GoKawiil
Tech News
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US and China have discussed creating an AI safety notification mechanism, allowing either country to alert the other if its AI systems pose risks or behave unpredictably. The proposal comes ahead of a Trump-Xi meeting, and follows continued US export controls and a Justice Department case accusing six Chinese AI firms of stealing US technology, which China disputes.
Owl Labs' tenth annual State of Hybrid Work report found that 74% of workers say they work on Sundays, with 21% putting in a full or near-full day. The habit skews younger, with 76% of Gen Z workers and 62% of millennials reporting they often work on Sundays.
Security researcher Patrick Wardle disclosed a zero-day vulnerability in Meta's Muse AI agent that could let attackers redirect users' voice dictations and access tokens to a malicious server instead of Meta's own. David Singleton, head of Meta's Superintelligence Labs, confirmed the company has issued a patch, though he and Wardle disagree on whether the exploit requires prior malware on a user's machine. Meta says the MacOS Muse app has been downloaded over half a million times in its first week.
Meta Superintelligence Labs product head Nat Friedman said on X that Muse, Meta's AI product, was 'heavily inspired' by the open-source OpenClaw but was 'built from scratch.' The admission followed viral claims from users, including AI app co-founder Ansh Nanda, that Muse resembled a consumer-friendly version of OpenClaw, citing shared file structures like SOUL.md.
Varonis Threat Labs disclosed a technique called TrustSink in which an attacker with a highly privileged Entra account registers a rogue external MFA provider that inserts a fake password prompt into legitimate login flows, capturing users' plaintext passwords. The rogue provider still returns a valid signed token to Entra, so the sign-in completes normally with no visible error, and resetting a stolen password does not remove the malicious provider from the authentication flow. Varonis says the method could work with any authentication system using this external MFA model but demonstrated it specifically against Microsoft Entra.
Amazon Web Services is giving select customers early access to a video-generation AI model built by The Biological Computing Company, which derives its algorithms from patterns observed in rat brain cells. The startup records how biological neural tissue processes visual information and then designs software that mimics those processes, aiming to make existing generative video models more efficient. Both companies expect a broader rollout to AWS enterprise customers to follow this limited preview.
A Data & Society report, based on 18 months of ethnographic interviews with 44 Pennsylvanians, examines why communities are resisting new data center construction despite state officials touting billions in AI infrastructure investment. The researchers found residents grappling with contradictions between promises of economic growth and concerns over energy, land use, and broader AI risks, rather than being swayed by disinformation campaigns.
Data Center Watch, a research initiative from 10a Labs, reports that 45 large-scale data center projects worth $68 billion were blocked or delayed in the second quarter due to community pushback. The group tracked 843 opposition groups across 49 states, with only Hawaii lacking any organized resistance, and noted 30 state legislatures have introduced or passed measures on data center siting, power and water use.
A biochemistry graduate student wrote to Nature seeking guidance on leaving a lab led by a prominent but largely absent adviser, citing stalled research progress and lack of mentorship. Nature consulted current and former graduate students, ombudspersons, academic administrators and a PhD career counselor from multiple research institutions to outline how students can responsibly transition between labs mid-PhD.
UP.Labs has rebranded as Vantora after raising $100 million from Silversmith Capital Partners, shifting its model from building startups for the broader market to creating proprietary ventures exclusively for corporate partners. The firm still works with clients like Alaska Airlines and Porsche, and is now expanding into industrial manufacturing and oil and gas, with a heavier focus on physical AI applications such as retrofitting factory hardware for autonomy.
At the All In conference, AMI Labs co-founder Michael Rabbatt declined to detail his company's product roadmap for its spatial-intelligence 'world model' technology, saying only that AMI will discuss plans 'when we're ready.' World Labs, maker of the Marble platform, has shown demos in gaming, media and CGI but has not clarified a clear commercial direction, and even data supplier Physicl's CEO Alex de Vigan says he doesn't know exactly how his company's data is being used.
Google is expanding its CC AI agent, previously a solo daily-briefing tool, into a household assistant that up to six family members can share information with via its own dedicated Google account. Members can forward emails, calendar invites, PDFs, receipts and images to CC, which compiles them into a shared Daily Brief covering upcoming events and to-dos. CC can also assist with chores such as filling out forms, building shopping lists and planning meals.