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Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of mining Claude as US debates AI chip exports

As one legal analyst noted, the settlement may be seen by the tech industry as simply “a price of conducting business in a fiercely competitive space”—a cost of doing business rather than a genuine deterrent. Meanwhile, the fair-use ruling on training means Anthropic retains the legal right to train on copyrighted works, as long as it doesn’t pirate them to do so.

Anthropic is accusing three Chinese AI companies of setting up more than 24,000 fake accounts with its Claude AI model to improve their own models.

The labs — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — allegedly generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through those accounts using a technique called “distillation.” Anthropic said the labs “targeted Claude’s most differentiated capabilities: agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding.”

The accusations come amid debates over how strictly to enforce export controls on advanced AI chips, a policy aimed at curbing China’s AI development.

The Strange Case of Elias Thorne, the Imaginary Man AI Chatbots Are Obsessed With

No matter the company, AI chatbots were raving about the same guy named Elias Thorne. He must be pretty fascinating. And he is, at least on paper. Depending on the AI, he’s a lighthouse keeper, a clockmaker, a librarian, an explorer, and the star of countless stories. He’s appeared in books, music listings, YouTube videos, and even health guides. You’d think he was one of the most influential men on the planet.

But he doesn’t exist.

According to reporting by fine folks at 404 Media, researchers at Cornell University may have figured out why large language models invent and keep telling tales of the same fictional man. In a study examining roughly 20,000 AI-generated stories from all the big LLM models, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, the research team found that the same handful of names and occupations kept cropping up. Specifically, names and words like Elias, Mara, Elara, lighthouse keeper, clockmaker, and librarian showed up in 88 percent of stories. Elias the lighthouse keeper appeared in nearly two-thirds of them.

Mysterious gas ‘bullets’ race from Milky Way’s only known helium nova at up to 20 million mph

Mysterious high-speed “bullets”—clumps of possibly oxygen-rich gas traveling at up to 20 million miles per hour—have been discovered shooting out of the rarest stellar explosion in our galaxy.

They were spotted after a cloud of debris surrounding the Milky Way’s only known helium nova finally cleared after more than 20 years, revealing that an unusual stellar system was to blame for the extraordinary explosion.

But the origin of the “bullets” is an enigma that has left astronomers puzzled—nothing of their kind has ever been observed in other novae throughout the universe.

A New Compact Instrument Enables High-Fidelity Measurements of Energetic Particles on CubeSats

Successfully launched on July 23, 2025, the REAL instrument can distinguish between these potential modes, making it possible to investigate their relative importance and determine which, if any, waves are responsible for electron fallout. Leveraging recent advancements in sensor miniaturization, the instrument includes three sensor heads — a low-, medium-, and high-energy head with two, five, and four simultaneous look directions, respectively — integrated with four electronic boards. Together, they occupy only about half of the REAL CubeSat and use a time resolution sufficient to resolve microbursts of electrons with energies ranging from 40 keV up to 2 MeV. As its parent 3U CubeSat flies in LEO, REAL points along Earth’s magnetic field and can simultaneously measure the quantity, energy, and angle of the particles as they fall into the atmosphere — a first-of-its-kind capability.

“Most CubeSats can observe particles from only a single direction, so they have to spin in order to build up a full picture — and that takes a few seconds, too slow to capture microbursts,” said space physicist Robyn Millan of Dartmouth College, who serves as the REAL mission principal investigator. “With REAL, we’ve managed to squeeze three sensors, each with multiple look directions, into the top of this 100-by-100-millimeter head, allowing us to capture those measurements all at once. We’re really proud of that.”

The high-energy head consists of a 30-millimeter-thick aluminum collimator with four apertures, each spanning 20 degrees of pitch angle. Each aperture connects to an active area on a solid-state detector (SSD) at the base. The medium-energy head similarly uses an SSD base but instead employs five active areas that connect to a 22-millimeter-thick aluminum collimator with five apertures, each spanning 20 degrees of pitch angle. The low-energy head, on the other hand, is a miniature electrostatic analyzer (ESA) consisting of titanium electrodes sandwiched between etched silicon selector slits. These lie on top of a microchannel plate (MCP). The low-energy head uses 36 apertures, two look directions (±40 degrees), and 15 channels to measure electrons with lower energies, from 1 keV to 40 keV.

Astronomers Find Escaping Helium on Rocky World LHS 1140 b

By detecting helium escaping into space, astronomers have found the first direct evidence of an atmosphere on LHS 1,140 b, a rocky exoplanet located in its star’s habitable zone.

A collaborative team of researchers recently announced the discovery of an atmosphere on a rocky exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star. While this finding is intriguing for the search for life beyond Earth, the atmosphere is not only comprised of helium, but it was found to be escaping the exoplanet. The researchers discuss these findings in a recent study published in the journal Science and it holds the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of rocky exoplanets while narrowing the search for life beyond Earth.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data about LHS 1,140 b, which orbits a red dwarf star about 50 light-years from Earth and has a radius and mass about 1.7 and 5.6 of Earth, respectively, designating LHS 1,140 b as a super-Earth. While the researchers note this is the first time an atmosphere has been detected around a rocky exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star, LHS 1,140 b’s atmosphere is primarily comprised of helium and was also found to be escaping the exoplanet or being stripped away.

This is because red dwarf stars have been found to be significantly more active than Sun-like stars, meaning its intense radiation is potentially stripping LHS 1,140 b’s upper atmosphere where the helium is found. Despite this, the team noted other types of gases could be present in the lower altitudes of the atmosphere.

A tiny universe in a bottle reveals clues to the origins of life

Researchers have created cosmic dust from scratch by recreating space-like conditions inside glass tubes. The dust contains complex carbon-rich molecules built from elements essential to life and produces infrared signals similar to real material found in space. By studying these laboratory samples, scientists can explore how organic chemistry unfolds around stars and how comets, asteroids and meteorites may have carried those ingredients to Earth.

Japan space probe skims asteroid in test for planetary defense

A Japanese space probe performed a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid on Sunday in a test mission for technology that could help protect the planet from space rocks.

The fridge-sized Hayabusa2 was due to fly within 800 meters (0.5 miles) of asteroid Torifune, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) scientists said earlier, a trial run to see whether such a probe could deflect a potentially dangerous space rock away from Earth.

The mission comes after NASA deliberately smashed a spacecraft into the 160-meter-wide (525-foot-wide) Dimorphos asteroid in 2022, successfully altering its orbit around a larger space rock.

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