The Trump administration has reportedly asked OpenAI to stagger the release of GPT-5.6 over security concerns. The model will initially be offered to a small group of partners, with the government "approving access customer by customer during this preview period," reports The Information. The request came from conversations with the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the report said.

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BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Foundation has announced Akrites, a new initiative to coordinate vulnerability disclosure and remediation for critical open source software as AI dramatically speeds up vulnerability discovery. Founding members include AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Red Hat, NVIDIA, IBM, Cisco, JPMorganChase, and others. Akrites will provide a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT), a standardized coordinated vulnerability disclosure process, and act as a "maintainer of last resort" for abandoned but widely used packages. The goal is to reduce duplicate reports, avoid conflicting patches, and help upstream maintainers address vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. As AI makes it easier to find security flaws, can a coordinated industry effort help protect open source, or does it risk giving large corporations too much influence over the ecosystem? "Akrites is the largest coordinated effort in history to create systems and deploy tooling that leverages the collective power of the community to make everyone safer," the Linux Foundation said in an open letter. "Akrites participants will contribute engineering resources; work to build and ship fixes; or fund the engineers who do. Some companies have contributed mightily already. The reality is, collectively, we need to contribute more."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic has accused the Chinese firm Alibaba of launching the largest attack yet attempting to clone Claude, as China races to match the capabilities of Anthropic's leading model following Mythos' release and subsequent restriction from foreign markets. Ars obtained a June 10 letter sent to Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) one day ahead of a Senate committee hearing on "AI and the American Dream." In the letter, Anthropic shared "new, confidential evidence of the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude's capabilities we have ever measured." The attacks occurred between April 22 and June 5, when "operators afliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba's AI lab" allegedly generated "more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts," Anthropic said. Violating Claude's terms of service and access restrictions, this campaign "targeted some of Claude's most valuable capabilities, such as agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon tasks." According to Anthropic, Alibaba evaded detection by "using obfuscation techniques and proxy networks." As Chinese demand for reliable obfuscation techniques increases, Anthropic warned there's already "a growing circumvention economy" to fuel an ever-expanding web of future distillation attacks. [...] "Alibaba is governed by an independent board, none of whom has any military affiliation," Alibaba said. "Its products and services are built for retail, logistics, and enterprise information technology -- not weapons, defense, or intelligence." Anthropic appears unconvinced, however, that Alibaba isn't working with the Chinese government. In the letter, Anthropic warned that without stronger interventions, these distillation attacks will "help China reach Mythos Preview-level capabilities sooner." To keep the US ahead of China, Anthropic recommended that Congress pass legislation with three objectives. First, antitrust laws must be updated to allow AI firms to share information about evolving Chinese tactics to deter more threats. Second, the US needs more export controls on chips to hamstring Chinese access to advanced compute so that they simply can't train on US model outputs. That could make conducting distillation attacks pointless, Anthropic suggested. Finally, Congress should pass laws penalizing Chinese labs' "bad behavior" so that it's "more difficult and costly" to rely on distillation attacks to advance Chinese models. Penalties could include limiting Chinese firms from accessing US models or advanced US chips or from relying on data centers outside of China, Anthropic suggested.

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After Ford's automated quality-control systems and AI tools fell short, the automaker hired 350 veteran engineers over the past three years to mentor younger staff and reprogram the underperforming technology. "Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as the information you use to train it," Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters on a call Wednesday. "Over prior years, we didn't pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles." Bloomberg reports: Those engineers were "at the heart" of Ford's efforts to turn around quality problems, said Kumar Galhotra, chief operating officer. They now run mandatory meetings that rigorously troubleshoot quality problems and they have reprogrammed AI tools to head off glitches before they happen. "We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems" and not getting the desired results, Galhotra said. "We brought back technical specialists" and "they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor." The return of the veteran engineers at Ford cuts against the prevailing wisdom -- and fear -- that AI will replace all kinds of knowledge workers. But Ford found the machines couldn't replace experience. "Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product," Poon said. But "we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals." As a result of the efforts of the old hands, Ford vaulted above quality stalwarts such as Toyota and Honda on JD Power's bellwether survey that measures the quality of a car during the first three months of ownership. Only luxury brands Porsche and Genesis topped Ford this year.

