“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

Last Wednesday, several global government websites temporarily went offline following an alarm set off by the National Security Agency and its counterparts in the European Union and the United Kingdom. All three organizations announced major vulnerabilities in PHP, the computer scripting language used by about 70 percent of websites globally. Ryan Austin, a researcher at the cybersecurity company Calif, had used artificial intelligence tools to discover a way for hackers to run code on a server that uses PHP without its operator knowing.

The Netherlands plans to cut 25,000 civil servant jobs as part of an AI push designed to save taxpayers €3.5bn (£2.9bn) a year.

Officials plan to cut around 15pc of all government jobs in the next decade as part of the efficiency drive.

Police and defence will be exempt from the push, as the country seeks to save €900m from its central budget by next year.

An MIT report finds that a child can still beat Artificial Intelligence (AI) in learning a language.

There is hope for humanity after all.

Their analysis commented that humans have used language for at least 100,000 years and then observed, “And in all that time, there has been only one thing in the world that could learn a human language to perfect fluency: a human child.”

Anthropic has warned artificial intelligence could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” as it unveiled details of its planned blockbuster stock market listing in the US.

The company behind AI chatbot Claude revealed losses of more than $80.7bn (£60.5bn) in the first half of the year, but said it had $112.4bn in cash or equivalents, and generated revenues of $16.3bn over the same period.

The number of shares to be released, their price range, and a date for the listing have not been disclosed.

On a busy freight corridor, the 240 miles of I-45 between Dallas and Houston, it was bumper-to-bumper, like usual, when something out-of-the-ordinary happened. A big rig let in several cars from the on-ramp. Another 18-wheeler changed lanes to make space for a truck pulled over on the shoulder.

Neither honked its horn—the baritone blasts anyone who has ever driven a hatchback can’t forget.

Toronto is paving the way to become the first Canadian city to welcome Waymo vehicles to the country.

The California-based company said on Friday that its autonomous vehicles will be in the city “in the coming days” as it lays the groundwork for a 2028 launch.

Chow voters hardest hit.

British-Canadian Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, often revered as the “Godfather of AI,” said AI is one of “three big revolutions where people ceased to be so important,” the others being Copernicanism — the understanding that planets revolve around the Sun, not the Earth — and Darwinism.

“Now we’re creating alien beings — meaning we’re not the only intelligent beings around,” the 78-year-old told The Guardian in a story published Tuesday. “And the reality is, we only have a couple of years to adapt to that.”

Europe has developed an extraordinary economic talent: it watches a technological revolution begin elsewhere, writes the rules for it, builds the authorities to supervise it, imposes the reporting — and only then wonders why so little of it is happening in Europe. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made the habit impossible to ignore. The habit is not an accident of Brussels. It is the Franco-German regulatory reflex, written into the treaties and then imposed on everyone else.

State lawmakers have introduced more than 1,500 AI-related bills, driven in part by fears that the technology is advancing dangerously fast. Congress is moving, too—the Senate Commerce Committee recently advanced the CHATBOT Act, which would require AI companies to take stronger measures to protect children and teens from harmful or exploitative interactions with these tools. And lawmakers in both chambers have proposed the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act. Twenty-seven states are considering legislation requiring AI developers to cover their own utility costs.

I’m losing track of the good and the bad of AI.

Under a blistering desert sun, the U.S. Army strained to show it had become a modern, AI-powered fighting force.

Some blamed the heat. It was July in the Mojave Desert, and the thermometer climbed toward 110 degrees. Servers overheated. Batteries died and couldn’t be recharged. Soldiers drenched T-shirts in ice water and draped them over antennas that were on the fritz.

Sgt. Ramontez Bennett’s drone from Anduril Industries was supposed to loiter overhead. Instead, the relentless glare forced it to land. “They gotta do something about it overheating,” he said. Plenty of America’s conflicts have played out in temperatures rivaling this particular July day.

The future is autonomous and scary.

The private dinner enjoyed by Chinese president Xi Jinping, US president Donald Trump and leading figures from the world of Big Tech was portrayed by the press as the oligarchs paying obeisance to political power. But the press, as usual, got it wrong: the real powers were not the politicians but those controlling the handful of companies that dominate not only America but also much of the world outside China’s sphere of influence.