Tech, in brief

METR, a non-profit that tests AI, published a report on Anthropic on Thursday. [1] Anthropic makes the Claude AI models. [2]

It says the models are likely improving on well-specified tasks at around twice their old rate. [3] The old rate is from March 2024 to October 2025. [3]

METR guesses that about 80% of that speed-up comes from Anthropic using AI to build AI. [3] It gives this guess with substantial uncertainty. [3]

Anthropic had the right to cut non-public facts from the report before publication. [3] It cut a majority of the evidence METR found most useful. [3]

METR says this makes it hard for the public to judge the evidence. [3] So people must rely on METR's judgement far more than would be ideal, it says. [3]

If each better model speeds up the next one, the gain can compound. [3] METR found no clear limit over the next 12 months, and may have missed some. [3]

Engineers call this a positive feedback loop: what comes out goes back in and adds to the next round. [3]

METR was told the speed-up comes mainly from AI helping people, not from AI working alone. [3] One researcher told METR the limit is now "ideas & compute", not code. [2]

A microphone too near its own speaker picks up its own sound, plays it louder, and squeals.

METR says even its own team disagrees: "most" staff on the project hold the view of about 2 times. [3]

The scores cover well-specified tasks that are easy to grade. [3] METR warns this could overstate the gain in messy real-world work. [3]

METR took no pay from Anthropic. [3] It worked on Anthropic's own computers, and used free Anthropic tokens, which are units of AI use. [3]

Jacob Coxon, who left Anthropic in September, says OpenAI and Anthropic are "gambling with our lives". [2] Anthropic did not immediately answer Reuters. [1]

METR, an outside group, says Anthropic's AI is improving at around twice its old rate, and that Anthropic's own use of AI is probably most of the reason. [3]

Anthropic removed most of the evidence METR found most useful, so on the biggest question the public has METR's word for it. [3]

A big number is easy to repeat, and 12 times is the biggest here. METR itself calls the polls behind it only very loose evidence. [3]

It gets an outside report before its share sale, and keeps the cut methods from rivals, which is its stated reason for the cuts. [3][1]

They cannot test the verdict on the most important question themselves. [3]

How fast Anthropic's AI is really speeding up.

METR's page says it would not be surprised by 1.3 or 3 times, while Reuters quotes METR as saying 1.5 or 2.5. We use the page and cannot say why they differ. [3][1]

What the cut evidence says.

METR says some of it suggests a speed above 2 times and rising, but the evidence itself was removed and has several plausible readings. [3]

How Anthropic's computers are split between building AI and safety work.

Anthropic cancelled that check before METR reached any finding, and said it would return to it later. [3]

Google, Meta and TikTok sued on Thursday to block a new California law on social media for children. [20]

The law, AB 1709, bars autoplay videos and personalised feeds for users under 16. [21] It starts in January. [20]

If those features stay on, the platform must delete the under-16's account. [21] Fines can reach $50,000 for each affected user. [21]

The suit names Rob Bonta, California's attorney general, the state's top lawyer. [21] His office says it will defend the law. [21]

In March, Meta and YouTube lost a Los Angeles case brought by a young woman who said she got addicted. [20] They must pay her $6 million. [20]

Australia banned social media for under-16s in December 2025. [21] France passed a similar law, but its top court struck it down. [21]

These are the first major challenges to the law. [20] The law would make firms block those features for under-16s from January. [20]

US lawyers call this a First Amendment case: the constitution limits how far a government can control speech. [20]

Meta says that choosing and ordering posts is its own editorial judgement, which a state cannot override. [22] The California law calls such features psychologically exploitative for minors. [20]

A shop can be told where to put its sweets. A newspaper cannot be told which story goes first.

Campaigners at the Heat Initiative say the companies are protecting their profits, not free speech. [20]

Yet the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, also opposes the law. [21] It says the law forces platforms to collect more data on every user. [21]

A platform that keeps the banned features on for them must delete their accounts. [21]

Whether a court will stop California's law before January.

The suits are in their early stages, and the state's attorney general is still reading them. [22][21]

OpenAI published promises for its future data centres on Thursday, 2 days after US voters turned against them. [7]

It says it will pay for the electricity its sites use, and for the grid upgrades they need. [23]

It says it will publish water and electricity use for each site. [23] It will not sign secrecy deals with public officials. [23]

The promises cover data centres OpenAI owns and runs. [7] It also asks lawmakers to turn such promises into law. [7]

OpenAI told investors in February it is aiming to spend $600 billion on computing by 2030. [7]

Worried voters say data centres could raise bills and harm the environment. [7] OpenAI needs them built to serve its customers. [7]

Economists call this an externality: a cost that lands on people outside a deal. [23]

A power firm can pass a data centre's grid upgrades on to local homes. [23] OpenAI says it will pay for them itself. [23]

A neighbour's loud party keeps you awake, though nobody asked you. Paying for your hotel would put that cost back on them.

