23:20 UTC

Quoting D. Richard Hipp

Years ago, we didn’t have SQL. There were people whose job was to generate software that would query large data sets. Their job title was COBOL programmer. Then SQL comes along—I’m simplifying this only a little bit—and it gives you this convenient way so people could just specify. With a very simple specification, you can generate all of that code that you had to pay the expensive COBOL programmer to do before. That didn’t mean programmers went away. It just meant the job changed a little bit.
Simon Willisons Weblog yesterday Jobs & economy

Too Many Cooks Spoil the Settlement

In American antitrust, clearing the federal gate increasingly means arriving at the state turnstiles. State attorneys general play a valuable role when harms are local or federal investigators miss key facts. But serial challenges to nationally integrated conduct turn that safeguard into a standing invitation to relitigate. The result is a system in which no ... Too Many Cooks Spoil the Settlement The post Too Many Cooks Spoil the Settlement appeared first on Truth on the Market .
Truth on the Market (digital regulation) yesterday Finance, VC & PE

US–Saudi Arabia Nuclear Cooperation

On 22 July 2026, the US administration announced a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. Under this deal, the US will provide support to the Golf country to establish a civilian nuclear programme. This is worrisome given statements by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, that once Iran has nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia would follow suit. Given the nuclear-induced tensions in the Middle East between Saudi Arabia and Iran and the scope of the agreement, this newly formed cooperation may put another nail in the
Verfassungsblog (EU law incl AI) yesterday Military & security

Measuring the Tendency of AI Agents to Go Rogue

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in The Guardian . In July, Hugging Face, a company that hosts much of the world’s AI software and open-source AI models, was hacked. A malicious dataset had been used to run code on one of its servers. Whoever was behind it captured internal security credentials and moved through systems over a weekend, running thousands of actions from a swarm of temporary server environments. It looked like the work of a sophisticated crimina
Bruce Schneier — Schneier on Security yesterday Agents & autonomyEnvironment

🏃 Fitness Tracker Privacy Fails | EFFector 38.14

Watches, bands, and rings—if you want to digitally monitor your fitness, more companies than ever are selling devices to do it. And more Americans than ever now own at least one wearable health device. But what are the companies that make fitness trackers doing to protect our sensitive data from prying eyes? A lot less than they could be, it turns out. We're explaining what companies can do to protect your health data, and more, with our EFFector newsletter . JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER For over 35 year
EFF Deeplinks yesterday PrivacyHealthcare

How To Maximize Value — And Minimize Risks — Of AI Assistants In Commerce Software

As commerce vendors embed genAI assistants into their platforms, digital leaders must balance productivity gains against growing governance risks to ensure that AI-generated work remains visible, auditable, explainable, and aligned with organizational policies.
Forrester AI blog yesterday RegulationJobs & economy

A new benchmark for evaluating patient-facing health AI agents

PatientAgentBench generates a synthetic patient health record, a realistic clinical vignette, and a patient agent that converses with the AI system under evaluation, to capture what a patient-facing agent actually has to do.
Amazon Science yesterday HealthcareAgents & autonomy

Poolside’s Laguna S 2.1: the model factory delivers

Poolside shipped Laguna S 2.1, an open-weights coding model trained in 60 days, then a desktop app for running agent fleets a week later.
Air Street Capital (State of AI) yesterday Agents & autonomy

Architect For Evolution, Not Perfection, In Agentic AI

Enterprise teams are moving agentic AI projects toward production faster than they are developing the architectural disciplines needed to build, govern, secure, and operate them. At the same time, many organizations are searching for a target-state agentic architecture that will stand the test of time. That, unfortunately, is a fool’s errand in the rapidly evolving […]
Forrester AI blog yesterday Agents & autonomy

DRC Takes Rwanda to the ICJ: Proxy Warfare, Layered Obligations, and the Future of State Responsibility

The DRC’s case against Rwanda could mark an important moment in the legal development of responsibility for proxy warfare. The post DRC Takes Rwanda to the ICJ: Proxy Warfare, Layered Obligations, and the Future of State Responsibility appeared first on Just Security .
Just Security yesterday Military & security

The Future Of AppSec May Be Autonomous, But The Present Is Surprisingly Practical

AI is no longer a future feature in application security; it is rapidly becoming a core part of how application security (AppSec) tools identify, prioritize, and remediate risk. Yet despite aggressive vendor investment, adoption remains constrained by trust concerns, questions about value, and uncertainty about pricing models. In our new report, The State Of Artificial […]
Forrester AI blog yesterday Finance, VC & PE

Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026)

Today's links Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global: The good globalism. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Fonz thumps x Linux; CBC v DRM; Aussie mall v photos; English town x CCTVs; Pay no taxes x Big Tech; Games Workshop v gamers; Delta x surveillance pricing. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I s
Pluralistic (Cory Doctorow) yesterday Privacy

Investors Need Better Information About How Companies are Using AI

The post Investors Need Better Information About How Companies are Using AI appeared first on Partnership on AI .
Partnership on AI yesterday Finance, VC & PE

How GPT-5.6 fuses frontier intelligence with frontier efficiency

GPT-5.6 improves AI efficiency across models, inference, and agentic workflows, helping deliver more useful intelligence per dollar.
OpenAI yesterday Agents & autonomy

The AI Act Implementation Timeline: What Changes Under the AI Omnibus?

