Tag: technology

The War Department Announces Agreements With Leading AI Companies To Deploy Capabilities On Classified Networks

The War Department has entered into agreements with seven of the world’s leading frontier artificial intelligence companies, SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, to deploy their advanced AI capabilities on the Department’s classified networks for lawful operational use.

These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare.

Integrating secure frontier AI capabilities into the Department’s Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Impact Level 7 (IL7) network environments will streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments. SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services will provide resources to deploy their capabilities on both IL6 and IL7 environments.

This effort supports the Department’s AI Acceleration Strategy by enabling new capabilities across its three core tenets of warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise operations.

GenAI.mil, the War Department’s official AI platform, is already demonstrating the scale and impact of this acceleration. Over 1.3 million Department personnel have used the platform, generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents in only five months. Warfighters, civilians, and contractors are putting these capabilities to practical use right now, cutting many tasks from months to days.

The Department will continue to build an architecture that prevents AI vendor lock and ensures long-term flexibility for the Joint Force. Access to a diverse suite of AI capabilities from across the resilient American technology stack will give warfighters the tools they need to act with confidence and safeguard the nation against any threat.

Together, the War Department and these strategic partners share the conviction that American leadership in AI is indispensable to national security. This leadership depends on a thriving domestic ecosystem of capable model developers that enable the full and effective use of their capabilities in support of Department missions.

As mandated by President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, the Department will continue to envelop our warfighters with advanced AI to meet the unprecedented emerging threats of tomorrow and to strengthen our Arsenal of Freedom.

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New robot ants work like real insects to build and dismantle on their own

It is based on “exbodied intelligence,” where coordination arises from interacting with the environment rather than complex internal programming.

Researchers at Harvard have developed a fleet of robotic ants that mimic the self-organizing behavior of social insects to build and dismantle structures without blueprints or central leadership.

Dubbed “RAnts”, these robotic ants have been designed by researchers from the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). 

These are simple, decentralized robots that can spontaneously organize to build — and just as easily destroy — complex structures.

Instead of chemical pheromones, these robots use light fields (photormones) to communicate.

“Our new study shows how simple, local rules can lead to the emergence of complex task completion that is self-organized and thus robust and adaptive,” said Professor L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Physics at SEAS and FAS.

“We also introduce the concept of exbodied intelligence, where collective cognition arises not solely from individual agents, but from their ongoing interaction with an evolving environment,” Mahadevan added.

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Italy’s Meloni Denounces Deepfake Lingerie Picture of Her That’s Gone Viral

Meloni said that the fake image ‘improved’ her.

As the first female Prime Minister of Italy, conservative Giorgia Meloni battles all sorts of prejudices: from her being a woman to her being a right-winger.

One of the weapons used against her by unscrupulous trolls and enemies is deepfakes.

Today, Meloni denounced the circulation of a deepfake photo of her in bed, wearing lingerie.

The Prime Minister complained that these AI images are being used to attack her.

Associated Press reported:

“Meloni shared the photo in question on Facebook. She included with it an apparent post from someone named Roberto who apparently had himself shared it on social media with the commentary that Meloni should be ‘ashamed’ of herself.

Meloni warned against sharing such images on social media without verifying them.

[…] It wasn’t immediately clear if Meloni would report the incident to law enforcement, as she was urged to do by people commenting on her post. She acknowledged though that the photo manipulation ‘actually made me look a lot better’.”

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UFO-linked scientist claimed a top secret energy weapon blasted her before her death… now the Pentagon admits they are real

A futuristic weapon often dismissed as a conspiracy theory has been publicly acknowledged as being part of the US military’s vast arsenal. 

The US Department of War chose ‘Star Wars Day’ on May 4 to state that ‘directed energy weapons are a fine addition to our arsenal.’

Directed energy weapons are devices capable of firing rays of energy, such as microwaves, at a target. Simply put, they fire lasers at the enemy, often to scramble and physically damage electronic equipment.

In the Pentagon’s post on social media, they confirmed that DEWs produced ‘beams of concentrated electromagnetic energy or atomic or subatomic particles.’

Monday’s post cemented decades of rumors that the military has been working on futuristic weaponry that was once thought of as science fiction or unrealistic experiments by Pentagon researchers.

However, the revelation comes as stunning claims from a dead scientist were recently unearthed, alleging that she was the target and victim of a DEW attack in her own home in 2022.

Amy Eskridge, who reportedly took her own life on June 11, 2022 at age 34, shared shocking images that allegedly showed the damage these weapons could cause to the human body.

Pictures and text messages shared with the Daily Mail by a former British intelligence officer revealed burned skin, lesions and painful blisters Eskridge allegedly suffered after a beam from a DEW was fired into her home by an unknown assailant.

Franc Milburn, a retired paratrooper, investigated the Eskridge case and concluded she was ‘murdered by a “private aerospace company”‘ to stop her research on futuristic propulsion technology and national security threats.

The images shared by Milburn also revealed how a microwave from an alleged DEW scorched the window of Eskridge’s Huntsville, Alabama home as the beam passed through the glass.

