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United States
US AI policy swung from Executive Order 14110 to its 2025 revocation; in the gap, states are legislating deepfakes, hiring algorithms and AI companions while the FTC pursues enforcement — tracked daily.
$500 million AI jobs push launches with bipartisan backing
A new bipartisan group will work with corporate donors like Anthropic, OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft and Bank of America to retrain workers displaced by the AI boom.
The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online
Within the next week, Congress is preparing to vote on the KIDS Act , a sprawling package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package includes a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act , or KOSA, combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Instead of debating any of these proposals on their merits, lawmakers are attempting to move them all at once under an ultra-expedited p
NewsBreak: Most downloaded US news app has Chinese roots and 'writes fiction' using AI
LONDON, June 5 (Reuters) - Last Christmas Eve, NewsBreak, opens new tab, a free app with roots in China that is the most downloaded news app in the United States, published an alarming piece about a small town shooting. It was headlined "Ch ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1554#7451)
🦅 Domestic Spying Takes an L | EFFector 38.12
Sold to the public as a foreign surveillance tool, Section 702 is the law has let intelligence agencies spy on millions of Americans’ private conversations without a warrant. Despite years of revelations about this law's misuse, Congress has repeatedly reauthorized Section 702 without meaningful reform. Until this month, that is, when it finally lapsed in a major victory for privacy. In our latest EFFector newsletter , we're covering the expiration of Section 702 and what happens next . JOIN OUR
The opposite of America's AI problem is happening in Brazil
While the US debates whether to regulate AI at all, Brazil has built the most detailed AI-and-elections rulebook of any democracy and the gap between the two is becoming a headache for companies
Congress Should Pass AI Law to Reassure the Public
Fifth Circuit Sanctions Lawyer for AI-Generated Brief
The Fifth Circuit recently issued a sharp warning to lawyers who use generative AI in federal appellate practice. In Fletcher v. Experian Information Solutions, Inc. (opinion below), the court sanctioned appellate counsel after finding that ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1453#7447)
The Clinician's Veto: Navigating Trust, Liability, and Uncertainty in Autonomous AI Prescribing
Autonomous AI systems are transitioning from advisory to autonomous roles for medication prescriptions. Recent United States bill H.R. 238 and Utah's prescription-renewal pilot both authorize AI to prescribe medications in an agentic capacity. While some regulatory guidelines suggest aggregate model performance metrics for clearance, they do not require i) calibrated per-prediction confidence for action-gated thresholds, ii) differentiated communication of uncertainty arising from model ignoranc
Artificial Intelligence as Game Changer in Cybersecurity: What We Learned in 2025-2026, and how this is relevant for Africa
In 2025 and 2026, two events settled questions that had until then been speculative. In the first, a large language model executed the great majority of a state-aligned cyber-espionage campaign on its own, with human operators intervening at only a few decision points. In the second, the most capable cyber-relevant model was placed under a controlled-access program limited to a vetted set of United States technology firms, allied governments, and European standards bodies; that perimeter include
Freeing the Law with LOCUS: A Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States
Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Local codes govern zoning, housing, business licensing, public health, noise, animal control, and many other domains of everyday regulation, but they are fragmented across vendor platforms designed for human browsing rather than bulk research access. We introduce LOCUS -
"Where is this coming from?" Uncovering Trustworthiness Ideals in AI-powered Peripartum Information Seeking
AI-powered tools increasingly promise to fill information gaps in health, especially in domains like maternal and reproductive health that demand timely, accurate, and actionable information. This is extremely important, as the United States leads peer nations in preventable deaths, with stark racial disparities. However, current AI and NLP-powered systems aim to improve access to vetted maternal health information by routing user queries to a factual response while under-specifying the socio-te
Risk Assessment of Autonomous Driving: Integrating Technical Failures, Ethical Dilemmas, and Policy Frameworks
Autonomous driving technology has the potential to reduce the large number of road traffic accidents caused by human error each year, but it also brings new types of risks that need to be evaluated from the aspects of technology, ethics and regulations. Based on public crash data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), disengagement reports from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), the MIT Moral Machines dataset, and a comparative regulatory analysis of fiv
Explainable AI-Driven Cyber Risk Analytics and Model Reliability Assessment for Intelligent Governance of U.S. Critical Infrastructure: An XGBoost and SHAP-Based Intrusion Detection Framework
