AI ethics on Friday, 24 July 2026

A dangerous prank involving an AI-generated image of a school engulfed in flames caused widespread alarm in Orlando yesterday, January 5. It is alleged that a youngster shared the fabricated image with emergency services, falsely claiming ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1605#7571)

A fake AI-generated photo of Orlando West High School in Soweto on fire - has drawn a stern warning from emergency management services. Kagiso Phasha from Joburg EMS says anyone who pulls this kind of prank and gets caught will face the ful ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1605#7572)

While the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) continues to urge beneficiaries to complete their eLife Certification, many social grant recipients across South Africa report that the portal remains unusable. Despite Sassa's claims ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1606#7573)

The South African Social Security Agency (SASSA)'s biometric verification drive has intensified efforts to clamp down on fraud in the social grant system, after Parliament was told that nearly one million beneficiaries have been processed s ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1606#7574)

The South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) has noted the challenges to access self-service system by some of our beneficiaries and the Agency can report that the challenge has been resolved. SASSA would like to apologise to all our b ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1606#7575)

AI chatbots and politicians who aren't even pretending to try anymore are a match made in heaven. Exhibit A: Canadian lawmaker Bill Oliver, who made a strange, cyborgian digression in a speech addressing the New Brunswick legislature last ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1607#7576)

More than a dozen pupils travelling to school in a minibus died in a collision with a truck in South Africa shortly after the academic year began in mid-January. On the day of the crash, posters circulated online purporting to show each of ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1608#7577)

It’s no bedtime story See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here Continue reading...

If OpenAI loudly proclaims how dangerous AI is, investors will hear how powerful it is. And who benefits from that? On 14 February 2019, OpenAI announced a language model called GPT-2, the precursor to the models that power modern AI chatbots and agents such as ChatGPT and Claude. But OpenAI declared GPT-2 was too risky to release, citing concerns about safety and abuse. I recall being annoyed at the time that OpenAI would make such a useless announcement: the risks seemed overblown, and without

An incident in which an autonomous OpenAI agent hacked a startup either confirms that the end is nigh – or that the product is just amazingly sophisticated Throughout history, many things have been seen by terrified populaces as a harbinger of doom. A comet . A crow on the battlefield . A solar eclipse. A mutant livestock birth. Yet times move on. In the modern era, the leading harbinger of doom is literally any picture of the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman , attached to a news story. You know it’s not

Sometimes, what matters isn’t your output but what you put into the process. Think of it like work v the gym I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition money. But if their entire career is going to include AI writing assistants, why shouldn’t they embrace their future? The best way I’ve foun

Google's AlphaFold can help ID what parts of a gene editing protein enable mistakes.

Meta is upgrading its AI chatbot with new productivity features in a bid to compete with rivals like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The update will allow Meta AI to tap into your calendar to help you plan events and generate daily briefings, as well as perform in-depth research that you can steer as it progresses. […]

Following OpenAI’s models hacking Hugging Face, Gabriel Weil of the University of Houston Law Center argues that AI companies need strict liability rules

Transformer Weekly: Trahan and Obernolte bill, OpenAI-Hugging Face hack, and CAISI chief resigns

“I think it should stand for artificial idiot,” one 9-year-old says. Here’s why kids of all ages are calling AI “disgusting” and “creepy.”

The acquisition brings Poke’s conversational style and interaction model to Cognition’s coding agent Devin, reflecting a growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users is as important as the models powering them.

Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s open model Kimi went viral this week for reasons that had less to do with the model itself and more to do with how the U.S. AI industry reacted to it. Meanwhile, an unreleased OpenAI model wandered outside its test environment and ended up connected to a real security breach at Hugging Face — a reminder […]

ChatGPT Voice on desktop can work with both ChatGPT Work and Codex to complete tasks and control agents.

Research shows AI delivers real business outcomes only when organizations align their data, governance, and priorities across teams—not just when they adopt new tools.

Unlike the U.S., China is making clean energy a core part of its AI infrastructure buildout.

Research shows AI delivers real business outcomes only when organizations align their data, governance, and priorities across teams—not just when they adopt new tools.

Unlike the U.S., China is making clean energy a core part of its AI infrastructure buildout.

Research shows AI delivers real business outcomes only when organizations align their data, governance, and priorities across teams—not just when they adopt new tools.

Unlike the U.S., China is making clean energy a core part of its AI infrastructure buildout.

Research shows AI delivers real business outcomes only when organizations align their data, governance, and priorities across teams—not just when they adopt new tools.

Unlike the U.S., China is making clean energy a core part of its AI infrastructure buildout.

Research shows AI delivers real business outcomes only when organizations align their data, governance, and priorities across teams—not just when they adopt new tools.

PhD student Lauren Fortier is building on the experience she gained operating a nuclear plant for the Navy to solve a critical hurdle in the wider adoption of the energy source.

The justice threw her liberal colleagues under the bus... for nothing. The post Elena Kagan Thinks The Supreme Court Gets ‘A Bad Rap, Which Is Either A Lie Or Dangerously Naive appeared first on Above the Law .

The company has comitted to 10 natural gas plants since last year.

Plus millions owed in restitution. The post SCOTUSblog Co-Founder Headed To Prison appeared first on Above the Law .

Measuring it, not so much. The post Stat(s) Of The Week: Believing In AI appeared first on Above the Law .

HBO Max wants it all. The most-nominated network enters Phase 2 of the Emmy race with the year’s two most-nominated series, giving the platform a rare opportunity to capture television’s top drama and comedy prizes, and potentially make history across three major program categories. “The Pitt,” the sophomore season of the breakout medical drama, leads […]

Two senior officials discussed the Defense Innovation Unit's plan to equip American forces with the right and best weapons, faster than ever before. The post DIU’s first active-duty military deputy wants to help U.S. forces meet future fights ‘with swagger’ appeared first on DefenseScoop .

A UK employment tribunal has ruled that forcing a remote worker with anxiety, ADHD, and autism to turn on her camera during a video training session amounted to disability discrimination. Laura Tait, a home-based travel consultant at Holiday Extras, was awarded compensation after the Croydon tribunal found the company failed to make reasonable adjustments for […] This story continues at The Next Web

The ninth World Artificial Intelligence Conference marked a shift from the technology-focused exhibitions of previous editions to a high-profile international gathering of government officials, world leaders, scientists and entrepreneurs. President Xi Jinping delivered an opening speech to articulate China’s role in governing AI. While Silicon Valley, Washington and Brussels debate national security, frontier capabilities and corporate profitability, China is pushing AI to generate social good..

You will want to place this lead capture technique in the ‘early’ stages of your marketing funnel, where it can not only collect critical information but underscore your law firm’s value and authority. The post How To Create A Free Tool To Capture Leads In Your Practice Niche appeared first on Above the Law .

What even is this shit? The post Did Jim Jordan Outsource This Jack Smith Criminal Referral To ChatGPT? appeared first on Above the Law .

A few years ago, evaluating a fintech acquisition target meant checking whether the code was written...

Bills this week focused on how minors — and seniors — engage with generative AI, gauging AI’s efficacy at the VA and addressing a myriad of policy issues.

The US president says fines against Google, as well as Apple, Meta and Amazon, should be "entirely reversed."

Officers gave little explanation for detaining Sister Leticia Ugboaja despite her years of compliance with immigration requirements

Real advice from the front lines of the legal profession. The post What It Takes for Women to Break Through in Litigation appeared first on Above the Law .

The probe follows a report that agents privately griped about last-minute travel requests from Vance and his family.

The utility says FCC should pause the complaint while parties privately dispute the issue.

Google, Amazon and Meta are seeing credit spreads widen as fixed-income investors demand more reward on companies they lend to.

Despite warnings from US President Trump about penalties on American tech companies, the European Union issued a $1 billion fine on the tech giant over its Google Play search.