Eskridge’s death was reportedly ruled a suicide from a gunshot wound to the head, but the scientist allegedly consulted a former CIA weapons expert about the DEW attack in early 2022.

On May 19, 2022, Milburn said Eskridge messaged him to say: ‘My ex-CIA weapons guy on my team saw my hands when they were burned really badly a couple months ago, and he saw that window pane in person,’ she wrote.

‘He said he had built things like that, and that it was most likely an RF k-band emitter run by five car batteries strung together from inside an SUV.’

While there has been no physical evidence to confirm Eskridge and Milburn’s claims regarding a DEW attack, the theory that such a weapon uses a k-band emitter does match what the military is currently using in its laser weapon tests.

The k-band is a specific range of invisible radio waves, or microwaves, that military directed energy weapons can use to send out powerful beams at enemy targets.

These beams can travel well, focus tightly on a target and are especially good at damaging electronics inside drones, missiles or vehicles from a distance.

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How a Bill Banning AI Companions for Kids Could Usher in Widespread ID Checks Online

Sen. Josh Hawley’s Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act advanced out of the Senate Judiciary committee last week. “A Trojan horse for universal online ID checks,” is how Jibran Ludwig of Fight for the Future described it.

The bill would require anyone using an AI chatbot to provide proof of identity and ban minors from interacting with many sorts of AI chatbots entirely.

Unlike some social media age verification bills, it would give parents no right to opt out of the rules the federal government sets on their kids’ technology use.

The GUARD Act is co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.), who—like Hawley—has long been a champ at moral panic around technology. (Cue: Bipartisan is just another word for really bad idea…)

And while some on the Senate Judiciary Committee expressed concerns about privacy or how this could actually backfire and harm minors, those senators still voted to advance the bill. It “easily passed in committee,” notes The Hill, despite some senators’ reservations:

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who voted yes, said there are concerns about “potential privacy and security risks” with the age-verification component, suggesting it may need to be “fine-tuned.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who supported various kids online safety bills, said he would vote yes but noted the bill needs “some revisions.”

Cruz was concerned the bill would completely ban all AI chatbots for minors, noting their potential benefits. Hawley clarified the bill does not ban all AI chatbots for minors, but rather it “prevents AI chatbots that engage with minors from pushing sexually explicit material to the minor,” or encouraging self-harm or suicide.

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EU Targets VPNs in EU Age Verification Push

Brussels has a problem with people trying to stay anonymous online and now it’s eyeing the tools they use to do it.

Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy, told reporters that VPNs sit on the agenda as the EU pushes its age verification app toward member states.

Asked how Brussels intends to stop children from routing around age checks with a VPN, she said “it’s also an important part of next steps also to look at that it shouldn’t be circumvented.”

VPNs are more than a tool for teenagers trying to access Instagram. They are how journalists protect sources, how dissidents talk to family, how ordinary people stop their internet provider from logging every site they visit. Treating circumvention as a problem to be solved at the network level means treating privacy tools as the obstacle, rather than the proportionate response to a system that demands ID for ordinary online activity.

The VPN comment surfaced at a press conference about the Commission’s broader regulatory squeeze.

Brussels provisionally found that Meta likely violated the Digital Services Act by failing to keep under-13s off Facebook and Instagram, accusing the company of “failing to diligently identify, assess and mitigate the risks of minors under 13 years old accessing their services.”

By the Commission’s own count, roughly 12% of European children below the age limit log into the platforms anyway.

Virkkunen framed the finding as enforcement of existing rules rather than a new mandate. “The DSA requires platforms to enforce their own rules: terms and conditions should not be mere written statements, but rather the basis for concrete action to protect users, including children,” she said.

A Commission spokesperson echoed the line, telling ISMG that the DSA “does not mandate specific mitigation measures,” and pointing to alternatives like better internal review processes.

The denial sits awkwardly next to everything else Brussels is doing. The Commission published guidelines last July recommending age verification. It is now pressing member states to “accelerate the adoption of age verification tools.”

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Families of ‘transgender’ school shooting victims sue OpenAI, say it ‘facilitated’ massacre

The families of the victims of a brutal school shooting at the hands of a suspected “transgender”-identifying male killer in a remote Canadian town are suing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in a California court.

In total, several lawsuits were filed in a San Francisco courthouse on April 29, with over $1 billion in damages being sought, according to lawyers.

The lawsuit is related to one of Canada’s deadliest school shootings. As reported by LifeSiteNews, the Canadian shooter suspect, identified as 18-year-old male Jesse Van Rootselaar, went on a rampage on February 10, killing eight, mostly children, and wounding no less than 27 people.

Van Rootselaar, who later killed himself, dressed as a female. It is the second-worst school shooting in Canadian history. Many of the victims are still on life support.

The lawsuits allege negligence, wrongful death, and product liability and directly accuse OpenAI and its leaders of aiding and abetting the shooting.

Altman is a homosexual who is “married” to another man, procured a baby boy through surrogacy, and has expressed radical transhumanist views, and ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI, is known for left-wing bias.

