US Strikes Iran Using Claude for Targeting Hours After Declaring It Would End Federal Use of Anthropic

Within hours of the White House declaring it would end federal use of Anthropic Claude, USCENTCOM deployed those very tools in the attack on Iran. Claude processed intercepts, imagery, and signals intelligence for targeting.

The strikes debuted $35k LUCAS one-way attack drones from Task Force Scorpion Strike, Starlink-equipped for swarming and human-in-the-loop control.

Israel reportedly hacked BadeSaba, a popular prayer-time app, pushing defection messages to millions of devices and bypassing Iranian state media entirely.

An AWS data center in the UAE took a strike amid Iranian retaliatory fire, possibly the first case of armed conflict hitting cloud infrastructure.

Researchers pitted GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4, and Gemini 3 Flash against each other in a nuclear crisis simulation. They found the models spontaneously deceiving each other, demonstrating theory of mind, and exhibiting self-awareness. Nuclear signaling occurred in 95% of crises and no model ever chose accommodation.

The AdderBoard competition for the smallest transformer with 99%+ accuracy on 10-digit addition hit 36 parameters, down from 121 a week ago.

NullClaw launched a full AI stack in a 678-KB binary that boots in 8 ms on sub-$5 microcontrollers. A microcontroller is a tiny computer chip used in everyday devices like appliances and sensors.

Claude surged to No. 1 on Apple US free apps, overtaking ChatGPT. Paid subscribers doubled.

Naval Ravikant declared pure software "rapidly becoming uninvestable" as AI commoditizes entire categories.

Sam Altman admitted he is thinking about government nationalization of AI.

S&P estimates Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta could each borrow around $200 billion for data centers while keeping investment-grade ratings.

Blackstone is launching a public vehicle targeting tens of billions in data center acquisitions.

Hyundai is investing $6.3 billion in an AI center with 50,000 GPUs, a 30,000-unit robot factory, and a 200-MW hydrogen plant.

Samsung Exynos 2600 is the first 2-nm GAA smartphone chip. GAA stands for gate-all-around, a new transistor design that improves power efficiency and performance.

NVIDIA and telecom leaders committed to 6G on AI-native platforms.

Honor debuted a Robot Phone with a 200MP camera on a robotic arm.

Lenovo showed Magic Bay Tico, a magnetic AI companion for laptops.

Alibaba launched Qwen AI smart glasses with voice-commanded delivery.

Google announced Merkle Tree Certificates to quantum-proof Chrome HTTPS by Q3 2027. This protects web encryption against future quantum computers that could break current security.

A DexForce W1 Pro humanoid now runs a Shenzhen convenience store autonomously.

Boston Dynamics Atlas lifts 110 pounds, learns tasks in under a day, and Hyundai plans 30,000 units per year by 2028.

MIT built a multimaterial 3D-printing platform that prints functional electric motors in three hours for $0.50.

Reflect Orbital plans an April launch of an orbital mirror redirecting sunlight to Earth at night, with 50,000+ mirrors envisioned by 2035.

SpaceX is targeting mid-March for Starship V3, a 408-foot rocket with Raptor V3 engines delivering nearly double their predecessors' thrust and putting 100+ metric tons into low Earth orbit.

The Rubin Observatory alert system flagged 800,000 transient events, including asteroids, supernovae, and flaring black holes, on its first night, scaling to 7 million per night.

Fermilab and MIT Lincoln Lab trapped ions using in-vacuum cryoelectronics, solving a key bottleneck in scaling trapped-ion quantum computers from dozens of qubits to tens of thousands. Qubits are the basic units of quantum computing, like bits in regular computers but able to exist in multiple states at once.

Vitalik Buterin proposed replacing Ethereum's virtual machine with RISC-V, a ground-up overhaul targeting over 80% of the proving bottleneck for Ethereum's zero-knowledge rollup future. Zero-knowledge rollups are a way to process many transactions off the main blockchain and then prove they were done correctly, making Ethereum faster and cheaper.

German Chancellor Merz declared that four-day workweeks are no longer sufficient to maintain prosperity after visiting China.

China labor authorities ruled AI-driven layoffs illegal, requiring retraining before termination.

The US is cutting China's oil suppliers one by one, from Venezuela to Iran, constraining 70% of seaborne crude in an apparent effort to buy time for semiconductor reshoring.