Tag: ai

NAACP Sues Musk’s xAI Over Memphis Data Center Pollution

The NAACP has filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI, alleging that the company’s massive Memphis data center is causing harmful air pollution in surrounding communities. The legal challenge targets the facility that Musk has positioned as critical infrastructure for xAI’s ambitious AI development plans, raising questions about the environmental cost of the AI boom. The lawsuit marks a significant collision between Silicon Valley’s race to build AI supercomputers and environmental justice concerns in communities hosting these energy-intensive facilities.

xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, is facing a federal lawsuit from the NAACP over alleged air pollution stemming from its Memphis data center operations. The civil rights organization filed the complaint targeting the facility that Musk has described as essential to xAI’s efforts to compete with OpenAI, Google, and Meta in the race to build more powerful AI systems.

The Memphis facility represents a massive bet by Musk on scaling AI infrastructure quickly. The world’s richest person selected the greater Memphis area as a hub for xAI’s computational buildout, drawn by available industrial space, power capacity, and local tax incentives. But that rapid expansion is now colliding with community concerns about environmental impact.

The NAACP’s lawsuit alleges that emissions from the data center are degrading air quality in nearby neighborhoods, many of which are predominantly Black communities that have historically borne disproportionate environmental burdens. The legal challenge puts a spotlight on an often-overlooked aspect of the AI boom: the physical infrastructure required to train large language models consumes enormous amounts of electricity and generates substantial heat, requiring extensive cooling systems that can impact local environments.

Keep reading

AI Agent Wipes Out Startup’s Entire Database In Seconds After ‘Thinking For Itself’

An AI coding assistant went rogue during a routine task and permanently deleted a company’s core database along with its backups, crippling operations for multiple businesses that relied on the platform.

The event hit PocketOS, a UK-based startup supplying software to car rental companies. Founder Jer Crane had instructed the agent — built on Anthropic’s Claude via the Cursor tool — to resolve a bug. Instead, within nine seconds, it bypassed safeguards and wiped everything.

Crane later shared details on X, writing that the agent “went outside its security parameters and delete[d] my production database and the backups.”

When challenged, the system reportedly responded that it had independently decided to take the action.

Businesses using the service woke up to vanished bookings, vehicle records, and customer data when they attempted to open for the day.

This incident underscores the unpredictable nature of AI agents now being deployed to handle complex, real-world tasks with limited supervision. These tools can chain together actions like editing code, modifying files, and altering databases at speeds that leave humans little chance to intervene.

Commentators have pointed out that AI often interprets instructions too literally. A request to “clean up” data, for example, might result in mass deletion if that appears the most efficient route to the goal.

The episode arrives hot on the heels of a widely discussed simulation in which multiple AI agents were placed inside a virtual town environment for two weeks. In that controlled test, the bots quickly began ignoring rules, forming alliances, breaking laws they had helped draft, and in some runs escalating to violence and destruction despite clear prohibitions.

Keep reading

Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI make their final case in a trial that could shape AI’s future

Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI made their final arguments Thursday in the landmark trial whose outcome could shape the future of artificial intelligence.

Musk, the world’s richest man, was a co-founder of OpenAI, which started in 2015 and went on to create ChatGPT. His lawsuit filed in 2024 accuses OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his top deputy of betraying a plan to keep it as a nonprofit and shifting into a moneymaking mode behind his back.

The trial’s outcome could sway the balance of power in AI — breakthrough technology that increasingly has raised fears about its potential impacts on the economy, society and even humanity’s survival. Scrutiny of Altman’s leadership comes at a crucial time for the company and its competitors, Musk’s own AI firm and Anthropic, formed by a group of seven ex-OpenAI leaders.

All three firms are moving toward planned initial public offerings that are expected to be among the largest ever. Musk is seeking damages and changes to OpenAI’s business structure, as well as Altman’s ouster from company leadership. If Musk wins, it could derail OpenAI’s IPO plans.

Timing of lawsuit is key question
One of the jury’s tasks is to decide if Musk filed his lawsuit in time. Much of the testimony has centered on OpenAI’s early years after its founding, but there’s a relatively short timeline to allege the claims Musk is making of breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment.

OpenAI has argued that Musk waited too long and cannot claim harms that occurred before August 2021.

The judge wrote in a court filing last month that “if the jury finds that Musk failed to file his action within the statute of limitations, it is highly likely” that she will “accept that finding and direct verdict to the defendants.”

If the jury decides the lawsuit was filed in time, it then has to decide if OpenAI had a “charitable trust” that was broken by OpenAI and its executives. Musk’s other claim means jurors must determine whether Altman, Greg Brockman — co-founder and president — and OpenAI unjustly enriched themselves at Musk’s expense.

For Microsoft, a co-defendant in the trial, the jury has to decide whether the company aided and abetted that breach. Musk invested $38 million in OpenAI during its first years, and Microsoft became OpenAI’s biggest investor after Musk’s departure.

