New studies of old dogs help #scientists understand where they came from. Scientists think dogs descended from an ancient population of gray wolves somewhere in Europe or Asia. Tens of thousands of years ago, those wolves got used to living with people and became less aggressive. As they became domesticated, their genes shifted along with their behavior, giving rise to the pups we know today.

But exactly when and where this happened remains a mystery. Scientists are studying bits of DNA found in ancient dog and wolf remains to figure out what the earliest dogs may have looked like and where they came from.

In two separate studies published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers pushed the timeline back. They established a new way to study ancient canine DNA — which is often contaminated and tough to extract — by isolating just the doggy bits.

They examined ancient genes from the remains of over 200 dogs and wolves. The oldest dated back to about 15,800 years ago, moving the origin of dogs back by at least 5,000 years.

“This unique relationship between people and dogs has existed for such a long time and is continuing on today,” said University of Michigan dog genomics expert Jeffrey Kidd, who was not involved with the new research.

The genes showed that dogs were already spread out across Western Europe and Asia 14,200 years ago, at a time before agriculture and farming. These dogs lived with hunter-gatherer humans who were constantly on the move.

The dawn of agriculture — a major shift in human history — brought new people to Europe from southwest Asia. They mixed and mingled with Europeans, leaving a lasting and varied imprint on their genes.

But the dog genes studied by the scientists, stretching from the United Kingdom all the way to Turkey, stayed more consistent. They were less impacted by the arrival of new humans during the development of agriculture, and more by interactions between different hunter-gatherer groups and their dogs thousands of years before.

That’s different from dogs in Asia and the Americas, whose genes more closely reflect the movement patterns of their owners.

Scientists don’t know exactly what the first dogs looked like, but they have some ideas.

“We’re suspecting they would have resembled smaller wolves,” said study co-author Lachie Scarsbrook with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

It’s also not clear how these ancient dogs lived alongside their humans. They could have stood guard or helped them hunt, but probably also played with young children.

There’s still more work to go to pinpoint exactly when dogs emerged — the first few pages of a storied relationship that’s still going strong.

“They are humanity’s best friend, alongside our societies for the last 16,000 years and will continue to in the future,” Scarsbrook said.

Adithi Ramakrishnan, The Associated Press

#Pentagon dispute bolsters #Anthropic reputation but raises questions about #AI readiness in military.

Anthropic’s chatbot Claude, for the first time, outpaced rival ChatGPT in phone app downloads in the United States this week, a signal of growing interest from consumers siding with Anthropic in its standoff with the Pentagon, according to market research firm Sensor Tower.

The Trump administration on Friday ordered government agencies to stop using Claude and designated it a supply chain risk after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to bend his company’s ethical safeguards preventing the technology from being applied to autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance. Anthropic has said it will challenge the Pentagon in court once it receives formal notice of the penalties.

And while many military and human rights experts have applauded Amodei for standing up for ethical principles, some are also frustrated by years of AI industry marketing that persuaded the government to apply the technology to high-stakes tasks.

“He caused this mess,” said Missy Cummings, a former U.S. navy fighter pilot who now directs the robotics and automation centre at George Mason University. “They were the No. 1 company to push ridiculous hype over the capabilities of these technologies. And now, all of a sudden, they want to be for real. They want to tell people, ‘Oh, wait a minute. We really shouldn’t be using these technologies in weapons.’”

Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The U.S. Defence Department declined to comment on whether it is still using Claude, including in the Iran war, citing operational security.

Cummings published a paper at a top AI conference in December arguing that government agencies should prohibit the use of generative AI “to control, direct, guide or govern any weapon.” Not because AI is so smart that it could go rogue, but because the large language models behind chatbots like Claude make too many mistakes — called hallucinations or confabulations — and are “inherently unreliable and not appropriate in environments that could result in the loss of life.”

“You’re going to kill noncombatants,” Cummings said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press. “You’re going to kill your own troops. I’m not clear whether the military truly understands the limitations.”

Amodei sought to emphasize those limitations in defending Anthropic’s ethical stance last week, arguing that “frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.”

Anthropic, until recently, was the only one of its peers to have approval for use in classified military systems, where it has partnered with data analysis company Palantir and other defence contractors. U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday, around the same time he was approving Saturday’s military strikes on Iran, that the Pentagon would have six months to phase out Anthropic’s military applications.

Cummings, a former Palantir adviser, said it’s possible that Claude has already been used in military strike planning.

“I just fundamentally hope that there were humans in the loop,” she said. “A human has to babysit these technologies very closely. You can use them to do these things, but you need to verify, verify, verify.”

She said that’s a contrast to the messaging from AI companies that have suggested that their technology is evolving to the point where it is “almost sentient.”

“If there’s culpability here, I’d say half is Anthropic’s for driving the hype and half is the Department of War’s fault for firing all the people that would have otherwise advised them against stupid uses of technology,” Cummings said.

One social media commentator this week described Anthropic’s government problems as a “Hype Tax” — a message that was reposted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s top AI adviser, David Sacks, a frequent critic of the company.

And while it has caused legal hassles that could jeopardize Anthropic’s business partnerships with other military contractors, it has also bolstered its reputation as a safety-minded AI developer.

“It’s applaudable that a company stood up to the government in order to maintain what it felt were its ethics and were its business choices, even in the face of these potentially crippling policy responses,” said Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.

Consumers have already spoken, leading to a surge of Claude downloads that made it the most popular iPhone app starting on Saturday and for all phone systems in the U.S. on Monday, according to Sensor Tower. That’s come at the expense of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which saw its consumer reputation damaged when it announced a Friday deal with the Pentagon to effectively replace Anthropic with ChatGPT in classified environments.

In the Apple store, the number of 1-star reviews — the worst rating — of ChatGPT grew by 775 per cent on Saturday and continued to grow early this week, forcing OpenAI to do damage control.

“We shouldn’t have rushed to get this out on Friday,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a social media post Monday. “The issues are super complex, and demand clear communication. We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy.”

Altman was planning to gather employees for an “all-hands” meeting on Tuesday to discuss next steps.

“There are many things the technology just isn’t ready for, and many areas we don’t yet understand the tradeoffs required for safety,” Altman said. “We will work through these, slowly, with the (Pentagon), with technical safeguards and other methods.”

Matt O’brien, The Associated Press