AI ethics on Friday, 17 July 2026

Investors are growing uneasy about increasing competition from China in the global race to dominate artificial intelligence.

Shift in pecking order illustrates that investors are reassessing outlook for artificial intelligence Apple overtook Nvidia on Friday to become the world’s most valuable company, reshuffling the top ranks of tech heavyweights as investors reassess the outlook for artificial intelligence. Apple was last valued at $4.88tn as ⁠its shares held steady, while Nvidia ⁠was roughly at $4.86tn, ​after a 3.5% decline. Continue reading...

Meta touts safety features – but for women, the dangers of these recording devices are obvious Imagine if every time you left the house, you couldn’t be sure that the stranger you met at a bar – or even the person walking by you in the street – wasn’t secretly recording you. It sounds like something out of a Black Mirror episode, but let’s face it, the era of wearable technology is fully upon us as everyday accessories have been developed to help track health and fitness data, receive smartphone

Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of privacy As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend. Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in

BBC Philharmonic/Havlat/Kaziboni/Piatti Quartet (NMC) Einstein’s field equations, Newton’s universal law and artificial intelligence are among the subjects of Laidlow’s ambitious orchestral works Robert Laidlow is as at home in the realms of science and technology as he is in the world of classical music. As this NMC debut album demonstrates, his intricate, wildly imaginative work is eminently approachable, even if the core concepts are highly complex. Warp, a terse, 12-minute piano concerto, pr

Transformer Weekly: NY data center moratorium, NDAA export controls and Amodei’s $1m to safety super PAC

The CEO of Foundation Future Industries, which counts the president’s son as its chief strategy adviser, tells WIRED it’s exploring some “kinetic things.”

From AI workflows to battery life and security, here's what it's really like to live with Vertu's luxury foldable every day.

Databricks has remade its image into an AI company and has published research on the cost savings of open weight AI models for coding.

Agility is opening a new training center for its Digit robots in Fremont, California.

Apple filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI last Friday, and it’s not messing around. The complaint alleges a pattern of misconduct reaching all the way up to OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and claims more than 400 former Apple employees now work at the company. OpenAI’s response so far has been carefully hedged, and the timing couldn’t be worse with the company reportedly eyeing an IPO […]

Patreon is strengthening its defenses against AI scraping by working with Cloudflare to block bots that train AI models on creators’ content without permission. The move marks a shift away from relying on websites using robots.txt alone to actively block unauthorized AI training.

Apple filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI last Friday, and it’s not messing around. The complaint alleges a pattern of misconduct reaching all the way up to OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and claims more than 400 former Apple employees now work at the company. OpenAI’s response so far has been carefully hedged, and the timing couldn’t be worse with the company reportedly eyeing an IPO […]

We start this week’s Wrap with a survey: ‘Has law firm AI use delivered cost savings for clients?’ There is a link here to share ...

By Kevin Walker, CEO, Centari. In recent months, several of the world’s leading law firms have announced investments in legal technology at a scale only ...

From mega-hit franchises to a destructive drug addict to a cowgirl whose husband is hiding a secret love affair, Anne Hathaway has been one of Hollywood’s most versatile leading women for more than 25 years. With the Oscar winner reuniting with Christopher Nolan as Penelope in “The Odyssey,” the highest-profile stop in a landmark 2026 […]

The DOJ Gabs About Its Biglaw Subpoenas: I don't think it'll work out the way they planned it in their head. House Oversight Caught With Their Pants Down : Alan "Underpants" Dershowitz cancels Monday Epstein interview at the last minute. Holding The Powerful... Not Accountable At All : Amid mounting court findings of DOJ misrepresentations, a federal court in Michigan calls out the government for an AI hallucination designed to keep a man locked up. No sanctions. Trump's Called In An FBI Forensi

Matt Damon has cemented himself as one of the defining actors of his generation, building a career that balances blockbuster stardom with acclaimed dramatic work. To celebrate the actor, Variety is ranking his 12 best film performances. After getting his start with small roles in films such as “Mystic Pizza” (1988) and the prep-school drama […]

It used to be *the* way to get yourself a Biglaw summer job. Not anymore. The post The Death Watch For Biglaw On-Campus Interviews Has Begun appeared first on Above the Law .

An Agency That Supports Health-Care Improvement Cuts Off Grant Funding Ryan Quinn Fri, 07/17/2026 - 06:15 PM The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality sent researchers letters this week saying they wouldn’t receive long-awaited funding continuations. The agency cited the “best interest of the federal government.” Byline(s) Ryan Quinn

The House Ways and Means Committee unanimously advanced a bill to reform Medicare Advantage prior authorization requirements. The post Healthcare Groups Praise Unanimous Committee Approval Of MA Prior Auth Bill appeared first on Above the Law .

Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm explains how ancient DNA, AI and CRISPR are helping scientists pursue de-extinction.

Muchas veces hemos tratado los videojuegos como si su disponibilidad estuviera garantizada, incluso cuando dependían de discos, tiendas digitales y servidores que podían desaparecer. Lo que hemos visto esta semana recuerda que conservarlos exige algo más que voluntad: hacen falta soportes que sobrevivan y organismos capaces de catalogarlos, mantenerlos y abrirlos a investigadores y público. Sony ha decidido cerrar una de esas vías para los lanzamientos futuros. Casi al mismo tiempo, Alemania ha

Netflix paid $587 million in cash when it purchased Ben Affleck’s AI startup InterPositive, the company disclosed in a federal filing. As part of the company’s Form 10-Q report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Netflix confirmed that it completed an acquisition in March “for a total purchase price of approximately $587 million. The disclosure […]

Understanding and optimizing for voice search is increasingly vital to online search visibility, especially for capturing the all-important local search activity. The post Voice Search For Lawyers: Why Your Firm May Already Be Losing Clients appeared first on Above the Law .

“In Central Command, we’re seeing disproportionately high traumatic brain injury rates in air defense,” said Col. Jessica Peck, a command surgeon. “Even a mild traumatic brain injury can significantly degrade effectiveness, impacting coordination, emotional regulation, spatial awareness, and decision-making.” The post Military services leaning into handheld blood testing devices to diagnose TBIs appeared first on DefenseScoop .

I remember... because I'm more than 30 days old. The post Remember When Alan Dershowitz Begged To Testify About Epstein? Well, Now He’s Not Showing Up appeared first on Above the Law .

It would open up a completely new business for the Facebook and Instagram maker.

Advocates urge stakeholders to contact lawmakers as the Republican-led agency considers changes to the $2.5 billion broadband subsidy.

Bottom line? The ostrich law firms that keep their heads in the sand are going to lose business. The post The BigHand Legal Report: More Trouble For Ostriches appeared first on Above the Law .

HSS chief digital and information officer Ashis Barad, who has worked on both the payer and provider sides of healthcare AI, thinks the industry’s growing “bot vs. bot” battle over prior authorizations and appeals is driving costs up. To him, the real fix lies in providers and payers sharing data to build more personalized care pathways. The post The ‘Bot Vs. Bot’ Dynamic Between Providers & Payers Is Driving Up Costs for Everyone appeared first on MedCity News .

So, I guess those Epshteyn documents really are relevant... The post The DOJ’s Biglaw Subpoena Explanation Raises More Questions Than It Answers appeared first on Above the Law .

The talks come weeks after Anthropic announced a similar deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX to use the computing capacity at its Colossus 1 data center

Oliver Morton, our planetary affairs editor, reflects on a warming Earth

Ben Ginsberg says years later, the proof Trump keeps promising still hasn't materialized. The post Veteran GOP Election Lawyer Still Has One Problem With Trump’s 2020 Claims: The Evidence appeared first on Above the Law .

Apple and the US Department of Justice are in early discussions about settling the 2024 antitrust lawsuit that alleges Apple violated competition law through its iPhone ecosystem, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. Apple has made multiple offers this year to close the case. The discussions are active but there is no guarantee of an agreement, and […] This story continues at The Next Web

The NHTSA recently called for autonomous vehicle companies to improve how cars respond in emergency situations.

Tesla launched a $225 balance bike for children aged 2 to 5. It has no motor, no pedals, no brakes, and is powered entirely by toddler legs. The lightweight white magnesium frame comes with a five-way adjustable seat, the Tesla wordmark on the side, and the T logo on the front. It sold out immediately, […] This story continues at The Next Web

Bills this week aim to regulate how children interact with and learn about AI, give America’s farmers more AI equipment and add AI regulation to Medicare claim denials.

Apple is blaming an Apple Music price hike on "rising licensing costs."

The company is expected to deliver comprehensive, data-driven reports and assessments to illuminate and secure the military’s medical supply chain. The post DOD selects Accenture to investigate ‘existential supply chain vulnerability’ threatening military medicine appeared first on DefenseScoop .

Before the saboteur in chief covers it with water. The post Litigants Ask To Check Reflecting Pool For ‘Sabotage’ appeared first on Above the Law .

