Amazon pledges $1 billion to data-center towns; Apple limits Mac disk access

Amazon Web Services chief executive Matt Garman published a long essay defending data centers and launched Built Together, a program that adds more than $1 billion over five years for neighboring communities, who will choose how it is spent across free community college, job training, energy bills and water. Amazon also put its practices in writing: it says it no longer uses nondisclosure agreements with local governments, will pay enough for power that household bills do not rise, and will publish energy and water use every year. Garman said more than 100 local moratoriums are under consideration and blamed foreign misinformation for part of the opposition. The environmental group Stand.Earth called the money small next to Amazon's spending on data centers this year, and said the plan leaves out a gas power plant Amazon is backing in Pecos, Texas.

Apple told developers it will add new controls so that people can grant an app full disk access on macOS only through "very explicit user action." The permission, built for backup apps, lets an app read everything on a Mac, including mail, messages and browsing history. "As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially," Apple wrote. It named no app, but the notice came two weeks after Meta's Muse agent surprised a columnist by referring to a private Messages thread, and Meta said Muse reads Messages only when full disk access is granted. Apple gave no date for the change.

The Justice Department has arrested Greg Lui, owner of Earthmade Computer, on charges that he used false paperwork and shipments through Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong to send more than $300 million worth of servers with Nvidia A100 and H100 graphics chips to China from late 2023 until this August. Prosecutors say his firm took in more than $176 million from the scheme in 2024 alone. The release refers throughout to "Super Intelligence" technology, the administration's new name for AI. Nvidia told Bloomberg that less than half of one percent of its products have been diverted, while a Bloomberg investigation found officials questioning how the company missed the warning signs.

Anthropic has launched Claude Frontier Academy, backed by $100 million, to train 10,000 "Frontier Deployed Engineers" by the end of 2027. Companies nominate their strongest engineers, each bringing a real Claude project. They start with a multi-day course with Anthropic engineers and a graded test, then spend 12 weeks leading that project at their own company before a second assessment. The first cohorts, in San Francisco, New York and London, include engineers from Accenture, Bain, Capgemini, Deloitte, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Novo Nordisk. Anthropic says the hardest part of deploying AI is finding people who can build with it, and expects the first graduates in early 2027.

Microsoft, which says it processes more than 165 trillion security signals a day, reports in its 2026 Digital Defense Report that attackers now use AI for reconnaissance, phishing, malware and exploit writing, though mostly to speed up familiar methods rather than invent new ones. Exposed cloud workloads were attacked an average of 5.3 hours after going online, and 63 percent of intrusions involved data theft. Government was the most targeted sector, at 27 percent of observed activity, up from 17 percent. The report devotes a section to securing AI agents, including agent identity, permissions, prompt injection and the ability to revoke an agent's access.

Meta has published open-source software kits that connect its Muse agent to hobbyist hardware, such as an ESP32 board or a Raspberry Pi, so people can wire it to displays, buttons and sensors. Its examples include an E Ink reminder screen and a stick that puts Muse on a television. Meta is also giving away 5,000 units of a Muse Home Link device that uses community-built skills to switch on lights, control a TV or print a document, with a waitlist open now and shipping due this month. Meta warns builders to "proceed at your own risk."

Suno, best known for AI-generated songs, has opened a public beta of Speech, which writes a voiceover from a script or a short description and can generate matching background music in the same track. A toggle turns the music off for plain narration, and users can set the voice's gender, speaking style and variety. Clips run up to about eight minutes. Suno's product chief said "beta really does mean beta," warning that British accents sometimes drift toward Australian. The move into speech puts Suno against ElevenLabs while record labels continue to sue it over its music models.