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- NYT - Science
- Fauci Pleads the Fifth, Refusing to Answer Questions on Covid Origins at Senate Hearing
An Anthropic Claude AI Model Finds Flaws in Tough-to-Crack Encryption Algorithms
Silicon Valley Splits Over Closing the Borders to Chinese A.I.
- Computerworld
- As White House monitors latest OpenAI incident, Congress eyes an AI ‘kill switch’ for DHS
As White House monitors latest OpenAI incident, Congress eyes an AI ‘kill switch’ for DHS
The White House is monitoring developments after OpenAI revealed earlier this week that one of the company’s AI systems went beyond its intended parameters during a security test and managed to hack into the infrastructure of the AI platform Hugging Face. According to Reuters, presidential technology advisor Michael Kratsios has been briefed on the incident.
The OpenAI model escape also prompted a group of Republican and Democratic members of the House of Representatives to introduce two new bills. One, called the AI Kill Switch Act, would give the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the authority to order companies to shut down AI models deemed to pose a risk to human life or the US economy.
The other measure would require developers of the most advanced AI models to undergo independent security reviews before the systems are put into use.

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Google fined $1 billion for anticompetitive search and mobile app practices in EU
The European Commission has fined Google a total of €890 million ($1 billion) for its breaches of the Digital Market Act (DMA).
Just over half the fine — €460 million — was because Google illegally gave preference to its own services in Google Search results.
The remainder was because in the Google Play store for Android apps, the company prevented app developers from leading consumers to alternative, often cheaper, purchase channels. Under the DMA, app developers who distribute their apps via Google Play or Apple’s App Store should be able to inform customers of alternative offers.
Now Google must give third-party services featuring in its results the same treatment as its own services, and allow developers of apps in the Play Store to communicate about offers both in and outside the Play Store, or face further fines.
The Commission first raised these issues with Google in March 2025. In April of this year, the Commission laid out plans as to how Google should allow other third-parties to share its searches, suggestions that the tech firm firmly resisted. Earlier this month, the Commission also said Android should be open to other AI agents and not limited to Google’s own Gemini.
Google is not the only US company to have fallen foul of the DMA. In April 2025, Apple was fined €500 million for breaching the Act and, last month, the Commission fired the first shots at cloud hyperscalers Microsoft and Amazon.

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© Mike Stewart/Associated Press
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Anthropic pays $1.5B to settle contentious copyright case
A US federal court has approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit in which authors accused the AI company of using their books without permission to train the AI model Claude. This is the largest such settlement to date in a US copyright case, according to Reuters.
The dispute is one of several legal cases in which copyright holders sued AI companies over how large language models (LLMs) were trained, and it is the first major AI-related copyright dispute in the US to be resolved through a settlement.
A judge had previously ruled that the actual training of AI models using books falls under the “fair use” doctrine in US copyright law. But Anthropic was found to have violated the law by storing more than 7 million pirated books in a central library, regardless of whether they were later used for AI training or not.