On July 15, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the official most closely identified with Ukraine’s much-lauded effort to turn drones, software, and commercial technology into military advantage. The move could have implications not just for Kyiv, but also for Washington. Ukraine has become the clearest test of how a smaller force can use inexpensive systems and rapid development to counter a larger conventional army. Those are meaningful lessons

AWS users woke up Friday to find estimated billing emails showing charges ranging from hundreds of millions to $2.5 trillion. A unit pricing error in the AWS Billing Console’s estimated billing computation subsystem was the cause, Amazon confirmed. One Reddit user whose charges totalled $0.19 last month received an estimated bill of nearly $2.5 billion. […] This story continues at The Next Web

[Sponsored] Artificial intelligence accelerates the speed, scale, and variety of cyber threats – especially at the seams.

Acting Secretary Keith Sonderling said the DOL, National Science Foundation and Education Department are working on developing the curriculum for U.S. students. The post Labor Department eyes AI curriculum akin to China’s teachings appeared first on FedScoop .

Raj Subramaniam became the second-ever CEO of FedEx by taking every opportunity thrown his way—including his roommate’s job interview.

While investigations are ongoing, health officials suspect shredded lettuce may be partly responsible for the current outbreak.

"We must recognize that this generation of politicians, myself included, have failed to challenge a political culture and an economic model that simply doesn't work well enough for ordinary people."

Advice for lawyers at every stage of their career. The post What Lawyers Really Need To Know About Marketing appeared first on Above the Law .

The ship, which will support the Golden Dome effort, will be based on the national Security Multi-Mission Vessels Hanwha Philly Shipyard builds for the US Maritime Administration.

The goal of the new project is to field an operational capability for space-to-space and space-to-ground power beaming by 2030, according to the Defense Innovation Unit call to industry.

New megafirm sends London lawyers home after its air conditioning gives out during a heatwave. The post Things Are Heating Up At This Newly Merged Global Megafirm — Literally appeared first on Above the Law .

Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 topped Arena’s frontend coding leaderboard within 24 hours of launch, ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol. It placed third on Artificial Analysis’s Intelligence Index. The reaction from Washington, Wall Street, and academia was swift and pointed. TNW covered the model’s capabilities at launch, but the political and […] This story continues at The Next Web

The executive order establishes a Virtual Asset Council that will bring together key financial, revenue, and security agencies to improve regulatory coordination while supporting responsible innovation.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong is again joining a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education as it continues trying to end federal grants for school-based mental health services. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Tong joined a lawsuit about these same grants one year ago. That’s when the Department of Education initially discontinued the […]

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the screenings will boost the military’s readiness and resilience, but doctors express caution.

Amazon’s Zoox voluntarily recalled software in 105 of its robotaxis after an unoccupied vehicle drove into heavy smoke at an active emergency fire scene in Las Vegas on June 20. The smoke obscured the scene, which had not been cordoned off with cones. The vehicle entered, braked hard while attempting to steer away, and came […] This story continues at The Next Web

Judge spent two-thirds of her order explaining why fake citations are unacceptable, then shrugs off holding anyone accountable. The post DOJ Cites Fake Case To Keep Man Locked Up By ICE, Judge Declines To Do Anything About It appeared first on Above the Law .

Xenia, or the guest-host relationship, is central to Christopher Nolan's interpretation of 'The Odyssey' in his new adaptation of the ancient Greek text.

Why can’t the world’s most powerful military secure the Strait against a country that has no navy?

From the various translations to mythology-inspired novels to introductory fare for kids

As AI agents tackle more tasks, such as managing online accounts, authentication has become a practical engineering problem. For example, The post 1Password’s new browser integration for Claude changes how AI uses your credentials appeared first on The New Stack .

"As a result of rising licensing costs, Apple Music is increasing its subscription price beginning today," the company said. Source

On a video conference call from Hangzhou earlier this year, one of China's hottest startups held a four-hour pitch meeting with potential venture investors that was unusual by almost any measure. Von Saritha Rai und Olivia Poh ( Deepseek , KI )

The Investing Club holds its "Morning Meeting" every weekday at 10:20 a.m. ET.

Many underlying challenges have remained remarkably similar from one generation to the next. The post Lawyers Should Spend More Time Studying Legal History appeared first on Above the Law .

The president’s speech re-hashed debunked conspiracies around U.S. elections. Critics say the administration’s 18-month investigation into voter fraud has been a total failure. The post State officials, election experts pan Trump speech: ‘This is what desperation looks like’ appeared first on CyberScoop .

Limpiar nuestro hogar es algo necesario, pero no siempre tenemos el tiempo necesario para ello. Cualquier dispositivo que nos pueda echar un cable para ello es siempre bien recibido y, si encima lo hace sin que tengamos que hacer nada, pues mejor que mejor. Sí, nos estamos refiriendo a un robot aspirador y, aunque hay mucho donde elegir, hoy nos vamos a centrar en el Lefant M5 Pro : un modelo de gama alta que ahora sale por solo 499,99 euros . @xataka.seleccion Este robot aspirador hace TODO por

Depuis mai, Microsoft s’agite dans le domaine de la cybersécurité. Mi-mai, l’entreprise a ainsi présenté son système MDASH, pour « Microsoft Security multi-model agentic scanning harness ». Il s’agit d’un réseau d’une centaine d’agents travaillant à partir d’un mix de modèles pour débusquer les failles de sécurité dans le code. On sait que MDASH est déjà utilisé. […]

Possibly. But only under medical supervision

President Donald Trump’s teleprompter operator is on unpaid leave after reports that he used his inside knowledge to make bets about the president’s speeches on the online prediction market Kalshi , the White House said Thursday. The firm’s enforcement chief said Kalshi contacted federal regulators about bets allegedly made about what the president would say in public addresses. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president is aware of the situation, which she described as “unf

The week in appellate news. The post How Appealing Weekly Roundup appeared first on Above the Law .

K&L Gates has launched a significant round of redundancies targeting its “allied professional” workforce, cutting roughly 10% of its global business support staff. First picked up by Above the Law […] The post K&L Gates cuts circa 10% of its business services workforce appeared first on Legal IT Insider .

Last month, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi drove into an active emergency fire scene that was clouded with smoke, the company said.

As AI agents evolve beyond writing code toward handling everyday tasks for people, the infrastructure required to keep them on The post “They’re dead if they don’t offer this”: DoorDash’s CLI for agents may be out of necessity appeared first on The New Stack .

California’s latest budget includes $116 million over three years to help schools identify and support students experiencing homelessness — the first time the state has dedicated funding specifically for this purpose. Homeless student advocates welcomed the investment after years of lobbying lawmakers to supplement the federal dollars California gets annually to address student homelessness. However, […]

Breaking Defense previews some of the big news that could come at the Farnborough International Airshow.

“Our collective power to hold ICE accountable starts with looking out for our neighbors,” writes Kica Matos.

The Trump administration is considering plans for an independent regulator to vet the safety of artificial intelligence models with industry input, after Silicon Valley leaders complained about the ad ...

From the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept The post Writers Guild Of America Also Sues Paramount, Citing Looming Merger Layoff Bloodbath appeared first on Above the Law .

Fairlife’s U.S. operation includes plants in Michigan, New York and Arizona, and the company's retail sales passed $1 billion in 2022.

VW-Beschäftigte bangen um 50.000 Jobs, der Betriebsrat fordert Klarheit: Ende August muss sich VW-Chef Blume auf mehreren Versammlungen der Belegschaft stellen.

Ben O'Mahony discusses building custom AI-powered Language Server Protocols (LSPs) that go beyond standard rule-based checkers. He explains how to instrument AI agents natively with OpenTelemetry to track concrete user actions (accepting, dismissing, or regenerating code fixes) as implicit labels, creating a continuous data flywheel to distill frontier capabilities into cheaper, local SLMs. By Ben O'Mahony

Le réseau social X (anciennement Twitter) va pouvoir mettre en œuvre son plan de conformité pour améliorer l’accès de ses données aux chercheurs et la transparence des publicités. La Commission européenne avait infligé à l’entreprise d’Elon Musk une amende en décembre dernier, assortie d’une obligation de changements. La première décision de non-conformité avec le règlement […]

Europe's latest updates to its climate policy aren't great news for the planet.

UK agency warns cheaper open models could leave companies less time to patch critical vulnerabilities

A conversion-rate alert fires 30 minutes after a pricing engine deploys updated discount rules. The analytics platform holds millions of The post Why every AI agent decision needs a receipt appeared first on The New Stack .

Healthcare, coding education, digital payments and youth employment are among the initiatives organisations are supporting as they mark Mandela Day.

* Last night, Trump delivered a speech ostensibly about election security, but it was mostly a commercial for the 25th Amendment. [ Election Law Blog ] * Madison Square Garden sues WIRED over article claiming the stadium "used surveillance to track celebrities’ race, gender identity, and sexual orientation." Can you believe a despicable owner who already admits to routinely using face recognition to ban lawyers from events could do such a thing? [ USA Today ] * Trump selling financial firms earl

Yevhenii Khmara, a major general with deep experience in intelligence, counterterrorism and long-range strikes against Russia, is Ukraine's new acting defense minister.

