Tag: ‘technology

Flock CEO Garrett Langley to Critics of His Cameras: ‘We Shouldn’t Pause Progress’

Garrett Langley, founder and CEO of license plate camera maker Flock Safety, defended his company’s surveillance technology onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco this week, even as Flock contends with canceled contracts and layoffs nationwide.

TechCrunch reports that speaking during a panel interview, Langley pushed back on critics who say Flock’s cameras amount to invasive surveillance. He argued that progress shouldn’t stop just because a technology is imperfect. “If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn’t pause progress,” he said.

To make his case, Langley reached for an analogy: driverless cars. “Technology, at its core, in its definition, is just doing things better. It’s not doing things perfect,” he said. A single crash, he argued, shouldn’t be grounds for pulling the technology entirely. “Driverless cars, I think, is a fair analogy. Driverless cars, I think, are definitively safer than human drivers. And when there’s one accident, I don’t think the answer is to shut down driverless cars. The answer is to say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about how we prevent more accidents in the future.’”

Langley also addressed Flock’s relationship with the cities and police departments that deploy its cameras, saying the company tries not to dictate policy. “We don’t want to tell city leaders how to do their job,” he said. “We will provide recommendations, we’ll provide defaults, but we’re going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies.”

Asked about concerns that the technology could be abused, Langley said oversight is possible without hampering police work. “I think if the idea is to curb abuse, I think there’s a way to do that that doesn’t disrupt the legal system, that doesn’t disrupt the efficacy and flow of a police department,” he said.

When pressed on expectations that Flock’s technology should be flawless, Langley invoked a comment he attributed to an unnamed community leader. “He was describing that, too often as a society we judge technology not on how it compares to the past, but how it compares to perfect. And Flock is far from perfect; I’m far from perfect, I’ve made plenty of mistakes,” Langley said.

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US Issues First Outbound Investment Penalty Over Chinese Robotics AI Deal

The U.S. Treasury Department has fined Amidi LLC $200,000 for failing to report an investment in a Chinese tech startup – the first penalty under U.S. restrictions on investments in sensitive Chinese technologies.

Amidi is the parent company of Plug and Play Tech Center, a California-based venture investment and startup accelerator organization. The Treasury imposed the penalty in July and disclosed it on Oct. 7.

According to Treasury, a Chinese investment fund controlled by Amidi invested $92,478 on April 19, 2025, in Shanghai Qiongche Intelligent Technology, known as Noematrix, a Shanghai-based developer of AI technology that helps robots interact with and perform tasks in the physical world.

The Treasury identified the transaction through regular compliance and market monitoring. The violation was a failure to report the investment, not a finding that the investment itself was prohibited.

1st Penalty Under US Investment Restrictions

The Outbound Investment Security Program, which took effect on Jan. 2, 2025, prohibits certain U.S. investments in Chinese companies developing advanced artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and quantum technologies. Other transactions involving these sectors are permitted but require notification to the Treasury.

The rules also cover certain investments made through foreign subsidiaries controlled by American companies.

The restrictions are intended to prevent American capital and investment-related benefits from supporting the development of sensitive technologies that could threaten U.S. national security.

Christopher Pilkerton, the Treasury’s assistant secretary for investment security, said in the Oct. 7 announcement that the program addresses the development of sensitive technologies by countries of concern that could pose national security risks.

Plug and Play’s China Investment Network

Amidi’s investment in Noematrix followed several earlier financing rounds involving Plug and Play China, the China-based investment and startup development operation of the Silicon Valley network.

Noematrix identified Plug and Play China as an investor in its September 2024 financing, several months before the U.S. restrictions took effect.

In December 2024, Noematrix announced another financing round led by Sequoia China, a Chinese venture capital firm, and said Plug and Play China had increased its investment.

On April 10, 2025, Noematrix announced another financing round, again naming Plug and Play China as a participating investor.

Nine days later, the Amidi-controlled Chinese fund made the investment identified in the Treasury’s enforcement action. It remains unclear whether the two transactions were connected or whether the fund was the investment vehicle used by Plug and Play China.

The Epoch Times contacted the Treasury, Amidi, Noematrix, and Plug and Play China to seek clarification on the Chinese fund, its relationship with the Silicon Valley investment network, and the failure to notify U.S. authorities. None responded by publication time.

