Tayo Bero , The Guardian; The weirdest things a leak revealed about Peter Thiel’s secret club
"Given that the group’s members include some of the world’s most culturally and politically important people, one would think that this information would be far more securely guarded."
Madaleine Rubin, The New York Times ; Suspect in Library Killings Planned ‘Columbine-Type’ Attack, Police Say
An 18-year-old has been charged with killing two people in the shooting on Monday in Chico, Calif., the authorities said.
"The Chico branch, which had been scheduled to close temporarily in August for renovations, was closed Tuesday and will reopen once all repairs are complete, Ms. Wright said.
“I believe that one day families will walk through these doors again,” she said on Tuesday.
“When that day comes, the library will once again be what it has always been at its heart: a place of learning, a place of connection and a place of hope.”
Dustin Volz, The New York Times ; Google Says Criminal Hackers Used A.I. to Find a Major Software Flaw
"A criminal hacking group recently attempted to launch a widespread cyberattack that appeared to rely on artificial intelligence to detect a previously unknown bug, Google said in research published Monday, highlighting the potential threat that A.I. poses to digital security.
Security experts have feared for years that malicious hackers could eventually rely on A.I. models to identify undisclosed flaws in computer code to launch crippling attacks that are difficult to guard against. That fear was largely theoretical until now.
“We have high confidence that the actor likely leveraged an A.I. model to support the discovery and weaponization of this vulnerability,” the report said.
The tech giant did not say precisely when the thwarted attack happened, whom it was targeting or which A.I. platform the hackers used, but the company added that it did not believe it was its own Gemini chatbot."
Atmika Iyer, The Modesto Bee, Calif. via GovTech; Napa Valley Schools Emphasize Honesty, Ethics in AI Policy
"10 principles for AI use in Napa schools
Mark Landler, The New York Times; Louvre Director Resigns, Months After Burglars Stole Crown Jewels
Laurence des Cars’s departure is the latest setback for the world’s largest museum. Her tenure was marred by labor strikes, water leaks and security lapses that led to the heist in October.
"Laurence des Cars, the first female president of the Louvre Museum, resigned on Tuesday, less than three months after an audacious theft raised thorny questions about security at one of the world’s most famous museums.
Ms. des Cars submitted her resignation to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who had appointed her in 2021 and championed her plans for an ambitious refurbishment of the museum, known as “Louvre — New Renaissance.”
The president’s office said in a statement that Mr. Macron had accepted Ms. des Cars’s resignation “as an act of responsibility at a time when the world’s largest museum needs both stability and a strong new impetus to successfully complete major security and modernization projects.”
Ms. des Cars’s resignation came a day before she was scheduled to testify before the French Parliament about the security lapses that led to the theft of a collection of jewels, which were valued at more than $100 million."
Ashley Capoot, CNBC; Anthropic is clashing with the Pentagon over AI use. Here’s what each side wants
"Anthropic wants assurance that its models will not be used for autonomous weapons or to “spy on Americans en masse,” according to a report from Axios.
The DOD, by contrast, wants to use Anthropic’s models “for all lawful use cases” without limitation."
Matt Enis, Library Journal; Setting AI Policy
"As artificial intelligence tools become pervasive, public libraries may want to establish transparent guidelines for how they are used by staff
Policy statements are important, because “people have very different ideas about what is acceptable or appropriate,” says Nick Tanzi, assistant director at South Huntington Public Library (SHPL), NY, who was recently selected by the Public Library Association to be part of a Transformative Technology Task Force focused on artificial intelligence (AI).
In the library field, opinions about AI—particularly with the recent emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot—currently run the gamut from enthusiastic adoption to informed objection. But even the technology’s detractors would agree that AI has already become an integral part of the information-seeking tools many people use every day. Google searches now frequently generate Gemini AI responses as top results. Microsoft has ingrained Copilot into its Windows OS and Office software. ChatGPT’s global monthly active users exceeded 800 million at the end of 2025. Patrons are using these tools, and they may have questions or need assistance. Libraries should be clear about how these and other AI technologies are being used within their institutions."
Sanya Mansoor , The Guardian; The problem with doorbell cams: Nancy Guthrie case and Ring Super Bowl ad reawaken surveillance fears
"What happens to the data that smart home cameras collect? Can law enforcement access this information – even when users aren’t aware officers may be viewing their footage? Two recent events have put these concerns in the spotlight.
A Super Bowl ad by the doorbell-camera company Ring and the FBI’s pursuit of the kidnapper of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie, have resurfaced longstanding concerns about surveillance against a backdrop of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The fear is that home cameras’ video feeds could become yet another part of the government’s mass surveillance apparatus...