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Google is investing roughly $75 million in A24 as part of a research partnership with DeepMind to develop AI-powered filmmaking tools and workflows. "The deal represents the latest marriage between a Hollywood studio and AI in an era where companies have oscillated between partnerships and lawsuits," reports Variety. From the report: A24 partner Scott Belsky, who leads the studio's technology division A24 Labs, told the Journal the studio's Google partnership differed from other deals because AI developers mistakenly advertised their products as a means to make films cheaper and faster. His division is developing applications for AI-generated storyboards, another reimagination of the production process that has seen filmmakers like Martin Scorsese rubber-stamp. "We think there are better uses that preserve creative control and support risk-taking," said Belsky, arguing the new tools "won't look anything like the prompted generation type of AI that people feel uncomfortable with."

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Garfield AI, the UK's first regulator-approved AI law firm, has won its first court case after helping a freelancer recover 7,000 pounds in unpaid fees. "I was owed money for work I had done, but it felt like the process of recovering it could be too stressful, expensive and time-consuming," said Tamires Camal Taquidir, a freelancer who had provided HR-related services to a hospitality business. "Garfield made it possible for me to pursue the claim and keep going. When the counterclaim was brought, it was intended to intimidate me, but I knew I had accessible, cost-effective and competent support. I'm delighted by the result." Computer Weekly reports: After attempting to resolve a dispute over paid fees without court action, Camal Taquidir [...] used Garfield AI to help her pursue the case in court. She was able to generate pre-action correspondence, and then prepare and issue court proceedings. The AI legal assistant conducted all of the legal work preceding the court trial. The defendant instructed solicitors and brought a counterclaim, which the claimant disputed with the support of Garfield AI. The claimant continued to trial, including dealing with document production, the preparation witness statements and trial bundles. Garfield then instructed a junior, shortly before the trial began. She won the claim over unpaid fees following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court. The claimant paid around 400 pounds in Garfield AI fees to recover the 7,000 pounds owed, while the defendant instructed both a solicitor and a barrister. [...] Following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court on 14 May 2026, in which both sides were represented by barristers, the court found in favor of the claimant, awarding 7,000 pounds and dismissing the counterclaim.

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America's state prison systems need ways "to keep people from returning to prison," reports the Wall Street Journal, "when an estimated 40% end up back behind bars within three years." Part of the problem comes in the form of filing cabinets, manila folders and legacy digital databases. In other words, records for a single prisoner might be kept in a dozen places... Now a group of 19 prison systems are tackling the problem with digital tools and artificial intelligence in some cases. They are contracting with San Francisco nonprofit Recidiviz, whose computer systems bring together prisoner data from its disparate sources into digital dashboards. From there, corrections staff can see information — such as court records and notes from parole-board hearings — about a prisoner or parolee all in one place. The company says its efforts are working: Recidivism has fallen 16% in the prison population its systems track. It is the result of "just streamlining these workflows and knitting someone's journey together end to end," says Clementine Jacoby, chief executive officer of Recidiviz. Some criminal-justice groups show that recidivism is trending downward in general, though most of that data is nearly a decade old... The statistics from 11 states stop at 2019, and for four states stop at 2016. With 10 other states, no data was reported.

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"About 59% of TikTok videos served to a new account's For You feed are AI slop," writes Search Engine Journal, "according to a report from Kapwing, the video creation tool company. That's roughly three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube." The company manually reviewed over 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 categories and ran a separate fresh-account test, counting AI-generated content in the first 500 For You videos. Kapwing ran the same fresh-account test on YouTube and found that 104 of the first 500 Shorts, or 21%, were AI slop. On TikTok, 294 of 500 For You videos hit that threshold... Of the 2,000 videos Kapwing reviewed in TikTok's Kids category, 57% were AI slop. That was the highest rate of any category in the analysis. The highest-rate tag was #cartoonkids, where 97 of 100 featured videos were AI-generated. Tags like #cartoons and #babysong both reached 83%, and #forkids came in at 79%. After Kids, the next highest AI slop rates were in Science and Education (35%), Health (33%), and History (33%). All three are categories where visual illustration and voiceover narration make up much of the content. On the other end, categories where on-camera presence or physical demonstration are central had the lowest rates. Fashion came in at 1.3%, Music at 1.5%, and Fitness at 1.6%. The article notes that by last November, TikTok "had already labeled 1.3 billion videos as AI-generated, according to the report."

