Tech Brew Ride Home - The Week Of Apple Updates (Corrected)

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

Apparently, it’s going to be a week of Apple updates and it kicks off with the iPhone 17e and an M4 iPad Air. AWS service is struggling in the Middle East. An important ruling in terms of AI copyright. Anthropic makes it easy to switch to Claude. And what exactly went on with that whole Pentagon/Anthropic dispute. ⁠Apple announces the iPhone 17E⁠ (The Verge) ⁠Apple speeds up the iPad Air with an M4 upgrade, starting at $599 ⁠(TechCrunch) ⁠Amazon's cloud unit reports fire after objects hit UAE data center ⁠(Reuters) ⁠US Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material⁠ (Reuters) ⁠Anthropic's Claude can now absorb your past conversations with other AI chatbots⁠ (Engadget) ⁠Inside Anthropic’s Killer-Robot Dispute With the Pentagon⁠ (The Atlantic) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus. Let's go! Get ready for a new case. We're going to crack this case and prove for our decoranous partners of all time. New friends. You are Gary Destnake. And your last name? The Snake.

Dream team. Hit new habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly working at. Zootopia 2. Now available on Disney Plus rated PG. Welcome to the TechBrewrite home for Monday, March 2, 26. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Apparently, it's going to be a week of Apple updates, and it kicks off with the iPhone 17E and an M4 iPad Air. AWS service is struggling in the Middle East. An important ruling in terms of AI copyright, Anthropic makes it easy to switch to Claude, and what exactly went on with that whole Pentagon Anthropic dispute? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Apple this morning unveiled the iPhone 17E, offering a 6.1-inch display, a 3-9-1-inch display, a 3-9 automometer 819 chip, a C1X modem, a 48 megapixel fusion camera, and more for starting at $599, and shipping from March 11th. Quoting the verge, Apple has taken the wraps off the iPhone 17E, its latest entry-level smartphone.

The iPhone 17E starts at $599 with a higher 256 gigabytes of storage and is available in black, white, and pink. The company revealed the new device as part of a series of announcements that kicked off this week. Similar to the iPhone 16E, the iPhone 17E comes with a 6.1 inch display, but with a tougher ceramic shield two for better scratch resistance and reduce glare. It also offers more storage for the same starting price as its predecessor, which costs $599 for 128 gigabytes when it launched last year. The iPhone 17E adds an upgraded A19 processor and MagSafe charging with Chi-2 support, allowing for wireless charging at up to 15 watts. It also has a C1X chip,

the next-gen version of Apple's in-house modem, which the company says is twice as fast. The iPhone 17E offers a 48-mepixel fusion camera as well, enabling an optical-quality 2X telephoto. There's support for Apple's advanced portraits feature, which automatically recognizes people, dogs, and cats, and saves depth information, giving you the ability to add background blur after capture. The iPhone 17E will be available to pre-order on March 4th with availability starting March 11th. Along with the 256 gigabyte model priced at 599, Apple is also selling a 512 gigabyte option for 799, end quote. But wait, because there's more, quoting TechCrunch. Apple on Monday also unveiled a new iPad air that's powered by the M4 chip. The company says the device is designed to

be faster, thanks to an updated neural engine and more memory making it better for AI uses. This air is said to be 30% faster than the M3 iPad Air and 2.3 times faster than the M1 version. However, the new device still retails for the same price of $599 for the 11-inch model and $7.99 for the 13-inch model. The iPad Air now has an 8-core CPU and a 9-core GPU, which makes it a decent choice for gaming or image-and-photo-photo editing. Meanwhile, the device's unified memory has increased by 50% to 12 gigabytes, and the memory bandwidth is now up to 120 gigabytes per second, which Apple says, will help users run AI models faster than on older devices. The 16-core neural engine is also supposed to be three times faster than the one in the M1,

which helps with running on-device AI models. The devices are still the same sizes as before. We get a front 12-magixel center stage camera and a 12-migixel-wide camera on the back. As always, you can use Apple accessories with the device, like the Magic keyboard, Apple Pencil, or Apple Pencil Pro. The updated iPad Air will be available for pre-order on Wednesday, March 4th. four finishes are available blue, purple, starlight, and space gray. Storage options are 128 gigabytes, 256 gigabytes, 5, 12, and 1 terabyte, end quote. AWS says its facilities in the Middle East are facing power and connectivity issues after

unidentified objects struck its data center in the UAE. Quoting Reuters, the United Arab Emirates is reeling from Iran's retaliatory missile and drone strikes following U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran. The Iranian strikes hit airports, ports, and residential areas across the country and the wider Gulf. When Reuters asked AWS whether the incident at the data center was connected to the strikes, the company did not confirm or deny. AWS said at around 4.30 a.m. PST, one of our availability zones was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire. According to the company's website, an availability zone is made up of one or more connected physical data centers. These zones are separate.

