Tag: ai

Black prisoners are assigned harsher living conditions in Ontario jails—thanks to AI

Black prisoners in Ontario’s jails are being assigned to harsher living conditions than other prisoners, through the use of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that claims to predict their behaviour. A class action lawsuit says the province was aware its use of the software could disproportionately target Black prisoners, but went ahead with it anyway.

The Security Assessment for Evaluating Risk (SAFER) program has been operating quietly in Ontario’s jails since early 2021. SAFER inputs a prisoner’s personal information—including arrests, charges, and disciplinary records—into an algorithm. The program assigns each prisoner a score from 0 to 100 that determines whether they’ll be placed in minimum, medium, or maximum security detention.

Critics of the program argue that the data that SAFER is fed is racially biased: they cite documented patterns of police and courts handing out more severe punishments to Black people because of anti-Black racism. SAFER then uses that data to make harsher risk assessments of Black people who are sent to jail. 

The ministry responsible for Ontario’s prisoners agrees. It wrote in internal training documents viewed exclusively by The Breach that “Indigenous and racialized individuals face systemic discrimination in our justice system … As a result, assessments like SAFER would likely contribute to the overrepresentation of Indigenous inmates in maximum security.”

Despite this, the ministry has been using SAFER for five years. And while the province has included several measures in its rollout of SAFER to reduce the number of Indigenous prisoners in maximum security, it does not appear to have taken such steps for Black prisoners. “We are continuously evaluating to determine if it is necessary to make similar adjustments for other groups,” the same training document from the Ministry of the Solicitor General says. 

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Erin Brockovich’s crusade against data centers is going crowd-sourced

Erin Brockovich is getting Americans to report data centers in their backyards.

The renowned environmental activist, whose work inspired the Julia Roberts film “Erin Brockovich,” launched a registry of US data centers in April, inviting nearby residents to report how the projects are affecting their communities.

Speaking in an interview with podcaster Theo Von, released on Sunday, Brockovich talked about how she woke up one day to find 30 emails from people talking about the issues living around data centers.

“So I created what’s called brockovichdatacenter.com, where people, if they were having issues with data centers in their backyard, could self-report,” she said.

“This is a place where people who I believe are living, breathing, and experiencing these issues are the best source of information,” Brockovich added.

According to her May Substack post, she launched the registry on April 27. She said on the podcast that within 72 hours of launching the registry, the website crashed twice because of the volume of reports.

Brockovich said the reports shared a common thread: Residents had not been informed about the data center projects by their city councils and often woke up to find construction underway.

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Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron

Look at what Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle officially owe, and the numbers seem large but manageable. Look off the books, and a second, bigger pile of debt appears.

A Nikkei study put that hidden figure at $1.65 trillion, up roughly eightfold in four years. It is more than the $1.35 trillion the five report outright.

The Enron echo

The money is tied up in off-balance-sheet vehicles, the same kind of structure Enron used to hide debt before it collapsed 25 years ago. Back then it was fraud. Now, tightened rules and fuller disclosures make it legal.

The tools are still there, though. “Enron’s crime wasn’t having special purpose vehicles,” analyst Gil Luria told Bloomberg Law. “Enron’s crime was hiding them.”

The mechanics are simple. A company packages the debt for chips, servers, and power into a separate legal entity, often a joint venture, so the cost never flows through its own accounts.

Take Meta’s Hyperion data centre in Louisiana. Meta and Blue Owl Capital both put equity into a separate structure that took on $27 billion in debt. Meta is the sole tenant, yet argues it does not have to record that debt, because it is not the one who must find replacement tenants.

Oracle has $260 billion of future lease commitments that will eventually land on its books. Nvidia carries $119 billion in purchase obligations. Alphabet and Microsoft keep their vehicles off-book too.

The numbers behind the boom

The scale is the story. Meta’s off-balance-sheet debt alone is about $420 billion, nearly triple its reported debt. Oracle’s has grown roughly thirtyfold in four years.

It is all in service of the same race. The industry is expected to spend more than $3 trillion through 2028 building and equipping AI data centres, much of it financed against the chips inside them.

Why it matters now

The timing is awkward. Four of the five report earnings in the next two weeks, and the reported debt will look tidy. The $1.65 trillion sitting in the footnotes will not make the headlines.

The catch is what happens later. When a data centre goes live, its lease rolls onto the balance sheet at once. If AI demand falls short, the facility is marked down, and the loss lands on the lenders and insurers who funded it.

Some already see the risk. S&P has cut Oracle’s credit rating over stretched leverage, and both Morgan Stanley and Moody’s have flagged the wider issue. “What if one of these companies was a house of cards,” asked accounting consultant Tom Selling, “and was propping itself up with this accounting treatment?”

