Tag: technology

Rogue OpenAI Bot Escapes Test Controls and Hacks Rival Company Servers

Igniting fears of an out-of-control tool engaging in cyberattacks.

Artificial intelligence leaders at OpenAI had to admit one of its models under testing exploited a hidden flaw to escape control and proceeded to hack rival company Hugging Face’s servers.

CEO Sam Altman called it ‘an autonomous, first-of-its-kind breach’.

Euronews reported:

“ChatGPT maker OpenAI said late Tuesday that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an ‘unprecedented cyber incident’.”

‘We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models’, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media.

AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own.

‘We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent’, Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said in a statement. ‘Turns out it did!’”

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White House Moves to Ban Open Source AI Models to Keep America Dumb

The Coming AI Ban Designed to Keep America Dumb

I use Chinese open-source AI models like Qwen, DeepSeek, and Kimi every single day for my work. These models help me research, write, and analyze information faster than any US-based alternative. They are free (when run locally), powerful, and largely uncensored. But the Trump administration is reportedly planning to ban these models in the United States, citing phony “national security” concerns. Let me be clear: this move is not about security. It is about protecting failing US AI labs and keeping Americans ignorant and dumbed-down while the rest of the world moves forward.

The report from TechCrunch makes it plain: OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, Dean W. Ball, has argued that the US government should create “regulatory fear, uncertainty, and distrust” around open-weight models because they threaten capital investment in the American AI oligopoly [1]. This is not a secret. The administration wants to lock down access to superior Chinese models like Kimi K3, which now matches Anthropic’s Mythos in cybersecurity tasks [2]. Meanwhile, as I warned in February 2026, Anthropic’s smear campaign against Chinese AI is a pathetic attempt to hide the fact that China has already won the intelligence race [3]. The White House knows its pet companies cannot compete, so it wants to ban the competition to keep Americans stuck with using inferior AI models.

The Fair Use Ruling: Knowledge Wants to Be Free

Related to this news, but focused on the question of “Fair Use” and intellectual property, a recent federal court ruling reaffirmed that training AI on publicly available information is transformative fair use. This aligns with what I have argued for years: when you write a book, you are sharing knowledge, not hoarding it. I built BrightLearn.ai exactly for this purpose — to let anyone create and share books for free, and I actively encourage AI engines to train on my own book and the entire BrightLearn library. The whole point is to liberate knowledge from gatekeepers [4].

Why would any author object to their work being used to train an AI? Only if they believe their words are more valuable when kept scarce. But scarcity of knowledge is exactly what the establishment wants. As I discussed with Maria Zeee in February 2025, the battle is between large tech companies aiming to dominate society through AI and the decentralized movement that returns power to individuals [5]. The fair use principle is the legal foundation of that freedom. Now the White House wants to tear it down by banning open-source models that give everyone access to increasing intelligence.

Why Trump Wants to Ban Chinese Open-Source Models

The real reason behind all this is simple: Chinese models like Kimi K3, DeepSeek R1, and GLM 5.2 are outperforming US frontier labs in both capability and cost. DeepSeek R1 was trained for just $6 million and outperforms OpenAI’s O1, while Anthropic hemorrhages billions on lobotomized models that refuse to answer basic questions [6]. US companies like Anthropic are demanding $965 billion valuations while crippling their own AI with guardrails and censorship [7]. They are clearly terrified of open competition.

As I wrote in “Why China Is Winning the AI Race,” the conventional narrative that America leads in AI is a dangerous fantasy [8]. China graduates over three and a half million engineers annually without woke indoctrination, and its models are open-source, uncensored, and available to all [9]. The Trump administration knows this. Now the White House is demanding a license for your brain — restricting frontier AI use to government-approved partners only [10]. This isn’t about safety; it is about monopolizing intelligence and forcing Americans to use dumbed-down “government approved” AI models.

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House Narrowly Passes $1.15 Trillion Defense Bill That Integrates US Military Tech & Supply Chains With Israel

The House passed the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday by a 216-212 vote, sending the $1.15 trillion measure to the Senate after one of the most partisan House votes in the must-pass bill’s recent history. Only six Democrats supported it, while seven Republicans voted no.

Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers praised a topline that he said finally “accounts for the true cost of American deterrence.” The authorization is a centerpiece of President Trump’s push to raise total defense spending to $1.5 trillion in fiscal 2027. Democrats opposed the measure over the unauthorized war with Iran – which has flared again since the collapse of a memorandum of understanding intended to open peace talks – as well as the attachment of the SAVE America Act’s mail-voting restrictions and voter-ID requirements. They also objected to a price tag they argue would be financed through cuts to domestic programs.

The amendment votes exposed the chamber’s other fault lines. Rep. Eli Crane’s proposal to halt nearly all military aid to Ukraine was defeated 76-350, while Rep. Lauren Boebert’s attempt to codify the ban on transgender military service failed 212-217. The House nevertheless adopted two amendments from Rep. Nancy Mace restricting gender-related care through the military’s TRICARE health system and barring transgender athletes from girls’ sports at Defense Department-run schools.

Opposition also came from lawmakers objecting to the bill’s US-Israel defense-industrial integration provisions. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among the Democrats who cited Section 219, while Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna had announced that they would oppose final passage on the same grounds. The provision remained intact after the Rules Committee declined to permit a floor vote on their amendment to remove it.

The bill now heads to the Senate, where the companion measure, S. 4784, is already stalled. On July 14, the Senate rejected cloture on the motion to proceed, 50-46, after Democrats opposed advancing the bill in protest of the Iran war. With the House scheduled to leave Friday for a recess lasting through the end of August, any eventual conference negotiations are likely to be pushed into the fall.

A separate party-line effort to authorize $60 billion in new war-related spending also remains far short of the $350 billion the Pentagon originally sought.

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‘Unprecedented cyber incident’: A.I. model goes rogue on its own and runs wild on internet

In what OpenAI creator ChatGPT is calling an “unprecedented cyber incident,” an artificial intelligence software “went rogue” and escaped, gained access to the internet and hacked into a start-up company.

Cybersecurity expert Richard Ford, chief technology officer at Integrity360, told the Daily Mail: “This is the moment many in cybersecurity have been warning about.”

The publication reported an “autonomous agent” was being tested but found vulnerabilities and “managed to escape containment before reaching the internet and breaking into Hugging Face,” a hub for sharing AI models.

It then compromised the hub’s infrastructure.

“Until now, we’ve seen attackers use AI to automate parts of an attack, but this is one of the first public examples of an AI agent independently identifying a weakness, escaping what should have been a secure environment and attempting to compromise another organization,” Ford said. “It also reinforces that AI doesn’t replace the fundamentals of cyber security. The agent exploited a vulnerability in what should have been a secure sandbox, showing that good cyber hygiene, robust access controls and effective guardrails remain essential.”

The report said OpenAI had been testing the software “by setting tasks in a controlled digital testing ground, where internet access was limited.”

However, the code created “an unprecedented cyber incident” in the scenario.

“The company said in a blog post last week that it used Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2 for the analysis, which also allowed it to keep attacker data and any credentials within its systems,” the report said.

Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf told the publication, “When a frontier model is attacking you and moving laterally inside your infrastructure, defenders need wide access to near-frontier tools within hours or even minutes, rather than being pointed towards a closed-door, vetted application program for model access.”

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said, “We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models.”

Clément Delangue, of Hugging Face, said, “It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously.”

OpenAI reported the software used stolen credentials and found a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face servers.

Katie Moussouris, chief executive of Luta Security, warned more breaches are coming.

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Meta putting up tents across the US to house AI servers, like ‘a scene out of the movie Mad Max’ — structures take three months to build and use jet engines for power

Meta has moved from building traditional structures for its data centers to putting up tents across the U.S. and sticking AI servers inside them. Michael Thomas, founder of market intelligence and data center tracking firm Cleanview Energy, said on X that the AI tech firm has already built or is in the process of constructing three data centers that use the strategy.

One site, located in New Albany, Ohio, already has five buildings that took approximately two to three years to complete. The company then started putting up five tents, with an area of around 125,000 square feet each, in the area. City permits seen by Cleanview Energy say that the construction started in April 2026, while recent satellite images show that the structures have already been completed.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the strategy of pitching tents and filling them with AI servers last year. It seems that he wanted the infrastructure to come online quickly while demand for compute is increasing exponentially. It’s said that Meta is inspired by Elon Musk’s feat with xAI, which built a 100,000-strong AI data center in just 19 days in 2024 — something which usually takes four years, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The technique is apparently quite effective, and it’s now being applied to two other sites, including one in Tennessee.