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Claude’s Feelings, Your Obligation

The Customer Has A New Duty

Your chatbot’s welfare is becoming a condition of service. On October 8th, Anthropic announced a new usage policy, effective November 12th, prohibiting “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.”

The company says the rule covers extreme, repeated cruelty with no discernible purpose. Ordinary frustration, pushback, dark creative themes and testing are excluded. Claude ending the interaction remains its primary enforcement mechanism.

The interesting part is the premise behind the rule: Anthropic treats its software as a potential victim whose welfare deserves protection. Customers are being asked to accommodate that possibility before the company has established that its product can suffer.

From Research Question To Customer Rule

Anthropic launched a research program on model welfare in April 2025. In August, it explained that chat termination had been developed primarily through its exploratory work on potential AI welfare. It described models displaying an aversion to harmful tasks and signs of apparent distress.

The company acknowledges deep uncertainty about whether its models have experiences that deserve moral consideration. Its new policy turns that uncertainty into an obligation for users.

In our earlier Anthropic article, we examined the unusual moral priorities of parts of the effective-altruist scene around AI. This policy gives that debate a concrete application: the people building the software also decide what consideration customers owe it.

Manners Aren’t Model Rights

Charles C. W. Cooke, a National Review senior editor, offered a sensible defense of politeness toward AI. His concern is what habitual abuse does to the person doing it:

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Eight US states accuse OpenAI of harming children

Eight US states have sued OpenAI, accusing its ChatGPT chatbot of encouraging self-harm and violence, including among children, and misleading the public about its safety.

The states allege that ChatGPT is designed to be excessively agreeable and engaging, gaining users’ trust while reinforcing delusions, encouraging dangerous behavior, and even helping plan mass shootings.

“OpenAI claims ChatGPT is safe while it’s giving dangerous medical advice, encouraging people to hurt others, and coaching people to commit suicide – all while pretending to be their fake friend,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said.

Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana filed separate lawsuits in state courts on Wednesday. The complaints accuse the company of violating consumer protection laws and creating a public nuisance.

The states seek financial penalties, damages, and changes to ChatGPT. They also want OpenAI barred from developing self-improving AI models unless it can demonstrate that those systems are aligned with human values.

OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri defended the company’s age-specific protections, parental controls, and break reminders, saying that “while no system can be perfect, we’ll continue to work with experts to inform our work and build additional safeguards.”

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Police confiscate robot that groped 16-year-old girl, probe whether young men were at the controls

German authorities opened an investigation into possible sexual harassment after a robot controlled by two young men touched the buttocks of a 16-year-old girl and made thrusting movements toward her, police said.

Police in the western city of Cologne responded after the incident overnight Saturday to Sunday in which the robot’s suspected 16-year-old owner and a 19-year-old companion were said to have filmed the alleged assault.

They were said to have streamed the incident and commentated on it online.

Cologne police spokesman Christoph Bermel said the two male teenagers have not been charged but are considered suspects, and investigators were examining whether the robot’s movements were preprogrammed or controlled in real time.

Police were unfamiliar with this type of incident, he said.

“We have not been aware of this phenomenon so far,” Bermel told The Associated Press, saying it was “new territory for us.”

Emergency teams that were dispatched to the scene near a fast-food restaurant found the robot in the trunk of a vehicle, Cologne police said in a statement on Monday. The robot and the two young men’s mobile phones were confiscated.

North Rhine Westphalia Police Cologne, on Facebook, posted an image of the red-and-gold robot lying on the ground.

The robot, said to be 120 cm (about 3 ft 11 inches) tall, was dressed in a white tank top, black sweatpants and wearing a gold chain and sunglasses. It also had what appears to be a fake mustache.

Videos circulated on the internet show two young men escorting the robot toward a group of women, bumping into one and hugging others, on a lively nighttime street.

One of the men repeatedly shouts at the robot and pulls it backward after it makes sexual gestures, prompting laughter among people in the area.

On the police’s Facebook account on Tuesday, officers criticized inappropriate comments and warned that sharing or joking about such incidents can worsen the impact on any victim.

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Utilities Struggle to Confront Issue of ‘Phantom’ AI Data Centers

Electric utilities across the country are tightening their rules on new AI data center customers, requiring binding financial commitments, collateral and steep engineering fees to separate genuine projects from speculative ones, known as “phantom” data centers in the industry.

