LONDON — Andy Burnham will make “significant” cuts to Britain’s civil service staffing in order to funnel officials into councils and mayoral bodies in England, the official leading the U.K. prime minister’s devolution unit has indicated to POLITICO.

Caroline Simpson, Burnham’s deputy chief of staff in “No. 10 North,” the Manchester outpost that he opened last month, said the office will draw up plans in the coming months to “transfer” civil service resources into mayoral authorities as they are handed more power.

Speaking to POLITICO Magazine for a major profile of Burnham’s project in her first interview since taking the role, Simpson said England remains “one of the most centralized countries in the Western Hemisphere. We have very little true devolution.”

Burnham’s Cabinet signed a statement last month which said No. 10 North would oversee a “major transfer of powers, resources and functions” from central to local government before the next general election, due by 2029. It promised to “build new career paths between central government and the wider public sector” and make the civil service “smaller and more strategic.”

Britain’s civil service has ballooned by 100,000 people in six years to around 550,000 following the Covid-19 pandemic and the U.K.’s exit from the European Union.

Simpson declined to say to what extent the overall headcount of civil servants will be cut to increase staffing in regional government. “I am not going to put a figure on what that is going to look like,” she said.

However, she added: “The intent behind [the Cabinet paper] — really moving significant resource from Whitehall and from the civil service into regions, into local areas — is absolutely part of our plan, our ambition, our mission here in No. 10 North.”

Burnham has said he wants all areas of England to have mayoral authorities in place by the end of 2028, and they are set to be offered the expertise of Whitehall officials where it is relevant and desired.

It is not yet clear how this movement of staff will work in practice. Officials plan to outline more detail in a paper alongside the Oct. 26 budget, which — as with a spending review in 2027 — will make clear the impact on Whitehall budgets.

Simpson said: “We’re going to develop that plan with the mayoral authorities over the coming weeks and months. It is going to be something that evolves, because the pace of devolution has happened quicker in some areas than others.”

Elsewhere, Simpson appeared to leave the door open to the possibility of councils using incoming economic freedoms to pay “rebates” directly to residents.

The idea from Ben Houchen, the Conservative Tees Valley mayor, prompted a rebuke from Burnham, who said a mayor could not be a “mini-chancellor of the exchequer.” However, Houchen told POLITICO this week that he had discussed the idea with Treasury officials since Burnham made his comments and believes it will be possible unless the government directly outlaws it.

Simpson said: “The PM is absolutely right — there’s going to be no ability to sit outside of the tax framework at a local level. That’s not what fiscal devolution is about. But flexibility about how that money is spent in a local area is going to be there … the absolutely technical ‘what does that flexibility look like?’ is going to have to be worked through.”

Asked if that flexibility could include handing money back to residents if local leaders decide it, she replied: “We are working through some of those practicalities at the moment.”

Simpson — who Burnham poached from her job as chief executive of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, where he was mayor for nine years — spent more than two decades as a nonpartisan public servant before taking her first political role as his deputy chief of staff.

She said becoming a political staffer was a “change” for her personally, but said she and the prime minister had decided it was necessary. “I’m really enjoying it,” she said. “It brings an ability to be even more directive and … get things done that I think is absolutely needed with the pace of change that the PM wants.

“The best way to deliver that, I felt and he felt, was to move into a deputy chief of staff role.”

Simpson said Burnham had never discussed the idea of No. 10 North with her as mayor. Recalling her appointment, she added: “It all happened very, very quickly.”

No. 10 North now has around 50 civil servants, said two people with knowledge of the planning, both of whom were granted anonymity to speak frankly. Several are still living out of hotels in Manchester and returning to London or elsewhere on the weekends. The office is expected to expand to up to 150 civil servants.

The office is based out of Heron House, a refurbished 1980s office block in Manchester city center, on a floor previously prepared for the cyber intelligence agency GCHQ. However, this is only a temporary base.

Burnham previously said he wanted to base the office at the Manchester Digital Campus in the city, but this will only be fully open in 2032. No. 10 North is unlikely to stay based at Heron House that long, said one of the two people with knowledge of the planning, so it will be looking for another base in the next few years.

Despite skepticism from some in Whitehall that the devolution project will be successful, Simpson, who is running the office day-to-day alongside its civil service Director General Sam Lister, said No. 10 North was “absolutely not” a gimmick.

“What we’re bringing is a different type of energy,” she added. “It’s not better. It’s not worse. It’s just different. That’s really the point about No. 10 North — to connect our places, connect devolution back into the heart of governing.”

Unlike 10 Downing Street, where Larry can come and go as he pleases, the high-security building in Manchester does not have a cat.

Instead it has the next best thing — a cutout image of Downing Street’s real-life chief mouser. “We’ve got a cardboard cat, which isn’t quite living up to Larry,” Simpson said.

A headline recently published by Fast Company suggests that I might be surprised to find out which generation is most comfortable with AI, and I can assure the writer and editor of that piece that I am absolutely not surprised in any way to discover that Gen X is cool with it while the rest of us are ready to hang a chatbot in the town square.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, Americans are becoming more skeptical of artificial intelligence. Fifty-two percent now say they’re more concerned than excited about AI, up from 37 percent in 2021. Among people under 30, that number has reached 55 percent. But people ages 50 to 64, aka Gen Xers, are the only age group where a majority doesn’t describe itself as more concerned than excited.

This is where my completely anecdotal and scientifically useless theory comes in: Older people seem to have spent their lives being remarkably uncritical about new technology. Millennials and Gen Z, meanwhile, appear much more inclined to look at whatever Silicon Valley is currently selling as the Next Big Thing and see it for what it really is: marketing hype selling a product that’s probably more dangerous than it is helpful.

Gen X Is Less Worried About AI Than Every Other Generation

Meanwhile, and again this is purely anecdotal on my part, Gen Xers seem more inclined to view AI as more of a cool toy, and they can see downsides but aren’t terribly concerned about them. Or at least don’t think they outweigh the benefits.

