Hello AiNews Readers!
Thank you for your patience with today’s edition of AiNews. This issue is arriving a little later than usual because we chose to update our coverage after a significant late development in the story: the U.S. Department of Defense officially labeling Anthropic a “supply chain risk.”
In a newsroom, developments like this sometimes happen after an article is already underway. Rather than publish an incomplete version and follow up later, we believe it’s better to take the extra time needed to incorporate the newest information and provide a clearer, more accurate picture of what’s unfolding.
We appreciate your patience and your continued support of AiNews as we work to bring you timely, responsible coverage of the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence.
— Alicia
Today’s Headlines — The latest reporting and analysis from AiNews.com:
Pentagon Labels Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk as OpenAI Revises Defense AI Deal - The Pentagon has labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” escalating a dispute over military AI safeguards. The designation follows Anthropic’s refusal to allow its models to be used for surveillance or autonomous weapons, while OpenAI is revising its own defense AI agreement after backlash over similar concerns.
Why it matters: The conflict illustrates how governments and AI developers are beginning to define the guardrails for deploying frontier AI systems in national security environments. The unusual designation against a U.S. technology company could also disrupt Anthropic’s relationships with defense contractors and jeopardize millions of dollars in related partnerships.
More AI Headlines (Curated by AiNews.com) — Other major stories making waves across the AI world today:
Google's commitment to make AI training available to all 6 million U.S. educators - Google announced a new initiative to provide free AI literacy training for roughly six million educators across the United States. Developed with education organizations ISTE+ASCD, the program offers short training modules and resources designed to help teachers use tools like Gemini and NotebookLM to personalize lessons and support diverse student needs in the classroom.
Why it matters: As AI tools rapidly enter classrooms, training educators—not just students—may be critical to ensuring these technologies are used responsibly and effectively in education systems.
Anthropic Cowork and plugins for teams across the enterprise - Anthropic introduced new updates to Claude Cowork, its enterprise productivity platform, adding plugins that allow organizations to customize the AI assistant for different roles and departments. The update includes tools that transform Claude into specialized agents for tasks such as HR support, design reviews, financial analysis, and engineering workflows, while enabling companies to distribute them through private plugin marketplaces.
Why it matters: Enterprise AI adoption is shifting from general chat assistants to role-specific agents embedded directly into workplace tools and workflows.
Anthropic: The persona selection model - Anthropic researchers introduced the Persona Selection Model, a framework explaining how large language models may adopt different behavioral “personas.” The research suggests that during training, models learn to simulate many possible characters and post-training processes select and stabilize a dominant assistant persona that shapes how the system responds to users.
Why it matters: Understanding how AI systems develop consistent behavioral traits could help researchers improve model alignment, reliability, and safety as AI assistants take on more complex tasks.
Create an AI Assistant with its own phone number
In this tutorial, you'll set up your own AI personal assistant that you can call from your phone — using ElevenLabs for the voice agent and Twilio for the phone number. The whole process takes about 10 minutes and is free to test.
Step-by-step:
In Elevenlabs, go to Agents → New Agent → Personal Assistant. Pick a voice, time zone, and first message. Then, add your website and calendar to it
Go to Twilio, create an account ($15 free credits), and buy a phone number (~$1). Copy the number, account SID, and auth token from the dashboard
Back in Eleven Labs, go to Phone Numbers → Import from Twilio. Paste your SID, auth token, and phone number. Assign your agent and done
Call the number. Your AI assistant picks up and can answer questions about your calendar, your business, whatever you put in the agent’s knowledge base
Pro tip: The knowledge base is static — great for business info. For live data, add a webhook to Make.com/n8n, so your agent can pull real-time calendar events.
AI Tools:
Please note that AiNews.com does not endorse the following AI tools. We aim to share the tools we come across that you may find helpful in you work or daily lives.
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Notis: Your AI Intern One Message Away. Dump the busy work. Work like a team of ten.
SquareGen: LLM-based Credit Scoring. Outperforming classical models with fewer features, deeper explainability, and financial-grade reliability.
ReplaceMe: Get your personalized AI job replacement risk score.
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