US clears Anthropic's Mythos; NYT escalates its copyright suit

The US Commerce Department lifted the export controls it had imposed two weeks earlier on Anthropic's frontier Claude Mythos model, clearing it for use by more than 100 "trusted" American companies and government agencies. The original block followed concerns that a South Korean telecom with Chinese ties could gain access. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said "appropriate safeguards are in place," and Anthropic agreed to work with the government on protocols for future releases — making Mythos the first frontier model deployed under the new federal oversight framework.

The New York Times asked a federal court to amend its long-running copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing Microsoft did not passively benefit but actively built a bespoke supercomputer — more than 285,000 processor cores and 10,000 GPUs — specifically to enable the mass ingestion of copyrighted work. The sharpened "inducement" framing responds to a recent Supreme Court ruling that raised the bar for contributory infringement, requiring proof a partner intentionally induced the conduct, not merely that it knew the conduct was happening.

DeepSeek open-sourced DeepSpec, a full-stack codebase for training and evaluating speculative-decoding algorithms, alongside three drafting modules — DSpark, DFlash, and Eagle3 — that bolt onto its DeepSeek-V4 models to speed up text generation. Speculative decoding lets a small "draft" model propose several tokens at once for the larger model to verify in parallel; DeepSeek's paper reports generation speedups in the range of 60 to 85% on its V4 checkpoints. It is the latest in the lab's run of openly released inference tooling.

Google Research retrofitted multi-token prediction (MTP) onto its existing Gemini Nano models without retraining them, appending a lightweight transformer head that predicts several future tokens in parallel by reusing the main model's frozen cache. The "zero-copy" design adds no separate memory cache and delivers more than 50% faster generation on a Pixel 9 while saving about 130 megabytes of memory per instance. It is a concrete win for on-device AI, where battery and memory limits make every efficiency gain count for features like notification summaries and proofreading.

South Korea's defense minister announced a plan to train up to 500,000 soldiers as "drone warriors" who would wield drones like personal firearms, with AI-controlled drone swarms slated for a later wave. The military aims to field 11,000 drones by year's end and 60,000 by 2029, deploying first to the demilitarized zone bordering North Korea. The move — a response to escalating Northern weapons tests — drew skepticism, since the 500,000 figure exceeds the country's entire and shrinking active-duty force.

An IEEE Spectrum feature surveys how fast AI is closing in on professional mathematics — gold-medal performances at the International Mathematical Olympiad, a DeepMind system producing publishable research in arithmetic geometry, and a tool that formalized a Fields Medalist's proofs in days. The progress is forcing uncomfortable questions: if machines handle the technical work, what is mathematics for, how do students build intuition, and do humans risk becoming, in one researcher's phrase, "priests to oracles"?