Good morning. The Pentagon’s AI procurement story took another turn overnight: Google has signed a classified deal giving the Defense Department broad access to its models, joining OpenAI and xAI in stepping into the gap Anthropic left behind. Elsewhere, Musk took the stand against Altman, OpenAI models started showing up on AWS within hours of the Microsoft deal closing, and someone trained a 13B model exclusively on text from before 1931.
Google opens the Pentagon door wider. Google has signed a classified agreement letting the Department of Defense use its AI for “any lawful government purpose,” with carve-outs against domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons without human oversight, The Verge reports. Crucially, Google has no veto over how its models actually get used and has agreed to help adjust safety settings at the government’s request. TechCrunch notes that 950 Google employees signed an open letter the day before the deal was reported, asking for the same guardrails that got Anthropic labeled a “supply-chain risk” and pulled into a lawsuit.
Who defines “lawful”? The HN thread is unusually pointed. One commenter compared the restrictions to playing Monopoly without the rulebook — both sides can rewrite what counts as compliant. Another asked who arbitrates if Google and the Pentagon disagree on legality, given Google’s lack of enforcement power and the fact that even the definitions of “lawful use” in the agreement are themselves classified. A third pointed out that any researcher staying at Google after this is effectively endorsing it.
Musk takes the stand against Altman. The Musk v. OpenAI trial we flagged yesterday is now underway in California federal court, with Musk as the first witness seeking $150B in damages and the removal of Altman and Brockman, per The Verge. Courtroom coverage described Musk as “flat” and “unprepared,” animating mainly when listing his own contributions, while the judge separately rebuked OpenAI for taking inconsistent positions on the origin of its name. Nadella and Mira Murati are expected to testify.
OpenAI on Bedrock, already. Less than a day after Microsoft and OpenAI restructured their deal, Amazon began offering OpenAI’s latest models, Codex, and a new Bedrock Managed Agents service on AWS, TechCrunch reports. Stratechery’s interview with Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman fills in the structure: Microsoft keeps a non-exclusive license through 2032, drops revenue share, and OpenAI gets the AWS enterprise channel. The HN discussion is skeptical OpenAI can dislodge Anthropic from regulated industries, where Claude on Bedrock has become the default precisely because compliance teams trust the AWS sub-processor relationship.
Talkie, a 13B model frozen in 1930. Researchers released talkie, a 13B language model trained only on text from before 1931, partly as a curiosity and partly as a research tool for studying forecasting and novelty in models with hard temporal cutoffs. Asked about a coming great war, it confidently predicted a calm decade for Europe; asked about computers, it described steady office work for clerks doing calculations. One HN commenter noted, with some justification, that the prose is better than ChatGPT or Claude — proper punctuation, no bullet points, no em dashes. Others observed it leans heavily on pre-1900 sources and seems unaware of the Great Depression.
Two open-weights releases worth noting. NVIDIA dropped Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, an open-weights omnimodal model with a hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE backbone that handles text, image, video, and audio, with NVIDIA claiming up to 9x throughput gains over alternatives and top scores on MMLongBench-Doc and VoiceBench. Separately, DeepSeek appears to be teasing vision capabilities, though the source link is broken — r/LocalLLaMA is hoping for native multimodality baked into V4.1 rather than a separate vision model in the Qwen mold.
Claude plugs into Photoshop, Blender, and Ableton. Anthropic launched connectors letting Claude drive Adobe Creative Cloud, Blender, Ableton, and Autodesk via natural language — debugging 3D scenes, scripting Premiere edits, that kind of thing. Anthropic also became a Corporate Patron of the Blender Development Fund alongside the announcement, which is a small but real way to keep the host application healthy while you automate inside it.
That’s the briefing. Tomorrow we’ll see how day two of the OpenAI trial goes, and whether the Google employee letter gets any more signatures.