The Anthropic export control ban arrived at 5:21 PM ET on 12 June, when the Commerce Department sent a letter to CEO Dario Amodei invoking national security authorities to bar all foreign nationals from accessing Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the company’s two most advanced AI models. The directive applied not just to users abroad but to foreign nationals inside the United States, including Anthropic’s own foreign-born employees. Faced with no practical way to screen every user, Anthropic pulled the models entirely. The immediate trigger, according to multiple reports, was Amazon. Reuters reported that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was among…
Author: Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale has been filing general news for the better part of fifteen years. He started at a regional evening paper, moved to a mid-sized digital outlet covering UK news, and spent three years as a general assignment reporter before going freelance. He has covered inquests, council elections, infrastructure announcements, and the kind of stories that sit on page five but matter on page one. He writes about public services, housing, local government, and the institutional stories that take six months to develop and thirty seconds to read. He prefers facts to angles and considers that unfashionable. Marcus lives in Bristol. He still reads the local paper and thinks that makes him an endangered species.
Signal president Meredith Whittaker has a message for anyone confiding in their AI assistant: these systems are not your friends, they are not conscious, and they are absolutely paying attention. Whittaker made the remarks in a Bloomberg interview, pushing back on the increasingly cosy framing that surrounds products like ChatGPT and Claude. ‘These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors,’ she said, delivering the kind of flat, unambiguous statement that tends to get lost in the ambient enthusiasm of the AI moment. What Meredith Whittaker Actually Thinks About AI Tools To be clear,…
The iOS 27 new features that arrived alongside Apple’s WWDC25 announcements run considerably deeper than Siri’s AI glow-up. Yes, Apple Intelligence grabbed the keynote spotlight when the conference ran from 9 to 13 June 2025, according to the Apple Newsroom. But buried beneath the AI headlines is a solid haul of practical upgrades to Maps, Wallet, Music, Notes, and more. What Apple Maps and Find My Actually Gained Apple Maps is getting two additions that look suspiciously like a response to Google Maps and social discovery apps. The first is a refresh of Flyover, the immersive 3D city-view feature, with…
Kyber, the Paris-based startup building real-time robot control infrastructure, has closed a $5 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with co-investment from OVNI Capital and Kima Ventures. The firm managing the cheque oversees over $50 billion in assets and has previously backed Anthropic and Mistral AI. For a $5m seed, that is a fairly well-credentialled cap table. The company was founded by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, best known in open-source circles as a core contributor to VLC and FFmpeg. His new project takes the same instinct (make media run faster and more reliably, everywhere) and points it squarely at robots,…
The Walt Frazier Finals suits that lit up every broadcast during the Knicks’ 2026 championship run were made in a week by a fifth-generation family business that started life on the Lower East Side over a century ago. You could be forgiven for spending those games watching the wrong person. The Walt Frazier Finals Suits Behind the Broadcast For the uninitiated: Walt ‘Clyde’ Frazier is the legendary Knicks point guard who led the team to their only two championships, in 1970 and 1973, before the 2026 title. He retired more than 40 years ago and has been a fixture on…
Kate Barton Resort 2027 is the young New York designer’s first venture into pre-collections, and it reads less like a commercial hedge and more like a genuine extension of everything she has been quietly building since she debuted her spring 2023 collection alongside her e-commerce platform.The timing makes sense. Barton has spent the past several seasons nudging her brand beyond the sculptural, liquid eveningwear that first made people pay attention, and a resort offering gives her room to do that without disrupting the runway calendar she has built around a September show and a February New York Fashion Week presentation.…
Reem Acra Resort 2027 takes Venice as its muse, and the city’s theatrical excess translates more directly than most designer travel epiphanies manage. The collection grew from a practical prompt. Several of Acra’s clients travelled to Venice this year; she dressed them for the trip, absorbed the city’s drama and lavishness, and came back with a creative brief. For a label already built on opulent beading and embroidery, Venice is essentially home turf. The question was always going to be how much further she’d push it. The answer: ostrich feathers. They appear at necklines and along trim in several looks,…
The 6397 Resort 2027 collection does what the brand does best: takes the clothes most people already own and makes them quietly, unmistakably better. Designer Lizzie Owens built the lineup around updated essentials, injecting each piece with small, considered details that reward a closer look without demanding one. Lightness as a Design Brief Owens went into this season with a clear mood in mind. ‘We wanted this collection to feel very light, especially because everything feels very heavy at the moment,’ she says. The result is a range that leans on peppy colours and polka dots, with a childlike innocence…
The Piccioli’s Balenciaga Resort 2027 collection arrived not on a runway but over a Zoom call, which is either refreshingly low-key or a sign that the real spectacle is being saved for later. Either way, what came through the screen was the most coherent statement yet from a designer who has spent the past several months quietly redefining one of fashion’s most architecturally rigorous houses. The mood-setter came early. Demi Moore appeared at the Cannes Film Festival in an emerald green long dress suspended from a collar of gems, paired with an ice blue bolero and white opera gloves. It…
Prabal Gurung Resort 2027 is named ‘The First Light,’ and the title does a lot of quiet heavy lifting. Inspired by the stillness of early mornings, the collection is less about a statement and more about a feeling: that private moment before the world gets loud. Prabal Gurung Resort 2027: Tailoring the Quiet Moment ‘I’m a super-early riser,’ Gurung said, ‘and …I’ve always found the solitude and melancholy in the early morning to be quite beautiful.’ The muse this season is a woman getting dressed, unobserved. Gurung wanted to capture that specific beat of introspection before public life resumes, and…