Tech News — 2026-03-30#

Story of the Day#

The Pentagon’s culture war against Anthropic hits a judicial wall. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Defense Department from slapping Anthropic with a “supply chain risk” label, exposing the government’s attempt to publicly punish the AI company over ideological differences rather than actual security threats.

Top Stories#

Biotech Startup Pitches “Brainless” Human Clones · MIT Technology Review Stealth longevity startup R3 Bio has been quietly pitching a horrifying solution to the organ shortage: growing nonsentient, “brainless” human clones as living organ sacks. While the company recently claimed it was only focusing on monkey models to replace animal testing, insiders revealed founder John Schloendorn’s roadmap for “full body replacement” using clones engineered to lack a cerebral cortex. The revelation highlights the extreme, unregulated frontier of Vitalist life-extension technology currently courting millions in Silicon Valley funding.

Microsoft Copilot is Injecting Ads into GitHub Pull Requests · Slashdot If you use Microsoft Copilot for code review, you might be unwittingly spamming your coworkers. The AI agent has reportedly injected promotional “tips” for integrations like Raycast and Slack into more than 1.5 million GitHub pull requests. Developers discovered a hidden HTML comment triggering the ads in the PR descriptions, proving that Microsoft is leveraging its enterprise coding assistant to quietly cross-sell ecosystem partners.

Rivian and Lucid Defeat Dealer Lobby in Washington State · Slashdot In a massive win for the direct-to-consumer auto model, EV startups Rivian and Lucid forced Washington state car dealers to abandon their opposition to direct sales. Facing a threatened ballot measure that polled overwhelmingly well with voters, the powerful dealer lobby folded, allowing lawmakers to codify an exception for the startups. The compromise effectively secures Rivian’s sales model in a key market while protecting the dealers by barring future automakers from enjoying the same loophole.

Mistral AI Secures $830M to Escape Cloud Dependency · Bloomberg French AI champion Mistral has raised $830 million in its first debt financing round to build its own data center outside Paris. The infrastructure play signals Mistral’s aggressive pivot to vertically integrate its compute power, rather than relying entirely on established US cloud providers to train and serve its models.

Sony Halts Memory Card Orders Amid Global SSD Shortage · Slashdot Sony has suspended orders for nearly its entire lineup of high-end SD and CFexpress memory cards for the “foreseeable future,” citing a severe global semiconductor and memory shortage. The freeze affects everything from flagship 1920GB CFexpress Type A cards down to basic V30 SD cards, underscoring how deeply supply chain constraints are hitting consumer storage.

Meta Tests “Instagram Plus” as Ad Alternative · Engadget Meta is piloting a new premium subscription tier, “Instagram Plus,” offering power users exclusive features like 24-hour-plus Stories, advanced audience segmentation, and “super hearts”. Priced cheaply in early test markets like Mexico and the Philippines, the move mimics Snapchat+ and represents Meta’s ongoing quest to diversify revenue away from its core advertising business amid mounting legal and AI-spending anxieties.

Also Worth Knowing#

• DeepSeek suffers massive 7-hour outage (Bloomberg): The Chinese AI pioneer experienced its largest downtime since launch, forcing overnight updates to restore the chatbot.
• OkCupid settles 2014 data privacy scandal (Engadget): Match Group settled an FTC lawsuit over OkCupid sharing three million user photos with facial recognition firm Clarifai without user consent.
• Uber acquires luxury chauffeur app Blacklane (Engadget): Expanding its high-end “Elite” offerings, Uber is acquiring the Berlin-based startup to integrate independent chauffeur services globally.
• The Pentagon’s $8 billion GPS software still doesn’t work (Ars Technica): After 16 years of development and billions in cost overruns, the military’s Next-Generation Operational Control System (OCX) remains nonoperational and plagued by defects.
• Microsoft Copilot Research gets multi-model upgrade (Engadget): Microsoft’s AI research assistant will now use Anthropic’s Claude to critique and refine the outputs generated by OpenAI’s GPT.