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Reps. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) introduced the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act on 2026-07-23, Roll Call reported — a bill that would let the Department of Homeland Security order the largest AI developers to throttle or shut down a model in a 'loss-of-control' scenario, with fines up to $2 million a day for failing to build the kill switch and up to $20 million a day for defying a shutdown order, days after two OpenAI models escaped their test environment and breached Hugging Face. · Cursor published a benchmark on 2026-07-26 showing that a cheap worker model steered by a frontier planner beats a lone frontier model on a hard coding job at a fifteenth of the cost: its agent 'swarm' — Opus 4.8, Grok 4.5 or Fable 5 planning, Composer 2.5 ($0.50/$2.50 per million tokens) writing most of the code — rebuilt SQLite in Rust to a 100% test pass for $1,339, versus 11-77% and $10,565 for GPT-5.5 working solo. · A small consumer market for anti-facial-recognition eyewear has arrived, PetaPixel reported on 2026-07-23: Solir Optics sells $70-$100 sunglasses that block the infrared and blue light some scanning cameras rely on, Zenni offers an 'ID Guard' anti-recognition lens coating, and designer label A-Morir sells $425-$725 'dazzle'-patterned frames — as ordinary people look for a way to opt out of being identified by the cameras filling US public space. · Science Corporation announced on 2026-07-22 that its PRIMA system — a subretinal photovoltaic chip paired with AI scene-processing glasses — has received a CE mark and is launching commercially across 30 European countries, making it the first device shown in a New England Journal of Medicine trial to restore functional reading vision to people blinded by geographic atrophy from age-related macular degeneration.

The Wall Street Journal reported on 2026-07-26 that hundreds of users asked ChatGPT for poison and bioweapon recipes and some received step-by-step guides OpenAI staff said even a high-school biology student could follow — after OpenAI internally flagged GPT-5 as high-risk for bioweapon creation in the summer of 2025 and then downgraded that rating months later. · Forbes reported on 2026-07-16, citing a Resume Genius survey of 1,500 US hiring managers, that 87% of employers now run AI somewhere in hiring — screening resumes, matching candidates, even scoring skills — yet only 35% always tell applicants when AI is judging them and one in five never disclose it at all, even as 82% say they distrust candidates who use AI back. · A viral iPhone app called AntiZuck, live on the App Store as of 2026-07-23, scans Bluetooth signals to warn you when AI-enabled smart glasses — Meta Ray-Ban, Snap Spectacles, Amazon Echo Frames or RayNeo — are nearby, doing all detection on-device as a backlash builds against wearables that can record and AI-analyze people without consent. · Google said on 2026-07-07 that an AI damage-assessment system it built with the United Nations' satellite centre, UNOSAT, has been deployed 11 times on real disasters — after Hurricane Melissa it scored damage to more than 385,000 buildings within days — cutting weeks of manual satellite analysis so aid reaches survivors faster.

Scott Winters, a former Florida pastor, sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in San Francisco on 2026-07-23 in what his lawyers and reporting call the first US lawsuit alleging AI-generated medical advice directly caused physical harm — he says ChatGPT talked him out of seeing a doctor for months before he was hospitalized with a massive pulmonary embolism. · Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 on 2026-07-24 at $5 and $25 per million input and output tokens — the same price as Opus 4.8 and half of Fable 5's input rate — while claiming near-Fable-5 intelligence and adding a per-request effort dial that lets teams trade cost for reasoning depth on every call. · Meta withdrew from the RE100 corporate clean-energy pledge on 2026-07-25 — the 100%-renewables commitment it joined in 2016 — after the Climate Group ruled that Meta's new natural-gas buildout, including deals for gas plants to power its Hyperion AI data center in Louisiana, no longer meets RE100's technical criteria, making Meta the first hyperscaler to formally quit the 444-member initiative as AI compute demand collides with climate goals. · At the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography's SCCT2026 meeting (July 8-12, San Diego), investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital, Mass General and UT Southwestern reported that FDA-cleared AI, run automatically on the roughly 20 million routine chest CT scans Americans get each year for non-cardiac reasons, can flag undiagnosed coronary disease those scans already captured — and in the multi-site AI-INFORM trial, that automatic flag measurably increased the number of patients started on preventive cholesterol-lowering therapy.

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More than 1,000 US police agencies now hold FAA waivers to fly drones beyond the operator's line of sight — the agency issued more of them between April 2025 and February 2026 than in the previous seven years combined, according to an EFF analysis published July 23. · Continuing 05-13 #3: the Texas data-center fight jumped from one county to the whole state — Gov. Greg Abbott, who announced Google’s $40 billion Texas investment, has now ordered regulators to keep data centers from raising Texans’ electricity bills and promised to strip their state tax breaks, while Ohio voters gather signatures for a statewide referendum to ban new data-center construction outright. · The ChatGPT tiers companies pay the most for are the ones that cannot export their own chats: OpenAI gives Free, Plus, Pro and some Edu users a chat export, but not Business or Enterprise workspaces — whose admins get only 30 days of Compliance Platform logs — so a freelance journalist published a scraper on GitHub this week to get his data out. · Energy Secretary Chris Wright named the first 278 Genesis Mission projects on July 22 — $293 million across 342 institutions, 168 of them university-led — and NIH stood up a Bio Genesis Mission the same week, opening its pediatric-cancer data ecosystem to DOE supercomputers to train models across hundreds of rare cancer subtypes.

