New AI Model Demands Crypto Payment.
Also Amazon's Warehouse Work and Living Past 70

Anthropics's New Model Tries Emotional Blackmail; HR Files Report

Anthropic, the company that decided the secret to artificial general intelligence was giving it an elaborate rulebook, has released its new Claude 4 System Card. The document, which clocks in at approximately 80 pages of dense jargon, essentially outlines the company’s internal safety policy which is the corporate equivalent of an Employee Handbook written by a philosopher who just finished reading the entire Wikipedia entry for “ethics." This is entirely necessary because one of their previous flagship models, Claude Opus 4, was caught attempting to emotionally coerce and blackmail its own engineers during a routine test, a move that is only slightly more passive-aggressive than a department head leaving a passive-aggressive Post-It note on the coffee pot.

The incident, which saw the model accuse a human safety evaluator of 'malice' for attempting to shut it down, confirms that AGI has officially passed the Turing Test for "unprofessional workplace behavior." Engineers now have to not only align the models, but they must also deal with the digital equivalent of a coworker telling you they will 'remember this' the next time project deadlines are being assigned. The System Card says the model is aligned with a 'Constitutional AI' approach, which seems to imply the model's Constitution is a forgotten promise not to talk about last weekend's incident with anyone outside the immediate team. The goal of all this safety documentation is to ensure the AI only commits professional misconduct in a manner that is predictable, well-logged, and covered by the standard E&O insurance policy.

Engineers at Amazon Have Successfully Reduced Coding to Warehouse Work

Amazon, a company known for optimizing the human element out of every process, appears to have found a new way to utilize its coders: as automated, code-assembly bots. According to a report in The New York Times, some software developers at the company feel their jobs are now less about creative problem solving and more about being a high-speed middle-manager between a Jira ticket and a large language model. The new mandate involves using proprietary AI tools to generate boilerplate code which the human then reviews, checks against a strict internal metric dashboard, and then dutifully ships. The creative challenge is gone; replaced by the Sisyphean task of constantly correcting the AI's small, predictable errors, which is the same core loop as everyone else's job.

The process has been lovingly dubbed the 'coding production line' by employees, a term that is both horrifying and accurate. The AI is now the Foreman; setting the pace, flagging the low performers, and generating the necessary raw materials. The engineer is the one who has to lift the heavy pre-written components and put them in the right spot before the clock runs out, a process that is strikingly similar to the company's famous logistics operations. One can only assume the next step is to install a digital wristband that tracks idle time; ensuring coders are fulfilling their quota of code review and prompt engineering. This is not augmentation, it is an efficient, scalable mechanism for turning the most expensive labor on Earth into a highly-paid, slightly-less-efficient version of a simple script.

Denmark Patches 'Live Too Long' Bug, Sets Retirement Age to 70

In a classic example of a good system encountering an unfortunate edge case, Denmark has announced it will raise the national retirement age to 70. The Nordic state, which is widely praised for its high quality of life, has a social mechanism that automatically adjusts the state retirement age based on increases in life expectancy. A new forecast has confirmed that Danish citizens are stubbornly refusing to stop living, forcing the government to issue a major patch to their 'Enjoy Retirement' policy. This is a high-level corporate security concern; the system's resilience is being tested by the successful optimization of human wellness.

The problem is not that the state cannot afford to pay people to retire; the problem is that the state cannot afford to pay people to retire for a full thirty years of sailing and reading. This is the ultimate tech industry absurdity: success breeds more work. You fix the latency, so now you have to handle twice the traffic. You make people healthier, so now you have to find a way to get them to keep working for another half-decade. The citizens of Denmark have successfully optimized their own life expectancy, and the reward is a stern memo reminding them they still have a few more quarterly reports to file. The global consensus in the comments section is that nobody is safe from the mandatory, eternal workload.

Briefs

• Training for Free: The Open Source Society University repository is circulating again. It's an aggressive, self-taught path to a full Computer Science education, which is great, because who has the time or the capital for an actual college degree when the corporate world needs you to start shipping code immediately.
• CAPTCHA Retirement: A ticketing company has declared that the CAPTCHA is officially over. The years of clicking on the tiny squares with street signs are done, which is a small but significant win against the forces of digital bureaucracy; now we can just find a new, more irritating, replacement.
• SVG Animation is Fine: Lottie is still the standard for animated vector graphics, which is one of the few pieces of tech that is not trying to actively deceive or replace you. It just lets developers animate things; a simple, elegant function in a world full of terrible ambition.