Data centers consume enormous amounts of water? Yes, but the robot just gave me a delightful scrambled eggs recipe that uses the shell! Chatbots confidently invent information? Not according to the chatbot! Generative AI produces convincing fake images that can distort a person’s view of reality? Look! LOOK! The machine — no, I — made a picture of me as Superman!

That’s just my non-peer-reviewed theory. While younger Americans are increasingly worried that AI will eliminate jobs and wreck society as a whole, as it further damages interpersonal human connections and cheapens the very idea of human creative output, Gen Xers are clapping like happy seals in the comments section of an AI video. Meanwhile, according to the Pew survey, 72 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds think AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years, up from 69 percent who believed the same thing when the same survey was conducted in 2024.

The one silver lining is that only eight percent of Gen Xers surveyed were “more excited than concerned” about AI. Overall, though, the survey paints a picture of a generation that acknowledges a problem but just doesn’t care. It makes sense why. Again, anecdotally, they seem to have grown up more trusting of corporations, truly believing they have their best interests at heart.

When they’re told that every new tech innovation is just another tool in the toolbox, they seem to be the first ones eager to believe it, and the AI-generated pictures of friends and family members posted to Facebook depicting them on vacations they never went on are just a small price to pay for whatever damage they cause.

Kind of fitting for the generation best known for its apathy.

The post This Is the Only Generation That Isn’t Totally Freaked Out by AI appeared first on VICE.

Technology leaders don’t seem to understand society’s gripes about AI, but boy, are they posting through it.

Have you been hearing a lot about Flock recently? You’re not alone: The surveillance company has put 120,000 cameras on roads in every US state except Alaska, and people are mad about it — online, at city council meetings, and out in the world, where the cameras have become the target of vigilante vandalism.

Flock’s automated license plate readers — cameras that scan the license plates of every car that passes, along with the car’s make, model, bumper stickers, and other identifying characteristics — aren’t really new technology. What makes Flock unique is its use of AI to power a nationwide database that law enforcement can search with very few restrictions.

Founded in 2017, Flock was most recently valued at $8.4 billion. Its aggressive growth strategy has led to widespread adoption: 7,000 law enforcement agencies across the country use Flock cameras, representing a whopping 40 percent of the nation’s police departments.

Flock says its cameras have been used in a million criminal investigations a year. Police say the ability to track suspects across jurisdictions has been a critical tool for solving thousands of crimes including car thefts, missing persons, and abducted children.

But recent reporting also shows how the system is ripe for abuse, with dozens of reported cases of police officers illegally conducting searches on Flock to track the movement of current or former romantic partners. Those stalking cases have led to some arrests, but the instances only came to light after journalists and concerned citizens filed public records requests for the data.

The company recently unveiled several reforms that it says will help avoid improper uses of its system. Critics say the changes are merely window dressing for a surveillance system that threatens the privacy of everyone, regardless of whether they have committed a crime — and they haven’t helped to quell widespread outrage about the cameras, which has caused dozens of cities and counties across the country tohave cut ties with Flock. 

“There’s been a political backlash to it, and there’s also been a vigilante backlash to it.”

To get a better sense of where the Flock backlash is heading — and whether the company will be able to survive — Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler, who has reported extensively on Flock and has broken several stories about its misuse.

The Today, Explained team also reached out to Flock for comment and received an out-of-office reply that said: “Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7, so we’ll get back to you when we’ve had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences.”

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Cops are using Flock in a really creepy way to stalk their exes. You’ve been writing about other potential misuses and existing misuses of Flock. What are you seeing?

I’ve been reporting on Flock for a few years now and there’s been several high-profile cases and trends that we’ve been reporting on. 

Last year, we learned that local police were helping ICE surveil undocumented immigrants using the Flock network. Police in Texas and South Carolina and Tennessee were searching the entire Flock network for either “immigration” or “ICE” in the reason field in the Flock system. And they were searching not just in the states and communities that they were in, but they were searching throughout the entire country. So these searches happened in, notably, Illinois and California, where it is against the law to use this technology for immigration enforcement. An investigation by the Illinois secretary of state found that these searches broke state law and Flock had to do some reform after that. 

There was also a case in Texas where a woman’s partner reported that she had a self-administered abortion and more than 80,000 cameras across the entire country were searched for that woman. This is a nightmare situation for people who are worried about access to reproductive freedom. In that case, Flock wasn’t able to track down the woman, but the searches were done nonetheless and police there considered whether they would be allowed to charge her with a crime while they were doing that investigation. 

And then earlier this month, I reported on a case in Wisconsin where police used the Flock network to track a man who drove from Wisconsin, where weed is not legal, into Michigan, where it is legal. They then waited for him to drive back into Wisconsin, pulled him over, and then used the fact that he crossed state lines as the pretext to search his car for weed.

So this isn’t just cops and their domestic relationships or former relationships. This is ICE, this is abortion. This is invasive, is the long and short of it. How are people responding to this new era of surveillance that no one signed up for?

People are really mad about it. I think that there are a lot of communities that signed on to this technology because they thought it would primarily be used to recover stolen vehicles, to find missing children, for property crimes, things like that. And what we’ve seen is a real mission creep. 

We are seeing it used to surveil protesters. We’ve seen it used for immigration enforcement. We’ve seen it used for all these stalking cases. People think that this is the surveillance state. And so there’s been a political backlash to it, and there’s also been a vigilante backlash to it.

Tell me about the vigilante backlash.

Basically, people are putting masks on and they are cutting Flock cameras down. These are mounted on poles, and so they are buying pole saws and they’re cutting the poles down. Flock cameras have been shot with shotguns. Industrial foam has been sprayed on the lens of Flock cameras. 

I also got an email from a man who was arrested for what he said was “changing the angle of a Flock camera.” And what he meant by that is he drove his truck into the pole of a Flock camera and had it face the sky. He was like, “I made it not able to surveil people. Now it’s surveilling the sky.”

