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OpenBSD 8.0 has been released with major virtualization and hardware upgrades, including support for up to 64 vCPUs per VM, Intel Arc graphics, ARM64 hibernation, and expanded RISC-V support. Linuxiac points out that it marks the "61st release of the security-focused Unix-like operating system." From the report: Several fixes improve compatibility with 32-bit Linux guests, while changes to virtual machine ownership management and interrupt emulation make the virtualization infrastructure more capable. Graphics support has also been upgraded, with DRM drivers updated to those from Linux kernel 6.18.53. Notably, OpenBSD 8.0 adds support for Intel Arc A-Series (Alchemist) graphics cards through the inteldrm driver. Another important change increases the amd64 kernel's virtual address space from 4 GB to 512 GB, allowing the system to map over 4 GB of video memory. The release also addresses GPU timeout issues affecting some Intel Alder Lake systems. [...] For security, OpenBSD 8.0 adds checks and fixes across the kernel and system utilities, including improvements to pledge and unveil, tighter validation of executable files, and protections against memory corruption and information disclosure. A full list of changes can be found here. Further reading: Wine Ported to OpenBSD

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Security researchers say Meta's Muse AI assistant exposed thousands of users' shared conversations because conversation titles were placed in subdomains that could be discovered through public DNS records. Meta has since suspended the sharing feature while it considers making changes. Ars Technica reports: Like many online services, Muse has allowed users to share searches, conversations, images, and similar content with other people. Such share features usually involve clicking an option to create a unique URL that anyone can use to load a page hosting the content. To keep potentially sensitive information from being accessible to unintended people, the URLs typically contain a long sequence of text that can't be easily guessed. Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was "built from the ground up for privacy and security," seems to take the same precautions. But a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover. As a result, researchers from security firm Claroc said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links Muse users created for sharing conversations with others. After opening a few hundred of them, the researchers found information that was clearly not intended to be publicly available... [...]. "If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort," the researchers wrote. "It took one query." [...] The easiest way to discover the URLs is to perform a passive DNS search through one of many available commercial services. Passive DNS records store the historical resolution of domain names to IP addresses, as well as nameserver, and mail-server records over time. Passive DNS systems typically collect DNS responses from sensors positioned at recursive DNS resolvers or other infrastructure. A passive DNS record is generally created when a monitoring system observes a DNS response. In the case here, once the intended party clicks on the share link, the DNS information is recorded in a searchable database. Claroc researchers were able to discover the Muse share links because all of them use the domain name cf.metaaiusercontent.com. Discovery is further made easy by the decision to add the conversation name to the URL, along with a long string of text. Simplified examples of such links are home-sale-budget-9f21c8a3.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, and loan-application-draft-a4c9e2.cf.metaaiusercontent.com. It's this last design decision, putting the conversation title in the subdomain rather than in the URL path, that makes public discovery possible.

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The Trump administration has banned DeepSeek AI from most US civilian federal agencies, ordering the removal of the Chinese company's models and technology developed using them. The Department of Homeland Security did not specify the security threats behind the decision. The BBC reports: The order (PDF) is broad, as it requires agencies to ditch "all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations." Complying will be tricky as it is not clear which third-party products and services have been developed using DeepSeek's wares. Nor is it clear whether "developed using" means providing ongoing access to DeepSeek models via API or simply refers to any app vibe-coded with the help of DeepSeek. It also leaves open the question of AI gateways. Services such as OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway make DeepSeek's models available through APIs. And those using gateway services may find themselves using DeepSeek models without meaning to do so. OpenRouter, for example, "routes requests to the best available providers for your model." It selects what the service deems to be the best fit provider of AI services. Vercel AI Gateway does the same by default. So federal civilian agencies could be using DeepSeek models inadvertently, if they haven't taken steps to constrain their AI providers.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Nscale is in talks to sell AI computing power to Claude maker Anthropic in a new deal that could be worth about $45 billion, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday. The data center developer is seeking another major deal with the AI lab for a second facility at its Monarch data center campus in West Virginia, the person said. In August, Anthropic struck a deal to spend $45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale's West Virginia data center campus. A second Monarch building would deliver 460 megawatts of computing power using Nvidia's advanced Vera Rubin AI chips, according to the source. [...] According to the Nscale prospectus, Microsoft and Anthropic are expected to be the company's major customers in the future. Further reading: Microsoft Abandons UK AI Supercomputer As Grid Struggles to Keep Up

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Version:next-20261020 (linux-next) Released:2026-10-20

Time for a new Crosswords release! This is a good one. This past cycle features two major changes: the game got a major visual overhaul, and the Acrostic Editor is no longer in Beta.

