The midterms will be a referendum on the GOP’s alignment with tech overlords over the public they’re meant to serve
Welcome back to How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Last week, Robert Reich highlighted the link between corruption and affordability. Today’s edition was written by Guardian US columnist Rebecca Solnit. Sign up for future editions here.
“The world should accept some bad things happening,” Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said recently, “for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” Like so many things tech oligarchs say, it’s incoherent, since Altman would like to deny the world and the people in it the agency to decide whether or not we should accept his bad things. Surveys show that most Americans would like to pause AI; opposition to AI datacenters is a factor in many races in the midterm elections. People are outraged and anxious about what tech hath wrought, mad enough to fight back in what is coming to seem like a human v machine battle.
A fight over a datacentre in Utah has been a testing ground for citizens’ assemblies, paving the way to oversight
What’s your “(p)doom” – the percentage chance that rogue AI will create an existential catastrophe? Judging by their recent warnings, it is rising among tech bosses.
On 25 September, OpenAI paused training of its latest frontier models as reports of AI agents going rogue mounted. A day later, Australia’s Senate asked the bosses of OpenAI and Anthropic to appear before an inquiry after rogue OpenAI agents broke into US government websites and an Australian health portal. Both declined.
Richard Wilson is the CEO of Iswe Foundation and Clara Long is the co-executive director of the Bloom Project
Pioneering computer scientist on why Trump is using ‘superintelligence’ wrong, whether AI could wipe out humanity – and how our biggest challenge will be accepting we’re not the only intelligent beings
Donald Trump is a “corrupt, senile felon” whose fixation on the term superintelligence proves he knows nothing about AI, said Geoffrey Hinton, “godfather” of the technology, in a wide-ranging interview where he doubled down on recent warnings that AI models pose an existential threat to humanity and scoffed at claims the industry could regulate itself.
The pioneering computer scientist, whose work helped lay the foundations of modern AI, has since become one of the technology’s most vocal critics. His latest remarks come after a tumultuous month during which a growing list of senior AI scientists and researchers havejoined Hinton in ringingthealarm about how the technology he helped create could ultimately escape human control, sparking an industry crisis, the hasty assembly of congressional meetings and a rare global consensus that something must be done.
TL;DR: enter card details manually, not using Link, if you need to change your payment method and it’s stuck.
Three days ago my Claude Pro subscription was up for renewal but I’d forgotten to top-up the prepaid credit card I use for this. It was (logically) declined and my subscription was suspended.
I was using Link as the payment method.
No sweat, I thought, I’ll top up the credit card and “try again”. No luck, still declined.
Cool cucumber, I’ll just use another card this month. Clicked through to select an other payment method, but… once I was back on the Anthropic payment screen, the active payment method displayed was still the first card that had been declined.
What I did:
What I got:
Then I went a bit wild. I tried to change the payment method again. I went into Link and removed the card, leaving only the second one, but the payment was still attempted by Anthropic (Link?) with the card I had removed
I logged out of Link and back in. I even tried Apple Pay. My card transaction statement shows a string of $0 card checks, and my inbox is full of e-mails telling me my payment was unsuccessful, but that is all that there is to show for these efforts. Whatever card I chose, Anthropic insisted on trying the same one again and again.
At some point, inspiration hit and I tried settling the open subscription invoice from inside Link directly, with my other card, instead of through the Anthropic billing screen. That worked!
But I wasn’t out of the woods. I wanted to buy some extra usage (I know, I know). The same frustrating dance started again, to no avail.
I decided to let it rest 24 hours and try again.
I tried again today. Same same.
In desperation (of course I’d already had a frustrating chat with Fin the Anthropic “support bot” and sent an e-mail to support) I tried chatting up the Link support chatbot. It confirmed that there was indeed a trace of the failed purchase on their side. At least something! I requested a human, and started chatting up my credit card’s support too, as I now had a clear indication that the purchase request had left Anthropic’s walls.
I’ll spare you the hour of slow, mind-numbing, half-chatbot-half-human support chats. You’ve been there I’m sure. There would be a lot to say.
In the end, after going around in many more circles, here is what worked:
I clicked to change the payment method on checkout on the Anthropic site
I disconnected Link in there
I entered my card details manually
What I did (notice how I’m not signing into Link here):
What I got (notice how this time I actually did manage to get it to switch to the Mastercard and drop the Visa!):
Lo and behold, the payment went through!
(This is the second card, mind you, I’m not that crazy. Next step, before my next subscription invoice comes around, will be to try and make a purchase with the initial – preferred – card. Maybe by then the e-mail the service cyborg promised with details of why the transaction failed will have reached me.)
Sharing this in hope it can spare at least one other person some headaches.
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