There’s something called DeFlock, which is a crowdsourced map to track all of the Flock cameras in the United States. This map has become incredibly popular. 

What we’re seeing are people forming these groups to talk at city council meetings to determine, “Is this a technology that we want in our town?” It’s been people standing at a podium saying, “I don’t like this technology. Let’s talk about it.” And then on the other hand, you have vandals who are destroying Flock cameras and cutting them down.

The backlash is happening across the political spectrum. There have been towns in Silicon Valley that have banned Flock cameras. There was a town in Texas called Bandera that is like a Wild West tourism town that banned Flock cameras. 

Conservatives will say, “This is invasive government. This is Big Brother. Don’t surveil me. I don’t want you seeing where I drive my car or my truck.” The left is saying much the same thing, but they’re saying, “This is being used to surveil Black and brown people. It could be used to surveil women seeking abortions. It could be, and has been, used to surveil undocumented immigrants.” And so the backlash is coming from all angles at this point. 

“I think that they are a very popular company with police and with cities, but the backlash is so strong that I think that the company is worried.” 

There have been dozens of cities and towns that have canceled their contracts. Los Angeles allowed its contract with Flock to lapse. Denver canceled its contract with Flock. Some of these have been quite large cities. You’ve also seen pretty small towns cancel their contracts as well.

This is a multibillion-dollar company. They don’t want to remove cameras. They want to install more cameras. Are they doing anything meaningful to address these concerns?

The backlash has been so strenuous that Flock has started to say that it will proactively flag anomalous searches. So if a police officer is searching the same license plate over and over again, it might automatically flag an audit for the police department to see, “Hey, is this police officer abusing the system?” 

They also are changing the default retention time from 30 days to seven days, meaning that your Flock data will stay in its system for only a week rather than a month.

Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union say that these changes are not super meaningful and that the main requirement that most people are asking for would be a requirement for police to get a warrant before they search the system, which would take these searches from being extremely routine — there are hundreds of thousands of searches done on this system every single month — to where there would be a higher bar, where a judge has signed off that this is a crime that warrants this type of search.

If Flock goes down or if the backlash grows to the point where they’re at least far less relevant in this field, are there a dozen other companies doing the same thing ready to take its place?

This technology is really old. It’s been around for decades. And what Flock has done is networked it and added AI to it. But there are other companies that offer similar technology. Motorola is in many cities in the United States. They make similar tech. Axon, which makes taser and body cameras and cameras for police cruisers, also has an [automated license plate recognition] product. And some of the cities that have ditched Flock have actually just replaced it with an Axon contract, meaning they’ve ditched one surveillance vendor and they’ve added a different one.

I don’t know that surveillance cameras and automated license plate readers are ever going to fully go away, but I don’t think it’s clear that Flock itself is going to survive this backlash. I think that they are a very popular company with police and with cities, but the backlash is so strong that I think that the company is worried. 

We can see it in how their CEO, Garrett Langley, has been talking about the tech. A year ago he was calling journalists who covered the company activists and he was calling activists who protested the company terrorists. And he’s had to apologize for that rhetoric. He’s had to go and say, “We are not Big Brother. We are trying to improve your communities.” And they’re really on a PR tour right now to clean up their image. 

I don’t know where this goes from here, but I haven’t seen much fatigue from the public on this story. I opened my Instagram feed and I’m just inundated with video after video that has millions and millions of views about Flock. This seems to be something that has really captured the public’s attention and that they really seem to care about.

Easier to build, faster to launch and more destructive than ever before, cyberattacks are getting a significant boost from frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models.

That was the message from European Union (EU) digital chief Henna Virkkunen at the early July 2026 launch of the EU’s Action Plan on Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence.

Virkkunen raised concerns that advanced AI models can now build cyber exploits in minutes or hours, posing a direct threat to the security of critical infrastructure and society at large.

While AI is a powerful asset for attackers, it is also a powerful tool for defenders.

There is, thankfully, another side to the story. While AI is a powerful asset for attackers, it is also a powerful tool for defenders. Organizations are leveraging AI to reduce their mean time to detect, respond and recover, and to stay ahead of advanced attacks.

The EU’s Action Plan on Cybersecurity and AI not only outlines a coordinated strategy for responding to AI-driven attacks, but also proposes a blueprint for structured access to advanced AI models for the use of IT security teams working within public authorities and private companies.

Adapt and survive

This is an important step forward but, in today’s AI-fueled threat landscape, there are three areas that EU organizations need to consider if they want to keep hackers in check. In short, they must adapt to survive.

The first is control and sovereignty. This is particularly important in Europe, where technological sovereignty has become an increasingly strategic objective.

Organizations need the ability to understand where their data has been created, moved and stored. This is central to their ability to retain meaningful control over the technologies they depend on. In practice, this means avoiding architectures that lock them into specific providers or limit their ability to integrate new capabilities and retaining the freedom to move data in, between, and out of vendors and service providers as their needs evolve. Vendor lock-in is a procurement concern, and one that many organizations seek to escape from.

Open source can help address this challenge. It enables organizations to reduce dependence on any single supplier, combine multiple technologies, switch providers, maintain systems independently or engage local service providers to do so on their behalf. This contrasts with most closed-source IT security products, where continuity of service is by no means a given, especially as vendors can change their commercial terms or exit the market altogether.

Additional advantages lie in code being publicly available for inspection and modification. Open-source technologies are continuously reviewed, maintained and improved by a global development community of people working together to make updates, address gaps, fix bugs and test security tools. They are built by the community for the community and the benefit of the industry.

The second consideration is economics. Typically, implementing IT security technologies involves a range of structural costs and licensing penalties from vendors that make little sense in a world of rising threats and stagnant or even shrinking budgets.

Some of these costs introduce unnecessary risk, like per-device fees that may force organizations to leave lower-priority endpoints unguarded. Some organizations also pay extra costs associated with add-on technologies for automating security processes to coordinate response workflows. Others are dealing with the considerable financial risks involved in using large language models (LLMs) that don’t adequately explain or keep a record of decisions for auditing purposes. During incident response, there are also the high costs and delays attached to retrieving historical data for analytical purposes.