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day.

The school year starts again in less than a month, and a remarkable number of big districts in Colorado and elsewhere will open it without a permanent superintendent. Jeffco. Cherry Creek. Los Angeles. Miami-Dade. I’m guessing Denver will soon join this group of districts given the Denver school board’s growing frustrations with Superintendent Alex Marrero’s […]

Google is adding Instacart, Canva and YouTube Music integrations to AI Mode, letting users complete tasks across apps while raising questions about privacy, control and liability. The post Google now lets users connect apps to AI Mode in Search appeared first on MEDIANAMA .

Studies increasingly show that how kids are using screens is more important than the exact amount of time they’re spending on them – and parents and caregivers tend to know what’s best for their families.

As enterprise leaders start deploying agentic workflows, they must establish the infrastructure to build and run them, one capable of The post Arm and Google offer a smarter option to run agentic AI workloads appeared first on The New Stack .

A new technical analysis published by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) argues that the future of agentic AI will be built not on entirely new infrastructure, but on the mature cloud-native ecosystem that already powers modern distributed applications By Craig Risi

China denied President Trump’s accusation that it interfered with the 2020 presidential election, calling the claim “entirely fabricated” and “groundless” while insisting it never had any interest in meddling with U.S. elections. Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian responded to Trump’s Thursday primetime address, when the president accused...

During her mentoring of young people in STEM, she met deaf students struggling through STEM classes because qualified sign language interpreters were scarce. It struck her as an engineering problem as much as an educational one.

Google Cloud incorporates key Wiz capabilities into an agentic defense platform to automate threat detection and remediation against AI attacks.

NetCom BW testet den Glasfaser-Standard 50G-PON im Labor und will die symmetrischen 50 GBit/s perspektivisch auch f�r Endkunden anbieten. ( Nokia , Huawei )

Plus: A free 'good practice guide' for video game writing contracts in the UK.

Every UK bank says it’s ‘exploring AI’. But in reality, most mean they’re ‘waiting for permission’. ...

Tesla's Autopilot may fail to recognize children at times, but the company certainly recognizes their potential as future buyers.

For decades, protection has been treated as something Nigerians buy...

Experts from across the world debated whether age verification can protect children without undermining privacy, anonymity and free expression. The post Privacy-preserving age verification is contradictory by design, says EDRi advisor at SFLC discussion appeared first on MEDIANAMA .

Remote access to domestic devices is increasingly being used to manipulate, intimidate and disturb. Policymakers and tech companies are grappling with safeguards

Isuzu Motors sets up a R2 million AI, coding and robotics lab at Khulile Primary School in the Eastern Cape.

Founded this year by brothers Rohit and Rishabh Kumar, LexiTrove is taking a specialist approach to legal AI and focusing exclusively on UK employment law. The startup is building its […] The post Startup Corner: LexiTrove – AI for the employment matter lifecycle appeared first on Legal IT Insider .

I stand alone on a stage in front of 200 high school freshmen. They’re looking at their phones, talking to one other, laughing — paying attention to anything but me. I pick up my guitar, strum a chord and start singing, first in almost a whisper: “Who am I, mind on fire, born of you […]

The Spotify managed accounts for children of 13 years age and below would be available in 6 countries like UK, US, Germany where parents can create these separate accounts for kids and control the settings. The post Spotify expands free managed accounts for children to six new markets appeared first on MEDIANAMA .

You’ve come a long way, Bibi: Israel’s crucial election    The Economist

“Whether or not FIFA has gotten this policy exactly right, the need for hydration breaks underscores a new reality,” writes Laura Schifter.

An open-source flight-control system found in consumer drones has been installed in Ukraine’s latest cruise missile, showing how cheap technology is making military hardware accessible to all

Claude-Joseph Vernet, Die vier Zeiten des Tages, Mittag (1757) – Gemeinfrei: Wikimedia Unwetter kommen mal aus heiterem Himmel, mal kündigen sie sich lange vorher an. In beiden Fällen hilft es, gut gewappnet zu sein. Dank eures Rückenwindes sind wir das.

Netflix is scaling generative AI across content production while expanding cloud gaming, children’s games and new entertainment formats, executives said during its Q2 2026 earnings call. The post Netflix Q2FY26: AI now powers 300+ titles as cloud gaming logs 11x growth in active players appeared first on MEDIANAMA .

Warner Music Group has renewed its licensing agreement with China’s NetEase Cloud Music. The multi-year extension covers distribution of Warner‘s recorded music and publishing catalog across the streaming platform. It also broadens the partnership beyond distribution into promotion of Warner artists and multimedia content. The companies announced the renewal on Thursday (July 16). NetEase Cloud … Continued Source

By combining a CRM platform like Maximizer CRM with AI-driven automation, businesses can respond faster, work smarter and deliver service that customers remember, says Mark Annett, head of CRM sales at Camsoft CRM Solutions.

Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed the dual nature of artificial intelligence’s opportunities and challenges, calling for a principle of “openness” and regulations to keep the technology “secure and controllable” in a speech at the country’s flagship annual AI conference. Xi’s first speech to the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai showed AI is a national strategic priority as China seeks to build greater technological self-reliance amid its tech rivalry with the United States. Earlier...

The days of treating fraud as a simple line-item liability are over. For years, the banking industry...

If you’ve spent any amount of time using ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI assistants, you’ve witnessed some of the ways it can go wrong. LLM accuracy remains an issue, and there are plenty of social situations in which your outputs can be unwelcome. AI also presents privacy pitfalls, given how personal some conversations can get. The AI assistants themselves won’t give you much guidance on what to avoid, which means you might be on your own to figure this stuff out. Here are some pointers I’ve gathe

QCon AI Boston 2026 focused on the operational challenges of deploying AI agents, emphasizing the need for robust production infrastructure. Key themes included improving context management, ensuring security through a "harness" around agents, and adopting a comprehensive engineering model for AI. By Tatiana Fesenko

Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 has taken the top spot in a front-end coding leaderboard, giving Sacks fresh ammunition against tighter U.S. AI rules.

Media companies have gotten pretty good at blocking AI bots. They have been less good at deciding which ones should be allowed in. Reports say most major publications almost universally block crawlers from major AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and many small to midsize publishers mirror that, configuring their robots exclusion protocol settings, or robots.txt, to keep them out. It’s an understandable stance, and it might even be appropriate. But it also crudely compresses a complex issue

Jio Credit’s AUM rose 163% YoY to Rs 30,667 crore in Q1 FY27, while loan disbursements jumped 173%. Jio Financial’s payments, banking and asset management businesses also posted strong growth. The post Jio Financial Q1: NBFC arm sees 173% rise in loan disbursements, payments bank users near 4 million mark appeared first on MEDIANAMA .

Karnataka's new social media coordination framework promises faster action on misinformation, fake news and hate speech. Read the details. The post Karnataka to set up direct social media response framework as other states step up online content enforcement appeared first on MEDIANAMA .

Before the twentieth century gave armies antibiotics, the leading killer of American soldiers in wartime was neither enemy fire nor shrapnel. Two-thirds of the roughly 620,000 deaths in the U.S. Civil War came from diseases like typhoid and dysentery. Spread through contaminated water and crowded camps, they were eventually controlled through inoculation and field sanitation rather than the antibiotics that would not arrive until the following generation. Later in World War I, American forces lo

SHANGHAI (AP) — Development and governance of artificial intelligence should be a global effort, Chinese President Xi Jinping said Friday, while reiterating China’s objections to what he called the “overstretching” of national security concerns. Speaking at a conference in Shanghai, Xi said AI should not be dominated by any single nation. American-led restrictions have blocked...

Deutsche Unternehmen erwarten bis 2026 einen ROI von 24 Prozent durch KI. Doch viele sind noch nicht bereit für den Einsatz von KI-Agenten.

It’s 2028, and the Fujian carrier strike group has just left Yulin, China, for an unknown destination. The U.S. Navy’s “Hedge Strategy” has let commanders disperse unmanned systems across regional choke points as forward-deployed scouts. But days before contact with Fujian, an unmanned undersea vehicle in the Banda Sea transmits an error code and must head back to Yokosuka for repairs — a 3,000-mile, 15-day trip. A second platform, an unmanned surface vehicle, is overdue for a routine oil filter

The Cyborg 15 is versatile enough to handle work, school, and the latest PC games.

India's cybersecurity ecosystem faces deep structural problems, from weak regulation to outdated policy. Experts identify ten reforms that cannot wait. The post Ten things wrong with India’s cybersecurity system: what the experts say appeared first on MEDIANAMA .

The Kenya Investment Authority (Invest Kenya) is working on proposals for a residency-by-investment programme that would grant long-term residency to investors who commit substantial capital and create jobs, reviving a plan first floated in 2019 but never implemented.

