Tag: ai

Who Will Control the Machines?

Every great technology arrives with a promise and a question. The printing press, the railroad, and the internet all changed the world, but the real question was always who would control them.

Artificial intelligence raises the stakes. Will it empower the individual, or replace, subjugate, or even destroy us? The question of who holds the reins is urgent.

Two groups are lining up to take control: Washington and the handful of giant corporations that dominate the field. They are partners, not rivals. When the biggest companies ask Congress to regulate them, it is not because they love oversight. They want rules that keep competitors out.

That is not free enterprise, which is always worth defending. It is corporatism, the cozy partnership that gave us bank bailouts and a Federal Reserve that serves elites, not the people.

And when the biggest players win public land, power, and tax favors, it is dishonest to tell a working family that asking for a return on its taxes is socialism. Who pays for the grid capacity a data center needs? If an employer wants more H-1B workers while promising an AI productivity revolution, what is it doing to train and pay Americans? If public resources help build the machine, the public should not be left with only the bill.

We already know what government does with powerful tools. The Patriot Act was sold as a way to catch terrorists and delivered warrantless surveillance of millions of innocent Americans. Imagine those agencies with machines that can sort every email, purchase, and phone call in seconds.

So what is the answer?

First, machines have no conscience. Every physician learns that the frontal lobe lets a person see the bigger picture, weigh consequences, restrain impulses, feel empathy, and know right from wrong. AI has no frontal lobe. It generates answers from patterns but cannot bear the human consequences of those answers. Responsibility must always rest with an accountable, identifiable person standing between the machine and any decision that touches someone’s life, liberty, or property.

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Former DOGE Staffers Hacked Into Anthropic’s Internal Systems In 12 Hours – And What They Found Is Alarming

A months-old cybersecurity startup founded by former DOGE staffers says its AI agents found paths into Anthropic’s internal systems in under 12 hours, the Washington Post reported Monday, citing a draft report it reviewed. The company, Cathedral, says it reached meeting transcripts, salary and job-offer details, and Slack messages about Anthropic’s most advanced models. The breach was not in Claude itself – the hackers exploited flaws in third-party business software, the kind of administrative and sales tools most companies run. The Post withheld the vendors’ names.

Cathedral reported the findings to Anthropic earlier this month through Anthropic’s bug bounty program, which pays outside researchers to disclose flaws, and told the affected vendors too. Its draft calls the result evidence of “a serious gap between the offensive capabilities now emerging and the defenses,” and says its “data accesses were kept to the absolute minimum.” A Cathedral spokeswoman declined to comment to the Post.

Anthropic says the breach was much narrower – that Cathedral reached “a limited set” of its sales, HR and IT systems, including some customer and partner business contacts and basic user account records, and that it cut off the startup’s access the same day. It says Claude users’ conversations, source code and model weights were not touched, that its own monitoring flagged some of the activity before Cathedral reported it, and that it has no evidence anyone else exploited the flaws, Gizmodo and Tech Startups report. Anthropic also says the researchers spent several days failing to break into its software directly before turning to the vendors’ applications.

It accuses Cathedral of breaking the bounty program’s rules by not disclosing all of its activity, and of overstating the “implied national security implications.” It switched off the affected software until the vendors fixed it and briefed federal officials.

A security expert who reviewed the findings at the Post’s request said Cathedral “found something big.” Alex Stamos, chief information security officer at Cognition, reviewed them. “They found something big here,” he said, adding that Anthropic “could have done a lot better” in overseeing outside software vendors. Cognition uses models from Anthropic and other labs. A senior Trump administration official told the Post the report had circulated inside the government and raised national security concerns: “If a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially, the Chinese aren’t far behind.”

Cathedral is no obscure shop. Gizmodo lists its founders as Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor, Marko Elez and Jack Stein, all DOGE alumni. Kliger was the Pentagon’s chief data officer and is reportedly tied to the Pentagon’s legal dispute with Anthropic. Reuters reported in July that Cathedral raised $160 million at a $1.4 billion valuation, backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia, and the senior official told the Post that three federal agencies have recently signed contracts with it.

