Top Stories — Saturday, April 11, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- Jeffrey Epstein victims will get House committee hearing, James Comer says — CNBC
- Vance, Bessent questioned tech giants on AI security before Anthropic's Mythos release — CNBC
- Anthropic temporarily banned OpenClaw’s creator from accessing Claude — TechCrunch
Jeffrey Epstein victims will get House committee hearing, James Comer says
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/11/2026, 2:06:32 AM
Victims of Jeffrey Epstein will get the chance to speak about the late sex offender's crimes at hearings of the House committee investigating him and his procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, the panel's chairman said Friday.
Rep. James Comer's promise to hold those hearings came a day after first lady Melania Trump urged Congress to give "women who have been victimized by Epstein ... a public hearing specifically centered around the survivors."
"I agree with the first lady and appreciate what she said," Comer, R-Ky., said in a Fox News interview. "We will have hearings."
Comer said that hearings featuring victims of Epstein would be held after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee finishes taking testimony from several high-profile people who had been connected to Epstein and his former associates.
The panel has scheduled interviews with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, billionaire Ted Waitt, federal jail guard Tova Noel, and others.
The committee was scheduled to depose former Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 14, but that session was canceled this week after the Department of Justice said she was subpoenaed as attorney general. Democrats on the committee have threatened to initiate contempt charges against Bondi if she fails to show up for the scheduled hearing.
"I've always planned on having hearings with the victims," Comer told Fox News on Friday.
"My attorneys on the Oversight Committee have been communicating on a constant basis for months with the attorneys representing Epstein victims, he said.
"There are some victims who are willing to come in. Most victims aren't, and I completely understand that. But we have always planned on having a hearing with Epstein victims once the depositions have been completed."
Vance, Bessent questioned tech giants on AI security before Anthropic's Mythos release
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/11/2026, 2:02:22 AM
Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last week questioned leading tech CEOs about the security of artificial intelligence models and how to respond to cyber attacks before Anthropic released its new Mythos model, CNBC has learned.
The meeting occurred over the phone, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the meeting was private.
The person said that Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Google's Sundar Pichai, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, CrowdStrike's George Kurtz and Palo Alto Networks' Nikesh Arora also participated.
The tech CEOs met to discuss the security posture of large language models and safe deployment, according to the person. Officials also discussed how to respond if models scale in favor of attackers, they added.
OpenAI declined to comment on the meeting. CNBC has reached out to the White House and the other companies for comment.
An Anthropic official declined to comment on the meeting, but told CNBC Friday that the company has been in touch with White House officials about cybersecurity in recent weeks and has made itself available to support "the government's own testing and evaluation of the technology."
"Prior to any external release, Anthropic briefed senior officials across the U.S. government on Mythos Preview's full capabilities, including both its offensive and defensive cyber applications," the official said. "Bringing government into the loop early — on what the model can do, where the risks are, and how we're managing them — was a priority from the start."
Anthropic rolled out its Mythos AI model to a limited group of companies on Tuesday as it assesses ways to prevent hackers from using it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike were among the initial launch partners.
Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell this week called a surprise meeting with the heads of the biggest U.S. banks to address the potential threat of Mythos, signalling further concern from the Trump administration about advanced cyber tools.
It was also a sign that Anthropic is still part of the conversation about AI in the White House, as President Donald Trump seeks to strip the startup's Claude platform from federal agencies.
Anthropic's legal challenge to the Department of Defense supply chain risk designation is still playing out in court after two opposing rulings on opposite sides of the country.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday denied the company's request to temporarily block the blacklisting, weeks after a federal judge in San Francisco granted Anthropic's request for a preliminary injunction in another legal challenge.
With the opposing rulings, Anthropic remains blocked from DOD contracts but can keep working with other federal agencies while the cases play out.
CNBC's Kate Rooney contributed to this article.
Anthropic temporarily banned OpenClaw’s creator from accessing Claude
Source: TechCrunch • Published: 4/11/2026, 1:57:52 AM
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“Yeah folks, it’s gonna be harder in the future to ensure OpenClaw still works with Anthropic models,” OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger posted on X early Friday morning, along with a photo of a message from Anthropic saying his account had been suspended over “suspicious” activity.
The ban didn’t last long. A few hours later, after the post went viral, Steinberger said his account had been reinstated. Among hundreds of comments — many of them in conspiracy theory land, given that Steinberger is now employed by Anthropic rival OpenAI — was one by an Anthropic engineer. The engineer told the famed developer that Anthropic has never banned anyone for using OpenClaw and offered to help.
Yeah folks, it's gonna be harder in the future to ensure OpenClaw still works with Anthropic models. pic.twitter.com/U6F8GZvPcH
It’s not clear if that was the key that restored the account. (We’ve asked Anthropic about it.) But the whole message string was enlightening on many levels.
To recap the recent history: this ban followed news last week that subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude would no longer cover “third-party harnesses including OpenClaw,” the AI model company said.
OpenClaw users now have to pay for that usage separately, based on consumption, through Claude’s API. In essence, Anthropic, which offers its own agent Cowork, is now charging a “claw tax.” Steinberger said he was following this new rule and using his API, but was banned anyway.
Anthropic said it instituted the pricing change because subscriptions weren’t built to handle the “usage patterns” of claws. Claws can be more compute-intensive than prompts or simple scripts because they may run continuous reasoning loops, automatically repeat or retry tasks, and tie into a lot of other third-party tools.
Steinberger, however, wasn’t buying that excuse. After Anthropic changed the pricing, he posted, “Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source.” Though he didn’t specify, he may have been referring to features added to Claude’s agent Cowork, such as Claude Dispatch, which lets users remotely control agents and assign tasks. Dispatch rolled out a couple of weeks before Anthropic changed its OpenClaw pricing policy.
Steinberger’s frustration with Anthropic was again on display Friday.
One person implied that some of this is on him, for taking a job at OpenAI instead of Anthropic, posting “You had the choice, but you went to the wrong one.” To which Steinberger replied: “One welcomed me, one sent legal threats.”
When multiple people asked him why he’s using Claude instead of his employer’s models at all, he explained that he only uses it for testing, to ensure updates to OpenClaw won’t break things for Claude users.
He explained: “You need to separate two things. My work at the OpenClaw Foundation where we wanna make OpenClaw work great for *any* model provider, and my job at OpenAI to help them with future product strategy.”
Multiple people also pointed out that the need to test Claude is because that model remains a popular choice for OpenClaw users over ChatGPT. He also heard that when Anthropic changed its pricing, to which he replied: “Working on that.” (So, that’s a clue about what his job at OpenAI entails.)
Steinberger did not respond to a request for comment.
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