The implementation timeline of the EU AI Act has been significantly modified through the recently adopted AI Omnibus, which pushes compliance with the obligations for high-risk AI systems to December 2027 (Annex III) and August 2028 (Annex I), from the initial date of 2 August 2026. Changes of the AI Act include, among others, the […]
Future of Privacy Forum 2d ago Regulation

Quoting Akshat Bubna

We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed ​anyone on the internet to use ​their ⁠sandboxes for code execution. This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s ⁠platform ​or isolation were not ​compromised in anyway. — Akshat Bubna , Modal's CTO, talking to Reuters about this incident Tags: ai-security-research , openai , sandboxing , security , openai-hugging-face-incident
Simon Willisons Weblog 2d ago Agents & autonomy

San Francisco: Don’t Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

The concept of “surveillance pricing” is just one part of a much larger problem and business model: corporations maximizing their profits by invading our privacy. The all-too-common business model is to systematically harvest, collate, and store as much of our personal data as possible, and then monetize it through use and sale. When it comes to surveillance pricing, that looks like corporations offering the same product to two different people at two different prices, based on harvested persona
EFF Deeplinks 2d ago PrivacyMilitary & security

Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident Hugging Face just released this extremely detailed technical description of OpenAI's recent accidental cyberattack against their infrastructure . This attack was very sophisticated, and the resulting document doubles as a crash-course in modern adversarial security approaches. We're still waiting for more details from OpenAI on how their agent broke out of its sandbox. The package proxy that it found a zero
Simon Willisons Weblog 2d ago Agents & autonomy

Scientific computing in the age of agentic AI

A new field report shows how scientists use AI coding agents to modernize scientific computing, accelerating software development and discovery in genomics and beyond.
OpenAI 2d ago Agents & autonomyBiotech

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

Recent reports have raised alarm about the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scanning system, at multiple LGBTQ+ bars in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. Much of the attention has focused on reports that the system photographs patrons as they enter venues and questions about whether those images are used for facial recognition. A broader privacy concern also deserves scrutiny. For years, PatronScan has marketed itself not just as an ID-verification tool, but as a system that allows
EFF Deeplinks 2d ago Privacy

Gemini API Managed Agents: 3.6 Flash, hooks, and more

We’re announcing even more new capabilities in Managed Agents in Gemini API so developers can build reliable, production-ready agents.
Google AI Blog 2d ago Agents & autonomy

Powerful Compute So Compact, It’s Clutch — Build AI Anywhere With NVIDIA Jetson

As a discerning AI investor who values style and substance, Sarah Guo knows this season’s standout accessory isn’t the latest designer purse — but what’s inside it. In a recent video, Guo, founder of AI-native venture capital firm Conviction and co-host of the AI podcast No Priors, highlighted how the NVIDIA Jetson platform for edge […]
NVIDIA Blog (AI) 2d ago Finance, VC & PE

Axon Is Another License Plate Surveillance Company

Governments are switching, but I’m not sure it makes a difference : …some municipalities, including Denver, Colorado, are ditching their Flock arrays. But keep in mind that if they’re only switching from Flock to another brand of license-plate readers, like Axon, it’s like a gambling addict trying to kick the habit by switching from FanDuel to DraftKings. […] Despite what you may read on the Flock website, Axon cameras are pretty effective when it comes to hoovering up personal details that can
Bruce Schneier — Schneier on Security 2d ago Privacy

Pluralistic: Discernment (28 Jul 2026)

Today's links Discernment: How can you fact-check AI when you're asking it to teach you something you don't understand? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: How to help with computers; Batman equation; Fuck and the law; NC's racist voting law; Pregancy app is full of spyware; Stiglitz v Apple's "tax fraud"; Accelerometer fingerprinting; Sacklers v bankruptcy; Boss-politics antitrust. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent a
Pluralistic (Cory Doctorow) 2d ago Regulation

Send Not to Know for Whom the Bell Tolls… as Long as It’s the Court Playing

Perhaps due to the notable impact of climate change on the ongoing summer, the delivery on C-67/25 by the Court of Justice has gone relatively unnoticed hitherto. The brevity of the judgment conflicts with the thunderous effects it may unleash, which have potential to open a definitive breach in the Union’s constitutional acquis. Noteworthily, this rupture is being perpetrated in alleged defence of Art. 2 TEU values: the lynchpin of the Union as a “militant” democracy is being deployed on the ex
Verfassungsblog (EU law incl AI) 2d ago Military & securityEnvironment