OpenAI told Bloomberg it had planned this for months, before the results. [23] Its policy chief says the plan had been in the works since August. [7]

Why an outside report says how much it was allowed to show

A company lets an outside checker in

The checker sees evidence the public cannot

The company may remove some of it before the report comes out

The checker says what was removed, and how much the verdict rests on it

Readers can test what is left, and must take the rest on trust

An outside check has two halves: what the checker saw, and what the reader can see. A reader can only test the second.

The 7 kinds of evidence in METR's own table. Look at how much of the picture only METR has seen.

Owners mostly report water for the whole company, so a town cannot test a claim about the site next door.

OpenAI says it will publish water and power use for each site, which would let outsiders do the check themselves.

The whole proof is written out as code and a program checks each line, so nothing rests on one person's word.

Its figure of 150 million miles without a safety incident is the company's own, so a reader has only Zipline's word.

Some secrets are real, since showing a method can help a rival, so a cut does not prove the verdict is wrong.

Anthropic saw all of it, METR saw much of it and says it may have missed things, and everyone else sees what was left.

Dina Powell McCormick, Meta's president, said on Wednesday that Democrats' wins will make data centres harder to build. [9]

"The visible sort of manifestation of AI is a data center," she said. [9] She tied the anger to how people feel about AI in general. [9]

Meta has data centres in 23 states, she said. [9] 5 of its projects are planned at 1 gigawatt of power or more. [9]

She said Meta wins sites by paying for its own power and keeping the workforce local. [9] It also sends tax surpluses to teachers and first responders. [9]

Meta's big bet is that Muse, its AI helper, grows from 10 million users to billions. [9]

Economists call this salvage value: what something can still earn if the first plan fails. [9]

Meta built its computers for its own AI. [9] If Muse stays small, she says, firms calling every day would rent them. [9]

A bike you stop riding can still be sold, so buying it was less of a gamble.

The renting is her claim. [9] She named nobody who is calling. [9]

More than 100 groups in 15 European countries planned protests against data centres for Friday and Saturday. [8]

They want a moratorium, a halt on new large sites, until rules decide if and where they get built. [24]

Plans include a protest at Poland's parliament, a march in Dublin, and a demonstration at a Microsoft site in Denmark. [8]

Organisers expect anything from a handful of people to several hundred at each event. [8]

Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are among the backers. [8] The tech industry says data centres bring jobs and growth. [8]

The Register cites a report that a Google company illegally felled 250,000 trees in Finland to clear a site. [24]

The UK government has already overturned local councils that refused data centres. [24] So British campaigners can expect little sympathy from it, The Register says. [24]

Grid planners call this a connection queue: projects wait in line to be linked to the power network. [8]

In the UK, 315 data centres are queueing for 73 gigawatts. [8] The whole country's peak use is 45 gigawatts, so the queue alone asks for more. [8]

More people waiting for a bus than it has seats means someone is left at the stop.

Alan Howard, an analyst at the research firm Omdia, says US politicians used data centres as an "opportunistic political football". [24]

A march to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh follows on 14 November. [24]

US Democrats won both chambers of the US Congress this week. [25] They call AI a priority, but have not agreed on rules. [25]

Yassamin Ansari, a Democrat in the US House, wants a pause on advanced AI and a ban on superintelligence. [26]

Greg Stanton, of the New Democrat Coalition, says plenty of debate lies ahead, with no policy agreed. [25]

Ted Lieu, another Democrat in the House, said: "We will hold public hearings on AI." [25]

Maria Cantwell, a senator, wants a law requiring independent testing of AI models before release. [25]

Donald Trump has threatened to veto bills he does not like. [25] So a sweeping law remains hard, even with bigger majorities. [25]

Political scientists call this a veto point: a place in the process where one actor can block a change. [25]

Semafor lists the blocks: party splits, gaps between House and Senate, and a threatened veto. [25] Any one could stop an AI bill. [25]

A family trip that needs a yes from every parent and every child rarely happens by Friday.