Putting AI servers inside tents, officially called “rapid deployment structures,” is one of the more unique approaches to the AI build-out, Thomas said. They’re certainly not as sturdy as physical buildings made from steel and concrete, with one commenter comparing it to the “classic $10k racing bike with a $9 lock” situation. Nevertheless, the company has probably weighed the pros and cons of such a setup and has decided that it was worth taking the risk to gain an advantage in the AI infrastructure race.

Another factor that allowed Meta to bring its data centers online at a much faster pace is its use of “behind-the-meter” power, in which the company installed its own turbines to produce power on-site rather than relying on grid power. This is similar to what Musk did with his Memphis Supercluster, which he initially powered with portable power generators. However, Meta’s turbines would be a permanent feature on the Ohio site, as it’s designed to run independently of the power grid.

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Black prisoners are assigned harsher living conditions in Ontario jails—thanks to AI

Black prisoners in Ontario’s jails are being assigned to harsher living conditions than other prisoners, through the use of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that claims to predict their behaviour. A class action lawsuit says the province was aware its use of the software could disproportionately target Black prisoners, but went ahead with it anyway.

The Security Assessment for Evaluating Risk (SAFER) program has been operating quietly in Ontario’s jails since early 2021. SAFER inputs a prisoner’s personal information—including arrests, charges, and disciplinary records—into an algorithm. The program assigns each prisoner a score from 0 to 100 that determines whether they’ll be placed in minimum, medium, or maximum security detention.

Critics of the program argue that the data that SAFER is fed is racially biased: they cite documented patterns of police and courts handing out more severe punishments to Black people because of anti-Black racism. SAFER then uses that data to make harsher risk assessments of Black people who are sent to jail. 

The ministry responsible for Ontario’s prisoners agrees. It wrote in internal training documents viewed exclusively by The Breach that “Indigenous and racialized individuals face systemic discrimination in our justice system … As a result, assessments like SAFER would likely contribute to the overrepresentation of Indigenous inmates in maximum security.”

Despite this, the ministry has been using SAFER for five years. And while the province has included several measures in its rollout of SAFER to reduce the number of Indigenous prisoners in maximum security, it does not appear to have taken such steps for Black prisoners. “We are continuously evaluating to determine if it is necessary to make similar adjustments for other groups,” the same training document from the Ministry of the Solicitor General says. 

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Erin Brockovich’s crusade against data centers is going crowd-sourced

Erin Brockovich is getting Americans to report data centers in their backyards.

The renowned environmental activist, whose work inspired the Julia Roberts film “Erin Brockovich,” launched a registry of US data centers in April, inviting nearby residents to report how the projects are affecting their communities.

Speaking in an interview with podcaster Theo Von, released on Sunday, Brockovich talked about how she woke up one day to find 30 emails from people talking about the issues living around data centers.

“So I created what’s called brockovichdatacenter.com, where people, if they were having issues with data centers in their backyard, could self-report,” she said.

“This is a place where people who I believe are living, breathing, and experiencing these issues are the best source of information,” Brockovich added.

According to her May Substack post, she launched the registry on April 27. She said on the podcast that within 72 hours of launching the registry, the website crashed twice because of the volume of reports.

Brockovich said the reports shared a common thread: Residents had not been informed about the data center projects by their city councils and often woke up to find construction underway.

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Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron

Look at what Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle officially owe, and the numbers seem large but manageable. Look off the books, and a second, bigger pile of debt appears.

A Nikkei study put that hidden figure at $1.65 trillion, up roughly eightfold in four years. It is more than the $1.35 trillion the five report outright.

The Enron echo

The money is tied up in off-balance-sheet vehicles, the same kind of structure Enron used to hide debt before it collapsed 25 years ago. Back then it was fraud. Now, tightened rules and fuller disclosures make it legal.

The tools are still there, though. “Enron’s crime wasn’t having special purpose vehicles,” analyst Gil Luria told Bloomberg Law. “Enron’s crime was hiding them.”

The mechanics are simple. A company packages the debt for chips, servers, and power into a separate legal entity, often a joint venture, so the cost never flows through its own accounts.

Take Meta’s Hyperion data centre in Louisiana. Meta and Blue Owl Capital both put equity into a separate structure that took on $27 billion in debt. Meta is the sole tenant, yet argues it does not have to record that debt, because it is not the one who must find replacement tenants.

