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Anthropic Says Looking to Power European Tech with Hiring Push

As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
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Anthropic Says Looking to Power European Tech with Hiring Push

As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File

American AI giant Anthropic aims to boost the European tech ecosystem as it expands on the continent, product chief Mike Krieger told AFP Thursday at the Vivatech trade fair in Paris.

The OpenAI competitor wants to be "the engine behind some of the largest startups of tomorrow... (and) many of them can and should come from Europe", Krieger said.

Tech industry and political leaders have often lamented Europe's failure to capitalize on its research and education strength to build heavyweight local companies -- with many young founders instead leaving to set up shop across the Atlantic.

Krieger's praise for the region's "really strong talent pipeline" chimed with an air of continental tech optimism at Vivatech.

French AI startup Mistral on Wednesday announced a multibillion-dollar tie-up to bring high-powered computing resources from chip behemoth Nvidia to the region.

The semiconductor firm will "increase the amount of AI computing capacity in Europe by a factor of 10" within two years, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang told an audience at the southern Paris convention center.

Among 100 planned continental hires, Anthropic is building up its technical and research strength in Europe, where it has offices in Dublin and non-EU capital London, Krieger said.

Beyond the startups he hopes to boost, many long-standing European companies "have a really strong appetite for transforming themselves with AI", he added, citing luxury giant LVMH, which had a large footprint at Vivatech.

'Safe by design'

Mistral -- founded only in 2023 and far smaller than American industry leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic -- is nevertheless "definitely in the conversation" in the industry, Krieger said.

The French firm recently followed in the footsteps of the US companies by releasing a so-called "reasoning" model able to take on more complex tasks.

"I talk to customers all the time that are maybe using (Anthropic's AI) Claude for some of the long-horizon agentic tasks, but then they've also fine-tuned Mistral for one of their data processing tasks, and I think they can co-exist in that way," Krieger said.

So-called "agentic" AI models -- including the most recent versions of Claude -- work as autonomous or semi-autonomous agents that are able to do work over longer horizons with less human supervision, including by interacting with tools like web browsers and email.

Capabilities displayed by the latest releases have raised fears among some researchers, such as University of Montreal professor and "AI godfather" Yoshua Bengio, that independently acting AI could soon pose a risk to humanity.

Bengio last week launched a non-profit, LawZero, to develop "safe-by-design" AI -- originally a key founding promise of OpenAI and Anthropic.

'Very specific genius'

"A huge part of why I joined Anthropic was because of how seriously they were taking that question" of AI safety, said Krieger, a Brazilian software engineer who co-founded Instagram, which he left in 2018.

Anthropic is still working on measures designed to restrict their AI models' potential to do harm, he added.

But it has yet to release details of its "level 4" AI safety protections foreseen for still more powerful models, after activating ASL (AI Safety Level) 3 to corral the capabilities of May's Claude Opus 4 release.

Developing ASL 4 is "an active part of the work of the company", Krieger said, without giving a potential release date.

With Claude 4 Opus, "we've deployed the mitigations kind of proactively... safe doesn't have to mean slow, but it does mean having to be thoughtful and proactive ahead of time" to make sure safety protections don't impair performance, he added.

Looking to upcoming releases from Anthropic, Krieger said the company's models were on track to match chief executive Dario Amodei's prediction that Anthropic would offer customers access to a "country of geniuses in a data center" by 2026 or 2027 -- within limits.

Anthropic's latest AI models are "genius-level at some very specific things", he said.

"In the coming year... it will continue to spike in particular aspects of things, and still need a lot of human-in-the-loop coordination," he forecast.

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Technology

Nebius Signs AI Capacity Deal with Meta for at Least $12 Billion

FILE PHOTO: The logo of Nebius during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Nebius during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo
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Nebius Signs AI Capacity Deal with Meta for at Least $12 Billion

FILE PHOTO: The logo of Nebius during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Nebius during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo

Amsterdam-based Nebius Group said on Monday it has signed a new five-year deal with Meta Platforms to provide the social media giant with $12 billion of dedicated AI computing capacity ⁠across multiple locations by ⁠2027.

