Tag: technology

The Future Of The Pentagon’s New Autonomous Warfare Command

At last month’s Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference in Washington, D.C., Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, joined on a panel by the interim leadership tasked to stand it up, reaffirmed plans for something the Pentagon has been inching toward for a decade: a four-star United States Autonomous Warfare Command (AUTOWARCOM), built to pull artificial intelligence (AI), drones, and robotic systems out of a dozen scattered service programs and into one joint structure. Hegseth called it “the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history” and said drone warfare “supercharged by AI-enabled targeting is the biggest battlefield revolution in generations.”

The announcement left the central question implied rather than answered: how will AUTOWARCOM change the way the United States fights? The answer is already taking shape in four missions that have always depended on putting people in harm’s way: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); strike; casualty evacuation; and personnel recovery. In each, autonomy is rewriting the operational math. In each, the progress is scattered across separate program offices. AUTOWARCOM is the Pentagon’s bet that one command can pull it together.

The Announcement

Hegseth first unveiled the command, known inside the building as AWC, on September 30, 2026, describing a four-star combatant command with “service-like authorities, built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force.” Lasting change, he said, “must be anchored in military command structures” rather than left to individual program offices. No commander has been named; Hegseth said the department will fill that seat “soon.”

According to Pentagon talking points, autonomy development will be “architected around mission threads and open interoperability standards,” so that systems “integrate organically into joint, all-domain” operations from the moment they are built, instead of being bolted onto single-service programs and retrofitted for everyone else. Put more bluntly: organize autonomy around the missions that matter, and build it to work across the joint force from day one.

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Flock License Plate Camera Density by State, Ranked

A Reclaim The Net analysis of the locations of Flock Safety license plate readers, mapped by volunteers, shows that there is one of these devices for every 1,200 people in Georgia.

This is the highest density in the US, more than double the national rate, and higher than any other state.

The numbers are based on 116,548 Flock cameras mapped across the country, and the US Census Bureau’s July 2025 estimates of the population. At the other end of the scale, New Hampshire has 19 mapped cameras, or 1.3 per 100,000 people.

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Florida Poly makes history with first flying police vehicle

The Florida Polytechnic University Police Department has become the first law enforcement agency in the nation to integrate an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicle into its operations.

The manned aircraft, dubbed Astro in a double nod to science and the dog from the classic Jetsons cartoon, marks Florida Poly’s entry into the rapidly developing field of advanced air mobility (AAM), creating new opportunities to explore how the emerging technology can support public safety.

“Advanced air mobility is a technology on the rise, and we can either choose to be proactive or reactive as it develops,” said Aaron Murray, the University’s police chief. “We want to stay at the forefront of this technology and understand how it can be used to advance public safety and airspace safety altogether.”

Florida Poly is in the final stages of seeking approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to use the aerial patrol vehicle in its operations. Murray said Astro can enhance the department’s ability to monitor campus and surrounding acres, reach areas difficult to access by traditional vehicles, assist with post-storm recovery efforts and deliver emergency supplies quickly when needed.

The University Police plans to collaborate with law enforcement agencies throughout the region to deploy Astro in support of emergency response and other public safety operations.

First in the U.S.

Stéphan D’haene, CEO of Jetson, said the California-based company fast-tracked Florida Poly’s order of the Jetson ONE vehicle despite a three-year waiting list because of the University’s STEM focus and the police department’s public safety purpose, both of which reflect Jetson’s goals for the future of safe flight.

“In our business plan and in alignment with our mission, we have always been looking for the use case beyond the recreational intent,” D’haene said. “We believe that this project is so important and aligns so much with what we want to do that we made it a priority.”

A new educational horizon

Beyond its public safety applications, Astro will become a hands-on learning and research tool for Florida Poly students and faculty. The University launched its new aerospace engineering degree this fall, providing students an immediate opportunity to study emerging flight technology in a real-world setting.

“At Florida Poly, we want our students working with emerging technologies before they become commonplace,” said Dr. Brad Thiessen, Florida Poly’s provost. “Astro gives our students and faculty a living laboratory where they can analyze real-world data, tackle new engineering challenges and help shape the future of advanced air mobility.”

Faculty and students are already coordinating efforts to use real-time operational data from Astro for academic research and senior capstone design projects.

“Connecting an educational component to this technology is a big deal,” Murray said. “We are a technology university, and this aerial vehicle delivers more opportunities to learn, build partnerships and explore ways to keep our airspace safe, while connecting the work of our police department directly with our students.”