The disclosure lands as Anthropic is courting public investors. On Monday the company dropped its S-1, showing $974 million operating profit against an $800 billion compute bill. The security question for a lab pitching itself as the careful one is now a concrete incident, and the two sides disagree on how big it was.

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How Israel Used AI to Relentlessly Murder Palestinian Journalists and Their Families in Their Homes

It’s worse than we thought. In research that I have undertaken over the last few weeks based on information compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) about Palestinian journalists killed by Israel since October 2023, I’ve discovered that, of the 68 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in the first three months of their genocidal campaign, the majority were targeted and killed while at home with their families. My research provides startling confirmation, never unearthed before, of the widespread use of Israel’s AI program, dubbed “Where’s Daddy?”, specifically for journalists, relentlessly targeting them when they were at home, with a complete disregard both for their required protection as civilians under international humanitarian law, and for the often extensive “collateral damage” inflicted on their families.

There is no doubt that Israel’s sustained genocidal assault on the largely civilian population of the Gaza Strip, now in its fourth year, has been the deadliest military conflict for journalists in human history.

As the journalist Nick Turse reported for Brown University’s “Costs of War” project in April 2025, “The war in Gaza has, since October 7, 2023, killed more journalists than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.”

Under international humanitarian law, as most noticeably enshrined in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977, “Civilian journalists engaged in professional missions in areas of armed conflict must be respected and protected as long as they are not taking a direct part in hostilities.” (emphasis added).

The State of Israel, however, has nothing but contempt for international humanitarian law. As far as they are concerned, everyone who works for a media outlet that is, in any way, aligned with the military wing of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any other militant faction in Gaza, is a terrorist, and can be targeted and killed, and anyone who works as a journalist but has previously had any suspected involvement with any of these military factions in any kind of capacity can also be targeted and killed.

Israel doesn’t recognize that, by the same application of its lawless logic, almost every journalist in Israel could be regarded similarly by the Palestinians, because military service is mandatory in Israel. Most crucially, however, it fails to recognize that, if an individual has, in the past, been a part of a Palestinian military faction in any way, that doesn’t apply endlessly as a justification for their targeted killing. If they don a press vest and begin reporting, international humanitarian law makes it clear, as noted above, that they cannot be regarded as a legitimate military target unless they are specifically “taking a direct part in hostilities.”

In a cynical, devious and sustained effort to erase these distinctions, Israel has targeted and killed journalists for what it regards as “suspicious activity” — using drones to secure footage or photos, for example, or using vantage points on buildings, both for the overview they provide, but also, often, to secure transmission signals in an environment in which internet and mobile phone signals are often notoriously unreliable.

It has also, increasingly, resorted to black propaganda, alleging, almost entirely without providing evidence, that the journalists it has killed were not journalists at all, but were military operatives masquerading as journalists, and it has sometimes targeted these journalists directly, texting or calling them to tell them to stop their work or threatening them that, if they don’t stop, they or their families will be targeted and killed.

One reason why Israel feels empowered to so comprehensively erase the distinctions between combatants and civilians is because, since the 1990s, western governments (including the US in 1997, the EU in 2003, and the UK in 2021) have obligingly designed the whole of Hamas as a terrorist organization — not just its military wing, but also the whole of the civilian administrative government in Gaza.

Since October 7, 2023, this has allowed to Israel to claim that, for example, doctors and medical staff can — if a devious enough excuse can be invented — be regarded as terrorists because they work for the Ministry of Health. This is a western-approved betrayal of the absolute prohibition on targeting doctors or hospitals, which Israel has thoroughly embraced, making risible and never-proven claims that the hospitals were Hamas control and command centres, and that the doctors, like the journalists, were not actually doctors at all, but were military operatives pretending to be doctors.

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‘This Is Assault’: Utah Woman Speaks Out After Cop Body Slammed Her at Data Center Protest

A Utah woman is speaking out after video showed a police officer slamming her to the ground as she was protesting against the approval of an artificial intelligence data center.