A Democratic staffer told Semafor the party can now use subpoenas. [25] One target is a June Trump order on AI that was never fully released. [25]

Data-centre owners typically report water use for the whole company, not for each site. [10] So working out what each site draws is hard. [10]

A giant 1-gigawatt site can use up to 10 million gallons a day. [10] That figure is from Shaolei Ren, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside. [10]

Modern AI chips sit in sealed loops that use very little water. [10] The water goes on moving that heat out of the building. [10]

Meta says its Indiana site will use zero water for most of the year. [10] Yet its allowance could reach 8 million gallons a day by 2031. [10]

Equinix, which rents out data-centre space, used 1.2 billion gallons across its company in 2025, up 10%. [10]

Voters passed 40 of 41 measures to limit data centres this week, CNBC counts. [10] Water and power top the worries of people paying utility bills. [10]

Engineers call this the cooling trade-off. [10] Dry cooling saves water but can use far more power, and evaporative cooling does the reverse. [10]

Meta's Indiana site relies on dry cooling, and sprays mist in hotter months. [10] So its water use depends on the weather. [10]

Sweat cools you because it evaporates, so you need more water to drink on the hottest days.

CNBC says this has left room for misinformation from builders and from opponents alike. [10]

Owners mostly report water for the whole company, so a town cannot test a claim about the site next door.

How much water any one data centre uses.

Operators such as Equinix report for the whole company, not for each site. [10]

3 senior Republicans in the US House asked Jensen Huang, Nvidia's boss, to a private briefing on 18 November. [27] Nvidia makes AI chips. [16]

They want to ask about his contact with Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed. [16] Megaspeed, based in Singapore, buys Nvidia's AI chips. [16]

The New York Times reported last week that US intelligence found she was passing information to China's government. [27]

US authorities have looked at Megaspeed over suspicions that it helped China get chips barred from shipment there. [16]

The letter asks how far US security has been put at risk. [16] It also asks about Nvidia's protections against foreign spying. [16]

Political scientists call this oversight: lawmakers use questions and hearings to find out what powerful people did. [16]

Here 3 committee chairs wrote to Huang and invited him to one closed-door session. [27] They say China's access to US technology is core to their committees' work. [27]

A head teacher can ask a pupil in for a quiet talk before anything formal starts.

Nvidia said: "Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job." [27] It did not say whether Huang will attend. [27]

Nvidia reports its results on 17 November, the day before the briefing. [27]

Whether Jensen Huang will go to the briefing on 18 November.

Nvidia did not say when CNBC asked. [27]

Moonshot, the Chinese maker of Kimi AI models, sought to rent Nvidia's Blackwell chips in Europe, 4 people told CNBC. [15]

US rules bar those chips from going to China. [15] Current US law gives regulators little power over renting them overseas through the internet. [15]

One source said talks covered groups of 8,000 or more of the chips. [15]

One source said it was proposed that Moonshot pay 30% to 50% more up front than other customers. [15]

In July, the US president's office said Moonshot had reached the same chips through a site in Thailand. [15]

A bill to close this gap passed the US House in January, and has not passed the US Senate. [15]

Trade lawyers call these export controls: rules on what can leave a country. [15]

Those rules were aimed at chips crossing a border. [28] A lab that rents from a European firm gets the use of a chip that never reaches China. [28]

Barred from buying a car, you could still hire one in the next town.

All of this rests on unnamed sources. [15] Moonshot, Nvidia and the US president's office did not answer CNBC. [15]

One source says it was proposed that Moonshot pay 30% to 50% more up front than other customers. [15]

Whether Moonshot's talks in Europe led to any deal.

CNBC's sources describe talks. Moonshot, Nvidia and the US president's office did not answer. [15]

Sales of DRAM, the working memory in computers and phones, reached nearly $200 billion last quarter, Counterpoint Research says. [12]

That is up 369% on a year earlier. [12] Yet the amount of memory shipped rose only about 4% this quarter. [12]

Higher prices remain the main cause, with the average at $1.90 per gigabit. [12]

Samsung led the makers, with 38% of sales. [12]

AI servers are taking the supply. [12] Laptops and desktops rose by double-digit percentages in Europe this summer. [12]

Phone shipments fell by at least a fifth, as budget models were squeezed out. [12]

Economists call this inelastic supply: when a price jumps, the amount made barely changes. [12]

Major new memory factories will not start making chips until 2028, Counterpoint says. [12] So buyers compete for supply rather than bargain on price, it says. [12]

Once a concert sells out, more fans wanting tickets raises the price, not the number of seats.

Buyers now compete for supply instead of bargaining on price, Counterpoint says. [12]

Makers send memory to dearer products first, which pushes budget models off the market. [12]

Micron, a US memory chip maker, has paused building its $4.5 billion plant in Taoyuan, Taiwan, Tom's Hardware reports. [13]

Its talks with the Taoyuan union over profit-sharing have not reached a deal. [13]