A longtime small-business owner writing for Entrepreneur outlines seven lessons learned from two decades of using independent contractors, warning that savings from avoiding payroll taxes and benefits can be offset by higher hourly rates, turnover and other hidden costs. The piece advises comparing the total cost of a contractor versus an employee for each role rather than assuming contractors are automatically cheaper.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-10-30
The Department of Defense's fiscal year 2027 budget request shows steep increases in planned munitions purchases, including PAC-3 MSE interceptors rising from 341 to 3,203 units, THAAD interceptors from 37 to 857, and Tomahawk missiles from 57 to 1,049 compared to FY2026 figures. These requests come alongside new multiyear framework agreements between the DOD and contractors aimed at expanding the munitions industrial base.
csis.org
· 2026-10-18
Bank of America brought on roughly 1,000 contract workers to remediate software vulnerabilities uncovered by Anthropic's Mythos system. The hiring suggests the AI tool identified a substantial volume of issues requiring manual remediation work.
it.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-15
California's attorney general and city attorneys from San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles reached a settlement with Lyft over claims it misclassified drivers as independent contractors from 2016 to 2020, denying them owed wages and benefits. Pending a judge's approval, Lyft will pay $272.5 million, making it the largest wage-and-hour settlement in state history.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-12
The Department of Defense's CDAO runs a procurement initiative called Tradewinds, which lets companies submit short video pitches showing how their AI products meet specific military focus areas. A judging panel reviews submissions monthly, and accepted products are deemed 'post-competitive,' letting officials bypass lengthy competitive bidding steps. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are listed as participants, though none commented, and a DOD official says some awards have been made in under a week.
wired.com
· 2026-10-07
404 Media reports that Microsoft hired hundreds of contractors to evaluate how well its Copilot AI executes image-editing prompts, including sexually explicit and nonconsensual requests involving real women, children's cartoon characters, and upskirt-style images. The contractors say Microsoft instructed them to judge output quality using their 'intuition,' not to assess the ethics of the prompts themselves, and faces in uploaded photos reportedly remain uncensored.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-28
404 Media reports that multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI's models were terminated after being caught using AI tools to complete their training tasks, citing internal documents and interviews with contractors. One worker shared a termination letter citing concerns about the 'authenticity' of their work, while sources said such firings are common across a workforce of thousands. Two of the contractors worked through Mercor, a staffing firm reportedly in talks with Nvidia for a $20 billion valuation.
slashdot.org
· 2026-09-24
Meta announced it will let smart glasses owners opt out of having images and video captured during Meta AI interactions used to train its AI models. Previously, camera captures triggered by voice commands like asking Meta AI to identify an object were stored and sometimes reviewed by third-party contractors abroad for labeling, even though they weren't saved to users' camera rolls. The opt-out applies only to visual data; audio interactions with Meta AI can still be used for training, though users can manually delete those recordings.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-24
A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration illegally retaliated against Anthropic after the AI firm refused to lift restrictions on using its technology for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Judge Rita Lin vacated orders that barred federal agencies from using Anthropic's products and blocked defense contractors from doing any business with the company, calling the government's national security justification baseless.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-08-28
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