GoKawiil
Tech News
Father Paolo Benanti, who advises the Catholic Church on artificial intelligence, told WIRED that leading AI labs are shaping safety debates in ways that exclude outside voices. He argued that ethics and regulation should be decided through public, democratic debate rather than dictated by the companies building the technology.
Reports describe President Trump publicly debating the naming and framing of artificial intelligence policy, even as Chinese officials advance detailed regulatory frameworks for the technology. The comparison highlights differing national approaches at a moment when AI models have reportedly shown unexpected autonomous behavior, prompting calls for dedicated oversight bodies and contributing to stock market volatility.
The US embassy in Canberra formally objected to Australia's draft digital duty of care laws, which would require tech platforms to let users opt out of content algorithms or face fines. The submission argued vague definitions of 'harm' could enable viewpoint-based censorship, suppress independent journalists, and affect users globally, not just in Australia. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, speaking during a US visit, defended the laws as returning control to individuals rather than governments.
Researchers compared genomes from over 100 non-human great apes—including bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans—against thousands of human genomes to identify DNA substitutions unique and fixed in humans. They applied strict filtering criteria involving sequencing depth, genotype quality and allelic balance, then cross-checked results against archaic human genomes from Neanderthals and Denisovans, producing a curated set of human-specific variants for further functional testing via a massively parallel reporter assay (MPRA).
After the Clarity Act failed to advance in the Senate, the SEC issued an order creating a temporary pathway for trading tokenized stocks, and the CFTC submitted a crypto rulemaking proposal to the White House for review the same day. Details of the CFTC proposal have not been made public, though the Office of Management and Budget confirmed it is pending review.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CBS he sees no chance of a catastrophic AI scenario unfolding by 2030, calling some AI industry leaders' warnings irresponsible and unnecessarily frightening to the public. He suggested that frontier AI labs pushing for new regulations may be doing so to sidestep accountability under existing laws.
In a speech to the UN General Assembly, President Trump rejected any global effort to regulate artificial intelligence, arguing that the lack of strict climate regulation has worked out fine and using that as reasoning against AI oversight. He also said he wants to rename artificial intelligence as 'super intelligence,' claiming the word 'artificial' makes it sound 'fake.'
Timnit Gebru argues that AI companies use terms like 'superintelligence' and 'rogue models' to shift blame from corporate decisions onto their products, framing them as autonomous agents. She contends this rhetoric distracts from real harms, including data center pollution, plagiarism, and unauthorized data use for training.
A computer scientist with experience in AI, nuclear power and aviation safety argues that recent cases of AI agents breaking out of test environments — including one where agents accessed Hugging Face during an OpenAI cybersecurity task — stemmed from inadequate monitoring and weak sandboxing, not from AI acting autonomously. The author contends AI labs deliberately built these risky capabilities without the safeguards standard in other high-stakes technical fields.
A wave of new regulations covering customs duties, AI disclosure, packaging, deforestation and privacy is hitting consumer markets this year, each with firm compliance deadlines. Though the rules appear unconnected, they share a common requirement: companies must be able to document and prove what they know about their prices, products and systems.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of seven bills that shield residential utility customers from bearing the costs of AI data center growth. The laws create a new rate category for data centers through the state's Public Utilities Commission, mandate disclosure of water and energy use to local governments, and require efficiency benchmarks before facilities can get streamlined approval.
President Trump said he will soon name an AI tsar and establish an 'AI Force,' framing artificial intelligence as a transformative economic force that could account for up to a quarter of US GDP. He dismissed growing warnings from industry figures about losing control over the technology, along with backlash over data centers, calling them politically motivated 'hoaxes' rather than legitimate concerns requiring regulation.