Here are the top AI stories for 24 Feb 2026: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge, says it won’t halt AI development if competitors ‘blaze ahead’ Anthropic scrapped the central commitment of its Responsible Scaling Policy: the 2023 promise to never train an AI system without first guaranteeing adequate safety measures. Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan told TIME that “it wouldn’t actually help anyone for us to stop training AI models” given competitors’ pace. The revised RSP commits only to matching or surpassing rivals’ safety efforts and to delaying development only if Anthropic leads the race and considers catastrophe risks significant. ( source ) Hegseth gives Anthropic Friday deadline to accept Pentagon’s ‘any lawful use’ terms or face blacklisting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth set a Friday deadline for Anthropic to agree to the Pentagon’s demand for “any lawful use” terms for Claude, which would permit mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons. The Pentagon threatened to classify Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk,” a designation normally reserved for foreign cyber threats. Emil Michael, the former Uber executive now serving as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, is driving the negotiation. OpenAI and xAI have reportedly already accepted the same terms. ( source ) WiseTech to cut 2,000 jobs, nearly 30% of workforce, as CEO declares ‘era of manually writing code is over’ Australian logistics software maker WiseTech Global plans to eliminate about 2,000 jobs under an AI-driven restructuring. CEO Zubin Appoo said AI is “unlocking levels of efficiency gains across WiseTech that were previously out of reach.” The cuts come after weeks of market turmoil around the SaaSpocalypse trade, where investors have been selling software stocks on AI disruption fears. ( source ) Meta signs multi-year deal with AMD for up to 6GW of AI inference chips, buys 10% equity stake Meta and AMD announced a multi-year deal covering up to six gigawatts of Instinct GPUs focused on inference workloads. The first 1GW rollout of custom MI450 chips, which Meta helped design, begins H2 2026. AMD offered performance-based warrants for up to 160 million shares tied to delivery milestones. AMD signed a similar deal with OpenAI earlier. For Meta, it’s a way to reduce dependence on Nvidia. ( source ) Other important stories Anthropic launched Claude Cowork with an enterprise plugin marketplace for Excel, PowerPoint, and finance tools — going straight at Microsoft Copilot. ( read more ) AI chip startup MatX raised $500M to build processors it claims are 10x faster than Nvidia GPUs for LLM training, backed by Jane Street and the Collison brothers. ( read more ) Inception Labs released Mercury 2, a diffusion-based reasoning LLM hitting 1,009 tokens/sec with 1.7s end-to-end latency, compared to 14.4s for Gemini 3 Flash. ( read more ) DeepMind proposed that AI should occasionally assign humans busywork to prevent skill atrophy, addressing the “paradox of automation.” ( read more ) Moody’s flagged $662B in hidden data center liabilities across five hyperscalers, equal to 113% of their combined adjusted debt. ( read more ) Wayve raised $1.5B at $8.6B valuation from Microsoft, Nvidia, and Uber to take its robotaxi software global, starting with London this year. ( read more ) A Cloudflare engineer rebuilt Next.js from scratch with AI in one week for $1,100 in tokens — it builds 4x faster and produces 57% smaller bundles. ( read more ) Fed Governor Lisa Cook warned the Fed may not have sufficient tools to counter AI-driven unemployment, contradicting another Fed governor who called the risk overstated. ( read more ) Harvard study found AI can predict 71% of trades made by actively managed funds. ( read more ) submitted by /u/fabioperez
Originally posted by u/fabioperez on r/ArtificialInteligence