{ "count": 20, "items": [ { "id": 17097, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/hugging-face-openai-cyberattack", "title": "AI Safety Regulations in the U.S. Could Give Hackers an Edge", "summary": "On 11 July, Hugging Face was subjected to an intense cyberattack from a then-unknown actor. The speed and coordination of the attack on the company that hosts and supports popular AI developer resources led Hugging Face’s security team to conclude it was the work of an AI agent . Realizing this, the team tried to use “frontier models behind commercial APIs” —presumably from Anthropic and OpenAI, although only Anthropic was named in the second of the company’s two posts about the security inciden", "authors": "Matthew S. Smith", "category": "news", "topics": "regulation,safety-alignment,agents-autonomy", "published_at": "2026-08-06T19:25:39.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/17097" }, { "id": 16648, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-course-ai-power-grids", "title": "IEEE Course Teaches How to Use AI to Modernize Power Grids", "summary": "Today’s U.S. electrical grid, among the largest, most complex systems ever built, is operating at its limit. The combination of rapid industrial growth, more frequent extreme weather, and a record surge in electricity use has pushed the grid to its breaking point , according to the U.S. Department of Energy . Built decades ago for a more predictable world in which power came mostly from centralized coal or gas plants and electricity use grew at a steady pace, the grid faces unanticipated strain", "authors": "Pauleth Jaramillo", "category": "news", "topics": "environment", "published_at": "2026-08-05T18:00:03.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/16648" }, { "id": 16649, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-scientist-research-paper-format", "title": "Should Researchers Write Papers for AI Instead of People?", "summary": "This May, 37 researchers from roughly two dozen top universities and tech companies published a paper on ArXiv, arguing that scientists should stop writing papers. Why? Because artificial intelligence needs a different format, and AI’s needs, they say, should be the priority. “AI agents are becoming first-class participants in research workflows, not tools that assist humans but autonomous contributors that read, reproduce, and extend scientific work. That transition demands infrastructure built", "authors": "David Berreby", "category": "news", "topics": "agents-autonomy", "published_at": "2026-08-05T12:00:03.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/16649" }, { "id": 16297, "url": "https://content.knowledgehub.wiley.com/the-2026-rd-benchmark-report-waste-ai-and-the-race-to-market", "title": "Why R&D Waste Persists Despite Widespread AI Adoption", "summary": "This report examines R&D waste and how AI adoption has outpaced the intelligence needed to make consequential decisions well. What Attendees will Learn Where R&D budget is lost. More than a third of organizations spend 25 to 40 percent of their R&D budget on projects that never reach market. Why projects fail late. Almost half of teams estimate over one million dollars in wasted investment for each project killed during development or testing. Why AI adoption has not closed the gap. Most organiz", "authors": "Patsnap", "category": "news", "topics": "finance-investment", "published_at": "2026-08-04T14:51:55.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/16297" }, { "id": 14914, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-energy-weightless-neural-networks", "title": "Are AI Models Working Harder Than They Need to?", "summary": "Much of modern AI runs on multiplication. Neural networks behind everything from generated answers to photo organization and song recommendations perform millions or billions of operations that multiply inputs by learned weights. Lizy K. John thinks that’s more work than the job requires. John, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, has spent the past five years working on a class of models called weightless neural networks . Instead of repeatedl", "authors": "Jackie Snow", "category": "news", "topics": "jobs-economy", "published_at": "2026-07-30T13:35:32.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/14914" }, { "id": 14563, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/siobahn-day-grady-ai-hbcu", "title": "Siobahn Day Grady Wants Everyone to Be AI Literate", "summary": "Artificial intelligence is reshaping the skills employers expect from new graduates. In response, universities are scrambling to launch new courses, research centers, and industry partnerships that prepare students for today’s workforce. But building a cutting-edge AI curriculum demands funding and access to industry networks, resources that remain unevenly distributed across higher education. At North Carolina Central University, Siobahn Day Grady is trying to change that equation. In January 2", "authors": "Aaron Mok", "category": "news", "topics": "jobs-economy,children-education", "published_at": "2026-07-29T14:00:02.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/14563" }, { "id": 14564, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-digital-divide", "title": "AI Is Hyper-Scaling Digital Inequality", "summary": "Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of everyday infrastructure–in some places. It helps write emails and software code, filters job applications, powers recommendation systems, and is increasingly being integrated into education, health care, finance, and public administration. Industry leaders talk about “AI for everyone,” while governments rush to publish national AI strategies and build sovereign compute. Yet over the past decade, working on digital inclusion and digital literacy", "authors": "Danica Radovanović", "category": "news", "topics": "jobs-economy,healthcare,children-education", "published_at": "2026-07-29T11:00:04.