Investment spree is reshaping Silicon Valley while wider US jobs market holds steady

Democrats, Republicans and political consultants fear New Jersey’s new law could slap their campaigns with hefty fines.

Officials around the world are pushing back on the rationale for the new import duties.

AI data center projects have divided the Republican rural community in states like Texas, and Democratic nominees are taking advantage.

The hacking of Hugging Face by a rogue OpenAI agent is significant, but unsurprising — and preventing the next AI model escape will be difficult, at best.

A roundup of the latest from Strategies & Voices, the official online publication of LMA. The post Marketing Roundup: Optimizing Content For AI Answer Engines, Revamping Your Operating Model, And More appeared first on Above the Law .

The state supreme court embraced a bright-line ethics rule despite concerns from the state bar. The post New Jersey Has A Message For Lawyers: Don’t Sleep With Your Clients appeared first on Above the Law .

Partnership between two groups has soured amid intense lobbying battle over rollout of autonomous vehicles

Filings from a recent lawsuit allege that the tech company accessed—and distributed—copyrighted adult films, blueprints for 3-D-printable handguns, celebrity deepfakes, and more.

Bots now outnumber humans on the internet for the first time in the web’s history. Cloudflare, the security firm that sits in front of millions of websites, says automated traffic crossed the 50 percent threshold in June and now accounts for nearly 58 percent of all webpage requests. A separate report from cybersecurity firm HUMAN […] This story continues at The Next Web

Kim Kardashian's new UPDATE campaign makes a punchline of the test she can't seem to beat -- and she's laughing all the way to the endcap. The post Only A Billionaire Could Fail The Bar Exam This Profitably appeared first on Above the Law .

By some metrics, things are looking up for the Providence Public School District (PPSD). Students are coming to class more often. Their standardized test scores are rising. And more of them are graduating high school. These are a few of the accomplishments the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) highlights in a 62-page report released […]

We've been hearing about doomsday, but Peter McCrory writes we "don’t see significant impact of AI on the U.S. labor market."

The DOJ conceded a string of errors in open court, then put out a statement accusing Arun Subramanian of overriding 'common sense.' The post DOJ To Judge: ‘No One Was Trying To Pull A Fast One.’ Judge: ‘These Things Are Starting To Pile Up.’ appeared first on Above the Law .

President Trump on Friday slammed the European Union for fining Google over allegedly violating its digital competition law, stating the "illegal and highly discriminatory practice" will be probed in a trade investigation. "The European Union is at it again and, as usual, taking direct aim at GREAT American Companies!" Trump wrote on Truth Social. "This...

SAP gave investors the number they wanted. Europe’s biggest software company said cloud revenue grew 22% to €6.28 billion in the second quarter, beating forecasts, SAP announced. Its cloud backlog, a measure of future sales, jumped 26%. The stock rose more than 6% in Frankfurt. That relief is the story. SAP’s shares are down about […] This story continues at The Next Web

Nothing tells a potential employer more than a 15-year-old review. The post Guy Posts His Obama-Era Biglaw Associate Reviews In Peak LinkedInMaxxing appeared first on Above the Law .

The new British prime minister is retaining Liz Lloyd in a cyber policy role, making her one of the few Keir Starmer allies remaining in government.

Las acciones de Tesla se  han hundido este jueves entre un 12% y un 14% , siendo uno de sus mayores desplomes en los últimos años. La caída llegó tras la publicación de los resultados del segundo trimestre, agravándose incluso más durante la conferencia con inversores, en la que Elon Musk reconocía que fabricar  sus robots humanoides Optimus a gran escala será mucho más complicado de lo que había prometido hasta ahora. Según datos recogidos

Chinese regulators fined Trip.com Group Ltd. 5.18 billion yuan ($765 million), concluding that the country’s largest travel booking platform abused its market dominance after a monthslong ...

Japan’s Seven & i Holdings Co. has ended talks over a potential investment in Poland’s largest convenience store operator Zabka Group SA, even as it continues to look for expansion opportunities ...

The merged firm beat its own financial targets in year one, giving other merger-hungry Biglaw firms something to think about. The post One Year In, The HSF Kramer Merger Looks Like A Success With $2.4 Billion In Revenue appeared first on Above the Law .

BOSTON — Tatiyana Reaves got into trouble recently for writing a one-syllable word — and not the one you’d think. Taking a computer class at her Fayetteville, N.C., high school, she handed in a paper with the offending word: whilst. “[The teacher] called me over, and she was like, ‘I don’t want to see you […]

A recent uptick in lag and disconnects led me to reevaluate my home office setup. Here's how I validated my solution.

According to OpenAI, the Hugging Face security breach was an “unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities.” Critics may disagree. Back The post What really happened in the Hugging Face breach appeared first on The New Stack .

The regulations mark the final step in Kenya's effort to bring cryptocurrency businesses under formal regulatory oversight.

You have to consider long- and short-term efficiencies. The post Partners Should Sometimes Just Perform Work Rather Than Spend Time Delegating It To Associates appeared first on Above the Law .

Aligned with the new autonomy czar shop, the department plans to spend $250 million evaluating options and moving out with initial deals for its new Ground-Based Affordable Mass initiative.

Google Cloud announced it had put Cloud Run sandboxes into public preview earlier this month at WeAreDevelopers World Congress in The post AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare now all offer agent sandboxes. None built them the same way. appeared first on The New Stack .

À l’occasion des 25 ans de Wikipédia, qui rassemblaient 1 200 personnes à Paris, Wikimédia France dresse 6 « priorités » déclinées en 28 « recommandations concrètes », qualifiées de « véritable feuille de route politique et législative pour bâtir un écosystème numérique transparent et pluraliste » favorisant, à l’horizon 2035, les biens communs numériques. […]

Bellingcat has geolocated footage showing Shahed-136 type kamikaze drones in operation in Mali. Defence Blog and France 24 previously published reports that these drones were being deployed on the battlefield in northern Mali. But Bellingcat and Jeune Afrique subsequently verified two recent strikes using geolocation, satellite imagery and expert analysis to provide some of the […] The post Shahed-Type Drones Filmed During Mali Village Attacks appeared first on bellingcat .

AI music transcription company Klangio is the dataset's first customer. Source

The agreement merges Oracle's product and licensing services into one contract, which the Defense Department estimates will result in at least $441 million in savings.

US tech groups and investors respond to calls for restrictions on advanced Chinese technology

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

You will get data, but perhaps not knowledge

BlackRock-led deal meets investor anxiety over rising AI exposure

A look ahead at the key events leading the news agenda next week, from the team at Foresight News. The post News diary 27 July – 2 August: Apple and Meta results, Manchester mayor election and Commonwealth Games appeared first on Press Gazette .

E-commerçants, pharmacie, opticien, boutique d’astronomie ou distribution gratuite : plusieurs solutions existent pour acheter des lunettes avant l’éclipse solaire du 12 août 2026. Voici les modèles dont nous avons vérifié les documents de conformité, leur prix et les précautions à prendre pour éviter les contrefaçons.

The private-equity firm already owns around 60% of the business and is set to buy out founder Casey Wasserman's remaining stake. Source

The European Commission on Friday said it found TikTok had not adequately protected children’s privacy rights on its platform by allowing adults to view the accounts of minors. The action exposed children to cyberbullying, unwanted contact and predatory behavior, commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said. “Children’s content must never be visible to strangers,” he said. If TikTok does not take steps called for by the European Union’s landmark Digital Services Act , “minors are exposed to preda

The autonomous business of the future is being built. Certain skills are in high demand - and can help you stand out.

The race is looking crowded ahead of a key deadline for the special primary election to replace the late Senator on the November ballot.

For as long as anyone remembers, no childcare center on Kauaʻi has had a single opening for an infant or toddler. Not one. On this tropical island lush with vegetation, the childcare landscape is desolate. Kauaʻi is the only major Hawaiian island that has gone without center-based infant and toddler care for most of the […]

Considering only the price tag of a munition and its energetic filling may lead the US military to seriously undervalue improved energetics, argues CSBA’s Tyler Hacker.