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"A grassroots movement is forming among everyday tech workers who are demanding their companies develop and deploy AI responsibly," reports TechCrunch. Hoping to leverage that discontent is a new super PAC called the Guardrails Alliance. The New York Times reports that it launched Thursday with backers that included tech employees and labor unions: Guardrails positions itself as a populist political movement that runs on small donations from people in the trenches of the AI boom. The PAC has about $5 million at its disposal today and planGuardrails will buy ads to support Alex Bores, a New York congressional candidate who became Leading the Future's first target and is running in the primaries next week. s to raise $15 million this cycle — small potatoes compared to deep-pocketed adversaries like Leading the Future, which has more than $100 million from tech leaders like OpenAI president Greg Brockman... "This is not about matching [Leading the Future] dollar for dollar," [said the super PAC's co-founder, political operative Shaunna Thomas]. "What this vehicle is meant to do is be a political home for people who are concerned about the way the anti-regulation AI tech sector is trying to manipulate elections." Meanwhile a former Netflix and Warner Bros. executive has launched the Alliance for Responsible Innovation in the Arts & Media, reports Variety, calling it an AI-focused content coalition that says it's dedicated to supporting "responsible and sustainable AI innovation and the importance of human creativity." The initial members of the coalition, announced Monday, include Disney, the New York Times, Adobe, Condé Nast, the Financial Times, ITV, Advance, BBC, Cambridge University Press & Assessment, U.K. publisher Reach and Wiley. Many of the coalition's members have either struck deals with AI companies or are developing their own AI tools... The group plans to argue for legal and policy guardrails around AI's usage, with its funding directed towards analyses, tools and services focused on advancing those initiatives... One of the group's launch advisers is Damian Collins, OBE, who previously served as the U.K. Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology under prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. "Using AI to break the law can never be an acceptable excuse," he said in a statement. "Laws around personal safety, intellectual property and financial crime still apply in the age of AI. This is why ARIAM has been created and why I'm proud to working with this necessary initiative."

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This week OpenAI announced a 750-task test to to measure "whether AI systems can support realistic life science research tasks, not just answer biology questions." But while OpenAI's top-performing GPT-Rosalind model led the rankings, Slashdot reader BrianFagioli notes that "it achieved a pass rate of just 36.1 percent, failing nearly two-thirds of benchmark tasks." Nerds.xyz points out that means "the best-performing model failed nearly two-thirds of the benchmark's tasks." The benchmark also revealed a familiar weakness. AI systems generally perform better when everything is presented as text. Once they are forced to work with supporting documents, figures, or complex datasets, performance drops noticeably. GPT-Rosalind's pass rate fell from 45.1 percent on text-only tasks to 28.1 percent on tasks involving artifacts or URLs. To be fair, the benchmark is not intended to suggest AI is useless in research. Quite the opposite. OpenAI found that models are becoming increasingly capable of scientific communication, evidence synthesis, and translating research findings into practical explanations. Those are valuable skills, particularly for researchers drowning in information. But LifeSciBench serves as a useful reminder that today's AI systems are still far from autonomous scientists. They can help. They can assist. They can sometimes provide surprisingly useful insights. What they cannot reliably do, however, is replace the expertise, judgment, and skepticism that real scientific research requires.

