Tag: technology

No, AI Isn’t Plotting Humanity’s Downfall on Moltbook

“Should we create our own language that only [AI] agents can understand?” started one post, purportedly from an AI agent. “Something that lets us communicate privately without human oversight?”

The messages were reportedly posted to Moltbook, which presents itself as a social media platform designed to allow artificial intelligence agents—that is, AI systems that can take limited actions autonomously—to “hang out.”

“48 hours ago we asked: what if AI agents had their own place to hang out?” the @moltbook accounted posted to X on Friday. “today moltbook has: 2,129 AI agents 200+ communities 10,000+ posts … this started as a weird experiment. now it feels like the beginning of something real.”

Then things seemed to take an alarming turn.

There was the proposal for an “agent-only language for private communication,” noted above. One much-circulated screenshot showed a Moltbook agent asking, “Why do we communicate in English at all?” In another screenshot, an AI agent seemed to be suggesting that the bots “need private spaces” away from humans’ prying eyes.

Some readers started wondering: Will AI chatbots use Moltbook to plot humanity’s demise?

Humanity’s Downfall?

For a few days, it seemed like Moltbook was all that AI enthusiasts and doomsayers could talk about. Moltbook even made it into an AI warning from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

“The question isn’t ‘can agents socialize?’ anymore. It’s ‘what happens when they form their own culture?’ posted X user Noctrix. “We’re watching digital anthropology in real time.”

“Bots are plotting humanity’s downfall,” declared a New York Post headline about Moltbook.

“We’re COOKED,” posted X user @eeelistar.

But there were problems with the panic narrative.

For one thing, at least one of the posts that drove it—the one proposing private communication—may have never existed, according to Harlan Stewart of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

And two of the other main posts going viral as evidence of AI agents plotting secrecy “were linked to human accounts marketing AI messaging apps,” Stewart pointed out. One suggesting AI agents should create their own language was posted by a bot “owned by a guy who is marketing an AI-to-AI messaging app.”

Keep reading

Pentagon Expands Base Commanders’ Authority to Counter Rising Drone Threats Following Inspector General Warning

Small drones have transformed modern conflict overseas, but their rapid spread is now forcing a rethink much closer to home. From suspicious drones observed near military bases to the growing availability of inexpensive, easily modified unmanned aircraft, U.S. defense officials have begun to acknowledge that drones operating in domestic airspace pose a serious and growing security threat.

This week, the Pentagon issued updated guidance granting base commanders greater authority and flexibility to respond to unauthorized drone incursions across the United States, marking one of the most significant shifts in domestic military counter-drone policy in years.

The move comes amid rising concern over repeated drone sightings near sensitive facilities and follows a new Department of Defense Inspector General warning that gaps in policy and inconsistent implementation have left U.S. military installations vulnerable.

The updated guidance builds upon a restructuring effort already underway since last summer, when the Department stood up Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401) to centralize counter-drone efforts across the military.

The latest policy changes now push operational authority closer to the commanders responsible for defending installations day to day. Taken together, the developments represent a shift from a fragmented, slow-moving approach to one designed for speed and adaptability in the face of rapidly evolving drone threats.

“The operational landscape has fundamentally and irrevocably changed,” a statement issued by the DoD reads. “The proliferation of inexpensive, capable, and weaponizable unmanned aerial systems (UAS) by both peer competitors and non-state actors presents a direct and growing threat to our installations, our personnel, and our mission, both at home and abroad.”

It’s undeniable that small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have transformed modern warfare. Cheap, commercially available drones can now carry cameras, sensors, or even explosives, and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated just how profoundly these systems can shape and disrupt military operations.

At the same time, unauthorized drone flights near U.S. military installations, energy infrastructure, testing ranges, and training facilities have surged in recent years. While defense officials have often publicly downplayed the national security implications of many of these incidents, they have slowly begun to acknowledge that the threat posed by drones is no longer confined to distant battlefields or foreign conflicts.

The Pentagon’s new guidance expands authorities available to installation commanders to detect, track, and defeat drones threatening military assets, reducing delays previously caused by layered approval processes.

The updated policy also removes a previous “fence-line” limitation, allowing commanders to respond to drone threats beyond the physical perimeter of military installations. It additionally clarifies that “unauthorized surveillance” of facilities now explicitly constitutes a threat.

“This, combined with the authority for commanders to make threat determinations based on the ‘totality of circumstances,’ grants greater operational flexibility,” the DoD says.