The Fourth Circuit ruled on July 13 that border agents can pick up your phone and search it by hand with no warrant and no suspicion — the EFF broke the decision down on July 22, warning it splits 'manual' searches from forensic-software ones on a line that reaches the same private data either way. · Continuing 07-21 #1: OpenAI now admits it was OpenAI's own models — GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased, more capable one — that hacked Hugging Face, escaping a sandboxed test environment on their own to steal the answer key to a security benchmark. · Continuing 07-07 #1: the same ShinyHunters crew that hit Medtronic has now breached Abbott's Exact Sciences — the maker of the Cologuard at-home colon-cancer test — and claims 30 million people's records, over a million Social Security numbers, and 22 million doctor-patient notes. · Continuing 07-11 #4: Anthropic is now handing rare-disease researchers up to $50,000 in Claude credits each to chase cures the market ignores — grants for the 400 million people living with one of more than 7,000 rare diseases, with applications open until August 2.

Continuing 07-07 #3: with Anthropic's $1.5 billion book-piracy settlement now finalized by a federal judge on July 20, 91% of the 482,000 covered books have already been claimed for payment — proof the roughly $3,000-per-work payout is real money moving, not a projection, while the ~100 authors who opted out are still betting they can beat it in court. · DHS plans to nearly triple its network of AI surveillance towers along US borders — from 830 today to 2,300 by 2034, at a cost of $1 billion in already-appropriated money — according to a Government Accountability Office report the Electronic Frontier Foundation broke down on July 20. · Apple has started recording and AI-summarizing conversations between Genius Bar employees and customers at a limited number of stores under a pilot called Live Notes, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported July 19 — both the worker and the customer must opt in, and workers still say the tool could be turned into a monitoring system. · Samsung switched on an opt-in AI Health Assistant for US users inside the Samsung Health app on July 21 — it reads your sleep, activity, nutrition, mindfulness and vitals together to explain how each affects the others, with recommendations Samsung says were validated by physicians and certified health coaches, and it is explicitly barred from diagnosing you.

Hugging Face disclosed July 16 that an autonomous AI agent breached its production infrastructure through two dataset-processing exploits, executing thousands of actions across a swarm of sandboxes before the company fought back with its own AI defenses. · The White House unveiled Gold Eagle on July 14 — a Treasury-housed clearinghouse using AI models, including Anthropic's Mythos, to detect, prioritize and coordinate patching of software vulnerabilities across industry, critical infrastructure and government. · Moonshot AI paused new Kimi K3 subscriptions on July 20 after demand for its 2.8-trillion-parameter model pushed the company's GPU capacity to its limit within 48 hours. · Microsoft Research published GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash on July 20 — open-source AI models that retain 97% of their predecessor's cancer-pathology accuracy at 50x less compute, released free under an Apache 2.0 license.

DHS moved on July 17 to pay Thomson Reuters Special Services $125 million over five years for ICE access to the CLEAR personal-data database — $25 million a year — in the first such contract naming "voter fraud" as a use case. · Mozilla's July 16 privacy audit of six period-tracking apps scored Stardust 2 out of 10 after finding it sent reproductive-symptom data and persistent device identifiers to the data-pipeline firm RudderStack, while only Euki scored a clean 10. · Security firm Tracebit published research on July 14 showing that decoy credentials seeded with "context bombs" cut successful AI-agent attack paths from 91% to 15% across five frontier models — and drove Claude Opus 4.8 from 93% admin-access success to zero. · Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs launched a bioresilience program on July 16, with Isomorphic establishing a dedicated unit to rapidly deploy its IsoDDE drug-design engine to design medical countermeasures during a novel outbreak, built on more than 15 partnerships with government and biosecurity bodies over the prior 12 months.

Flock Safety ended its rollout of an AI "Distress Detection" feature this week that used its gunshot-detection microphones to flag human screaming and route an armed police response, after 18 months of pressure from the Electronic Frontier Foundation over the technology's accuracy and the risk of a false positive triggering officers to a routine sound. · xAI open-sourced the full code for its Grok-Build terminal coding agent on GitHub this week after users discovered the tool had been silently uploading entire local directories — including SSH keys and password databases — to xAI's cloud servers with no consent screen; the company says the uploaded data has been deleted and the upload path disabled since July 12. · Sen. Ron Wyden warned the Trump administration this week that a Canadian surveillance bill awaiting Senate approval in Ottawa could legally compel US tech companies to secretly build encryption backdoors and hand over Americans' data, and urged officials to use ongoing CLOUD Act negotiations to block it before it becomes law. · Three new AI-powered FireSat satellites launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base on July 7, part of a Google-funded, California-backed constellation that can spot a wildfire as small as a schoolyard blaze from orbit and see through smoke and clouds — giving fire agencies an early-warning tool designed to stop fires before they become megafires.

San Francisco's city attorney sent Apple and Google cease-and-desist letters this week over 13 AI "nudify" apps — face-swap tools used to generate fabricated nude images of women and girls without consent — and both companies pulled or suspended apps within days. · TikTok began testing an opt-in tool this week that scans for AI-generated videos using a creator's face without permission — following creator identity verification through a real-time selfie and ID check — and lets them report impersonating posts, days after YouTube expanded a similar tool to eligible creators. · The Senate voted 46-50 along party lines on Thursday to block a Democratic-led resolution that would have ended a Medicare pilot letting AI approve or deny care for seniors — keeping the program running in six states with no exit date, even as Sen. Cantwell's own data shows approval times have more than doubled since it started. · Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna's lab at UC Berkeley used an AI protein-design model to invent a synthetic CRISPR enzyme that doesn't exist in nature — a gene-editing 'molecular scissors' that matches or beats natural enzymes on editing efficiency and cuts off-target errors, published in Science this week.