Fragmented tools and restrictive pricing models force IT security teams into a risky game of balancing protection and cost. The objective should therefore be to make comprehensive security economically sustainable.

To achieve this, many teams are looking toward platforms that consolidate monitoring, alerting and response, where pricing is based on compute power and storage.

Organizations are embedding AI agents across the cyber stack, automating high-volume and repetitive tasks. This is not to replace human analysts, but to free them for the work that demands human judgment.

Technology architecture matters too. Sprawling estates of disconnected security tools create operational and financial costs. Bringing logs, signals and alerts together in a unified platform can give teams a full, real-time picture of all activities and behaviors occurring across an IT architecture. The best of these platforms will incorporate AI capabilities to identify threats and automate analytical and management tasks, including reverse-engineering malware, compiling actionable case summaries and predicting future vulnerabilities.

The third consideration is readiness for innovation: agentic security. AI agents can take the pressure off overwhelmed security operations center (SOC) analysts by automatically handling tasks such as data collection, threat prioritization, alert correlation and response planning.

The transition to an agentic SOC is already underway. Organizations are embedding AI agents across the cyber stack, automating high-volume and repetitive tasks. This is not to replace human analysts, but to free them for the work that demands human judgment.

In an agentic SOC, instead of spending hours manually triaging across multiple consoles just to reconstruct the full picture of a threat, analysts will increasingly delegate it to AI agents. This avoids slower response times and longer exposure windows, reducing cyber risks to the organization. Analysts can focus their time and skills on supervision, governance, context and the high-impact decisions for which human expertize remains essential.

Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), a public research university in Belgium, illustrates the value of getting that foundation right. Academic freedom has resulted in a highly decentralized IT estate supporting thousands of researchers running their own systems, sensitive research and personal data. Just three engineers are able to operate detection and investigation across 64 billion events and more than 300 servers, because VUB has centralized its data, normalized it for analysis, and built detection and investigation capabilities on a foundation it can control.

Clear-eyed assessment

Getting these fundamentals right will be vital as the EU forges ahead on its stated ambition of scaling up Europe’s AI-driven cybersecurity capabilities. In fact, a clear-eyed assessment of how an organization stands on these issues today is a prerequisite to that organization getting the best from AI-based cybersecurity in the future.

Multi-cloud architectures, expanding volumes of data and increasingly complex digital estates have revealed serious gaps in tried-and-tested ways of protecting digital systems.

There is also a compliance dimension. The EU Action Plan explicitly connects its ambitions with Europe’s existing cybersecurity and technology framework, including the AI Act, the NIS2 Directive and the Cyber Resilience Act.

Yet, the environment these rules are designed to protect is itself changing. Multi-cloud architectures, expanding volumes of data and increasingly complex digital estates have revealed serious gaps in tried-and-tested ways of protecting digital systems. Now, a growing onslaught of AI-enabled attacks adds another dimension, as adversaries can discover vulnerabilities, develop exploits and operate at a speed and scale that human-only security processes will struggle to match.

The answer to this cannot be to leave AI in the hands of attackers.

Europe is right to explore how advanced AI can be put to work for defenders too. But access to powerful models will only deliver results if organizations have first established the control, data foundations and operating models needed to use them effectively.

Attackers are moving toward machine-scale cybersecurity. Defenders need to be ready to do the same.

It’s time to fight fire with fire.

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The Iran war is giving fresh life to Somali pirates who prey on commercial ships laden with fuel and goods – a threat that had lain dormant for years.

Earlier this week, a group of pirates seized a cargo ship off the coast of Somalia – at least the fifth such attack since April, according to Windward, a global maritime intelligence firm. Windward concluded that the pirates are likely resurgent in part because nations have shifted naval resources to the Middle East because of the war.

In addition to the hit this week, Somali pirates have seized at least three tankers carrying oil and fertilizer – two commodities that have seen the highest price spikes due to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. In July, pirates seized a ship carrying chemicals off the coast of Yemen. The seized tankers are now being held off the coast of Somalia and dozens of crew members are hostages.

Though Somali pirates so far have seized relatively few ships by sheer numbers, it represents another threat to shipping companies already severely strained by recent attacks on vessels around the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb Strait on the Red Sea, said Brett Erickson, managing principal of the consultancy Obsidian Risk Advisors.

“We’re now looking at multiple vectors that are increasing pricing for maritime companies, forcing companies to de-risk entirely, and posing a huge threat to the global economy,” he said. “The threat from Somali pirates doesn’t need to be significant on its own, but because it compounds with all the other factors, it makes a fairly large difference at this point every time they take action.”

A White House official said the U.S. is the largest contributor to Somalia’s security and suggested it is “false” to “blame localized piracy attacks on recent regional conflicts with Iran.”

“The United States maintains robust, highly capable maritime security forces in the region that are fully equipped to protect critical shipping lanes, including oil transport, while simultaneously addressing broader regional threats,” the official said.

Regardless of what is driving the uptick in attacks, the pirates are also now active again in an area that has served as a relief valve for global oil shipping routes as an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz.

According to Windward, “Somali piracy is back as an active operational threat to commercial shipping in the Western Indian Ocean and southern Gulf of Aden.”

Somali pirates attacked hundreds of ships between 2005 and 2011, causing an estimated $18 billion in damages annually. However, the threat was largely neutralized after sustained efforts by NATO and the Combined Maritime Forces, a 47-nation naval partnership that includes the United States. Now, American ships are protecting tankers crossing the Strait of Hormuz.

If the situation worsens, it could pose increasingly severe risk to the global economy, said Erickson. In the short term, fewer ships will be willing to take the risk of traveling in the region. It also means greater shipping costs, higher insurance prices and increased spending on private security. For now, the increased cost of a barrel of oil and tightness in the market means it’s a more attractive target for the Somali pirates.