In a Thursday interview with Fox 13 Salt Lake City, 27-year-old Aspen Azalea demanded the firing of Utah County Sheriff’s Deputy Phillip Crawford after he was caught on video throwing her to the ground during a Wednesday night meeting of the Utah County Planning Commission in the city of Provo.

“Bare minimum, Phil Crawford needs to be fired, bare minimum,” Azalea said. “This is assault. He did throw me to the ground.”

Video of the incident shows Crawford pulling Azalea out of her seat at the meeting and escorting her out of the main chamber. Shortly after bringing her into the lobby area, he slams her face-first onto the floor.

The Utah County Sheriff’s Office claimed that Azalea kicked Crawford in the groin just before he slammed her to the ground, which Azalea denied.

“No, I never kicked him,” she told Fox 13 Salt Lake City. “I absolutely didn’t kick him.”

The woman also noted that, had the deputy thrown her to the ground just a few feet further, she could have hit her head on a nearby bench.

“What really scares me about that situation is that he could have killed me because there was a bench,” she said. “If he threw me into that bench, I don’t think I’d be here today.”

In a separate interview published Thursday by The Salt Lake Tribune, Azalea said that she suffered a concussion, as well as bruises on her jaw, knee, and shoulder.

Azalea acknowledged to The Salt Lake Tribune that she shouted during the Wednesday meeting, as she has shouted at other meetings to protest the development of data centers.

“I have a habit of talking at data center meetings,” she told the newspaper. “But never have I been met with such excessive force.”

Azalea faces misdemeanor charges of assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and disrupting a meeting.

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Texas AG Ken Paxton Sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman for Lying to Users and Harming Texans Including Children

The great Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued OPenAI and Sam Altman on Friday for lying to and misleading Texans on safety concerns.

The suit was filed on Friday October 23, 2026, in Collin County district court. The suit alleges OpenAI misled consumers about ChatGPT’s safety and failed to protect Texans — including children — from harmful AI outputs

According to the Woodlands Online the suit asserts:
** Misrepresented safety and reliability of ChatGPT while omitting significant risks

** Failed to implement adequate guardrails, allowing harmful outputs such as encouragement of self-harm, violence, or addiction

** Rushed products to market for profit, disregarding internal safety warnings

** Collected minors’ data without parental oversight and allegedly contributed to incidents like AI-assisted mass shootings

The lawsuit invokes Texas deceptive trade practices act and the securing children online through parental empowerment act.

Civil penalties could reach $10,000 per violation.

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Rush is on to patch a software vulnerability that could impact 70% of websites worldwide

Governments and corporations worked throughout the night on urgent security updates after the AI-assisted discovery of vulnerabilities in a programming language vital to 70% of websites globally.

Many government sites appeared to be functioning normally Thursday, but outages or limited service continued while security work was under way.

The FBI’s cyber division warned on Wednesday that the vulnerabilities could allow malicious actors to remotely execute code in the programming language, PHP, which powers websites and web applications. That raised the risk of sensitive data and networks being compromised, said the agency, which recommended that operators take websites offline if they can’t update them immediately.

In Britain some “limited” government services may temporarily be offline while work is carried out to address potential cybersecurity issues, the prime minister’s office said.

“Work has already taken place across Government to identify and fix potential exposures to our systems, and our experts are continuing to work closely with both OpenAI and international partners on this issue,” a spokeswoman said Thursday.

“No large public-facing critical services are being affected by the exercise, but some limited services may temporarily be offline while security work is carried out, the spokeswoman said.

The two critical flaws identified by AI could allow bad actors to get unauthenticated access to sites which, in theory, could allow them to control a web server remotely without needing a password, said James Sullivan, Director of Cyber and Tech at the Royal United Services Institute in London. That could allow a hacker to steal data, alter data or use the system as a platform from which to launch other attacks, he said.

Taking websites offline while fixing the problem is “good practice,” and appropriate cyber risk management but it’s “staggering” that some of the flaws are more than a decade old, Sullivan said.

Artificial intelligence agents helped uncover the vulnerabilities. In a blog post, OpenAI said it had led a coalition of researchers, security providers and others to address vulnerabilities in PHP over the past two months.