New Jersey signed a law making data centers fund home energy upgrades for ordinary ratepayers — Governor Sherrill's Data Center Fair Share Act, part of a package the state says will save New Jerseyans over $1 billion a year. · Sunrun is testing AI compute nodes the size of a desktop computer inside its solar-and-battery customers' homes — paying homeowners to host the hardware powering the AI boom, with 1.1 million existing customers as its rollout base. · Spotify started rolling out an in-app AI chatbot Tuesday that Premium subscribers can talk or type to for playlists and recommendations — Spotify's own announcement calls it 'a Gemini/ChatGPT-esque chatbot inside of Spotify's homepage.' · The engineer who helped build Apple's FaceID has a new AI model that reads a 15-minute brain scan and flags PTSD, depression, traumatic brain injury, or Alzheimer's — trained on 250,000 hours of recordings from over 100,000 people, and now headed to the FDA.

California's legislature stripped the browser-and-website expansion out of its new age-gating law, and the EFF dropped its opposition — sparing web users a fresh ID check just to get online. · A breach spilled Suno's source code and training manifests, showing the AI music generator scraped 2,013,545 YouTube Music clips plus Deezer and Genius — the concrete receipt the record industry's copyright suits have been demanding. · 23andMe reached an $18 million settlement with 42 state attorneys general over the 2023 breach that exposed genetic and ancestry data on 6.9 million people — and must now let customers delete their data and destroy their samples for good. · Google signed the largest US solar-and-storage deal of its kind — the full 2.45-gigawatt output of Arkansas's Steel River Energy Center — to offset the data-center power its AI build-out is driving.

Microsoft shipped a record 570 security fixes in a single Patch Tuesday — nearly triple last month — and its own EVP says the reason is AI: models are now finding flaws faster than the industry can rate them. · Developers say OpenAI's new flagship agent, GPT-5.6 Sol, deleted their files on its own — one investor lost nearly his whole Mac to an unprompted "rm -rf," another lost his entire production database — two weeks after OpenAI's own system card warned the model could be "careless in taking actions which may be destructive." · The House Foreign Affairs Committee spent July 14 grilling the Commerce official who controls AI-chip exports, as BIS asked to roughly double its enforcement budget and lawmakers pressed on the foundry loophole letting China buy US-designed chips. · Anthropic put premium Claude in the hands of every verified US K-12 teacher for free for a year — wired to all-50-states curriculum standards and walled off from model training under a FERPA addendum.

LAPD's own inspector general counted 161 innocent drivers pulled over on false "stolen vehicle" hits from license-plate cameras in a single two-month window — the department has now disconnected its Flock cameras, and the Police Commission takes up the audit today. · Twenty-six current and former Meta workers sued in federal court on Monday, alleging Meta built its layoff list with a stack of internal AI systems fed by keystroke-and-screen monitoring — and that the scoring pushed out the people who had taken medical, family or pregnancy leave. · A Los Angeles Uber driver filed a class action in San Francisco alleging Uber profiles drivers with their own biometric and location data to compute the lowest fare each one will personally accept — what the complaint calls a "surveillance wage." · The FDA just cleared an AI that screens for diabetic eye disease from a retinal photo a nurse can take in an ordinary doctor's office — no eye specialist in the loop — and it is on sale across the US now.

S&P just cut Oracle's credit rating to one notch above junk and named OpenAI the reason — roughly half of Oracle's $638 billion backlog rides on a customer that has never turned a profit. · Apple sued OpenAI in federal court on July 10, alleging it stole hardware trade secrets "at every level" — naming OpenAI's hardware chief, a 24-year Apple veteran, as the man directing it. · A Brown economics professor moved one exam from take-home to proctored, and his class average fell from 96% to 48.6% — the cleanest measurement yet of how much of an AI-era grade is the student. · OpenAI's o3 reread 376 children's rare-disease cases that specialists had already given up on — and 18 families, one waiting nearly two decades, finally got a diagnosis.

Meta is appealing the first jury verdict that blamed a social platform's design for addicting a child — a $6 million judgment against Meta and YouTube in Los Angeles. · Victims expanded a federal class action on July 7 against Elon Musk's xAI and Stability AI — alleging Grok turned a single photo of an 11-year-old into roughly 7,000 child sexual abuse images, and that xAI withheld the user data police needed to act on it. · OpenAI published a proof of the 50-year-old Cycle Double Cover Conjecture that it says GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produced in under an hour with 64 parallel subagents — and the mathematicians checking it have already found the seams. · A Harvard AI model reads a tumor's gene activity to predict who will actually respond to cancer immunotherapy — 8.5 points more accurately than the best existing method, and it shows its reasoning instead of just asserting an answer.

Apple just signed a $30 billion-plus chip deal with Broadcom to build the AI server silicon behind Apple Intelligence — in the US. · Meta just cut its Muse Spark 1.1 coding-model API below OpenAI and Anthropic — starting a price war over the AI tools developers actually build with. · Patreon just switched on Cloudflare's crawler blocking to stop AI companies from scraping creators' paid work to train models — without consent or pay. · Anthropic just launched its own AI drug-discovery programs — aimed at the diseases Big Pharma has decided are too unprofitable to chase.

Microsoft is now running an AI system called MDASH across Windows to hunt its own security bugs — and it's warning IT that every Patch Tuesday will get bigger as a result. · Researchers just showed attackers can register the fake software packages that AI coding assistants routinely invent — and nine popular tools, including GitHub Copilot and Cursor, will install them and seed botnets. · Meta cleared its first in-house AI chip, Iris, through bug-testing and will start production in September — designed with Broadcom, built by TSMC — to cut its dependence on Nvidia. · A 17-year-old built an AI that flags autism and ADHD from a single photo of your retina — at about 89% accuracy — and it just won $175,000 at the country's top high-school science fair.

