Obscura has released a VPN service that splits traffic handling across two servers so no single party ever sees both a user's identity and their decrypted internet activity. The company says this architecture makes logging impossible even under legal compulsion or server compromise, and it uses a QUIC-based stealth protocol intended to disguise VPN traffic as regular HTTP/3 traffic to evade censorship and network filtering.
Anthropic launched a new AI model, Claude Opus 4.5, roughly ten days after its CEO publicly called for a slowdown in AI development. The company says the model performs well on internal alignment safety measures, while also stating that government policy will eventually be needed to guard against risks from AI systems that can improve themselves.
A commentary published in Nature argues that the world lacks a coordinated fallback system to preserve and share climate-risk intelligence if key data sources fail or become inaccessible. The piece warns that current climate monitoring and forecasting infrastructure is fragmented and vulnerable to funding cuts, political shifts, or technical disruptions.
President Trump announced he will create an 'AI Force' initiative and appoint an AI czar to keep the U.S. artificial intelligence industry advancing rapidly. The announcement came shortly after several tech executives publicly raised concerns this month about potential catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems. Trump's statement offered few specifics on how the new office would operate or address those safety worries.
Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said Monday that the central bank might need to accept higher unemployment as a cost of bringing down persistently high inflation. He noted that supply shocks create a short-term conflict between the Fed's dual goals of stable prices and maximum employment, forcing policymakers to prioritize one over the other.
The FBI published CJIS Security Policy version 6.1 on June 25, 2026, refining the modernized control-based framework introduced in v6.0 last December. The update raises required encryption key strength from 128-bit to 256-bit for CJI both in transit and at rest, and increases mandatory vulnerability scanning frequency from quarterly to monthly.
A university president outlines six principles meant to help institutions resist political pressure on research funding, peer review and academic autonomy, citing examples from the United States and Hungary. The piece traces how funding cuts, shifting grant priorities and legal campaigns against institutions like Central European University have already eroded independent scholarship in some countries.
Australia's public service minister Katy Gallagher announced the government is exploring a ban on Meta's AI-enabled smart glasses in federal government buildings, citing privacy and security risks tied to their recording capabilities. Officials plan to consult the public service commission and hold a roundtable with major employers like Microsoft and Commonwealth Bank to develop broader AI workplace guidelines.
A new Institute for Policy Studies report finds that private jets, used by a small fraction of Americans, receive significant taxpayer-funded subsidies and infrastructure support despite their outsized carbon footprint. The study argues that ordinary taxpayers effectively help cover the costs of a travel mode overwhelmingly used by the wealthy.
American AI developers have alerted US authorities that foreign actors, likely from China and Russia, are using distillation techniques to replicate the capabilities of Western frontier models at much lower cost. These attacks reportedly involve buying logs of conversations from legitimate accounts to extract training data, making the practice difficult to fully stop despite lab collaboration efforts started earlier in 2026. China has denied the accusations and warned it will impose 'countermeasures' if the US uses this issue to justify restricting Chinese AI development.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named eight new members to the 16-seat US Preventive Services Task Force, the federal panel that grades preventive care services like cancer screenings and statins on an A-to-D scale that determines insurance coverage. The appointments come after Kennedy spent over a year sidelining the panel, canceling meetings and firing two of its leaders earlier this year. Several new appointees share ideological alignment with Kennedy and the Trump administration, including critics of COVID-19 vaccines and gender-affirming care, plus a non-physician health economist.
OpenAI published an analysis arguing that as AI systems approach or exceed human-level cognitive performance, policymakers need to prepare economic tools now rather than waiting for disruption to occur, as happened during past technological shifts like the Industrial Revolution. The piece frames AGI as fundamentally different from past automation waves because it could automate intelligence itself rather than just routine tasks, potentially affecting a much broader swath of jobs and industries simultaneously.
GoKawiil