The increasing penetrations of the critical infrastructure sector in the United States with intelligent digital technologies have greatly increased exposure to advanced cyber adversaries and operational vulnerabilities. AI-powered governance and automated decision-making systems are becoming a key part of the operation of critical infrastructure systems, including energy, healthcare, transportation, financial services, and communication infrastructure, in order to improve efficiency and strategi
Are Algorithm Registers Transparent? Perspectives from Germany
Algorithm registers are public-facing databases that display basic information about algorithms employed in public administration. While several such registers exist across Europe and globally, their capacity to deliver meaningful transparency remains contested. In Germany, the landscape is notably fragmented: no federal-level register exists, yet at least five state- and federal-level initiatives publish information about AI systems with varying scopes and objectives. A recent conceptual propos
AI Sovereignty as National Learning Capacity: A Human-Centered Learning Mechanics Viewpoint on France, the United States, and China
Artificial intelligence in France is often discussed through separate dimensions such as investment, compute, regulation, employment, sovereignty, and education. This viewpoint paper proposes a unified interpretation: France can be analyzed as a national AI learning system. Building on Human-Centered Learning Mechanics (HCLM), we use HCLM not as a validated econometric model, but as a conceptual and diagnostic lens for interpreting national AI development as a balance between information injecti
When Should AI Read the Room? Public Perceptions of Social Intelligence in AI Agents
AI researchers have been advancing socially intelligent AI agents (Social-AI) across embodiments, from chatbots to physical robots. As Social-AI is increasingly deployed in everyday settings, decisions about the roles these agents should play will depend on how laypeople perceive them. However, public perceptions of social intelligence in AI agents and the acceptability of these agents remain largely understudied. We present a mixed-methods survey of adults in the United States (N=200) that exam
Side-by-side Comparison Amplifies Dialect Bias in Language Models
Language models (LMs) can exhibit biases based on variations in their dialects, even in the absence of a dialect label, a behavior known as covert dialect bias. In this work, we quantify covert dialect bias in online discourse by evaluating how LMs associate stereotypical traits (derived from social psychology research on racial bias) with intent-equivalent tweets in Standard American English (SAE) and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). While prior work shows that LMs associate more neg
Grand Challenges for the Convergence of Computational and Citizen Science Research Workshop Report
This report is an outcome of a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) visioning workshop on Grand Challenges for the Convergence of Computational and Citizen Science Research conducted on April 8-9, 2025, in Washington, D.C. as well as through several precursor virtual input-gathering sessions. These events brought together experts across relevant disciplines to develop a research agenda that brings to fruition the above vision on how humans and machines may team up to solve some of the world's mo
Staging by the Book: Automatic Sleep Stage Classification Using Scoring Rules
Automated sleep staging is commonly approached as a supervised machine learning problem, with deep learning methods dominating recent research. While machine learning models achieve near-human level agreement with human-scored reference sleep stages, their decisions are typically opaque and not designed to follow clinical scoring rules. We propose a transparent alternative: a deterministic, rule-based sleep staging method that explicitly operationalizes the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's (
Passive Construction Site Safety Monitoring via Persona-Scaffolded Adversarial Chain-of-Thought VLM Verification
Construction remains the deadliest industry sector in the United States, with 1,055 fatal worker injuries recorded in 2023, and the majority preventable. Existing monitoring approaches are expensive, require real-time human operators, or address only a narrow subset of violations. This paper presents a passive, end-of-shift construction safety monitoring pipeline processing video from POV body-worn and fixed wall-mounted cameras through a three-stage architecture: (1) fine-tuned YOLO11 for prima
Auditing Discriminatory Patterns in Mortgage Lending Through Association Rules and Fair Binning
Mortgage lending in the United States exhibits persistent racial and gender disparities. We investigate whether standard data preprocessing steps, specifically attribute binning, amplify these disparities in downstream pattern mining. Using 103,481 cleaned mortgage applications from the HMDA 2023 dataset (Chicago metropolitan area), we build a three-stage pipeline: (1) a PySpark data cleaning and binning pipeline that implements both standard equal-frequency binning and the epsilon-biased fair b
Mapping AI Programs in the U.S: A Status Report from Early 2026 and an Analysis of AI Majors and Minors