It is much easier for hackers to target hundreds of smaller businesses with weaker defences than trying to breach one heavily-fortified enterprise.

More than 9.4 million investor accounts applied for shares in the blockbuster initial public offering (IPO) of ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), with retail demand reaching about 212 times the shares initially available online. Investors submitted valid applications for nearly 817 billion shares on Thursday, according to an official announcement published Thursday night. The response highlights the intense appetite for China’s leading producer of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, as...

Two organizations targeted by O’Leary say his comments caused “significant economic losses, severe emotional distress, and ongoing threats to their physical safety.”

New College of Florida Absorbs a USF Campus. Sort Of. Ryan Quinn Fri, 07/17/2026 - 03:00 AM The property has changed hands, but the students and employees didn’t go with it. And there’s a reversion clause if New College can’t handle the debt. Byline(s) Ryan Quinn

DOJ Sues Maryland Over In-State Tuition for Undocumented Students Sara Weissman Fri, 07/17/2026 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Sara Weissman

SJSU Grad Student Arrested for ‘Hateful and Threatening’ Campus Graffiti kathryn.palmer… Fri, 07/17/2026 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Kathryn Palmer

Rise of Chinese Social Media Sleuth ‘Exposes Research Failures’ sara.custer@in… Fri, 07/17/2026 - 03:00 AM Content creator who helped oust top Chinese academics after accusing them of fabricating data promises to strike again. Byline(s) Rosalind Skillen for Times Higher Education

How 4 Colleges Are Expanding Student Success Joshua.Bay Fri, 07/17/2026 - 03:00 AM From academic interventions to childcare and basic needs support, institutions are stepping up efforts to help students persist. Byline(s) Joshua Bay

Iowa Schools Acknowledge Federal Limits on CTE Courses for Undocumented Students Sara Weissman Fri, 07/17/2026 - 03:00 AM Iowa school districts and community colleges had to acknowledge to the state that the federal government opposes undocumented students participating in many college-level career and technical education programs. Byline(s) Sara Weissman

Michigan Investigation Into Football Coach Tops $12M gianna.jakubowski Fri, 07/17/2026 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Gianna Jakubowski

Symmetry Investments has received the regulatory approval to operate in Dubai, joining hedge fund peers who’re continuing to expand in the emirate despite the regional conflict.

xAI, maison mère du réseau social X et du moteur d’IA générative Grok, poursuit en justice un homme de Caroline du Sud au motif qu’il aurait utilisé Grok pour créer du contenu représentant des agressions sexuelles sur mineurs (Child sexual abuse material, CSAM). L’homme, Terry Harwood, a été arrêté plus tôt dans l’année pour des […]

Chinese tech unicorn BrainCo has unveiled what it claims is the world’s first integrated “brain-to-robot” platform that lets users control robots using only their thoughts, without moving a muscle. The launch of the Brain-Controlled Robot AI Platform was announced on Friday at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai – China’s premier AI event. It comes as global technology firms are racing to develop powerful embodied AI systems, where artificial intelligence is...

OpenAIs erstes eigenes Gerät heißt Codex Micro und ist ein Makro-Pad. Es kostet 230 US-Dollar und steuert KI-Agenten, wird aber nicht von OpenAI selbst gebaut.

Never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing

Apple Inc. was upgraded to buy at HSBC Holdings Plc on Friday, in the latest reflection of how Wall Street is increasingly positive on the iPhone maker’s position in a market where many trades related ...

Die US-Amerikanerin Daniela Rus erhät den bayerischen High-Tech-Preis des Ministerpräsidenten von Bayern. Die Forscherin hat besondere Beziehungen zu Bayern.

Investors pull away from shares in companies that have led markets higher this year

The UK and EU have committed twice as much money as the US to investments in the computing sector

South Korean regulators fear single-stock leveraged ETFs are fuelling volatility

Reports of a Russo-Chinese plan to disable satellites underline how markets are ignoring geopolitical threats to the tech boom

Founder of VC firm Lakestar has raised a $300mn ‘resilience’ fund to back European dual-use and defence tech start-ups

Here are the ways leading companies are already responding to the AI revolution in professional services

No, not the one to supposedly steal an election — the one by ABC and NBC to keep his "big news" primetime address off their airwaves

Un grupo de investigadores españoles aclara en un nuevo estudio cuánto material delictivo original hay en el rincón más profundo de internet

Fourth brush with the law for Ehud "The Analyzer" Tenenbaum, who once hacked Pentagon and NASA.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has made a landmark speech at the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, delivering his first-ever keynote address at the country’s premier artificial intelligence event. Xi’s speech came just moments after his US counterpart, Donald Trump, delivered an unprecedented attack against Beijing during a prime-time national broadcast, accusing China of orchestrating the “largest compromise of election data in history”. The dueling addresses are set to further fuel...

The records provide new details about Chinese intelligence collection on voters and internal analytic debates, but do not undercut longstanding findings on the 2020 election.

Japanese AI-linked stocks tumbled as a fresh rout in U.S. semiconductor shares spread across Asia after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's outlook failed to reassure investors.

Billions of dollars in leveraged bets on South Korea's AI darlings have warped a stock market once revered as a reliable barometer of global growth into a wild ​casino, confounding both regulators and ...

China will use its largest annual artificial intelligence gathering this week to showcase an ambition that extends beyond catching up with the United States in foundation models to building dominance in autonomous agents, scientific research, humanoid robots and consumer devices. The World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai comes amid an intensifying technology rivalry with the US, whose restrictions continue to constrain China’s access to advanced computing chips. Beijing has responded by making.

Data center-related policy proposals, protests and litigation are underway across the country citing Colossus and Memphis as a cautionary tale.

Global fintech venture funding hit $28.6 billion in the first half of 2026, up 23% on the same period the previous year, according to data from Crunchbase.

As parents push to equip their children with AI skills, companies seeking to exploit their anxieties around the new technology are exaggerating claims about what they can teach their children.

Google introduces Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, a lightweight cybersecurity model to find and patch vulnerabilities.

Senior research fellow Gary Miller spoke to Financial Times about attempts to exploit mobile network vulnerabilities to track US personnel during the Iran war. The post US Military Smartphones Targeted Through Roaming and Ad Tech appeared first on The Citizen Lab .

Reversing course, Flock Safety—the surveillance technology vendor most known for its extensive network of automated license plate readers — has announced that it will end a pilot for its acoustic gunshot detection devices to identify signs of “human distress.” In October 2025, EFF warned the public that Flock was rolling out a new feature called “Distress Detection” that would be deployed through their acoustic gunshot detection devices (formerly known as Flock Raven, now called Audio Detection)

When Ubisoft's Watch Dogs 2 was released in 2016, it was a headtrip for those of us working on digital-rights issues in the Bay Area. During the day, I'd fight tech-authoritarianism from EFF's San Francisco offices and then, at night, I'd fight tech-authoritarianism in an uncanny simulation of San Francisco from my home gaming console. Watch Dogs 2 is an open-world video game that follows a hacktivist collective called Dedsec as they take on surveillance tech and discriminatory AI systems that a

The post Privacy and human rights award 2026 appeared first on Access Now .

The post Why we’re increasing the AI focus of our job board appeared first on 80,000 Hours .

Lots of articles about this . As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy.

I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which was as great as I remember. It has an age rating of PG-13 in the US and 15 in the UK for bad language and some kissing. (There is also lying to parents but apparently that doesn’t count.) This seems absurd. I have way less problem with some light cursing/petting than films that are ostensibly for kids like cartoons and superhero movies that treat mass existential threat as an incident plot point in the hero’s journey. Like: Frozen 2 in which the entire ci

In some countries, the debate around technological sovereignty has been framed as a race toward independence. Governments have invested billions in sovereign cloud initiatives, national AI programs, semiconductor manufacturing, and critical infrastructure under the implicit assumption that sovereignty means self-sufficiency. But that assumption is detached from reality.

Lowest cost per token from extreme codesign maximizes intelligence per dollar for post-training in the agentic era.

Brazil may soon become the first country in the Americas to regulate digital platforms before they do anything wrong. Bill 4,675/2025 would let the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) designate large technology companies as having “systemic relevance” and impose special obligations without first proving anticompetitive conduct or consumer harm. That is a substantial change ... Brazil’s Gatekeeper Bill Gets a Tuneup, Not a Rethink The post Brazil’s Gatekeeper Bill Gets a Tuneup, No

The biologist’s bold “energetic view of life” looks to the body’s strangest organelles as the link between cells, health, and mind and the foundation of our experience of being alive. The post Martin Picard’s Mitochondrial Theory of Mind first appeared on Quanta Magazine

As usual, part 2 of the weekly deals with speculative, regulatory, political and alignment questions.

