Marked-up Mac minis flood eBay amid shortages driven by AI

Overpriced Mac minis are flooding eBay amid shortages of the sold-out machines, which have become a favored tool for running on-device AI models like OpenClaw. This week, reports indicated that the $599 M4 Mac mini base model with 16GB RAM and 256GB of storage is sold out on Apple’s retail website, with no options for … Read more

Mystery solved: Anthropic reveals changes to Claude's harnesses and operating instructions likely caused degradation

For several weeks, a growing chorus of developers and AI power users claimed that Anthropic’s flagship models were losing their edge. Users across GitHub, X, and Reddit reported a phenomenon they described as "AI shrinkflation"—a perceived degradation where Claude seemed less capable of sustained reasoning, more prone to hallucinations, and increasingly wasteful with tokens. Critics … Read more

Claude can now connect to lifestyle apps like Spotify, Instacart and AllTrails

Anthropic is expanding its directory of connected services for its Claude AI chatbot. The platform can now link up with your accounts on AllTrails, Audible, Booking.com, Instacart, Intuit Credit Karma, Intuit TurboTax, Resy, Spotify, StubHub, Taskrabbit, Thumbtack, TripAdvisor, Uber, Uber Eats and Viator. Additional services will be added in the future. More and more AI companies … Read more

Rivian R2 production has started despite tornado damage to factory

Rivian has rolled the first customer-ready R2 SUVs off the production line at its factory in Normal, Illinois, just days after it was hit by an EF-1 tornado that tore off part of the roof. Despite the damage, founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday morning that Rivian doesn’t expect any delays … Read more

FAA orders investigation into Blue Origin’s New Glenn mishap

The Federal Aviation Administration has instructed Blue Origin to perform an investigation into the apparent failure of the upper stage of its New Glenn rocket on Sunday, according to the Orlando Sentinel. That means the company won’t be able to fly New Glenn again until it completes the probe. That could put a damper on … Read more

The NSA is reportedly using Anthropic’s new model Mythos

Despite the months-long feud between Anthropic and the Pentagon, the National Security Agency is using the AI company’s new Mythos Preview, according to Axios, which spoke to two sources with knowledge of the matter. Anthropic announced Mythos Preview at the beginning of April, describing it as a general-purpose language model that is “strikingly capable at … Read more

Train-to-Test scaling explained: How to optimize your end-to-end AI compute budget for inference

The standard guidelines for building large language models (LLMs) optimize only for training costs and ignore inference costs. This poses a challenge for real-world applications that use inference-time scaling techniques to increase the accuracy of model responses, such as drawing multiple reasoning samples from a model at deployment. To bridge this gap, researchers at University … Read more

Anthropic’s relationship with the Trump administration seems to be thawing

Despite recently being designated a supply-chain risk by the Pentagon, Anthropic is still talking to high-level members of the Trump administration. There were earlier signs of a thawing relationship — or a sense that not every part of the administration wanted to cut off Anthropic — with reports saying that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and … Read more

15 years after ‘Video Games,’ Lana Del Rey has an actual video game song

The James Bond franchise has a long history of getting pop stars to record its theme songs (perhaps most memorably with Live and Let Die), and it looks like that tradition will now extend to video game adaptations about the fictional spy. IO Interactive has announced that Lana Del Rey co-wrote and performed the theme … Read more

InsightFinder raises $15M to help companies figure out where AI agents go wrong

The role of observability tools has evolved once again. While the market for solutions to ensure tech systems’ reliability has grown over the years, the center of gravity has steadily shifted from “track everything” to “control complexity and costs.” Meanwhile, the rapid influx and adoption of AI agents within enterprises have only added a brand … Read more