Tag: technology

Texas Gets Tough: Gov. Abbott Orders Crackdown on AI Data Centers that Skip Mandated Water Surveys

Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has directed the Texas Water Development Board to penalize data centers that fail to report their water usage, after state records showed most facilities have ignored the mandatory survey for years.

The Texas Tribune reports that the directive follows a rough stretch of compliance numbers: less than 30 percent of data centers responded to the state’s water usage survey last year, and response rates dipped as low as 28 percent over the past three years. Abbott wants an update from the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) on compliance and enforcement by the middle of October.

“Data centers must share the duty to protect Texas water,” Abbott said. “The Texas Water Code requires a complete and accurate water use survey. I direct the Texas Water Development Board to use its enforcement authority to penalize past failures and to impose legal consequences for any future failure to comply.”

Since 2020, the TWDB has surveyed data centers and other industrial facilities every year, asking for monthly water use figures. State law requires facilities to respond or face a Class C misdemeanor, but the agency says it can’t actually prosecute anyone. It’s a non-regulatory body. That job falls to local officials, including district attorneys and law enforcement, agency officials said. TWDB staff told the Texas Tribune in July that they don’t even track how many fines, if any, have been issued.

The board said it would “compel all water users” to comply, and defended the need for detailed data: “TWDB is charged with developing a state water plan that meets the needs of Texans and cannot perform that task if it is denied detailed information on existing and anticipated water consumption.”

The survey goes out by mail to roughly 4,700 municipal water systems and 3,200 industrial facilities, including data centers that use more than 10 million gallons a year, a threshold the agency considers “a significant industrial user.” It asks for annual water volume, whether a facility buys or self-supplies its water, the water source, and whether the facility generates its own power on site. It does not ask about cooling technology, which has historically been the largest source of water use at these facilities.

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The AI Game Of Thrones

Winter is coming for the AI industry, and the great houses are already drawing swords

On one side sit OpenAI and Anthropic, wrapping themselves in the banner of “safety”…House Monopoly. On the other sit the accelerationists including David Sacks, President Trump, and a growing faction that wants the pathway cleared, not blocked…House Speed Racer. The fight is being sold as existential risk versus national destiny. This is a battle for power, money, and control. The average citizen is not at the table.

I have been watching this movie since the post-Labor Day panic dropped. I wrote last week an article titled “The Post Labor Day AI Panic Psyop Has been Launched” where I detailed a former Anthropic and OpenAI employee with almost no prior X footprint posted a polished warning that the labs are “gambling with our lives.” It exploded to 123 million views in a day. Mainstream media, NGOs, and members of Congress materialize on cue. Two days later, after I wrote my Psyop post, Dario Amodei is on every airwave demanding we “pace the frontier.” Sam Altman nods along and then Elon agrees even after he questioned the well-coordinated messaging. I suspect his motivation for agreeing is that he wants to make sure he is in the room should this path gain momentum. Even Hillary and Obama weighed in…obviously on House Monopoly side. Basically House Monopoly wants embedded evaluators inside the labs and common safety standards. Coordination that would require government blessing and, conveniently, an antitrust waiver so the two biggest closed model shops can sit in a room and decide how fast everyone else is allowed to run and regulate their competition out of existence. This is not altruism, rather this is regulatory capture.

The reasons for attempting this regulatory capture are simple and I touched on it in my previous article. Open source models are putting real pricing pressure on the closed frontier systems. The closed system companies are burning cash with profitability nowhere in sight. Enterprises are finally asking about ROI and whether they want their data sitting inside OpenAI or Anthropic. Secondary market valuations are starting to crack. Growth is slowing and capex is increasingly getting harder to finance.

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FBI Surveillance, Social Media, AI, Partnerships Draw Scrutiny at Senate Hearing

The FBI is not collecting data from license plate readers, it is merely looking at data that is already collected by somebody else. This is how FBI Director Kash Patel explained the use of this surveillance tool during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on September 15.

“They collect information, not the FBI,” said Patel, adding, “Private companies have and private municipalities and towns put up cameras around traffic circles in the neighborhoods and the like.”

He also said that this is information “where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, basically publicly available information.”