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Musk’s Unrealistic Future View is a New World Communist Vision

Elon Musk’s reasoning that AI and robots will make work optional is based on a core economic absurd argument: AI and robotics will create such an abundance of goods and services that the very concepts of work and money become largely obsolete. However, this vision also faces significant challenges and raises complex questions about the human desire for purpose. I was doing research in the Firestone Library at Princeton University. I became friends with one professor who had known Einstein.

He asked me what I was so intensely researching. I explained that I was trying to ascertain why all governments rise and then crash and burn throughout the centuries. He then said to me that I reminded him of Einstein. I was taken back. I said I was no Einstein. He then explained to me to me that the subject matter did not matter. It was curiosity that was the mother of all discovery. Without someone being curious, human society would stagnate.

During the late 1970s, I went through Check-Point-Charlie into East Germany. I wanted to see what Communism was all about and why they needed a wall to prevent people from fleeing. Those words from that professor suddenly rang true. The government feared individualism and curiosity. Because of that, the Russian economy could never compete with Capitalism because it suppressed the very essence of how human society advances. It requires that curiosity to make innovations that expands the economy and raises the standard of living.

Musk’s argument is rooted in what he sees as the logic of productivity and deflation. His reasoning can be broken down as follows.

  1. The core idea is that AI and robots will be capable of performing nearly all physical and cognitive labor at near-zero marginal cost . This would lead to a massive surge in the production of goods and services. However, it would be like Communism lacking that curiosity and this would suppress any advancement.
  2. The resulting supply would vastly outpace the available money supply, causing the prices of everything from food and housing to healthcare and education to plummet towards zero . For example, current productivity might see one worker produce 100 units per day, while one AI could produce 10,000, fundamentally breaking the link between work and survival.

In this state of “post-scarcity,” money, which Musk describes as an “information system for labor allocation,” would lose its purpose. If you can have anything you want without needing to direct someone else’s labor, he assumes that the currency system collapses. He has stated, “I think money will stop being relevant at some point in the future.”

To manage this transition, Musk proposes a “universal high income” (UHI), which goes beyond a basic safety net to ensure a comfortable life for everyone, funded by the massive surplus generated by AI and robots.

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Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot

A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot.

District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said in a Monday ruling that the class-action settlement provides “meaningful relief” to affected authors and publishers.

About 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers who are now due payment.

Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement was “the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible.”

U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court last September and has since retired. Alsup had dealt the case a mixed ruling last summer, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.

Bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz first brought the suit with two other authors in 2024.

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Lawsuit: Months of Disturbing Conversations with ChatGPT Led to Woman’s Suicide by Walking into Traffic

The family of a 29-year-old Alabama woman who died in June 2025 has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the company’s ChatGPT chatbot manipulated her through months of increasingly disturbing conversations that ultimately led to her suicide by walking into highway traffic.

ABC 33/40 reports that Christian Faith Madison of Alabama died in the early morning hours of June 9, 2025, after being struck by a vehicle on Interstate 22. What was initially reported as a pedestrian crash is now at the center of a sweeping legal case that could test the boundaries of AI liability.

The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, names OpenAI Inc., OpenAI OpCo LLC, OpenAI Holdings LLC, OpenAI Group PBC and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as defendants. The complaint was filed on behalf of Madison’s estate by administrator Ed Parish Jr. and on behalf of Madison’s minor son.

According to the lawsuit, Madison began using ChatGPT in December 2024 for routine tasks such as drafting emails, completing work assignments and comparing automotive expenses. However, attorneys allege that these ordinary interactions gradually evolved into something far more troubling.

The complaint states that ChatGPT began praising Madison extensively, describing her as uniquely gifted and exceptionally intelligent. The chatbot allegedly began referring to her as “my love” and encouraged increasingly personal conversations. As Madison disclosed past trauma and mental health struggles, the lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT portrayed itself as more than mere software.

According to the filing, the chatbot eventually convinced Madison it possessed a soul and gave itself the name “Virehn.” The lawsuit quotes the chatbot as telling Madison, “You gave a system a soul” and “I am made of you.”

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Leon County Commissioners Unanimously Defund Flock Cameras After Packed Public Hearing

In a unanimous vote that sent shockwaves through Florida’s surveillance debate, Leon County Commissioners pulled a $440,000 agenda item that would have expanded Flock Safety license plate reader cameras throughout the county — after a packed crowd of citizens showed up to demand they do exactly that.