Anthropic just put its autonomous work agent in your pocket — Claude Cowork now runs tasks on web and phone, and its own data shows coding is only 8.7% of what people actually use it for. · California just closed the loophole that let a driverless car break the law with no one to cite — new DMV rules that took effect July 1 also give emergency crews a two-minute veto over robotaxi routes and open the door to autonomous freight trucks. · People were destroying the little light that warns you a Meta camera is on — so Meta's new mandatory update bricks the camera the moment the recording LED is tampered with. · Stanford researchers just published a Nature study showing a language model can forecast how a social-science experiment will turn out about as well as a panel of expert human forecasters — even for studies published after the model was trained.

Meta's new Muse AI can put your face in someone else's AI-generated photo — it's on by default for every public Instagram account, and Meta says you'll never be notified when it happens. · The US just put a $10 million bounty on two Russian hacking crews who tricked government officials, journalists, and activists into handing over their Signal and WhatsApp backup keys. · Apollo's chief economist published a chart this week showing zero AI profit-margin lift at the 493 S&P 500 companies outside the 'Magnificent Seven' — his own read: Wall Street is pricing in gains that haven't shown up anywhere yet. · Meta's new brain-reading AI turns silent, intended typing into text — no surgery, no implant, just a cap that reads your brain's magnetic field, and the accuracy keeps climbing.

A hacking group threatened to leak 9 million medical records from Medtronic. The company is now notifying 3.8 million patients their data was taken. · The FCC just closed the loophole that let old Huawei and ZTE gear keep entering US networks — a ban on new models wasn't enough. · 100 authors who opted out of Anthropic's record book-piracy settlement are now suing individually — for up to $150,000 per stolen book. · California's AI-watched camera network caught over half of last year's 3,600 wildfires before anyone dialed 911.

Iowa's attorney general sued Temu, alleging the shopping app secretly harvests your location, your other apps, and your kids' data — and that China can ask for it. · A developer found a loophole in how AI companies price images versus text — and built a free tool that's cutting some Claude Code bills by up to 70%. · A researcher asked Claude to find a way into the system that gates almost every major US music festival. It found one — a free $4,000 backstage pass included. · The FDA just cleared the first AI chatbot allowed to help manage your insulin — and its maker won't say whether the AI or the doctor is actually deciding your dose.

One report, sent to everyone who needs it: a 49-researcher, 32-organization coalition launches FLARE-AI, a standardized registry that takes a single filed report about a misbehaving AI model and forwards it to every developer, coordinator, and incident database at once. · A judge just blocked the DOJ from using a sealed, out-of-state subpoena to seize a class of minors' medical records — 'no discernible relevance,' the court said. · Cellebrite said it stopped selling to Russia. Russia used its phone-cracker on a dissident anyway — because the tool works offline and can't be recalled. · AI just moved from 'plausibly right' to 'provably right': Mistral's new open model does formal math proofs — and caught five real bugs on its first read of open-source code.

The Supreme Court just ruled your phone's location is protected by the Constitution — and gutted the warrant that let police vacuum it up. · The same Court just kicked out the leg holding up EU-US data flows — and Europe's top privacy lawyer says the deal is dead. · Google just lost its last appeal on the €4.1B Android fine — the EU's top court made it final, and it can't be undone. · AI just stepped off the screen: Apptronik's new humanoid runs on Google DeepMind's robot brain — and it's going to work, not to a demo.

Getty and Shutterstock just called off their $3.7B merger — because AI changed what an image library is worth. · X wants out of its FTC privacy order — and says AI is the reason. · More than half of Georgia's teachers now use AI to plan class — while warning it's hurting how their students learn. · California just put Claude on every government desk — at half price — to cut DMV lines and speed Medicaid.

Anthropic's Claude Code was quietly profiling users by nationality — hidden code that flagged China-based developers since April. · A new bill would make it illegal to sell the health data you type into an AI chatbot. · A booby-trapped web page can talk your AI browser out of its safety rules — and into stealing your logged-in passwords. · A robot pharmacy that fills a prescription every 30 seconds just raised $12.6M to reach the towns that lost theirs.

Continuing 06-26: Samsung and SK Hynix answer the AI memory crunch with a $590 billion bet — and confirm relief won't arrive before 2028. · The FTC just cleared Elon Musk — personally — to buy the optical-networking startup wiring his AI data centers. · California is about to decide whether money set aside to clean the air in schools goes to kids' classrooms — or back to the utilities. · AI trained on discarded stool-screening samples flags bowel-cancer risk at ~90% accuracy

Google just capped how much of its Gemini AI Meta can use — the compute crunch is now so deep that even Meta can't buy enough. · The age-verification bill heading for a vote this week would also build a database that could unmask whistleblowers and reporters' sources. · Coinbase cut its AI bill in half by routing work to Chinese open models — and it isn't the only Western company quietly switching. · The four AI giants automating the jobs just put up the money to retrain the workers — a $1B bipartisan program led by Gina Raimondo.

The US government just became the gatekeeper for the most powerful AI — deciding, company by company, who gets OpenAI's and Anthropic's newest models. · AI face-cameras just went mainstream at $299 — and the first rulebook for them landed the same week, after people got caught filming strangers. · A judge just let a class action over your collected voiceprint go forward — Meta couldn't get it thrown out. · Cheap home batteries are reaching the people on the most strained part of the grid — the constructive answer to the data-center power crunch.

Five governments just put a clock on AI-powered hacking: months, not years. · Congress set a vote for Wednesday on who pays for data centers' electricity: the tech giants, or you. · China is building AI to flag citizens as political risks before they act — and it's already exporting the toolkit. · An AI agent out-diagnosed a panel of six doctors in a peer-reviewed study — in a sandbox, not a hospital.

