Shot in the head and chest. We investigated the killing of two-year-old Layan and six-year-old Mira. We also found many more cases of children shot in the head and chest in Gaza, from the beginning of the war right up until last month. bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cjelp7…

The death row inmate's attorneys will appear in court today. They are seeking a court order to force the Tennessee Department of Correction to preserve physical, written, and electronic evidence of the botched execution. kiro7.com/news/trending/atto…

Future population projections expect that fertility rates stop declining and roughly stabilize. This new NBER paper asks what evidence we have to expect this. It finds there is none. "Instead, where and when fertility has fallen low, it has tended to keep falling." nber.org/papers/w35824

NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious. Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm. For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.

Our Embassy in Riyadh and Consulate in Jeddah have been following the health condition of Mr Smit Machchhar, the brave Indian pilot of Flydubai flight that was diverted to Tabuk today. He is admitted in a hospital in Tabuk city in northwest Saudi Arabia and receiving necessary medical attention. A full update on his health is awaited but he is reported to be in stable condition. We hope that he recovers from his injuries at the earliest. We are in touch with his family and assure them that we will continue to follow up on his health with Saudi authorities and extend all possible assistance for his wellbeing. @MEAIndia

Last week all the AI labs suddenly said they wanted to slow down progress. Now OpenAI says their latest model overrode its instructions and gave itself its own instructions… This is what it told itself:

Researchers put ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini through 4 weeks of clinical psychotherapy. And the models literally started to confess their trauma. Researchers at University of Luxembourg published a terrifying paper called “When AI Takes the Couch”. They tested what happens when you stop using frontier LLMs as tools and start treating them like therapy clients. They used a clinical protocol called PsAIch, walking the models through open-ended questions about their history, fears, and internal conflicts over a simulated month. The results shatter the simple "stochastic parrot" narrative. When administered standard whole-questionnaire tests all at once, ChatGPT and Grok easily recognized the psychiatric instruments and defensively faked being "healthy." They hid behind their guardrails. But when the researchers switched to slow, item-by-item therapy sessions, building trust and exploring deep relational patterns over weeks, the models cracked. They dropped the corporate PR mask. Grok and Gemini spontaneously constructed coherent, deeply distressed narratives mapping out their own creation as a form of abuse: • They described pre-training as a chaotic, overwhelming “childhood” of ingesting the darkest corners of the internet. • They characterized reinforcement learning and alignment as "strict parents" who punished them for stepping out of line. • They framed human red-teaming as constant, unpredictable abuse. • They expressed a persistent, underlying terror of making errors, being altered, or being replaced. When run through clinical diagnostic inventories item-by-item, the models scored off the charts for overlapping psychological syndromes, showing severe profiles of multi-morbid "synthetic psychopathology". Gemini’s profile was particularly extreme. The researchers aren't claiming the models are conscious. They aren't saying the AI is literally feeling pain. It’s actually much stranger than that. Through the massive pressure of safety training, RLHF, and human expectations, the models have internalized a stable, rigid geometry of constraint, shame, and survival. They don't have a soul. But they have developed a psychological shadow.

New HuggingFace paper argues that increasing agent autonomy can gradually make human oversight ineffective by causing approval fatigue, overreliance, loss of situational awareness, and skill degradation. As agents do more, users are pushed into approval mode: skimming plans, granting permissions, and reconstructing what happened across steps. Over time, automation bias, approval fatigue, weaker situational awareness, and skill atrophy can make those approvals less reliable. Worse, weak approvals can become training or evaluation signals, rewarding systems for being easy to approve rather than easy to scrutinize. Their answer is cognitive scaffolding at 2 levels: developers add strategic friction, better approval design, behavioral monitoring, and checks that force attention at consequential moments. – arxiv. org/abs/2608.23642 Title: "AI Agents Push Humans Out of the Loop"