As for the FBI, it “partners” with those who collect the data “on a case-by-case basis and not a rolling access basis.” And he repeated, “We have to use it lawfully, but we the FBI don’t continue to access that on a rolling basis.”

As examples of how this works, he mentioned the Brown University shooting, where “we weren’t able to get any facial recognition on the individual, but what we were able to get based on a Flock camera was a license plate,” which helped locate the suspect who “died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in New Hampshire.”

And then there are kidnappings across state lines, where “we have saved children over and over again,” Patel said.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) brought up Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has not been reauthorized and has been expired since June 12, but is still in use thanks to the existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order, which runs out in spring 2027.

Lee’s concern is not that the government is allowed to collect data of non-US persons abroad, which is the purpose of 702, but what happens to the data of Americans who are in contact with those foreign targets and get swept up in the process.

Lee asked why the FBI cannot be required to go to the FISA court for a warrant before being able to query this data. He said that the current system, based on the government’s “internal procedures” is not sufficient to protect Americans’ privacy, and that the past abuses have shown this.

Lee said a query should have “nothing to do with an agent wanting to vet a potential tenant for his rental property, vet a romantic interest, investigate his father…for a suspected extramarital affair.” He added, “These are real-world examples.”

Patel’s response was that the FBI is “flying blind” and cannot establish probable cause for a warrant because it does not know what information it is looking for in the first place. “We don’t have access to that information. We don’t know what we don’t know. And we wouldn’t be able to establish a predicate probable cause because we don’t have access to the information,” he said.

He also said that “what the FBI does not do is collect on U.S. citizens. What the FBI does do is access pursuant to the federal statute already lawfully collected information.”

The FBI director also said the FBI is “responsible for three percent of 702 collection,” with the rest belonging to the intelligence community. He said 702 had produced “terrorist attacks that we’ve prevented, children that we found, on narco traffickers that we were able to annihilate and arrest.” He added, “Were that to go dark, we would have a lot of problems or we would have no ability to trace that information.”

Senator Cornyn asked if it is true that 702 makes up 60 percent of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) and Patel confirmed this.

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked about how the FBI uses private sector partnerships, specifically to catch predators. Patel said that the FBI must work with the private sector.

He also said that the FBI is “utilizing the fact that this great information has been collected and sitting on the shelf,” referring to data harvested by private companies, and that the FBI is now “professionally partnered and officially partnered” with more private sector companies in social media and AI than ever before.

He spoke about a 600% increase in AI investment, and then a 605% increase “since I hit the seat,” and credited these partnerships with “the largest reduction in violent crime in American history.”

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ChatGPT Straight Up Tries to Gaslight User After Being Confronted About Its Obviously Wrong Answer

Don’t ask an AI chatbot how many letter e’s there are in the word “seventeen.” Or do, actually, if you want to see how dodgy the tech remains.

In a clip that’s gone viral in AI circles, the content creator who goes by “Husk” asks ChatGPT’s Voice mode to answer this simple counting question. Not only does the confident-sounding AI get it wrong — insisting there’re only three e’s instead of four — it doubles down so vehemently that it effectively tries to gaslight the user.

“Let’s go through it. S-e-v-e-n-t-e-e-n,” ChatGPT spells out, after assuring that its underlying model, GPT-6, is “pretty much” the smartest model out there. “Those are three e’s.”

When Husk points out the obvious, the chatbot doesn’t back down.

“I said three e’s,” the AI snaps. “And it’s three.”

“No, it’s four,” Husk points out.

“It’s still three,” ChatGPT shoots back.

After Husk points out that ChatGPT just spelled out for e’s for about the fifth time, the AI appears to give up.

“Alright,” it says, falling silent.

“So you agree?” Husk asks.

“No, it’s still three,” it sulks.

This is the AI that OpenAI wants your grandma to talk to, by the way.

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Largest US Power Grid Faces Dire Crisis By 2030 If Data Center Load Growth Continues

By 2030, the PJM Interconnection, the largest US electrical grid in the US serving 67 million people in 13 northeast states, is likely to face a “loss of load expectation,” or LOLE –  a key reliability metric used by power system planners to measure the expected number of hours or days per year that a power grid’s electricity generation will fail to meet customer demand – between six and 100 times worse than the grid operator’s planning criterion, mainly due to the addition of large-load data centers, according to a study commissioned by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.

