SITUATION UPDATE: Following GMO Internet's refusal to pay a $50M ransom, the hackers behind the breach have promised to trigger ransomware covertly planted on customers' PCs via the cloud. GMO is urging users to unplug network cables, and power off their PCs before noon today.

I think this article gives a glimpse into what law firms actually expect and need from their ai vendors. Also shows the actual value of vertical legal ai tools (vs general purpose ai tools). I’ve heard that in order to get Anthropic’s attention, law firms and enterprises need to pay a minimum of a few tens of millions of dollars a year. “Attendees were accustomed to legal tech startups making well-tailored pitches on how they would train attorneys to use their products and address law firms’ needs for data privacy and work-product accuracy. What they heard in August was that Anthropic won’t let them negotiate key contract terms around privacy and data security unless they commit to a minimum amount of spending. They also left with the impression they’re more or less on their own for training, according to three sources who attended the meeting.” “Innovation leaders said Anthropic doesn’t offer as many ready-to-use tools as those vendors or as much training. Another attendee said without the support of Anthropic, his firm might have to pay consultants to train its attorneys.” “The primary takeaway from that meeting was that unlike a lot of other legal tech vendors, there was a strong sense that we as an industry probably don’t rate significantly high on Anthropic’s universe of expected revenue, and therefore the level of attention that we would get as an industry is relatively low,” “Bigger firms may have the resources to implement Claude themselves, but smaller firms lack the resources to do that, said Alex Finkel, chief innovation officer at Offit Kurman. Firms like his are looking for vendors that provide pre-built workflows, trainers and AI experts. Anthropic is still in the process of building that infrastructure, Finkel said.” news.bloomberglaw.com/legal-…

Researchers proved every LLM is secretly obsessed with Japan. And they finally figured out why. They published a paper investigating hidden cultural biases in large language models. they tested 31,000 questions across 24 different languages on models like gemini, chatgpt, claude, and llama. they stripped out all geographic hints and just asked the models to pick a place and answer. the finding was universal.. across a wide range of models and languages, there is a pervasive "obsession" with japanese culture. even when you prompt them in a language with zero ties to japan, they default to japanese norms, values, and aesthetics at a disproportionately high rate compared to its actual global demographic weight. the craziest part? they tracked down exactly when the ai develops this obsession.. and it is not from reading the raw internet. during pre-training, the models actually have a fairly balanced, global view of the world. the obsession gets injected during the safety phase. when tech companies fine-tune these models to be "helpful, harmless, and polite," the ai starts mapping those corporate safety guidelines directly onto japanese cultural concepts. in the pursuit of creating the perfect, inoffensive, compliant assistant, they warped how the models view the world. the quantization process (compressing models to run faster locally) actually amplifies this determinism. the smaller and faster your local model is, the more stereotypically it behaves, causing japanese cultural tropes to spike hard. we spend all this time worrying about existential ai safety, but the real alignment problem is that our most advanced reasoning engines are hyper-fixated on japanese internet culture. every model upgrade is reinforcing an invisible regional bias that dictates how they generate stories, facts, and code. the cultural commonsense of the internet is not universal.. it’s just localized to whatever the heaviest reddit and anime wiki users were obsessed with.

Law folks: If you’re not using Claude Code or ChatGPT’s Codex, you have no idea what you’re missing. So I’m distributing my research tools that provide a huge boost to legal scholarship. Research assistance, cite-checking, proofreading, and more (thread): danepps.github.io/legal-rese…