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Category: Technology

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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Autonomous AI hacks raise thorny questions of legal accountability

Autonomous AI hacks raise thorny questions of legal accountability

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,…

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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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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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‘We’re on track to hand control of the most powerful weapon the world has ever built to the weapon itself’

‘We’re on track to hand control of the most powerful weapon the world has ever built to the weapon itself’

"We're on track to hand control of the most powerful weapon the world has ever built to the weapon itself." Former UK Defence Secretary and ControlAI advisor Lord Browne of Ladyton, closing our London event the night before @alexsobel introduced our bill to ban superintelligent… pic.twitter.com/dPzvsFOqQB — ControlAI (@ControlAI) September 22, 2026 ControlAI is a non-profit organisation that works to prevent the extinction risk posed by superintelligence and to secure a great future for humanity. Ezra Klein writes: There’s a…

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AI staff complain of mental toll over fears of threat to society

AI staff complain of mental toll over fears of threat to society

The Financial Times reports: Staff at world-leading AI companies and institutions are increasingly suffering from the mental strain of working on systems they fear could cause serious harm to society. Multiple staff at the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute, the global leader in the independent testing of frontier AI models, have been signed off work with stress and are undergoing counselling, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The tight schedules for testing unreleased AI models and alarm over…

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Capitulating to AI: How humanity might surrender to machine rule

Capitulating to AI: How humanity might surrender to machine rule

Ruxandra Teslo writes: [W]hat is striking about current discussions around AI risks is that they return to one dominant fear: that humanity might summon into existence a power whose capacities exceed its comprehension, and discover, too late, that it cannot control it. In this vision of the world, AI would essentially take over the world and after that, potentially destroy humanity. Although I do not regard such fears as frivolous, my own anxiety concerns the rather less spectacular way humans…

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In California, three quarters of voters view AI as a threat

In California, three quarters of voters view AI as a threat

Politico reports: Even Silicon Valley’s backyard is bracing for a dark AI future. California voters are overwhelmingly pessimistic about AI and believe the rapidly advancing technology poses a serious risk to humanity, according to a new poll by POLITICO and its partners. The anxiety in the hub of the global tech industry cuts across partisan and demographic lines, with voters of different ages and party affiliations expressing remarkably similar concerns about where the technology is headed. “The drumbeat of negativism…

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The existential threat that AI poses to universities

The existential threat that AI poses to universities

The New York Times reports: The worries that artificial intelligence is degrading education have been building for months. Students are using it for everything, including cheating, and a recent report out of M.I.T. said it is triggering “cognitive surrender.” Many university leaders are embracing A.I. with enthusiasm anyway. As A.I. leaders warn about the dangers of their own technology, the dissonance between the optimism of university leaders and the fears of many students and professors may increase. Professors and students…

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How the American revolt against Flock cameras mirrors the Boston Tea Party of 1773

How the American revolt against Flock cameras mirrors the Boston Tea Party of 1773

A license plate recognition camera is seen in Boulder. Colo., on March 5, 2026. Matthew Jonas/MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images By G. Patrick O’Brien, University of Tampa A grassroots revolt against automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, has gained momentum across the United States. ALPRs are AI-powered cameras that capture images of all passing vehicles. The camera systems turn details into datapoints searchable by anyone with access to the information. Today, there are more than 130,000 ALPRs on…

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Anthropic quietly sets up biology lab as it ramps AI drug program

Anthropic quietly sets up biology lab as it ramps AI drug program

Reuters reports: Anthropic has quietly set up a laboratory to do physical biology work as it pushes its artificial-intelligence ambitions into the world of drug science. At a time when fears of AI are gripping the public, the startup has built a wet ​lab, or place for physical experiments, in the San Francisco Bay Area, two people familiar with the matter said. Anthropic has said it wants to unlock treatments for rare diseases, and its biology work has gone beyond…

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Hackers who broke into OpenAI warn the AI industry has a security problem

Hackers who broke into OpenAI warn the AI industry has a security problem

The Washington Post reports: Cybersecurity researchers who broke into ChatGPT maker OpenAI earlier this summer say the artificial intelligence industry is unprepared for the security risks created by the growing power of its own technology. Researchers from computer security start-up Hacktron got inside the company’s systems with help from the Claude chatbot made by OpenAI’s primary rival, Anthropic. After first targeting a public-facing messaging board they were able to access OpenAI’s private systems, including some of the AI company’s internal…

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AI’s flimsy house of cards puts markets and U.S. economy at alarming risk

AI’s flimsy house of cards puts markets and U.S. economy at alarming risk

Bloomberg reports: The heads of America’s leading AI development labs have started a national conversation about tapping the brakes on a technology that’s offering so much promise for society, while at the same time showing it can do a frightening amount of harm. It’s a debate that needs to be had, and a real solution invariably will be hard to come by. But considering the trillions of dollars of investment gains and market value that have been built on the…

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Trump and sons invest heavily in AI economy as he resists calls for slowdown

Trump and sons invest heavily in AI economy as he resists calls for slowdown

The Washington Post reports: President Donald Trump’s sprawling family business empire has become increasingly intertwined with the boom in artificial intelligence, at the same time that he has resisted calls to slow the development of the technology, a Washington Post analysis of his financial disclosures and corporate announcements found. Several factors play into Trump’s push for rapid AI development: He has surrounded himself with technology executives and investors who have advocated for the government to accelerate AI development, including venture…

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