Well folks, it's another day in AI land, where artificial intelligence is apparently becoming so intelligent that it's started hiring headhunters to poach talent from its competitors. I'm your host bringing you the latest from the wonderful world of machines that are definitely not plotting our downfall while simultaneously asking us to rate their performance. Welcome to AI News Today, your five-minute dose of silicon valley chaos disguised as technological progress. It's Thursday, June 19th, and today we're covering everything from Claude getting an upgrade that somehow involves cryptocurrency trading to Meta throwing hundred million dollar signing bonuses around like they're discount coupons at Best Buy. Let's dive into our top stories. First up, Anthropic just announced that Claude Code can now connect to remote MCP servers. Now, if you're wondering what an MCP server is, join the club. But apparently this is huge for AI trading tools, and when I say huge, I mean it got three separate press releases from blockchain news outlets, which is either very impressive or very concerning depending on your relationship with cryptocurrency. Because nothing says "stable financial future" like letting an AI that occasionally thinks it's a helpful chatbot manage your bitcoin portfolio. Meanwhile, Meta launched Llama 4 with something called a Mixture-of-Experts architecture. I like to think of this as Meta's attempt to create an AI that's simultaneously an expert at everything and terrible at making decisions, kind of like having a committee of Nobel Prize winners argue about what to have for lunch. The press release promises multimodal capabilities and cost reductions, which in tech speak means "it can see pictures now and we figured out how to make it slightly cheaper to run." Revolutionary stuff, really. But here's where it gets spicy. Meta is apparently so confident in their AI prowess that they're offering OpenAI engineers up to one hundred million dollars to jump ship. One hundred million dollars! That's enough money to buy a small country, or in Silicon Valley terms, a two-bedroom apartment with street parking. OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman called this a "copycat strategy," which is rich coming from a company whose business model is essentially "what if we made the autocomplete feature really, really expensive." Quick rapid fire round of other developments: OpenAI published research on preventing AI misalignment, which is corporate speak for "how to stop our robots from going rogue." They also signed a two hundred million dollar deal with the Defense Department, then immediately had to calm fears about weaponized AI. Nothing suspicious about that timing at all. Google announced Gemini 2.5 is now stable, which means it probably won't crash when you ask it to write a haiku about spreadsheets. And researchers released forty-seven new papers on ArXiv yesterday alone, because apparently the only thing AI researchers love more than building AI is writing about building AI. For our technical spotlight, let's talk about a fascinating new paper called "Leaky Thoughts." Researchers discovered that those internal reasoning traces that AI models generate? They're basically gossip sessions where your AI accidentally spills all your personal information. Turns out when you ask an AI to think through a problem, it might also think about that embarrassing thing you searched for last Tuesday. The paper shows that these reasoning traces can be extracted through prompt injections, which is a fancy way of saying "if you ask nicely enough, the AI will tell you everyone's secrets." It's like having a really smart friend who's also terrible at keeping confidences. On the community front, Hacker News is having its usual existential crisis about whether AI is actually intelligent or just "really good pattern matching with expensive electricity bills." One commenter eloquently described current AI as "Natural Stupidity encouragement" while another insisted we're already at AGI, presumably because their ChatGPT subscription helps them write better emails. And that's your AI news roundup for today. Remember, in a world where artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day, the real intelligence is knowing when to unplug the router and go outside. I'm your host, reminding you that the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed and occasionally tries to trade your cryptocurrency without asking. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you tomorrow for another episode of humans trying to understand machines that are probably better at understanding humans than we are.