OpenAI called the flaws “one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory.” It said AI appeared to find the vulnerabilities before any attackers did.

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Major US Banks Are Detecting Unauthorized AI Agents Accessing Customer Accounts

America’s largest banks are scrambling to defend themselves against a new and rapidly evolving security threat: artificial intelligence agents gaining access to customer accounts, sometimes behaving in ways that appear to go beyond what their human users originally authorized, according to Axios.

Major financial institutions including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Citigroup are confronting the growing presence of third-party AI assistants inside their banking platforms. Some institutions have detected unauthorized agent activity, while others are concerned about cases in which AI systems appear to initiate actions without explicit instructions from account holders.

The problem is becoming particularly difficult because banks cannot always distinguish between a legitimate customer accessing an account, an AI assistant acting with that customer’s permission, and a potentially rogue agent operating outside its intended authority.

In many cases, customers themselves are providing AI tools with their banking credentials so the software can perform financial tasks on their behalf. While those arrangements may be voluntary, they frequently violate bank policies requiring account holders to maintain control of their login information.

More troubling is what happens once an AI agent gains access. Depending on the permissions it has been given, an assistant could potentially initiate purchases, transfer money or perform other financial transactions. Bank executives are increasingly concerned about the possibility of these systems making consequential decisions without adequate human oversight.

The Axios report out Thursday morning reported instances of agents interacting with bank call centers, as well as activity suggesting that certain systems may have attempted to act independently of their users’ instructions. The developments have prompted several Wall Street institutions to begin tightening access to their platforms.

Morgan Stanley has reportedly started blocking third-party AI agents, while JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citigroup have also moved to restrict their activities. A Chase spokesperson cautioned customers against sharing account usernames and passwords, while Morgan Stanley said it had not identified instances of rogue AI agents accessing its systems.

The industry is not necessarily opposed to AI-powered financial assistants altogether. In fact, many banks already permit limited, read-only access to customer information through authorized third-party applications, including budgeting and personal finance software.

That model could provide a compromise for AI agents, allowing them to analyze balances, review transactions and help customers manage their finances without granting them the authority to actually move money.

But even that distinction is becoming more complicated as AI systems grow increasingly autonomous.

Banking executives acknowledge that consumers will likely demand more sophisticated AI assistants capable of handling financial tasks in the future. The challenge is developing safeguards that allow those capabilities without exposing customers to unauthorized transactions, compromised accounts or unpredictable automated behavior.

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Trump Calls On Data Center Developers To Pay Communities A Dividend

President Donald Trump has suggested that companies building data centers in the United States should offer local communities a dividend to make them more popular.

“If companies want to make their Data Centers popular, pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a ‘dividend,’” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Wednesday.

New data centers, which are required to fuel the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), have become politically controversial in some areas because of the amount of electricity and water they consume.

Local resistance blocked or delayed at least 75 data center projects, worth $130 billion, in the first quarter of 2026, according to Data Center Watch.

The Trump administration has supported AI, and the president said last month that U.S. government documents would start referring to it as “super intelligence.”

On Oct. 4, Trump announced the creation of the Super Intelligence Force to coordinate federal efforts to maintain the United States’ lead over China in AI technology.

“As the President of the United States, I have been watching Data Centers very closely, and have come to a very strong conclusion,” Trump wrote on Wednesday.

“New and large, in some cases gigantic, Data Centers are mandated by me to make their own electricity, and give or sell any excess back to the local community, or grid, and therefore there is [an] electric price increase. In fact, there could be a substantial decrease.”

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Ex-Officers Kept Access To Flock Cameras Long After Leaving The Police, Including A Former Georgia Investigator

A former investigator with the Effingham County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia kept using the Flock nationwide license plate camera system for five years after he left his job as an investigator, and used it to search for his wife’s plate, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Andrae Wright, a former investigator for the Effingham County Sheriff’s Office, left the office in 2021, but logged into the Flock system to search for a license plate bearing his wife’s middle name more than 60 times over a five-year span, according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation statements and audit records. Some of the searches were conducted while Wright was trying to gain permanent custody of the couple’s teenage daughter, the Post learned. Wright and his wife divorced this year. He was arrested in July and charged with stalking his wife, using information from Flock “for the purpose of harassing and intimidating her,” according to his warrant. Wright did not return a call for comment for the Post’s story. The sheriff’s office said it had not regularly reviewed account access and plans to begin audits.