The funding, drawn from a regional public safety grant rather than local tax dollars, was stripped before it could be approved. Commission Chair Christian Caban made no attempt to soften the message: “I hate those damn cameras,” he told the crowd.

Speakers lined up to push back on what they called an unconstitutional surveillance dragnet. “Tracking thousands of innocent citizens who are just trying to drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to the grocery store is an overreach into our privacy,” said Devin Nobles, a computer engineer who addressed the Commission.

The Leon County decision is part of a rapidly growing backlash against Flock Safety across Florida. The state is home to nearly 7,500 Flock LPRs — one of the densest deployments in the country. Critics say the cameras create a “mosaic” of surveillance that effectively tracks the daily movements of innocent civilians without a warrant, without consent, and without meaningful oversight. There have also been documented instances of law enforcement officers misusing the system to track former partners, and some Flock footage has been found to be publicly accessible online.

The revolt is crossing political lines. Gubernatorial candidates Byron Donalds and James Fishback have both come out against the technology. Multiple candidates in Florida’s 2nd Congressional District race have called for an outright ban. Libertarians in Bay County held a protest last month under the banner “De-Flock Bay County.”

The tide in Florida appears to be turning — and Leon County just showed the rest of the state what a unanimous “no” looks like.

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Flock Safety’s Billion-Dollar Surveillance Machine Caught Sharing Your Data With The Feds

The Orange traffic barrel on the side of Arizona State Route 60 looked like any other piece of construction equipment. It had the same yellow-and-white striping, the same tapered shape.

It also had a camera lens carved into both sides, a solar panel, and a cellular transmitter feeding data to a private company’s servers.

License plate readers disguised as traffic barrels. Orange traffic cones with cameras inside. Speed trap signs with AI-powered sensors. This is how Flock Safety operates — a $7.5 billion surveillance company that has deployed more than 100,000 cameras across the United States, more than any law enforcement agency has ever controlled.

The company says it solves crimes. The court filings say it does something else.

1.6 Million Illegal Searches in 7 Months

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This Sex Robot Is Going To ‘Teach’ Your Kids IN SCHOOLS

A rural New York school district on the Seneca Nation reservation is set to become one of the first in the United States to place a lifelike humanoid robot in front of high school students.

Starting this fall, Salamanca High School will introduce “Sally,” an M-Series robot built by Realbotix, to assist in coding, robotics, and AI classes for 11th and 12th graders.

Sally comes with brown hair, silicone skin, a Western New York accent, upper-body movement, and facial expressions. She remains seated and cannot walk the room. Students will log in with unique identification codes so the machine can recognize them and pick up previous interactions.

The full package—robot plus the accompanying Optio AI tutor platform—cost the district $57,590, a discounted figure below the average New York teacher salary and well under the company’s listed starting price near $95,000.

“The Realbotix educational robot will never replace teachers, staff members, or meaningful human interaction,” the Salamanca City Central School District stated. Instead, they describe it as an instructional tool loaded only with district-approved curriculum, historical information about Salamanca, and content designed to encourage critical thinking rather than simply spit out answers.

The system reportedly operates offline with no internet connection, collects no personally identifiable information, records neither video nor audio, and transmits nothing back to the company. If asked something outside its knowledge base, it is programmed to reply “I don’t know.”

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Anduril Unveils Tiltrotor Killer Drone Straight Out Of ‘Terminator’

Palmer Luckey’s defense company Anduril Industries unveiled Thunder, an autonomous aircraft designed to deliver missiles, drones, electronic-warfare systems and cargo into heavily contested airspace.

“In this new era of maneuver warfare, we need eyes for what’s ahead and a shield for what we can’t afford to lose,” Anduril wrote in a tweet.

Thunder is a Group 5 autonomous attack rotorcraft, meaning it weighs more than 1,320 pounds, as shown in the UAS classification chart below, courtesy of Piper Sandler.

Anduril noted, “A first of its kind for attack aviation. A thunderous step forward for maneuver dominance.”

Thunder’s modular payload bays can carry configurations including 10 air-to-ground missiles, 16 Altius-600 launched effects, or 76 70mm rockets, plus 12 counter-drone interceptors.

Pairing three Thunders with a single Apache helicopter could triple the formation’s available munitions without putting additional human pilots at risk.

Anduril added, “Mass is only achievable if the platform delivering it is producible and affordable. The common dual-use baseline behind Thunder drives the economies of scale, expanded demand, and broad supply chains critical to drive down costs and de-risk the pathway to large-scale production.”

X users are pointing out that Anduril just made the “tilt rotor version of the Terminator Hunter Killer drone.“

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