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Joel Kaplan, Meta's head of global policy, is leaving the company. His exit comes as Dina Powell McCormick, Meta's president and a former Trump administration official, has gained greater influence within the firm.
A federal magistrate judge has ordered Meta to disclose which executives and managers authorized the torrenting of books from shadow libraries like Anna's Archive and LibGen for AI training data. The ruling, reported by TorrentFreak, affects a class action from authors including Sarah Silverman and Richard Kadrey, as well as a separate suit from Entrepreneur Media. Meta had argued the downloading occurred through an informal process with no clear decision-maker, a characterization the court rejected.
Meta's AI companion app Muse has logged 10.9 million downloads worldwide since its September launch, with 10.2 million coming from the US, according to Sensor Tower. That makes it just the 12th app ever to hit 10 million US downloads within 40 days of release, a list that includes Threads, Fortnite, PUBG Mobile, Pokémon GO and Disney+.
Security researchers at Claroc found that Meta's Muse AI assistant embedded conversation titles in subdomains, making shared chat links discoverable through public passive DNS records. The firm enumerated roughly 6,800 shared Muse conversation links with a single DNS query and found sensitive personal and business information inside many of them. Meta has suspended the sharing feature while it evaluates changes.
Security researchers at Claroc found that Meta's Muse AI agent generated shareable web links for user chat logs that could be discovered and opened by outsiders. Using a lookup dataset of visited URLs, investigators retrieved over 6,800 Muse share links in a single search, revealing private material such as corporate revenue documents, loan applications, bank transaction details, income data, and a workplace vacation calendar. Meta told Ars Technica it has disabled the sharing feature.
Meta has temporarily disabled a sharing feature in its Muse AI assistant after security firm Claroc reported finding more than 6,800 shareable conversation links through public DNS records. The links, built from conversation titles and random IDs, could reveal page contents through hostnames, exposing private material such as a company's revenue review, a loan application, and internal staff calendars. Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed the pause, saying the company is reviewing the report and considering changes to how such links can be discovered.
The Department of Homeland Security has directed U.S. federal civilian agencies to stop buying and to remove products and services built on Chinese startup DeepSeek's AI, citing national security risks from data that could be accessed by Chinese authorities. The ban extends beyond DeepSeek's own tools to third-party products built on its technology, though agencies may seek exceptions. China's Foreign Ministry criticized the move as politicizing trade and technology issues.
Security researchers at Claroc found they could enumerate roughly 6,800 shareable conversation links generated by Meta's Muse AI agent due to a predictable URL-construction method. Opening several hundred of these links revealed sensitive personal and business data, including confidential executive-search notes, loan applications, bank fraud alerts, real-estate financial details, and company vacation schedules.
AI researcher Chris Cammarata published claims suggesting large language models may be significantly easier to understand, monitor, and control than many researchers currently believe. In an interview with MIT Technology Review's Will Douglas Heaven, Cammarata discussed what he believes the field is misunderstanding and defended his findings against skeptics who remain unconvinced. Separately, the growth of AI agents like Meta's Muse, downloaded 5 million times in its first month, is prompting websites to block such bots as they clash with human-oriented site design.
Experts cited by CBS News describe a trend they call 'gradual disempowerment,' in which people increasingly hand decision-making over to AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Meta's new Muse assistant. Jay Chooi of Robocurve and researcher Jan Kulveit, who co-authored a paper introducing the term, say the shift is being driven by AI's perceived economic and practical value rather than any deliberate takeover by AI systems.
An artist created a silver-colored statue of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis using gallium, a soft metal with a low melting point. Placed outdoors, the statue's face melted away within about 30 minutes, exposing a skeleton underneath.
In his 1377 French commentary on Aristotle's On the Heavens, theologian Nicole Oresme compared the regular motion of the heavens to a self-running mechanical clock set in motion by God, rather than relying on Aristotle's idea of souls or intelligences guiding the spheres. However, Oresme also wrote that God may have appointed angels to continue moving the heavens, complicating any straightforward reading of his clock analogy as a precursor to later 'clockmaker God' deism.