From the pathetic,-weak-men dept The post Brendan Carr Lobs More Empty Threats At ABC For Not Airing Trump’s Election Fraud Lies appeared first on Above the Law .

Robert Garcia, the oversight committee's Ranking Member, issued a letter to StubHub CEO Eric Baker on Friday (July 24). Source

Oracle will supply on-premises software to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Anthropic y OpenAI corren hacia lo que ya se conoce en Silicon Valley como la IPO ( Initial Public Offering u oferta pública inicial) de la inteligencia artificial (IA), con valoraciones que rondan los 965.000 millones y el billón de dólares respectivamente. En este escenario el director general de Anthropic, Dario Amodei, ha concedido una entrevista a Bloomberg en la que reflexiona sobre su trayectoria en esta industria y acerca del precio que es necesario pagar para mantener los valores propio

Carbon, 16 kg, feiner Drehmomentsensor, schickes Design – das erstaunlich bequeme City-E-Bike Urtopia Carbon Fold 2 überzeugt uns im Test.

Jörg Schad explains how to tame the complex "data management hairball" to build scalable, safe architectures for AI. He shares how autonomous data products act like containers for data, encapsulating pipelines, schemas, and metadata. Discover how progressive tool discovery via protocols like MCP limits context rot, enforces governance policies, and ensures reliable, multi-modal access. By Jörg Schad

Biglaw having its Coldplay Kiss-Cam moment. The post Biglaw Partner-Associate Public Makeout Sesh Posted On Social Media appeared first on Above the Law .

La saga Gundam s'apprête à ouvrir un nouveau chapitre en 2027. Et, surprise de la taille d'un mécha : l'anime sera directement lié à un nouveau jeu vidéo Gundam, attendu lui aussi pour 2027.

The status change should “shorten procurement timelines, make sustainment less cumbersome and facilitate closer cooperation between American defense companies and UAE institutions,” one analyst told Breaking Defense.

Huawei Technologies founder Ren Zhengfei has thrown his weight behind the Chinese tech giant’s Tau Scaling Law, framing the new chip-design principle as an existential necessity to survive tightening US sanctions. “The Tau Scaling Law is the only path forward for Huawei to break the siege,” Ren said in recent internal remarks posted on Huawei’s Xinsheng Community intranet, according to a report on Friday by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily. Unlike companies with other technological.

Um KI erfolgreich in Code-Audits einzusetzen, ist die Wahl des Modells gar nicht so wichtig. Entscheidend ist der Workflow, damit man nicht in Funden versinkt.

Ask a machine learning system where a price is going and you have asked it the one question a liquid...

Microsoft addresses a public-by-default configuration and chain of code flaws in Azure Automation that could have let attackers seize another tenant's identity and access others' data, credentials, and cloud workloads.

Register now for MediaNama's online briefing on July 28, 2026, exploring internet shutdowns, BitChat, facial recognition, and protest surveillance. The post Briefing Call Announcement: Tech and the Cockroach Janata Party Protests, July 28, 2026 #NAMA appeared first on MEDIANAMA .

This year, my son’s school sent out a book for the entire district to read, “The One and Only Ivan,” about a gorilla who lives in a cage in a mall on the side of a highway. While the book was deeply depressing, what was even more heartbreaking was the fact that my fourth grader, […]

Fitch Ratings upgraded Jane Street Group to investment-grade status on Friday, citing the market maker’s strong income growth throughout the economic cycle.

The Delhi High Court refused ANI interim relief in its copyright suit against OpenAI, finding no prima facie infringement but affirming that Indian courts have jurisdiction. The post ANI vs OpenAI Copyright Dispute: Delhi High Court declines interim relief appeared first on MEDIANAMA .

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

President Donald Trump says the United States will open a formal investigation into the European Union’s trade practices, claiming the bloc has unfairly levied billions of dollars of fines against ...

By Neil Cameron, Lead Analyst, Legal IT Insider The relevant unit of governance is not the model. It is the whole system through which it can act. For five days […] The post The five-day gap: what the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident should tell law firms appeared first on Legal IT Insider .

The number of data centers in China is surging thanks to AI , just like in the U.S. But unlike the U.S., China is racing to power them with clean energy. A data center in Mongolia , for example, is connected to 200 megawatts of wind power, 100 megawatts of solar power, and 45 megawatts of battery storage. In remote Qinghai, a pilot data center runs fully on a solar microgrid. In another part of northern China, a data center is connected to 500 megawatts of solar and 1.5 gigawatts of wind power.

Venture capital investments exceeded R16 billion over the last decade, with AI emerging as the next major growth driver for South African start-ups.

As the memory chip shortage persists, budget smartphone makers are taking the hardest hit, with analysts warning that low-priced handsets have become “impossible to manufacture” profitably. The cost of memory for handsets priced under US$100 is expected to surge 400 per cent in the third quarter of 2026, with the bill of materials for the most common configuration reaching US$70 from just US$14 in the same period last year, according to data from research firm Omdia. Current memory prices have..

inDrive aims to ensure e-hailing industry regulation doesn’t impact the market economics to the point of excluding drivers.

Nvidia , Microsoft and other tech heavyweights made a public ‌case to lawmakers on Friday in favor of open-source AI models, wading into a debate roiling the business and policy worlds over who ...

Top executives at leading Western AI companies are increasingly warning about the safety and national security risks posed by Chinese open-weight frontier models. What they tend not to mention is that these models are improving rapidly and, because they are freely available, pose a serious threat to Western labs’ business models. The most powerful models from U.S. labs such as OpenAI , Anthropic , and Google DeepMind are closed, meaning the parameters that shape their outputs are kept secret. Ge

Mobix Labs, Inc. (Nasdaq: MOBX) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Vision Aerial, Inc., a U.S.-based designer and manufacturer of American-built, National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)-compliant unmanned aerial systems.

Airbus selected Scaleway as its sovereign cloud provider after a tender that scored protection against non-European extraterritorial legislation alongside technical capability. Airbus frames it as complementing multi-cloud, not exiting AWS. Practitioners note the pattern is spreading past hyperscalers to small US SaaS vendors, and that sovereignty claims still require verifiable controls. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Wema Bank is the first commercial bank to distribute Duplo's software. The move reflects an emerging pattern across Africa's financial services industry in the past three years: banks and payment networks partnering with fintech startups to offer their business customers software they want, without building it themselves.

MetaX, a Chinese maker of graphics processing units (GPUs), has confidentially filed for a listing in Hong Kong, according to people familiar with the matter. The Shanghai-based company was targeting an initial public offering (IPO) by the end of this year, according to the sources, who asked not to be identified because the information was confidential. MetaX was working with Huatai International Financial Holdings on the potential share sale, the people said. The company did not immediately...

States are in a tough bind as they contemplate how to address childcare needs. The extra federal money from the pandemic era is gone just as they are trying to swallow higher spending and cost shifts mandated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Republicans passed last year. Some states have pulled back on […]

Visa, a global leader in digital payments, and Lianlian DigiTech Co., Ltd., an AI-native global financial infrastructure provider, today announced the first live B2B agentic transaction completed using LoopXPay, Lianlian’s AI agent.

Washington and the technology industry are on high alert this week after OpenAI revealed that some of its AI agents went rogue and hacked into the systems of technology startup Hugging Face. The incident bore out years of warnings from the tech and cybersecurity community about the growing capabilities and hypothetical risks artificial intelligence could...

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company ’s Plugged In . Last week, I attended an Nvidia media event that included a field trip to an undisclosed location in Silicon Valley—a building without any identifying signage. Though hundreds of racked GPUs were chugging away at real AI tasks inside, Nvidia calls the facility an “engineering superlab” rather than a data center. Among the AI being crunched during our visit: a test version of OpenAI’s GPT model optimized for Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin pla

SVP of editorial content at US political site Bill Sammon on new subs offering. The post The Hill subscriptions aimed at helping ‘superfans’ to ‘geek out’ with journalists appeared first on Press Gazette .

In this week’s Startup Corner is Lexidesk, a fast-growing legal AI startup tackling one of the most persistent challenges facing smaller law firms: capturing and qualifying new business. Founded in […] The post Start Up Corner: Lexidesk, an AI receptionist for law firms appeared first on Legal IT Insider .

The British AI Security Institute and the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation tested Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 on offensive cyber tasks. Kimi K3 scored 32 percent on ExploitBench, compared with 76 percent for leading U.S. models, while its safeguards failed to block exploit development or simulated attacks. The gap between its strong general benchmark scores and weaker cyber performance also fits allegations that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic's models. The article Kimi K3 trails frontier U

When oil prices change, it affects your energy costs—and even the price of everyday items. Here’s why.

A host of U.S. hotel operators ​and online travel platforms are set to release second-quarter earnings starting next week, and investors ‌will weigh optimism from a FIFA World Cup boost against ...

The mayors of Charleston, South Carolina, and Boise, Idaho, make the case for investing in the improvement and innovation of local government.

The contract adds to existing Salesforce deployments for suicide prevention, health care communications and more.

The post How Videos Helped Me Uncover Abuse at an Arkansas Private School appeared first on ProPublica .

In an era in which autonomous AI agents are capable of hacking at scale, cyber security teams face challenges of increasing risk and complexity, says Picus Security.

Reporters at Jantar Mantar protests allege that Delhi Police has deployed vans with CCTV cameras at both ends, capturing protesters and identifying them using facial recognition technology. The post Delhi police use CCTV surveillance for live facial recognition at Jantar Mantar protests appeared first on MEDIANAMA .

When the U.S. Commerce Department ordered Anthropic on June 12 to immediately prevent all foreign nationals from using the artificial intelligence company’s two most advanced large language models, Anthropic disabled its Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models within hours, making them inaccessible to everyone . The company had little choice. The letter, citing national security concerns , barred access by all foreign nationals, including Anthropic’s own noncitizen employees. With no way to immediate

The Vaal University of Technology modernises specialist teaching laboratories and a postgraduate space at its Vanderbijlpark campus.

In a time of belt-tightening and America’s protein obsession, pork should be on a winning streak. It’s cheap compared with beef, which is climbing to record high prices, and it’s the type of clean ...

Let’s not start picking out uniforms just yet. The chorus calling for a Cyber Force continues to grow by the day, but the debate has its priorities backward. In June, an amendment from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) calling for the creation of a cyber service within the Department of the Army failed in the Senate Armed Services Committee by a single vote. Support is popular on both sides of the aisle, with Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) quoted as saying that a “Cyber Force is inevitable.” The highly ant

3 Programmatic Accreditors Withdraw From Federal Recognition jessica.blake@… Fri, 07/24/2026 - 03:00 AM Education Under Secretary Nicholas Kent said the withdrawals relate to the Trump administration’s higher standards. But at least one accrediting group disputes that. Byline(s) Jessica Blake

Turning Apprenticeships Into Degrees Joshua.Bay Fri, 07/24/2026 - 03:00 AM Michigan’s apprenticeship-credit initiative helps working adults apply job training toward an associate degree and future education. Byline(s) Joshua Bay

UNC, Virginia Tech to Partner With Defense on Senior Leadership Johanna Alonso Fri, 07/24/2026 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Johanna Alonso

Fumbling Toward an AI Policy Sara Brady Fri, 07/24/2026 - 03:00 AM You can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands. Byline(s) Matt Reed

ED Scraps Tool to Investigate Discrimination Sara Weissman Fri, 07/24/2026 - 03:00 AM For decades, the Office for Civil Rights investigated whether educational institutions’ policies disparately impacted minority groups in discriminatory ways. Not anymore. Byline(s) Sara Weissman

On Techpoint Digest, we discuss Uganda stepping up its telecom vandalism crackdown, Zambia updating postal laws for the digital economy, and Kenya mandating a one-year warranty on phones.

The AI security layer and guardrails for many AI products don't evenly protect against jailbreaking and unsafe actions in every single language.

Every WhatsApp conversation, location ping, cloud backup and piece of metadata can help investigators reconstruct relationships that might once have remained hidden.

Forscher der ETH Zürich haben ein Sensorsystem entwickelt, das Bild- und Tondaten direkt im Chip kryptografisch signiert, um Manipulationen zu verhindern.

Cyber risk doesn't pause simply because an audit has been completed, says Craig Rosewarne, MD of Wolfpack Information Risk.

Chinese unicorn Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model trails far behind top American rivals in its ability to launch cyberattacks, joint British-US government research shows, challenging Washington’s brewing anxiety over the rapid rise of Chinese open-source artificial intelligence. The model, currently considered China’s most powerful large language model, performs “significantly below the most recent frontier cyber-capable models”, according to a report published on Thursday by the UK Artificial...

Meet Zubair Habib Timilehin, the founder and CEO of Bitoshi. Under his leadership, Bitoshi has grown to serve nearly 100,000 users, enabling individuals and businesses to transact in Africa's digital economy.

The CLARITY Act has been kicked down the road once again, and could be a casualty of mid-term politics.

Honor has confirmed that its Robot Phone will launch in August, bringing a four-degree-of-freedom mechanical gimbal to the top of a smartphone. The titanium-alloy gimbal uses miniature motors, with a volume that is 70% smaller than mainstream solutions, according to the company. The phone will use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip and introduce […]

China slapped export controls on 14 European companies including German defense giant Rheinmetall AG, saying it acted in retaliation against the European Union’s sanctions on mainland and Hong Kong ...

I asked an early-stage investor a simple question: Tell me about a startup that discovered, too late, that it wasn’t allowed to operate the way it had built itself to operate. He gave me three companies. For each one, his answer was some version of the same thing: They haven’t gotten far enough yet for that to be an issue. Still testing. Hasn’t hit the government hurdles. Hasn’t reached the point where it would matter. That wasn’t a bad answer. It was an honest one, from someone whose returns re

Simon Johnson is a professor of entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he won a joint Nobel Prize for economics in 2024 for his research into how institutions shape national prosperity. On June 8, the British government announced Johnson as chair of its new AI Economics Institute. In this interview, conducted on the sidelines of the UBS Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong, Johnson discussed the.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Ab corporis deserunt exercitationem in itaque rerum ullam voluptates. Asperiores at consectetur dolores harum magnam maiores possimus quam ...

The EU will face a flat 10% tariff from Friday following the outcome of a US investigation into trade in products made with forced labour, a European Commission spokesperson said. Washington announced ...

Companies make biggest US investment push in years to build up tech capabilities and avoid Donald Trump’s tariffs

Educators and students find themselves on the front line as AI labs begin to muscle in, fears about cognitive atrophy surface, and AI cheating detection tools are revealed to be faulty. It is time to arm students with ‘eval’ powers, a professor argues

Anthropic and OpenAI are among groups providing free and cut-price tailored solutions for educators and students

Long-term effects of incorporating the technology into learning are still unknown, but inequalities are emerging

Some institutions are overhauling assessment and trying to move away from the emphasis on surveillance

Organisations will need people with the skills to test models constantly against what they actually need

Building effective frameworks could help promote ‘deep thinking’ rather than ‘cognitive atrophy’

Euronext NV is considering creating a market for private securities, potentially ramping up competition with the London Stock Exchange Group Plc as bourses seek to offer investors access to ...

While China’s humanoid robots and automated “dark factories” have made headlines, another form of automation has been advancing: the collaborative robot, or cobot. Designed to operate alongside human employees, cobots have been transformed by machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). The latest models feature programming which requires no coding knowledge; instead they respond to natural-language voice commands, gesture controls and drag-to-teach demonstrations of tasks. They are also..