China's 'dying' companies

and where productivity growth will really come from
ChinaTalk 2d ago Jobs & economy

Click, Strip, Repeat: Sex Workers and Digital Violence Amidst the Deepfake Boom

For victims of targeted, sexualized attacks, searching for redress is not easy: they are blamed for posting pictures of them online, accused of overreacting by the police, and followed for life with the consequences of losing the control over their own body and image.
AlgorithmWatch 2d ago Misinformation

Workforce Intelligence Is Canada's Missing Discipline

As countries compete for technological leadership, the ability to anticipate workforce constraints may prove just as important as anticipating geopolitical ones. (Carlos Osorio/REUTERS) In 2021, ...
Centre for International Governance Innovation 2d ago Jobs & economy

Untrusted advice for AI control: Short, strong advice significantly uplifts weak LLMs

When a misaligned AI can only output tiny amounts of information, it may find sabotage very difficult
Redwood Research 2d ago Safety & alignment

An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff

An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff It's interesting watching the evolution of Ethan Mollick's guide over time. A year ago it was still all about chat - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - with o3, Claude 4 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro as the models and Deep Research as a useful alternative mode. Today it's much more about agentic systems - "where the AI is capable of doing the equivalent of many hours of real human work in one go". Gemini has fallen off Ethan's list, since Google still doesn’
Simon Willisons Weblog 3d ago Agents & autonomy

Microsoft’s Project Perception Announcement And How To Implement It Right

Today, Microsoft announced Project Perception, a series of red, blue, and green team agents designed to be coordinated together in an agentic architecture to evaluate infrastructure and close gaps as close to autonomously as possible. The red team agents find potential paths to compromise. The blue team agents prioritize and evaluate them. The green team […]
Forrester AI blog 3d ago Safety & alignmentAgents & autonomy

The FTC’s AI Accuracy Statement Needs a Fact Check

A policy statement about accuracy should, at minimum, be precise. The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Proposed Policy Statement Concerning the Suppression of Accuracy in Artificial Intelligence Systems (AI Policy Statement) struggles with that assignment. The International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) submitted comments in response to the FTC’s request for input, and this post ... The FTC’s AI Accuracy Statement Needs a Fact Check The post The FTC’s AI Accuracy Statement Needs a Fact Check
Truth on the Market (digital regulation) 3d ago Regulation

Steering AI’s Economic Impacts, Before They Arrive

The post Steering AI’s Economic Impacts, Before They Arrive appeared first on Partnership on AI .
Partnership on AI 3d ago

Social Choice for Fair Recommendations

Recommender systems influence nearly every aspect of our digital lives—but what does it mean for those systems to be fair? Robin Burke joins Data Skeptic to discuss the history of recommender systems, the limitations of optimizing purely for accuracy, and how ideas from social choice theory can help balance the needs of users, creators, and society. The conversation explores the future of recommendation algorithms and why fairness is a far more complex challenge than it first appears.
Data Skeptic 3d ago Bias & fairness

📈 Data to start your week

Open models volume ↑ AI & productivity ↑ Kids in cities ↓
Exponential View (Azeem Azhar) 3d ago Jobs & economyChildren & education

The EU Can No Longer Let Fashion Go Up in Flames

Can the law tell a company that it is no longer free to destroy its own products? Among the powers traditionally associated with ownership is the freedom to determine the fate of one’s property. Whether doing so is economically sensible or environmentally responsible is another matter. However, as of 19 July 2026, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which entered into force in 2024, prohibits large companies from destroying unsold clothing, accessories and footwear, subject
Verfassungsblog (EU law incl AI) 3d ago RegulationEnvironment

Import AI 466: The bitter lesson for robotics, AIs complete week-long programming tasks; and OpenAI's accidental AI hacker

The warning shots will continue until civilization wakes up
Import AI 3d ago Agents & autonomy

FLUX 3: from video generation to robot control

The same multimodal backbone that generates 20-second video with audio is being tested on industrial manipulation at Audi Production Lab.
Air Street Capital (State of AI) 3d ago Agents & autonomy

Authoritarians Keep Telling Us What They Fear. We Should Listen.

Research shows that, more than military strikes or sanctions, authoritarians fear support for independent media, anti-censorship tech, and civil society. The post Authoritarians Keep Telling Us What They Fear. We Should Listen. appeared first on Just Security .
Just Security 3d ago Military & security

Early Edition: July 27, 2026

Signup to receive the Early Edition in your inbox here. A curated guide to major news and developments over the weekend. Here’s today’s news: IRAN WAR President Trump directed the U.S. military not to conduct new strikes in Iran on Friday, breaking a nearly two-week streak in daily attacks, two sources said. “We’re talking to [the […] The post Early Edition: July 27, 2026 appeared first on Just Security .
Just Security 3d ago Military & security
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