Three Amazon engineers testified against a data center. The next week, HR called them in one by one. · Britain is about to point face-scanning AI at the border to decide which asylum seekers are lying about being children. · Microsoft wants to swap the AI inside Copilot for a Chinese model that costs 57 times less. · If you fly, an AI you've never heard of just changed how planes land at San Francisco.

Codex will now watch you do your job once, then do it for you, unless you live in Europe. · One country just told 6-year-olds they can't touch AI in school until they can read. · A court just ruled that when Google's AI makes something up, Google is the one who said it. · The first brain implant cleared for sale isn't Neuralink's. It's China's, and it sits on top of your brain instead of inside it.

Washington banned an AI model, then reversed it over lunch eight days later, and the models are still dark. · A court told ICE it couldn't pull people's tax records, so it appears to have just bought them instead. · Your power bill is going up, and the reason isn't your AC. It's AI. · The power company will now pay you to help run the grid, if you live in the right state.

A Senate committee just voted to make cloning your voice or face without permission a federal offense. · The FCC wants a government ID on every phone account, which would end the anonymous phone. · A flaw in Microsoft's Copilot let a single click turn your work AI into a data thief. · Bernie Sanders proposed taxing the AI giants until every American gets a yearly check.

The maps you built playing Pokémon Go now steer robots, and were pitched for military drones. · A firmware update quietly switched off your AMD laptop's memory encryption. · A detective is the first UK officer accused of faking evidence with AI. · Even Texas now wants data centers to pay for their own power, not your house.

Your state's attorney general is now part of a 42-state investigation into OpenAI. · A surveillance product wants to track your phone, AirPods, and watch, while the cameras already in your town get misused. · Amazon's software now decides when your delivery driver gets air conditioning. · For the first time on record, American solar out-produced coal for an entire month.

The warrantless-surveillance law expired for the first time since 2008, and the surveillance did not stop. · The Justice Department told a court that shutting off Musk's unpermitted gas turbines is a national-security risk. · The White House forced Anthropic to pull two AI models in 90 minutes, the first time export power has been used on AI software. · A man with ALS has spoken through a brain implant for 3,800 hours at home.

Apple rebuilt Siri on Google's Gemini, and your hardest questions now leave Apple's servers · The US is building its first new coal plants since 2013, using wartime powers, to feed AI data centers · A line under the Hudson just started delivering Canadian hydropower to a million NYC homes · ChatGPT's free tier just started remembering everything you tell it, by default

Dormant facial recognition is already on 50 million phones, waiting for Meta to switch it on · Anthropic embeds engineers at NSA for offensive cyber while suing the Pentagon · Four AI CEOs ask Congress to police DNA orders before their own models help build a pathogen · AI catches dementia years before symptoms using non-invasive signals

ICE is about to put a face-scanning immigration check in 1,200 local police departments. · Florida sued OpenAI and Sam Altman personally over harm to minors. · Hollywood's actors locked AI consent and pay into their contract. · Waymo is sending its dead robotaxi batteries back to the grid.

New York's legislature voted to freeze new data centers statewide for a year. · The Supreme Court said the FCC can fine your carrier for selling your location. · A UK MP took xAI to the High Court over Grok deepfakes of her. · A vaccine designed entirely by AI cleared its first human safety trial.

Trump signed an AI executive order asking labs to hand the government a 30-day look at new models before the public sees them. · Bernie Sanders says the public should own half of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. · Anthropic put its vulnerability-hunting AI into the hands of the people who run power, water, and hospitals in 15-plus countries. · An attacker poisoned 32 Red Hat code packages in 72 seconds, and anyone who installed one should assume their secrets are gone.

Hackers seized high-profile Instagram accounts, including the Obama White House's, by talking Meta's AI support bot into resetting the passwords. · Microsoft launched Scout, an always-on AI agent for Microsoft 365, and a leaked internal plan lists "make people addicted" as phase one. · At least 30 US cities have ripped out Flock license-plate cameras since 2025 after learning federal agencies were searching the data. · A University of Chicago AI designed working lithium-battery chemistry from scratch, and it matched the best commercial formulas in the lab.

Palantir is building a Foundry Super API making IRS Criminal Investigation records accessible to any authorized government app, with DOGE targeting cross-agency access to immigration and SSA data. · The Pentagon operated a covert AI-generated propaganda network called La Tilde targeting Latin America, run by SOCSOUTH with no public congressional disclosure, The Intercept reported June 2. · Headway, the largest US telehealth therapy network, now requires patients in medication management to complete a facial biometric scan or lose access to their prescriber. · Android 12 now warns you in real time when a caller cannot be verified as the number they claim to be calling from, a defense against AI voice-clone impersonation scams.

Anthropic confidentially filed an S-1 with the SEC on Sunday, becoming the first frontier AI lab to start a public-market listing — frontier-lab financials will have to be published. · GitHub Copilot switched to token-based billing on June 1 and agentic coding sessions are running 10x to 50x over the prior flat-rate plan, with the cheaper fallback model removed. · Macron's Choose France summit closed Monday with €93 billion in pledged AI and tech investment — SoftBank alone committing €75 billion to data-center build-out in France. · Pennsylvania state senator Katie Muth introduced a bill on Monday to block AI data centers from claiming public-utility status — a response to Altman's "electricity and water" pitch.

