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Sign of the TIME(s): OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Sam Jacobs TIMEās editor in chief, speak onstage during A Year In TIME at The Plaza Hotel on December 12, 2023. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for TIME)
Welcome to the latest edition of Breaker. If this email has been forwarded, you can subscribe here and send your questions and complaints here. If you have a tip contact the 24/7 Breaker Tip Hotline via text or Signal # 551 655 2343. Anonymity guaranteed!
In tonightās edition, TIME magazine published a piece about AI company Anthropic this week, gaining unparalleled access for its cover story. The article pumps up Anthropicās position in the AI landscape, but itās the details and background of one of the journos involved that could be the real story.Ā
Plus, The New York Times poaches yet another high-profile journalist, The Guardian has a name for its new U.S. video-first podcast to take on The Daily, and a well-known scribe is working on a profile of Jeff Bezosās wife.Ā
And, itās Thursday, which means Journo Jobs is back. Tonight we have gigs at Google, The Wall Street Journal, Caliber Inc., Business Insider, Reuters, and USA Today.Ā
Finally, we know youāve all been losing sleep over who won Best Hat On Ground (BHOG) at Rupert Murdochās 95th birthday party, so tonight we reveal the winner of our reader poll. Plus photos of the current and former Murdoch execs who did a good job of (almost) avoiding our camera.
Mentioned tonight: Emma Tucker, A.G. Sulzberger, Peter Rice, Barry Diller, Amy Chozick, Rupert Murdoch, Victoria Newton, Bari Weiss, Steven Rubenstein, Jeremy Adler, Christa Robinson, Adam Mendelsohn, Erik Wemple, Kai Wright, Carter Sherman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and more.
About Time for A Disclosure
(Exclusive.) āThe War For AIā blared the cover of TIME magazine this week. āWhat the fight between Anthropic and the Pentagon means for the future,ā read the dek underneath.Ā
The more than 5,000-word article was reported by journalists Billy Perrigo and Harry Booth, the latter of whom spent three days inside Anthropicās California HQ āinterviewing executives, engineers, product heads, and safety leaders in an attempt to figure out how what was once the eccentric little brother in the race for artificial intelligence has suddenly become the pacesetter.āĀ
āAlready, its $380 billion valuation eclipses those of Goldman Sachs, McDonalds, and Coca-Cola. Its revenues are a rocket ship,ā Booth and Pettigo breathlessly wrote.Ā
āClaude is considered a world-class model, with products like Code and Cowork upending what it means to be a programmer. Its tools are so good that each new release causes stock-market shocks, as investors grasp the likelihood the advances will upend entire categories, from law to software development. Over the past few months, it emerged as the company most poised to disrupt the future of work.ā
The piece continues to champion Anthropic while highlighting competitor OpenAIās links to the Trump administration and perceived issues of safety and security with their product ChatGPT. It also reports that after negotiations over government military contracts failed, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei attempted to explain the situation to staff.
āThe real reasons [the Department of Defense] and the Trump admin do not like us is we havenāt donated to Trump,ā Amodei wrote in a leaked internal memo. āWe havenāt given dictator-style praise to Trump (while [OpenAI CEO] Sam [Altman] has), we have supported AI regulation which is against their agenda, weāve told the truth about a number of AI policy issues (like job displacement), and weāve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce āsafety theater.āā
But an important detail was missing from the article. Before Booth joined TIME magazine, he was ā¦
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ā As credited in The New York Times, CNBC, Axios, The New York Post, CNN, Bloomberg, The Guardian, and more.