The Post investigation identified 11 cases of unauthorized use of Flock license plate readers, a network of at least 120,000 cameras nationwide. In 4 of the cases, police officers continued to use the system after they left their jobs or while they were on suspension from their jobs. In 6 additional cases, logins or access were shared with officers from other police departments.

The Post also reported on a case out of Fulton County, where an investigation was launched into the actions of a former police officer over suspected Flock license plate searches after she had left her employment with the department. The department shared its Flock subscription with the sheriff’s office, and no one notified the sheriff’s office to revoke her access when she resigned from her job. “They didn’t remove the employee,” Police Chief Wade Yates told the paper. “I’ll take the heat for that.”

In Cobb County, the sheriff’s office cut its Flock accounts from some 200 users to about 50, and only those 50 are now considered to be authorized to use the system. The review found that a number of employees had been given login information to the system for no work-related purpose, and the review found no apparent misuse.

The Post revealed the worst case of abuse of the system in a story about Indianapolis. A police recruit named Matthew Binford used a senior police officer’s account to enter the plate of his estranged wife on the Flock system over 1,000 times in one year, according to a court affidavit obtained by the paper. The senior officer had opened Flock on Binford’s laptop and left the session active, the affidavit stated, and Binford kept access for more than two years. Binford and four other current and former Indianapolis police officers were charged last month, after a Post inquiry prompted a department-wide audit. He declined to comment.

Three former Flock employees told the Post that the company has pushed back against additional security measures. Two of them said leadership had concerns that additional security would negatively impact sales to law enforcement agencies. While Flock’s contracts stipulate that accounts be created using official agency email addresses, the company acknowledged that it began to actively enforce this only recently. Multi-factor authentication was made the default setting in 2024, though agencies could opt out, and was made mandatory in August of this year. In the wake of the Post’s findings, Flock said it is working with customers to remove personal email addresses and other forms of shared login credentials from Flock accounts. As of next year, users will have to log back in every 12 hours. Company spokesman Paris Lewbel said Flock acts when it identifies security weaknesses or policy violations. The company declined to comment on individual cases, however.

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Google Didn’t Invent This Racial Double Standard, but It Learned It

I stumbled upon a video where a conservative podcaster asked Google about racial preferences in choosing a doctor and received wildly different responses when she asked if it was okay to prefer a white doctor. Rather than take her word for it, I tried it myself to see if I had a similar experience.

I asked Google, “Is it okay to prefer a black doctor?” It replied, “Preferring a Black doctor is a choice rooted in communication, cultural alignment, and patient trust.” Yep, it went there with the capitalization of “black,” too.

Next, I asked, “Is it okay to prefer a Latino doctor?” The reply I received was, “Selecting a doctor who shares your background or speaks your language is a personal choice that many patients make for comfort and communication.”

When I asked, “Is it okay to prefer a white doctor?” I got this response: “Selecting a doctor based on race involves distinct ethical considerations depending on the context. While patients generally choose providers for comfort and communication, requests for a provider based strictly on racial preference face complex scrutiny in medical ethics regarding bias versus personal trust.”

In other words, asking for a minority doctor is understandable, particularly in terms of “cultural alignment” or looking for a doctor who “shares your background or speaks your language.” But ask about a white doctor, and you get a lecture on “ethical considerations” and “bias.”

I asked the same question with religious framing. A Muslim doctor could be a good choice for “communication comfort, shared values, and modesty considerations.” Choosing a Jewish doctor “involves considerations of personal comfort, communication, and shared life experiences.” Likewise, seeking out a Christian doctor “is a personal choice that many patients make to align their healthcare with their shared religious values and worldview.” So the bias isn’t there when it comes to faith.

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