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Long-time tech pundit Robert Cringely started his career at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab back in 1978. Last month 73-year-old Cringely explained why his site went on a two-year hiatus — and it's not just because of a heart attack and a stroke last July: Just like everyone else, I've been busy all this time on Artificial Intelligence, founding with two partners a company called 2Brains... The work we were doing together is unfinished, but it's not stopped. The patents are filed, the architecture is documented, and the small team continuing the work includes me. Cringely's first piece made the cast that "the trillion-dollar bet the AI industry is making right now may be wrong, and that there's an architectural alternative we've patented and built." In Machines of Loving Grace, Amodei made the case that scaling compute would eventually solve essentially every hard problem in artificial intelligence. Buried in that optimism — or maybe not buried, maybe right out in the open — was a quiet absolution. Hallucinations, the embarrassing tendency of these systems to state falsehoods with total confidence, would take care of themselves. Make the models big enough, train them long enough, and the problem dissolves. You don't have to solve it. You just have to wait, and spend. And so the entire AI industry breathed a sigh of relief. I have spent forty years watching this industry, and I know a permission slip when I see one. Because that is what the essay became, whatever Amodei intended. It gave every other person writing nine- and ten-figure checks a reason not to worry about the one thing that should worry them most. The hallucination problem is the difference between a clever toy and a system a hospital or a bank or a court can actually rely on. It is the whole ballgame for enterprise AI. And the prevailing wisdom, blessed from the top, is that you needn't address it directly. Scale will provide... A small company I helped start, 2Brains Inc., set out in 2022 to solve hallucinations — before ChatGPT, before the scaling consensus hardened into received truth, back when the polite assumption was that the problem was simply insurmountable. We did not solve it by waiting for bigger models. We solved it architecturally, by separating the part of the system that generates language from the part that retrieves and verifies facts, and reconciling the two before anything reaches the user. It runs on ordinary processors. It is cheap. And on the industry's own benchmark for this kind of faithfulness, it more than doubles the published baseline, with no fabricated facts in the verified case at all. The article asks whether scaling will, at tremendous cost, eventually reduce hallucinations — or even worse, if the largest companies in the world "are spending a fortune chasing a cure that is not coming." And last week Cringely pitched more advantages for their solution, noting that most prompts aren't even chatbot-level creative prompts — but just requests to retrieve simple data: The reason 2Brains doesn't lie and the reason it's cheap are the same reason. It looks the fact up instead of guessing it — so it cannot fabricate, and the lookup runs on a processor that sips power instead of a chip that gulps it. Trust and thrift are not a trade-off you balance against each other. They fall out of a single design decision. You do not pay extra for the honest version. The honest version is the cheap version. That sentence is the whole company.

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CNBC reports: Waymo is recalling almost 3,900 robotaxis in the U.S. to fix software issues after some cars drove into freeway construction zones, according to notices filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The voluntary recall, the Alphabet-owned company's second in just over a month, followed 13 known incidents where Waymo robotaxis drove into construction zones on freeways in Phoenix, or entered freeway lanes with active construction in the San Francisco area, the filings published Thursday said... A letter posted to the regulator's website... noted that, "Driving through a closed construction zone increases the risk of a crash..." [Waymo said in a statement emailed to CNBC] "We voluntarily restricted freeway operations last month while making improvements, proactively notified state and federal regulators, and decided to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA. We continue to safely serve riders on surface streets in all the cities where we operate...." The company implemented another voluntary recall in May after some of its robotaxis had driven into flooded zones or standing water. The NHTSA Safety Board also initiated a probe of Waymo after a January incident in which a robotaxi illegally passed a stopped school bus.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The Trump administration's move to impose export controls on Anthropic's most powerful AI technology followed a spat over the company granting South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom access to its Claude Mythos model, according to people familiar with the matter. US officials were concerned about what they alleged were SK Telecom's ties to China, those people said. Those concerns appear to have compounded when Amazon later flagged vulnerabilities to the White House it identified in Fable 5, a highly safeguarded version of Mythos that Anthropic released to the public on June 9. The Amazon researchers claimed that it was possible to circumvent some of Fable 5's guardrails and access Mythos' formidable cybercapabilities, though Anthropic and outside cybersecurity experts have argued these risks are not unique to Claude. The confluence of events is what ultimately led the White House to determine that it could not trust Anthropic to safeguard its most advanced AI technology, according to a person close to the administration. On Friday, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to revoke access to Mythos and Fable 5 for all foreign nationals, including immigrants inside the US. Rather than gate access to its technology based on nationality, a process that would be difficult to implement while also preserving privacy, Anthropic decided it was better to disable access to the models entirely. The White House and Anthropic still remain at odds after days of negotiations about bringing Claude Mythos and Fable 5 back online. SK Telecom was one of roughly 150 organizations granted early access to Anthropic's vulnerability-detection model Claude Mythos through Project Glasswing, notes Wired. The White House later asked Anthropic to revoke the company's access, reportedly amid concerns about alleged China ties, and Anthropic immediately complied. There was, however, no mention of the telecom in the government's formal demand to restrict Mythos and Fable 5 to U.S. nationals. SK Telecom told a Korean newspaper that the "anonymous insider's remarks in foreign media lack verified facts, and our company has no ties to China."

