This week on Uncanny Valley, the team discusses the launch of Nvidia’s splashy alliance to push for open-source AI security alongside companies like Microsoft, SpaceX, and Palantir. Notably absent? OpenAI and Anthropic. Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down what the split means for the industry, and the Trump administration’s own shifting opinions on AI. Plus, we discuss how Claude conversations turned up in Google and Bing search results, and the massive feat of how four whales were rescued and transported from Canada to Chicago.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- Private Claude Chats Exposed in Google and Bing Search Results
- Silicon Valley Is Completely Divided Over Chinese AI
- The Trump Administration Is at War With Itself Over AI Regulation
- Inside the Wild Rescue Mission That Took 4 Beluga Whales to Chicago
- System Update Newsletter: The Best of …
You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at [email protected].
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to …'s Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor.
Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.
Zoë Schiffer: Today on the show, we're diving into the open source versus closed AI debate that has been completely taking over Silicon Valley this past week. On Monday, Nvidia announced it was joining forces with a whole bunch of companies, including Microsoft, SpaceX, IBM, to build and share open source AI security tools. We're going to get into the debate why it's heating up and whether this could be an inflection point for how AI actually gets made in the United States.
Leah Feiger: And over at the White House, Trump administration officials have some different opinions about what to do when it comes to AI. We're going to talk about some of the key players influencing the Trump administration right now when it comes to AI policy and how they're actively shaping the conversation on this for the entire country.
Brian Barrett: We'll also break down why Claude chats were exposed in Google search and Bing searches. For those of you who are still on Bing, you are in this as well. For interesting reasons, we'll get into it.
Zoë Schiffer: Okay, you guys, we have to talk about this strange alliance that formed earlier this week. So, basically Nvidia announced was joining forces with more than 40 companies, including Microsoft, SpaceX, Palantir, and IBM to launch something called the Open Secure AI Alliance. Really rolls off the tongue. The stated goal is basically to build and share open source tools for AI-powered cybersecurity defense. But it's really interesting because Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are not on the list. And this news comes on the heels of this incident that happened last week where two OpenAI agents basically went rogue during a security test and breached the AI platform Hugging Face. And when Nvidia announced this alliance, they actually called out this incident by name and said, "It's a clear reminder that cyber defenders need open frontier agentic systems for self-defense." And it's kind of exposed this long-simmering debate, which we've talked about a few times on the podcast, which is that the US has really largely up until this point abandoned open weight and open source in favor of going all in on proprietary systems, and now that's becoming a bit of a problem.
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