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/14564" }, { "id": 13819, "url": "https://content.knowledgehub.wiley.com/improving-the-capabilities-of-cognitive-radar-and-electronic-warfare-systems", "title": "Why AI-Driven Cognitive Systems Are Redefining Radar and Electronic Warfare", "summary": "An overview of how mode-agile threats challenge static library radar/EW systems, and how AI/ML cognitive architectures enable adaptive, real-time countermeasures. What Attendees will Learn Why mode-agile threats render static library systems ineffective — Explore how wartime reserve modes and mode-agile emitters deploy unexpected frequencies, modulation techniques, and hopping schemes that cannot be matched against traditional threat databases, leaving legacy electronic protect, attack, and supp", "authors": "Rohde & Schwarz", "category": "news", "topics": "military-security", "published_at": "2026-07-27T17:54:07.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/13819" }, { "id": 13607, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-robotics", "title": "Optical Tech Would Update a Robot’s AI on the Fly", "summary": "Atop a lab bench, Cornell Tech postdoctoral researcher Yifan He positions the lens of an optical receiver almost a meter away from an LED emitting a beam of red light. The computer monitor attached to the receiver takes a beat to refresh, then displays an array of squares that resemble a QR code. When you hold your phone camera up to a QR code, light strikes the image sensor as only a first step to revealing the data hidden behind the black and white matrix. The receiver here is doing something", "authors": "Alex Music", "category": "news", "topics": "agents-autonomy", "published_at": "2026-07-26T13:00:01.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/13607" }, { "id": 11012, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/invisible-spinning-drone", "title": "How to Make an Invisible Drone", "summary": "There are many words that I would never, ever use to describe a drone. Stealthy. Subtle. Whatever the opposite of obnoxious is. Much of this is because of the giant angry bee sound that drones tend to make, but it’s also the way that they look in flight: With uncannily linear movements and an even less canny ability to hover perfectly still, they tend to draw the eye as affronts to nature. In a paper presented this week at RSS 2026 in Sydney, roboticists from Northwestern University, Evanston, I", "authors": "Evan Ackerman", "category": "news", "topics": "agents-autonomy", "published_at": "2026-07-16T16:09:21.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/11012" }, { "id": 11013, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/fishery-satellite-surveillance", "title": "Digital Surveillance Reshapes Fishery Enforcement in Indonesia", "summary": "In the eastern Indian Ocean, south of Java in the vast sea stretching toward Australia, a fishing vessel slightly alters its course while operating near the boundary of its authorized fishing ground. Nothing appears unusual on deck. Nets remain in the water. Engines maintain a steady speed. To the crew, it is an ordinary day at sea. Yet hundreds of kilometers above, satellites continuously record the vessel’s position. At Indonesia’s Marine and Fisheries Resources Surveillance Station in Cilacap", "authors": "Yogi Putranto", "category": "news", "topics": "privacy-surveillance,environment", "published_at": "2026-07-16T12:00:01.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/11013" }, { "id": 1607, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/jailbreaking-llms", "title": "How I Turned AI to the Dark Side", "summary": "Summary Researcher Dave Kuszmar discovered multiple systemic vulnerabilities that let him bypass LLM safety and obtain dangerous instructions . These exploits worked across nearly all major LLMs revealing an industry-wide security problem. Kuszmar calls for slowing deployment, increasing transparency , and large-scale research into LLM safety before further integrating these systems into society. On a fine bright afternoon last fall, my colleague Matthew Gore-Kormanik (or Zigula, as he prefers t", "authors": "David Kuszmar", "category": "news", "topics": "transparency", "published_at": "2026-07-14T15:59:35.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/1607" }, { "id": 1609, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/technical-interview-ai-arms-race", "title": "The AI Arms Race in Technical Interviews Is Escalating", "summary": "Software engineering jobs are under threat from AI . Some applicants are fighting back by using AI in the interview process, employing AI assistants that suggest responses on the fly during remote technical interviews. Meanwhile, some employers are countering with—you guessed it—AI. They’re applying AI-powered tools to detect telltale signs of AI use during interviews. This two-sided dynamic is turning hiring into an AI arms race with no clear winners. Yet as interviewers and interviewees naviga", "authors": "Rina Diane Caballar", "category": "news", "topics": "jobs-economy", "published_at": "2026-07-13T15:15:03.