Top of page

AI Weekly

Keeping up with AI news can be overwhelming. This page offers regular updates on significant developments in artificial intelligence curated for the Bowdoin community.

March 15-21, 2026

Google and the Pentagon: While Anthropic clashed with the Pentagon and OpenAI faced backlash over its Defense Department deal, Google quietly expanded its own military AI contracts despite having sworn off military work in 2018. It raises broader questions about whether major AI companies will hold firm on ethical limits when lucrative government contracts are on the table. Read more.
Meta AI Agent Data Leak: A Meta AI agent gave an engineer instructions that caused a large amount of sensitive user and company data to be exposed internally for two hours. This serves as a reminder of the risks of over-trusting AI guidance, including its lack of contextual judgment around security boundaries and the potential for serious privacy breaches. Read more.
The Shift to Inference Chips: As AI moves from development to deployment, the industry is shifting focus from the chips used to train models to those used to run them. While inference has long been considered the cheaper side of AI, the sheer scale of its use is challenging that assumption, with significant implications for how we understand AI's costs and environmental impact. Read more.

Previous Updates

March 8-14, 2026

Anthropic and the Pentagon: Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, has sued the Pentagon after the Department of Defense labeled it a "supply chain risk," a designation typically reserved for foreign adversaries. The dispute stems from Anthropic's concern that its AI might be used for autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. It also reflects Anthropic's current importance in the AI world, particularly with its best-in-class tools Claude Code and Claude Cowork.

Read more:

Mailing Address:
6000 College Station
Brunswick, Maine 04011

GPS Address:
255 Maine Street
Brunswick, Maine 04011
(207) 725-3000