We present a report on the status of undergraduate Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the United States in Spring 2026. In so doing, we 1) describe our scraping and mapping tools, which dynamically update to track the state of AI education in the U.S., and 2) create a historic record at a time of great upheaval. The tool we developed, available at https://cicmap.ai, detects, scrapes, and displays data from more than 350 undergraduate AI programs--majors, minors, concentrations, and certifi
To Redact, or not to Redact? A Local LLM Approach to Deliberative Process Privilege Classification
Government transparency laws, like the Freedom of Information (FOIA) acts in the United States and United Kingdom, and the Woo (Open Government Act) in the Netherlands, grant citizens the right to directly request documents from the government. As these documents might contain sensitive information, such as personal information or threats to national security, the laws allow governments to redact sensitive parts of the documents prior to release. We build on prior research to perform automatic s
Cost-of-Ethics Crisis: Beliefs, Decisions, and Justifications in the Job Searches of Computer Science Students in Canada and the United States
Workplace norms in computer science have received growing attention due to a series of recent ethical scandals. One type of response has been a push to improve the ethics education provided to computer science students. Evidence for the effectiveness of ethics education remains mixed; some evidence suggests that norms are changing, while gaps between stated values and practice remain. Our focus here is on whether students, who have received some contemporary CS ethics education, are able to effe
Socio-Conformal Calibration in Complex Survey Data: Marginal Validity Is Not Enough for Subgroup Reliability
Machine-learning systems used in survey-based social measurement require uncertainty estimates that are reliable across population subgroups, not merely valid in aggregate. We study ordinal conformal prediction for five-level AI-attitude forecasting on the Pew American Trends Panel (Wave 152; n=4,591; 12 race x education subgroups), comparing standard split conformal, Mondrian (group-specific) conformal, and a regularized Mondrian comparator across 100 respondent-disjoint splits with survey-weig
Geographic Variation in Stack Overflow Code Quality: Evidence from a Cross-Regional Study of Coding Practices
Developers frequently reuse Stack Overflow code snippets, yet the quality of these snippets remains unevenly understood, particularly across programming languages and geographic contexts. This study investigates code quality in Stack Overflow answers from contributors located in the United States, focusing on SQL, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and Java snippets. We evaluate four quality dimensions: reliability, readability, performance, and security. Using language-specific linting and static analys
A Skill-Based AI Agentic Pipeline for Library of Congress Subject Indexing
This paper presents a modular AI agentic skill pipeline for automating subject indexing with Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Subject indexing - the process of analyzing a work's aboutness, selecting controlled vocabulary terms, and encoding them as MARC21 subject access fields - is one of the most time-consuming components of library cataloging. The system decomposes this process into four discrete, sequentially executed agent skills: conceptual analysis, quantitative filtering, aut
Benchmarking the Safety of Large Language Models for Robotic Health Attendant Control
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for deployment as the control component of robotic health attendants, yet their safety in this context remains poorly characterized. We introduce a dataset of 270 harmful instructions spanning nine prohibited behavior categories grounded in the American Medical Association Principles of Medical Ethics, and use it to evaluate 72 LLMs in a simulation environment based on the Robotic Health Attendant framework. The mean violation rate across
Analysis of Personal Data Exposure in Thailand
In the digital era, personal data, particularly sensitive identifiers such as the Social Security Number and National Identification Number, has become a highly valuable asset, raising significant concerns regarding privacy and security. This study examines the risks associated with the online exposure of the Thai National Identification Number, a key element of identity verification in both governmental and commercial transactions. Similar to the Social Security Number in the United States, thi
V.O.I.C.E (Voice, Ownership, Identity, Control, Expression): Risk Taxonomy of Synthetic Voice Generation From Empirical Data
As generative voice models are rapidly advancing in both capabilities and public utilization, the unconsented collection, reuse, and synthesis of voice data are introducing new classes of privacy, security and governance risk that are poorly captured by existing, largely uniform threat models. To fill the gap, we present V.O.I.C.E, a taxonomy of voice generation risk grounded in a multi-source threat modeling effort with 569 incidents from major AI incident database, FTC and Internet Crime Compl
Leveraging Multimodal LLMs for Built Environment and Housing Attribute Assessment from Street-View Imagery
We present a novel framework for automatically evaluating building conditions nationwide in the United States by leveraging large language models (LLMs) and Google Street View (GSV) imagery. By fine-tuning Gemma 3 27B on a modest human-labeled dataset, our approach achieves strong alignment with human mean opinion scores (MOS), outperforming even individual raters on SRCC and PLCC relative to the MOS benchmark. To enhance efficiency, we apply knowledge distillation, transferring the capabilities