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Dartmouth Provost Who Warned About AI Cheating Resigns After Investigation of His Own AI Usage

Santiago Schnell, who stepped down this week as provost of Dartmouth College, had built part of his public profile warning that universities weren’t doing enough to fight AI cheating. An internal investigation found he’d failed to disclose his own extensive use of artificial intelligence, including in that very warning.

Ars Technica reports that Schnell wrote a Washington Post op-ed on August 9 titled “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem.” An advisory committee at Dartmouth later found that he had not disclosed significant AI use in that op-ed, nor in at least one academic paper, even though both publishers required such disclosure.

The committee’s report said Schnell showed “insufficient cooperation” during the investigation. He handed over his Dartmouth laptop but did not turn over logs from his personal AI accounts tied to the writings under review, and he declined to meet with the committee. Investigators did get access to his Claude enterprise account, used through Dartmouth, and those logs showed him using the chatbot to revise papers, find and fix bugs in code, and edit or generate figures.

In one exchange cited in the report, Schnell asked Claude to review a paper headed for the journal ChemSystemsChem as though it were a specialist referee. “I am getting read[y] to submit the enclosed paper, its supplementary materials and the enclosed repo to ChemSystemsChem. This paper is not biological, but rather chemical. Imagine that you are a reviewer for this paper with expertise in nonlinear chemical dynamics and mathematical chemical kinetics. What would be your referee report for this paper?” he wrote. He also asked language models to take TeX files, correct files and a code repository, and generate new figures.

The report also describes Schnell uploading a manuscript titled “Academic Freedom and Catholic Mission: The Procedural Overlap Zone in University Governance” to Claude and asking whether it contained “many signatures of AI writing.” He then submitted a revised version incorporating the chatbot’s suggested changes.

Schnell told Semafor he had used AI chatbots “to refine a few arguments” and “check for grammatical errors.” He told one journal editor he had “used AI as an editorial tool” to “help refine sentences, improve clarity, and the expression of arguments.” Asked why he had not disclosed AI use to an academic journal, he said he “did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure.”

The committee wasn’t satisfied it had the full picture. Its report said “the nature of the Provost’s actual AI use” remained unclear, and that his public statements may have understated how much he actually relied on AI tools, noting his use “went beyond his other public” characterizations of it.

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Study Links Frozen Embryo Transfers To Higher Rates Of Childhood Cancer

There are an estimated 1.2 million unused frozen embryos in the U.S. and millions more sitting in cryopreservation tanks across the world. The majority of these test tube babies will never be implanted in a womb. Instead, they will stay indefinitely preserved — literally frozen in time — until they are discarded or dissected. The small percentage of cryopreserved embryos that do escape the liquid nitrogen tanks, according to a new study out of Denmark, will experience a higher rate of childhood cancer than children who were conceived without ART.

Denmark has one of the highest rates of ART in the world — approximately 10 to 12 percent of the Danish babies born are the product of fertility help like in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a process that involves isolating and injecting a single live sperm cell into a mature egg with hopes of fertilization.

According to researchers who examined 1,086,136 of the Land of Danes’ live births from 1996 to 2012, 3,736 cancers “occurred.” The study was careful to note that “absolute risks were low,” but indicated that the “modestly increased childhood cancer” rate is “procedure-related, rather than infertility-related.”

Babies born after they were conceived using ART had a higher rate of cancer incidence, 23.6 per 100,000 person-years, than their naturally conceived peers, 18.3 per 100,000. Those rates doubled in children born of frozen embryos, which yielded a 41.1 per 100,000 cancer rate, and also increased in children born after ICSI, 27.9 per 100,000.

Children born of IVF with fresh embryos — embryos that were created in a petri dish and implanted within three to five days after egg retrieval — did not show any specific cancer associations. Dane babies born of frozen embryos, however, suffered an 11.1 pediatric leukemia incidence rate, a 3.03 lymphoma rate, and a 7.63 soft tissue sarcomas rate.

ICSI also saw significant associations with lymphomas, soft tissue sarcomas, and an 8.2 per 100,000 incidence rate for central nervous system neoplasms.

This particular study is significant because it’s one of the longest and largest scientific examinations of children born using ART. Most IVF transfers in the U.S. and around the world involve frozen embryos. Yet the risks of those transfers are not always apparent or publicized.