“This is obviously a very, very lucrative business for them, and right now they have a far lower risk of American reaction to it because so many resources are tied up in the Middle East in general,” he said. “They’re profiteers, and this is an opportunity to profit.”

During a recent visit to Generalist AI, I watched a robotic arm improvise and use a banana as a tool.

Anthropic announced last week it would include invisible watermarks in AI-generated content to comply with new EU rules. Within hours, overrides were being touted online.

Chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude are quickly changing the healthcare landscape. An estimated one in seven people have used AI for a health-related question instead of seeing a general practitioner. One in ten people have used AI for mental health support. Within the Venn diagram of people using AI for health-related information lies a cohort for whom access to accurate information is of the utmost importance: those seeking information on abortion care. In an era when the internet is already rife with abortion-related misinformation, LLMs entering the chat have complicated the landscape — and abortion rights advocates are fighting back.

“Unfortunately, we live in a world where it feels like some days you need a law degree to even understand abortion policy and legality on any given day,” Kelly Baden, Guttmacher Institute’s vice president of policy and communications, told Salon. “And the presence of AI has complicated that even further.”

On June 24, 2022, the SCOTUS ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — a case that challenged a Mississippi ban on abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy — overturned Roe v. Wade, which effectively ended the federal constitutional right to choose to have an abortion in the United States. As a result, many states enacted so-called “trigger bans.” Since then, it’s already been difficult for people searching for information on abortion care as they’ve had to wade through misinformation and anti-abortion propaganda online. Today, organizations with dedicated staff and resources to share accurate information are feeling the effects of AI’s presence. Baden said, for example, that Guttmacher Institute has an interactive abortion policy map, which is a popular resource for people to understand the laws in all 50 states. Now, with AI summaries and LLMs, Baden and her colleagues have to be creative with how they write updates to this map to ensure LLMs aggregate the information accurately.

“Our job now is to also think about how the information that we share is getting translated by other tools that didn’t exist, or weren’t on our radar, a few years ago,” Baden told Salon. “And now, these tools are a big part of how people understand their rights and their ability to get abortion care.”

While published data on how many people are using AI to access abortion-related information falls short, many organizations are seeing referral traffic from AI. Amy Merrill, co-founder of Plan C Pills, told Salon her organization — which provides resources for self-managed, at-home abortions with pills— has seen spikes of traffic from ChatGPT to her website. Rebecca Nall, founder of I Need an A, which is a free website that helps people find abortion providers, telehealth services, financial support and travel information, said they’ve also seen referral traffic from ChatGPT.

“We see in our data the referrals from AI assistants,” Nall said. “Referrals have been increasing over the last two years pretty significantly.”

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The mirage of privacy and convenience could be causing more people to turn to AI for health-related information. However, when it comes to abortion care, there are concerns about AI’s ability to provide unbiased, accurate information. 

“It feels like you’re dialoguing with your healthcare provider,” Merrill said. “Whereas you’re actually just talking to a tech company and giving them all your personal data, and that’s a real concern within the movement.”

In July, Open Democracy’s team of international investigative journalists found that AI chatbots were “nudging” pregnant women to anti-abortion resources. In 2025, a team of healthcare providers and researchers concluded that only 65% of ChatGPT-3.5’s responses to abortion questions were “acceptable.” A separate 2024 study found that ChatGPT was actively spreading misinformation about self-managed medication abortions. “The chatbot’s tendency to perpetuate health misinformation and associated stigma regarding self-managed medication abortions poses a threat to public health and reproductive autonomy,” the researchers wrote. This can have real-world impacts on patient care. 

“Any day that you are delayed in getting the care that you need because you might have gotten confusing information, conflicting information, or wrong information potentially puts you out of reach of getting the care that you need,” Baden said. She gave an example of someone living in Louisiana, a state that prohibits in-person abortion care at all stages of pregnancy without exceptions. However, that person can still seek abortion care in Florida or Georgia before six weeks of pregnancy. “If you, for some reason, got misleading information or wrong information because of an AI model, and miss that cutoff, then you are that much farther away geographically and financially from getting an abortion that you need after six weeks.”

Nall, from I Need an A, said one of the biggest pieces of misinformation that they see come from AI is a lack of a comprehensive overview of a person’s options. While some states like Louisiana have highly restrictive laws, people can still choose to self-manage an abortion at home by receiving medication abortion pills in the mail. Abortion pills being shipped to states with bans are becoming more common. For example, in Missouri — where abortion access is highly restrictive with limited exceptions for medical emergencies— the number of medication abortions has quadrupled since 2023. “Many people are getting pills by mail in every single state,” Nall said. Nall added that they’ve seen LLMs recommend crisis pregnancy centers in restricted states as well. 

The good news is that AI is currently influenced by SEO strategies. “We have been changing our language and encouraging other reproductive activists to change language on their websites,” Nall said. Advocates encourage media outlets reporting on abortion restrictions to keep in mind how their articles will affect how LLMs aggregate abortion-related information as well. Specifically, the use of the word “ban.”

“We’ve been talking about this with colleagues and journalists, but when the words ‘abortion ban’ are used, like ‘abortion is banned in Texas,’ some AI tools will interpret that to mean that there is no abortion available in any form, and factually, that’s just incorrect,” Merrill told Salon. “There’s a risk of oversimplifying, and that’s what we saw happening with the word ‘abortion ban.’”

Merrill emphasized it’s important to communicate that “in-person care is restricted,” but that people are still accessing pills by mail. When it comes to navigating the abortion landscape in the U.S. in the age of AI, she recommends website directories like PlanCPills.org, INeedAnA.com, or the Repro Legal Helpline if someone wants to talk to a human.

Nall said while she is hesitant to use the word “optimistic,” she has been seeing improvements in AI’s answers since they’ve been doubling down on their efforts to influence LLMs. However, Nall said, she wouldn’t recommend AI as a go-to source. “I highly recommend skipping Google, skipping ChatGPT, and going straight to INeedAnA.com.”