isolated locations within each AWS region. The fire department cut power to the facility while crews worked to extinguish the fire, AWS said it will take several hours to restore connectivity in the affected zone. The data center operator said, adding that other zones in the UAE are operating normally, end quote. The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear a dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material in a case where a computer scientist was denied a copyright for AI-generated art. Quoting Reuters, plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection

because it did not have a human creator. Thaler of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering a recent entrance to Paradise, a visual art, he said, his AI technology, Dabas created. The image shows train tracks entering a portal surrounded by what appears to be green and purple plant imagery. The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors to be eligible to receive a copyright. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration had urged the Supreme Court not to hear Daler's appeal. The Copyright Office has separately rejected bids for artists for copyright on images generated by the AI system mid-jury. Those artists argued that they were

entitled to copyrights for images they created with AI assistance, unlike Daler, who said his system created a recent entrance to Paradise independently. A federal judge, Judge in Washington upheld the office's decision in Thaler's case in 2023, writing that human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the ruling in 2025. Thaler's lawyers told the Supreme Court in a filing that his case was of paramount importance considering the rapid rise of generative AI. With a refusal by the court to hear the appeal, Thaler's lawyers said, even if it later overturns the copyright office's test in another case, it will be too late. The copyright

Office will have irreversibly and negatively impacted AI development and use in the creative industry during critically important years. Although the Copyright Act does not define the term author multiple provisions of the Act make clear that the term refers to a human rather than a machine, the administration said. The Supreme Court previously rejected Dailor's request to hear his argument in a separate case involving prototypes for a beverage holder and a light beacon concerning whether AI-generated inventions should be eligible for U.S. patent protection as well. applications were rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on similar grounds, end quote. Anthropic has launched a tool to bring a user's preferences and context from other AI platforms to clawed

with one copy-paste command available on all paid plans. Again, it's so weird how the AI wars so often mirror the browser wars of the 1990s. This is like being able to import your favorites and your bookmarks from one browser to another, kind of, quoting a gadget. It. Anthropic has made switching to its Claude AI chatbot easier than ever. The company announced a new memory import tool that can extract all of the competing AI chatbot's memories and context of you into a text prompt that can be fed into Claude. With Anthropics prompt, you can then copy and paste the output into Claude's memories and the AI chatbot will pick up where you left off with another AI chatbot, whether it's chat GPT, Gemini, or co-pilot. Anthropic said it'll take about 24 hours for Claude to assimilate the new context, but you'll be able to see. the change by clicking on the See What Claude Learned About You button. Claude users can even tweak what the AI chatbot remembers in the managed memory section in the app's settings. Anthropic pointed out that Claude is meant to focus on work-related topics to enhance its

effectiveness as a collaborator, adding that it might not remember personal details that are unrelated to work. Anthropics' timing doesn't seem to be just a coincidence. Claude recently jumped to the number one spot in the App Store's free apps chart, dethroning chat GPT in the process. The rise in popularity likely stems from its recent dispute with the Defense Department, where Anthropic refused to budge on AI guardrails related to mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. On the other hand, OpenAI will be taking Anthropics vacated role with the Department of Defense,

leading to a trend of users boycotting chat GPT and canceling their subscriptions, end quote. Yes, more on that in one second. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th,

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More on that in a second. But according to the Atlantic, the talks with Anthropic failed because apparently all the way through to the end of the talks, the Pentagon wanted to use Anthropics AI to analyze bulk data collected about Americans. Quote, according to a source familiar with the negotiations on Friday morning, Anthropic received word that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegzest's team would make a major concession. The Pentagon had kept trying to leave itself little escape hatches in the agreements that it proposed to Anthropic. It would pledge not to use Anthropics AI for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous killing machines, but then qualify those pledges with loophole phrases like, as appropriate,

suggesting that the terms were subject to change based on the administration's interpretation of a given situation. Anthropics team was relieved to hear that the government would be willing to remove those words, but one big problem remained. On Friday afternoon, Anthropic learned that the Pentagon still wanted to use the company's AI to analyze bulk data collected from Americans. That would include information such as the questions you ask your favorite chatbot, your Google search history, your GPS tracked movies, and your credit card transactions, all of which could be cross-referenced with other details about

your life. Anthropics leadership told Hegseh's team that that was a bridge too far, and the deal fell apart. Soon after Hegseh directed the U.S. military's contractors, suppliers, and partners to stop doing business with Anthropic, the list of companies that contract with the military is extensive and includes Amazon, the company that supplies much of Anthropics computing infrastructure. My source, who I am granting anonymity because they are not authorized to talk about the negotiations also shed further light on the disagreement between Anthropic and the Pentagon over autonomous weapons, machines that can select and engage targets without a human making the final call. The U.S. military has been developing these systems for years and has budgeted $13.4 billion for them in fiscal year 2026 alone.

