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OpenAI has reached an agreement with the Defense Department to deploy its models in the agency's network, company chief Sam Altman has revealed on X. In his post, he said two of OpenAI's most important safety principles are "prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems." Altman claimed the company put those principles in its agreement with the agency, which he called by the government's preferred name of Department of War (DoW), and that it had agreed to honor them.
The agency has closed the deal with OpenAI, shortly after President Donald Trump ordered all government agencies to stop using Claude and any other Anthropic services. If you'll recall, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth previously threatened to label Anthropic "supply chain risk" if it continues refusing to remove the guardrails on its AI, which are preventing the technology to be used for mass surveillance against Americans and in fully autonomous weapons.
It's unclear why the government agreed to team up with OpenAI if its models also have the same guardrails, but Altman said it's asking the government to offer the same terms to all the AI companies it works with. Jeremy Lewin, the Senior Official Under Secretary for Foreign Assistance, Humanitarian Affairs, and Religious Freedom, said on X that DoW "references certain existing legal authorities and includes certain mutually agreed upon safety mechanisms" in its contracts. Both OpenAI and xAI, which had also previously signed a
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 Starting on Monday, we're going to get our first major product announcements of 2026. Apple CEO Tim Cook teased a "big week ahead" with an "Apple Launch" hashtag, plus Apple has media events scheduled in New York, Shanghai, and London on Wednesday, March 4. We're expecting the iPhone 17e, an all-new low-cost MacBook, and minor refreshes to the Mac and iPad lines.
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OpenAI is on track to hit the kind of global scale most tech products only fantasize about. The AI giant just announced that ChatGPT now has around 900 million weekly active users — and it's aiming squarely at the 1 billion weekly user milestone. The company also noted how it now boasts more than 50 […]
The post ChatGPT Nears 1 Billion Weekly Users in Record Growth Surge appeared first on eWEEK.
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Spectrum is the largest internet provider in the US after the acquisition.
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Google will finally be able to provide real-time driving and walking directions in South Korea, The New York Times reported. The company has received permission from the nation's Transport Ministry to export geographic data out of the country, which will allow it to provide GPS services as well as detailed listings for restaurants and other businesses.
"We welcome today's decision and look forward to our ongoing collaboration with local officials to bring a fully functioning Google Maps to Korea," Google's senior executive Cris Turner told the NYT in a statement. However, the approval is contingent "on the condition that strict security requirements are met," a spokesperson from the Transport Ministry said. Those conditions reportedly restrict Google from displaying sensitive military sites and longitude and latitude coordinates.
South Korea has generally restricted the export of 1/5000 scale map dat
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The company's new flagship smart ring stores more data, too. But that doesn't really help Americans.
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 The first camper kit developed specially for Kia's tiny, modular electric PV5 van hit the market just a couple weeks ago, and now we have the world's first pop-up PV5 production camper van. British converter Sussex Campervans aims to make the
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The Federal Communications Commission has given the go ahead for two of the US' biggest cable providers, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, to merge. Charter announced its intention to acquire Cox for $34.5 billion in May 2025, with specific plans to inherit Cox's managed IT, commercial fiber and cloud businesses, while folding the company's residential cable service into a subsidiary.
"By approving this deal, the FCC ensures big wins for Americans," FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a statement. "This deal means that jobs are coming back to America that had been shipped overseas. It means that modern, high-speed networks will get built out in more communities across rural America. And it means that customers will get access to lower priced plans. On top of this, the deal enshrines protections against DEI discrimination."
The FCC claims that Charter plans to invest "billions" to upgrade its network following the closure of the deal, leading to "faster broadband and lower prices." The company's "Rural Construction Initiative" will also extend those improvements to rural states lacking in consistent internet service, a project the FCC was heavily invested in during the Biden administration, but has been pulling back from since President Donald Trump
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Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery are officially merging. The studio paid Netflix the $2.8 billion termination fee it was owed for breaking its original deal to buy Warner Bros. earlier today, and the historic film studio has now formally accepted Paramount's offer.
Along with the deal, which values Warner Bros. Discovery at $31 per share, Paramount is making several commitments to assuage the fears of regulators and the entertainment community. Those include a guarantee that the new company will produce 30 theatrical films annually, that theatrical releases will have a minimum 45-day window in theaters before they're brought to video on demand (something Netflix ultimately also agreed to) and that deal itself will close by Q3 2026.
This turnaround in Paramount's fortunes has happened quickly. Warner Bros. Discovery announced that Paramount's offer was superior to Netflix's on Thursday, and not long after the
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 For this week's giveaway, we've teamed up with Astropad to offer MacRumors readers a chance to win an iPhone 17 and an anti-reflective Fresh Coat screen protector from Astropad to go along with it.
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This 12-week training program is the sign you're looking for to sign up for a Hyrox this year.
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 If there's one thing that stops people using their smart rings over the long term, it's the battery life. After all, they're so unobtrusive, it's easy to forget to drop it on the charging plate every few days. It doesn't take long for your pricey gadget to become little more than a very expensive piece of jewelry. It's one of many maladies Ultrahuman is looking to address with the advent of its new Pro, a smart ring boasting up to 15 days of battery life. It even ships with a fancy battery case, which itself includes enough power to last it 45 days, making it easier to keep re-charged on the go.
Ultrahuman Ring Pro hasn't just got a far bigger battery, it's been re-engineered from the ground up. The company's Bhuvan Srinivasan explained the older hardware had been pushed to its limit, especially in terms of the data it could process. Consequently, the Pro is equipped with a dual core processor with on-device machine learning to better crunch the numbers your body is throwing out. Its memory has also been increased, holding up to 250 days of data before it needs to sync with your smartphone. As well as improvements to durability, the new ring is also easier to cut apart in the hopefully rare event your finger, or its battery, begins to swell.
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Proposals before the FCC involve mirrors that could bathe entire cities in sunlight and, from SpaceX, a million satellites to serve as data centers.
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Apple is taking a different approach with its latest event, as new product announcements could happen all week long.
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Perplexity Computer launches with 19 specialized AI models working in parallel to build apps, dashboards, research, and more from a single prompt.
The post Perplexity Wants to Replace Your Computer With 19 AIs appeared first on eWEEK.
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 Xiaomi will introduce a new software update at this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC) that will reportedly improve connectivity between its own devices and Apple products.
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AI-generating malware, deep fake identity spoofing, and state-sponsored ransomware are just a few of the latest methods that attackers are using to bypass traditional cybersecurity tools. Ritesh Agrawal, CEO of cybersecurity startup Airgap Networks, noticed that many of the attacks that compromise enterprise networks fail to penetrate telco and service provider networks.
"Even though they're deploying the same routers, switches, and firewalls, there's something fundamentally different about telco networks that shields them from many threats to enterprise LANs," Argawal said. Agrawal has 20 years of experience with cybersecurity, enterprise networking, and cloud computing, most of that time spent with Juniper Networks focusing on telco and large enterprise clients.
To read this article in full, please click here
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