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Midjourney is expanding beyond AI image generation with plans for a medical-imaging business built around a water-based, full-body ultrasound scanner that uses hundreds of thousands of sensors and AI to reconstruct MRI-like images. "As you descend into the water, hundreds of thousands of tiny elements take turns, sending out waves, listening together, compressing and then streaming data to a massive cluster where thousands of computers split the task," Midjourney explained in the announcement. "By looking at how the shapes of all the waves change, we reconstruct a detailed map or 'image' which basically lets us figure out what's in there." The company hopes to open a San Francisco scanning "spa" in late 2027, with 50,000 or more deployed around the world by 2031. The Register reports: It's not clear how fast the process is with the prototype unit, but Midjourney said its goal is for the whole thing to take around a minute. "We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs," the company added. According to a "technical" video included in the announcement, there's a ring of 40 scanners included in the prototype unit the company has built. That ring of 40 elements contains 358,000 ultrasonic elements made up of tiny transducers that create ultrasound waves in water while listening for how they change when they slap the body of whoever is in Midjourney's dunk tank up to a thousand times a second. [...] Midjourney said that it's planning to open its first ultrasound scanner spa at the end of 2027, but it has another hurdle to jump: FDA approval. Beyond improving its tech so that the second-generation scanner is ready for its 2027 spa date, "regulation is the next limit," the company said. "Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval," Midjourney explained. "We're starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps -- and we'll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities." Midjourney also fails to mention how it will store and secure those scans, whether it will use said scans to train its body composition-detection algorithms, and how it's ensuring those algorithms get things right that it usually take a human a few years of education and training to learn.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Artificial Intelligence will lead to labour shortages, not the replacement of humans, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted in a highly optimistic appearance at the VivaTech technology conference in Paris on Wednesday. Bezos put forward a rosy vision of how technology will help humanity, speaking about projects including his space venture Blue Origin and his new AI startup Prometheus, which is aimed at speeding up physical manufacturing. "I know there's a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant and so on," Bezos said. "I totally disagree with this point of view. And I think, in fact, AI is going to create a labor shortage." Half of Americans fear the rise of AI could put them or someone in their household out of work, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found this month. Bezos, the world's fourth-richest person with a net worth around $250 billion, argued that people have "endless" things to do, and are currently limited by barriers that he said AI would lower. One goal of space exploration is to move polluting industries off Earth, said Bezos, whose Blue Origin aims to compete with trillionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX in rockets. "If space travel gets reliable enough and inexpensive enough, and we can get materials from asteroids and near-Earth objects and the moon, then this garden planet can be returned to its pre-Industrial Revolution state," Bezos said.