The lawsuits say that OpenAI did not flag disturbing content posted by the shooter online. They allege that the company was silent about contacting the police about the shooter because it would have shown just how prevalent violent dialogue is on ChatGPT.

OpenAI is soon looking to go public, and doing so is expected to make over $1 trillion for the company. This lawsuit could impact this. 

One of the wrongful death plaintiffs is the father of Abel Mwansa Jr., who was a Grade 7 student killed. 

The lawsuit has also been filed on behalf of 12-year-old Maya Gebala, who is recovering from shots to the head and has been left with serious brain injuries.

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Senate Panel Backs GUARD Act, AI Age Verification Bill

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 22-0 on Thursday to advance the GUARD Act, a bill that would require AI chatbot companies to verify the age of every American who wants to use them.

The legislation, sponsored by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, sailed through committee with a tweet from its author celebrating the outcome.

“My bill to stop AI from telling kids to kill themselves just passed out of committee UNANIMOUSLY,” Hawley wrote on X. “No amount of profit justifies the DESTRUCTION of our children. Time to bring this bill to the Senate floor.”

As usual, the framing is about children but the result is age verification/digital ID for everyone.

Under the bill’s text, a “reasonable age verification measure” cannot mean a checkbox or a self-entered birth date. It cannot rely on whether a user shares an IP address or hardware identifier with someone already verified as an adult.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

What it can mean, the legislation makes clear, is a government ID upload, a facial scan, or a financial record tied to your legal name. Every user of every covered chatbot would need to hand one of those over before being allowed in.

The bill defines an “artificial intelligence chatbot” as any service that “produces new expressive content or responses not fully predetermined by the developer or operator” and “accepts open-ended natural-language or multimodal user input.”

That language reaches well beyond the companion apps the press conference focused on. It covers service bots, search assistants powered by AI, homework helpers, and the general-purpose tools millions of adults already use without proving who they are.

Hawley described the legislation as a “targeted, tailored effort,” telling the committee, “We’re often told that this new dawning age of artificial intelligence is going to be a great age that will strengthen families and workers. I would just say that’s a choice, not an inevitability.”

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Car Company Puts Human-Like Robots on Their Production Line

German car company BMW is rolling out humanoid robots in another one of their factories to help build electric vehicles.

The manufacturer tested out the cutting-edge robots at their facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and is now expanding them to their location in Leipzig, Germany, according to an April 20 report from Fox News.

BMW announced the project for the first time in February, revealing that they would test the “Physical AI” robots — enabled by Hexagon Robotics — in Leipzig, where the company makes electric vehicles.

“The project aims to integrate humanoid robotics into existing series production of cars and to explore further applications in the production of batteries and components,” the company said.

Milan Nedeljković, a member of BMW’s management board, said that “digitalisation improves the competitiveness of our production — here in Europe and worldwide.”

“The symbiosis of engineering expertise and artificial intelligence opens up entirely new possibilities in production,” he continued.

While car companies have long used robotics in their production processes — such as robotic arms that assemble specific parts — the use of Hexagon’s humanoid robots enables a more natural and adaptable integration.

A previous pilot by BMW used Figure 02 humanoid robots for positioning sheet metal on the BMW X2 production line, per Fox News.

Those robots helped with the construction of more than 30,000 cars.

Michael Nikolaides, who oversees BMW’s production network, said that piloting the robots helps the company integrate AI and enable the robots to learn in complex factory environments.

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First US Integrated Humanoid Robot Factory To Build 100,000 NEO Robots By 2027

U.S.-based robotics firm 1X has started full-scale production of its humanoid robot NEO at a new manufacturing facility in Hayward, California.

The factory marks a key step toward commercializing general-purpose humanoid robots designed for home use. The company says the robots are built to safely operate alongside humans and assist with everyday tasks such as mobility support, light household activity, and routine interaction.

Spanning 58,000 square feet, the facility currently employs more than 200 workers and is expected to expand further as production scales. It has the capacity to produce up to 10,000 robots annually, with plans to increase output beyond 100,000 units by 2027. The setup is designed for rapid iteration as hardware and AI systems evolve.

The company has already seen strong early demand. It said its first-year production capacity of over 10,000 units sold out within five days of launch in October, signaling early commercial interest in humanoid home robotics.

Full-stack manufacturing push

A key feature of the factory is its vertically integrated production model. 1X designs and manufactures core components in-house, including motors, batteries, sensors, structures, and transmission systems.

This approach allows the company to control the entire production process, from raw material handling to final assembly. It also reduces reliance on external suppliers and supports faster iteration cycles, especially for hardware upgrades and safety improvements.

“We’re building the world’s safest, most reliable humanoid robots—right here in Hayward, California,” said Vikram Kothari, VP of Manufacturing & Hardware.

The company says its setup includes automated motor manufacturing lines and systems that handle precision tasks such as copper coil winding. This level of integration is aimed at improving reliability, reducing production bottlenecks, and scaling manufacturing efficiently without outsourcing key subsystems.

Robots produced at the facility are currently being routed to internal testing, validation, and research environments. Customer shipments are expected to begin in 2026, starting with early access users before wider rollout.

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