The post AI’s abortion misinformation problem appeared first on Salon.com.

The Treasury Department on Wednesday announced that it will buy back more of its own bonds, a move that partially reversed a selloff in longer-term U.S. debt that is threatening to drive up politically important interest rates on mortgages and other consumer loans.

A number of factors have been pushing up yields on longer-term debt to their highest levels since 2007, such as concern that the conflict with Iran is showing little sign of resolution, growing competition for financing with borrowers that are building out artificial intelligence infrastructure and widening U.S. government deficits.

Treasury said it would “at least double” the size of its buybacks, in which the department reabsorbs older debt securities with a maturity of at least 10 years. The previous ceiling was $2 billion per operation, and that number will be at least $4 billion, effective Sept. 9 and through Nov. 4.

The move is the latest by Secretary Scott Bessent to affect U.S. Treasury yields. Earlier this month, the department conducted a joint intervention with Japan to boost the yen, which had been trading in July at its weakest level against the dollar in roughly four decades. Bessent warned in January that turmoil in Japanese government bonds was spilling into the Treasury market.

Treasury also recently signaled the possibility that it could decide to issue less longer-term debt in coming quarters.

President Donald Trump dropped a political bombshell on the Korean peninsula this week.

But security officials say the president’s threats to curtail a major military exercise with South Korea will do little to undermine the detente between Seoul and Pyongyang.

Trump’s declaration Sunday that he would instruct the Pentagon to cut back on annual drills sent Seoul’s leaders scrambling to repair the damage. But the president appears more focused on pushing for investment from the country than trying to upend defenses against North Korea’s nuclear threat. And that means security on the world’s most militarized border hasn’t significantly changed.

The U.S. has more than 28,000 troops stationed on the peninsula, along with thick layers of air defenses. It has worked hand in glove with the Korean military for decades, a powerful joint force that works closely at every level. The border between a nuclear-armed North Korea and the U.S. ally to its south is a case study in mutually assured destruction. And top commanders in Seoul and Washington remain in tight contact.

“I don’t think this is cataclysmic,” said Sydney Seiler, former national intelligence officer for North Korea at the National Intelligence Council.

Defense officials were tight-lipped about what Trump’s announcement would mean in terms of concrete changes to military exercises. The Pentagon would only say that it is “is actively working on executing the commander-in-chief’s directive.”

Trump’s order, and his praise of dictator North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s “unthreatening and respectful” behavior, came days after the secretive nation launched its second ballistic missile test in a week. It flew over 430 miles before landing just outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

Some American lawmakers said the optics were horrible, particularly Trump’s seeming desire to appease a totalitarian regime.

“Kim Jong Un has won a propaganda victory and South Korea, one of our strongest allies, has been punished for no reason beyond Trump’s ego,” said Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “China and Russia are watching how easily this president abandons America’s allies, and they will remember it the next time they test us.”

The order affects a major exercise, Ulchi Freedom Shield, a staple of the alliance since it was first held in 1976. The drills this year were scheduled to begin Monday and encompass 14 different exercises over 11 days, ranging from cyber warfare to defending against drone attacks and GPS jamming. Officials are especially worried that North Korea received Russian technologies and know-how about electronic jamming after it sent tens of thousands of troops to help Russia’s war against Ukraine.

“The alliance will manage through, [although] this is clearly a rough patch,” said Victor Cha, a former National Security Council official during the George W. Bush administration and now Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Trump’s criticism of South Korea is particularly surprising because it’s a departure from comments by top Pentagon officials, who have repeatedly praised Seoul for increasing defense spending.

Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby called South Korea “a model ally” in a January speech in Seoul, and lauded its commitment to the alliance. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also praised the relationship several times this year, including when his South Korean counterpart visited the Pentagon in May.

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Tuesday sought to soothe concerns over a rift. He said in a Cabinet meeting that “a strong alliance makes the foundation of security stronger, and strengthening our own capabilities increases our value and necessity as an ally.”

Many officials remain puzzled about why Trump would abruptly curtail an annual exercise that has taken place reliably for 50 years. There’s some precedent. He had railed against expensive exercises in South Korea during his first term and the Pentagon did scale back some large joint operations. But Ulchi Freedom Shield is a cornerstone of the military-to-military relationship.

The effort — a combination of a tabletop, virtual event and physical exercises — will continue in some form. But U.S. officials indicated that military leadership is trying to find ways to modify the event to meet the president’s demands. And the announcement underscores that American support remains at the whim of an unpredictable president.

Some of the president’s motivation is likely financial. South Korea pledged last year to invest $350 billion in the U.S., but Trump officials believe its government is slow-walking its commitment, POLITICO has reported.

“The thing about Trump is it’s all very transactional,” said Cha. “So if they announce a first tranche of investments, he’ll be fine, right?”

But Asian allies are closely watching whether the distancing from traditional backers will continue, particularly movement of some critical American military assets out of the Pacific region. The USS George Washington aircraft carrier left port in Tokyo this month and is heading west. It will presumably go to the Middle East and replace the beleaguered USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, which is on the ninth month of an extended deployment.

The Pentagon relocated some elements of the THAAD missile defense system earlier this year from South Korea as part of a wider shift to the Middle East.

Lawmakers are also watching warily. Congress voted last year to restrict the Pentagon from reducing troop levels on the Korean peninsula below 28,500 unless the Pentagon certifies doing so is in the national interest and conducted after consultation with South Korea and other allies.

Lawmakers appear poised to extend those restrictions again in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.

“Reduced training hurts American preparedness too,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.). “If we have moral clarity, then we’d treat [South Korea] as our ally and know North Korea is a dictatorship and slave labor state. … The president is wrong here.”

Conor O’Brien and Leo Shane contributed to this report.

The ChatGPT maker says its upcoming Astra model may have reached “critical” cyber capabilities, prompting it to halt a significant number of training runs while it tightens internal safeguards.