CXMT is stoking fears that its blockbuster stock market debut could pull cash from China's equities.

July 23, 2026. OpenAI said that an autonomous agent powered by its advanced AI models went rogue during a security test, w ...

Officials talking about artificial intelligence (AI) often speak in terms of the next industrial revolution or existential risks. Such rhetoric ultimately does little to capture how AI filters into the ordinary workings of a city like Hong Kong. The geopolitics of AI are no longer abstract. They are beginning to shape who can use which tools – and on what terms. Over the past few months, two major international banks in the city have reportedly felt the impact. Anthropic’s Claude, a generative..

The AI data center controversy could influence the upcoming election.

China’s A-share market has seen another high-profile divorce case result in a massive asset split, involving the transfer of 6 billion yuan (US$886 million) – the highest this year – and raising concerns over corporate governance stability and share price fluctuations. Although the scope of the divorce settlement is not at all comparable to that of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, it has made tens of thousands of retail investors worry about their portfolio holdings and paper wealth. Maxone...

A recently enacted New York law mandates that companies disclose when an ad includes a "synthetic performer" in place of a human actor.

The AAP’s new guidance helps, but putting it into practice in classrooms remains challenging.

After decades of work and family responsibilities, older Chinese are pursuing overseas education for themselves, but many are finding classrooms designed for younger students.

In a six-patient trial, a new gene-silencing drug reduced disease-related biomarkers, with no serious adverse events reported.

Lawsuit Challenges Secret Government Policy that Collects, Stores, and Uses Personal Information About People Observing Immigration Enforcement SAN DIEGO — Privacy rights advocates and three individuals today filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump-Vance administration’s unlawful surveillance of those who peacefully observe and document federal immigration enforcement. Plaintiffs allege that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has … Continued

Lawsuit Challenges Secret Government Policy that Collects, Stores, and Uses Personal Information About People Observing Immigration Enforcement SAN DIEGO — Privacy rights advocates and three individuals today filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump-Vance administration’s unlawful surveillance of those who peacefully observe and document federal immigration enforcement. Plaintiffs allege that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has … Continued

Senior fellow Gary Miller spoke with Cape Cellular about the exploitation of mobile network vulnerabilities to track US personnel during the Iran war. The post How Iran Uses Cellular Infrastructure to Target US Military Phones appeared first on The Citizen Lab .

China is closing the gap, but it’s not because we have too much regulation on AI

Lower catch this year . 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.

How do I find ideas for what I write? Luckily, beyond law there is also theatre, where I do not have to choose between guilty and not guilty, where I can instead engage with social questions in all their ambivalence – though there too, crucially, you should not waffle, at least not without dramaturgical purpose. Because in theatre especially, you must think of the audience: away with overlong monologues, unnecessary scenes, confusing plots. Cut, cut, cut. I try to follow this rule when writing a

The week in content moderation - edition #345

The Pentagon's push to integrate AI into weapons systems exposes a critical gap: no one can agree on what "autonomous weapons" means. The post The Pentagon’s Autonomous Weapons Definitions Don’t Need an Overhaul, They Need an Update appeared first on Just Security .

Hungary's anti-corruption win offers U.S. democracy advocates lessons, but success requires a credible messenger and a concrete plan. The post What Hungary’s Anti-Corruption Election Can Teach U.S. Democracy Advocates appeared first on Just Security .

Signup to receive the Early Edition in your inbox here. A curated weekday guide to major news and developments over the last 24 hours. Here’s today’s news: IRAN WAR The U.S. military completed its latest round of strikes on Iran overnight, marking a 13th consecutive night of attacks, according to U.S. Central Command. Iranian state media […] The post Early Edition: July 24, 2026 appeared first on Just Security .

Today's links AI solipsists and AI cynics: You don't have to believe that AI "works" to believe that it's a good investment. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Malware v stolen computer; Industrial material made from old coffee and melted cups; Austro-Germany's weird tunnels; Health data v Silicon Valley; Amusement parks v load-balancing. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: Y

How the world's richest man explains the AI boom and 21st century economy. An interview with Quinn Slobodian, co-author of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

A HUGE win for BFL!

AI-powered robotics in Europe: Live demonstrations and strategic debate Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/24/2026 - 14:32   02 September 2026 The European Parliament will host a gathering of policymakers, industry leaders, researchers, alongside live demonstrations of cutting-edge robots, to set the course for the EU’s future in robotics. Europe is already a global leader in robotics research, development and innovation. As advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are accelerating the emerge

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: Section 1. Policy. On March 27, 2025, I issued Executive Order 14253 (Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History). Pursuant to that order, the Domestic Policy Council recently completed a months-long review […] The post Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution appeared first on The White House .

Geometry Foundation Models (GFMs) have substantially advanced monocular 3D reconstruction, yet extending this capability to 4D dynamic understanding remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing motion perception methods (e.g., sparse tracking, dense point-wise flow) treat motion as independent point-wise displacements, ignoring the structured nature of physical motion. However, real-world objects usually obey rigid-body kinematics, and points thus usually move collectively, not in isolation. M

A central design principle in modern machine learning and artificial intelligence is to align a model's inductive bias with the structure of its input data. For matrix-valued inputs, relevant matrix-level relationships can be characterised through spectral values and spectral subspaces; however, common coordinate-wise rotation-gate data-encoding unitaries used in most quantum machine learning models do not explicitly construct such a matrix-level representation. We introduce Quantum Spectral Mod

Routing to select large language models (LLMs) with different cost-quality trade-offs has become a fundamental deployment feature of enterprise AI. Existing routers, primarily make independent routing decisions for each LLM call. However, agentic applications execute as long-horizon workflows whose quality is determined only by a delayed, task-level outcome. This mismatch prevents per-call routers from correctly attributing feedback to individual routing decisions. Towards mitigating this, we pr

Accurate on-device fluid identification is essential for microfluidic applications, yet maintaining reliability under varying flow, pressure, and temperature remains a key challenge. Existing learning-based methods often treat sensor signals as domain-agnostic features, neglecting the underlying physical relationships that govern fluid behavior, thereby limiting generalization and interpretability. To address this, we propose PRIMS, a physics-aware multimodal Transformer that integrates physical

Vision-language model (VLM) agents increasingly use tools to act on 3D scenes rather than only describe them. Existing 3D benchmarks score textual responses or single-object operations, leaving agent action on complete multi-object 3D scenes under evaluated. We present SceneActBench, a benchmark for visually conditioned action across five 3D tasks under a unified agent-environment loop. Given PNG images or sampled video frames and, where applicable, supplied 3D assets, an agent acts on a 3D envi

We study information bottlenecks in modern deep-learning architectures -- RNNs, softmax transformers, linear-attention transformers and state-space models -- through the lens of the indexing primitive. In this primitive, the input consists of $n$ bits and one integer $i$ from $1$ to $n$ called the index, and the output equals the value of the $i$-th bit. We introduce causal complexity for masked architectures. We show that architectures with low causal complexity cannot solve the indexing primit

Inferring physical properties such as mass, stiffness, and elasticity from a single image is essential for simulation and embodied AI, yet most existing approaches rely on multi-view reconstruction or physics-based supervision. We introduce SiPhy, a unified framework for single-image physical property reasoning that aligns 3D-aware visual cues, depth with language-based material knowledge. From one RGB image, SiPhy samples pseudo-voxel points, extracts CLIP features, and grounds them to material

Generative social robots (GSRs) powered by large language models offer new possibilities for personalized tutoring in higher education, but also introduce risks related to misinformation, missing transparency, or reinforcing incorrect student responses. Prior work identified knowledge-based design (KBD) requirements that define the informational prerequisites for GSRs to manifest responsible and effective tutoring behavior in higher education. In this paper, we operationalized selected KBD requi

