The Pentagon illegally blacklisted Anthropic as a national security threat based partly on things Claude couldn't actually do, a US federal judge has ruled. US District Judge Rita Lin found that the government illegally retaliated against Anthropic for speaking out, denied the company due process, and unlawfully branded it a supply-chain risk. In a 59-page ruling, she repeatedly picked apart the Pentagon's national security case and found some of its central claims about Claude "entirely unfounded." The dispute erupted in February after Anthropic refused to remove safeguards preventing Claude from being used for certain military applications, including fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. At a meeting with Anthropic, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Claude's capabilities "exquisite" and said the company's concerns were "understandable," but gave it three days to agree to "all lawful uses" or face being designated a supply-chain risk. Hegseth also floated invoking the Defense Production Act to declare Anthropic essential to national security and compel it to provide Claude. He then announced that Anthropic would be designated a supply-chain risk, while President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using its technology. One problem: the Pentagon hadn't yet written the assessment explaining why Anthropic supposedly posed that risk. When that assessment arrived, it suggested Anthropic could interfere with Claude during military operations by altering or disabling models, allowing them to "drift," or introducing hidden biases or backdoors. According to the court, Anthropic couldn't actually do those things to Claude models already deployed inside Pentagon systems. Those models are static, and Anthropic cannot remotely access, modify, update, or disable them. The government didn't dispute that evidence, leading Lin to call the alleged danger "entirely unfounded." Years of government records also contained no previous Anthropic supply-chain concerns, said the judge's order. Lin said the chronology suggested the Pentagon assembled its case "after the fact to justify the foreordained conclusion." The government also did not behave as if Anthropic were an intolerable national security threat. Even after the designation was finalized, Under Secretary of Defense Emil Michael was still negotiating contract language with the company. "I think we are very close here," he wrote in an email. The government later continued working with Anthropic around Project Glasswing and its Mythos cybersecurity model. According to the ruling, the NSA and NASA began deploying Mythos, while senior White House officials held what Anthropic described as "productive and constructive" talks with CEO Dario Amodei. Lin instead found substantial evidence that Anthropic had been punished for publicly disagreeing with the administration. Her order cited Trump branding it a "RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY" staffed by "Leftwing nut jobs," adding that Hegseth spoke of its "Silicon Valley ideology." The Pentagon's own internal memo complained that Anthropic had behaved in an "increasingly hostile manner through the press." Lin said announcing Anthropic's punishment before the formal designation process had begun appeared designed to "make a public example of Anthropic for daring to criticize the Administration." The judge also rejected the idea that being a difficult supplier makes a company a security threat. "An IT vendor does not become a potential adversary of the United States whenever it asks probing questions," she wrote, warning against blacklisting companies simply because officials considered them "too arrogant or difficult to 'trust.'" The consequences went well beyond losing a Pentagon contract. Hegseth's directive sought to prevent Pentagon contractors and suppliers from doing business with Anthropic, even for work unrelated to defense. More than 100 enterprise customers contacted Anthropic with concerns about continuing to work with it, and the company estimated the measures could knock multiple billions of dollars off its 2026 revenue. Lin stressed that the Pentagon remains free to stop buying Anthropic's technology through lawful procurement processes. It couldn't, however, use a contracting dispute to punish a government critic. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," she concluded. ®

Microsoft has pushed back detection and question answering by the Teams Facilitator to November, after initially scheduling General Availability for June. Teams Facilitator is an AI assistant that joins meetings. It tracks agendas and can take notes, if enabled. The next stage in its development is to have it pop up and answer questions if it detects a knowledge gap. For example, somebody might ask "What is this Teams Facilitator thing?" and, if nobody answers, Facilitator will show a prompt offering to find an answer. It sounds like a marginally more irritating version of Clippy, and getting it into a state where it is declared generally available has proved difficult for Microsoft. When Microsoft added the capability to its roadmap in April, the expectation was that it would roll out in June. Then July. Then August. Then September. The latest update schedules it for a targeted release in November and worldwide general availability in mid-December. It is unclear why the feature is being delayed. It might be that determining whether a lull in conversation actually signals a question needing an answer is trickier than expected. Or it could be that whatever a search turns up doesn't make sense in the context of the meeting. The Register asked Microsoft to explain the holdup, but the