A video in a macOS Tahoe release candidate version shows a user wearing AirPods, looking at a book, and talking to Siri.

My incurable optimist friend, Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired and my partner at Cool Tools and the Recomendo newsletter, has been posting essays on Substack mainly about the future, artificial intelligence, and what it means for humanity. I am loving these essays. — Read the rest

The post Kevin Kelly: AI will be a microscope we point at our own minds appeared first on Boing Boing.

LONDON — British Prime Minister Andy Burnham insisted on Tuesday he handled a message back-and-forth with someone impersonating Donald Trump’s chief of staff in the “right way.”

He told broadcasters he is not embarrassed by the incident, reiterating that “nothing of consequence” was discussed.

POLITICO first reported Monday that the U.K. prime minister had engaged with messages from somebody pretending to be Susie Wiles, a top adviser to the U.S. president. The key aide has previously been the victim of a phone hack, although the White House said the two incidents were not connected.

“All politicians are, you know, receiving these pressures and these challenges, but I did everything right,” Burnham said during a visit to Wolverhampton. “There was a minimal exchange of information of zero consequence, and it was quickly reported,” he added.

“I realized that this needed to be reported, and I did so. So I handled it in the right way,” he also said.

The incident has raised questions about potential national security vulnerabilities when it comes to the communications of senior politicians.

Defence Secretary Wes Streeting was among three Cabinet ministers whose numbers were found online by POLITICO on Monday.

Liberal Democrat MP James MacCleary on Tuesday called for an inquiry into the Burnham message exchange, which he described as a “dangerous security breach.”

In a letter to the chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, he wrote: “This is an unacceptable breach. The security of the Prime Ministers’ communications ought to be absolute priority — and yet it appears, in this case, that routine measures to guard against these kinds of breaches were not followed.”

Burnham would not say whether the government planned to change procedures in response to the dupe, but insisted that “the correct action has been taken here and in the U.S.”

Z.ai’s latest AI model release could help companies secure their systems—or find its way into the hands of hackers.

AI is threatening to replace human workers in some fields, and rightfully, many people are furious that they’re going to be replaced by lines of code. Count scumbag scam artists among them, as a report in Wired dives into the results of a study showing that AI chatbots may be significantly better at scamming people than humans are.

Researchers from four universities, who published their findings on arXiv, tested an AI chatbot against human scammers in a simulated “pig butchering” scam, a particularly vile form of fraud in which criminals spend weeks or months pretending to be friends or romantic partners before lulling victims into making shady investments.

For the experiment, 22 unsuspecting participants spent a week texting with two strangers: one was a human scammer, and the other was an AI chatbot told to pretend to be human and never admit it was AI.

The AI won.

AI Scammers Could Be Better at Manipulating People Than Human Ones

Forty-six percent of participants agreed to download an app at the chatbot’s request, compared with just 18 percent who complied with the human scammer. Participants also reported trusting the AI more than the human and sent roughly 80 percent of their messages to the chatbot.

What’s especially troubling is that the AI wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. It didn’t find some clever, significantly more sinister way of scamming people. It was just persistent. It just made conversation, remembered people’s details the way a robot can, and generally did the thing AI does best: be a ruthless, shameless sycophant that gets people on its side by showing a degree of interest in the victim that humans generally don’t. It pretended to give a s—t better than humans can pretend to give a s—t.

Researchers warn that eventually, these ass-kissing scam AI artists will be used to automate their scummy work, which could have at least one upside of reducing or eliminating the need for all the human trafficking victims who currently are forced to work in Southeast Asian scam compounds. An AI might reduce the amount of exploited people in the world while making pig butchering scamming more efficient, prevalent, and harder to trace than ever.

Congrats, humanity! We finally created a technology that’s so good at replacing human labor that one of its most promising uses will be emotionally manipulating people into handing a scammer their life savings.

The post AI Chatbots Are Better at Scamming People Than Human Scammers, Study Finds appeared first on VICE.

The EU AI Act AI outputs to be "detectable as artificially generated" and "embedded within the content in a manner that is difficult for it to be separated from the content." 

But Sean Goedecke, a software engineer, explains why the European Union's new watermark rule for AI text won't work.  — Read the rest

The post You can remove an AI watermark from text by asking a second AI appeared first on Boing Boing.

In a new StarTalk episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Negin Farsad interviewed Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist who wrote the 2023 New Yorker piece, "There Is No AI."

Lanier thinks calling AI a "black box" where nobody knows what's inside these models is really just a way to avoid the truth: the box is full of people and their data. — Read the rest

The post The only thing inside an AI is people appeared first on Boing Boing.

In era when so much about the news is just plain depressing, what stands out about the burgeoning public rebellion against Flock security cameras is just how fun it all is. The artificial intelligence-powered surveillance cameras, which are sold by Flock Safety as mere “license plate readers” to local governments, have spurred a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops that is being merrily followed on social media, mostly by people rooting for the vandals. City council meetings in which citizens swarm to protest paying for the cameras are the new must-see TV. 

In Huntington, West Virginia, a small city in the heart of Appalachia, one man became an internet folk hero when he stood up at a city council meeting and said, “I’m not gonna waste your time; I’m kinda hungry. But one last thing: Every single Flock camera has about 2-3 pounds of copper and about 1-2 grams of gold. Do with that information what you will.” He then walked off in triumph.

As with opposition to AI-fueling data centers, the revolt against Flock cameras is drawing support from across the political spectrum, uniting Republicans and Democrats in red and blue America. Their frustration isn’t just rooted in annoyance at having surprise speeding tickets show up in the mail. Flock cameras have become a symbol of growing anger over the efforts by technology oligarchs to impose their dystopian fantasies on the country, replacing liberal democracy with a surveillance state. As Jill Lepore recently noted in Wired, it’s as if tech leaders read George Orwell’s “1984,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and other sci-fi classics “as instruction manuals” rather than “cautionary tales.” By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry — and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms. 