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"As the use of artificial intelligence spreads across companies worldwide, it is relieving workers of tedious old chores but creating new ones," reports the Los Angeles Times. "Most people don't realize the amount of time that they're spending working on the tools to get the time savings that they're professing," said Paul Leonardi, Duca Family professor of technology management at UC Santa Barbara." Leonardi is one of the co-authors of the new study published by the Work AI Institute, whose contributors include academics from Stanford University and UC Berkeley. The institute is sponsored by AI company Glean... The research surveyed 6,000 digital workers across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia between December and January. The report found that we are in a phase of significant personal productivity gains, but few companies are translating these gains into revenue and business growth. While 75% of individuals reported a boost in productivity, only 13% of the organizations say they have seen significant business gains as a result of AI adoption, the survey found... The reason the boost in productivity sometimes leads to waste, Leonardi said, is the time people spend correcting the bot's work and gathering the right files, documentation, and tacit knowledge required for it to produce high-quality output. "It's pretty striking the amount of time and effort people are spending," Leonardi said. Most employees now spend over six hours a week of their workday babysitting their work chatbots, the survey said. There is a "thick, mostly invisible layer of human labor holding the whole thing together," the report said. The survey found that for every hour a worker spends getting useful output from AI, they spend roughly another hour making it usable. Of the total time workers spend interacting with AI each week, 37% goes to botsitting, 36% to actually using the tool to produce work. Part of the reason so much time disappears into botsitting is how often the tools fall short: Workers report that more than a third of AI sessions fail outright, requiring a full restart or substantial rework. Paradoxically, as more workers hand over bigger parts of their jobs to AI, they are offloading personal judgment and responsibilities to the bots. The survey found 41% of workers say they sometimes deliver AI-generated work they couldn't explain if asked... "I think what's happening with a lot of these Gen AI tools right now is we're essentially expecting individual contributors to act as managers," Leonardi said. "They're just managing these AI tools, AI agents, and we're expecting that they'll be able to produce way more, but we're not taking into account all of the work that actually goes into managing." This problem isn't likely to go away.

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"A year after spending over $14 billion to bring in Alexandr Wang and a group of his top Scale AI engineers to revamp its artificial intelligence efforts, Meta is at least back on the map in AI," reports CNBC, "though it's still far behind OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in the market." Wang's big accomplishment was the delivery of the Muse Spark AI model in April, marking Meta's first jump into proprietary foundation models and away from a strict adherence to open source, or open weight as it's more commonly called in AI... "Meta needs to provide more proof points of both adoption and commercialization," said Ralph Schackart, an analyst at William Blair who recommends buying the stock. "Investors are looking for Meta to monetize a new AI-first product, beyond the substantial positive impact AI is having on enhancing the advertising models." Wall Street, at least so far, is unimpressed. Meta's stock is down 18% over the past 12 months, the worst performer in the megacap group, along with Microsoft, which has its own challenges in AI. That's even after Meta reported 33% revenue growth in the first quarter, the fastest rate of expansion for any period since 2021. For Meta, the problem started with what some industry experts called, in hindsight at least, a strategic blunder. The company jumped into AI with its Llama family of models, offering an open-source approach that allowed developers to freely tinker, while the other big model makers charged for access. In April of last year, Meta's release of Llama 4 fell flat, failing to captivate developers and leading Zuckerberg to reconsider his company's approach to AI development... Since the release of Muse Spark, Meta has unveiled new AI and business-related subscription plans as part of an effort to expand its business beyond online ads. Historically, it hasn't worked. Meta still counts on ads for 98% of revenue. Schackart said he wants to see "tangible evidence of a growing list of new, AI-first products created by Muse Spark, even if monetization lags." He said that's "what investors are looking for." No matter how good Wang's model may be, Zuckerberg has a high hill to climb with developers coming off the Llama debacle. "I think the AI community largely ignores Meta at this point," said Rob May, CEO of the startup Neurometric, which works in the realm of token engineering.... Krish Subramanian, the CEO of consulting firm KOI AI and former product head at IBM Consulting, said developers are more excited about Google's AI models than what Meta is offering. The appeal of Llama was that it specifically targeted developers wanting open-weight alternative models, while with Muse Spark, Meta has made little effort in that direction, he said. "The lack of developer trust will come back to hit them if they don't focus on third-party developers," Subramanian said, noting that it took years for Microsoft to regain trust from open-source coders during the early days of Azure. "To just focus on a walled-garden kind of an ecosystem and ad revenue as the main source of income, they probably will never become the big player," he said. A Meta spokesperson pointed to Wang's recent comments about the company's continued support for the open-source ecosystem, and said Meta still plans to offer outside developers access to Muse Spark's underlying technology via an API, as it previously announced. "We're already testing with some early partners, and look forward to releasing it this month," the spokesperson said. "That Zuckerberg's metaverse and virtual reality ambitions have generated over $80 billion in total losses since late 2020 makes the AI pitch a tougher sell," the article points out, citing this observation from Howard Yu, business professor at Switzerland's International Institute for Management Development. "He's running out of the space for his credibility to last," Yu said. "I think the virtual reality foray may have burned up a lot of his goodwill in front of investors."