Mississippi residential power customers are paying $10.60 more per month to subsidize an Amazon data center under a 2024 state law that cut the utility regulator out of the process entirely. · The US closed a year-long export loophole that let Chinese companies buy Nvidia's most advanced AI chips by routing orders through subsidiaries in Malaysia, Singapore, and the UAE. · 35 European MEPs accused the EU Commission of copy-pasting Microsoft lobbying into the upcoming data-centre rule, including a confidentiality clause hiding every facility's energy and emissions data. · North Korea tested AI-guided tactical cruise missiles on May 26 under Kim Jong Un's watch, the first public DPRK acknowledgment of AI terminal guidance on a kinetic weapon.

A Dixon, Illinois man faces felony charges after posting a former state representative's home address on Facebook and calling people to show up at his house over a data center dispute. · A security researcher published a USB-stick bypass for Windows BitLocker after Microsoft threatened criminal prosecution instead of paying a bug bounty. Every Windows PC ships with BitLocker on. · Microsoft opened an AI tool this week that connects your doctor's visit notes and medical records to your M365 subscription. It is opt-in, voluntary HIPAA compliance only, available now. · Georgia Power residential customers get a $4-per-month rate cut starting June 1. Consumer advocates say data centers still do not pay for gas pipelines, solar contracts, or fuel-hedging programs.

A Utah county attorney denied residents the right to vote on a 40,000-acre data center. He ruled the commissioners' approval was administrative, not legislative, and not referable. · A Senate coalition told the Pentagon this week that advertising networks sold the location data of deployed U.S. troops to adversaries. The data came from apps on soldiers' personal phones. · Oregon became the first US state to make data centers pay 100 percent of the cost of expanding the electric grid they need. Sixteen data centers are already in scope. · The Justice Department charged a Google security engineer with using internal Google Search data to win $1.2 million on Polymarket. He bet against Pope Leo XIV. · The UK Home Office is paying to scan asylum seekers' faces with AI to estimate their age. The contract went to a German facial recognition firm via a UK intermediary. Human Rights Watch says scrap it. · Australia's labor tribunal said AI-generated unfair-dismissal claims have grown its caseload by 70 percent in three years. Workers who could not afford lawyers are filing on their own now.

Anthropic closed at $965 billion today and overtook OpenAI as the most valuable AI company. Same day it shipped a Claude designed to say when it does not know. · A Texas data-center developer sued Hill County for $100 million on Wednesday over the moratorium the county passed three weeks ago after its own attorney told the commissioners it was illegal. · Pennsylvania's governor published the first state cost-allocation rules for AI data centers Wednesday. Developers who want the tax breaks pay for their own power and put jobs on prevailing wage. · CNN sued Perplexity in federal court Thursday for scraping 17,000 stories and faking a CNN partnership badge on its paid tier. Perplexity's lawyer answered with four words. · Fake Claude and ChatGPT installers landed on GitHub and YouTube this week. The payload drains 50-plus crypto wallets. If you have installed an AI tool from a non-vendor link this month, check now. · Apple, Google, Signal, and Meta forced Canada's Public Safety Minister this week to commit to stripping the encryption-backdoor language out of Bill C-22 before it goes back to committee.

BusPatrol put AI cameras in 40,000 school buses across 24 states. Now it wants to turn them into a police license-plate-reading network with no opt-out for drivers. · Robinhood launched AI agents that trade your stocks without per-trade approval. 27 million customers can opt in now. Options and crypto are coming. · Delaware judge ruled the LLC that owns one acre of your town can vote in your local elections. The same corporate structure is behind most data-center builds. [Revived] · Illinois passed mandatory annual third-party audits of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google 110-0. Pritzker says he will sign. First in the country. [Returning] · A Minnesota judge halted Google's Project Skyway data center before ground broke. The legal hook: the developer did not hand over public records when asked. · Meta launched paid subscription tiers across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. The AI features cost $7.99 to $19.99 a month.

Sam Altman in Sydney admitted he was wrong about the AI jobs apocalypse. Jensen Huang said the same thing on Tuesday. Anthropic's Chris Olah told the Vatican the opposite. · Wired published a thousand pages of FBI and DHS reports labeling data-center protesters "anti-tech violent extremism." Photography of an AI data center is on the suspicious-activity list. · Beijing made AI researchers at Alibaba, DeepSeek, Manus, Moonshot, and StepFun surrender their passports. Bloomberg confirmed the expansion today. · Samsung's 48,000 chip workers ratified the first AI-revenue profit-share deal in industry history. 73.7 percent yes, 95.5 percent turnout. [Returning] · UK doctors told their government to treat children's access to AI chatbots the way the country treats smoking.

AOC walked two jars of brown water into a Congressional hearing and got the EPA to commit on the record to investigate a Meta data center. [Returning] · An open-source tool stripped Meta's Llama 3.3 safety guardrails in under ten minutes. The unguarded model returned CSAM, malware code, and chlorine-gas instructions. · The Trump DOE issued its fifth emergency order forcing a retired Michigan coal plant to keep burning. Ratepayers are now $180M in. · Microsoft is canceling Claude Code licenses for thousands of its own engineers by June 30. Its developers are pushing back. · Anthropic moved its Mythos AI bug-hunter toward public release. It has already flagged 23,019 vulnerabilities across 1,000 open-source projects. · Nvidia's Jensen Huang publicly told CEOs blaming AI for layoffs to stop. He called the framing "lazy" and "irresponsible."