The standard AI competition story has plenty of supposed villains. It just keeps leaving out one of the biggest. Regulators and academics warn that a small group of firms—including Amazon, Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, with Microsoft and Meta sometimes added—will dominate generative artificial intelligence. Their advantages in computing power, capital, data, and distribution will harden ... The Missing Rival: China and the Limits of AI Antitrust The post The Missing Rival: China and the Limits

Artificial Intelligence can produce biased outputs. In part, this is because unrepresentative data is used to train, validate and test AI. To remedy skewed datasets and train fairer AI, many call for more comprehensive and systematic data production and processing about diverse people’s bodies and lives, including disabled people. Yet this response rests on a number of assumptions. Drawing on disability data, I argue that we should be cautious about these assumptions when regulating AI. The post

On 15 July 2026, the Court of Appeal handed down an important judgment in Vince v Associated Newspapers ([2026] EWCA Civ 899). This decision establishes, for the first time, that a person can sue a newspaper under data protection law for an “unfair” article even if, under the law of defamation, there is no claim. […]

CEPS is pleased to announce a call for interest for a new three-day executive course designed for mid- to senior level health policy experts and practitioners from low- and middle-income countries ...

An intelligence official on what the declassified material shows—and does not show—about foreign threats and the president’s allegation of an intelligence community cover-up. The post An Initial Readout of Trump’s Election-Interference Speech appeared first on Just Security .

Suggestion for hyperscalers feeling pressure over data center water use: Buy up a few exclusive country clubs, convert the golf courses into public parks, pay for guides and binoculars to get the previous members into birdwatching - help them embrace a more sustainable hobby! Google used 10.9 billion gallons in 2025 , so about 30 million gallons per day. The Coachella Valley has 120 golf courses each using ~800 acre-feet per year , which is ~750,000 gallons per day. So Google buying up 40 of tho

As concerns around data privacy in machine learning grow, the ability to unlearn—or remove—specific data points from trained models becomes increasingly important. While state-of-the-art unlearning methods have emerged in response, they typically treat all points in the forget set equally. In this work, we challenge this approach by asking: do points that have a negligible impact on the model’s learning need to be removed? Through a comparative analysis of influence functions across language and

The U.S. Department of Energy ("DOE") is adopting the interim final rule published on August 25, 2025, as final, without change. This final rule establishes the procedures for developing and carrying out voluntary agreements and plans of action under the Defense Production Act. The Defense Production Act provides a defense from antitrust laws with respect to any action taken to develop or carry out any voluntary agreement or plan of action when certain criteria are met.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is amending its regulations to change the admission period in the F, J, and I classifications from duration of status to an admission for a fixed time period, and additional changes to admission and extension requirements. This final rule will provide additional protections and oversight of these nonimmigrant categories and will allow DHS to better evaluate whether these nonimmigrants are maintaining status while temporarily in the United States. This fi

REMARKS AS DELIVERED UN Special Envoy Amandeep Singh Gill Calls for Global Cooperation and Capacity-Building on AI Governance at WAIC At WAIC in Shanghai, the United Nations Special Envoy emphasized ...

The UN Secretary-General remains deeply concerned by the continuing deadly military escalation between Iran and the United States, his spokesperson said on Friday as attacks destroyed key civilian and ...

From 6 to 9 July 2026, the third workshop on “Teaching and Learning with East Asian Shared Heritage” was successfully held in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China. Jointly organized by UNESCO Regional ...

AI governance increasingly requires judgments about whether an AI system remains adequately trustworthy over time, whether observed changes are tolerable, and how such judgments should be documented in a transparent and contestable way. Yet existing work on AI trustworthiness remains either too high-level to support lifecycle monitoring and reassessment or too narrowly metric-driven to connect with governance needs. We therefore propose a lightweight methodology for auditable trustworthiness lev

Frontier AI companies have published capability thresholds that differ substantially, making it difficult for third parties to verify whether a threshold has been crossed or to compare requirements across companies. Moreover, without common minimum thresholds, risk mitigation may be inconsistent, creating a potential race to the bottom in safety standards. We develop a methodology for deriving harmonized thresholds across three risk domains. For misuse risks (cyber and biological), we take expec

Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI), enabled by Large Language Models, marks a shift from rule-based automation toward autonomous, goal-driven control of Next-Generation Networks (NGNs). Existing surveys treat the two domains in isolation, leaving protocol integration, evaluation, and standardization alignment underexplored. To address this gap, a two-part tutorial-and-survey is presented. Part I formalises the control, management, and AI-native planes of 5G and 6G. It then covers the foundatio

Retinal layer segmentation in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a fundamental step for extracting quantitative biomarkers of retinal structure. Indeed, there is a growing interest in the analysis of OCTs in the context of neurodegenerative diseases. However, segmentation remains challenging due to speckle noise, shadowing artifacts, low contrast between adjacent layers, anatomical variability across subjects, and domain shifts arising from different acquisition protocols and clinical populat

Scientific work increasingly spans heterogeneous artifacts -- papers, code, datasets, scientific file formats, model outputs, figures, manuscripts, and team decisions -- yet general-purpose AI assistants rarely preserve these objects as a coherent, auditable research state. We present SciForge, a multimodal research-native AI workbench that reserves the graphical interface for human judgment while search, parsing, model routing, workflow execution, plotting, writing, and presentation generation

Governments are increasingly mandating that LLM-generated content carry watermarks. The EU AI Act calls for markings that are "sufficiently reliable and robust." California's SB 942 requires disclosure that is "permanent or extraordinarily difficult to remove." Both mandates rest on an untested assumption: that watermark detection yields evidence reliable enough for courts. This paper tests that assumption directly. We evaluate three representative LLM watermarking methods -- KGW, Unigram, and t

Over the past decade, responsible AI (RAI) has produced a substantial body of practice for identifying and mitigating the risks AI poses in high-stakes settings. Yet this work has not produced a market that rewards trustworthiness. Firms that invest seriously in safety, fairness, and oversight cannot consistently prove to consumers, regulators, and shareholders that their systems go beyond the bare minimum of compliance. What is missing is a way for society to recognize or compare the difference

The ODRL policy language is emerging as the de-facto standard for policy modelling data access and usage preferences, AI governance policies and data workflows in European dataspaces. The current standard has no mathematical formal semantics to describe how a system should implement policy evaluation. This has resulted in a variety of systems and tools that implement their own interpretation of the language, which limits interoperability and cannot guarantee consistent results. Based on an exist

Standard automation ROI misses four categories of systemic risk -- tacit knowledge erosion, resilience reduction, regulatory exposure, and socio-institutional capital degradation -- that affect long-term organizational performance. PHP-AIO (Protocol for Human Preservation in AI-Optimized Organizations) is a five-gate sequential decision protocol with a final composite check that quantifies these unpriced systemic risks at the role level and produces auditable automation decisions. A closed-form

Autonomous driving ethics is not only an expert concern, but also a public issue involving risk, responsibility, and governance. However, non-experts often struggle to interpret these issues in concrete incidents, especially when responsibility is distributed across multiple stakeholders. This paper investigates interactive narrative as a public-facing method for eliciting situated ethical reflection on autonomous driving. We present Red Light, Grey Zone, a web-based, multi-perspective interacti

Large language models are broadly capable, yet in sustained one-to-one conversation they still read as flat: competent, responsive, and somehow not quite the presence of a mind. We hypothesize that a central missing ingredient is not more capability but dimensional completeness. We propose that the believability of an artificial interlocutor -- the degree to which a user attributes an inner life to it, which we call perceived mind -- is governed by whether the agent expresses a small set of firs

Much empirical legal research depends on translating unstructured text into structured variables. In corporate governance research as elsewhere, this translation has traditionally relied on human coding of documents such as charters and bylaws, a process that is costly, difficult to scale, and often opaque. This paper introduces DECODEM, a set of benchmark datasets for evaluating the automated extraction of corporate governance variables from organizational documents. The benchmarks pair randoml

Coding agents can fix a failing example without preserving the domain rule that made it fail, so later generations can repeat the same plausible mistake. We present agentic synthesis against counterexample-supplemented sketches, a repository-native method for systems whose governing policy is discovered during implementation. A human starts with a partial, code-shaped sketch, and a coding agent generates the first implementation. When a concrete failure exposes missing or mistaken policy, an ope

Classical approaches to event-based egomotion estimation, including those adopted by the top-performing teams of the ELOPE challenge, rely on geometric optimization frameworks such as contrast maximization, homography estimation, or dense optical flow combined with analytic motion inversion. This work investigates the geometric structure that emerges inside a multi-modal network for egomotion estimation. Event tensors, inertial measurements, and range signals are fused through a cross-modal atte

Geospatial datasets support applications from urban planning to climate modeling, yet consistent assessment of FAIR compliance is difficult. Existing evaluators use different rubrics and evidence sources and may fail on JavaScript-rendered pages or repository-specific identifiers. For 50 datasets from 10 repositories, the standard deviation of normalized scores across available tools averages 15.0 percentage points and reaches 30.3 for one dataset. Because these outputs are not equivalent measur