Under the deal, Meta will also buy an additional $15 billion worth of capacity planned by Nebius over ⁠the coming five years if it is not sold to other customers, giving the contract a total value of up to $27 billion, Nebius said.

Nebius is a so-called "neocloud" company that sells hardware and cloud capacity ⁠as ⁠services to other tech firms. It uses Nvidia processors to provide AI cloud infrastructure.

It signed an initial $3 billion deal with Meta in November.

Technology

ByteDance Reportedly Suspends Launch of Video AI Model after Copyright Disputes

FILE PHOTO: The ByteDance logo is seen at the company's office building in Shanghai, China July 4, 2023. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The ByteDance logo is seen at the company's office building in Shanghai, China July 4, 2023. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo
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ByteDance Reportedly Suspends Launch of Video AI Model after Copyright Disputes

FILE PHOTO: The ByteDance logo is seen at the company's office building in Shanghai, China July 4, 2023. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The ByteDance logo is seen at the company's office building in Shanghai, China July 4, 2023. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo

TikTok's Chinese parent, ByteDance, has put on hold the global launch of its latest video-generation model, Seedance 2.0, after a series of copyright disputes with major Hollywood studios and streaming platforms, The Information reported on Saturday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report. ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ByteDance said last month it would take steps to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property on its AI video generator Seedance 2.0, ⁠following threats of ⁠legal action from US studios, including Disney.

Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Chinese firm last month, accusing it of using Disney characters to train and power Seedance 2.0 without permission, after videos generated by the model went viral in China, including one of Tom Cruise ⁠and Brad Pitt in a fight.

Disney said ByteDance had pre-packaged Seedance with a pirated library of copyrighted characters from franchises including Star Wars and Marvel, portraying them as public-domain clip art. ByteDance, which officially unveiled the model in February, has said the system is aimed at professional film, e-commerce and advertising use, highlighting its ability to process text, images, audio and video at once to reduce content production costs.

Seedance 2.0 has drawn attention after earning comparisons with DeepSeek, a ⁠Chinese AI ⁠company that has built models rivaling those of Anthropic and OpenAI. Tech executives, including Elon Musk, have praised its ability to generate cinematic storylines from a handful of prompts.

ByteDance had been aiming to make the new video model available to customers worldwide in mid-March, but the company has since suspended those plans, The Information report said.

ByteDance's legal team is working to identify and resolve potential legal issues and engineers are adding safeguards to prevent the model from generating content that could lead to further intellectual property violations, the report added.

Technology

Fake Images, Videos in Wartime: How to Tell Fact from Deepfakes

Misinformation spreads rapidly on social media during crises and conflicts (Shutterstock)
Misinformation spreads rapidly on social media during crises and conflicts (Shutterstock)
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Fake Images, Videos in Wartime: How to Tell Fact from Deepfakes

Misinformation spreads rapidly on social media during crises and conflicts (Shutterstock)
Misinformation spreads rapidly on social media during crises and conflicts (Shutterstock)

As tensions escalate across several fronts in the Middle East, information is spreading almost as quickly as the events themselves.

Social media platforms are often the first place where images, videos, and reports of alleged attacks or military developments appear.

But alongside legitimate information, a wave of misleading or fabricated content is also circulating online, making it increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction.

A Growing Digital Challenge

Cybersecurity experts warn that the rapid spread of misinformation, particularly through manipulated videos and deepfake technologies, has become a growing digital threat during periods of geopolitical instability.

Maher Yamout, Lead Security Researcher at Kaspersky, told Asharq Al-Awsat that distinguishing reliable information from false narratives becomes especially critical during emergencies, when emotions run high, and people tend to share content quickly without verifying it.

“With developments unfolding in the Middle East, government authorities in Gulf Cooperation Council countries have warned against publishing or circulating information from unknown sources,” he said.

“Fake news, misleading or inaccurate information presented as real news, becomes more dangerous during emergencies.”

