Ford announced a series of changes to its gas- and electric-powered vehicle business aimed at dramatically increasing hybrid vehicle production in the face of slowing EV sales. The automaker also introducing some new products as part of this plan, including an extended-range EV version of its F-series truck and battery storage systems to meet growing demand from AI data center construction.
The news comes after Ford has weathered years of compounding losses from its struggling EV business. The 122-year-old company once had aspirations to surpass Tesla in battery-electric vehicle sales, but higher material costs and waning demand have since turned that goal into a financial albatross. Over the past two years, the company’s EV division, Ford Model e, has lost over $12 billion, with EV sales down over 60 percent in November alone. Now, Ford says it’s ready to pivot once again.
Hybrids are now going to be the major focus going forward, Ford said. The automaker expects gas-electric hybrids, extended-range electric vehicles (EREVs), and smaller, more affordable battery-electric vehicles to make up 50 percent of its global volume by 2030, versus just 17 percent today. Ford says it expects its hybrid and EV business to be profitable by 2029.
Hybrids are now going to be the major focus going forward
“These are big decisions that we believe will pay off for years to come for our customers, our employees, American jobs, and manufacturing,” said Andrew Frick, president of Ford Model e and Ford Blue.
The shift won’t come cheap. Ford says it expects to record a $19.5 billion charge in 2025, with the majority in the fourth quarter. The company also expects to be hit with $5.5 billion in “cash effects” with the majority paid in 2026 and the leftover in 2027.
Nor will it come without major changes to Ford’s workforce. Ford recently agreed to dissolve its partnership with South Korean battery maker SK On, which will result in the automaker taking full ownership of the BlueOval SK battery factory in Kentucky. That factory will be repurposed to build energy storage systems, as first reported by Bloomberg. At least 1,600 employees are expected to lose their jobs as a result, though Frick said that more jobs, as much as 2,100, are expected to be added over the years.
“This is positive for jobs and positive for how much we’re going to utilize those plants,” Frick added.
In terms of products, Ford expects to replace its first-generation F-150 Lightning with an extended-range version that can travel up to 700 miles on a single charge. The EREV truck will be produced at Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan, with timing and starting price announced at a later date.
EREVs have a small internal combustion engine to recharge the EV battery for more range. They function as EVs, with the electric motors driving the wheels, and batteries that can be plugged into EV chargers. The gas generator is intended to relieve any range anxiety — or with truck owners, towing capacity — that some customers may have about buying a full EV.
“This is positive for jobs and positive for how much we’re going to utilize those plants.”
The F-150 Lightning was once thought to be a crucial driver for wider EV adoption in America. After all, a battery-electric version of Ford’s bestselling truck was sure to be a big winner. But the high price, heavy battery, and range and towing concerns from longtime truck owners kept the Lightning from breaking through as it was expected.
“It’s been a great truck for many people, and it has remained the bestselling electric pickup,” Frick said, “but we also learned a lot from our first generation of EVs, and we know that for many truck owners, towing heavy loads over long distances is nonnegotiable. That is why our next generation F-150 Lightning will be an extended range EV.”
The elimination of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit at the hands of Donald Trump and the Republicans played a role as well. But electric trucks have always been a tough sell, with their big, expensive batteries pushing prices up higher than most consumers are willing to spend. And now Ford is heavily invested in a brand-new EV platform for more affordable models, making the F-150 Lightning an awkward fit for the company’s future lineup.
Energy storage is another way in which Ford plans to repurpose its previous EV investment. Since it won’t be building as many EVs in the near future, the company plans to use its prismatic lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries for energy storage systems to power data centers, among other uses. Lisa Drake, vice president of technology platform programs and EV systems, said energy storage “just made a lot of sense as a natural adjacency for us.” Ford could expand that business to include battery storage products for residential uses, but Drake said that commercial customers would be first and foremost.
Source link
#Fords #big #bet #EVs #didnt #pan #pivoting #hybrids #energy #storage
![Anthropic’s Mythos AI Reportedly Hacked the NSA’s Most Sensitive Systems ‘in Hours’
When Anthropic first disclosed Mythos in April, it sent an anxious shockwave through much of the cybersecurity sector. The new AI model was allegedly so ruthlessly effective at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in existing software that the company said it was holding off on a public release and would only grant access to a small group of early testers, including the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Another wave of fear reverberated this week after the NSA reportedly discovered multiple vulnerabilities within its own cybersecurity systems during its tests with Mythos. If that agency—which supposedly boasts the most impenetrable cyberdefenses in the world—can be hacked by Mythos, what hope does the rest of the world’s cybersecurity infrastructure have? This latest round of panic began with what seems to have been something of a game of telephone: Someone says one thing, which gets repeated by another, and another after that, and along that chain of communication, the original statement is distorted. Last week, The Economist reported that during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that Mythos had broken into “almost all of [the NSA’s] classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” Warner said he’d received that information from the head of the NSA himself, General Joshua Rudd, who also leads the Pentagon’s Cyber Command division. On Monday, a coalition of intelligence agencies—including the NSA and its counterparts in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand— issued an unusually public warning that the risk that AI now poses for cybersecurity warrants a “whole-of-society response.”
