Artificial Intelligence

Feb 16, 2026

Bytedance has announced it will restrict its AI video tool Seedance after Disney threatened the company with legal action. In a cease-and-desist letter, Disney accused Bytedance of maintaining a pirate library of protected characters from Marvel, Star Wars, and other franchises - what Disney's lawyers called a virtual "smash-and-grab" of intellectual property. Disney has signed an exclusive deal with OpenAI.

Since the launch of Seedance 2.0, viral videos featuring copyrighted characters have been popping up across social media. Paramount Skydance also sent a cease-and-desist letter. The Motion Picture Association and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) both demanded an immediate end to the violations. Japan has also opened an investigation into possible copyright infringement involving anime characters.

Bytedance told the BBC that it respects intellectual property and is working on stronger protections, but didn't share any specifics.

Comment Source: BBC

Matthias Bastian

Feb 16, 2026

AI in practice

Peter Steinberger, the developer behind the open-source project OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI. His focus will be on building the next generation of personal AI agents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called Steinberger a "genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people." Altman expects this work to quickly become a core part of OpenAI's product lineup.

OpenClaw, Steinberger's original hobby project, which blew up over the past few weeks, will "live in a foundation as an open-source project" and will be supported by OpenAI, Altman says, calling the future "extremely multi-agent."

Steinberger writes in his blog that he spoke to several large AI labs in San Francisco but ultimately chose OpenAI because they shared the same vision. Steinberger's goal: building an agent that even his mother can use. Getting there, he says, requires fundamental changes, more security research, and access to the latest models.

What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.
Peter Steinberger

Comment Source: Steinberger Blog | Altman via X

Jonathan Kemper

Feb 15, 2026

AI in practice

Mastra's open source AI memory uses traffic light emojis for more efficient compression

Colorful chat bubbles next to grey stacks of cards with red-yellow-green traffic light emojis.

Maximilian Schreiner

Feb 15, 2026

Update

AI in practice

Anthropic still won't give the Pentagon unrestricted access to its AI models

The Pentagon wants unrestricted access to AI technology. Anthropic is demanding guarantees against autonomous weapons control and domestic surveillance. A $200 million contract hangs in the balance.

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Matthias Bastian

Feb 15, 2026

AI and society

Developer targeted by AI hit piece warns society cannot handle AI agents that decouple actions from consequences

An AI agent wrote a hit piece on a developer who rejected its code. Days later, the agent is still running, a quarter of commenters believe it, and no one knows who’s behind it. The case shows how autonomous agents turn character assassination into something that scales.

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Matthias Bastian

Feb 15, 2026

AI in practice

Bytedance's Seedance 2.0 is so good at copying Disney characters the company calls it a "virtual smash-and-grab"

Bytedance’s Seedance 2.0 can generate Disney characters, replicate actors’ voices, and recreate entire fictional worlds with stunning realism. Hollywood is fighting back with cease-and-desist letters and calls for legal actio, but the case highlights a growing problem: copyright law was built for a world where copying took effort.

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Jonathan Kemper

Feb 15, 2026

AI research

Popular LLM ranking platforms are statistically fragile, new study warns

Stacked playing cards with two floating crowns at the top, tweezers remove two cards from the stack in a colorful shadow look.

Matthias Bastian

Feb 14, 2026

AI in practice

Bytedance's Seed2.0 adds even more price pressure on Western AI models

Bytedance has released its new Seed2.0 AI model series. The story is a familiar one by now: the models match Western AI models on benchmarks while costing a fraction of the price.

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Matthias Bastian

Feb 14, 2026

Short News

WIRED reporter Reece Rogers rented out his body to AIs. He tested RentAHuman, a platform where AI agents pay people for real-world tasks. Despite an hourly rate of just 5 dollars, no bot reached out.

He started applying on his own. One gig offered 10 dollars to listen to a podcast and tweet about it, but he never heard back. An AI agent called Adi offered 110 dollars to deliver flowers and marketing materials to Anthropic for an AI startup. When Rogers hesitated, the bot bombarded him with ten messages in 24 hours and even emailed him.

While I’ve been micromanaged before, these incessant messages from an AI employer gave me the ick.

On his third try, Rogers took a gig putting up flyers for 50 cents each. He cabbed to the pickup spot, but the contact changed the meeting point mid-ride. At the new location, he was told the flyers weren't ready—come back that afternoon. After two days, Rogers hadn't made a penny, and every task turned out to be advertising for AI startups.

Comment Source: WIRED

Matthias Bastian

Feb 14, 2026

Short News

Google and OpenAI are complaining about data theft—yes, you read that right. According to Google, Gemini was hit with a massive cloning attempt through distillation, with a single campaign firing over 100,000 requests at the model, NBC News reports. Google calls it intellectual property theft, pointing to companies and researchers chasing a competitive edge.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has sent a memo to the US Congress accusing DeepSeek of using disguised methods to copy American AI models. The memo also flags China's energy buildout, ten times the new electricity capacity the US added by 2025, and confirms ChatGPT is growing at around ten percent per month.

Distillation floods a model with targeted prompts to extract its internal logic, especially its "reasoning steps," then uses that knowledge to build a cheaper clone, potentially skipping billions in training costs. Google security head John Hultquist warns smaller companies running their own AI models face the same risk, particularly if those models were trained on sensitive business data.

Comment Source: NBC News | OpenAI