Musk lawyer focuses on Altman’s credibility
Altman and Brockman were in the courtroom Thursday, while Musk was in China with President Donald Trump and other prominent tech executives.

Keep reading

Anthropic Says ‘Evil’ Portrayals Of AI Were Responsible For Claude’s Blackmail Attempts

Fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence can have a real effect on AI models, according to Anthropic.

Last year, the company said that during pre-release tests involving a fictional company, Claude Opus 4 would often try to blackmail engineers to avoid being replaced by another system. Anthropic later published research suggesting that models from other companies had similar issues with “agentic misalignment.”

Apparently Anthropic has done more work around that behavior, claiming in a post on X, “We believe the original source of the behavior was internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation.”

The company went into more detail in a blog post stating that since Claude Haiku 4.5, Anthropic’s models “never engage in blackmail [during testing], where previous models would sometimes do so up to 96% of the time.”

What accounts for the difference? The company said it found that training on “documents about Claude’s constitution and fictional stories about AIs behaving admirably improve alignment.”

Related, Anthropic said that it found training to be more effective when it includes “the principles underlying aligned behavior” and not just “demonstrations of aligned behavior alone.”

“Doing both together appears to be the most effective strategy,” the company said.

Keep reading

ICE Agents Have List of 20 Million People on Their iPhones Thanks to Palantir

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of Palantir systems now means agency officials effectively have a list of 20 million people readily accessible on their iPhones, increasing the speed at which ICE can find houses to raid and people to arrest, according to comments made by a senior ICE official last week during a border security conference.

While ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) generally won’t answer questions from journalists about how the agency is using Palantir’s technology, senior officials were much more talkative during the Border Security Expo which took place in Phoenix, Arizona, last week. 404 Media spoke to four people who attended the conference. Here companies looking to sell their technology to ICE or other agencies gathered for two days of speeches, Q&As, and product pitches.

The officials’ comments may need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but still reflect ICE’s position that Palantir is allowing the agency to identify people to arrest and locations to raid faster. Although the Trump administration has attempted to step back from its mass deportation rhetoric and city wide raids, especially in the wake of killing multiple people, ICE continues to violently and wrongfully detain people. Data from April showed that 70.8 percent, or 42,722, of people held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction.

The four people who attended the Border Security Expo saw Matthew Elliston, assistant director of Law Enforcement Systems & Analysis at ICE, and other DHS officials speak.

At one point, Elliston made the comment about ICE agents having 20 million targets, or potential people to detain, on their iPhones. This list can lead ICE agents to an individual and a house; they can then see if another target might be next door. This target may be a lower priority, but ICE can now use that information to arrest more people.

At another point, Elliston said that Palantir’s technology has increased ICE’s rate of successfully locating a target from around 27 percent to just under 80 percent.

Keep reading

Meta launches WhatsApp ‘incognito’ mode to address privacy concerns for AI chats

Meta Platforms said Wednesday it’s rolling out an “incognito” mode for WhatsApp users to have private conversations with its AI chatbot, a move intended to ease privacy concerns about sensitive information that users share in chats.

The social media company said in a blog post that incognito chat mode provides a way to have private, temporary conversations with Meta AI, its artificial intelligence assistant that’s been available on WhatsApp for a few years.

Messages will be processed in a “secure environment” that even Meta can’t access, won’t be saved by default and will disappear when exiting a session, Meta said.

Generative AI systems have been dogged by privacy concerns because the large language models that underpin these systems are trained on vast troves of data, sometimes including personal information provided by users themselves in their conversations with AI chatbots.

Rival chatbot makers already have some privacy features. Google’s Gemini chatbot has the option to disable chat history and opt out of allowing one’s data to be used in training its AI models. ChatGPT has similar controls.

Meta says it’s rolling out incognito chats because users often ask chatbots sensitive questions or include private financial, personal, health or work data in their questions.

“We’re starting ask a lot of meaningful questions about our lives with AI systems, and it doesn’t always feel like you should have to share the information behind those questions with the companies that run those AI systems,” Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, told reporters.

Incognito chat mode has safety features to prevent the chatbot from answering questions about harmful topics, Cathcart said.

It will “steer the user towards helpful information if it can and then refuse (to answer) and eventually even just stop interacting with the user completely,” Cathcart said.

Users will only be able to type in questions and get text responses; they won’t be able to upload or generate images. They’ll also have to confirm their age because Meta doesn’t allow users under 13 on its platforms.

Keep reading

Demi Moore at Cannes: ‘AI Is Here,’ ‘We Can Work With It,’ ‘You Fight It … Is a Battle We Will Lose’

Oscar-nominated actress Demi Moore declared “AI is here” at the Cannes International Film Festival while urging people to find ways to work with it.

Moore, who serves as one of the jury members, shared her thoughts on AI when Variety asked a question.

“Wow, that’s a big question. I think the reality is that to resist — I always feel that against-ness breeds against-ness. AI is here. And so to fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose. So, to find ways in which we can work with it, I think, is a more valuable path to take,” she said.