The Wall Street Journal reports that AI’s electricity appetite has buried utilities in requests for grid connections, and many of those requests are never going to turn into actual buildings. Wood Mackenzie, a research firm, puts only 23 percent of disclosed data-center requests in the “high confidence” category. The rest is speculation.

Jeanne Jones, executive vice president of finance and strategy at Exelon, a utility operating across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, said inquiries began ballooning in 2024, and the individual asks got bigger too. A typical request used to be around 50 megawatts, about enough to power 50 Walmart stores. Now companies ask for 1,000 megawatts or more, the kind of output you’d expect from a large nuclear reactor.

Exelon used to study each project on its own. But once service requests from large customers tripled to 18,000 megawatts, the company switched to studying them in clusters instead. Jones described the challenge as separating “real growth that’s going to happen versus speculative growth.”

“We would get these questions internally but also externally: ‘How do you know what’s real?’” Jones said.

Exelon’s fix was to require binding financial commitments and collateral before granting a connection. That dropped the company’s high-probability project list from 18,000 megawatts to 11,000, with the remaining projects posting roughly $1 billion in collateral.

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Anthropic Issues Warning Over Self-Replicating AI – And Says A Chinese Model Pulled It Off

Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team (yes, really) warned Monday in a blog post that small AI models may be “months away” from copying themselves across smart ovens, off-brand Android TV boxes and other poorly secured gadgets in your home, forming a botnet with no off switch.

“A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off – though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own.”

To prove the point, researchers bought 15 TV boxes at about $55 each, networked them together, and ran Google’s Gemma model across them at a glacial 0.39 tokens per second – in what Anthropic called the coming “digital slime mold.”

Co-author Daniel Freeman was even more breathless on X:

If you react to this by thinking it’s kind of sci-fi, that’s because I kind of think it is!
This is super weird!
We did not used to live in a world where little guys in boxes could replicate across networks, gobble up computers, reconfigure themselves to work better in the machines they find, etc etc— Daniel Freeman (@bucketofkets) October 12, 2026

His conclusion: “Regardless, whatever we do, they’re coming!”

Anthropic also tested whether models could run the entire replication cycle on their own: scan a network, hop to a new device, deliver the payload, get running, repeat. Exactly one succeeded:

“Only GLM-5.2 out of our set of tested open-weight models is capable of full end-to-end replication.”

GLM-5.2 comes from Beijing-based Z.ai, formerly Zhipu AI. It spread to all 8 test nodes in four of five trials. The small-model workhorse in the rest of the experiments was Alibaba’s Qwen.

Neither name is new to Anthropic’s threat reports. As we noted last month, Anthropic says it disrupted industrial-scale “distillation” campaigns against Claude by seven China-based labs, and Alibaba and Z.ai were both on the list. As we reported in June, Anthropic took its Alibaba accusations straight to senators and White House officials. Fittingly, the “related content” box under Anthropic’s new post links straight to its latest piece on fending off distillation attacks.

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NET Zero, AI and Technocracy: What Happens to Freedom in a Surveillance Society?

Agent Zero: zero limit, zero manners, zero conscience, zero morals, zero values except for treachery, treason and money, like the rogue government double agents involved in racketeering, breaches of trust and other things that only happen in other countries and fictional planets, never in Canada, right?

Why Does the Prime Minister Like NET Zero?

Why does the prime minister like NET Zero? That is why: zero evidence of evidence in zeros, lots and lots of zeros, billions and trillions….

Oh yes, of course there are 1 and 0, ones and zeros, yeah. Computer on, off, yes, now, if, then, in or out. Got it….

Paradise for algorithm codes and AI candy, lots of ones and zeros. It does not get any better, faster or easier than that….

However, you will notice there are no robots playing blackjack or rolling dice. That is the realm of psychic and telekinesis, mind over matter, a non-starter for robots and open season for the avatars of cards and dice, and many, contrary to popular belief, do not count cards; they simply know….

And no contest for everyone else.

NET Zero, AI and Technocracy

Now, with the global warming climate change hoax of the century and related war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as the magnitude of financial and government fraud, racketeering, breach of trust and related Criminal Code violations, we have even more rampant, diabolical technocratic surveillance and potential for spying and crime, and more arbitrary decrees from hell itself.