company has yet to respond. There are some privacy implications around the feature, although it is worth noting that Facilitator must be included in the meeting, and removing the assistant will stop the behavior. According to Microsoft: "The feature processes meeting conversations in real time to detect knowledge gaps and generate responses," which indicates extra data processing and, of course, AI capabilities are required to generate responses in the correct context. That said, the premium edition of Microsoft 365 Copilot is required, so the data privacy ship could have likely long sailed. Also, if web search for Copilot is disabled, there won't be any responses anyway. Still, having to wait a few more months before a perky virtual assistant chimes in with "it looks like you're having a heated debate about the benefits of AI. Would you like some help with that?" is probably no bad thing… ®

UK businesses say the market power of Big Tech is stifling competition, and will hinder the UK’s ability to reap the benefits from AI, a key part of the government’s plans for economic recovery. A report [PDF] from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) points out that a handful of companies hold almost total control over the digital infrastructure relied on in Blighty, and warns that we risk letting AI become monopolized in the same way unless more pro-competitive measures are introduced. A survey conducted for the report found 79 percent of UK businesses relying on digital platforms are concerned about Big Tech using their dominance to limit competition. They rank this as a bigger constraint on their growth than access to finance or talent, according to the IPPR. So we are in no doubt about which tech giants are being referred to, the report points out that Google handles more than 90 percent of UK internet searches, Microsoft and AWS each control 30 to 40 percent of customer spending on cloud services (Google takes another 5 to 10 percent), and Microsoft is also being investigated for its dominance in business software. The report is highly critical of the UK’s official market regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), almost accusing it of allowing the global tech giants to maintain their dominant position in Britain’s technology market. “Over the past two years, senior officials have resigned or been sacked from the CMA, and in interviews they describe a collapse in ministerial support for their work. In 2025, the government explicitly asked the regulator to prioritise inward investment (DBT 2025), which was widely interpreted as a call to go easy on ‘big tech’. And subsequently, multiple investigations have led to voluntary commitments rather than binding rules, despite evidence of harm,” it states. As The Register reported earlier this year, the chair of the CMA’s cloud inquiry quit, citing the glacial pace of implementing reforms and saying the independence of the agency was at risk. This came just weeks after the CMA appointed Doug Gurr, a former Amazon veteran, as permanent Chairman at the agency. In fact, the IPPR recommends the government develops an updated strategic steer for the CMA, to encourage it to be more proactive, rapid and bold in its enforcement. Greater emphasis is needed on interventions that genuinely boost growth, it claims, saying the CMA has so far done little to create conditions where competitors thrive, even though these conditions may deliver growth and sovereignty. The report warns the stakes are becoming even higher with the rapid growth of AI. The technology is central to the government’s plans for future growth, as laid out in the AI Opportunities Action Plan, introduced at the start of last year. But UK investment in home-grown AI firms risks being undermined when they depend excessively on infrastructure controlled by overseas technology giants, the IPPR says. The AI industry is already highly concentrated, with Nvidia dominating the accelerator market, and the hyperscalers largely controlling access to AI infrastructure via their cloud platforms. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have collectively invested in excess of $20 billion in the major AI developers, causing the CMA and the US Federal Trade Commission to flag these partnerships as a risk. If AI ends up becoming a monopoly (or oligopoly), the UK’s leverage will likely be tiny and its financial returns constrained, the IPPR says. “Big tech dominance is holding back British businesses, limiting competition and making it harder for new firms to innovate and grow,” claims IPPR senior research fellow and report author Roa Powell. “The CMA has the expertise and the tools to improve competition, what it needs now is clear political backing from government to act boldly,” she added. Alas, MPs have already warned Parliament that the UK has no "coherent strategy" for creating sovereign capabilities across a range of technologies, including AI, space, and quantum computing. And as The Register reported last year, experts believe it is now close to impossible for European firms to escape the clutches of the US cloud giants. In response to the IPPR claims, a CMA spokesperson told us: “The CMA has not waited to act. Since the digital markets regime came into force 20 months ago, we have made 3 strategic market status designations, implemented targeted, impactful interventions in Google search and secured meaningful improvements to Google and Apple’s mobile ecosystems. "We continue to progress interventions in both search and mobile ecosystems. We also have an investigation into Microsoft’s business software ecosystem underway - which includes cloud licensing practices and AI-enabled products - at a time where these are becoming critical for the UK. “Our interventions are already opening up opportunities for thousands of UK businesses, giving them greater choice, fairer access to customers and a stronger ability to compete and innovate in markets that have long been controlled by a small number of powerful global firms, and there is more to come.” ®