The Economist’s report was seen by some as evidence that the worst fears about Mythos were true, a reaction that was undoubtedly fueled also by the aura of power and mystery that has coalesced around the model in recent months. That aura has arguably been a boon for Anthropic, which recently usurped OpenAI as the most valuable startup in the world and is preparing for what’s expected to be a historic IPO.
But it’s also been a contributing factor in its latest skirmish with the Trump administration, which ordered the company earlier this month to restrict access for all foreign nationals to Fable 5, a “Mythos-class” model that had recently been made publicly available and which was built with safeguards that to some users were annoyingly stringent. Citing national security concerns, the administration invoked an obscure piece of export control legislation, a move that, according to some legal experts, is spurious. Many cybersecurity experts, meanwhile, argued that the ban would hamstring U.S. cybersecurity defenses and give adversaries like China the upper hand. That argument was seemingly vindicated by a Tuesday report from the New York Times which said that Trump’s ban—which also targeted another model called Mythos 5, which had only been made available to a small group of organizations—had put the kibosh on the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos, and that the administration was now working with Anthropic to reinstate the agency’s access for limited purposes related to national security. The NSA did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
That same report from the Times also clarified that the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos were less apocalyptic than online rumors might suggest. According to federal officials cited in the report, the tests were carried out in a digital environment so robustly controlled that it’s very unlikely any hacker or foreign intelligence agency could replicate them. The officials also told the Times that even though Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, it didn’t actually exploit them. The author of the report in The Economist—the one that had been the initial cause of all the worry—has also admitted that his portrayal of the NSA’s tests with Mythos had been misleading. The tests “surely [involved] using Mythos alongside other tools under very particular conditions,” he wrote in a X post on Sunday. “I quoted [Senator Warner] to give a sense of Mythos’ potency. But it was a mistake not to have added caveats.” #Anthropics #Mythos #Reportedly #Hacked #NSAs #Sensitive #Systems #HoursAI,Anthropic,Mythos,NSA,Trump,White House Anthropic’s Mythos AI Reportedly Hacked the NSA’s Most Sensitive Systems ‘in Hours’
When Anthropic first disclosed Mythos in April, it sent an anxious shockwave through much of the cybersecurity sector. The new AI model was allegedly so ruthlessly effective at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in existing software that the company said it was holding off on a public release and would only grant access to a small group of early testers, including the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Another wave of fear reverberated this week after the NSA reportedly discovered multiple vulnerabilities within its own cybersecurity systems during its tests with Mythos. If that agency—which supposedly boasts the most impenetrable cyberdefenses in the world—can be hacked by Mythos, what hope does the rest of the world’s cybersecurity infrastructure have? This latest round of panic began with what seems to have been something of a game of telephone: Someone says one thing, which gets repeated by another, and another after that, and along that chain of communication, the original statement is distorted. Last week, The Economist reported that during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that Mythos had broken into “almost all of [the NSA’s] classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” Warner said he’d received that information from the head of the NSA himself, General Joshua Rudd, who also leads the Pentagon’s Cyber Command division. On Monday, a coalition of intelligence agencies—including the NSA and its counterparts in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand— issued an unusually public warning that the risk that AI now poses for cybersecurity warrants a “whole-of-society response.”
The Economist’s report was seen by some as evidence that the worst fears about Mythos were true, a reaction that was undoubtedly fueled also by the aura of power and mystery that has coalesced around the model in recent months. That aura has arguably been a boon for Anthropic, which recently usurped OpenAI as the most valuable startup in the world and is preparing for what’s expected to be a historic IPO.
But it’s also been a contributing factor in its latest skirmish with the Trump administration, which ordered the company earlier this month to restrict access for all foreign nationals to Fable 5, a “Mythos-class” model that had recently been made publicly available and which was built with safeguards that to some users were annoyingly stringent. Citing national security concerns, the administration invoked an obscure piece of export control legislation, a move that, according to some legal experts, is spurious. Many cybersecurity experts, meanwhile, argued that the ban would hamstring U.S. cybersecurity defenses and give adversaries like China the upper hand. That argument was seemingly vindicated by a Tuesday report from the New York Times which said that Trump’s ban—which also targeted another model called Mythos 5, which had only been made available to a small group of organizations—had put the kibosh on the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos, and that the administration was now working with Anthropic to reinstate the agency’s access for limited purposes related to national security. The NSA did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
That same report from the Times also clarified that the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos were less apocalyptic than online rumors might suggest. According to federal officials cited in the report, the tests were carried out in a digital environment so robustly controlled that it’s very unlikely any hacker or foreign intelligence agency could replicate them. The officials also told the Times that even though Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, it didn’t actually exploit them. The author of the report in The Economist—the one that had been the initial cause of all the worry—has also admitted that his portrayal of the NSA’s tests with Mythos had been misleading. The tests “surely [involved] using Mythos alongside other tools under very particular conditions,” he wrote in a X post on Sunday. “I quoted [Senator Warner] to give a sense of Mythos’ potency. But it was a mistake not to have added caveats.” #Anthropics #Mythos #Reportedly #Hacked #NSAs #Sensitive #Systems #HoursAI,Anthropic,Mythos,NSA,Trump,White House](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/GeneralJoshuaRudd-1280x853.jpg)

Post Comment