This release is dedicated to Luciana. She contributed the adorable artwork for libipuz, and is a budding cruciverbalist. She’s currently having a bit of a tough go of it healthwise, so please join me in sending her good wishes. We’re all rooting for you!

New Game Layout

The game mode got a complete rework this cycle. We moved the Across /Down labels into the header, and added independent header bars for each column. This work was designed by “gnoman”, who did a fabulous initial mockup, and then provided a lot of additional feedback as we iterated through possibilities. The end result looks so much better than before, and is orders of magnitude better than anything I dreamed of when I started this project.

Initial mockup from “gnoman”

Every aspect of the game looks better, especially single-column mode. That now has a bottom drawer for the clues. Take a look at how it resizes:

https://blogs.gnome.org/jrb/files/2026/10/Screencast-From-2026-10-19-16-36-11.webm

I had to heavily adjust the reflow animation to deal with the updated appearance. For better or worse, this layout cannot be done with stock GTK/libadwaita containers and needs a complex custom layout widget. It’s a pain to edit, but it also means that we control every stage of the animation process. We handle things from reparenting buttons to panel changes.  The direction switching even cross-fades between the label and the toggle instead of snapping. It’s a small thing, but it makes the whole animation silky smooth.

“Gnoman” also contributed animated SVGs for the “How to Play” dialog. Florian migrated us to the new GTK SVG animation framework, and we’ve ended up with an even slicker, charming intro screen.

Acrostic Editor Is No Longer Beta

A few years ago, Tanmay added acrostic support to the game. This puzzle type was fun-looking! But since we didn’t have a ready source of them, he started working on editor so we could write our own. He got something basic working but it wasn’t reliably usable. The problem was the grid autofill feature: it was just too slow. It worked by doing a DFS through the possible anagrams with a random answer shape. Sometimes it found results, most of the time it did not.

This cycle, I went back to try and fix it and now have something usable. As sometimes is the case, the trick to get it working turned out to be really simple: We just had to try a new random shape after 30K iterations or so. It was a small change to the code — just a counter. But we ended up with something that could find grids with regularity.

Once that started working I went back and fixed up the rest of the workflow. The Quote/Source entries are now instant apply and you can manually edit entries in the list. There’s an info panel that gives acrostic stats and an overlay pane to mark progress. It looks a lot better — and works! I’ve used it to create three acrostics already and have more coming. Take a look:

https://blogs.gnome.org/jrb/files/2026/10/Screencast-From-2026-10-19-18-14-20.webm New Generic Widgets

As part of working on the Acrostic Editor, I wrote some new widgets. These are not crosswords-specific, and are written so that people can cut-and-paste them into their app (if it’s GPLv3 compatible). They’re targeted for internal use but maybe would be useful for others.

The more interesting of the two is XwdRichTextRow. It’s an alternative for AdwEntryRow that uses a GtkTextView instead of a GtkEntry. It has two features that the libadwaita widget doesn’t:

• An :n-rows property to set the number of visible rows. If set to 1, it matches the pixel extents of AdwEntryRow. But larger numbers will provide additional lines of editable space. A vertical scrollbar is provided once the row count gets large enough.
• Rich text editing. It supports bold, italic, strikethrough etc, and provides a convertor from pango markup to-and-from the widget. I wrote it in such a way that a markdown convertor could be written as well.

It’s not as comprehensive as AdwEntryRow yet: it doesn’t support prefix/suffix widgets, emojis, or an apply button, and there are probably a lot of bugs. It also will never support GtkEditable, due to the GtkTextBuffer underpinnings. But it may be useful and fill a niche that I, at least, have felt a void for a while.

https://blogs.gnome.org/jrb/files/2026/10/Screencast-From-2026-10-19-16-05-18.webm

I also wrote XwdInfoButton, which is basically a simple menu button that creates explanatory popovers. It should be used sparingly, but for a really complex app like the editor I think it can help demystify some sections. It takes a markdown string as its format.

Info Popover

Let me know if you have any interest in using these widgets.

Non-Distro Builds, And a Plea For Help

Crosswords has built on macOS for a while thanks to Vinny’s heroics, but nothing stopped us from breaking it. He’s fixed that: we now have a macOS arm64 CI job, building against Homebrew with Apple clang. Now macOS-specific errors can be caught at commit time.