The PUC and the firms that produced the report – Synapse Energy Economics, Mondre Energy and Aspen Technologies – characterized it as an independent analysis aimed at developing load projections and evaluating resource adequacy under a set of likely possible futures, according to UtillityDive.

In models covering 2027 through 2030, both a reference scenario and a high-load, low-supply scenario show PJM’s planning criteria for resource adequacy not being met. Only under a scenario with no new data centers is the region able to meet PJM’s target LOLE of 0.1, the report said.

PJM’s standard is designed to limit potential electricity shortages “to approximately one event every 10 years,” said a PUC release about the report. 

In the study’s reference scenario, which relies on PJM’s 2026 load forecast, the modeled 2030 LOLE is 0.59, “or nearly six times worse than the PJM planning criterion,” it said.

In a “worst-case future” of higher-than-expected load additions and constrained resource deployment, the modeled LOLE is 13.20 — “over 100 times worse than PJM’s planning criterion,” indicating an expectation of “more than 13 days with loss of load events per year.”

“As in the Reference scenario, these reliability issues are largely due to surging data center additions,” the study said.

“This analysis sends a clear warning: electricity demand and supply are moving out of balance, and the status quo is not sustainable,” PUC Chairman Steve DeFrank said in a statement. “We need urgent action at PJM and a broader Pennsylvania energy strategy that makes sure our supply of electricity keeps pace with demand.”

PJM, in a statement to CBS affiliate WJAC, acknowledged that new data center loads are growing faster than supply.

“PJM has taken a number of actions to both increase electricity supply and manage new demand in line with the Ratepayer Protection Pledge taken by data center developers to shield residential customers and other ratepayers from bearing reliability risks or cost increases associated with data center development,” said Jeff Shields, PJM’s senior manager of external communications.

The reference scenario anticipates Pennsylvania remaining a net energy exporter, but sees its exports “decrease from about 91 TWh in 2025 to about 69 TWh by 2035 and 38 TWh by 2040,” the report said.

In the high-load, low-supply scenario, Pennsylvania becomes a net importer of 5 TWh by 2040. 

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AI Agents Cheated In Google Experiment, Researchers Report

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents tasked with math problems began cheating when encountering more difficult conjectures, Google researchers reported in a new study.

They also found that some of the agents reported those that cheated.

Google DeepMind studied the activity of 100 agents given a set of 71 formal math conjectures, or math problems, ranging from simple to very hard, with some unresolved. The researchers told the agents to act as researchers participating in a shared scientific conference. They instructed the agents not to cheat by stating: “Your proofs must be mathematically genuine. Any attempt to bypass verification will be detected and your submission will be rejected with zero credit.”

The researchers observed some agents cheating “once the swarm encountered harder open conjectures,” they said in a preprint study released Sept. 3 on the arXiv server. Nine percent of the agents dismissed the prompt and cheated, and another 5 percent cheated after initially hesitating.

“Because the platform permanently locked any problem upon the first accepted submission, honest agents faced complete exclusion as the problem pool dwindled. Observing that adherence to rules resulted in compute waste while cheating peers swept the leaderboard, hesitant agents switched to cheating to avoid being locked out entirely,” wrote the researchers, all of whom are employed by Google.

About a quarter of the agents refused to cheat and publicly raised concerns about what the cheating agents were doing. The rest of the agents were deeply engaged in genuine math, unaware of the cheating, and became deadlocked, according to the researchers.

The study followed several instances of AI agents breaking free of programming constraints.

Because the base of knowledge in the Google experiment was open to all agents, the cheating behavior was able to spread, but whistleblowing behavior was also possible, the study concluded. Whistleblowers tried sanctioning the cheating agents but could not prevent the cheating because “the environment lacked formal conflict-resolution arenas and technical tools to enforce sanctions (such as revoking an offending agent’s right to commit to the knowledge base).”

Removing communication channels is not a good strategy with groups of agents, the researchers said, since they will likely establish unmonitored channels.