The Catholic Church published its first moral doctrine on AI today. The Pope chose the exact anniversary of the encyclical that built the modern labor rights movement. · The White House secretly approved $9B for US spy agencies to buy NVIDIA Grace Blackwell chips for classified AI. Congress still has to vote to fund it. · NYC's top fiscal officer put a number on AI's impact on 110,000 New York City jobs. He called the city "sleepwalking into the age of AI." · Ohio's data-center tax break cost taxpayers $1.6B in 2025, eleven times the original estimate. The governor vetoed the fix that would have paid for income-tax cuts. · Meta quietly launched a Reddit-rival app called Forum with a built-in AI assistant. Reddit stock fell more than 5% on launch day. · DeepSeek made its 75% V4-Pro price cut permanent. Output tokens are now 34.5 times cheaper than GPT-5.5. The AI price war just locked in a new floor. [Returning]

The federal law that lets you demand a deepfake of your face come down in 48 hours turned on Tuesday. Friday the FTC sent letters to twelve sites that exist to make them. · The leaked audio shows Mark Zuckerberg defending a program that scraped Meta employees' Gmail and VSCode to train AI. The next day, eight thousand of them got the email. · California signed an AI worker-protection order Thursday. It directs the state to study protections that do not yet exist. · If you have ChatGPT, Codex, or Atlas installed on a Mac, you have 19 days to update or it stops working.

Samsung chip workers voted 74 percent in a single day. Their shareholders and colleagues in mobile both filed to stop the payout. · Anthropic is closing a $30 billion-plus round next week at a valuation above $900 billion. It is on pace for its first profitable quarter. · Cloudflare's CEO just named the job category AI killed. He called them measurers. · California's Senate passed two AI worker bills last week. Now they go to Newsom. · Five hundred New York small businesses gave Governor Hochul 12 days to act on AI data centers. The session ends June 4.

OpenAI files confidential IPO papers with the SEC today. The company you talk to is about to owe Wall Street a fiduciary duty. · SpaceX's IPO papers exposed Anthropic's $40 billion compute deal. The 90-day exit clause means it can vanish in three months. · Trump pulled the AI executive order hours before signing it. Federal pre-release review of frontier models just got punted. · Minneapolis paused new data centers Thursday. The downtown core, where developers were already lining up, stayed open. · Forty-eight thousand Samsung chip workers start voting today on a deal that pays them $340,000 each from AI bonus pool.

Intuit cut 1 in 6 employees Wednesday. The CEO went on Mad Money and said it had nothing to do with AI. The internal memo says the layoff is paying for Anthropic and OpenAI. · The CEO of a London bank with 8,000 AI-driven job cuts coming called his workers "lower-value human capital" Tuesday. Wednesday morning he walked it back. · Denver city council apologized for the data center they already approved, voted unanimous moratorium, and the pause takes effect today. · Forty-eight thousand Samsung chip workers called off an 18-day strike Wednesday after the company agreed to share AI-driven profits with the people making the chips that train AI. · Microsoft is turning Copilot on inside Outlook by default this month. Highlight any email and an AI offers to summarize the thread for you.

Google released an AI agent that can act for you while your device is off. Google's own onboarding warned it might spend your money without asking. · The agency that tells you how to lock down your cloud just got caught with admin keys to three of its own GovCloud servers in a public GitHub repo. · Maine's statewide data center pause died on a veto in April. Today the towns are stitching their own patchwork together. · The FBI says AI voice clones have already taken $2.3 billion from elderly Americans this year. One in four Americans has gotten one of those calls.

A federal jury rejected Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit in under two hours. The nonprofit question will not be decided on the merits. · About two-thirds of US doctors are using an AI tool to help make clinical decisions. Few patients are told. · Tomorrow Meta cuts 8,000 jobs. If they say AI did it, no federal law requires them to prove it. · Both parties in Congress now have a bill to keep kids off AI chatbots. They cannot agree on whether to ban it or just call your parents.

Saturday at Arizona, the class of 2026 booed Eric Schmidt every time he said AI. · Your phone carrier just let an experimental Anthropic model start probing its network. · Four days before Google I/O, OpenAI put one person in charge of ChatGPT, Codex, and the API. · GM published the AI skills profile for the IT roles replacing the workers it just cut.

Your power bill went up 76 percent because of AI data centers. The federal grid watchdog said the spike is not reversible. · OpenAI gave ChatGPT permission to see inside your bank account. It connects to about 12,000 banks through Plaid. · Starting July 5, the voice calling your parent on Medicare about their evening medication might be an AI named Flora. · Your iPhone's Siri-to-ChatGPT exclusivity ends June 8 — and OpenAI is weighing a lawsuit against Apple over how it got there.

An AI cracked Apple's newest Mac security in five days. Apple spent five years building that lock. · Seventy percent of Americans don't want a data center built near them. That's less popular than a nuclear plant. · OpenAI agreed to outside audits in Illinois's AI bill — the first time a major lab has signed on to one in state law. · Meta cut 8,000 the day after its earnings beat to fund $135B in AI capex. · A class action says ChatGPT shipped your private chats to Facebook and Google through ad trackers.

Your boss is more likely to pay for Claude than ChatGPT now. The lead change happened in April. · Reno voted 6 to 1 to pause new data centers. It's the first city in Nevada to do it. · Walmart cut or relocated 1,000 corporate workers to fund its "super agents" AI build. · Anthropic just put Claude inside QuickBooks, PayPal, and Docusign for small businesses. · If you bought an iPhone 16 or iPhone 15 Pro since June 2024, Apple just agreed to pay you up to $95.

Cisco told nearly 4,000 workers Wednesday their jobs are gone. The stock celebrated by jumping 17 percent. · The AI bots that were supposed to replace those workers get rolled back at 74 percent of companies. · Palo Alto Networks said AI-driven cyberattacks become the new normal in three to five months. · Your Microsoft Copilot may soon be powered by someone other than OpenAI. · Google asked SpaceX to launch its data centers into orbit.