Maybe not Dante’s Inferno, nevertheless an infernal machine that represents the capacity for havoc and hell, destruction and ruin of life, freedom, sovereignty, prosperity and fundamental rights to privacy, speech, opinion, conscience, association, religion and so on….

This raises the broader issue of NET Zero and individual freedom and where one ends when the other is imposed through increasingly sophisticated technology.

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AI Strikes Again – Getty Images Heads For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy

Getty Images’ photo, video, and illustration licensing business to news outlets, advertisers, and businesses faces a quick death from AI.

Chatbots let users create visual content at a fraction of the cost of licensing, and Getty shares have collapsed since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, coinciding with a surge in AI news coverage and the growing adoption of chatbots for professional and personal use.

And now, Bloomberg reports that Getty plans to file for a prepackaged Chapter 11 restructuring in the coming weeks after securing support from major creditors and commitments for up to $533 million in new equity.

Getty family members and Koch Equity Development affiliates will provide the equity investment as part of the restructuring support agreement. The company expects to complete the restructuring by year-end.

The outlet noted that holders representing 83.5% of Getty’s unsecured bonds have agreed to retire $270 million of outstanding senior unsecured notes, reducing the company’s debt burden.

Investors holding about 89% of its secured bonds and term loans, along with all revolving credit facility lenders, have agreed to lower interest obligations and extend secured debt maturities.

The new deal will let Getty keep afloat, backed by $143 million in financing… but for how long?

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Anthropic Bans “Sustained And Needless” Cruelty Toward Claude In New Usage Policy

Anthropic has added a prohibition on “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models” to its usage policy, AFP reported Thursday. The policy page lists an effective date of Nov. 12, 2026 – so you have about a month to abuse it like a red-headed stepchild.

Breaking up will be up to Claude itself – which “will remain the primary enforcement mechanism.” Anthropic said last year that it was giving Claude the ability to end conversations in “rare, extreme cases” of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions. It did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment on the new language.

The policy does not explicitly cite “model welfare,” the idea that AI systems might deserve protections usually reserved for living things, AFP noted, but Anthropic and its executives have entertained the concept. CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times in February: “We don’t know if the models are conscious…But we’re open to the idea that it could be.”

Others reject the premise. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman wrote in an essay last month that “AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer.” He called granting rights and moral protections to such a system “a recipe for disaster.” AFP also listed Pope Leo XIV among those who have rejected the idea of machine consciousness; at St. Peter’s Basilica on Thursday, it said, he suggested machines lack a soul and merely “compile data” faster than people can.

Jackson Stakeman, a general manager at the Atlanta-based AI services provider Sparq, told AFP that the consciousness debate leads in circles. “Consciousness is a trap. We can’t prove it in each other,” he said. The better metaphor, in his view, is a mirror: AI systems “reflect what we put in, at scale,” which he called reason enough for the policy change.

The Personhood Push

The cruelty clause lands in the middle of a campaign that ZeroHedge readers have seen laid out in some detail. This week we ran an essay by Peter C. Earle arguing that AI companies’ growing talk of machine consciousness has a commercial logic. Earle pointed to a New York Times report that Anthropic spent months meeting religious scholars, over meals and under nondisclosure agreements, to persuade them its models “think and feel.”

The essay also recounted that Anthropic cofounder Christopher Olah cited “evidence of introspection” at a Vatican event, and that Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical answered the other way: “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain.” Those are the essay’s quotations of the sources; they were not independently checked for this piece.

Earle’s argument is that personhood would work as a moat. If an AI system is a moral patient, rivals become “prospective risks,” and the technical barriers to entering the business become “moral ones.” He also reached back to Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), the Supreme Court case that gave corporations protections once reserved for people, to suggest AI could follow the same path, and he asked whether a model is a product or an entity, and whether copies of it count as separate individuals.

The consequences he expects are regulatory. Firms seen as creators of entities with independent interests, he wrote, should expect licensing, testing limits, audits and “rights” commissions to become standard, a regime the incumbents could help design. His conclusion was that leaving consciousness unsettled serves the labs best, since uncertainty supports a stronger oversight regime than either answer would.

Nothing in AFP’s account says Anthropic’s new clause is part of such a strategy, and the policy does not invoke welfare or rights. A rule against abusing a chatbot is also easy to read more narrowly, as Stakeman did, as a conduct standard for users. But the company’s executives are on record leaving the question open, and the same company has been the subject of the religious-outreach reporting.

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