#AI ethics

The Future of Life Institute released a report rating nine top AI companies on safety, with none receiving an A grade. Anthropic earned the highest score of C+, while OpenAI and Google DeepMind received C, Meta got D+, and DeepSeek, xAI, and others received F. This report highlights a critical gap in AI safety governance as companies rapidly develop transformative AI without robust risk management plans. It underscores the need for stronger safety standards and transparency in the industry. The report notes that many companies have shifted from banning military use of their AI to actively seeking defense partnerships. Chinese companies Z.ai and Alibaba Cloud deny allegations of military ties, but were still rated low.

Anthropic's Claude Code version 2.1.91 includes obfuscated code that checks for Chinese timezones and proxy URLs, then encodes region information into prompts sent to the API without disclosure in changelogs. This raises serious concerns about user privacy and transparency in AI tools, as it could be used to identify unauthorized usage or model distillation without user consent, potentially undermining trust. The detection logic uses XOR obfuscation with key 91 to check for timezones Asia/Shanghai or Asia/Urumqi, and proxy URLs pointing to Chinese domains or AI labs; region data is encoded by altering the system prompt's date format and Unicode apostrophe.