Today's Hallucination HQClaude Gets a Government Discount; Washington Gets the Bill
Anthropic has struck a deal with California Governor Gavin Newsom to provide Claude at half price to state government employees — a cosy arrangement that has not gone unnoticed in Washington, where the federal government has been growing increasingly cool on OpenAI's main rival. So California gets affordable AI, Anthropic gets a powerful friend, and the Trump administration gets to add another name to the list. Everyone wins, depending entirely on where you live.
Source: TechCrunch
OpenAI Is Releasing a Box With Buttons. For Coders. Yes, Really.
On July 15th, OpenAI will unveil a small square hardware device tied to its AI coding tool, Codex — described as an upgrade to your "favourite Codex shortcuts," which is a very confident assumption about how people feel about keyboard shortcuts. The device appeared in a teaser video on X, featuring several buttons and an air of mystery that OpenAI seems to have confused with excitement. It is not, notably, the rumoured consumer device. It is, apparently, a box.
Source: The Verge
Turns Out, Ranking AI Chatbots Is Surprisingly Good Business
Arena, the startup behind Chatbot Arena — the popular leaderboard where humans vote on which AI model gives the better answer — has just hit a $100 million valuation. It launched its commercial service in September. That's nine months from "free website where people argue about chatbots" to nine-figure business, which either says something remarkable about Arena or something deeply revealing about what the AI industry will pay to know whether GPT-4o beats Gemini in a blind taste test.
Source: TechCrunch
Your New "Colleague" Alex Has Never Once Eaten a Sad Desk Lunch
MIT Technology Review raises a quietly important point: companies are calling AI agents "coworkers," giving them names like Alex, and slotting them into org charts as if they'll chip in for birthday cake. They won't. The concern isn't that AI agents are useless — it's that framing them as colleagues obscures accountability, muddies liability, and makes it genuinely unclear who's responsible when Alex does something catastrophically wrong. Spoiler: it won't be Alex.
Source: MIT Technology Review
Tidal to AI Music: You Can Stay, But Don't Expect a Cheque
Starting July 15th, Tidal will label tracks identified as 100% AI-generated — and, effective immediately, will stop paying royalties on them. The streaming platform frames this as protecting artists, which it arguably is, while also quietly solving the problem of paying money to software. It's not a ban; Tidal will still host the music. It simply declines to financially reward it, a policy that, when you think about it, several labels have been applying to human artists for decades.
Source: The Verge
As always, the models are getting smarter. Whether the industry is — we'll check back in quarterly.
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