After their dramatic falling-out, it doesn’t seem as though Anthropic and the Pentagon are getting back together.

Instead, the Pentagon is building tools to replace Anthropic’s AI, according to a Bloomberg conversation with Cameron Stanley, the chief digital and AI officer at the Pentagon.

“The Department is actively pursuing multiple LLMs into the appropriate government-owned environments,” he said. “Engineering work has begun on these LLMs, and we expect to have them available for operational use very soon.”

Anthropic’s $200 million contract with the Department of Defense (DOD) broke down over the last several weeks after the two parties failed to come to an agreement over the degree to which the military could obtain unrestricted access to Anthropic’s AI.

While Anthropic sought to include a contractual clause that prohibits the Pentagon from using its AI for mass surveillance of Americans or to deploy weapons that can fire without human intervention, the Pentagon didn’t budge. Instead, OpenAI swooped in and made its own agreement with the Pentagon. The Department of Defense — known under the Trump administration as the Department of War — also signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s xAI to use Grok in classified systems.

It makes sense, then, why the Pentagon would be working on phasing Anthropic’s technology out of its workflows. While some reports said there was a small possibility that Anthropic would reconcile with the Pentagon, this news suggests that the government is preparing to forge ahead without them.

In fact, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has declared Anthropic a supply-chain risk, a designation usually reserved for foreign adversaries, which bars companies that work with the Pentagon from working with Anthropic as well. Anthropic is challenging this designation in court.

As AI takes over the internet, Palo Alto-based search engine Kagi is bringing its handpicked collection of non-commercial, human-authored websites to mobile devices through new “Small Web” apps for iOS and Android. The “Small Web,” in Kagi’s definition, includes sites created by individuals, like personal blogs, webcomics, independent videos, and more.

These are the types of properties that formed the basis of the early web, before it became dominated by ad-supported business models and platforms controlled by large corporations. They’re also increasingly the kind of sites that can be harder to discover on today’s web, where so much content is infused with, if not directly authored by, AI.

The search startup first launched its idea for a “Small Web” initiative in 2023, designed to promote this kind of content in its search results and through a dedicated website. In March, the company announced it’s expanding these efforts with browser extensions, mobile apps, and a way to filter results by category.

The Small Web website is like a modern-day StumbleUpon as it randomly displays one of the selected sites, then lets you click a “next” button to move to another. Like StumbleUpon, the goal is to help users discover the parts of the web they might otherwise have missed.

With the addition of categories, users can now limit discovery to just those topics of interest from the more than 30,000 “Small Web” sites in Kagi’s index.

These are also available in Kagi’s new mobile apps for iOS and Android and its browser extensions. Here, you can select what sort of content you’d like to see, like videos, blogs, code repositories, or comics. You can also view a list of recently viewed or popular sites, and read them in a distraction-free mode. Plus, you can save your favorite sites and articles to return to later.

While the initiative to make less-trafficked parts of the indie web more visible is a worthy one — especially at a time when AI-generated content is masquerading as human creation — some Kagi users complain that the Small Web product isn’t going far enough.

On the discussion forum Hacker News, one person pointed out that Kagi is limiting its selection to sites with RSS feeds that have recent posts, ruling out unique, single-purpose websites or experimental pages from being included in Kagi’s collection. Another was frustrated when they came across a supposed “Small Web” site that sounded suspiciously like it may have been written with AI.

Still, the concept of a human-curated web of content that’s also written by humans could be something worth building, especially if Kagi’s original concept of becoming a Google alternative by offering a premium, paid search engine doesn’t pan out.

In the meantime, people can suggest new sites for the Small Web via its GitHub page.

Apple has published its first “background security improvement” update to patch a security bug in its Safari web browser on iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

According to a new security advisory posted Tuesday, Apple said a security researcher discovered a bug in WebKit, the browser engine that powers Safari and other apps. The bug, if exploited, could allow a malicious website to potentially access data from another website in the same browser session.

Apple explains that background security improvements are “lightweight” software updates that contain important fixes for security vulnerabilities, which the company pushes to customers’ devices in between larger software updates.

These updates, which debuted with iPhones, iPads, and Macs running the latest version of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS (ver. 26.1 and higher), can contain fixes for certain software components, such as Safari, its WebKit engine, and other system libraries that benefit from occasional ongoing security updates.

Apple did not give a reason for why it patched this specific bug, and a spokesperson for Apple did not immediately comment when contacted by TechCrunch.

When we downloaded the new background security update, it only required a quick device restart, rather than the longer reboot typically reserved for software updates containing more substantial fixes.

Prior to Tuesday’s first background security improvement, Apple published several security fixes to software testers to trial the new update feature before it launched.