They run the gamut from individual drones to whole swarms that can be used in the air and at sea. According to my source, at one point during the negotiation, it was suggested that this impasse over autonomous weapons could be resolved at the Pentagon would simply promise to keep the company's AI in the cloud and out of the weapons themselves. The argument was that the models could be kept outside so-called edge systems, be they drones or other kinds of autonomous weapons. They might synthesize intelligence before an operation, but they wouldn't actually be making kill decisions. The AI's hands would be clean of any deadly errors that the drones made. But Anthropic wasn't satisfied by this solution.

The company reasoned that in modern military AI architectures, the distinction between the cloud and the edge is no longer all that defined. It's less a wall and more of a gradient. Drones on the battlefield can now be orchestrated through mesh networks that include cloud data centers, and although they're designed to survive on their own, the military's impulse will always be to maintain as much connectivity between them and the most powerful models in the cloud. The better the connection, the more intelligent the machine, end quote.

So as I said, after all of that back and forth, Anthropic dropped out, is out, and Open AI jumped into the breach on terms with the Pentagon that are not entirely clear at the moment. Quoting the verge, on Friday evening amidst fallout from a standoff between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that his own company had successfully negotiated new terms with the Pentagon. The U.S. government had just moved to Blacklist Anthropic for standing firm on two red lines for military. use, no mass surveillance of Americans, and no lethal autonomous weapons, or AI systems with the power to kill targets without human oversight. Altman, however, implied that he'd found a unique way to keep those same limits in OpenAI's contract. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapons systems, Altman wrote. The Department of War agrees with these principles, reflects them in

law and policy, and we put them into our agreement, he added, using the Trump administration's preferred name for the Department of Defense, the Department of War. Across social media and the AI industry, people immediately began to challenge Altman's claim. Why they asked, would the Pentagon suddenly agree to those red lines when it had said in no uncertain terms they would never do so? The answer, sources told the Verge, is that the Pentagon didn't budge. Open AI agreed to follow laws that have allowed for mass surveillance in the past while insisting they still protect its red lines. One source familiar with the Pentagon's negotiations with AI companies confirm that OpenAI's deal is much softer than the one Anthropic was pushing for thanks largely to three words,

any lawful use. In negotiations, the person said the Pentagon wouldn't back down on its desire to collect and analyze bulk data on Americans. If you look line by line at the Open AI terms, the source said every aspect of it boils down to if it's technically legal, then the U.S. military can use Open AIs technology to carry it out. And over the past decades, the U.S. government has stretched the definition of technically legal to cover sweeping mass surveillance programs and more. In a statement to the verge, Open AI spokesperson Kate Waters said the Pentagon had not asked for mass surveillance powers and denied that the government allowed for the crossing of certain lines. The system cannot be used to collect or analyze Americans' data in a bulk open-ended

or generalized way, Waters said. AI systems could help the military or other departments conduct widespread surveillance operations with unprecedented levels of detail. AI's best talent is finding patterns and human behavior is nothing, if not, a set of patterns. Imagine an AI system layering for any one individual geolocation data, web browsing information, personal financial data, CCTV footage, voter registration records, and more, some publicly available, some purchased from data brokers. Using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. Dario Amadai, CEO of Anthropic, wrote in a statement, Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered,

individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person's life, automatically and at massive scale, end quote. Anthropics Amadai has publicly said that the law had not yet caught up with AI's ability to conduct surveillance on a massive scale, and Sam Altman takes pains in his statement to say that Open AIs contract, quote, reflects its red lines in law and policy, meaning that it's simply abiding by existence, laws and existing Pentagon policies, the latter of which can change at any time.

The Intelligence Law section of this is very persuasive if you don't realize that every bad intelligence scandal in the last 30 years had a legal memo saying it complied with those authorities. Palisade researchers Dave Kasten wrote of Open AIs Agreement, end quote. Nothing additional for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. Today's lesson is on the Argo Rewards app. Try to stay with me. The fundamentals are simple. Earn at least five cents a gallon in rewards, then redeem them later for up to a dollar off every gallon.

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