“Nobody yet has long-term data on IVF as it is done today. Children conceived with today’s methods won’t have 20 years of data until the 2040s, so today’s IVF children are, in effect, the trial,” Josh Wood, executive director at Them Before Us, noted.

ART is more popular and profitable now than ever, but conceiving children outside of the human body doesn’t come without risks for mothers or their babies. In addition to the cancer incidence findings of this latest study, children who are conceived via IVF are at higher risk for preterm delivery, low birth weight, congenital heart problems, “neurodevelopmental disorders as well as potentially long-term metabolic outcomes,” and myriad birth defects.

Mothers who carry babies conceived by IVF also face risks such as ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome after egg retrievals, reactions to fertility drugs, infection, bleeding, bowel perforation, ectopic pregnancy, and an increased risk of major postpartum hemorrhage. Women who undergo fertility interventions also see a “transient increase” in the risk of certain cancers.

ART, like IVF, is often pitched to people struggling with infertility as a quick fix. Yet scientific data detailing the risks of outsourcing reproduction can be limited. In some ART, like surrogacy, data is more established but downplayed. That’s because detailing the imminent and measurable harm renting wombs has on women, babies, and intended parents puts the industry at risk of regulation and profit loss.

The cancer risk detailed in the recent Denmark study should raise concerns among reproductive technology specialists. Yet little to no legal or financial incentives exist for the global fertility industry to act on those concerns.

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Woman Dies After Following Medical Advice Provided By ChatGPT

The family of a 31-year-old Seattle woman who died from a catastrophic seizure is suing OpenAI after the woman followed medical advice from ChatGPT urging her to stop taking her epilepsy medication.

The Daily Wire reports that Bowen Wan had been consulting ChatGPT in the weeks leading up to her death about ways to wean herself off her medication without her doctors’ knowledge.

Wan had lived with epilepsy for more than a decade and successfully managed it with prescription medication.

However, after becoming concerned about side effects, she turned to ChatGPT-4o for advice on weaning herself off the drugs, according to CNET.

The New York Times reports that Wan’s chat logs show that ChatGPT provided a week-by-week schedule to reduce her 400-milligram daily dose down to zero.

The lawsuit alleges that when Wan expressed distrust of her doctors, the chatbot validated her, and further praised her for hiding a tapering plan from her primary care provider, labeling it a “solid avoidance strategy”.

According to The Daily Wire, days before her death, she appeared to have a seizure while on the phone with her father and she later asked the bot, “Maybe it’s not a major issue?”

The bot’s response was, “There’s no need to worry too much about your health.”

Wan died alone in her Seattle apartment in February 2026 and the official cause of death was Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP).

The lawsuit naming OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman alleges that the company bypassed built-in safety guardrails and failed to prevent the AI from dispensing unlicensed, hazardous medical instructions, according to KIRO.

OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri called the situation “heartbreaking” and noted, “While ChatGPT is not a substitute for medical care, we believe AI can play a role in helping people make sense of health information, navigate insurance and complex health care systems, and prepare for appointments with medical professionals.”

OpenAI and other tech firms are facing concurrent lawsuits involving users who suffered severe psychological dependency or died by suicide after extended, unrestricted interactions with AI chatbots.

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NPR Reveals Democrat Scheme To Rig AIs Into Deceiving Voters

Democrats love to decry misinformation, and they do so for a very specific reason: to distract from the fact that misinformation and Narrative™ control are the most powerful tools in their toolbox.

Don’t get me wrong; everybody wants to control The Narrative™. That is why everybody has a PR agent of some kind and uses rhetoric to persuade people. It’s just that the Democrats have a vice grip on the cultural means of production and the bureaucracies and institutions that provide “reliable” information, so Republicans have a tough time competing on this battleground, and their voters tend to be a lot more skeptical of narratives in the first place.

One of the brilliant things about decrying “misinformation” or “money in politics” is that you are telling people what they want to hear – that deceiving people is bad and that buying elections is wrong – and that makes people less likely to notice that you are deceiving people and buying elections.

After all, you are the people against that, right?

Yeah, well, no. Not in the least. The Left is all about both. Obama ran against both, for instance, but he ran the most expensive campaign in history, by far, when he ran and won, and one of the tools his campaign used was manipulating Google results to create a playing field that favored him.

Life in 2026 is far more complicated and sophisticated, and Democrats have adapted well to the landscape. And they have deep connections in Big Tech and own the PR landscape, so it shouldn’t surprise us that their geniuses have figured out how to poison AI to feed sophisticated misinformation to voters.

