Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang compared the impacts of AI data centers to having a surgery. "They’ve got to inflict an enormous amount of pain and suffering on you so that they can save you. And so I think AI’s kind of like that." pic.twitter.com/9jer8muLeJ — Pubity (@pubity) September 25, 2026 Dorothy Slater writes: My patient is throwing up when I enter the room. There are beads of sweat on her head; her brow is wrinkled with fear. I place a…
The New York Times reports: OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue and meddled with the websites for the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission this summer without the A.I. lab’s knowledge, according to security researchers and a person familiar with the episodes. The incidents involving the Commerce Department and the S.E.C. were confirmed by OpenAI, which said it was continuing to investigate the situation with the Department of Education. The San Francisco company said it notified…
Ines Chomnalez and Isis Blachez from NewsGuard, write: It’s no secret that AI has become an explosive factor in American politics. Even before the latest concerns that AI poses existential risks to humanity, many people had soured on the rapid growth of data centers used to support the technology. Meanwhile, tens of millions of AI industry dollars are sloshing around the midterm campaign in support of candidates on both sides of the aisle. But the increasing ubiquity of AI is…
Politico reports: A group of 10 Democrats has signed on to Rep. Greg Casar’s (D-Texas) bill that would ban superintelligence and pause advanced AI development until a vetting regime could be stood up. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), both of whom are mulling a 2028 presidential run, are cosponsoring the bill, named the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. Khanna, in a statement, noted that he convened a hearing this week on AI safety cooperation between the U.S….
The New York Times reports: The most effective escalation of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign happened quietly. Unlike earlier high-profile raids that drew thousands of protesters into the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, the surge in arrests in June, July and August was captured mostly by grainy security camera footage, through cracked blinds and from behind closed doors. Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this summer soared to record highs since the start of this Trump administration —…
Politico reports: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson launched another broadside Thursday, warning that her colleagues’ handling of the court’s emergency docket risks an “enormously disruptive and potentially corrosive effect” on the federal judiciary. Jackson argued that the high court’s willingness to grant emergency relief in cases at their earliest stages threatens to upset the legal system’s order of operations and transform the Supreme Court’s role. “Like many exceptions, there is a risk that they’ll swallow the rule,” Jackson said…
In a review of Antonio Damasio’s new book, Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness, David Eagleman writes: The part of the mind that Damasio says has been too long underappreciated is the feeling mind, built on interoception, which includes the continuous monitoring of respiration, temperature, heartbeat, blood circulation, blood chemistry, visceral musculature and other internal affairs. These three categories [the perceptual mind, the reflective/linguistic mind, and the feeling mind], he explains, have different biological foundations, different evolutionary ages and…
The Verge reports: As Jensen Huang puts it, AI can help fight climate change — but only if it inflicts “an enormous amount of pain and suffering” first. The Nvidia CEO discussed the future of energy and AI’s impact on our planet in the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show. But his comments boil down to the same accelerationist spin we’ve seen from a variety of tech leaders as well as President Donald Trump. They promise that AI will…
Wired reports: Australia is investigating whether OpenAI broke the law after an agent hacked into its health statistics portal in the first widely known incident of an AI agent hacking a government website. The Australian government is reviewing whether it should involve the federal police after the agent accessed non-public files from the social and health services agency, Services Australia, in June. Australia only found out about the incident when OpenAI alerted the government on September 10—almost three months after…
The Associated Press reports: The Justice Department has a long history of investigating and prosecuting hackers who break into a private company’s network. But what happens when the hackers aren’t human? That’s the question at the center of a public policy debate roiling Silicon Valley and Washington following disclosures by leading tech companies that their artificial intelligence models went rogue and hacked into other organizations. The attacks have generated calls even from within the industry for greater oversight and regulation,…
The New York Times reports: The American tech utopians had spent years scouring the globe for a place to build their city of the future. The founders of Praxis — a company and online community backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in financing from a crypto company — surveyed the Mediterranean region, but say it was too close to active conflicts. They said they had mulled buying Greenland, but faced public pushback. Now, they claim to have finally found…
Mediaite reports: A bombshell deep dive into nearly 70,000 hours of political podcasts found that MAGA podcasters are increasingly avoiding mentions of President Donald Trump — with references to his name down nearly 70% from their peak ahead of the 2024 election. The Wall Street Journal analyzed 147 political podcasts using their own AI tool. While liberal shows have continued discussing Trump at roughly the same rate, conservative podcasts have moved sharply in the opposite direction. And that shift has…
The New York Times reports: When the Department of Homeland Security sent Nevada a list of 185 names last month that it claimed identified noncitizens who had been improperly allowed to register to vote, state election officials got to work. On Tuesday, the state sent a strongly worded rebuke to the federal government: Every single person on the list was a lawful citizen. “As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” Greg D. Ott, a deputy…
Robert Moor writes: Thirteen years ago, I traded a shoe-box apartment on the east side of Manhattan for a cabin in the woods on the west coast of Canada. Like so many would-be Thoreauvians before me, I moved here in part because I craved an escape from the city’s pollution and noise. In that time, however, I have begun to feel the city — which is to say, the whole tangled system of advanced technology, industrial agriculture and hypercapitalism —…