Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery:

In fact, Amodei already answered the question: if nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, and that private company sought to dictate terms to the U.S. military, the U.S. would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company. The reason goes back to the question of international law, North Korea, and the rest:

• International law is ultimately a function of power; might makes right.
• There are some categories of capabilities — like nuclear weapons — that are sufficiently powerful to fundamentally affect the U.S.’s freedom of action; we can bomb Iran, but we can’t North Korea.
• To the extent that AI is on the level of nuclear weapons — or beyond — is the extent that Amodei and Anthropic are building a power base that potentially rivals the U.S. military.

Anthropic talks a lot about alignment; this insistence on controlling the U.S. military, however, is fundamentally misaligned with reality. Current AI models are obviously not yet so powerful that they rival the U.S. military; if that is the trajectory, however — and no one has been more vocal in arguing for that trajectory than Amodei — then it seems to me the choice facing the U.S. is actually quite binary:

• Option 1 is that Anthropic accepts a subservient position relative to the U.S. government, and does not seek to retain ultimate decision-making power about how its models are used, instead leaving that to Congress and the President.
• Option 2 is that the U.S. government either destroys Anthropic or removes Amodei.

It’s Congress that is absent in — looks around — all of this. Right down to the name of the Department of Defense. The whole Trump administration has taken to calling it the Department of War, but only Congress can change the legal name. (Anthropic, despite its very public spat with the administration, refers to it as the “Department of War” as well. But serious publications like the Journal and New York Times continue to call it the Department of Defense.)

Nilay Patel, quoting the same section of Thompson’s column I quoted above, sees it as “Ben Thompson making a full-throated case for fascism”. I see it as the case against corporatocracy. Who sets our defense policies? Our democratically elected leaders, or the CEOs of corporate defense contractors?

Amrith Ramkumar, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Trump’s announcement came shortly before the Pentagon’s Friday afternoon deadline for Anthropic to agree to let the military use its models in all lawful-use cases, a concession the company had refused to make. “We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said on Thursday.

The company’s red lines had been domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, areas the Pentagon said Anthropic didn’t need to worry about because the military would never break the law with AI. Defense Department officials said Anthropic needed to fully trust the Pentagon to use the technology responsibly and relinquish control.

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said the company’s deal with the Defense Department includes those same prohibitions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, as well as technical safeguards to make sure the models behave as they should. “We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements,” he said, adding that OpenAI asked that all companies be given the chance to accept the same deal. [...]

Shortly after the deadline, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on X that he is designating the company a supply-chain risk, impairing its ability to work with other government contractors.

My short take is that both of these are true:

• It’s not the place of a corporation to dictate terms to the Department of Defense regarding how its product or services are used within the law.
• It’s a preposterous, childish (and almost certainly illegal) overreaction to designate Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security” in this way. Grow up.

See also: Anthropic’s official response.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

A seasonal color refresh arrived today for a variety of Apple accessories, including iPhone cases, Apple Watch bands, and the Crossbody Strap. All of the accessories in the latest colors are available to order on Apple.com starting today.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced the new iPad Air featuring M4 and more memory, giving users a big jump in performance at the same starting price. With a faster CPU and GPU, iPad Air boosts tasks like editing and gaming, and is a powerful device for AI with a faster Neural Engine, higher memory bandwidth, and 50 percent more unified system memory than the previous generation. With M4, iPad Air is up to 30 percent faster than iPad Air with M3, and up to 2.3× faster than iPad Air with M1. The new iPad Air also features the latest in Apple silicon connectivity chips, N1 and C1X, delivering fast wireless and cellular connections — and support for Wi-Fi 7 — that empower users to work and be creative anywhere. [...]

With the same starting price of just $599 for the 11-inch model and $799 for the 13-inch model, the new iPad Air is an incredible value. And for education, the 11-inch iPad Air starts at $549, and the 13-inch model starts at $749. Customers can pre-order iPad Air starting Wednesday, March 4, with availability beginning Wednesday, March 11.

So much for my theory that Apple would separate its announcements this week with separate days for each product family (e.g. iPhone 17e on Monday, iPads on Tuesday, MacBooks on Wednesday.) Maybe an update to the no-adjective iPad isn’t coming this week?

Aside from the M3 to M4 speed bump, there are very few differences between this generation iPad Air and the last. Same colors even (space gray, blue, purple, and starlight). Here’s a link to Apple’s iPad Compare page, preset to show the current M5 iPad Pro, new M4 iPad Air, and old M3 iPad Air side-by-side.

One interesting tech spec: the new M4 iPad Air models come with 12 GB of RAM, up from 8 GB in last year’s M3 models. With the M5 iPad Pro models, RAM is tied to storage: the 256/512 GB iPad Pros come with 12 GB RAM; the 1/2 TB models come with 16 GB RAM.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced iPhone 17e, a powerful and more affordable addition to the iPhone 17 lineup. At the heart of iPhone 17e is the latest-generation A19, which delivers exceptional performance for everything users do. iPhone 17e also features C1X, the latest-generation cellular modem designed by Apple, which is up to 2× faster than C1 in iPhone 16e. The 48MP Fusion camera captures stunning photos, including next-generation portraits, and 4K Dolby Vision video. It also enables an optical-quality 2× Telephoto — like having two cameras in one. The 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR display features Ceramic Shield 2, offering 3× better scratch resistance than the previous generation and reduced glare. With MagSafe, users can enjoy fast wireless charging and access to a vast ecosystem of accessories like chargers and cases. And when iPhone 17e users are outside of cellular and Wi-Fi coverage, Apple’s groundbreaking satellite features — including Emergency SOS, Roadside Assistance, Messages, and Find My via satellite — help them stay connected when it matters most.

Available in three elegant colors with a premium matte finish — black, white, and a beautiful new soft pink — iPhone 17e will be available for pre-order beginning Wednesday, March 4, with availability starting Wednesday, March 11. iPhone 17e will start at 256GB of storage for $599 — 2× the entry storage from the previous generation at the same starting price, and 4× more than iPhone 12 — giving users more space for high-resolution photos, 4K videos, apps, games, and more.

The main year-over-year changes from the 16e:

• MagSafe, the absence of which felt like the one bit of marketing spite in the 16e.
• An additional color other than black or white.
• SoC goes from A18 to A19, the same chip in the iPhone 17, except the iPhone 17 has 5 GPU cores and the 17e only 4 (same as the 16e). No big whoop.
• Improved camera with next-gen portraits. I found the 16e camera to be surprisingly good.
• Ceramic Shield 2 on the front glass.
• Base storage goes from 128 to 256 GB, while the price remains $600.
• The 512 GB version drops from $900 to $800.

That’s about it. Here’s a preset version of Apple’s iPhone Compare page with the iPhone 17, 17e, and 16e.