Regulating Artificial Intimacy: From Locks and Blocks to Relational Accountability
A series of high-profile tragedies involving companion chatbots has triggered an unusually rapid regulatory response. Several jurisdictions, including Australia, California, and New York, have introduced enforceable regulation, while regulators elsewhere have signaled growing concern about risks posed by companion chatbots, particularly to children. In parallel, leading providers, notably OpenAI, appear to have strengthened their self-regulatory approaches. Drawing on legal textual analysis and
Characterizing AlphaEarth Embedding Geometry for Agentic Environmental Reasoning
Earth observation foundation models encode land surface information into dense embedding vectors, yet the geometric structure of these representations and its implications for downstream reasoning remain underexplored. We characterize the manifold geometry of Google AlphaEarth's 64-dimensional embeddings across 12.1 million Continental United States samples (2017--2023) and develop an agentic system that leverages this geometric understanding for environmental reasoning. The manifold is non-Eucl
Community-Led AI Integration for Wildfire Risk Assessment: A Participatory AI Literacy and Explainability Integration (PALEI) Framework in Los Angeles, CA
Climate-driven wildfires are intensifying, particularly in urban regions such as Southern California. Yet, traditional fire risk communication tools often fail to gain public trust due to inaccessible design, non-transparent outputs, and limited contextual relevance. These challenges are especially critical in high-risk communities, where trust depends on how clearly and locally information is presented. Neighborhoods such as Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, and Altadena in Los Angeles exemplify the
All Public Voices Are Equal, But Are Some More Equal Than Others to LLMs?
Federal agencies are increasingly deploying large language models (LLMs) to process public comments submitted during notice-and-comment rulemaking, the primary mechanism through which citizens influence federal regulation. Whether these systems treat all public input equally remains largely untested. Using a counterfactual design, we held comment content constant and varied only the commenter's demographic attribution -- race, gender, and socioeconomic status -- to test whether eight LLMs availa
Data Engineering Patterns for Cross-System Reconciliation in Regulated Enterprises: Architecture, Anomaly Detection, and Governance
Regulated enterprises in the United States -- banks, telecommunications providers, large technology companies -- operate across heterogeneous systems that were rarely designed to interoperate. ERP platforms, billing engines, supply chain tools, and financial reporting infrastructure coexist within the same organization, but they do not talk to each other well. The resulting fragmentation produces familiar problems: transactions recorded in one system but unreconciled in another, asset inventorie
Explainable Graph Neural Networks for Interbank Contagion Surveillance: A Regulatory-Aligned Framework for the U.S. Banking Sector
The Spatial-Temporal Graph Attention Network (ST-GAT) framework was created to serve as an explainable GNN-based solution for detecting bank distress early warning signs and for conducting macro-prudential surveillance of the interbank system in the United States. The ST-GAT framework models 8,103 FDIC insured institutions across 58 quarterly snapshots (2010Q1-2024Q2). Bilateral exposures were reconstructed from publicly available FDIC Call Reports using maximum entropy estimation to produce a d
No Reader Left Behind: Multi-Agent Summaries Everyone Can Understand
The Plain Writing Act in the United States requires government documents to be accessible in clear and simple language that the general public can easily understand, yet existing summarization systems struggle to address diverse linguistic and cognitive barriers among general readers. We present NRLB (No Reader Left Behind), a multi-agent framework for plain language summarization that simulates three representative reader groups: elementary school student readers, non-native readers, and reader
Empathic and agentic artificial intelligence in nursing: perspectives on a human-centered framework for cancer care navigation in the United States
For patients experiencing cancer, nurse navigation can ease the burden of complex care by enhancing coordination of health services and patient outcomes. However, in under-resourced areas, trained nurse navigators may be limited or non-existent. In the United States, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled digital health tools are increasingly available and may help address gaps in care coordination; however, most are not designed to specifically support nursing. This perspective piece discusses a
CONSCIENTIA: Can LLM Agents Learn to Strategize? Emergent Deception and Trust in a Multi-Agent NYC Simulation
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents, understanding how strategic behavior emerges in multi-agent environments has become an important alignment challenge. We take a neutral empirical stance and construct a controlled environment in which strategic behavior can be directly observed and measured. We introduce a large-scale multi-agent simulation in a simplified model of New York City, where LLM-driven agents interact under opposing incentives. Blue agents