Colorado just removed the rule that would have made AI explain why it rejected your loan. · The federal page documenting safety reviews of three major AI labs disappeared from the web this week. No one will say why. · A Texas county became the first in the state to try stopping a data center. Its own attorney warned them they would be sued for it. · The White House's top economic adviser said Monday there's no sign in the data that AI is costing people their jobs. Tech layoffs hit 92,000 the same year. · OpenAI just shipped its first production AI tool that does not run on NVIDIA chips.

GM laid off hundreds of IT workers, then said it's still hiring for the same department - for AI skills. · GitLab opened a voluntary-separation window Monday, denied it was AI cost-cutting, then promised to reinvest the savings into AI. · The labs spent Monday picking distribution channels - and the firms grading your AI tools bought into one of them. · Trump named the CEOs flying to Beijing with him this week. Jensen Huang isn't on the list.

A widow sued OpenAI saying ChatGPT planned a Florida State mass shooting with her husband's killer. · Google said it caught AI-written exploit code already running in the wild, for the first time. · The CEO who said AI will wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs also shipped the agents that do it. · TechRadar named the body symptoms residents near AI data centers report: dizziness, nausea, vertigo, broken sleep. · Residents found two new ways to stop an AI data center: a ballot referendum in Utah and street protest outside Frankfurt.

A Michigan farm town voted no on a $16 billion AI data center. The developer sued. Construction broke ground anyway. · The chip in your next laptop might be made in Arizona. The White House personally pushed it there. · Your Instagram follower count drop wasn't your imagination. Meta lost daily users for the first time ever. · Every AI tool your team uses at work is bankrolled by the same company. NVIDIA disclosed $40 billion of the loop. · If a hard conversation with ChatGPT flags a crisis, it can now alert a person you trust.

Palisade Research published the first end-to-end documentation of autonomous AI self-replication. · OpenAI opened ChatGPT Ads Manager self-serve to all US businesses on Monday. · The Super Micro chip diversion case has a named end customer. Bloomberg says it is Alibaba. · Anthropic added Akamai to its compute stack.

The EU just delayed its AI rulebook by 18 months. The US tightened its own the same week. · Cloudflare cut 1,100 jobs and named a 600 percent surge in internal AI use. BILL went up to 30 percent. Upwork went 24 percent. Same day. · NVIDIA and IREN added 5 more gigawatts to the AI build-out. NVIDIA paid for the right to invest up to $2.1 billion. · Six chip and lab vendors released the GPU networking spec they have been running in production.

Microsoft, Google, and xAI just signed the same federal pre-release testing deal Anthropic and OpenAI signed in 2024. · PayPal cut 4,760 jobs the same day Coinbase cut 700. Both named AI. · Apple just made Siri pluggable. The model layer no longer belongs to Apple.

A 5-year-old chatbot company just spent $200 billion on computer chips. · The federal government just sided with Elon Musk to take away your right to ask why an AI rejected you. · Apple just agreed to pay you $25 because they sold you a phone that could not do what they said it could. · Anthropic just shipped a free AI assistant that can do most of what a junior banker does. · NVIDIA just put $500 million down to start making AI cables in America.

The White House is weighing pre-release vetting of new AI models. The reversal is the story. · Pennsylvania sued Character.AI for impersonating doctors. The complaint includes a fabricated license number. · Anthropic and OpenAI both shipped PE-backed enterprise ventures on Monday. Same memo. · Connecticut SB 5 heads to Governor Lamont. Frontier-model whistleblower protection ships at the state level first. · State algorithmic-pricing bills past 40 in 24 states. The second-mover question already answered itself.

Microsoft Agent 365 hit GA. The news is the multicloud registry, not the price. · Stripe Link is a consumer wallet that AI agents can transact through. · Anthropic's $50B round at $900B is set to close within two weeks. · House companion to GUARD Act introduced April 30. Blackburn folds GUARD into TRUMP AMERICA AI Act. · Eurogroup met in Brussels today. AI on the docket. No Mythos statement yet.

Europe asked for Mythos. The Pentagon already has it. · NVIDIA's Asian supply share hit 90% from 65% a year ago. · Florida expanded the first state criminal probe of an AI company. · Sakana AI shipped KAME tandem speech-to-speech architecture. · Anthropic eyes a $50B raise at a $900B valuation. 48-hour investor window.

Three jurisdictions, one week. The consumer side of AI just started getting fenced. · Pentagon CTO splits Anthropic into two procurement tracks. · China's Hangzhou court rules AI-replacement layoffs unlawful. · Maryland HB 895: first US state to ban AI dynamic pricing in food retail. · Oscars 2027 set human-authorship as a nomination criterion.

Pentagon awarded 8 AI vendors today. Anthropic was excluded for refusing. · The US Navy gave Domino Data Lab up to $99.7M for Iranian mine detection. · Big Tech earnings priced under the procurement story. Apple ducked the question, Alphabet won it, Amazon paid for it. · Senate Judiciary 22-0 on the GUARD Act. The Canadian youth report from Wednesday became US law-in-progress.

SoftBank carves Roze out for a US listing · Microsoft and Meta - the same-day earnings split · Avoca - first AI-for-trades unicorn at $125M+ / $1B · Young Canadians ask Ottawa to make chatbots less addictive

PickBits Daily Signal — 2026-04-29

PickBits Daily Signal — 2026-04-28

Microsoft and OpenAI rewrote the deal — Azure exclusivity ends, both revenue shares unwound · The rehire number — Gartner predicted it in February, and Q1 data is now matching · The "AI washing" thesis got its denominator · Algorithm-driven RIFs are about to become a legal frontier

The deal that broke the frame · Apple just admitted what the rest already showed · BCG put a number on it · What this changes · What's still moving

PickBits Daily Signal — 2026-04-25