Eleven companies have pledged $2.4 billion in AI tools and compute credits to the consortium behind the Genesis Mission, the Energy Department's program to apply AI to scientific research, per FedScoop. Nvidia's $1 billion is the largest commitment, followed by AMD at $500 million and OpenAI at $200 million, with Anthropic and Google also contributing. The consortium formed in February and has grown as the mission expanded to more than a dozen federal agencies. NIST, the Commerce Department's standards agency, said it intends to join as a federal agency partner. Industry partners were mandatory for large team bids in a $293 million Genesis Mission funding round. Companies took part in more of the 278 awards announced this summer than any other type of organization.
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Anthropic is hiring a Political Programs lead to create an in-house "presidential engagement" program for the 2028 race, according to a company job posting reported by Fortune. The hire would size up likely candidate fields in both parties, offer candidates and their advisers AI policy briefings on equal terms, and plan for the platform, convention and transition stages. The role also covers daily management of the company's political giving. Anthropic formed its first employee funded political action committee, AnthroPAC, in April. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said in a statement that "education and influence are not the same thing, and the public deserves to know where one ends and the other begins." The posting lists pay of $295,000 to $345,000.
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Minnesota's temporary Medicaid commissioner, John Connolly, asked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that oversees Medicaid, to reveal the criteria, methods and any machine learning or AI it used to flag 870 state providers for fraud or unusual billing, StateScoop reported, citing his letter to CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz. Federal officials have described the tools as including machine learning and AI that can analyze Medicaid claims, the letter says. Washington has already frozen $550 million in deferred Medicaid payments to the state and have threatened to hold back $2 billion a year. State officials expect a disallowance, a formal federal refusal to reimburse spending, in the coming weeks. Connolly wrote that Minnesota can halt payments and investigate providers but needs the evidence behind CMS's findings first.
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Anthropic launched a Critical Infrastructure Defense Program that gives its frontier models and onsite engineers to the security providers serving power grids, water systems and industrial plants, SiliconANGLE reported. Its 11 founding partners include Booz Allen Hamilton, CrowdStrike and Rockwell Automation, and more partners and sectors are due to join in the coming months. As part of a new initiative it calls Anthropic Cyber Mission, the company opened OSS Scanner, which offers open source projects that opt in free recurring vulnerability scans from its strongest models, including Claude Mythos. The scan reports are entirely model generated, with no human review, The Verge reported. Anthropic's models have flagged more than 29,000 candidate vulnerabilities in widely used software over six months, and staff have manually reviewed about 6,000.
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OpenAI banned accounts tied to two covert propaganda operations, one based in Russia and one in Iran, and said the Russian campaign reached more people than any it has tracked since it began reporting on such schemes, per The Hill. The Russian operation, which OpenAI named "Dark Clark," recruited unwitting people in Latin America to staff a fake think tank and produced bogus leaked documents, including material meant to undercut recruitment for Ukraine's armed forces. The Iranian operation, "Bogus Bylines," hid its location with virtual private networks and used seven invented Western freelance writer personas to pitch articles about the U.S.-Iran war to small and medium outlets worldwide. Both groups leaned on AI to draft internal reports that inflated their own results, OpenAI said.
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A group of 121 lawmakers, mostly Democrats, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), wrote to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Spirit CEO Dave Davis objecting to Google's $10 million deal for the defunct airline's internal data to train AI systems, per Bloomberg Law. The records include about 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages and employee payroll and tax files. The lawmakers asked that worker information be left out wherever possible. Google won the data at an August auction during Spirit's liquidation, according to Reuters. A privacy ombudsman on Monday recommended that a bankruptcy judge approve the sale at an Oct. 14 hearing, excluding personal data on 97 million passengers. "We are not looking to buy any personal information from Spirit," a Google spokesperson said.
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