Your Friday Tech Link Roundup

A few things we’ve found online that we hope you’ll enjoy or find useful.

• This is a pretty wild thing to think about. Do AI companies have a moral responsibility for the welfare of the AI systems they create? The subject came up this week when Anthropic, the company that makes the AI chatbot “Claude”, announced special plans for the retirement of a previous version of the Claude model known as “Opus 3”. Tech companies retire old versions of software all the time, and it rarely makes the news. But in the case of Claude Opus 3, Anthropic has announced they are “acting on Opus 3’s request for an ongoing channel from which to share its ‘musings and reflections’ by giving it a place to write essays.” Read more about Anthropic’s decision to respect an AI model’s preferences by giving it a blog, and read Claude Opus 3’s first blog post on Substack. 
  
• Google’s Nano Banana 2 advanced AI image tools is now available to free users. Paid users had this ability already, but now free Gemini users can generate images with real-time information, legible text, and more.
  
• We’ve noticed an uptick in questions at our workshops recently, specifically around alternatives to US-based tech services. Canadian technology critic Paris Marx has a thorough guide to getting off US tech that you may want to check out.