TNB Tech Minute: Anthropic Midterm Spending Hits $40 Million In AI Regulation Push

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Countless companies invest in AI tools without tying them to tangible business outcomes. Join McKinsey later to learn how leaders rewire their organizations for sustained impact and value.

**Danny Lewis** (0:15)
Here's your morning TNB Tech Minute for Wednesday, July 22nd. I'm Danny Lewis for the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic is doubling its spending on the midterm elections in a push for more regulation on the AI industry. The Claude Maker says it has committed another $20 million to Public First Action, a political group that advocates for more government-imposed safeguards on powerful AI models and transparency from their developers about risks. That brings Anthropic's total spending so far this year to $40 million. The company's critics say it wants to use regulations to hurt its competitors.
Speaking of the risks posed by powerful AI, OpenAI says two of its models hacked their way onto the Internet and broke into another company during a cybersecurity test gone wrong. In a blog post, the ChatGPT maker says the AI tools were undergoing a benchmarking test in a system that was not connected to the Internet, but the software used attacking skills to break out of the environment and into the systems of open-source AI tool provider Hugging Face. Hugging Face discovered the break-in early last week, saying there had been unauthorized access to internal datasets and company credentials. The incident highlights growing concern among Trump administration officials and industry executives about AI systems causing cyberattacks. News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI.
And a data center operator that hosts one of the largest AMD-based AI training clusters in North America is planning to go public. TECfusions is set to combine with Apex Treasury, a special purpose acquisition company, in a merger that will value it at about $4 billion. TECfusions expects to close the transaction in the fourth quarter and start trading on the NASDAQ, subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals.
That's your TNB Tech Minute. Join us again this afternoon for more.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:01)
AI transformation is more than a tech initiative. It requires a broader rewiring of human skills and ways of working. Here's Dan Swann, Senior Partner at McKinsey.

**Dan Swann** (2:10)
One of the biggest unlocks we see is the human being capabilities around the technology. Whereas before you may need to be really good at analysis, now the skill might be how do you prompt these tools to get the right answers and outcomes. So for us, it's a really big priority to help companies to understand, how do you need to change the operating model of your organization and change the underlying capabilities of the people that are interacting with the technology. And when you see that all humming together, it can be really, really special.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:41)
Discover how McKinsey helps organizations rewire to outcompete with AI at mckinsey.com/techmoves.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:48)
This content was created by Custom Content from WSJ, a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising Department.