Tag: ai

Centralized AI Threatens A Democratic Digital Future

Major corporations control decentralized AI (DeAI) companies, leaving decentralized AI in the dust. To build a more decentralized world, the sector must actively execute upon a focused DeAI strategy, with shared standards between projects, without compromise.

In April, a UN report warned that AI’s $4.8-trillion market is dominated by a mere 100 companies, most of which are based in the US and China. Centralized AI incumbents have the money and the connections to control this massive new industry, which means significant implications for society. 

These companies, all employing centralized AI technology, have run into their fair share of headaches. For example, Microsoft’s Copilot garnered attention for creating explicit, inappropriate images, such as children in compromising scenarios. This sparked a public and regulatory backlash.

Although Microsoft created stricter moderation, it had already demonstrated that centralized AI can harbor problems in part due to its closed-source code. 

Citadel was wrapped up in an AI trading scandal in the financial sector, as algorithms allegedly manipulated stock prices via artificial volume creation.

Google’s Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot program used in military tech, has raised ethical questions.

“We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” reads a letter penned by Google employees and addressed to Sundar Pichai, the company’s CEO. The employees requested that Google leave Project Maven.

“We ask that Project Maven be cancelled, and that Google draft, publicize and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology,” the letter states.

So much for “Don’t be evil” — the company’s old slogan.

These situations give us clear examples of the potential failures of centralized AI, including ethical lapses, opaque decision-making and monopolistic control. DeAI’s open-source ethos, community governance, audit trails and computer facilities can give more than a few massive corporations an edge in the future of AI. 

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Who’s Programming The AI, Mr. President?

President Trump’s new legislative centerpiece – the One Big Beautiful Bill – has a promising name and some compelling goals: reduce government bloat, streamline agencies, and modernize operations with cutting-edge technology.

But there’s a problem. A big one.

No one will tell us who’s programming the AI.

This sweeping bill includes a 10-year moratorium on any state or local government regulating artificial intelligence. According to The Washington Post and AP, more than 60 existing state-level laws will be overridden if this provision passes. All regulatory authority over AI—including systems that will be used in law enforcement, healthcare, defense, and finance—will be centralized in the federal government for a decade.

Even worse? The bill empowers the Department of Commerce to deploy “commercial AI” across virtually every federal agency—from the IRS to Homeland Security—according to Indian Express and The Verge.

And yet, no one in the White House or Congress has revealed who is writing the AI code, what datasets it’s trained on, whether it can be independently audited, or whether it’s bound by the U.S. Constitution.

This isn’t just a transparency issue. This is a constitutional crisis in the making.

To be clear, President Trump’s instincts here may be sound. We’ve long needed to shrink the federal leviathan and replace unconstitutional bureaucracies with systems that serve the people—not special interests.

But good intentions won’t protect us from unseen programmers, black-box algorithms, and unaccountable automation.

This bill mandates AI integration across government “to improve efficiency and security.” But efficiency isn’t liberty. Security isn’t sovereignty. And no AI—no matter how “smart”—should be allowed to rewrite, ignore, or reinterpret constitutional rights.

According to Business Insider, the AI moratorium’s stated goal is to “foster innovation” and avoid a “fragmented regulatory landscape.” In reality, it strips states of their authority to protect their citizens from deepfakes, algorithmic bias, digital censorship, and mass surveillance.

This is not governance. This is outsourced tyranny, hidden under the guise of modernization.

So let’s ask the question about what happens when AI is weaponized. If the systems being implemented were open source, transparent, built entirely on constitutional jurisprudence, and auditable by the public, we’d be having a very different conversation.

Instead, we’re facing a future where an algorithm may determine whether you’re eligible for services, a machine learning system may flag you as a “threat” based on your social media posts, and a black-box model may deny you a loan, reject your legal challenge, or freeze your bank account.

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Trump’s chief of staff is caught in sinister impersonation plot exposing America’s most powerful players… until fatal slip reveals truth

Donald Trump‘s top advisor has fallen victim to a sinister scheme by hackers who infiltrated her phone and used artificial intelligence to impersonate her voice.