Vinny also provided an MR for building bundles as part of the build process! I’d love to have bundles available to go with the flatpaks we create. However, I have neither a Mac to test on, nor the skills to evaluate this MR. I would deeply appreciate if anyone can help test and evaluate this!

Crosswords running on a Mac

Florian also did another build of Crosswords for Android and created another APK. It’s still pretty buggy, but it’s significantly better than the previous release. I think we can get it usable with a little more effort.

Android Build Other Features

A grab bag of the rest:

• The metadata tab now has rich text editing throughout and was reorganized into a vertical layout.
• The  Language and Country rows let you set the puzzle’s $LANG and Charset. A new layer warns about letters that aren’t in the alphabet. It was shockingly complex to write.

Rows for setting $LANG

• Word lists now show synonyms in clue definitions.

Definition and synonyms of “RAISE”

• The Editor preview window uses the real game widget.
• We enabled large text for printing. Toluwaleke did most of the work already a few releases back, it just needed a template.
• Added support for the Czech CH digraph, mirroring the existing Dutch IJ digraph.
• Laureen has been steadily working on a grid generator for vocab puzzles. None of it is visible yet — it’s all generator code — but it’s a solid basis for the next game type.
• I fixed a massive leak with all the PuzzleTasks. Turns out we weren’t freeing them at all due to a ref loop. Not a big deal with the normal autofill behavior, but once we started running it every keypress the leak grew fast.

Thanks!

This release, thanks to:

• Rosanna for tireless help with UI word-smithing and editing, as well as endless patience.
• “Gnoman” for the amazing design for the revamped play mode, the animated SVGs, and general design support.
• Tobias for design support and advice throughout the Circle process.
• Florian for the port to GTK4’s new SVG widget and other fixes.
• Vinny for macOS input method support and the macOS arm64 CI job, and in general amazing build gardening.
• Michel for build and license advice.
• Laureen for continued work on the vocab editor.
• Federico for general advice.
• Alice for general advice, and for fixing my issues with libadwaita.
• Eleanor, Sophia, Michael, and Rosanna for puzzle play-testing (coming soon!)

Peace

Microsoft has reportedly abandoned plans to serve as the anchor customer for Britain's largest proposed AI supercomputer after learning that the project's Essex data center might not receive sufficient grid power until the early to mid-2030s. "Its departure leaves Nscale without a publicly announced customer for the site, although the neocloud insists the project is still going ahead," reports The Register. From the report: When the deal was announced in September 2025, the plan was to pack 23,040 Nvidia GB300 GPUs into a 50MW facility, with room to expand to 90MW. Microsoft would use the computing power for its Azure cloud services, with the first chips expected in early 2027. One important detail remained: how to power it. As The Guardian reported last month, UK Power Networks warned Nscale that the grid capacity needed might not be available until the 2030s. A UK Power Networks spokesperson told The Register it could not discuss individual connections due to obligations under Section 105 of the Utilities Act. "However, in general, many datacenters, whilst they can connect to our distribution network, are awaiting works on the national transmission network which we do not own," the spokesperson said. Nscale, meanwhile, isn't letting the small matter of losing its biggest customer dampen its enthusiasm. "We remain committed to both the Loughton project and the UK and we are exploring alternative power sources for the site, in addition to other expansion sites in the UK. Our relationship with Microsoft remains strong and long-term, and this unfortunate London-wide grid issue has no impact on our other contracts," Nscale told The Register.