Generative AI and coding agents are intensifying a central governance tension in open-source software (OSS): they scale contribution generation faster than maintainers can assess risk, evidence, and accountability. Existing responses improve agent-readability and traceability, but project rules must also organize contribution-specific risk, evidence, accountability, and review-gate states. We theorize this organizational arrangement as project-side governability infrastructure. A diagnostic audi

As Text-to-Image (T2I) systems rapidly advance, evaluating the cultural authenticity of synthesized content has become increasingly important for fair and trustworthy generative AI. Existing T2I evaluation metrics and multimodal judges often rely on visual-semantic representations that underrepresent implicit cultural norms, leading to biased preference judgments and the omission of fine-grained cultural cues. In addition, visual question answering (VQA)-based evaluators typically depend on auto

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly used by students for programming explanation, debugging, and assignment support. Yet unrestricted large language model (LLM) tutors can hallucinate, contradict course policy, reveal complete solutions, and foster passive dependence. This paper presents EduGuard, a safe retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tutoring framework for introductory programming. EduGuard integrates query understanding, instructor-approved course retrieval, pedagogical strategy select

Policymakers around the world face the question of how to use artificial intelligence in general, and large language models in particular, to improve the policymaking process. Used well, large language models can strengthen the collection, interpretation and synthesis of policy-relevant information and the drafting of policy-relevant output. Yet the use of large language models in policymaking is associated with risks. Output that is plausible but not necessarily correct, bias resulting from unr

We present S1-Omni, a unified multimodal reasoning model for scientific understanding, prediction, and generation. AI for Science (AI4S) has advanced significantly through domain-specific models, tool-augmented LLMs, and scientific language models. However, model capabilities remain highly fragmented, limiting the joint modeling of heterogeneous data, scientific laws, and expert knowledge. S1-Omni addresses this gap by consolidating these capabilities into a single, coherent scientific reasoning

LEED v4.1 BD+C certification remains a document-intensive process that requires reviewers to read hundreds of pages of project evidence and apply credit-specific threshold logic by hand. This paper investigates whether small, locally deployed language models can perform meaningful screening of LEED documentation and how deterministic symbolic components should share that work. A neuro-symbolic pipeline is introduced that aligns project PDFs to LEED credit sections, retrieves evidence with credit

Large language models bring instruction following and scene reasoning to end-to-end driving, but their inference latency collides with the control rate a vehicle requires. Existing closed-loop agents hide this gap by invoking the model on alternate simulation ticks and replaying the previous command in between, so half of all control outputs ignore the newest observations. We present a fast-slow architecture that removes this compromise. A frozen 7B vision-language backbone acts as the slow syst

Multimodal Knowledge Graph Completion (MKGC) requires inferring missing entities from structural, textual, and visual cues. Existing diffusion-based MKGC methods usually denoise directly on raw multimodal features. Such a design forces the denoiser to simultaneously perform relation-dependent cue selection, cross-modal semantic alignment, and structure-aware entity generation, which introduces noisy and semantically inconsistent conditions for diffusion and consequently leads to suboptimal compl

Logic and optimization can, in combination, make valuable contributions to rule-based AI. Logic is the obvious medium for encoding a rule base and drawing inferences from it, while optimization provides a powerful technology for computing inferences. Their combination has taken on new relevance amid a growing concern for transparency in AI. which is important for reproducibility, explainability, trustworthiness, and fairness. Rule-based AI provides a natural solution to transparency that is beco

Four-finger SLAP fingerprints are flat live-scan impressions of the index, middle, ring, and little fingers of one hand, used for identity verification in border control and law enforcement. No benchmark has evaluated whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can verify identity from SLAP images. We introduce SLAPBench, the first benchmark for MLLM-based four-finger SLAP fingerprint verification, built from NIST SD302b with 7,832 pairs (176 mated, 7,656 non-mated). We evaluate four open-s

Background: Binge eating disorder (BED) is highly prevalent and impairing; yet, the UK national guideline–recommended first-line treatment of guided self-help (ie, supported program-led interventions in which content is delivered by the program with brief support) remains underused in routine National Health Service (NHS) care. Digital delivery offers a scalable approach, but evidence from real-world NHS settings is limited. Objective: This real-world evaluation aimed to pilot a supported digita

Entropy control has become an effective tool in reinforcement learning (RL) of large language models (LLMs), helping balance exploration-exploitation trade-off during alignment process. Such RL paradigm is often conducted on mixtures of heterogeneous tasks, which induce distinct entropy regimes under the same policy, making global or token-level entropy regulation insufficient to corresponding heterogeneous needs of exploration. This heterogeneity further makes GRPO-style normalized advantages i

Training API-calling large language model (LLM) agents demands massive amounts of high-quality trajectories. However, collecting such data at scale typically requires fully implemented environments with executable APIs and realistic, pre-populated backend databases, creating a major bottleneck for scalability. To overcome this, we propose an environment-free synthetic data generation approach that leverages LLMs as on-the-fly digital world models. Given only API specifications, our method genera

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to automate data-processing workflows, yet coding agents typically produce scripts that are not automatically materialized as persistent, editable platform artifacts. We call this disconnect the NL2Pipeline gap. To bridge it, we introduce DataFlow-Harness, a platform that guides an LLM agent to construct platform-native directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) through typed, incremental mutations rather than free-form scripts. The platform combines DataFl

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging is essential for the diagnosis and treatment of retinal diseases. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated considerable potential in medical image analysis, existing benchmarks largely reduce OCT understanding to coarse-grained disease classification or isolated visual question answering, leaving the complete cognitive process from visual perception to clinical reasoning insufficiently evaluated. To address this limitation, we

Background: Acute respiratory infections caused by influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and SARS-CoV-2 remain a major public health challenge in Europe. Although surveillance systems for these pathogens are well established, the past 2 decades have seen a rapid diversification of data streams supporting surveillance and research. This expanding data landscape, combined with fragmentation across institutions, sectors, and countries, may limit timely evidence synthesis and effective publi

In many applications of matching, the point clouds to be matched are not merely unstructured sets of points but rather samples from distributions with an intrinsic cluster structure. In such cases, as individual points are often interchangeable within a coherent region, finding a robust region-to-region alignment is more desirable than establishing a precise point-to-point correspondence. To this end, we propose a novel approach for cluster-aware matching based on Laplacian Optimal Transport (La

AlphaFold2's 93 million parameters, shaped by the evolutionary record of protein structure encoded in the Protein Data Bank and in sequence alignments, are conventionally treated only as machinery for converting sequence to structure. We propose they are also a scientific object that can be analyzed directly: a learned encoding of protein conformational organization that can be probed and characterized. By smoothing the Evoformer's weight tensors with a Gaussian convolution and scaling the resul

This paper presents our system for Task 3 of the CLEF 2026 FinMMEval Lab, which requires daily long, flat, or short trading decisions for Bitcoin (BTC) and Tesla (TSLA) using news and historical market data. We formulate the problem as a discrete-action Markov Decision Process and compare four deep reinforcement learning algorithms: Policy Gradient (PG), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Deep Q-Learning (DQL), and Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). The agents use technical indicators,

Remote sensing vision-language models are increasingly expected to support open-ended reasoning over Earth Observation data and a variety of tasks. Most recent progress in this area has been driven by remote-sensing-specific architectural designs, often introducing new encoders, alignment modules, or task-specific fusion mechanisms. In this work, we challenge the necessity of such architectural specialization. We show that a generally capable vision-language model can achieve competitive or stat

Adult and pediatric electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation relies on age-sensitive criteria, and models pretrained mainly on adult ECGs often transfer poorly to pediatric populations when pediatric labels are scarce. Existing multimodal ECG--text methods typically align waveforms and text at the global sample level, entangling evidence from co-occurring diagnoses and limiting transfer under this gap. We propose Pediatric-Adult ECG Alignment via Cross-modal Enhancement (PEACE), a knowledge-guided

Rollout generation is a major bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Large Language Models, motivating low-precision rollout acceleration such as FP8. As an emerging low-precision format, NVFP4 combines fine-grained scaling for accuracy preservation with native W4A4 FP4 GEMMs for higher throughput than FP8. However, we find that directly applying NVFP4 to MoE RL rollout is impractical. NVFP4 rollout with BF16 training collapses after roughly 150 steps, accompanied

Multimodal-attributed graphs (MAGs), whose nodes carry modalities such as images and text alongside topological structure, now pervade applications including social platforms, e-commerce, and biomedical networks, offering richer semantic signals than single-modality graphs. In practice, such graphs are fragmented across privacy-restricted silos owned by different platforms and institutions, so learning a broadly transferable model over them demands collaborative training that never exposes raw d

Publication date: Available online 15 July 2026 Source: Computers in Human Behavior Author(s): Heejoo Lim, Hyeonjeong Kim