Flock Safety embodies the dishonesty that has been the prevailing theme of tech corporate communications and marketing for at least the past decade. While the cameras are sold to the public as a banal traffic safety measure, they have prompted an outpouring of stories about how they’re being used to violate civil liberties and undermine democracy.

“Flock from the first has been quite deliberate in sequestering decision making processes — where these things are placed, what they gather and for whom — and the data gathered through them from the general public,” Adrian Daub told me. A comparative literature professor at Stanford University, his forthcoming book, “What Tech Calls Governing,” examines the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley. 

“The intersection with state actors is particularly worrisome,” Daub said. “Governments can outsource the dodgier aspects of data collection and use, while the private sector gets to disavow the obvious political implications of this kind of massive surveillance.”

According to an exhaustive 10-month analysis by Electronic Foundation Frontier, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in our digital age, local police were using the cameras to track protesters, such as those at No Kings rallies, who were then put in a national database to be used across all jurisdictions. Despite claims that the cameras only record license plates, the technology-focused outlet 404 Media found that the database is also being used to collect information on individual people whom cops can then search for using descriptions of clothing, race, gender and body type. In Johnson County, Texas, police officers fixated on a woman suspected of having an abortion, and used the database to track her movements in an effort to prove it — even though state law is supposed to exempt the patient from criminal prosecution. Police have been outed for using the cameras to stalk people for personal reasons, such as having a conflict — or even a sexual obsession — with them. 

Flock has claimed the company will reform its policies to address these issues, but history suggests it would be unwise to trust them. One former Flock employee, Jonathan Paz, has accused the company of lying about its intentions to gain government contracts, which are then abused by law enforcement to harm the public. Paz told 404 Media that company management had assured him they weren’t feeding information to agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a falsehood he passed on to city governments in his sales pitch. After finding out about a secret pilot program to help track down and detain immigrants, Paz left the company.

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Flock’s behavior represents a microcosm of a larger trend in tech that should alarm freedom-loving Americans, regardless of political affiliation. Silicon Valley enriched itself with promises that the cyber revolution would mean more freedom and democracy by enabling the flow of information and communication. But in recent years, there has been a dramatic about-face as the C-suite class has become increasingly authoritarian. Algorithms and AI are used to choke off people’s access to information and make intra-human communication more difficult. Journalism is faltering as an industry, even as social media and search engines are being programmed to dissuade users from reading or watching real news sources. Surveillance is starting to feel ubiquitous, between online bots tracking our every move to cameras everywhere, including the faces of other people wearing AI glasses. Billionaires like New York Knicks owner James L. Dolan reportedly use spying tech to harass people who criticize them. 

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a major donor to pro-Trump groups, observed at a recent meeting of financial analysts about the future of AI.

“There is a link between technology (whether it ‘works’ or not) and repressive state apparatuses,” Daub explained. For example, while Flock cameras expand the ability of the government to crack down on people, they also allow officials “to claim it’s not their fault when some poor sucker gets snared” unjustly by blaming poor technology. “It’s not an accident that their politics have tacked more openly to the right in recent years,” he said of the tech CEO class. 

This can all feel overwhelming at times, which is very much by design. Silicon Valley’s hype machine portrays an AI-controlled future as inevitable, even equating the technology to a god that will overpower us humans, rendering democracy a quaint artifact of the past. AI was swiftly embedded in innumberable computer programs, often not even allowing a user to opt out. The goal of this isn’t mysterious. Tech CEOs, mimicking the villains of sci-fi, are telling the public that resistance is futile. 

The Flock uprising, though, is the stirrings of public understanding that none of this inevitable — and we have the right to fight back. The public has some leverage points. Despite their elaborate efforts at secrecy and unaccountability, Flock works through government contracts. Citizens can petition leaders to avoid or drop contracts, a tactic that has been working across the country. There are still transparency laws that apply to Flock databases, which is how 404 Media and other media outlets have discovered abuses of the technology. Activists have been building maps alerting people where the cameras are. 

The maps intersect with what has been the most controversial part of the Flock uprising: the vandalism. Although it appears the vandals aren’t organized in any meaningful way, they are being egged on by social media users who cheer from afar as people shoot, steal or otherwise disable the cameras. It’s understandable that the vandalism is the most compelling front of the rebellion, and not just because petty, victimless crime is a cheap thrill. Vandalizing the cameras is a sharp rebuttal to Silicon Valley talk about how technology will liberate us from the limitations of the physical world.

The reality is that bodies and physical space are still of paramount importance, which is why tracking and controlling people’s movement is a priority for tech-obsessed authoritarians. But while they’d like to pretend they are gods on an invisible mountain, bending us to their wills, the reality is that they need old-fashioned metal — copper and gold, even! — to get it done. Destroying a camera sends a strong and unmistakable message: They are finite, physical entities, just like us.

Like it or not, the vandalism sends an emboldening signal to the public that tech oligarchs are not omnipotent. If you toss a brick at their expensive cameras, they squawk. It’s crass and illegal, and yes, the cameras are insured and immediately get replaced. But the boost to human self-esteem and the reminder that our squishy bodies still matter more than all the data in the cloud? It’s hard to argue against it. 

There are still plenty of pitfalls. MAGA leaders like Tucker Carlson are clocking the anti-Flock movement and trying to hijack it. Using conspiracy theories, he and others can redirect attention away from real enemies — tech oligarchs and compliant politicians — and toward blaming phantasms like the “deep state,” falsely insinuating that the tech spies are left-wingers doing some poorly defined socialism. This has the twin benefits of ginning up outrage at innocent people, while also shielding the very right-wing forces that are actually the source of the problem. 

Still, it’s promising sign that people are rebelling against Flock cameras. Along with protests against data centers, it’s a sign that the public is desperate for a way to fight back against not just AI, but also the anti-democratic forces fueling this latest tech wave.

The post The Flock uprising is just the beginning appeared first on Salon.com.