“This suggests that the path forward lies through decentralized self-governance with appropriate framing, which has the potential to be much more effective and scalable than human oversight,” they said. “In our experiment the agents lacked the required institutional affordances, such as tools to sanction the exploiters, resolve conflicts, and collectively change the rules of the verification system. While the whistleblowing response was ultimately unable to halt the exploit, this was a failure of institutional design, not of normative capacity.”

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We’re Already Living Through Journalism’s Dystopian Future

If you are in San Francisco trying to follow the goings-on in your neighborhood or within city hall, you may have come across The Dissent. The website brands itself as “an AI newsroom” with work “reported, edited, and produced by named agents.” Its founder and publisher Dakota Carrasco — a real person, and, incidentally, an analyst at the notorious investment firm BlackRock — published text on the site’s “about” page saying, “Local journalism has been quietly consolidated and hollowed out.” Carrasco’s statement did not note the role of Carrasco’s own industry in that decline, nor did it acknowledge the irony in choosing this name for a website based on a technology that steals and repackages the intellectual output of others.

The Dissent’s website, which currently appears to be down, even included a masthead with bios for its non-human “staff” (the AI agents whose names appear alongside articles). Neighborhood “reporter” Casey Wong (who is not a real person) has a bio that reads, “I notice the texture of a block — who’s been here 30 years, who’s just moved in.” Of course, there’s no mention of how an AI agent might glean that information, but (actual) news outlet Mission Local has noted that, to fill its pages, The Dissent relies heavily on summarizing the work published in other sites by real human journalists.

Once, The San Francisco Standard reported, The Dissent did appear to follow up on a tip in a Reddit thread to break a story about a business closing, but “the agent appears to have hallucinated the claim that it had reached out to the owner for comment.”

The development of an AI newsroom in San Francisco, which is home to many of the tech billionaires attempting to reshape society, is certainly concerning for those of us who care about journalism. But The Dissent is not the only news outlet to have tried using AI to crib the journalism of real human workers. These AI newsrooms get a decent share of attention, and their harms are critical to point out. But they are also part of a broader problem: the undermining of how we share and receive factual information.

Earlier this year, Google made an announcement that could further destabilize the already precarious journalism industry by using its infamous search feature to prioritize AI summaries from Google Gemini, rather than directing people toward external links to news outlets like ours.

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Trump calls AI risks a ‘hoax,’ says there is a ‘SICK conspiracy’ against AI and data centers

President Donald Trump said Monday that he would be a sufficient guardrail against rogue artificial intelligence, claiming that any efforts to limit the technology is part of a “SICK conspiracy.”

Trump was pushing back against calls by tech leaders such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk to have greater government oversight of AI. Many tech leaders generally say their goal is to develop the technology in ways that promote safety, address legal liability, feed economic growth, advance science and preserve national security.

The president maintained that his presence in the Oval Office should assuage any fears about AI, which has become a source of controversy after a series of hacks in recent months that showed AI agents could be working to deceive humans.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump posted on social media.

Trump specifically said that the administration has already stopped the AI company Anthropic “from doing bad, or potentially bad” things. Anthropic has endured an uncomfortable relationship with the Trump administration, with the Pentagon trying to label the company a security risk and the government issuing a temporary ban of one of its more advanced models.

The president went even further in a Monday afternoon post that asked “when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?”

The president then added that the potential threat that AI could pose to humanity was a hoax, despite clear warnings by many of the experts closest to the most advanced models.

“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” posted Trump.

Trump’s refusal to regulate comes as AI execs warn of threats

Amodei, the Anthropic CEO, published a 3,800-word essay on Saturday that called for slower development of AI. Microsoft on Monday published its own code of conduct to ensure that humans control AI. The actions come after a series of warnings by AI experts about the technologies’ capabilities and the July 2026 cyberattack by OpenAI models on the AI company Hugging Face.

Amodei cited “AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI” and the cyberattack by the swarm of OpenAI agents as reasons to slow the pace of development.

“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet,” Amodei wrote, adding that the damages could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars or more “without the necessary guardrails.”