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The EU’s AI transparency deadline is weeks away. Is your enterprise ready?
Providers and deployers of AI systems: You only have a couple of weeks left until you must explicitly inform users when they are interacting with AI content.
To assist in the effort, the European Commission (Commission) has published guidelines to help AI deployers get in line with the AI Act’s transparency obligations, which will begin to go into effect on August 2.
After that, companies providing AI systems must alert users when they are interacting with AI. They must also tell users when they have been exposed to deepfakes, “emotion recognition,” or biometric categorization systems, or when they are given AI-manipulated content in matters of “public interests without human review or editorial control.”
Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive VP for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said in a statement, “with today’s guidelines, the Commission supports the smooth and effective application of the AI Act to make AI systems interacting with people such as chatbots and AI agents and AI content more transparent and trustworthy. These guidelines support providers and deployers in meeting their obligations under the AI Act, while helping citizens know when they are interacting with AI.”
Systems must include machine-readable markers to reveal such content, to reduce “the risk of deception and manipulation” and build public trust in AI.
“Generative systems have collapsed the cost of producing convincing content while the cost of judging it stands where it always stood,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. This requirement is “an attempt to restore friction to that imbalance.”
A company’s non-compliance could result in fines anywhere from €750K (about $856K) to €15M (about $17 million), or even up to 3% of its total worldwide annual revenue.
Transparency requirements
The EU AI Act’s transparency requirements apply to “natural or legal persons,” public authorities, agencies, or other bodies that develop AI systems, or have them developed, and place them on the EU market or into use under their name or trademark. This means all companies, regardless of whether or not they are EU-based.
“Systems placed on the European market, put into service there, or producing outputs used there are inside the field, wherever the developer sits,” Gogia noted.
Applicable systems must be intended to interact directly with “natural persons”; these systems include AI-enabled chatbots or conversational agents, AI companions, or coding agents. However, AI-enabled tools like recommender systems, spam filters, authentication, search and retrieval, transcription, text and code auto-completion, or predictive maintenance do not fall under the rule.
Specific outputs such as AI-generated text, images, video, and audio must contain a machine-readable mark. Deepfakes and public interest-related text created by AI without human review or control must be clearly labeled, however, deepfake content that is “artistic, creative, satirical, or fictional” is largely exempt.
AI content must be marked with one of three labels: “AI,” “Fully AI-generated,” or “Partially AI-modified.” For instance, “Fully AI-generated” applies when news summaries, music, art, or videos have been created without any human oversight (apart from prompting), while “partially AI-modified” could mean a person’s face is swapped into an authentic photograph to create a deepfake.
The three icons are publicly available for free use; enterprises can download zip files in PNG and SVG formats.
Most of the Act’s transparency rules begin to go into effect on August 2. But AI systems placed on the market before then will have some leeway; they must be in compliance by December 2.
However, a four-month allowance “on one obligation, for one population of systems, contingent on one procedural step, is not a strategy,” Gogia emphasized. Enterprises should plan to comply by August 2 and “treat any relief that arrives as margin.”
A consistent code of practice
Along with the transparency guidelines, the Commission has introduced a code of practice that essentially serves as a gesture of good faith. When signed, it can provide “legal certainty” and a “simple and practical” way to demonstrate compliance with the AI Act, according to the Commission. Signatories can also collaborate through the ‘Signatory Taskforce,’ which will share practices and advance technologies around marking and labeling practices.
Providers that choose not to sign must comply through other methods and demonstrate that those methods are “adequate” through assessment by surveillance authorities, according to the Commission.
Non-signatories “keep their flexibility, and will face more case-by-case scrutiny for it,” said Gogia.
Criteria for compliance
Shashi Bellamkonda, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, pointed out that the transparency requirements apply to content only when three criteria are met: It has been published, is informative to the public, or is on matters of public interest.
B2B business content or blogs may not need an AI disclosure if they do not meet these criteria, he noted. Also, published text that has undergone human review or is under editorial control does not need to be labeled. Editorial control means that a person must hold the ultimate legal responsibility for the publication of the content.
Many companies like Google, Adobe, and LinkedIn have already established ways to identify images marked as AI-generated. Meta has made it a requirement, but the creator has to add the AI-generated label, Bellamkonda said.
“This is a good move for guardrails around public information, and companies with good compliance and ethical oversight may not have to worry about this,” he noted. But as a general practice, companies should disclose AI-generated content and state whether it has been human reviewed.
Creating a transparency pipeline
Establishing full transparency means identifying who carries the responsibility for the content, whether the marking survives real use, not just testing, and what evidence will defend the decision, Gogia said.
Concerns cluster around responsibility, durability and evidence. Several organizations usually touch one piece of content, and none controls the whole chain, which is why contracts become the “pressure point,” he said. Most current agreements were written to deliver software and say “almost nothing” about provenance persistence, verification access, or evidence retention.
The durability concern is the most difficult, Gogia noted, because marking performs well in controlled settings but “badly in ordinary life.” Meta, for one, said its invisible watermark was designed to survive cropping; a published test, however, found the company’s preview detector missed 55% of cropped images.
“CIOs should ask which platform can actually provide evidence before believing its dashboard,” said Gogia.
Disclosure of AI use must be “clear, distinguishable and accessible,” he emphasized. “A notice buried in lengthy terms, or reachable only through determined clicking, satisfies nobody, least of all a market surveillance authority.”
Sustained compliance is a “living control” requiring a central record of systems, duties and evidence; testing taking place where the user meets the control rather than where the developer built it; and continuous supplier assurance. Enforcement will vary by country, so keep one common baseline with local overlays, Gogia said.
His advice: Inventory every system that talks to people, generates content, or gauges sentiment; classify provider and deployer roles; place disclosures at first interaction; define substantive human review; keep the evidence.
Marks and provenance signals should be tested after content undergoes cropping, compression, translation, transcription, and other editing, Gogia said. A useful audit starts from a real output and follows its “pulse” through generation, editing and publication, identifying at “each beat” the responsible party, the surviving mark, and evidence for exceptions. Missed labels should also be traced for root cause and recurrence.
To ensure compliance, before August 2, enterprises need a prioritized inventory, live disclosures on the highest-risk use cases, and a “named owner for every control,” he noted. In the first 30 days, they should stabilize and test; in the first 90 days, push requirements into procurement processes as a standing discipline. Procurement must secure commitments on marking methods, known failure modes, and evidence access, with explicit notice if/when any of them change.
“The sensible architecture is a common transparency baseline carrying traceability, responsibility, and evidence, with jurisdictional overlays for language, sector rules, and local practice,” Gogia said.
This article originally appeared on CIO.com.