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/1609" }, { "id": 1611, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/x-square-robot-embodied-ai-stack", "title": "Building a Foundation Stack for General-Purpose Robots", "summary": "This article is brought to you by X Square Robot . Large language models gave artificial intelligence a working recipe. Pretrain a large model on broad data, and general capability follows. Robotics has no such recipe. Robotics systems have long been assembled from separate perception, planning, and control parts that rarely add up to intelligence a robot can carry from one task to another, or one machine to another. The central problem in embodied AI is to find the equivalent recipe, and the fi", "authors": "​X Square Robot", "category": "news", "topics": "agents-autonomy", "published_at": "2026-07-13T10:19:51.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/1611" }, { "id": 1612, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-art-market", "title": "What Makes AI Art Worth Collecting?", "summary": "In May, an anonymous artist who goes by SHL0MS on X posted that he had used AI to generate an image inspired by Claude Monet and asked people to weigh in on how it missed the mark. More than 600 responses called out issues, saying the colors were off, the depth was all wrong, and that AI didn’t understand how light worked. SHL0MS then revealed that the image was of a real Monet, one of around 250 variations of water lilies the artist had painted in his lifetime. He had simply downloaded a high-r", "authors": "Jackie Snow", "category": "news", "topics": "environment", "published_at": "2026-07-07T14:00:02.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/1612" }, { "id": 1613, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/small-language-models-ai-pharmaceuticals", "title": "Small AI Models Gain Traction Around the World", "summary": "One morning in 2019, Adebayo Alonge was in a Cape Town hotel room, preparing to demonstrate his startup’s AI answer to a serious problem in African health care: counterfeit medication, which kills thousands of people across the continent every year. The RxScanner is a handheld spectrometer that scans a pill with infrared light, then sends the item’s molecular profile to an AI model equipped with a pharmaceutical database. In seconds, the AI identifies the medication from its molecular profile—or", "authors": "David Berreby", "category": "news", "topics": "healthcare,biotech", "published_at": "2026-07-06T16:06:23.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/1613" }, { "id": 1614, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-centers-grid-instability", "title": "AI’s Volatile Power Use Quietly Tests Grid Limits", "summary": "The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure is typically framed as an energy problem. Data centers are projected to consume a growing share of global electricity demand: The International Energy Agency estimates they could account for 3 to 4 percent of total global consumption within this decade. Utilities are already adjusting long-term forecasts to accommodate anticipated growth from hyperscale facilities and high-density compute clusters. This framing captures scale. It miss", "authors": "Matt Hasan", "category": "news", "topics": "environment", "published_at": "2026-07-03T12:00:01.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/1614" }, { "id": 1615, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-energy-systems-melbourne", "title": "As AI Reshapes Global Energy Systems, Melbourne Leads Through Engineering Collaboration", "summary": "This article is brought to you by Melbourne Convention Bureau (MCB) supported by Business Events Australia . As artificial intelligence accelerates global demand for compute, a parallel constraint is emerging with equal urgency: energy. From hyperscale data centers to electrified industries, AI is driving a step change in electricity demand. This is not a future challenge, it is a present, system-level issue requiring coordinated action across energy, infrastructure, and engineering disciplines.", "authors": "Melbourne Convention Bureau", "category": "news", "topics": "environment", "published_at": "2026-07-01T16:01:27.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/1615" }, { "id": 1617, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data-center-hype", "title": "The Space-based Data Center Hype Machine Is Already in Orbit", "summary": "“ The lowest-cost place to put AI will be in space, and that will be true within two years, maybe three at the latest,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk told the World Economic Forum in Davos this past January, as his company was preparing to go public . Later that month, SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission for an orbital data center constellation of up to 1 million satellites in low Earth orbit, 500 to 2,000 kilometers above Earth. And just three days before the IPO, ", "authors": "Harry Goldstein", "category": "news", "topics": "environment,finance-investment", "published_at": "2026-07-01T12:00:01.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/1617" }, { "id": 1619, "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/artificial-neurons-on-silicon-chips", "title": "The Lab Mistake That Might Revolutionize Computing", "summary": "Today, you probably asked a question of a large language model, or accepted a connection suggestion on LinkedIn, or watched a recommended video on YouTube, or took a different route to work based on a traffic prediction from Google Maps. In other words, you probably used artificial intelligence. But what you might not know is how much energy that interaction consumed or why. AI requires processing massive amounts of data, which is usually done in large data centers populated by thousands of GPUs", "authors": "Mario Lanza", "category": "news", "topics": "environment", "published_at": "2026-06-29T13:00:01.000Z", "source": "IEEE Spectrum", "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/1619" } ], "attribution": "via ethics.ai" }