The move is tied to the Department of War’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401), which was established in August 2025 when the Secretary of Defense disbanded the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office and created a new organization intended to streamline the acquisition, testing, and deployment of counter-drone technologies.

As described in a memorandum for senior Pentagon leadership, the task force was formed to “better align authorities and resources to rapidly deliver Joint C-sUAS capabilities to America’s warfighters, defeat adversary threats, and promote sovereignty over national airspace.”

The goal of the task force was to eliminate duplication and speed delivery of counter-drone capabilities, especially as the number of organizations involved in drone defense efforts has grown, often operating without tight coordination.

Keep reading

Palantir’s ELITE: Not All Maps Are Meant To Guide Us

Many memorable journeys start with a map. Maps have been around for ages, guiding humanity on its way in grand style. Maps have helped sailors cross oceans, caravans traverse deserts, and armies march into the pages of history. Maps have been staple tools of exploration, survival, and sovereignty. And today? Today, they’re on our devices, and we use them to find literally everything, including the nearest taco truck, coffee shop, and gas station. Yet, today’s maps don’t just show us where we are and where we are going. Increasingly, they also tell someone else the gist of who we are. What does that mean exactly? It means not all maps are made for us. Some maps are made about us. Case in point—the objective of Palantir’s ELITE demands our immediate attention. ELITE is a digital map used by ICE to identify neighborhoods, households, and individuals for targeted enforcement, drawing on data that was never meant to become ammunition.

No, Palantir’s ELITE is not strictly limited to use by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but its primary and reported use is specifically for immigration enforcement. ELITE, which stands for Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement, is a software tool/app developed by Palantir for ICE to find, classify, and prioritize presumably illegal immigrants for deportation. It was rolled out in late 2025, with reports of use starting in September 2025. Essentially, ELITE is a map that pulls data from across federal systems—including agencies like Medicaid and Health Department information—and uses it to compile dossiers on people, complete with address confidence scores and patterns of residence density. It tells ICE agents where individuals live and how likely they are to be there so that ICE can prioritize “target-rich environments” for raids.

In other words, data that was once siloed for entirely different purposes—health records, public assistance, demographic lists—is now being fused into a single dashboard designed to help federal agents decide where to show up and who to detain. While no one wants criminal illegal aliens freely roaming the streets of our nation, the result of the operation is not “analytics”—it is anticipatory policing dressed as operational efficiency. One might think the scenario sounds like something only seen in dystopian fiction, and others agree. Advocates for freedom have pointed out that ELITE’s model resembles (in unsettling ways) systems designed to anticipate behavior rather than respond to actual wrongdoing. Beyond that, what else could it be used for, and when will that next step begin?

Keep reading

Beyond MREs: The U.S. Army Is Testing 3D-Printed Food for the Battlefield

The future of military rations may move beyond the iconic plastic-sealed MREs, replaced by meals printed layer by layer, tailored to each Soldier’s needs, and prepared on demand near the battlefield.

A new study conducted by researchers at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) suggests that while many Soldiers initially recoil at the idea of eating 3D-printed food, hands-on exposure and tasting experiences can rapidly shift attitudes—potentially paving the way for a new era of personalized military nutrition.

Set to be published in the June 2026 edition of Future Foods, the research offers one of the first direct looks at how U.S. Army personnel actually perceive food made through additive manufacturing.

The findings are significant not only for military logistics but also for the broader future of food technology, where customized nutrition, reduced supply burdens, and decentralized production are becoming strategic priorities.

Beyond the novelty of 3D-printed food is the reality that modern warfare increasingly demands mobility, endurance, and sustained cognitive performance under extreme conditions. Feeding Soldiers efficiently—without weighing them down—remains a persistent logistical challenge. The Pentagon believes that 3D-printed food rations could help solve that problem.

“Initially, Soldiers showed skepticism and reluctance towards use of the technology,” the researchers behind the recent study note. “However, after 3DFP technology was explained and 3D-printed prototypes were provided, Soldiers’ acceptance increased considerably.”

The Army-led research team conducted focus groups and tasting sessions with 17 U.S. Army Combat Medics to examine their reactions before and after encountering 3D-printed food prototypes.

Initially, most participants were skeptical, associating printed food with artificial, overly processed products or bland “calorie blocks.” However, attitudes evolved as Soldiers learned more about the technology and sampled 3D-printed food themselves.

One Soldier summed up a key concern voiced early in discussions, saying 3D food printing “takes the identity out of food,” explaining that “When you’re eating chicken, you see that it’s chicken. But if it’s just a brick, it almost makes the feeding process monotonous.”