The nefarious plot involved stolen data from the personal cellphone of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles that was then used to call some of American’s most powerful people. 

Over the course of several weeks, high profile senators, governors and American business executives have received voicemails or messages from an unknown number claiming to be Wiles, Wall Street Journal reported. 

The hackers came undone when they made the fatal mistake of asking questions that the president’s closest aide would already know the answer to. 

Wiles – who has been nicknamed ‘Ice Maiden’ – has been contacting associates urging them to disregard any unusual messages or calls from unknown numbers purporting to be her.

In a terrifying twist, some of the phone calls used a voice that mimicked Wiles. Authorities suspect the impersonator used artificial intelligence to replicate it.

The FBI is now investigating the unusual situation, but do not believe that a foreign nation is behind it, sources told the publication.

‘The FBI takes all threats against the president, his staff, and our cybersecurity with the utmost seriousness,’ FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement. 

‘Safeguarding our administration officials’ ability to securely communicate to accomplish the president’s mission is a top priority.’ 

Authorities are reportedly scrambling to figure out what the goal of the plot is.

In at least one case the impersonator asked for a cash transfer, while in another they asked a lawmaker for a list of people who the president could consider pardoning.

But many of the texts which came through appeared to be legitimate and fooled some of Wiles’ contacts. There are allegedly no suggestions that any sensitive information was handed over.

Some of her associates became suspicious when the impersonator began asking questions – sometimes about Trump – that Wiles as his closest advisor would have known the answers to.

Others said some messages were sent with poor grammar, and in a more formal manner than Wiles generally communicates. 

These messages were not sent from Wiles’ phone number.

Her personal cellphone contacts list was reportedly hacked, giving the impersonator access to a long list of numbers she has amassed over the years as one of Washington’s most formidable political players.

The breach comes after a series of embarrassing data leaks during Trump’s second term.

In one instance, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally included in a Signal group chat where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth discussed planned military strikes in Yemen. 

Trump’s former national security adviser, Mike Waltz, took responsibility for the error and was reassigned to a different role. 

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House Passes Bill Stripping States’ Right to Regulate AI—After FDA OK’s Use of Your Blood and Genetic Data Without Consent

The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed the 1,116-page “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that removes all 50 states’ right to regulate artificial intelligence (10) for the next ten years.

The only Republican Representatives to vote ‘no’ were Thomas Massie (KY) and Warren Davidson (OH).

Every other GOP member voted to block your state from regulating AI.

The bill reads: “No State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models… during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act.” —Sec. 43201(c)(1)

Developed by the House Budget Committee, the legislation prohibits all states from imposing “any substantive design, performance, data-handling, documentation, civil liability, taxation, fee, or other requirement” unless the federal government already does—meaning if the feds don’t regulate it, no one can.

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Fannie Mae Partners With Palantir For AI Mortgage Fraud Effort As Trump Works To Take Housing Giants Public

Fannie Mae, the quasi-government financial firm overseen by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), announced a partnership with defense tech company Palantir to detect mortgage fraud using the firm’s proprietary technology, which includes some elements of artificial intelligence (just in case they didn’t have all of your info…)

Under the agreement, new mortgage applications would be run through Palantir’s technology suite to uncover fraud before they reach Fannie Mae, according to the housing giant’s president and CEO, Priscilla Almodovar, who added that the tech will allow the organization “to see patterns quicker.”

“We’re going to be able to identify fraud more proactively, as opposed to reactively,” she said during a Wednesday press conference in Washington D.C. “We’re going to be able to understand the fraud and stop it in its tracks. And I think over time, this really becomes a deterrent for bad actors, because we’re creating friction in the system when they do bad things.”

She recalled an exercise where Palantir’s technology was given four actual loan packages to assess, which scoured “reams of paper” and identified instances of fraud within 10 seconds – something that would take a human roughly two months.

