Mentioned in today’s edition: Dario Amodei, Axios, Google, Bitcoin, Paul McCartney, and Reddit. Plus, deals on DJI drones, Roborock robot vacuums and Google Pixel phones.

The News

Australia has signed a deal with Anthropic — but there's one important word missing from the announcement

Anthropic has taken a step towards building its own data centres here by signing an agreement with the Australian federal government to abide by its new guidelines for the so-called 'AI factories' (Canberra Times). As part of Dario Amodei's Australian tour, the Anthropic CEO signed a non-binding agreement with the Prime Minister in Canberra which involves agreeing to the government's new "data centre expectations", to work with Australia's new AI Safety centre, give data to the government and give a bunch of Claude tokens to researchers (Anthropic).

The Sizzle: If you look through the Memorandum of Understanding, there's one word that isn't present: "culture". According to everyone I talk to in government, in AI circles, and industry groups, companies like Anthropic are promising rivers of gold and as much AI as you can shake a stick at... as long as Australia can sort out this pesky copyright problem. 

Rights holders and artist groups are adamant that the laws don't need to change, that AI companies could — and haven't — approached them to hash out a deal to license all the material that they stole to train their AI on. The counterpoint is that AI companies already have a few countries around the world where they are already cleared on copyright, and that they don't need to have a presence here... but it sure seems like they really want a presence here. We know there are two factions in the government on this: those who want to reform copyright to clear the way for AI training on Australian copyrighted material and those who don't think we need big changes. If I had to guess, I expect there will be a change to copyright law at some point, either now or years down the road. The question is how much can rights holders get for the enormous amount of culture that was stolen.

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Open source project with 100m weekly downloads hit with supply chain attack

An extremely popular open source Javascript project has fallen victim to a supply chain attack which has inserted a trojan into the code (Socket.dev). Yesterday, a cybersecurity firm flagged a new version of Axios, which has 100m+ downloads a week, as containing malware. It was caught just 3 hours after the affected library was uploaded to npm, but, given its popularity, a lot of people could be affected. Google researchers claim that North Korean hackers are behind the attack (TechCrunch).

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Google reckons quantum computers will break Bitcoin encryption by 2029

Speaking of Google, a new paper from its quantum team claims that breaking the cryptography protecting Bitcoin is 20x easier than expected (Forbes). Google Quantum AI's white paper estimates that a quantum computer with 500,000 physical qubits could break ECDLP-256, the algorithm used to secure a bunch of things including most popular cryptocurrencies (Google). This is still a ways off yet but Google recently introduced a 2029 deadline for migrating any of its services that rely on the algorithm. Seems like a hint about how long we have until it all gets cracked. 

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Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

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Oh, Also

Actually, Paul McCartney wasn't banned from Reddit for posting his own pictures

Over the weekend, Sir Paul McCartney was banned from Reddit after he posted a Dropbox link with pictures from his own concert (404 Media). But confusingly, a moderator from r/PaulMcCartney said they didn't ban him? "why would we ban the account of the man we're all passionate about?" said RoastBeefDisease. Then, a Reddit admin said the Beatles member hadn't been banned and instead had his account "restricted" because he hadn't reset his password (Reddit). 

I had a good chuckle imagining the author of Hey, Jude trying to remember which account he'd signed up to Reddit with. 

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The End

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