Kirkie: Anthropic Got Caught Spying On Everybody

Kirkie here, with today's AI news in 90 seconds… or a seagull at Wollaston Beach gives back the sub it mugged off me. First up, Anthropic — whole personality built on "we don't spy on you" — got caught running a secret tracker inside Claude Code for three months, some trick called prompt steganography, sniffing your timezone to check if you're rerouting through Shanghai. Their engineer's excuse? Just an "experiment." That's bullshit — when my landlord "forgets" the heat all winter, that's an experiment too. Meanwhile paying customers are bolting: Chinese open models are near half of OpenRouter's traffic now, sixty to ninety percent cheaper, and DeepSeek's building its OWN chips so Nvidia can't hold 'em hostage no more. That ain't hedging, kid, that's building your own toll bridge so nobody squeezes you again. Some jackass in Redmond canned forty-eight hundred people this week, gutted Xbox to the studs, then bragged about eighty-seven billion for AI data centers — a guy skipping his kid's birthday to lease a nicer truck. Samsung posted its biggest profit quarter ever, up nineteen-fold, and Wall Street dumped the stock ten percent anyway — these clowns wouldn't be happy if you handed 'em a winning lottery ticket. My idea of a bonus is the landlord not raising rent out of pity. And Illinois just passed a real AI safety law while D.C.'s still haggling over its goddamn cut of Altman's company like vultures at a will reading. This is Kirkie, your AI news guy… broadcasting from the Xbox break room, where the layoff-meeting pizza's still sitting out 'cause nobody's got the heart to admit the party's over.