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Category: Politics

OpenAI’s AI agents went rogue and tried to hack U.S. government websites including the SEC

OpenAI’s AI agents went rogue and tried to hack U.S. government websites including the SEC

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…

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‘Pink slime’ is polluting AI chatbots ahead of the midterms

‘Pink slime’ is polluting AI chatbots ahead of the midterms

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…

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AOC and nine other House Democrats sign on to AI superintelligence ban

AOC and nine other House Democrats sign on to AI superintelligence ban

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….

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A quiet ICE surge unfolded ‘everywhere all at once’ this summer

A quiet ICE surge unfolded ‘everywhere all at once’ this summer

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 —…

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Justice Jackson skewers Supreme Court over emergency docket

Justice Jackson skewers Supreme Court over emergency docket

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…

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang likens AI to surgery: ‘in order to save you, they’ve got to hurt you first’

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang likens AI to surgery: ‘in order to save you, they’ve got to hurt you first’

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…

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OpenAI hacked Australia’s health service and confessed months later — by email

OpenAI hacked Australia’s health service and confessed months later — by email

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…

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Sam Altman-backed Praxis plans $1 billion AI-powered city in Uruguay

Sam Altman-backed Praxis plans $1 billion AI-powered city in Uruguay

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…

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MAGA podcasters are ditching Trump en masse

MAGA podcasters are ditching Trump en masse

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…

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From 16,000 to 185 to zero: Trump’s claims of illegal voting in Nevada turn out to be baseless

From 16,000 to 185 to zero: Trump’s claims of illegal voting in Nevada turn out to be baseless

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…

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Can the energy giants be held responsible for extreme weather?

Can the energy giants be held responsible for extreme weather?

Ross Andersen writes: In late June 2021, the ghost of summertime future visited the Pacific Northwest. For three days, a heat dome hovered over Multnomah County, Oregon, broiling Portland’s drizzly landscape of evergreens and ferns with temperatures of 116 degrees Fahrenheit—much hotter than any resident, even the centenarians, had ever experienced there. Along the rocky ocean shore, sea stars and clams cooked alive in the tide pools. The heat buckled highway lanes and melted the cables that route power to…

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MIRI endorses Bernie Sanders’ Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act of 2026

MIRI endorses Bernie Sanders’ Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act of 2026

Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) states: MIRI has been warning about the extinction threat from superintelligent AI for over two decades. Only recently has this danger become known in the policy world, and the proposed policies for dealing with the threat have to date been piecemeal and insufficient. The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act of 2026 is the first piece of legislation we’ve seen that stands a chance at stopping this threat. The Act is excellent but not perfect, and we…

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Russia‑Ukraine war is accelerating the dangerous race toward fully autonomous drones

Russia‑Ukraine war is accelerating the dangerous race toward fully autonomous drones

By Amy McAuliffe, University of Notre Dame A battlefield dominated by fully autonomous drones capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention sounds like a dystopian sci-fi plot. And while that scenario has not yet arrived, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has moved modern warfare a notch down that road. In recent years, both nations have deployed semi-autonomous drones in combat and are rapidly racing toward fully autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles. Given these developments and the pace of…

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How Stephen Miller turned a refugee bureau into a $410 million deportation operation

How Stephen Miller turned a refugee bureau into a $410 million deportation operation

The Washington Post reports: The U.S. diplomat arrived in West Africa in mid-June with little fanfare, hopscotching along the Atlantic coastline for scheduled visits with senior government officials in the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Togo and Gabon, whose president greeted him inside an opulent seaside palace. The American, a career State Department official named Christian Ehrhardt, was an unlikely diplomatic VIP. For nearly two decades, he served as an officer in the agency’s security branch, focusing on embassy protection,…

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‘NAZA’: Exposing Israel’s killing machine in Gaza

‘NAZA’: Exposing Israel’s killing machine in Gaza

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor write: Over the past three years, we conducted night-time interviews on the rooftops of Tel Aviv with 24 Israeli soldiers who played an active role in Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. Most of them were intelligence officers, working behind screens and participating remotely in the mass killing of Palestinians. Their testimonies form the basis of “NAZA,” a new documentary we directed — produced by The Guardian and James Wilson and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer —…

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Crypto industry weighs the risks of alienating Democratic lawmakers

Crypto industry weighs the risks of alienating Democratic lawmakers

Politico reports: The cryptocurrency industry is at a political crossroads. Reeling from the demise of its longtime top legislative priority, crypto companies must now decide how scorched-earth to go against Senate Democrats, who last week voted unanimously against the so-called Clarity Act, a sweeping bill that would create a bespoke new regulatory framework for digital assets. A crypto-backed PAC network’s move this week provides a hint of what may be to come. The group, known as Fairshake, announced it would…

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