Publication date: November 2026 Source: Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 232 Author(s): Man Qin, Yaoyao Zhang

arXiv:2607.14447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI assistants increasingly retrieve web content at inference time to provide fresh and grounded answers, yet it remains unclear whether these search-augmented capabilities respect website-owner restrictions expressed through robots.txt. We present a controlled empirical study of ten widely used AI assistants with advertised web-search capabilities. For each assistant, we first identify a configuration that actually produces observable web-browsing

arXiv:2607.14479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models become increasingly capable, concerns about their potential to assist with biological misuse continue to grow. Prioritization of safety differs across the model ecosystem, with some models freely providing high-risk information that could be misused, and others refusing benign scientific content, potentially hindering legitimate research. Both failures stem from a lack of targeted mitigation to distinguish the most dangerou

arXiv:2607.15051v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Canadian organizations deploying artificial intelligence systems face a fragmented regulatory landscape spanning federal requirements (the Treasury Board Directive on Automated Decision-Making) and divergent provincial regulations across Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Manitoba, and British Columbia. The death of Bill C-27 (Artificial Intelligence and Data Act) in January 2025 - and the federal government's June 2026 confirmation that it will pursue targ

arXiv:2607.15134v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study how a representative sample of United States adult AI-assistant users (n=1,999; June 2026) choose among platforms, allocate tasks across them, evaluate provider trustworthiness, and value data-handling features. Estimates are weighted to the AI-user population using external adoption benchmarks. Four patterns emerge. The market is concentrated but internally differentiated: ChatGPT is the primary assistant for 58% of users and Gemini for 2

arXiv:2607.14301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative AI (GenAI) becomes increasingly embedded in undergraduate academic writing, how students rely on these tools, rather than simply whether they use them, has become a central question for learning, academic integrity, and educational equity. Existing measures of reliance were developed inductively, focused on discrete problem-solving tasks, and validated mainly with homogeneous samples. This study developed and validated the GenAI Rel

arXiv:2607.14309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Artificial Intelligent (AI) powered autonomous agents has fundamentally changed the existing forms of software governance. In spite of the rigorous standards of transparency and account ability required according to the international frameworks such as the European Union's AI Act, there is a considerable gap between theory and reality. The present study discusses the inherent drawbacks of

arXiv:2607.14436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigated the public acceptance of Society of Automotive Engineers Level 3 conditionally automated cars, which can self-drive under certain specified conditions but require the human driver to remain ready to resume control when requested. Previous Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2)-based research has focused mainly on European samples, and so it is still unclear whether the same factors shape acceptance a

arXiv:2607.14605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study examines the cross-prompt generalization and first-language (L1) scoring effects of a LoRA-adapted open-weight large language model (Gemma-3-27B-it) applied to automated essay scoring. Using the identical model and inference configuration reported in "AiAWE: An Open-Source LLM Automated Writing Evaluation System Using LoRA-Adapted Instruction-Tuned Models" (Gayed, 2026), which was fine-tuned on 480 argumentative essays from two prompts

arXiv:2607.14888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finetuning language models on small, curated datasets is standard practice for adapting them to specific policies or domains. We show that finetuning on narrow, factually-defensible, moderation-passing data can cause broad ideological shifts across unrelated domains, while preserving general capabilities. Training GPT-4.1 on right- or left-leaning economics Q&A yields matched ideological shifts on topics such as criminal justice, the environment,

arXiv:2607.15146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Online encyclopedias shape political opinion and, through it, democratic discourse. In late 2025, Grokipedia was released, an encyclopedia written entirely by the LLM Grok. One motivation behind the project was to provide an unbiased alternative to Wikipedia, which has faced accusations of "left-wing" and "liberal" bias. But does an encyclopedia written by an LLM deliver greater neutrality, or does it simply embed a different ideology? We conduct

arXiv:2606.01517v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The adoption of generative AI in the public sector has been treated predominantly as a technological problem, with the expectation that productivity gains would follow from the availability of increasingly capable models. This paper argues, drawing on two auditable cases in the Brazilian Public Service, that the determining barrier to adoption observed in these units was not technological but training-related, and describes the four-layer struc

arXiv:2509.01231v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Care is primarily a collective phenomenon, with a practice that involves sharing health and wellbeing information within a trusted "care circle" of family members and companions for sensemaking, interpretation, decision-making, and follow-through. However, current digital health tools and information systems are designed for individuals and primarily intended for Personal Health Informatics (PHI). This mismatch between collective practice

arXiv:2606.21317v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work has raised concerns about the influence of sycophantic AI on user judgment and relationships. One proposed mitigation, which has received regulatory attention, is to warn users about potentially harmful AI behaviors such as sycophancy. In a preregistered experiment in which participants (N = 2,610) discussed real interpersonal conflicts with an AI system, we test whether warning labels mitigate sycophancy's influence. We find

Synthetic sequential tabular data are increasingly used for privacy-preserving data sharing, yet a generator can reproduce every marginal and every foreign-key relationship while emitting timestamps that run backwards or repeat, and while sending entities along paths that no real entity followed. Conventional tabular evaluation, which pools records into static distributions, is blind to such failures. We present a taxonomy-guided evaluation protocol for temporal fidelity, in which the applicable

Equipping humanoid robots with coherent and adaptable personas is crucial for fostering natural, engaging, and trustworthy human-robot interaction (HRI). However, existing approaches often rely on static, hard-coded identities that lack the flexibility to adapt to individual user contexts. In this paper, we present PACE (Persona Adaptation through Conversational Elicitation), a novel framework for the interactive generation and deployment of structured personas on the Ameca humanoid robot. Our s

IntroductionGlobally, 1.3 billion tons of food is lost or wasted each year, negatively impacting food security, the economy, and the climate. Fresh fruits and vegetables (FFVs), with their short shelf life and temperature sensitivity, are the most affected. This study systematically evaluates the integration of Machine Learning (ML), Adaptive Learning (AL), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Fog computing for temperature-break detection and prediction in FFVs supply chains. It critically evaluate

Early identification of heart disease is important to reduce mortality rates and to provide timely medical intervention for better patient outcomes. In recent studies, machine learning has been used to predict cardiovascular risk, but many existing models use basic feature sets and fixed decision rules. This can limit their ability to adapt when new data are introduced and may also reduce their capability to detect early signs of risk. In this study, we present a heart disease prediction framewo

IntroductionReproductive tract infections (RTIs) and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) pose a substantial economic burden and public health concern in developing countries such as India, where inadequate early detection and prevention strategies often lead to increased morbidity, mortality, stigma, cancer and adverse reproductive health outcomes in both men and women.MethodsThe present cross-sectional study employed machine-learning models to predict the risk of RTI/STI among young women in

While Mars rover operators plan drives across hazardous Martian terrain and diagnose unexpected faults, the necessary information is distributed across separate systems and often reconstructed through manual correlation and memory. To address this challenge, we partnered with Mars rover operators at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to introduce Hindsight, a visual analytics system that unifies previously disparate rover drive data into a single workspace for search, comparison, and investigati

AI-driven algorithms and automated tools are increasingly embedded in the correctional landscape, shaping parole eligibility,release decisions, and surveillance. These tools are also often framed as objective, inevitable solutions to inefficiency andbias. Yet, these computational systems are rarely designed with input from justice-impacted individuals, which means theymight fail to address the real needs of incarcerated people. To address this gap, we surveyed 31 formerly incarcerated peopleabou

For a second time, the android robot Andrea was set up at a public museum in Germany for six consecutive days to have conversations with visitors, fully autonomously. Building on previously gathered qualitative results, the robot was now capable of engaging in multi-lingual conversation with the visitors about the museum context. The robot was prepared with context information about the museum in general and its surrounding exhibits this time. The robot featured a slightly artificial sounding vo

Muon is competitive with AdamW in large-scale pre-training, but its value for reinforcement-learning (RL) post-training remains unclear. We study vanilla Muon in sparse-reward agentic RL through matched single-seed comparisons with AdamW on ALFWorld using Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct. Under Group-in-Group Policy Optimization (GiGPO), applying Muon only to hidden weight matrices raises final-window validation success from 0.290 to 0.546 (+88%); high-rate AdamW controls retain no post-update success. The

LLM powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have emerged as a promising paradigm for complex tasks. However, their advantages over single-agent systems (SAS) remain unclear, with performance varying inconsistently across settings. Here, we provide an information bottleneck perspective on elucidating the differences between MAS and SAS. Specifically, our key observation is that a SAS accumulates its full reasoning trace in one shared context, while a MAS uses isolated local contexts connected by bounde

Evaluations should do more than measure a models current performance. They should tell us what to fix for the next model iteration and provide a way to generate targeted post training data. Most evaluation pipelines identify weak examples, topics, or categories, but they leave the underlying capability failure implicit: they say where a model fails, not why. We introduce CRAFT, a method that converts any rubric based evaluation dataset into a model specific diagnosis of weak capabilities. CRAFT

