Anthropic has announced a partnership with Palantir and Amazon Web Services to bring its Claude AI models to unspecified US intelligence and defense agencies. Claude, a family of AI language models similar to those that power ChatGPT, will work within Palantir's platform using AWS hosting to process and analyze data. But some critics have called out the deal as contradictory to Anthropic's widely-publicized "AI safety" aims.

On X, former Google co-head of AI ethics Timnit Gebru wrote of Anthropic's new deal with Palantir, "Look at how they care so much about 'existential risks to humanity.'"

The partnership makes Claude available within Palantir's Impact Level 6 environment (IL6), a defense-accredited system that handles data critical to national security up to the "secret" classification level. This move follows a broader trend of AI companies seeking defense contracts, with Meta offering its Llama models to defense partners and OpenAI pursuing closer ties with the Defense Department.

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On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman merely tweeted "chat.com," announcing that the company had acquired the short domain name, which now points to the company's ChatGPT AI assistant when visited in a web browser. As of Thursday morning, "chatgpt.com" still hosts the chatbot, with the new domain serving as a redirect.

The new domain name comes with an interesting backstory that reveals a multimillion-dollar transaction. HubSpot founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah purchased chat.com for $15.5 million in early 2023, The Verge reports. Shah sold the domain to OpenAI for an undisclosed amount, though he confirmed on X that he "doesn't like profiting off of people he considers friends" and that he received payment in company shares by revealing he is "now an investor in OpenAI."

As The Verge's Kylie Robison points out, Shah originally bought the domain to promote conversational interfaces. "The reason I bought chat.com is simple: I think Chat-based UX (#ChatUX) is the next big thing in software. Communicating with computers/software through a natural language interface is much more intuitive. This is made possible by Generative A.I.," Shah wrote in a LinkedIn post during his brief ownership.

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On Monday, Anthropic launched the latest version of its smallest AI model, Claude 3.5 Haiku, in a way that marks a departure from typical AI model pricing trends—the new model costs four times more to run than its predecessor. The reason for the price increase is causing some pushback in the AI community: more smarts, according to Anthropic.

"During final testing, Haiku surpassed Claude 3 Opus, our previous flagship model, on many benchmarks—at a fraction of the cost," Anthropic wrote in a post on X. "As a result, we've increased pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku to reflect its increase in intelligence."

"It's your budget model that's competing against other budget models, why would you make it less competitive," wrote one X user. "People wanting a 'too cheap to meter' solution will now look elsewhere."

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