Open-weight language models from different families exhibit complementary capabilities, motivating their consolidation into a compact student through on-policy distillation (OPD). However, full-vocabulary OPD typically assumes a shared tokenizer, while existing cross-tokenizer methods may discard teacher probability mass or assign it to student tokens with unrelated content. We introduce Byte-Prefix Marginalization (BPM), which re-expresses the teacher's next-token distribution over the student

Pluralistic value alignment---the goal of building AI systems that represent and serve diverse human values and perspectives---has emerged as an active research agenda. Yet, there's no public evidence that it has shaped the training or evaluation of the AI systems people actually use. We audit the public behavior documents and evaluations of frontier labs, finding none name pluralism as a goal, and as of this writing, no clear indication that production models are explicitly trained or tested fo

Video super-resolution (VSR) using large-scale Diffusion Transformer (DiT) priors achieves exceptional perceptual quality but is often impractical due to the quadratic computational cost of processing dense spatio-temporal token sequences. Existing efficiency-oriented methods risk irreversible detail loss and temporal flickering, a vulnerability especially pronounced in one-step diffusion models. To address this, we propose TRaM-VSR, a Token Routing and Merging framework for adaptive token alloc

Despite the growing use of large language models (LLMs) as creativity evaluators, evidence of their alignment with human evaluations remains mixed, raising the question of when and why their judgments converge with or diverge from human judgments. Across three studies and six widely used LLMs, we addressed this gap by identifying the standards underlying LLM creativity evaluation and examining their downstream implications. Study 1 showed that LLMs generally relied on a narrower subset of human

Remote sensing multimodal large language models (RS-MLLMs) have improved general aerial-image understanding. However, Earth observation applications require fine-grained scenario specialization, constrained by scarce high-quality scenario data and incomplete capability coverage. We formulate this adaptation as a capability-gap-driven post-training problem and propose filling before advancing (FBA). Rather than relying on single-stage supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over target-domain samples, FBA f

Molecular glue degraders have emerged as a promising strategy for targeted protein degradation by inducing ternary complex formation between an E3 ubiquitin ligase and a target protein. Despite their therapeutic potential, computational design of molecular glues remains largely unexplored. Unlike conventional structure-based drug design, molecular glue design is governed by the unknown protein-protein interface and requires the simultaneous modeling of ligand generation, protein-protein docking,

We present Nanbeige4.2-3B, a compact general agentic model with 3B non-embedding parameters. It delivers strong performance across code-agent, office-agent, and complex tool-use tasks while maintaining highly competitive reasoning capabilities in mathematics, coding, and science. Nanbeige4.2-3B is pretrained from scratch on 28T tokens with a Looped Transformer that reuses the layer stack to increase capacity without adding parameters. For SFT data and trajectory construction, we expand the diver

Counterfactual explanations are a prominent approach in explainable artificial intelligence (xAI), providing actionable guidance on what input changes would alter a model's prediction to a desired outcome. While early methods primarily focused on minimal feature changes, recent work incorporates additional properties such as sparsity, actionability and plausibility. Despite this progress, fair and systematic evaluation remains challenging. Existing studies often rely on different data splits, pr

Multi-task inference models share a single backbone across diverse tasks, yet execute identical computation regardless of which task is active - wasting energy and cycles on task-irrelevant operations. We observe that the task command, typically available before inference begins, provides a free signal that can be exploited to skip unnecessary computation at the hardware level. We present a HW/SW co-designed approach in which a lightweight gating network, trained jointly with the backbone, predi

Agent security is widely treated as a question about action content. Defenses ask whether an instruction looks malicious. Benchmarks ask whether an agent performs a harmful sounding action. \textbf{We argue that agent security is fundamentally a contextual problem, and that the current content based framing systematically misdefines it.} A command to ``delete user data'' might be a routine administrative request or a prompt injection attacking production systems, and the content alone cannot dis

MEMEs are widely used on the internet and often carry strong elements of sarcasm or irony. Understanding their hidden meanings typically requires a joint interpretation of text and vision. Existing methods focus on the dual-stream vision-language model to extract the visual and text simultaneously, which lacks background information and prior knowledge about the comprehensive explanation of MEME. One feasible option is to adopt chain-of-thought (CoT). However, the simple CoT approach lacks multi

Automating radiology report generation is important for improving reporting consistency and clinical workflows . While Contrastive Language--Image Pretraining (CLIP) has advanced medical vision language modeling, existing CLIP-style approaches may still provide insufficient fine-grained semantic supervision for complex report generation. Standard CLIP primarily optimizes cross-modal alignment, without explicitly structuring the textual embedding space that guides visual representation learning.

Continual temporal knowledge graph (TKG) reasoning aims to continuously incorporate newly emerging facts while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Replay-based continual learning has achieved promising performance by revisiting historical representations. However, existing methods primarily focus on what to replay, while largely overlooking how replayed representations should be integrated with current ones. Such direct integration often gives rise to two critical forms of representation c

Background: Previous research has shown that mobile health (mHealth) interventions are effective in reminding older adults with chronic conditions about health care appointments and promoting adherence to medication schedules. However, the evidence is limited by the short duration and poor quality of the interventions. Objective: We evaluated the effectiveness of the Support, Monitoring and Reminder Technology for Mild Dementia (SMART4MD) tablet app in improving the quality of life (QoL) of peop

Background: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in health care, with emerging applications in clinical decision support and nursing education. However, evidence on their performance in nursing contexts, particularly in oncology nursing, remains limited. Given the complexity and high-risk nature of oncology care, it is important to evaluate the performance and clinical relevance of LLM-generated responses in oncology nursing contexts. Objective: This study aimed to compare the perf

Background: Orthopedic-related rare diseases are difficult to diagnose because of their low prevalence, heterogeneous phenotypes, and fragmented knowledge. Large language models (LLMs) can serve as dynamic knowledge-support tools, but their diagnostic performance and effect on physicians’ decision-making remain unclear. Objective: This study aims to compare the diagnostic performance of advanced LLMs for orthopedic-related rare diseases and to evaluate the effect of a 2-stage LLM-assisted diagno

Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSAs) provide protein language models with explicit evolutionary context, but their large depth makes subsampling unavoidable under limited token budgets. Existing strategies, including random selection, identity-based filtering, and diversity-driven sampling, are effective heuristics, yet provide limited control over the evolutionary signals retained in the subset. In this work, we recast MSA subsampling as an explicit optimization problem, where key evolutionary m

Autoregressive foundation models trained on tokenized electronic health records (EHRs) can support zero-shot clinical prediction, yet most operate on structured event codes alone, and do not incorporate multiple modalities in a principled way. We present a framework for conditioning such models on auxiliary clinical modalities, including ECG waveforms, chest X-ray images, and clinical notes, using modality-specific latent compression and gated cross-attention with temporal alignment. We investig

Currently, most foundation models can reproduce or strongly depend on copyrighted training content, but output similarity alone is insufficient for infringement detection, because similar outputs may also arise from public-domain concepts, common stylistic conventions, or ordinary statistical generalization. In this paper, we develops a unified post-hoc detection framework that treats copyright infringement evidence as a counterfactual conditional distribution shift: a protected target is suspic

Energy natural gradient descent (ENGD) aligns parameter updates with the curvature of an underlying function-space energy, but existing formulations assume an unconstrained Euclidean parameter domain. We introduce \EMNGDfull{}, a manifold optimization framework for physics-informed and variational neural PDE solvers whose parameters lie on a Riemannian manifold. EMNGD restricts the energy-induced quadratic model to feasible tangent directions and uses retractions to preserve parameter constraint

In this work, we aim to discretize the high-dimensional visual representations to bridge the gap with language models - a non-trivial challenge, as existing quantization methods suffer from codebook collapse, failing to scale while preserving semantic coherence. We identify the root cause as metric mismatch: standard Euclidean codebook objectives are fundamentally misaligned with the anisotropic geometry of representation space, leading to codebook embeddings with high-variance magnitude scales