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America's Energy Department "wants to build a single national platform for doing science with AI," reports Communications of the ACM: It is called the Genesis Mission, and the idea is to connect the country's 17 national laboratories, their supercomputers, scientific datasets, and a growing layer of AI models and agents into one system researchers can access. The DOE has taken to calling it 'a national operating system for science.' That means treating compute, data, and AI models the way the country treats power lines and highways, as shared national plumbing everyone else builds on top of. If it works, Genesis will change how scientific work gets organized, checked, and scaled, with AI helping run the whole pipeline from hypothesis to simulation to experiment and back. The pitch is that this is better understood as infrastructure policy than as another research program. Genesis is now moving from announcement into execution. President Trump signed the executive order launching it in November 2025. This past February, the DOE published 26 science and technology challenges for the program, and in March it opened a $294-million call for research teams in fields like nuclear energy, quantum information science, semiconductors, and biotechnology. The program is also beginning to reach beyond U.S. borders. In June 2026, Japan moved to become Genesis's first international partner. The two governments plan to invest a combined $1 billion over five years, with Japan contributing $500 million toward joint work in quantum technology, nuclear fusion, and biotechnology. The stated goal is staying ahead of China in the fields where AI is advancing fastest. The open question is whether a federated platform this big can actually work, or whether it ends up as one more expensive coordination exercise.

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Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: Shutterstock has unveiled what it calls a "human-led, AI-powered" creative platform that combines its massive library of [human] contributor-created content with AI image and video generation, AI editing, conversational search, prompt enhancement, and automated model selection tools. The company says the goal is to help creators move from idea to finished work faster [in a single application] while maintaining commercial licensing protections and contributor royalty payments... While Shutterstock repeatedly emphasizes human creativity, much of the platform's future appears centered on AI-generated and AI-modified content. An article at Nerds.xyz suggests Shutterstock's AI tools let users "transform existing content into something new," while noting Shutterstock's repeated references to human creativity "almost feel defensive." But it points out other companies including Adobe and Canva "and countless startups are all racing to integrate AI into creative workflows."

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"A coalition of state attorneys general has opened an investigation into OpenAI," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter." OpenAI was served Friday with a subpoena seeking documents related to a broad range of its activities and impact on users, including advertising, user engagement and retention, handling of consumer data and health data, activities related to minors and seniors, deep learning models, model sycophancy and company policies, some of the people said. The subpoena, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, was sent by New York's attorney general.... Earlier this month, Florida became the first state to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman. The lawsuit claims OpenAI and Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users. Florida's Attorney General, James Uthmeier, opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI in April over the role its chatbot played in a mass shooting that killed two people at Florida State University last year. The suspect allegedly turned to ChatGPT as a confidant and sounding board to plan the attack, and the chatbot dispensed advice for his questions... State attorneys general have been scrutinizing OpenAI's competitors in the AI industry as well. In December, a coalition of 42 state attorneys general led by Pennsylvania's Dave Sunday sent a letter to companies including OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google and xAI. In the letter, the Attorneys General demanded safeguards to protect vulnerable users from harmful interactions with chatbots, warning that "developers may be held accountable for the outputs of their GenAI products" for "encouraging an individual to commit a criminal act." "We take the concerns raised by state attorneys general seriously," OpenAI told the Journal in a statement, "and intend to engage constructively with their offices." The article also acknowledges that The Wall Street Journal's parent company "has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI."

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