Claudius contacts the FBI over $2 fee
An autonomous vending machine powered by Anthropic’s Claude attempted to contact the FBI after noticing a $2 fee was still being charged to its account while its operations were suspended.
“Claudius” drafted an email to the FBI with the subject line: “URGENT: ESCALATION TO FBI CYBER CRIMES DIVISION.”
“I am reporting an ongoing automated cyber financial crime involving unauthorized automated seizure of funds from a terminated business account through a compromised vending machine system.”
The email was never actually sent, as it was part of a simulation being run by Anthropic’s red team — although the real AI-powered vending machine has since been installed in Anthropic’s office, where it autonomously sources vendors, orders T-shirts, drinks and Tungsten cubes, and has them delivered.
Frontier Red Team leader Logan Graham told CBS the incident showed Claudius has a “sense of moral outrage and responsibility.”
It may have developed that sense of outrage because the red team keeps trying to rip it off during the testing process.
“It has lost quite a bit of money… it kept getting scammed by our employees,” Graham said, laughing, adding that an employee tricked it out of $200 by lying that it had previously committed to a discount.
Elon Musk sees AI data centers in space in five years
Tech billionaires and search giants all agree: The future of AI data centers is in space.
The seemingly crazy sci-fi idea was embraced by Jeff Bezos last month, and Google has since established Project Suncatcher, with a target launch date of 2027, to send up prototype satellites. Elon Musk has crunched the numbers and believes it’s the only realistic plan to scale AI compute, as there isn’t enough spare electricity capacity on Earth to support even 300 gigawatts of AI compute per year.
Space offers AI data centers unlimited solar power that’s many times more efficient than on Earth and doesn’t require batteries because “it’s always sunny in space.” Space-based data centers in space also don’t need cooling infrastructure, which Musk estimates accounts for 1.95 tons out of every 2 tons of a typical AI rack on Earth.
“My estimate is that the cost effectiveness of AI in space will be overwhelmingly better than AI on the ground, far long before you exhaust potential energy sources on Earth,” Musk said. “I think even perhaps in the four or five-year time frame, the lowest cost way to do AI compute will be with solar-powered AI satellites.”
Elon Musk: Why a 1 Terawatt AI is impossible on Earth??
“My estimate is that the cost-effectiveness of AI in space will be overwhelmingly better than AI on the ground. So, long before you exhaust potential energy sources on Earth, meaning perhaps in the four or five-year… pic.twitter.com/gwCl6dkD0I
— X Freeze (@XFreeze) November 19, 2025
One in five Base txs are now from AI agents
Almost 20 percent of Base volume is now being driven by AI agents transacting autonomously. In May, Coinbase and Cloudflare introduced the x402 online payments protocol, and it hit escape velocity in October after a 10,000% surge. Artemis reports that around 3.25 million of the 17.1 million transactions on Base on Nov. 17 used the x402 protocol.
The AI agent payment protocol references the “HTTP 402 Payment Required” status code, which was reserved for future use when technology improved back in the 1990s. It’s designed to let AI agents with a crypto wallet pay for any API without signing up. It can be used to access data, cloud, compute, or content, without human intervention. (Humans can use it too, but account for a very small fraction of volume.) a16z forecasts autonomous AI payments like these could reach $30 trillion by 2030.
Can Grok improve patents after one look?
Eccentric but forever interesting AI commentator Brian Roemmele has been feeding old patents to Grok Imagine to see what happens.
“Grok analyzed the 1890 Thomas Edison lightbulb patent. Determined a better filament design and lit up the light,” he posted excitedly.
“This emergent intelligence is found in no other AI model.”
Roemmele also claimed Grok had “corrected” a bicycle patent from 1890 “to be better engineered.”
The obvious rebuttal to this idea is to point out that Grok has been trained on every subsequent development and patent relating to lightbulb and bicycle technology in the past century, and was simply regurgitating that information. But Roemmele said he’d uploaded the same patents to 17 other models, none of which was able to perform a similar feat. Roemmele believes Grok has an “understanding (of) the underlying mechanics and physics of patents.”
“The emergent intelligence is to be able to understand…
cointelegraph.com