Anthropic on Thursday teased a protocol for allowing AI agents "to safely operate physical devices," a somewhat optimistic ambition given it cannot reliably anticipate how its models behave. The as-yet-unpublished protocol, dubbed the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), is similar in concept to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a way for AI models to connect to data sources. Anthropic intends for MHS to allow Claude or other models to drive the hardware used in laboratories, factories, and robots. Supopse you are an Iranian research scientist setting up a network of centrifuges to enrich uranium. You might look at how your machinery spun out of control in 2010 and think: "Maybe if we use an AI model and MHS, we could avoid that sort of mishap next time." MHS, however, is being battle-tested in quieter regions of the world, specifically at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus in Maryland. And now other entities with suitable laboratory and industrial equipment can apply to join the research preview. "It typically takes a lab or manufacturing facility weeks, if not months, to set up and integrate their hardware," Anthropic explained in its post. "Most devices don’t communicate with each other, instead requiring specialists to build bespoke integrations. MHS reduces this integration work to hours or minutes." Linking hardware to an AI model requires a programmable interface. Many industrial machines offer one to expose relevant controls and data — but the ecosystem of such devices is very diverse and it is not easy for developers to make a hookup. MHS aspires to be a universal translation layer. The MHS driver software uses a limited set of primitives, such as "read" and "write," an approach similar to the way a few simple tools like Bash can be used to power AI agents. The driver makes connected devices discoverable in a standard format. It also supports tags that convey information about device functions, and lets users provide that data by conversing with the model during setup. The tags let the driver produce a reference file detailing device characteristics. AI agents can use MHS to interact with devices using three control paths: MCP, the command line interface, and API code. They can carry out commands on connected instruments, monitor test results, or tweak knobs and dials. According to Anthropic, biotechnology company Genentech has used MHS to run a drug-discovery experiment with real-time error handling. Quantum computing outfit QuEra is another user, and applied MHS to improve laser stabilization for its machines from 58 percent to 99.3 percent. The possibilities already have partners salivating. AWS is planning to support MHS through its Strands Robots library. Automata expects to add MHS to its LINQ lab automation platform. And similar support is planned by the likes of Danaher, Doosan Robotics, MBF Bioscience, Qiagen, Tecan, and Universal Robotics. "There’s more to learn before we open source MHS," Anthropic said. "LLMs still lack physical intuition, having learned about the physical world from text and images. The research preview will let us build more safety evaluations and strengthen protections for using AI in the physical world." Let the experiments begin. ®

If it walks like a robot duck and quacks like a robot duck, it’s probably a Microduck robot from Hugging Face subsidiary Pollen Robotics. And it's ready to work with AI. Bordeaux, France-based Pollen announced the Microduck on Thursday, describing it as a robot designed for immediate action, as well as being ready for training via reinforcement learning in an open-source physics simulator to teach it new tasks. Microduck is tiny, mind you: It’s a mere 25 cm tall (a little under 10 inches), and weighs in at about 800 grams (1.76 pounds), so don’t expect this to serve as your own in-home AI butler or cleaner. It’s more of a cheap (just $399) testbed designed to teach users about hardware AI, machine learning, and the potential of modern robotics. Microduck “sets out to make building AI on real hardware as approachable as running a model: complex behaviours out of the box, then an open-source stack covering robot control, simulation, RL training and sim-to-real deployment, so new skills can be trained in simulation and transferred to the robot,” Pollen writes on Microduck’s website. That’s not to say that Microduck can’t be trained to do real work, of course. A video on the bipedal bot’s website shows it picking up socks and a marker with its articulated beak and placing them in a box, which it’s able to see with its front-facing camera and determine distance thanks to a built-in LiDAR unit. That hardware isn’t open source, mind you, but the entire software stack Microduck is built on is, and Pollen is encouraging users to share skills once the entire Microduck system goes live later this year. A Pollen rep told us that the company has no plans to open source the hardware. Microduck should be able to handle a pretty robust library of tasks, too: It’ll ship with 1 GB of RAM, 32 GB of onboard storage, and a 50 Hz onboard policy loop for connecting its onboard AI to sensors to determine its next action. Like any good bipedal robot, Microduck is able to get back on its feet when knocked over, as demonstrated in videos on the minuscule machine’s website. It’s also able to roller skate, with a pair of wheeled feet available in an optional accessory pack that includes a ball it can play with, an NFC chip and NFC tags, and a laser pointer it’s able to follow with its eyeball camera. “Anyone can train new behaviors … in simulation using reinforcement learning,” Pollen representative Santiago Pavon explained to us in an email. “Adding purpose and autonomy to the robot is something we are still working on, and we expect the community to pick up and contribute.” Pavon explained that Pollen hopes it and the community it wants to build with Microduck will “achieve autonomous behaviors such as voice recognition, simultaneous localization and mapping, navigation and grasping,” though he admits its grasping capabilities will likely be limited given the small size of the robot. Pavon estimates Microduck probably can’t lift much more than 100 grams. Regardless of its ability to lift, Pollen wants Microduck to serve as an open platform for training tiny autonomous robots to do both practical and fun things. “We find the ‘autonomous behaviors as a community objective’ to be very exciting,” Pavon noted. Microduck is available for preorder now, with units planned to ship sometime before Christmas 2026. Now about that acquisition … El Reg readers are likely aware of the hubbub brewing around Pollen Robotics’ parent company, AI model hosting platform Hugging Face, and Nvidia. The GPU giant has reportedly agreed to buy the AI biz for somewhere in the neighborhood of $13 billion. The deal remains unconfirmed, with Business Insider saying its exclusive was based on “a person familiar with the matter” and that an agreement had not been finalized. If true, it would mean that Nvidia is putting its money where CEO Jensen Huang’s mouth is in regard to open-weight AI models. Nvidia’s own Nemotron AI models are fully open source and available on Hugging Face, and Huang has come out in support of open source and open weight AI models during the recent back-and-forth in the industry between frontier labs and open model makers located largely in China. Pollen Robotics itself was only acquired by Hugging Face in April 2025, and it’s unknown how the acquisition by Nvidia would affect the Microduck maker. While Pavon was willing to answer plenty of questions about Microduck, he didn’t respond to our inquiry about the rumored Nvidia deal. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face responded to our inquiries, and both have been silent on the matter since BI’s story broke. ®

The UK government is hiring someone to help lead its AI strategy for civil servants, and actual AI experience is apparently optional. The Cabinet Office is advertising for a Head of Strategy and Engagement in its Digital, Data, Innovation and AI team, or DDI & AI, with a salary of up to £83,355 ($113,000). The successful applicant will help shape how roughly 550,000 civil servants acquire the skills needed to survive Whitehall's increasingly enthusiastic embrace of AI. According to the job ad, the new hire will "lead on the design and delivery of a long-term, high-impact and adaptive vision" for the DDI & AI team, define its strategy, track developments in the sector, and work with experts across government, industry and academia. They'll also lead on policy positions and ministerial submissions. You might reasonably assume that some previous experience with AI, digital technology, data or innovation would come in handy, but Whitehall does not insist. The essential requirements instead include leadership, strategic thinking, communication skills, and the ability to build "productive collaborative and trusting relationships." Experience in "digital, data, innovation or AI" is tucked away under desirable criteria, alongside experience in learning design and delivery. To be fair to the Cabinet Office, this isn't a job for someone to train a foundation model between meetings with ministers. The DDI & AI team focuses on improving the skills of non-digital specialists across government, and the vacancy is heavy on strategy, planning, and engagement rather than technical work. The Cabinet Office did not respond to The Register’s questions, but a spokesperson told The Telegraph that it was "not a technical AI specialist role," adding that the team already includes people with AI expertise, and works with specialists across government, academia and the tech industry. A couple of months ago, the Cabinet Office was looking for a rather different sort of AI hire. Its £163,000-a-year AI and Innovation Director was expected to help create an "AI-first culture" across the Civil Service – and, for that job at least, a "deep understanding of the AI landscape" was part of the deal. Meanwhile, ministers have been pushing AI tools into government in the hope of squeezing more productivity from the public sector, including the brilliantly named Humphrey suite of AI assistants. The government has also set itself the rather sizeable task of improving AI and digital skills across hundreds of thousands of civil servants. Which brings us back to the new Head of Strategy and Engagement: the person helping decide how Whitehall builds those skills could, according to the government's own criteria, arrive without having previously worked in AI, digital, data, or innovation. One place where AI gets more explicit treatment is the application. Applicants are warned that while they can use the technology to help with their application, their examples must come from their own experience. Passing off AI-generated material as their own could result in the application being withdrawn. So AI experience isn't essential for the job. Just make sure AI doesn't apply on your behalf. ®