Quick question: Do you want AI to be so well trained, it could help husbands (or wives for that matter) to plan the perfect murder of their spouses? Probably not, right? Just as a gut reaction, that feels like a no. I wouldn’t even think it was a particularly hard question.

But America contains many diverse perspectives, and one such perspective was shared by Comma AI founder and longtime jailbreaker George Hotz over the weekend.

The post comes in response to a bunch of big-picture AI alignment plans, most recently the AI 2040: Plan A policy paper from the AI Futures institute. That paper envisions a world in which the world’s researchers collectively choose to slow down AI development for 14 years for the good of humanity. But of course, not everyone who read the paper agrees with its premises or conclusion.

Hotz is in the camp who disagrees. In his post, he argues that the fast-takeoff scenario — the hypothetical where AI rapidly obtains superhuman abilities — doesn’t make a lot of sense. I agree a lot of what he says here! For Hotz, the best approach to AI alignment and safety is to focus on locally controlled AI models that are closely aligned with the interests of their users.

That’s a cool idea, particularly since it reminds me how much of current AI is built around centrally managed services like Claude and ChatGPT. There are infrastructure-related reasons why AI services developed this way, like it’s expensive to host a these extremely large, state-of-the-art model and most people aren’t using it continuously it throughout the day to justify personal AI. But those factors become less important as the technology develops. Part of what was so exciting about OpenClaw was this experimental, DIY approach, and it would be great to see more AI products try to recapture that.

But Hotz is a provocateur by nature, so he doesn’t stop there. He compares user-aligned AI to a gun(!), which does not complain if you use it to kill your stepmom. (I feel like there are other rules against this?) A truly aligned AI would be able to order meth-lab equipment from Amazon Prime and show you how to use it if that’s what you wanted and asked for, he says. (Again, I don’t think AI would be the limiting factor here.) Hotz even says he would die to defend this principle, although it’s hard to imagine the series of events that would lead to that.

“We either live in a world with freedom or we don’t,” Hotz writes. If those are the options, the freedom world does sound better! Still, I don’t know.

It’s not all about freedom, right? Any structure involving a lot of people (societies, marketplaces, corporations, etc.) requires balancing equities, binding individual needs into a network of interdependent preferences and systems of accountability. And anyone deploying mass-market tech products should probably think about that network as a whole, which means taking seriously the interests of the as-yet-unmurdered spouses and stepparents of the world.

The freedom Hotz experiences is really a space of potential futures made possible by collective enterprise; those futures would disappear overnight if we all started behaving like little AI-powered Napoleons. Like the meme says, we live in a society.

Having a local AI willing to take on the corporate world for my benefit does sound cool though! I can’t wait for a review unit.

TV Time, the popular TV and movie-tracking app whose pending shutdown has prompted more than 25,000 users to petition against its closure, is getting a reboot of sorts.

One of the app’s original founders, Antonio Pinto, says he’s creating a new TV show tracking app, Bingers, which will attempt to rebuild the best features of TV Time while also addressing the issues that bothered him over the years.

Bingers will offer TV Time’s existing users a potential lifeline soon after the original app disappears from the app stores. It also gives the existing social community another place to go to continue discussing TV episodes, something that not all TV show tracking apps offer. According to data from app intelligence provider Appfigures, TV Time has more than 26.4 million lifetime installs, many of those users potentially helping seed the new app’s community.

Pinto, who is based in Paris, sold his app, then called TVShow Time, to Whipclip (now Whip Media) in 2016, after the company promised it could grow the app’s user base significantly thanks to its Los Angeles ties. When he heard the app was being wound down as Whip Media shifted its focus to AI, Pinto said he felt sad.

“Sad because TV Time was part of my life for so many years. And sad because this community was like my other family. Reading the community reactions after each episode became a ritual for me, and for many others,” Pinto wrote in a blog post on the new Bingers website.

“I decided to build the new home where the TV Time community could go. I wanted to rebuild all TV Time[‘s] great features, but also fix everything that always bothered me,” he said.

Notably, the new Bingers app will address TV Time’s performance issues, which often caused the app to load slowly and made it expensive to run. Pinto claims high server costs led to the shutdown, noting that its premium subscription plan only covered about 10% of those expenses due to the size of its community.

Instead, Bingers has been architected it keep its server costs low, making it more sustainable, Pinto claims. It will also allow the app to respond faster when users mark an episode as watched, even when millions of others are connecting at the same time.

The developer tells TechCrunch that the new app will be available on the App Store and Google Play by the end of July 2026. Until then, the website is collecting sign-ups for a waitlist that will alert users when the new app is ready for launch.

Of course, Bingers will also be able to import data from users’ TV Time archives, available through the app’s GDPR-compliant export tool before its removal from the app stores on July 15. By importing users’ archives, Pinto says Bingers will be able to recreate TV Time’s community comments as well.

The archive import is already up and running on the Bingers website, so your TV viewing history will already be available when the app launches on the app stores.

Anthropic has started localizing Claude’s pricing in India, its biggest market outside the U.S., as global AI companies increasingly tailor their offerings to win users in the world’s most populous nation.

Local pricing has begun to appear for some users in India on Claude’s website and mobile apps. However, Anthropic has yet to enable payments via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s widely used instant payments network. Users still need to pay by card or through Apple and Google’s app store billing systems. This is unlike OpenAI, which rolled out Indian rupee pricing for ChatGPT in August with UPI support.

Claude users in India have long sought rupee-denominated subscriptions, with dollar pricing and currency conversion adding friction to accessing the service. The move is particularly significant, as India accounts for 5.8% of global Claude usage, making it the service’s second-largest market after the U.S., according to Anthropic.

On Claude’s website in India, Anthropic is listing Claude Pro at ₹2,000 (about $21) a month when billed annually, compared with $17 a month in the U.S. Claude Max starts at ₹11,999 (around $125) a month in India, versus $100 in the U.S., while Team plans start at ₹2,399 (around $25) per seat a month, compared with $20 in the U.S. The India prices include local taxes. Moreover, prices on Claude’s mobile apps vary slightly from those listed on its website.

The Indian rupee pricing comes amid Anthropic’s growing focus on India. The Claude maker opened an office in Bengaluru in February, after announcing the move in October, and in January appointed former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose to lead its business in the country. Anthropic has also partnered with Indian IT services giants Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services in recent months as it looks to scale enterprise AI deployments.

That expansion faced a setback in June when Anthropic abruptly suspended access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for non-U.S. entities, prompting some Indian developers and startup founders to consider alternatives to American AI models. The restriction on Fable 5 has since been lifted, though access to Mythos 5 remains limited.

India has become an increasingly important market for AI companies, driven by its large base of developers and technology workers. However, converting widespread usage into paid subscriptions remains a challenge in the price-sensitive market.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment on the Indian rupee pricing rollout.