Generative AI is increasingly used for feedback in higher education, but evidence from repeated classroom use remains limited. This short paper analyses 2988 reflective essay-feedback-appraisal instances from 283 Estonian bachelor students across one semester. Students obtained and assessed feedback from a self-selected AI tool using a uniform prompt. The present analysis of the anonymized text corpus covers essay content, AI feedback, and its perceived helpfulness. Students found feedback helpf

Understanding how vision-language models (VLMs) interpret data visualizations remains an open problem, and is increasingly important as these models are used for analytical tasks where reliable reasoning is essential. We introduce a lightweight, diagnostic saliency map method tailored for text generation over images using transformer models, the current state-of-the-art models in visualization interpretation. Our approach aggregates the language model's attention over the visual tokens across al

Transferring policies across domains poses a vital challenge in reinforcement learning, due to the dynamics mismatch between the source and target domains. In this paper, we consider the setting of online dynamics adaptation, where policies are trained in the source domain with sufficient data, while only limited interactions with the target domain are allowed. There are a few existing works that address the dynamics mismatch by employing domain classifiers, value-guided data filtering, or repre

The post-training of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is essential due to the diversity of simulators, robot embodiments, and task objectives. Existing compute services, whether offered as direct accelerator rental or batch-workload submission, typically allocate an exclusive set of GPU and CPU resources to a single tenant. While this paradigm maximizes client flexibility, it burdens users with infrastructure adaptation, and the fixed card-hour accounting model renders short or bursty workloa

Model merging is promoted as a substitute for joint multi-task training, yet in the reinforcement-learning setting this substitution is essentially never tested against the baseline it claims to replace: methods merge independently released agents precisely because a joint model is unavailable. We build the missing comparison. Training difficulty-1 and difficulty-2 Qwen3-8B specialists on the AppWorld agent benchmark with LOOP, we merge them (TIES, RAM+) and pit the result against a jointly trai

Large language models (LLMs) are improving rapidly as reflected in benchmark scores, yet these AI benchmarks largely test capabilities such as factual recall, narrow question answering, mathematical problem-solving, and coding and agentic tool-use. What remains poorly measured is AI progress on the analytical knowledge work white-collar professionals perform daily, including synthesizing complex information, exercising judgment under uncertainty and incomplete information, applying strategic and

Dialogue state tracking (DST) is one of the core components in task-oriented dialogue systems. At each turn in a conversation, DST estimates the user belief or dialogue state, which is used as input for downstream modules to predict system actions and generate responses. The increasingly popular dialogue system applications like Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa need to support a large number of services and APIs, resulting in growing attention to the scalability of such systems. Especially for s

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) in robotics perception systems supports comprehensive 3D spatial scene understanding by integrating semantic segmentation and depth estimation. While Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) are increasingly adopted as robust feature encoders, existing decoding strategies present a critical bottleneck. To address this, we propose DPNeXt, a streamlined multi-scale feature fusion decoder and efficient alternative to the standard Dense Prediction Transformer (DPT). DPNeXt uses dual

Safety defenses for large language models (LLMs) have been extensively studied, with existing approaches focusing on attack detection and refusal mechanisms. Such fixed-form direct refusal strategies may introduce the risk of prefix injection attacks. Recent work has explored a new direction that leverages humor as an indirect refusal mechanism to mitigate over-refusal in jailbreak scenarios and reduce prefix injection risks. However, this approach implicitly assumes that humorous responses are

The flourishing code hosting platforms and coding agents enable even beginners with private data to build tailored Machine Learning (ML) models using available code quickly. The training data for ML models, often regarded as private property (e.g., clinical records, transaction information), is at significant risk of information leakage. Property Inference Attacks (PIAs), as a significant type of privacy attack, aim to expose global property information of the training set. In this paper, we pre

We study a society of agents belonging to a number of occupational or cultural groups that form opinions about others' situation in the same or different group. Opinions develop either by observation within own group or by directly interacting with members of other groups, therefore by word of mouth (WoM). Additionally, global mass media (MM) may be available that inform indirectly about the situation of the various groups. The sociocultural interplay of these processes and the degrees of relati

With the rise of online insurance sales, consumers face a significant \enquote{advice gap}, requiring them to navigate complex legal contracts without expert guidance. This paper presents a human-centric, extrinsic evaluation of a state-of-the-art Retrieval-Augmented Generation system, designed to make Quebec automobile insurance contracts more understandable. Through a user study with 154 participants from Laval University, we assess the agent's real-world utility by measuring system satisfacti

Data-free knowledge distillation transfers the knowledge encoded in a teacher model to a student model without access to the original training data. Prior work such as Contrastive Abductive Knowledge Extraction (CAKE) achieves this for classifiers by synthesizing samples near the teacher's decision boundary. In this work, we investigate whether this boundary-seeking principle extends to autoencoder distillation through experiments on the MNIST dataset . To enable a direct comparison, we reformul

Despite strong capabilities in data understanding and decision-making, autonomous data science agents still heavily rely on trial-and-error workflows that involve expensive computation. This bottleneck motivates models that can anticipate the effects of data science operations before real execution. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Data Science World Model, which model the data science execution environment by predicting environment state transitions conditioned on current workflow sta

Human motion capture from head-mounted devices (HMDs) offers a scalable way to acquire real-world human motion and interaction data, which is crucial for applications in embodied AI and VR/AR. Existing approaches focus on either egocentric body tracking, estimating the motion of the subject wearing the device, or exocentric tracking, capturing the movements of people in the wearer's surroundings. So far, these two paradigms have largely been explored in isolation. In this paper, we propose a nov

Workflow generation in visual creation systems such as ComfyUI demands not only syntactic accuracy but also expert-level reasoning over modular compositions. Existing large language model (LLM) approaches often treat this as a direct text-to-JSON generation task, struggling with structural brittleness and lacking the experiential knowledge required for effective design. We argue that successful workflow generation requires modeling knowledge itself, including its structure, hierarchy, and reason

Accurate timing prediction at the register-transfer level (RTL) is a longstanding challenge in design automation. Existing graph-based methods struggle with limited receptive fields, high complexity, and a lack of signal directionality. We present RTL-Sequencer, a novel sequence-based paradigm that enables scalable RTL timing prediction via linearizing logic cones by breadth-first traversal and applying modern linear sequence models. Furthermore, sequence models are customized by four synergisti

Automated essay scoring (AES) enables scalable assessment and timely feedback but remains challenged by transformer input-length limitations, which can cause information loss when processing long essays. This study proposes a generative AI-assisted summarization framework to improve long-form essay representation while maintaining scoring reliability. Using the ASAP 2.0 dataset, we generate controlled-length summaries with three GPT-5 variants (GPT-5, GPT-5 mini, and GPT-5 nano) and use them as

OWL ontologies provide a formal knowledge representation framework that enables semantic reasoning, and have been widely adopted across domains such as healthcare and bioinformatics. In practice, however, real-world ontologies are often incomplete, which pose challenges for reasoning. In this work, we focus on a fundamental subsumption reasoning problem: given an incomplete ontology and a candidate (non-entailed) subsumption, determine whether the subsumption is semantically plausible and, if so

Access to potable water is crucial for health, economic development, and sustainability. However, accurately classifying water quality remains a significant challenge due to the complexity and variability of water source data. This paper addresses the challenge of predicting water potability through machine learning and deep learning algorithms. It introduces a novel feature augmentation algorithm, AquaAugmentor, to enhance the predictive performance of these models for low-dimensional datasets.

Explainable AI (XAI) for time series has seen significant algorithmic growth, but its utility in providing measurable performance gains for downstream tasks remains under-explored. This paper bridges this gap by introducing drXAI, a novel methodology that repurposes XAI attribution methods for effective data reduction in Time Series Classification (TSC). The core challenge in modern TSC is scalability; state-of-the-art models, such as Transformers, exhibit quadratic complexity relative to sequen

Conversational Speech Synthesis (CSS) aims to synthesize speech with human-like emotional expression and contextual consistency in user-agent interactions. Existing CSS methods struggle to render authentic human emotions due to limited predefined emotion label spaces (e.g., seven emotion categories), while redundant multimodal tokens in multi-turn dialogue history interfere with context understanding. To address these issues, we propose AuEmoChat, a CSS framework for authentic emotion understand

Equipping humanoid robots with coherent and adaptable personas is crucial for fostering natural, engaging, and trustworthy human-robot interaction (HRI). However, existing approaches often rely on static, hard-coded identities that lack the flexibility to adapt to individual user contexts. In this paper, we present PACE (Persona Adaptation through Conversational Elicitation), a novel framework for the interactive generation and deployment of structured personas on the Ameca humanoid robot. Our s

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition captures affective neural signals with high temporal precision, but cross-subject variability and label noise remain critical challenges to its practical healthcare deployment. Existing label-denoising methods lack physiological grounding, while physiology-informed approaches rely on hand-crafted hyperparameters. To bridge these two paradigms, we propose PhyDA, a plug-and-play, tuning-free framework that unifies neurophysiological priors wit