’ve seen this play out already — video shows on YouTube give advertisers massive amounts of data about viewers, while podcasts can be delivered to an audience while almost totally preserving their privacy, if a creator wants to help them preserve their anonymity. The reason you see podcasters always talking about “use our promo code” in their sponsor reads is because advertisers can’t track you going from their show to their website.

This will also start to impact content. You don’t hear podcasters saying “unalive” or censoring normal words because there is no algorithm that skews the distribution of their content. The promotional graphics for their shows are often downright boring, and don’t feature the hosts making weird faces like on YouTube thumbnails, because they haven’t been optimized to within an inch of their lives in hopes of getting 12-year-olds to click on them instead of Mr. Beast — because they’re not trying to chase algorithmic amplification. The closest thing that podcasters have to those kinds of games is when they ask you to rate them in Apple’s Podcasts app, because that has an algorithm for making recommendations, but even that is mediated by real humans making actual choices.

But once we’ve got a layer of paid intermediaries distributing video content, and Apple leans more heavily into the visual aspects of their podcast app, incentives are going to start to shift rapidly. Today, other than on laptops, phones and tablets, Apple Podcasts app only exists on their Apple TV hardware, and doesn’t even have a video playback feature. By contrast, a lot of video podcast consumption happens in YouTube’s TV apps in the living room. Apple Podcasts will soon have to be on every set top device like Roku sticks and Amazon Fire TVs and Google’s Chromecasts, as well as on smart TVs like Samsungs and LGs, with a robust video playback feature that can compete with YouTube’s own capabilities. Once that’s happened — which will take at least a year, if not multiple years — creators will immediately begin jockeying for ways to get promoted or amplified within that ecosystem. Even if Apple has allowed independent publishers to make their own video podcast feeds, it’s easy to imagine them treating them as second-class citizens when distributing those podcasts to all of the Apple Podcast users across all of these platforms.

The stakes for all of this are even higher because nearly all of the independent online platforms for video creation outside of YouTube have been bought up by a single private equity firm. In short: even if you don’t know it, if you’re trying to do video off of YouTube, all of your eggs are in one, very precarious, basket.

What to do

Apple can mitigate the risks of closing up podcasts by moving as quickly as possible to reassure the entire podcasting ecosystem that they’ll allow creators to use any source for hosting video. Right now, there’s a “fallback” video system where creators can deliver video through the traditional podcast standard, and other podcasting apps will show that video to audiences, but Apple’s apps don’t recognize it. If Apple said they’d support that specification as a second option for those who don’t want to, or can’t, use their video hosting partners, that would go a huge way towards mitigating the ecosystem risk that they’re introducing with this new shift.

If Apple can engage with a wide swath of creators and understand the concerns that are bubbling up, and articulate that they’re aware of the real, significant risks that can arise from the path that they’re currently on, they still have a chance to course-correct.

Some of these decisions can seem like arcane technical discussions. It’s easy to roll your eyes when people talk about specifications and formats and the minutiae of what happens behind the scenes when we click on a link. But the history of the Internet has shown us that, sometimes, even some of what seem like the most inconsequential choices end up leading to massive shifts in a larger ecosystem, or even in culture overall.

A generation ago, a few people at Apple made a choice to embrace an open ecosystem that was in its infancy, and in so doing, they enabled an entire culture of creators to flourish for decades. Podcasting is perhaps the last major media format that is open, free, and not easily able to be captured by authoritarians. The stakes couldn’t be higher. All it takes now is a few decision makers pushing to do the right thing, not just the easy thing, to protect an entire vital medium.

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Ukrainian president voices support for US and Israel strikes on Iran, calling Tehran ‘an accomplice of Putin’. What we know on day 1,467

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the time and place of the next round of peace talks between the US, Russia and Ukraine would depend on the security situation in the Middle East and the level of “real diplomatic possibilities”. The Ukrainian president on Saturday said he would issue new directives to Ukraine’s negotiating team at the talks, without detailing what they were. He had said the next round of talks would probably take place in Abu Dhabi in early March. But the United Arab Emirates has since been caught up in hostilities after the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran.

Zelenskyy voiced his support for the US-led strikes, calling Iran “an accomplice of Putin” for supplying Shahed drones and the technology for Russia to produce them and other weapons in its war against Ukraine. He said it was important that Washington acted decisively, but also that hostilities did not escalate into a wider war.

“It is only fair to give the Iranian people a chance to get rid of the terrorist regime, to get rid of it and guarantee the safety of all nations that have suffered from terror originating in Iran,” Zelenskyy said in a video address on social media. “It is important that the United States is determined. And whenever America is determined, global criminals weaken.”

Zelenskyy said that Russia has used “more than 57,000 Shahed-type strike drones against Ukraine – against our people, against our cities, against our energy sector”. “Although Ukrainians have never threatened Iran, the Iranian regime chose to be Putin’s accomplice,” Zelensky said.

Donald Trump is urging Moscow and Kyiv to strike an agreement to end Europe’s biggest war since 1945, though Zelenskyy has complained that his country is facing more pressure to make concessions. Ukraine is seeking iron-clad security guarantees which commit the US and its European allies to action if Russia attacks again after a peace deal is reached. The last round of peace talks, which took place in Geneva last week, did not achieve a breakthrough and was described as difficult by Kyiv and Moscow, although Washington said it saw “meaningful progress”.

Zelenskyy’s chief of staff on Saturday said that Russia said at recent talks in Geneva that it would accept the US proposal for Ukraine’s postwar security guarantees. “At the last talks, the Russian side said for example that they would accept the security guarantees offered to Ukraine by the United States,” said Kyrylo Budanov in an interview aired on Ukrainian television. Budanov also said that at present Russia had not agreed to a summit between Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin, which had been floated earlier as a possibility by US special envoy Steve Witkoff.

Russia on Saturday condemned the US-Israeli strikes on Iran as “a preplanned and unprovoked act of armed aggression against a sovereign and independent UN member state”, demanding an immediate halt to the military campaign and a return to diplomacy.

Russia has maintained a delicate balancing act in the Middle East for decades, trying to navigate its warm relations with Israel even as it has developed strong economic and military ties with Iran. Iranian forces and Russian sailors conducted annual drills in the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean last week aimed at “upgrading operational coordination as well as exchange of military experiences,” Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency reported. Putin and his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian, signed a broad cooperation pact in January last year as their countries deepened their partnership in the face of stinging western sanctions.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Saturday its forces had taken control of the settlements of Neskuchne and Girke in Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Zaporizhizhia regions. And Ukraine’s Naftogaz said Russia struck a gas extraction facility in the Kharkiv region overnight, causing serious damage.

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Stunning colours on this tiny long legged fly.

Hij overleefde meerdere protestgolven, een aanslag op zijn leven en oorlogen met Israël, Irak en de VS. Met zijn uitschakeling is er alsnog een einde gekomen aan het decennialange, autoritaire bewind van Ali Khamenei.