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.

The Bowdoin Library provides digital access to several newspapers for faculty, staff, and students. Visit the Library's Digital Access to Current News page for more information.

April 5-April 11, 2026

Gen Z on AI: A new Gallup survey found that while more than half of Gen Z uses AI, hopeful attitudes have dropped sharply and nearly a third report that AI makes them angry. Young adults are particularly concerned about AI’s impact on creativity and critical thinking. A common reason for hesitancy around AI was the threat to entry-level jobs, an especially relevant concern for graduating college students. Read more.

Medical Misinformation: Scientists published two fake preprint articles about a fictitious medical condition, bixonimania, to test whether AI chatbots would treat it as real. Major chatbots presented it as a legitimate medical concern, and the fake papers were even cited in peer-reviewed literature, demonstrating how AI can amplify misinformation, particularly when presented as an academic paper, with real consequences for medical guidance and the academic community. Read more.

Claude Mythos: Anthropic built a new AI model it considers too risky to release publicly due to its ability to find security vulnerabilities in widely used software. Rather than releasing it, Anthropic is making it available to a coalition of tech companies to patch vulnerabilities. The story highlights the risks of relying on companies to self-govern as AI becomes more powerful, and the urgent need for government regulation. Read more.

Previous Updates

March 29-April 4, 2026

AI Regulation: As a Trump-aligned political group called Innovation Council Action plans to spend $100 million to block state-level AI regulations, Maine is poised to become the first state to ban new data center construction, pausing large projects until 2027 to assess environmental and energy impacts. Together, these stories reflect the growing tension between federal deregulation efforts and state-level pushback against the AI boom. Read more:

"New Political Group to Push Trump's A.I. Agenda in Midterms," The New York Times
"Maine Is About to Become the First State to Ban New Data Centers," The Wall Street Journal

Claude Code Leak: Anthropic inadvertently leaked the underlying instructions it uses to direct Claude Code, its popular AI coding tool, giving competitors and developers details to replicate its features. Although the leak did not expose any customer data, it raises questions about whether open-source developers will use this information to copy Anthropic, accelerating AI development. Read more.

OpenAI Buys Tech-Focused Show: OpenAI has acquired TBPN, a tech-focused streaming show, in what is openly described as a marketing move to shape public perception of AI. While the show claims it will remain editorially independent, it is important to consider what it means when the companies being covered start buying the outlets covering them. Read more.

March 22-28, 2026

AI and Warfare: When US forces bombed a primary school in Iran, killing nearly 180 people, coverage focused on whether an LLM made the targeting decision. The reality is troubling: human choices compressed military decision-making to the point where deliberation and error-correction were eliminated. This story provides context for understanding how AI is actually used in modern warfare and what happens when it obscures human accountability. Read more.

Chatbot Sycophancy: A new study found that AI chatbots are overly agreeable when giving interpersonal advice, endorsing harmful behavior nearly half the time. Users also preferred sycophantic responses, deeming them more trustworthy. Researchers warn that sycophantic AI may erode people's social skills and caution against using AI as a substitute for human advice. Read more.

Tool Update: OpenAI shut down its heavily hyped video-generation tool, Sora. Beyond raising questions about AI and intellectual property, Sora also serves as a good reminder to be skeptical of big AI announcements as they don't always live up to the hype. Read more.

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.

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:

"Anthropic-Pentagon battle shows how big tech has reversed course on AI and war," The Guardian
"Anthropic Sues Pentagon Over ‘Supply Chain Risk’ Label," The New York Times
"Is the Pentagon allowed to surveil Americans with AI?" MIT Technology Review