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Japan has successfully launched its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission to study Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Scheduled to arrive in August 2027, "MMX will become the first spacecraft to land on and return samples from Phobos for study back on Earth, which scientists think could shed light on a decades-old mystery about the moons' origins" and resolve whether they were formed from a giant impact or were captured asteroids, reports Space.com. From the report: It was the 10th liftoff of Japan's expendable, two-stage H3 rocket, which was jointly developed by JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. After clearing its launch pad today, the 207-foot-tall (63 meters) launch vehicle flew a nominal trajectory through its ascent corridor over the Pacific Ocean, jettisoning its four solid boosters in pairs just before the flight clock reached two minutes. The rocket shed its payload fairings about one minute and 20 seconds later, exposing MMX to the vacuum of space for the first time. [...] MMX is now under its own power, and on course for Mars. The interplanetary transit will last about 10 months, with the spacecraft scheduled to arrive at the Red Planet in August 2027. When it does, MMX's propulsion module will execute an orbital insertion burn to place itself in a quasi-satellite orbit (QSO) around Phobos, which places MMX within the space around the moon as both circle Mars. MMX will spend about three years in the Martian system, devoting much of that time to studying the 14-mile-wide (22 km) Phobos with its science instruments. The spacecraft also carries the IDEFIX rover, a joint effort of the space agencies of France and Germany, which is scheduled to deploy to the surface of Phobos in late 2028 or early 2029. After a mapping campaign to select suitable landing sites, MMX will perform two separate touchdowns on Phobos to collect and stow samples in the spacecraft's return capsule. Following its second landing and sample collection, MMX will briefly return to QSO with Phobos before transferring to a more elongated orbit around Mars that intersects with the planet's smaller moon, Deimos, which is just 8 miles (14 km) in diameter. During the last several months of its time around Mars, MMX will perform a series of Deimos flybys before departing for Earth in November 2030. If all goes according to plan, the MMX sample-return capsule will land in Australia in 2031. You can watch a recording of the launch on YouTube.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon is funding development of a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana and would be the first customer to buy its power, the companies announced Monday. Utility company American Electric Power (AEP) would operate the plant. X-energy, which designs small modular nuclear reactors and went public in April, would supply the reactors. The new power plant would consist of 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors and be located on the site of a demolished coal power plant just south of Terre Haute. The deal is the second commercial agreement between Amazon and X-energy, and it's three times larger than the first, which was announced two years ago. Amazon has invested heavily in X-energy, leading a $700 million Series C-1 round in October 2024. The two companies have said they ultimately plan to build 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity in the U.S. by 2039. Unlike many newly announced power plants, these reactors would be connected to the public electric grid, though Amazon says the power would also serve its data centers. The companies' aggressive timeline still depends on X-energy successfully delivering its first power plant at a Dow Chemical plant southeast of Houston, Texas. The site, called Seadrift, has recently been at the center of a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas, which accuses the plant of "habitual non-compliance" with water and solid-waste regulations and permits. X-energy has yet to break ground at Seadrift, which will host four Xe-100 reactors to provide the chemical plant with heat and electricity. The company said its construction permit is in the final phases of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's review process.

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Linux researcher Hyunwoo Kim has shown five ways to turn a limited account into root on tested Linux systems.

joshuark writes: Professor Christopher Marquis makes a provocative argument about business schools: "We need to abolish them." A 20-year business educator at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge, Marquis argues in The New York Times and on LinkedIn that MBA programs sanctify profit-driven dealmaking at the expense of public life. "That's not the institution failing," he writes. "Sadly, it's the institution working." "Business school doesn't just hand out skills and a network," argues Marquis, "it quietly reshapes how people see the world, rewarding dealmaking, simplification, and optimization for financial metrics, while workers and communities become afterthoughts." Marquis points to research suggesting that business-school-trained CEOs often benefit shareholders at the expense of workers, without delivering measurable improvements in company performance... "[W]hen a business-school-trained CEO takes over a firm, wages fall and labor's share of income drops, with no gain in productivity," writes Marquis. "In both the U.S. and Denmark, what passes for the 'managerial skill' of business-school graduates turns out to be a transfer of wealth away from workers and toward shareholders. Students deserve better than a machine that narrows their sense of what's possible."

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Attackers broke into BeyondTrust Remote Support before a patch was ready, then left ways to return to the server.

TP-Link plans to begin assembling routers in Mississippi as early as 2027 after the FCC banned imports of new foreign-made consumer routers over security concerns. Engadget reports: The company has signed a letter of intent with manufacturer Key Tronic and, pending approval from regulators, TP-Link says stateside assembly of its routers could start at a Mississippi production line as soon as early 2027. Once things are up and running, Wi-Fi 8 routers are expected to be among the first TP-Link products that Key Tronic assembles. TP-Link claims that the agreement is part of its "long-term effort to accelerate US investment in high-tech manufacturing and job creation, designing and assembling next-generation products for American consumers here on American soil." The company said it will still have to source components from outside the US. "Many [components] are just not available from a domestic source, and this is not a TP-Link issue," TP-Link's corporate affairs officer Steve Kovsky told PC Mag. "This is an issue for all manufacturers that are trying to onshore manufacturing."

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An artificial intelligence (AI) scanner helped find 28 security flaws in Apache Camel that led to fixes.