Misinformation Spreads Fast

Fake news is not new, but its scale and speed have changed dramatically with the rise of social media and artificial intelligence tools. During periods of geopolitical tension, unverified reports or manipulated videos can spread within minutes, reaching millions before fact-checkers can respond.

Experts generally divide fake news into two main categories. The first involves fully fabricated content designed to influence public opinion or attract traffic to specific websites. The second contains elements of truth but presents them inaccurately because the author failed to verify all the facts or exaggerated certain details.

Both can confuse audiences during crises, particularly when users rely on social media rather than trusted news outlets for updates.

Authorities in several countries have also warned that sharing inaccurate information, even unintentionally, may expose users to legal accountability.

Governments and digital security experts are therefore urging greater digital awareness and responsibility when sharing information during sensitive periods.

AI-Powered Deception

Artificial intelligence has added a new layer to the misinformation problem through so-called deepfake technologies, fabricated videos created using machine learning techniques such as face swapping or synthetic visual generation.

In some cases, authentic footage can be altered to appear as if it documents events that never occurred.

Yamout said verifying information has become more important than ever with the spread of deepfakes.

“Artificial intelligence makes it possible to combine different video clips to produce new scenes showing events or actions that never happened in reality, often with highly realistic results,” he said.

Such technology can make manipulated videos appear convincing and potentially mislead users, especially when they circulate in emotionally charged contexts. Edited clips may appear to show attacks, military movements, or political statements that never took place.

Even when these videos are later debunked, their initial spread can still trigger confusion or public anxiety.

How to Verify Information

Cybersecurity experts say users themselves play a key role in limiting the spread of misinformation. While platforms and regulators are developing tools to detect fake content, individuals can take simple steps to verify information before sharing it.

The first step is checking the source. Websites that publish false information may contain spelling errors in their web addresses or use unusual domains that mimic well-known media outlets.

Yamout advises carefully reviewing the website address and checking the “About Us” section on unfamiliar sites. It is generally safer to rely on official sources such as government websites or trusted media organizations.

Users should also verify the identity of the author or the organization behind the report. If the author is unknown or lacks clear expertise in the subject, the information should be treated cautiously.

Comparing reports with other credible sources is also important. Professional news organizations follow editorial guidelines and verification procedures, meaning major events are typically reported by multiple reputable outlets.

Yamout also highlighted the importance of checking dates and timelines, noting that some misleading content recirculates old events and presents them as recent developments.

He added that social media algorithms can create so-called “echo chambers,” where users are shown content that aligns with their existing views and interests. This makes it essential to consult diverse and reliable sources before forming conclusions.

Playing on Emotions

Many fake news stories are designed to provoke strong emotional reactions. Sensational headlines or dramatic clips are often crafted to trigger fear, anger, or shock, emotions that increase the likelihood that users will quickly share the content.

“Many fake news stories are written in a clever way to provoke strong emotional reactions,” Yamout said.

Maintaining critical thinking and asking a simple question — why was this story written? — can help users avoid spreading misinformation, he added.

This dynamic is amplified on social media platforms, where algorithms tend to promote content that generates strong engagement. Emotionally charged posts can therefore spread faster than balanced reporting.

Spotting Signs of Manipulation

Images and videos themselves may provide clues that they have been altered. Edited photos may display distorted background lines, unnatural shadows, or unrealistic skin tones.

In manipulated videos, inconsistencies may appear in lighting, eye movement, or facial expressions. While these signs are not always easy to detect, particularly on smartphones, they can raise doubts about the authenticity of widely shared clips.

A Shared Digital Responsibility

Experts say limiting the spread of misinformation during crises requires cooperation among governments, technology companies, media organizations, and users.

Yamout said the simplest rule may also be the most effective: “If you are not sure the content is accurate, do not share it.”

Responsible sharing can help curb the spread of misinformation and protect digital communities.

As digital platforms continue to shape how information travels across borders, the ability to critically evaluate online content is becoming an essential skill.

During periods of geopolitical tension and conflict, when rumors and facts can blur, the challenge is not only cybersecurity but also protecting the credibility of information itself.