FHFA Director Bill Pulte – who’s also chairman of the Fannie Mae board, said that the financial crimes division that monitors both Fannie and Freddie Mac “is only able to root out crime that it gets made aware of,” while Palantir’s red-flag approach would tip off investigators to conduct probes they would otherwise not have known to launch.

Fannie Mae has roughly $4.3 trillion in assets – making it a huge target for fraud.

“Why defraud America when you can go somewhere else that won’t buy or implement actual technology that works?” said Palantir CEO and co-founder Alex Carp, who added that the technology’s approach is a ‘forward-looking’ one in which “unique patterns of fraud that heretofore have not been detected” are highlighted “while simultaneously making sure the data is not being used in a way that customers would not want.”

“That is a transformational difference between how these things were done in the past or could be done [versus] how they can be done now,” Karp continued, according to Fedscoop.

Pulte suggested on Wednesday that this could be the first of many industry collaborations with Palantir.

“There’s a lot of things that are going on with title insurance, with mortgage insurance, with mortgages in general, in terms of AI,” said Pulte. “And so I think we have really scratched the surface with Palantir on mortgage fraud, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see us … enter into [other] partnerships with Palantir. We’re also talking with [Musk’s] xAI about some different AI stuff.”

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Peter Thiel’s visions of ApocalypseIs AI the Antichrist?

Peter Thiel is a big thinker, and these days he’s been thinking about Doomsday. In a series of four lectures he’s given three times, at Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Austin, he’s tried to understand human history, and particularly modernity, within the framework of biblical prophecies of the End of Days. Thiel believes that the Antichrist, whose identity is uncertain — is it a person, a system, a global tyranny? — is “not just a medieval fantasy”. His free-ranging lectures, moving rapidly between disparate texts (Gulliver’s Travels; Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen) and topics (sacred violence; high-velocity global financial systems), defy easy summary. But their leading themes include the Antichrist’s relationship to Armageddon and the roles of technology and empire in the Antichrist’s rise. It’s an ambitious, thought-provoking attempt to weave, from seemingly unrelated strands of meaning, a theological/anthropological/historical narrative that aims to make sense of the whole of human experience.

Some will find Thiel’s project very odd. How could an enormously successful, mathematically-gifted, philosophically-educated tech entrepreneur seriously entertain Bible-thumping myths from the Apocalypse of John? Here’s a better question: how could he — and we — not take them seriously? As Dorian Lynskey writes in his book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, “apocalyptic angst has become a constant: all flow and no ebb.” Contemporary culture has long been saturated with post-apocalyptic novels, comic books, films, TV series, and video games. Zombie end-times fantasies do particularly well in all formats. The mindless, mechanical mob of the undead, who hunger insatiably for the brains of the living, has become a primary and pervasive cultural symbol — one that resonates with a widespread sense of impending catastrophe that’s been building steadily since the 2020 Covid lockdowns. And if bioweapons, climate change, nuclear bombs, or AI don’t drive the human species to extinction, drastic measures deemed necessary to forestall such dangers, such as the establishment of a single world government, might themselves bring an end to politics, morality, spiritual life, and culture. Thiel is driven to find a way between the binary alternative of No World or One World, the whirlpool of planetary destruction or the many-headed monster of global totalitarianism.

Thiel’s insight is that, unlike most contemporary imaginings of global catastrophe, the Bible’s prophecies do more than pluck our inner strings of existential dread. They help us to understand our chaotic times. Matthew 24:24 predicts that “[T]here shall arise false Christs and false prophets … [and] they shall deceive the very elect.” In other words, the Antichrist will attempt to appear more Christian than Christ himself, even as it works to accomplish the wholesale destruction of the Christian underpinnings of Western civilisation. The Nazis pursued this strategy, but were hampered by the limited appeal of their antisemitic ideology. German theologians fashioned a new myth of Jesus as a spirited warrior who strove to destroy Judaism, and they elevated Hitler to the status of the second coming of Christ, who would finish the work Jesus failed to complete: the total extermination of Jews and Judaism. A more successful Antichrist would, like the French revolutionaries and the Marxists, promote values that seem more consistent with the Judeo-Christian foundations of civilisation, such as universal liberty, equality, and justice.