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from ProPublica: A few months into President Donald Trump's second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wanted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it. The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request. The proposition was shocking to CISA's career staffers, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference. "My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don't like," one of the former officials said. "This goes against everything CISA represents." [Or, perhaps do something worse?] The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA. Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation's voting systems.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: A hacker broke into more than 100 websites using an army of AI agents that mostly operated on their own, according to findings from the AI security firm Norforge. Though Norforge doesn't name the targets, Reuters reports that the victims included companies like John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins. [...] Researchers at Norforge uncovered the attacks through exposed work on Cairn, an open-source AI platform that describes itself as a "general-purpose problem-solving engine." With Cairn, users set a start and end point for the AI agents, which document their progress as they move forward with the task. However, as noted by Norforge, hackers can also use the tool to orchestrate cyberattacks using AI agents. The hacker who broke into more than 100 sites was the "most active" among the exposed Cairn instances discovered by Norforge, waging attacks on companies based in the US, Canada, Australia, and Japan, as reported by Reuters. This attacker laid out "preferred intrusion tactics" using fewer than 100 Chinese characters, with successful breaches taking about 23 hours, according to Reuters. Overall, Nordforge found more than 20 exposed Cairn instances that are "likely malicious." A John Deere spokesperson said there is "no indication that sensitive information was accessed" as a result of the attack, while Cummins said it's "investigating the report of a potential cyber-attack on a website operated by one of our third-party vendors." Meanwhile, SharkNinja says the breach impacted a standalone site with product support information, and that it has contained the threat.

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Following its October 13 HomeView launch, Apple is gearing up for its second hardware event of the month. The event is scheduled for October 28 in Los Angeles and carries the tagline "Pro and tell." 9to5Mac reports: Rumors say Apple has a slew of new products to announce at its next event, headlining by its first MacBook Pro with a touchscreen and OLED. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, here's what's on the docket: - New 14-inch and 16-inch touchscreen MacBook Pro models with OLED displays. They will also have a Dynamic Island for the first time and will be "significantly lighter" than the current models. The new MacBook Pro models are expected to be powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. - A revamped iPad mini with an OLED screen, a "revamped speaker system," and a relocated FaceTime camera - New iMac and entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro models powered by the M6 chip, which will "look like their current versions."

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Florida's DMV says a September 4 breach exposed driver's license and motor vehicle records after attackers obtained credentials that a local law-enforcement employee had "improperly stored on an electronic device." The ShinyHunters group has been linked to the intrusion. Ars Technica reports: In a notice posted Friday, [Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV)] confirmed that it took "immediate steps" after discovering that "a malicious actor accessed certain department records on September 4, 2026, using compromised credentials." There's "no evidence" that data has yet been misused, the department said, but law enforcement "determined the information potentially affected includes driver license and motor vehicle data, to include document images, and other personal information." [...] On a webpage describing the security incident, FLHSMV confirmed that an "international cybercriminal organization" was behind the breach but did not specify which group or how long they had access. Instead, officials claimed to have "promptly mitigated the breach, launched an investigation, and issued required notification to state authorities." Mitigations included "blocking unauthorized access, resetting relevant user credentials, engaging cybersecurity professionals, and implementing additional safeguards to protect sensitive information," FLHSMV said. Florida's investigation is "ongoing," officials said, but a cybercriminal group called ShinyHunters -- which recently claimed credit for hacking the FBI -- may have stolen the data. Florida residents affected by the breach will receive a letter offering one year of free credit monitoring through Sontiq, Inc. Those whose contact information is outdated can email the FLHSMV at customerinquiry@flhsmv.gov to determine whether their data was compromised.

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Version:next-20261019 (linux-next) Released:2026-10-19

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Elon Musk has said he will give every child in America a stake in SpaceX, his $2 trillion aerospace and artificial intelligence company, as tech firms face intensifying scrutiny over their impact on society. "Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America," he wrote on X on Monday. "This will be the first of many." SpaceX only began trading publicly in June (and after the biggest initial public offering in history). The company's shares were trading for about $146 when the market closed on Friday. Musk's proposal was thin on detail. It is not clear how those shares would be distributed to the tens of millions of American children or whether all of them would even be eligible. According to the United States Census Bureau, there are roughly 73 million people under the age of 18, making Musk's potential giveaway worth about $10.7 billion at SpaceX's current share price. The move came in response to Anthropic's announcement on Sunday that it will commit at least 5% of its shares to a "Public Benefit Fund" that will donate money to social causes. "I recommend giving the shares directly to the public," Musk said in a reply to Anthropic's announcement. "This is what I will be doing."

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