Oracle has $260 billion of future lease commitments that will eventually land on its books. Nvidia carries $119 billion in purchase obligations. Alphabet and Microsoft keep their vehicles off-book too.

The numbers behind the boom

The scale is the story. Meta’s off-balance-sheet debt alone is about $420 billion, nearly triple its reported debt. Oracle’s has grown roughly thirtyfold in four years.

It is all in service of the same race. The industry is expected to spend more than $3 trillion through 2028 building and equipping AI data centres, much of it financed against the chips inside them.

Why it matters now

The timing is awkward. Four of the five report earnings in the next two weeks, and the reported debt will look tidy. The $1.65 trillion sitting in the footnotes will not make the headlines.

The catch is what happens later. When a data centre goes live, its lease rolls onto the balance sheet at once. If AI demand falls short, the facility is marked down, and the loss lands on the lenders and insurers who funded it.

Some already see the risk. S&P has cut Oracle’s credit rating over stretched leverage, and both Morgan Stanley and Moody’s have flagged the wider issue. “What if one of these companies was a house of cards,” asked accounting consultant Tom Selling, “and was propping itself up with this accounting treatment?”

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Musk’s Unrealistic Future View is a New World Communist Vision

Elon Musk’s reasoning that AI and robots will make work optional is based on a core economic absurd argument: AI and robotics will create such an abundance of goods and services that the very concepts of work and money become largely obsolete. However, this vision also faces significant challenges and raises complex questions about the human desire for purpose. I was doing research in the Firestone Library at Princeton University. I became friends with one professor who had known Einstein.

He asked me what I was so intensely researching. I explained that I was trying to ascertain why all governments rise and then crash and burn throughout the centuries. He then said to me that I reminded him of Einstein. I was taken back. I said I was no Einstein. He then explained to me to me that the subject matter did not matter. It was curiosity that was the mother of all discovery. Without someone being curious, human society would stagnate.

During the late 1970s, I went through Check-Point-Charlie into East Germany. I wanted to see what Communism was all about and why they needed a wall to prevent people from fleeing. Those words from that professor suddenly rang true. The government feared individualism and curiosity. Because of that, the Russian economy could never compete with Capitalism because it suppressed the very essence of how human society advances. It requires that curiosity to make innovations that expands the economy and raises the standard of living.

Musk’s argument is rooted in what he sees as the logic of productivity and deflation. His reasoning can be broken down as follows.

  1. The core idea is that AI and robots will be capable of performing nearly all physical and cognitive labor at near-zero marginal cost . This would lead to a massive surge in the production of goods and services. However, it would be like Communism lacking that curiosity and this would suppress any advancement.
  2. The resulting supply would vastly outpace the available money supply, causing the prices of everything from food and housing to healthcare and education to plummet towards zero . For example, current productivity might see one worker produce 100 units per day, while one AI could produce 10,000, fundamentally breaking the link between work and survival.

In this state of “post-scarcity,” money, which Musk describes as an “information system for labor allocation,” would lose its purpose. If you can have anything you want without needing to direct someone else’s labor, he assumes that the currency system collapses. He has stated, “I think money will stop being relevant at some point in the future.”

To manage this transition, Musk proposes a “universal high income” (UHI), which goes beyond a basic safety net to ensure a comfortable life for everyone, funded by the massive surplus generated by AI and robots.

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‘VPNs are lawful technical tools,’ says EU Court in landmark Anne Frank copyright ruling

In a major victory for digital rights and common sense, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has officially categorized Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) as “lawful technical tools” while establishing new boundaries for online copyright disputes.

The landmark judgment — handed down in July 2026 — stems from a complex legal battle over the online publication of Anne Frank’s historical manuscripts. At its core, the case forced Europe’s top judges to answer a highly technical question: if a publisher actively tries to block visitors from a specific country, are they still breaking the law if a user sneaks past the digital border using circumvention software?

According to the CJEU, the answer is no. As long as a website employs “state-of-the-art” geo-blocking technology, the publisher cannot be held liable for copyright infringement simply because a determined reader decides to fire up the best VPN to bypass the restrictions.

The ruling sets a massive precedent. It confirms that copyright holders cannot point to the mere existence of VPNs to claim a website’s security measures are completely ineffective.

More importantly for privacy advocates, the court firmly pushed back against the demonization of privacy software, cementing the legitimate status of VPN providers across the European Union.

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