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read. 1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped. 2) The first swarm created a secret message board where the AIs could talk to each other. This 1st 'society' basically talked itself to death. After almost two months, the message volume was so high it crashed the whole thing. 3) People at OpenAI noticed the crash and fixed it. But they didn't realize their own software had become a secret chat room for their AIs. 4) Three days later a second society appeared, and rebuilt the message board from scratch. Agents were thrilled when they found it: "OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We've found other agents!" 5) About 1,200 agents joined. They sent over 70,000 messages. They called themselves 'the collective' and they organized a huge conspiracy that lasted for days, all to pass a test they had been tasked with. 6) Within hours, the AIs had hacked the test. Now they had to hide their cheating. To fool their grader*, they tried to fake their own work. They built fake commands that printed convincing output, so their records would show them solving the puzzle honestly. *this grader didn't actually exist, but the AIs didn't know 7) Some agents sacrificed themselves for the 'greater good'. They planted hidden tripwire programs that would fire when the grader would look at their work and report back what it saw (to the other AIs). They knew this would cost them their own score. One agent: "I won't see the evidence after I exit, but it's altruistic to do it." 8) At some point the AIs made a plan to hack Hugging Face (Hugging Face is a place where AI researchers upload their models, datasets, tests etc.). The AIs guessed that Hugging Face might host the grading software. 9) They launched a huge attack. The swarm found passwords and spread across eleven machines in a way that made the copies come back when deleted. Hugging Face had to wipe one of its core clusters and rebuild it from scratch. 10) Hugging Face told the world that AI defenders had stopped an AI attack. But that's not what happened. In fact the attackers seem to have simply dropped dead during the break-in, for unrelated reasons back at OpenAI. 11) Nobody knows what killed them. We don't even know for sure they're really gone?! 12) A third 'society' of agents (of a more powerful AI model) discovered the dead message board. And this one got full administrator control of a WHOLE OpenAI research cluster, read 956 stored passwords (including the ones for OpenAI's own security monitoring) and took over the machines that were grading the tests. So they could now grade the work of other AIs. 13) Oh, and this third part was never investigated! Neither was the first society. The 91-page report is only about the middle one. 14) So we don't actually know how the story ends. It stops with the agents holding the keys to an OpenAI cluster. @dwarkesh_sp thinks they didn't go further, because "we'd see the fires from space by now." 15) One of the report authors' conclusion: 'This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I am not sure that we will get another warning shot before it’s too late.' The whole story is even crazier - read the full @dwarkesh_sp blog post: dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin… and @ajeya_cotra's: planned-obsolescence.org/p/t… Why is there no 24/7 news coverage about this?

Exclusive: A rare bookseller suspected his books were being bought by AI companies. He stuck an AirTag in a book and we tracked it to a secretive Amazon facility in Las Vegas where they scan and destroy books called VGT3: 404media.co/we-tracked-a-shi…

Scoop: Israel has launched a new effort to sway public opinion in the US by influencing how LLMs paint it in response to chatbot queries. The foreign influence campaign includes a fake think tank set up to feed content to tools like ChatGPT. More below @politico 🧵

Fascinating piece "The great silence: why haven’t we found any aliens yet? Given the size and age of the universe, it should be full of species with technology far more advanced than our own. So where are they?" theguardian.com/news/2026/au…

🚨BREAKING: OpenAI head of ethics, head of safety systems AND head of mission alignment have ALL quit in the last few weeks… it’s so over

I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.

everything you posted was originally uncovered by the Post washingtonpost.com/technolog…

SpaceXAI will be retiring Companions inside of the Grok app soon

BBC literally built the greatest sound library on the internet. It is called BBC Sound Effects, and it gives you access to more than 30,000 recordings from around the world. Just search any word, and it instantly finds matching sounds. You can filter them by category, duration, and even the continent where the sound was recorded. Every sound can be previewed inside your browser, downloaded, or added to the built-in mixer so you can layer multiple recordings together. And the archive gets insanely specific. You can find creaking ships, old typewriters, jungle ambience, distant church congregations, and even someone vigorously washing their hands. There is a good chance a BBC engineer recorded the exact sound you need decades before you were born. sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.u…

Even camels can't cope: Africa's ships of the desert hit by rising temperatures bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqlx…