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Beginners in AI
Good morning and thank you for joining us again!
Welcome to this daily edition of Beginners in AI, where we explore the latest trends, tools, and news in the world of AI and the tech that surrounds it. Like all editions, this is human curated and edited, and published with the intention of making AI news and technology more accessible to everyone.
THE FRONT PAGE
DeepSeek Users Thought They Were Using DeepSeek. Anthropic Counted 12 Million Requests
TLDR: Anthropic says two Chinese AI companies, Moonshot and DeepSeek, sent their own users' questions over to Claude and showed people the answers as if their own chatbots had written them.
The Story:
Anthropic published a 154-page threat report on Thursday. In it, the company says Moonshot, the maker of the Kimi chatbot, passed close to 300,000 customer requests to Claude during one 10-day window, most of them to Claude Opus models. Anthropic doesn't allow access from inside China, so it says Moonshot got in through 5,380 accounts it describes as fake, with most set up in Singapore and Japan.
The report says DeepSeek did something similar, and Anthropic counted more than 12 million attempts over 14 days in July. Both cases fall under what the industry calls distillation, where one company uses a stronger model's answers to train its own. Moonshot, DeepSeek and Xiaomi didn't reply to reporters asking for comment. China's Commerce Ministry has said earlier claims like these have no factual or legal basis.
Its Significance:
These are one company's claims about its competitors, and the other side hasn't answered them yet. If the report holds up, users typed questions into one chatbot and those words traveled somewhere they didn't expect. Anthropic says some of the requests carried sensitive details from individuals, big companies, and accounts tied to governments in other countries.
QUICK TAKES
The story: A new paper from the Bank for International Settlements says AI has shrunk the time between someone finding a software flaw and someone using it, from weeks down to minutes. Regulators in Germany, Hong Kong and the UK are already pushing banks to patch faster, even outside their normal maintenance windows.
Your takeaway: Your bank's monthly update schedule was built for a slower world. What stands out in the paper is that the slow step isn't writing the fix anymore. It's the meeting where someone signs off on it.
The story: UMG signed a multi-year licensing deal with ElevenLabs to build an app where fans can remix, mash up and reinterpret songs from artists who opt in. It's ElevenLabs' first agreement with a major label, and the app will be separate from the company's existing ElevenMusic product.
Your takeaway: Labels spent two years suing AI music companies. Now they're renting them the catalog. If you've ever wanted to build a mashup without a takedown notice waiting for you, that door is opening, though nobody has said when it opens or what it costs.
The story: Google Labs opened Dreambeans to all U.S. accounts 18 and older on Android and iOS. The app builds a small daily set of personal stories from the Google apps you connect, and Gemini just joined that list alongside Gmail, Calendar, Photos, Search and YouTube.
Your takeaway: Watch the Photos piece. Google says the app can work pictures of you and your family into the stories it writes. That's a short hop from a written story to a show or a movie where you're one of the characters, and I'd put money on that being the destination. Good moment to decide which apps you're willing to hand over.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🤝 Capsule CRM Freemium: Track contacts, deals, and tasks in a clean pipeline view, the free plan holds up to 250 contacts for 2 users, no time limit.
⚔️ Habitica Freemium: Turn your habits and to-dos into a role-playing game, gain gold and experience for real tasks, lose health for skipped ones. The core game stays free and ad-free forever, the paid tier only adds cosmetics.
🌐 Webflow Freemium: Design and publish a fully custom website visually, no template constraints, the free Starter plan never expires but caps at 2 pages and a webflow.io subdomain.
📋 Trello Freemium: Organize projects on kanban boards with unlimited cards and unlimited users, the free plan holds up to 10 boards per workspace.
TRENDING
OpenAI Stopped Selling Its $200 Pro Plan
Demand for Astra, the model OpenAI launched on September 3, loaded up the company's servers enough that new Pro sign-ups are switched off. Product lead Thibault Sottiaux said Pro puts the most strain on their systems and called the pause the smallest step they could take. Existing Pro accounts still work, and so do Go, Plus and the API.
Meta's Muse Is the No. 2 App in the U.S.
Sensor Tower counted more than 83,000 iOS downloads for Meta's new AI agent app, moving it from fourth to second on the App Store chart. Threads pulled 4.3 million U.S. downloads on its first day, so the bar here is lower than the ranking suggests. Muse also shipped days after Meta agreed to an $18 billion multistate settlement over social media harms.
Anthropic Says It Blocked People Using Claude for Bioweapon Research
The same threat report lists accounts the company cut off for cyberattacks, surveillance, and biology research that could be turned into weapons. One blocked request asked for help writing a grant application for gain-of-function work on the chikungunya virus. Across 30 days of activity, Anthropic says it flagged about 35 separate research efforts worth worrying about.
A Robot Learned to Sprint, Kick and Cartwheel From 2.5 Hours of Human Motion
Researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford built a system called BeyondMimic and ran 30 motion clips on a Unitree G1 robot. One training recipe covered sprinting, spin kicks, crawling, dancing and aerial cartwheels, instead of engineers hand-tuning one trick at a time. In a 77-person study, viewers called the robot's movement more humanlike than Unitree's own controller in 70.8% of comparisons.
NASA and IBM Put a Moon-Mapping AI Online for Free
The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model trained on more than 30 data layers from nine instruments across four missions. NASA and IBM say it cuts errors on likely ice spots by up to 22% and maps craters about 19% better, using half the labeled training data. Anyone can download it from Hugging Face, with the code on GitHub.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🏛️ Name a place. Get the real property tax rate, state income tax, sales tax, and cost of living, all in one snapshot.
Build a single-file HTML app with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The Cost of Living & Tax Snapshot — name a location, get real property tax, state income tax, sales tax, and cost-of-living data via live web search. No API key needed.
Aesthetic: dark navy (#0e1420), steel teal (#4a9ca8) primary with a teal glow top-left, gold (#d4a24c) secondary for dollar estimates with a glow bottom-right. Inter throughout for a clean civic/spec-sheet feel, JetBrains Mono for labels.
Form: city/state text input, optional home-value number input, optional household-income number input.
Technical: call the Anthropic Messages API WITH tools:[{type:'web_search_20250305', name:'web_search'}] (works automatically), system prompt as a state/local tax and cost-of-living researcher who finds real current published figures (state income tax structure, average effective property tax rate, combined sales tax rate, a published cost-of-living index like MERIC's), grounding every number in real data, never inventing one, explicit that these are general averages not personalized figures. Return raw JSON: location_confirmed, state_income_tax_desc, state_income_tax_rate_percent (single representative number for rough estimation), property_tax_rate_percent (real average), sales_tax_desc, cost_of_living_index, notable_factors (3-4), data_caveat.
Client-side: if home value given, propertyTaxDollar = homeValue × (property_tax_rate_percent/100); if income given, incomeTaxDollar = income × (state_income_tax_rate_percent/100) — both labeled "rough estimate."
Render: a location header. A gradient cost-of-living-index hero card. A stat grid (state income tax rate + optional dollar estimate, property tax rate + optional dollar estimate, sales tax rate). A "worth knowing" factors card. A persistent caveat line noting these are general averages, not personalized tax figures.What this does: Enter a city and state and it searches the live web for real, currently published figures: the state's income tax structure, the average effective property tax rate for that area, combined sales tax, and a published cost-of-living index relative to the national average. Optionally add a home value or household income and it computes a rough dollar estimate for property tax and state income tax using the real rates found, clearly labeled as approximate.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: find a software flaw and start using it within minutes, according to the BIS paper.
❌ Still Can't: speed up the human approval chain that has to sign off before the fix ships, which is the exact step regulators are leaning on.
✅ AI Can Now: point to where ice most likely sits under the Moon's dark polar craters, with 22% less error than the best tool before it.
❌ Still Can't: prove any of it is there. Nobody has measured lunar ice on the ground yet.
FROM THE WEB
This is part three of our Practical AI Agents series where you can follow along to build useful agents. Text them like you would a regular person and see how they communicate with each other when you put them on teams. This current team is focused on health and wellness.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Android (1982) - Movie
Klaus Kinski plays a reclusive scientist running illegal robotics experiments alone on a remote space station, assisted by his own creation, an android named Max who is far more curious about human life than his creator ever intended. Made by Roger Corman's studio for almost nothing, and the London press called it the sleeper of the year on release. Max is one of the more charming and unexpectedly soulful robot characters of early 80s sci-fi, and the film's low budget forces real ingenuity onto the screen.
Exploring AI Voice With SuperBloom
For Deel's "Feeling of Deeling" campaign, agency SuperBloom needed one consistent brand voice across markets—deployed fast, without sacrificing quality or consent. In this on-demand video session, SuperBloom and Voices break down the casting, production, and governance, plus what they'd do differently and where AI voice is headed next.
Thank you for reading. We’re all beginners in something. With that in mind, your questions and feedback are always welcome and I read every single email!
-James
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