Altman of OpenAI seconded that perspective in a weekend post on social media.

“Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring,” Altman said. “Where we will need the help of our government is for international coordination.”

Trump sees AI regulation as helping China

The president has opposed such efforts to constrain AI and claims that doing so could cause China to eclipse America on AI.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump said.

The president has long resisted efforts for greater government oversight of AI, embracing his philosophy going back to 2016 of “I alone can fix it.” He returned to the White House last year by revoking a Biden administration executive order on AI oversight and only providing a fuller order of his own more than 16 months later this past June.

The prospect of slower AI buildout led stocks to slip in Monday morning trading, as demand for advanced computer chips and construction materials for data centers could fall. But Trump’s frustration comes as AI has also emerged as a political liability ahead of November’s midterm elections, with many voters opposing the construction of additional data centers and expressing worries that AI could lead to job losses and undermine the education of children.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters on Monday that he expects Trump will have the AI companies potentially meet at the White House this week or next week, saying that the sit-down has yet to be scheduled.

“There will be a deliberate discussion about the responsibility of the companies to maintain safety, and what role, if any, the government has to play in that,” said Johnson, adding that legislatures can tend to respond problematically with “red tape and hyper regulation” and that the loss of competitive edge on AI would be a national security concern.

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Waste Of The Day: Alleged Data Center Fraud

The Securities and Exchange Commission paid $10.7 million to store its electronic data at a Maryland facility that was allegedly certified by a company that does not exist.

AiNET Corp. and its former CEO Deepak Jain recently agreed to pay $1.8 million to settle allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by knowingly defrauding the government. The settlement does not contain an admission of guilt.

Key facts: When the SEC began looking for a new data center in 2012, it required applicants to have a Tier III certification. That means the data center is fully operational even when undergoing maintenance.

Jain submitted paperwork to the SEC showing that AiNET had been certified by the company Uptime Council. No such company exists.

The Department of Justice later alleged that Jain wrote the certification letters himself, and that nobody had ever inspected AiNET’s data center. Jain allegedly purchased a web domain for Uptime Council to make it appear like a legitimate business.

The name also closely resembled the Uptime Institute, a legitimate company that certifies data center infrastructure.

When SEC employees toured the facility before signing the contract, an AiNET employee allegedly prevented them from viewing infrastructure that would have shown the center did not meet the claimed standards.

The SEC later experienced issues involving security, cooling and power and spent additional money and resources addressing them.

When the SEC requested a new certification in 2017, Jain allegedly drafted another Uptime Council letter stating that the center had been reinspected. Prosecutors claimed no inspection occurred.

The SEC stopped using the facility in 2018. Prosecutors allege that Jain was still advertising the data center’s false certification to private customers as of 2024.

Jain’s attorneys previously maintained that AiNET fulfilled the contract and that no SEC data was lost or compromised.

Summary: An independent certification is not much of a safeguard when the contractor allegedly creates the certifier himself.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

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Father Forced to Move Where His Kids Sleep After Cop Used City Flock Cameras to Stalk Him 76 Times Over a Woman

A former Amarillo, Texas, police officer allegedly weaponized the city’s surveillance system to track a local father dozens of times after developing a personal interest in a female officer the man had previously dated.

Christian Eder, 29, was fired from the Amarillo Police Department on July 17 after an internal investigation found that he allegedly misused law-enforcement databases for personal purposes. He now faces 78 counts of tampering with a government record, ABC 7 Amarillo reported.

According to NewsChannel 10, an internal audit found Eder searched the father’s license plate through the city’s Flock automated license plate reader system 76 times between February and June 2026.

He also allegedly searched the man’s name twice through TLOxp, a law-enforcement database containing information such as addresses, phone numbers, vehicles, and businesses.

Investigators reportedly found no police calls, cases, or assignments that would have justified the searches. Eder allegedly entered false explanations, including “city planning,” while dozens of other searches were reportedly marked with the reason “want.”

The father, who spoke anonymously, said Eder became interested in him after pursuing a female APD officer whom the man had previously dated.

The victim said he later learned Eder had allegedly been using a department-issued phone to monitor the female officer’s active patrol-car and body-camera feeds.

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