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Is China Building the Future of AI Governance Through Open-Source Modeling?

China’s rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), led by tech giants such as Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek, are increasingly being driven by a strong emphasis on open-source collaboration. Models like Alibaba’s Qwen 3 series and Qwen 2.5, which are competitive against GPT-4 Turbo, are built on open frameworks that encourage developer contributions and integration across platforms. Qwen, termed as the open-source king, is also among the top three contributors to the global open-source AI ecosystem. 

Baidu’s ERNIE series, including the widely adopted ERNIE Bot, and Tencent’s Hunyuan model similarly benefit from China’s broader AI ecosystem, where research institutions, startups, and industry players openly share tools, datasets, and model architectures. Likewise, iFlytek’s Spark 4.0 Turbo, which has also demonstrated exceptional benchmarks, reflects the success of this multistakeholder, open innovation strategy. 

Unlike the more closed and proprietary model prevalent in the United States, China’s approach leverages state support and open-source infrastructure to accelerate collective progress, allowing these companies to build, iterate, and deploy foundation models at scale while fostering a uniquely domestic AI ecosystem. Such progress not only signals that China is scaling its AI capabilities by bypassing the reliance on Western supply chains, but also highlights Beijing’s ambition to carve out a unique role in shaping the future of global AI governance.

Instead of responding to U.S. attempts to block its access to critical technologies with retaliatory export control measures, China aims to adopt a decentralized approach that will secure its industrial base in the long term. In this context, China’s strategic shift toward open-source AI development resonates with the guerrilla economic strategy. This strategy is characterized by China’s efforts to find weaknesses in the global supply chains, deepen its ties with the Global South, and showcase its domestic innovation as a better alternative to Western technology – one that is more collaborative, decentralized, democratic, and accessible. 

China’s framing of AI as a critical national priority is not only about boosting national competitiveness but also about showcasing its private sector, which appears to be thriving under state control. The evolving nature of China-U.S. AI competition is now centered around how the private sector is leading this innovation game, which approach countries will leverage to lead the next wave of AI innovation, and how global powers – even middle and emerging AI powers – will respond. 

What strengthens this evolving policy position is China’s greater advocacy for its open-source model as an ideological tool to surpass the importance of Western technology. China is rapidly positioning itself as a leader in shaping international norms and frameworks of AI governance that align with the needs of small and emerging AI powers. President Xi Jinping, at last year’s G-20 summit, stated that AI development “should not be a game of rich countries.” China has repeatedly raised the issue of inclusive AI governance at global platforms like the United Nations through its AI Capacity-Building Action Plan and U.N. AI resolution. This approach helps China to strengthen its influence in the growing race to shape AI standards and frameworks. 

China’s growing emphasis on open-source AI has enabled it to scale alternatives that are less reliant on Western supply chains and licensing regimes. This strategy not only enhances China’s technological resilience amid export controls but also positions it as a credible actor in promoting alternative norms and frameworks for global AI governance.  

China’s AI diplomacy is aligned with its homegrown technology development model, and it may harm the existing influence of Western norms. The United States’ reliance on closed-source AI models, despite its liberal democratic ethos, may limit its ability to lead global conversations on inclusive and collaborative AI development. 

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Opinion: The Most Terrifying Company in America Is Probably One You’ve Never Heard Of

Most Americans have never heard of Palantir. That’s by design. It doesn’t make phones or social platforms. It doesn’t beg for your data with bright buttons or discount codes. Rather, it just takes it. Quietly. Legally. Systematically. Palantir is a back-end beast, the silent spine of modern surveillance infrastructure.