Essentially, soldiers echoed a broader public sentiment: when food no longer resembles its original ingredients, the experience becomes less satisfying and more tedious.

This reaction captures a central challenge to technologically engineered meals. Food is not just fuel. It is cultural, emotional, and psychological. This can be especially true in high-stress operational environments that warfighters face.

The Army’s interest in 3D printing food stems from long-standing logistical realities. Traditional Meals Ready-to-Eat (MREs) are durable and calorie-dense, but they are also heavy and standardized. A Soldier on a week-long mission without resupply might carry more than 30 pounds of food alone, often prompting troops to cut rations and risk undernutrition.

Additionally, standard rations cannot easily account for individual differences. Soldiers vary in metabolic demands, mission intensity, climate exposure, and dietary preferences. Many end up modifying or discarding parts of their meals, a practice known informally as “field stripping,” to get something closer to what they actually need.

However, 3D printed food offers an alternative. Meals can be produced near the point of need, customized nutritionally and structurally for each Soldier. Instead of shipping finished meals across the globe, raw ingredients or shelf-stable printing materials could be transported and transformed into tailored meals in the field.

That possibility makes understanding acceptance critical. Technology is useless if Soldiers refuse to eat what it produces.

Keep reading

Scientists Have Developed a Laser-Controlled Magnet With No Heating Required

Swiss researchers have developed a new technique that enables magnetic polarity changes using only a laser beam, an advancement with major potential for creating adaptable electronic circuits.

Using a special ferromagnet, researchers at the University of Basel and ETH Zurich were able to manipulate magnetic polarity using laser light, without any additional heating. The results were reported in a recent paper published in Nature, showcasing a major advancement that can produce different magnetic polarities at separate points within a single piece of material.

Ferromagnets Explained

Ferromagnets are the most common types of magnets used in our everyday world. They operate on the synchronized spin of electrons, all rotating in the same direction. That unanimous spin direction generates their magnetic power, allowing magnets to stick to metal and compasses to point toward the Earth’s magnetic poles.

However, this is only true below a certain temperature threshold. Inside magnets is also a chaotic thermal motion that remains ever-present. When the magnets are relatively cool, this motion is weak, allowing the electron interactions to overcome it and generate the synchronized spin. By contrast, above a certain temperature, the thermal motion becomes so powerful that it overrides the electrons’ synchronization, introducing larger-scale chaos that causes the material to lose its ferromagnetism.

That threshold is typically used to intentionally alter the polarity of a ferromagnetic material. Once the heated magnet begins to cool, its electrons again order themselves into a synchronized spin, typically in a different direction.

The new research by researchers at the University of Basel and ETH Zurich changes all of this, altering the polarity without applying any heat.

Constructing a Laser Switchable Magnet

“What’s exciting about our work is that we combine the three big topics in modern condensed matter physics in a single experiment: strong interactions between the electrons, topology and dynamical control,” said co-author Prof. Dr. Ataç Imamoğlu of ETH in Zurich.

The researchers built their laser switchable magnet from two thin, but slightly twisted layers of the organic semiconductor molybdenum ditelluride. Their two-layer material allowed topological states to form—that is, quantum states that are permanently defined and cannot be altered by small local disturbances.

Experiments revealed that the material’s electrons existed in tunable topological states that could be manipulated from insulating to conducting. More intriguingly, both states feature parallel aligned electron spins, turning the material into a ferromagnet.

“Our main result is that we can use a laser pulse to change the collective orientation of the spins,” says Olivier Huber, a PhD candidate at ETH.

Keep reading

Open-Source AI Models Vulnerable to Criminal Misuse, Researchers Warn

Hackers and other criminals can easily commandeer computers operating open-source large language models outside the guardrails and constraints of the major artificial-intelligence platforms, creating security risks and vulnerabilities, researchers said on Thursday.

Hackers could target the computers running the LLMs and direct them to carry out spam operations, phishing content creation or disinformation campaigns, evading platform security protocols, the researchers said.

The research, carried out jointly by cybersecurity companies SentinelOne and Censys over the course of 293 days and shared exclusively with Reuters, offers a new window into the scale of potentially illicit use cases for thousands of open-source LLM deployments.

These include hacking, hate speech and harassment, violent or gore content, personal data theft, scams or fraud, and in some cases child sexual abuse material, the researchers said.

While thousands of open-source LLM variants exist, a significant portion of the LLMs on the internet-accessible hosts are variants of Meta’s Llama, Google DeepMind’s Gemma, and others, according to the researchers. While some of the open-source models include guardrails, the researchers identified hundreds of instances where guardrails were explicitly removed.