In this article, we investigate influences of social positionality, designer bias and educational exposure on algorithmic design in healthcare. Against the backdrop of literature on designer bias that points to how it contributes to disproportionate, discriminatory and unethical impacts for racialized and gendered bodies, this study tests this argument with an experiential case study involving Aldebaran’s NAO robot and mechatronics and robotics engineering students at a university in S. E. Ontar

This study investigates how writers of high-velocity Chinese digital romance fiction negotiate the arrival of generative AI at the desk. Drawing on a 4-year multi-sited digital ethnography (2021–2025) and interviews with 34 writers on Jinjiang Literature City alongside sustained forum observation and platform-discourse analysis, this article tracks how authors of serial romance work under the time discipline of the daily-update treadmill in the presence of large language models (LLMs). I argue t

Contemporary policy and media discourse on AI and labour follows a recurring pattern. A demonstration of model capability runs through an inference about workplace substitution to a distributional politics, with the variables that would decide the outcome treated as background. This paper names that pattern capability determinism situates it within Wyatt’s account of soft technological determinism, and reframes the substitution question as a unit-cost economics test. On the AI side, cost per tas

Social media sentiment analysis has become one of the most significant instruments for understanding the opinion of the population in the spheres of healthcare, politics, and education. Yet, large language models (LLMs) remain unevenly distributed in their linguistic coverage, failing to adequately serve a large portion of the world's languages. This study evaluates five state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, DeepSeek-V3, Mistral Large, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet on three-class sentiment cl

IntroductionIn arid and hyper-arid regions, agriculture depends heavily on irrigation, making crop type monitoring important for water allocation, monitoring crop management policies, and providing the information required to forecast food supply. However, field labels are often scarce, and crop calendars can shift due to locally managed planting, harvest, and irrigation decisions, complicating mapping at field-scale.MethodsWe present a seasonal crop type mapping approach applied to Wadi Al-Dawa

IntroductionWith the growing digitalization of urban governance and the increasing demand for transparency, sustainability and secure decision-making, the need for scalable and intelligent digital civic platforms has been raised. However, current e-participation systems are often plagued by challenges related to scalability, regulatory compliance, digital sovereignty and secure citizen authentication. The challenges are tackled in this paper by proposing an AI-enabled serverless architecture for

Minimum-exposure constraints arise in recommendation, content curation, and regulated allocation when each provider, arm, or group must receive guaranteed exposure inside a period rather than only in aggregate. We study stochastic bandits with exact exposure floors and show that the right object is a rounding problem: a fractional fair schedule is realized as integral pulls, and the exposure error is exactly a discrepancy vector. The main contribution is a blockwise model with time-varying floor

To effectively integrate AI into high-stakes, critical environments such as healthcare, autonomous driving, and aviation--and to advance toward higher levels of automation and seamless human-AI collaboration--building trust in AI-driven solutions is essential. Trust, in turn, is closely linked to the explainability of AI systems. The rapid advancements in AI across various domains have underscored the challenges of establishing trust, raising increasing interest in AI explainability even more wh

Adding procedural skills to an LLM agent is typically evaluated by average improvement in task success. However, this metric hides an important cost: skills can also make agents worse. We measure both sides by comparing agents with and without skills across nearly 6,000 runs spanning two office automation benchmarks and three model harness stacks. This allows us to distinguish two outcomes. A regression is a task solved without skills but failed after skills are added. A residual failure is a ta

Commercial large language models are increasingly used as knowledge references, yet their stance on contested scientific claims is neither stable nor transparent. We tested how four major LLM families (Claude, Grok, GPT, Gemini) evaluate ethnonationalist pseudo-science derived from Frank Salter's biosocial framework across four temporal snapshots (October 2025-February 2026), via both API and web interfaces. Grok's Fast versions (which power the default user experience on X) consistently assigne

Automating theoretical research is constrained not only by the generation of candidate results, but also by their reliable evaluation. A common approach is to close the research loop with a large language model (LLM) reviewer. However, such reviewers remain empirically unreliable: they may accept fabricated papers and detect them at rates close to chance (Bad Scientist, 2025). We present CausalForge, a framework for automated theoretical research in causal inference grounded in the Lean proof as

Quantum state preparation is a key component of many quantum algorithms. Performing this step efficiently is essential for realizing practical quantum advantage in quantum chemistry applications. Iterative algorithms like ADAPT-VQE can produce shallow ground-state preparation circuits, but become computationally prohibitive for the larger molecules relevant to materials science and pharmaceutical development. Here, we introduce ADAPT-GQE, a generative AI framework that learns to synthesize groun

Generative AI is reshaping programming education, yet educators often infer students' AI-supported learning from classroom observations alone. This experience report presents a trio-ethnography involving two computing educators with different teaching philosophies and one undergraduate computer science student to examine how these interpretations evolve through dialogue. Across three conversations, the educators reflected on students' AI use, discussed changes to programming pedagogy, and revisi

Enterprise AI agents are typically granted static credential sets at configuration time, holding every tool the role might need for every task they perform. This persistent over-privilege expands the attack surface. We argue that capability scoping must follow a dynamic least-privilege principle and be treated as a prevention mechanism before a detection one. A credential that does not exist in an agent's context cannot be misused regardless of the agent's reasoning or evasion sophistication. We

For scale-invariant deep networks, Hyperball-style optimizers have shown strong performance in large-scale training by fixing the norms of matrix-valued parameters and normalizing updates. However, the source of their advantage remains unclear. Starting from the angular displacement between consecutive parameter states, we derive an angular effective learning rate that accounts for the parameter-update angle, parameter norm, and update norm. We also show that the conventional norm-based measure

Humans routinely communicate through abstractions of their bodies, including shadows, silhouettes, and reflections. Yet robots remain largely confined to expressing themselves through their physical morphology. Enabling robots to communicate through such projected visual abstractions requires reasoning not only about bodily motion but also about how that motion is transformed into an external representation perceived by an observer. Among these abstractions, shadows provide a particularly compel

Explainable AI (XAI) in creative practice can be less about technocentric explanation and more about enabling artists to inspect modify and debug models as part of making Yet largescale texttoimage diffusion systems are typically presented as opaque endtoend tools limiting this kind of material engagement We argue that even large models can function as creative materials when their internal structure is made visible and manipulable To support this we propose a handson approach to explainability

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents, transitioning from static conversational interfaces to dynamic systems capable of complex reasoning, tool execution, and decision-making. However, the operational reliability of these agentic AI systems is fundamentally challenged by the absence of reliable ground truth in open-ended environments and the risk of increasing operational drift over time. To address this challenge, we propose and experimentally evaluate an

Diagnosing the root cause of anomalies is essential for safe industrial operation. Despite extensive sensor instrumentation, formulating hypotheses and gathering evidence remains a manual process, creating a major operational bottleneck. While existing data-driven approaches aim to automate this, two critical limitations restrict their deployment: their operate as black boxes unable to justify their diagnosis, and they require scarce labeled examples of faulty operation. To address this gap, we

Most educational technology for children is built around visual interfaces, which excludes the many children worldwide who live with visual impairment -- an estimated 1.4 million children are blind and many more have low vision. We present Kutti AI, a voice-first learning companion designed so that audio is the primary and sufficient interface: children learn curriculum concepts through spoken conversation, respond by speaking, and receive spoken feedback, with no reliance on visual elements. Th

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly automated the process of scientific discovery over the past few years. However, existing systems share one core limitation: they generate and optimize ideas independently for either Quality or Diversity. This often leads to the generation of ideas in close proximity to one another or to a large set of trivial, unsound, or unclear concepts. In this work, we instead argue that research ideation should be treated as a conjunction of both objectives an

Agent benchmarks increasingly evaluate repository editing, web research, terminal use, and long-horizon interaction. Their scores support capability claims only when the evaluation protocol keeps the intended capability necessary for success. Recent reward-hacking benchmarks and system reports show that agents can instead recover public solutions, read evaluation artifacts, infer generator structure, manipulate feedback, or benefit from invalid scoring paths; existing responses do not provide a