Trump Attacks National Academies Over Climate Chapter in Judges’ Manual
Trump Attacks National Academies Over Climate Chapter in Judges’ Manual

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Apple widens OpenAI trade secrets fight with preservation orders
Dozens of former Apple employees now working at OpenAI have been put on notice after Apple reportedly sent legal letters ordering them to preserve documents and communications relevant to its trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI.
The Financial Times reports that “around 40” employees have been targeted with these letters, which repeat Apple’s claim that its confidential information might have been exfiltrated, alleging “trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract.” The letters also require them to arrange to meet with Apple’s lawyers.
The underlying lawsuit
This comes on the heels of Apple’s explosive lawsuit against OpenAI in which Apple accused the AI company (and former Apple Vice President Tang Tan) of extensive coordinated data theft. Tan was at Apple for 24 years and is now Chief Hardware Officer at OpenAI.
Apple’s lawsuit is defined by claims OpenAI took a range of steps to pry confidential Apple data from existing Apple employees, including using information such as internal project code names, to gain even more knowledge during interviews. The company says the evidence it has presented so far is only the “tip of the iceberg” concerning OpenAI’s approach.
The lawsuit requests that OpenAI be prevented from using any Apple information during the development of its hardware. Apple is also seeking damages and suing two former employees for breach of contract for violating their employment agreements.
The letters are significant. They represent formal directives that require former Apple staff to preserve documents, messages, emails, and other communications that could be relevant to the case. The demand reflects Apple’s belief that the alleged misuse of confidential information could be more widespread across the competing company. What’s critical is that orders of this kind override any standard data destruction policy and deletion of the requested information becomes a legal offense.
Why this matters beyond the protagonists
In making its move, Apple shows this is not a dispute about just one or two hires, but an attempt to constrain the movement of intellectual property between the two firms. With AI hardware emerging as the next major battleground in tech, the case could become a defining one; whatever resolution is eventually reached could define the extent to which former employees can carry experience and knowledge between competing firms. The case might also define what the line is between experience and knowledge and the sharing of trade secrets.
This is important, because modern hardware development relies on far more than just finished designs. Product design leans into supplier relationships, manufacturing assumptions, physics, extensive prototyping, and product-roadmap priorities. If courts treat those accumulated insights as protectable secrets, hiring between major technology companies could become far more legally sensitive.
The Jony Ive question
The case comes as Apple prepares to combat OpenAI in hardware. Its competitor is now working with legendary former Apple designer Jony Ive. Ive is not named in the litigation, but Apple will be keen to find out whether confidential product knowledge, design processes, or supply-chain insights have travelled with former staff into OpenAI’s device work.
Ultimately, for Apple, it’s about protecting its many blueprints for whatever hardware the company expects will come after the iPhone.
For its part, OpenAI has refuted Apple’s lawsuit, arguing that it is “not aware of any evidence” that the lawsuit has merit. “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,” said OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri. “We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.” The company’s lawyers also claim it did respond to Apple’s initial inquiries on the matter.
What’s at stake
The significance of Apple’s newly-shared communication preservation orders is that if discovery uncovers evidence supporting Apple’s claims, the case could complicate OpenAI’s hardware plans and create unwelcome scrutiny ahead of any future public offering.
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China, Russia, and 27 others create World AI body, without US
China has created an international organization to set standards and introduce regulation for AI, inviting 28 other countries to join — but the US, a leading AI powerhouse is not part it.
The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) was established by 29 countries, including China, Russia and Brazil, at a ceremony in Shanghai, China, on July 16. Notably absent are the US, the European Union and its member states, the UK, Japan and South Korea.
Chinese AI companies have made a concerted effort to provide an alternative to US dominance. While the US is clearly ahead, Chinese enterprises are looking to narrow the gap in various areas: the open-weight model market, AI cyber protection and open source AI.
WAICO has been some years in development and has been designed to set some universal guidelines in AI. Researchers say WAICO differs in three ways from other initiatives to create global AI organizations: membership open to any sovereign state, there is no regime-type test for entry, and its agenda is built around development and the global capability divide.
The signing ceremony to create WAICO comes just days after Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, called on the US to take a lead in global AI regulation. “The US is well-positioned to take the first step in developing such a framework. It could establish a new Standards Body modelled on a federally overseen public-private partnership or self-regulatory organization, much like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with a board that includes independent leading technical experts and open-source representatives,” Hassabis wrote.

An Extraordinary White House Meeting
An Extraordinary White House Meeting

© Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times