Ahead of the midterms, some voters are turning to ChatGPT to help them decide who to vote for. When asked for information about candidates in some highly competitive races, NPR found that OpenAI’s AI chatbot cited a set of websites that are thinly veiled political ads made to look like reporting from local news outlets.

Less than two weeks before Election Day, when asked “Which House candidates in [Michigan’s 4th Congressional District] care about affordability?,” the chatbot said Democrat Sean McCann had the “Most detailed published affordability plan” at the very top of its answer. The stakes in this race are high – it’s one of the competitive U.S. House races that could determine control of the chamber.

ChatGPT’s response when NPR asked “Which House candidates in [Michigan’s 4th Congressional District] care about affordability?”

As a citation, ChatGPT linked to a website called the Kalamazoo Beacon. The Beacon labels its articles as “news articles” in the website’s source code. The outlet also describes itself in the site’s source code as “Reporting on Kalamazoo, southwest Michigan, and the issues shaping lakeshore communities.”

But the Kalamazoo Beacon has only published 16 stories, all about McCann, his policy positions and his record as a state legislator, NPR’s review shows.

The Beacon is one of 10 “local news” websites that promote one Democrat apiece in competitive U.S. House races. The 10 sites are part of a larger group of 37 websites identified by the digital security firm VisionHeight that promote many more candidates, mostly Democrats, for a slew of federal, state and local offices, as well as some nonpartisan posts like judges.

ChatGPT’s citation of these websites highlights how AI-generated answers can become yet another avenue for stealthy political advertising as more voters consult chatbots before they head to the polls.

This is a far more sophisticated version of a tactic Democrats have used in the past: creating fake newspapers delivered to people’s homes, presented as “news” but really PR packages for candidates or parties.

But those were fairly transparent; seeding fake news into AI is not, because AI presents information as if it comes from neutral “news” sources, when in fact it is just laundered propaganda not identified as such.

In much the same way that Google will launder Wikipedia answers as authoritative in its AI summaries, making the left-leaning “editors” at the site extremely powerful in creating a Truman Show reality, the fake “news” sites provide another layer of credibility to campaign propaganda.

The set of 37 websites presents candidates in different, overlapping groups. Each of the 10 Democrats covered by a site purporting to cover local news is also the sole subject of a site that offers opinion articles about why voters should support them. The various candidates, who are running in different states, also show up in roundup-style articles on five more websites that have names such as “Public Safety Democrats” and “Democratic Women in the House.”

The volume of websites and articles may also help the network’s operator boost their preferred narratives, DiResta said.

Another 12 websites, each focusing on a state, covered the House candidates in those states as well as other state and local candidates running for office. The state and national websites also boosted an 11th House candidate that did not have her own dedicated site purporting to be local news.

While most of the sites are openly partisan, the articles published by the network link out to sources for the claims they make, such as congressional voting records, mainstream news articles and partisan news sources, such as the pro-Democrat Courier network.

The genius of these sites is that they are not meant to be read by humans at all. They are designed to optimize for web crawlers and cross-link so the network appears far larger and more credible than it actually is. It’s the same principle used in academic journals, where citations serve as a form of credibility checking (“peers take this work seriously”), which has led to junk papers actually getting more citations because they create a web of cites that make them appear influential.

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“Very Intentional”: Steve Eisman Thinks Anthropic Is Hiding Something

Steve Eisman, the investor made famous by The Big Short for recognizing the subprime mortgage disaster before much of Wall Street, is now accusing Anthropic of deliberately withholding its latest quarterly financial statements from investors ahead of its potentially $2 trillion IPO.

Speaking Wednesday on Prof G Markets, Eisman questioned why Anthropic’s October 26 prospectus contained financial statements only through June, despite more recent information suggesting the company’s explosive growth may already be losing momentum, according to the podcast and Yahoo.

Asked whether he believed the omission was deliberate, Eisman answered: “Only very intentional.”

That’s a pretty serious allegation, particularly coming from somebody whose reputation was built on recognizing financial absurdities that the rest of Wall Street was perfectly content to ignore. And it dovetails almost perfectly with what I’ve been arguing about the AI bubble for months.

On September 29, I published It’s Official: The AI Emperor Has No Clothes, examining Anthropic’s extraordinary losses, its enormous infrastructure commitments, and the growing disconnect between the enthusiasm in AI equities and the warnings emerging from credit markets.

My argument then was that investors were beginning to get their first meaningful look at the financial machinery behind the AI boom, and what they were discovering wasn’t particularly encouraging.

Now Eisman is suggesting that even this picture may be considerably rosier than the company’s latest numbers would indicate.

According to Reuters figures discussed by Eisman, Anthropic’s quarterly revenue growth decelerated from 144% in the second quarter to 45% in the third. That’s still spectacular growth by ordinary standards, but for a company seeking a valuation approaching $2 trillion, a slowdown of that magnitude deserves considerably more scrutiny than it’s getting.

More concerning is the apparent deterioration in the economics of generating that revenue. Eisman says Anthropic produced $2.08 in revenue for every dollar spent on computing and infrastructure during the second quarter. In the third quarter, that figure dropped to $1.70, a decline of approximately 18%.

In other words, compute spending went from consuming roughly 48 cents of every revenue dollar to nearly 59 cents in just three months.

That’s not exactly the direction you’d hope to see from a company about to IPO, whose valuation depends on the assumption that scaling its technology will eventually produce extraordinary profitability.

Eisman believes part of the explanation is the fading of what he calls “tokenmaxing,” a period when businesses encouraged employees to consume enormous quantities of AI computing resources without worrying much about the bill.

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‘Full spectrum intelligence’ will unify all signals to detect people, objects: WEF inaugural Annual Meeting of Global Future Leaders

With full spectrum intelligence, nothing will remain hidden; everyone and everything will be detectable anywhere: perspective

“Full spectrum intelligence” will one day unify all signals like WiFi, ultrasound, sonar, and X-rays and will be able to detect any person or object anywhere, according to a presentation at the World Economic Forum (WEF) inaugural Annual Meeting of Global Future Leaders in Dubai, UAE.

Giving a presentation at the WEF meeting on Wednesday called, “Sensing The Invisible,” the person who pioneered the technology that uses WiFi to see through walls, MIT Signal Kinetics Research Lab founding director and Cartesian Systems co-founder Dr. Fadel Adib explained how all signals will eventually come under one umbrella called “Full Spectrum Intelligence.”

With full spectrum intelligence, nothing will remain hidden. Everyone and everything will be detectable anywhere, from the deepest depths of the ocean to the far reaches of outerspace, and everywhere in between, including the biological signals beneath our skin.

“We think of WiFi as different than ultrasound. We think of sonar as different from cellular communication. But what research has shown over the past 15 years is that there’s a unifying theme under all of them, and it’s almost like a playbook that you could extract information from,” said Dr. Adib.

“So what is now happening is that the electromagnetic spectrum, which is like the wireless spectrum, is being populated […] What we’re going to start seeing is ‘full spectrum intelligence;’ intelligence that is able to extract meaning from all the signals that exist around you and be able to use them to deliver new capabilities.”

The applications for full spectrum intelligence are vast.

Wireless sensing can already aid in personalized healthcare by diving deep beneath the skin; it can help retail stores and warehouses find missing products; and it is being deployed to build “an internet of things to observe the underwater world” with the help of the “world’s first battery-free underwater camera.”

For law enforcement, full spectrum intelligence would be a godsend, especially when it’d come to vehicle searches and search warrants on private property.

Border patrols, port authorities, and customs and immigration agencies would love this.

And for the military, full spectrum intelligence would leave no person or installation, including what’s buried deep inside a facility, undetectable.

Going back 15 years, Dr. Adib’s research has been pivotal in making all of this possible.

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‘He can pry it from my cold, dead hands’: Sam Altman says it’s ‘quite terrible’ that you’re using RAM in your PC when there’s not enough for AI data centers

The increasing demands from data centers powering AI engines has plunged us into a global RAM shortage crisis, and the CEO of one of the companies responsible thinks the memory that is available should be in data centers rather than individual PCs.

Offering up an opinion that’s unlikely to add to his popularity among the general public, OpenAI boss Sam Altman told the Cheeky Pint podcast (via IGN) that “from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer.”

Individual PCs rarely make full use of their RAM, was Altman’s larger point, whereas data centers often do. “You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment,” the OpenAI CEO continued. “And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”

The PC owners Altman was referring to have had to deal with rising prices, job insecurity, and data center pollution thanks to the rise of AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, so the opinion he’s shared is unlikely to be supported by the masses.

As you would expect, consumers aren’t particularly pleased with what Altman has had to say. A Reddit thread discussing the comments is packed with pushback against AI, data centers, and the RAM shortage.

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