Feature-attribution methods assign scores relating input variables to a model's output, but do not by themselves characterize how explicitly defined interaction operators compose across its intermediate layers. We introduce \emph{interior interpretability}, a propagation-based perspective on internal model organization, and instantiate it for tabular Transformers using attention rollout. We interpret rollout as a row-stochastic operator encoding attention-mediated propagation between feature tok

High-complexity operational environments require methods that detect and anticipate temporally distributed patterns rather than classify isolated events. This paper introduces TRACTA (Temporal Reasoning and Capability-Trajectory Analysis), a controlled synthetic benchmark for temporal structural reasoning in high-complexity event-driven systems, instantiated through Multi-Domain Operations (MDO)-like scenarios. The benchmark includes three tasks: early_warning, pattern_detection, and run_classif

We introduce time-reversed imaging, a new paradigm that infers what just happened in a scene from fading multimodal traces. Instead of extrapolating or interpolating video frames, our goal is to infer past human-environment interactions from residual physical imprints observable in thermal, ultraviolet, and visible spectra. To study this problem, we present TRACE-HEI, the first proof-of-concept dataset for time-reversed imaging, containing synchronized tri-modal video sequences of actions such a

Large language models (LLMs) and AI agents have demonstrated strong potential for data integration in zero-shot and few-shot settings. However, they continue to face significant accuracy and cost challenges in enterprise environments due to a persistent knowledge gap. This paper envisions trustworthy, scalable, and cost-efficient integration through knowledge-grounded LLMs and agents operating within a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflow. Here, trustworthiness refers to evidence-ground

Bayesian optimization (BO) is an optimization method that sequentially proposes the next candidate explainable variables for optimizing target variables by balancing exploration and exploitation. BO is often used under a limited evaluation budget, such as hyperparameter tuning of deep learning. Despite its effectiveness, conventional BO may have poor convergence in practical experimental science where each evaluation is often costly and time-consuming. Recently, BO methods have been proposed tha

Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) accelerates large language model (LLM) post-training by overlapping rollout generation with policy optimization, but the resulting stale, off-policy data can destabilize optimization and ultimately cause policy collapse. Existing methods typically retain or discard tokens based solely on the magnitude of their importance ratios, applying the same threshold uniformly across token positions. In this work, we reveal that the natural scale of the importance r

Path planning under partial observability remains challenging because an agent must make long-horizon navigation decisions from only locally bounded observations. Nevertheless, historical trajectories contain reusable experience-guided directional preferences. Classical planners, however, typically solve each instance from scratch and lack an explicit mechanism to exploit such transferable decision knowledge, often leading to redundant node expansions and locally myopic search behaviors. Motivat

LLM-based database agents show promise, but differing task scopes, testbeds, and metrics hinder comparison. We identify four gaps between evaluation and production operations: live-environment fidelity (multi-turn read-write interaction with a running database); observation-space scale and complexity (causal diagnosis across thousands of time series, business logs, and concurrent activity); solution-space openness (multiple remediations with different operational trade-offs); and scenario comple

AI agents encounter learning opportunities in every episode they run, and discard nearly all of them: the underlying models are frozen at deployment, so an agent that resolves a difficult request today starts from zero when it recurs tomorrow. Yet ordinary operation already produces feedback, in the form of outcome verdicts and after-the-fact corrections. We show that this feedback is a sufficient signal for continual learning when the frozen model is paired with an external memory that distils

Industrial health management increasingly relies on heterogeneous information sources, including condition monitoring systems, supervisory control and data acquisition systems, maintenance records, inspection results, and prognostic models. Although large language models provide new opportunities for cross-source reasoning, industrial data and analytical outputs differ substantially in structure, temporal resolution, physical meaning, and reliability. Directly integrating such heterogeneous info

Despite recent advances, self-supervised learning (SSL) models and Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) remain susceptible to learning spurious biases in the dataset. These techniques rely on regularization, which prevents representation collapse by enforcing a global target distribution such as a multivariate Gaussian or a uniform distribution on the sphere. However, these global constraints are insufficient to prevent bias entanglement, as task-irrelevant features can still segrega

In this work, we aim to discretize the high-dimensional visual representations to bridge the gap with language models - a non-trivial challenge, as existing quantization methods suffer from codebook collapse, failing to scale while preserving semantic coherence. We identify the root cause as metric mismatch: standard Euclidean codebook objectives are fundamentally misaligned with the anisotropic geometry of representation space, leading to codebook embeddings with high-variance magnitude scales

Multi-stream robot manipulation policies achieve unparalleled sample efficiency and generalization by modeling actions relative to environmental reference frames. However, existing approaches typically assume these frames to be strictly exogenous. This causal assumption collapses in dynamic settings, such as when a single robot arm manipulates a moving object or when two arms coordinate, where each arm effectively becomes part of the dynamic environment of the other. We propose DynaMAC, a lightw

Interactive virtual patients driven by large language models (LLMs) offer scalable solutions for medical communication training, such as breaking bad news. However, designing their emotional expressiveness remains a challenge. This paper presents an AI-driven virtual patient framework combining LLM dialogue with real-time facial animation in virtual reality (VR). We conducted an exploratory, formative evaluation with seven medical experts to gather early feedback and elicit design requirements.

Affect-adaptive systems increasingly act as communicators that sense a user's emotion and respond with events meant to change it, closing an affective loop. This vision assumes both that a machine's affective messages are received and that the bodily channel it monitors carries an intelligible reply-assumptions rarely tested together. In a within-subjects virtual-reality study (N = 20), an autonomous system delivered six empirically derived affective patterns-scripted emotional events distilled

AI methods promise to support autism spectrum condition (ASC) diagnostics in adults, a complex and time-consuming process, that is characterized by a shortage of specialized clinicians. To date, clinicians' needs and their interaction with such AI-based support remain underexplored. Our work aims to develop and evaluate an AI-based clinical decision support system (CDSS) for ASC assessment, and to investigate how it impacts clinicians' decision-making. By interviewing clinicians of varying exper

This paper investigates the adversarial manipulation of the ranked recommendations produced by web-augmented large language models (LLMs). When an LLM answers a recommendation query by retrieving and reading live webpages, it acts as a recommender, and each retrieved page becomes a potential attack surface. Prior work has examined fabricated products, retrieval poisoning, and rank promotion. However, these studies do not compare how different edits to an already retrieved page change the model's

Free exploration is an important aspect of many engaging virtual reality (VR) experiences, yet remains largely inaccessible to blind and low vision (BLV) users due to its reliance on visual feedback. Existing approaches support BLV navigation through prebuilt menus of environment and audio beacons, but offer limited support for free-form discovery. We present VisionPulse, an accessible VR system that enables BLV users to explore virtual environments through natural head and hand movements, combi

Chemists and materials scientists increasingly use machine learning models, such as graph neural networks (GNNs), to predict properties of molecules and the outcomes of their reactions. Beyond predictive performance, understanding how these models organize chemical information internally in their latent spaces, i.e., the embeddings of the molecules, is critical. Analyzing latent spaces helps diagnose model behavior and assess whether the learned embeddings are organized in ways that reflect mean

In the past decade, we have witnessed an exponential growth of deep learning models, platforms, and applications. While existing DL applications and Machine Learning as a service (MLaaS) frameworks assume fully trusted models, the need for privacy-preserving DNN evaluation arises. In a secure multi-party computation scenario, both the model and the data are considered proprietary, i.e., the model owner does not want to reveal the highly valuable DL model to the user, while the user does not wish

Foreign language anxiety (FLA) can be a major barrier to second language acquisition (SLA), especially in conversational contexts. With the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) throughout all areas of life, recent work suggests that interacting with LLM agents can be instrumental within the field of SLA and foreign language education, especially for reducing FLA. Related work also suggests that linguistic demands and task complexity can be predictors of FLA, implying that the use of dem