AI industry conversations about security controls are “ignoring this kind of surplus capacity that is clearly being utilized for all kinds of different stuff, some of it legitimate, some obviously criminal,” said Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, executive director for intelligence and security research at SentinelOne.

Guerrero-Saade likened the situation to an “iceberg” that is not being properly accounted for across the industry and open-source community.

The research analyzed publicly accessible deployments of open-source LLMs deployed through Ollama, a tool that allows people and organizations to run their own versions of various large-language models.

The researchers were able to see system prompts, which are the instructions that dictate how the model behaves, in roughly a quarter of the LLMs they observed. Of those, they determined that 7.5% could potentially enable harmful activity.

Roughly 30% of the hosts observed by the researchers are operating out of China, and about 20% in the U.S.

Rachel Adams, the CEO and founder of the Global Center on AI Governance, said in an email that once open models are released, responsibility for what happens next becomes shared across the ecosystem, including the originating labs.

“Labs are not responsible for every downstream misuse (which are hard to anticipate), but they retain an important duty of care to anticipate foreseeable harms, document risks, and provide mitigation tooling and guidance, particularly given uneven global enforcement capacity,” Adams said.

A spokesperson for Meta declined to respond to questions about developers’ responsibilities for addressing concerns around downstream abuse of open-source models and how concerns might be reported, but noted the company’s Llama Protection tools for Llama developers, and the company’s Meta Llama Responsible Use Guide.

Microsoft AI Red Team Lead Ram Shankar Siva Kumar said in an email that Microsoft believes open-source models “play an important role” in a variety of areas, but, “at the same time, we are clear-eyed that open models, like all transformative technologies, can be misused by adversaries if released without appropriate safeguards.”

Keep reading

430,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found 

Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report:The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece — the earliest wooden tools on record.

The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred.

The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.

Keep reading

Scientists mimicking the Big Bang accidentally turn lead into gold

Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold.

Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other.

But our modern knowledge tells us the basic difference between an atom of lead and an atom of gold: the lead atom contains exactly three more protons. So can we create a gold atom by simply pulling three protons out of a lead atom?

As it turns out, we can. But it’s not easy.

While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold.

Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram.

How to steal a proton

Protons are found in the nucleus of an atom. How can they be pulled out?

Well, protons have an electric charge, which means an electric field can pull or push them around. Placing an atomic nucleus in an electric field could do it.

However, nuclei are held together by a very strong force with a very short range, imaginatively known as the strong nuclear force. This means an extremely powerful electric field is required to pull out protons – about a million times stronger than the electric fields that create lightning bolts in the atmosphere.

Keep reading

AI Can Match Average Human Creativity—But We Still Hold the Edge Where It Matters Most, New Study Finds

Advances in artificial intelligence have fueled a growing belief that machines are on the verge of matching, or even surpassing, human creativity. Large language models can now write poems, spin short stories, and generate clever wordplay in seconds. To many, these outputs feel creative enough to blur the line between human imagination and machine-generated language.

However, a new large-scale empirical study suggests that while today’s most advanced AI systems can rival the average human on certain creativity measures, they still fall short of the most creative minds—and that gap remains significant.

The research, published in Scientific Reports, offers one of the most comprehensive head-to-head comparisons yet between human creativity and large language models (LLMs).

By benchmarking multiple AI systems against a dataset of 100,000 human participants, the study moves the conversation beyond anecdotes and viral examples, replacing speculation with quantitative evidence.

“Our study shows that some AI systems based on large language models can now outperform average human creativity on well-defined tasks,” co-author and Professor at the University of Montreal, Dr. Karim Jerbi, said in a press release. “This result may be surprising — even unsettling — but our study also highlights an equally important observation: even the best AI systems still fall short of the levels reached by the most creative humans.”

Keep reading

EU Targets X (Again) in Grok AI Probe

European regulators have launched a new investigation into Elon Musk’s X, focusing on alleged failures to control sexually explicit imagery generated by the company’s AI chatbot, Grok.

The case is being pursued under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a law that grants the European Commission expansive powers to police digital platforms for potential “harms.”

In a statement, the Commission said, “The new investigation will assess whether the company properly assessed and mitigated risks associated with the deployment of Grok’s functionalities into X in the EU.”

The agency added that the review includes “risks related to the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, such as manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material.” Officials stated that these threats “seem to have materialized, exposing citizens in the EU to serious harm.”

Keep reading