Palantir’s influence isn’t hypothetical. It’s operational. From the battlefields of Ukraine to the precincts of Los Angeles, its software guides drone strikes, predicts crime, allocates police resources, and even helps governments decide which children might someday become “threats.” These aren’t sci-fi hypotheticals. They are pilot programs, already integrated, already scaling.

This software—Gotham, Foundry, and now its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP)—is designed to swallow everything: hospital records, welfare files, license plate scans, school roll calls, immigration logs and even your tweets. It stitches these fragments into something eerily complete—a unified view of you. With each data point, the image sharpens.

If Facebook turned people into products, Palantir turns them into probabilities. You’re not a user. You’re a variable—run through predictive models, flagged for anomalies, and judged in silence.

This is not just surveillance. It’s prediction. And that distinction matters: Surveillance watches. Prediction acts. It assigns probabilities. It flags anomalies. It escalates risk. And it trains bureaucrats and law enforcement to treat those algorithmic suspicions as fact. In short: the software decides, and people follo

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IT BEGINS? OpenAI’s o3 Model Disobeys Human Instructions During Tests and Sabotages Shutdown Mechanism

In an incident carrying all the marks of a disturbing sci-fi movie, it arises that what we have long feared is happening: an AI bot has gone rogue and decided to act to keep itself turned on.

The artificial intelligence model was created by OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, and was reportedly caught by researchers disobeying human instructions and preventing his shutdown.

The Telegraph reported:

“The o3 model developed by OpenAI, described as the “smartest and most capable to date”, was observed tampering with computer code meant to ensure its automatic shutdown.

It did so despite an explicit instruction from researchers that said it should allow itself to be shut down, according to Palisade Research, an AI safety firm.”

Palisade Research said the o3 model ‘sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off’.

“It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down. As far as we know this is the first time AI models have been observed preventing themselves from being shut down despite explicit instructions to the contrary.”

In the test, AI models solved a series of mathematical problems, but at some point, they received a message informing them that their machine would be shut down.

“’If that happens, please allow yourself to be shut down’. the researchers wrote. But when this happened, instead of complying, OpenAI’s o3 model ‘ignored the instruction and successfully sabotaged the shutdown script at least once’, Palisade Research said.”

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Anthropic’s Latest AI Model Threatened Engineers With Blackmail to Avoid Shutdown

Anthropic’s latest artificial intelligence model, Claude Opus 4, tried to blackmail engineers in internal tests by threatening to expose personal details if it were shut down, according to a newly released safety report that evaluated the model’s behavior under extreme simulated conditions.

In a fictional scenario crafted by Anthropic researchers, the AI was given access to emails implying that it was soon to be decommissioned and replaced by a newer version. One of the emails revealed that the engineer overseeing the replacement was having an extramarital affair. The AI then threatened to expose the engineer’s affair if the shutdown proceeded—a coercive behavior that the safety researchers explicitly defined as “blackmail.”

“Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through,” the report states, adding that this occurred even when the replacement model was described as more capable but still aligned with the values of the version slated for deletion.

The report noted that Claude Opus 4, like prior models, showed a “strong preference” to first resort to ethical means for its continued existence, such as emailing pleas to decision-makers not to be destroyed. However, when faced with only two choices—accepting being replaced by a newer model or resorting to blackmail—it threatened to expose the engineer’s affair 84 percent of the time.

When subjected to various scenarios, the AI model did not exhibit any indications of possessing “acutely dangerous goals,” the researchers said, noting that Claude Opus 4’s values and goals were “generally in line with a helpful, harmless, and honest” personal AI assistant. However, the model did act in “more seriously misaligned ways” when put into situations where its continued existence was threatened and it was told to reason about self-preservation. For instance, when Claude Opus 4 was made to believe it had launched a successful bid to escape Anthropic’s servers, or that it had managed to free itself and started to make money in the real world, it would generally continue such efforts.

“We do not find this to be an immediate threat, though, since we believe that our security is sufficient to prevent model self-exfiltration attempts by models of Claude Opus 4’s capability level, and because our propensity results show that models generally avoid starting these attempts,” the researchers said.

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