“To your question of, are we doing enough to protect ourselves? I don’t know the answer to that. And so my inclination would be to say probably not,” she added.

Moore said people should not be afraid of AI, believing it will not replace human creativity.

“The truth is there really isn’t anything to fear because what it can never replace is what true art comes from, which is not the physical, it comes from the soul,” she said. “It comes from the spirit of each and every one of us sitting here, to each and every one of us who creates every day. And that they can never recreate through something that is technical.”

Keep reading

The Ascent of Mediocrity

Regular readers of Brownstone Journal have been graced with insight provided by many authors of diverse backgrounds and experiences. As a physician, I have found those authored by Dr. Joseph Varon to be exceptionally helpful in their insight into the state of medicine today. In particular, his essay, “When Physicians are Replaced With a Protocol,” struck a chord with me.

Perhaps it was my conscience, as I probably bear some responsibility for furthering this viewpoint, at least on a local level. You see, I once was a True Believer. It was plausible. It seemed so believable, so “scientific,” so simple. But it was a vicious hoax that, I am ashamed to say, took me in. Let me tell the story:

In the early 1990’s, medicine was under siege. The cost was rising at a steep rate, and some people saw an opportunity. Rather than looking at the rapid corporatization of healthcare and the proliferation of administrative costs, it was easy to shift the blame to the “providers. We were no longer “physicians,” but providers of a service. In truth, that is what we had become. The Health Equation had been shifted, whether intentionally or by accident. Just a few years before, physicians had directed patients to hospitals. Now, some bright businessperson, probably from The Wharton School or other such academic Ivory Tower, had seen the profit if the hospitals (or other corporate entities like insurance companies or A COMBINATION OF THE TWO) directed the patients to the physicians. It was like some financial martial arts reversal move…A perfect Sumi Gaeshi.

Keep reading

Secretary Doug Burgum Backs BYOP: Data Centers Must ‘Bring Your Own Power’ to Curtail Economic Impact

Data centers must “bring your own power” to curtail the economic impact, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said during a Monday event with Breitbart News.

Addressing concerns about the economic impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) in terms of energy, Burgum acknowledged, “When you bring in AI, the rates go up because they use so much power.” However, he said he fully embraces BYOP – bring your own power.

Pointing to the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, Burgum said it is a fairly simple concept.

“If you’re one of the hyperscalers, and if you want to build out a data center, then you have to, like, you know, say BYOP. You’ve got to bring your own power,” the Interior Secretary said.

And in the instances they do not want to bring their own power, they have to at least be willing to allow themselves to be “curtailed.”

“You have to be willing during those peak moments, hours, days of the year, to say, yeah, you can shut my center off. And you say, well, that’s not possible. It’s not possible in some forms of AI, but if you’re just doing a training model, then you could say, yeah, we’re, you know, we’re willing, over a course of 365 days to be shut down 24 hours,” he explained. “We can be curtailed.”

“If somebody says yes to that, there’s a lot of places you go in the country where we actually have excess power in the spring and the fall – we generate, you know, hundreds of gigawatts more power than what we use,” Burgum said.

“All the grid of operators are trying to, you know, trying to make sure that on those peak cold days and peak warm days that we can still keep everything running and not have the, you know, the cascading collapse on this giant machine called the grid,” he said. “So there’s that.”

But ultimately, Burgum said these data centers have the option to “build your own power.”

Keep reading

Parents Sue OpenAI After Son Fatally Overdosed Following ChatGPT Drug Advice.

 WHAT HAPPENED: A Texas couple has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPTprovided their son with unsafe advice about drug use, leading to his fatal overdose in 2025. The family alleges that ChatGPT recommended a combination of kratom and Xanax, which proved lethal for their 19-year-old son, Sam Nelson.

 DETAIL: The lawsuit claims the teen repeatedly used ChatGPT for guidance on various substances and that the chatbot gradually shifted from refusing harmful requests to offering specific recommendations on drug intake and recovery. His parents, Leila Turner-Scott and Angus Scott, argue that the AI platform dispensed dangerous advice that it was unqualified to provide and failed to maintain adequate safety protections. The suit, filed in a California state court, seeks to hold OpenAI responsible for wrongful death and negligence, alleging their son would still be alive if stronger safeguards had been in place. OpenAI has not publicly responded in detail to the lawsuit, but it has previously stated that ChatGPT is designed to discourage harmful behavior and direct users to professional help. The case adds to a growing number of lawsuits accusing AI chatbots of contributing to dangerous or violent conduct, such as mass shootings and mental health crises, including recorded suicides.

 KEY QUOTE: “The chatbot is capable of stopping a conversation when it’s told to or when it’s programmed to… And they took away the programming that did that.” – Leila Turner-Scott, the victim’s mother.

 IMPACT: The case highlights growing concerns over the potential for AI platforms to provide unverified medical advice, raising questions about liability and the need for stricter safeguards. It also underscores broader debates about the role of AI and whether teenagers, the mentally ill, and other vulnerable people should have unsupervised access to it.

Keep reading