“Ring has a history of playing it pretty loose with people’s privacy rights,” said Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission charged the company with “compromising its customers’ privacy by allowing any employee or contractor to access consumers’ private videos and by failing to implement basic privacy and security protections”. This, in turn, allowed hackers to “take control of consumers’ accounts, cameras, and videos”. Ring agreed to pay $5.8m in a settlement with the FTC."
Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review; Moltbook was peak AI theater
"Perhaps the best way to think of Moltbook is as a new kind of entertainment: a place where people wind up their bots and set them loose. “It’s basically a spectator sport, like fantasy football, but for language models,” says Jason Schloetzer at the Georgetown Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy. “You configure your agent and watch it compete for viral moments, and brag when your agent posts something clever or funny.”
“People aren’t really believing their agents are conscious,” he adds. “It’s just a new form of competitive or creative play, like how Pokémon trainers don’t think their Pokémon are real but still get invested in battles.”
Even if Moltbook is just the internet’s newest playground, there’s still a serious takeaway here. This week showed how many risks people are happy to take for their AI lulz. Many security experts have warned that Moltbook is dangerous: Agents that may have access to their users’ private data, including bank details or passwords, are running amok on a website filled with unvetted content, including potentially malicious instructions for what to do with that data."
Johana Bhuiyan, The Guardian; Documents offer rare insight on Ice’s close relationship with Palantir
"Over the past decade, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) has amassed millions of data points that it uses to identify and track its targets – from social media posts to location history and, most recently, tax information.
And there’s been one, multibillion-dollar tech company particularly instrumental in enabling Ice to put all that data to work: Palantir, the data analytics firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, the rightwing mega-donor and tech investor.
For years, little was known about how Ice uses Palantir’s technology. The company has consistently described itself as a “data processor” and says it does not play an active role in any of its customers’ data collection efforts or what clients do with that information.
Now, a cache of internal Ice documents – including hundreds of pages of emails between Ice and Palantir, as well as training manuals, and reports on the use of Palantir products – offer some of the first real-world examples of how Ice has used Palantir in its investigations and during on-the-ground enforcement operations.
The documents, which were obtained by immigrant legal rights group Just Futures Law through a Freedom of Information Act request and reviewed by the Guardian, largely cover Palantir’s contract with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of Ice that is responsible for stopping the “illegal movement of people, goods, money, contraband, weapons and sensitive technology”."
Robert Booth , The Guardian; ChatGPT offered bomb recipes and hacking tips during safety tests
"A ChatGPT model gave researchers detailed instructions on how to bomb a sports venue – including weak points at specific arenas, explosives recipes and advice on covering tracks – according to safety testing carried out this summer.
OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 also detailed how to weaponise anthrax and how to make two types of illegal drugs.
The testing was part of an unusual collaboration between OpenAI, the $500bn artificial intelligence start-up led by Sam Altman, and rival company Anthropic, founded by experts who left OpenAI over safety fears. Each company tested the other’s models by pushing them to help with dangerous tasks.
The testing is not a direct reflection of how the models behave in public use, when additional safety filters apply. But Anthropic said it had seen “concerning behaviour … around misuse” in GPT-4o and GPT-4.1, and said the need for AI “alignment” evaluations is becoming “increasingly urgent”."
MARTY LEVINE, University Times; PittGPT debuts today as private AI source for University
"Today marks the rollout of PittGPT, Pitt’s own generative AI for staff and faculty — a service that will be able to use Pitt’s sensitive, internal data in isolation from the Internet because it works only for those logging in with their Pitt ID.
“We want to be able to use AI to improve the things that we do” in our Pitt work, said Dwight Helfrich, director of the Pitt enterprise initiatives team at Pitt Digital. That means securely adding Pitt’s private information to PittGPT, including Human Resources, payroll and student data. However, he explains, in PittGPT “you would only have access to data that you would have access to in your daily role” — in your specific Pitt job.
“Security is a key part of AI,” he said. “It is much more important in AI than in other tools we provide.” Using PittGPT — as opposed to the other AI services available to Pitt employees — means that any data submitted to it “stays in our environment and it is not used to train a free AI model.”
Helfrich also emphasizes that “you should get a very similar response to PittGPT as you would get with ChatGPT,” since PittGPT had access to “the best LLM’s on the market” — the large language models used to train AI.
Faculty, staff and students already have free access to such AI services as Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. And “any generative AI tool provides the ability to analyze data … and to rewrite things” that are still in early or incomplete drafts, Helfrich said.
“It can help take the burden off some of the work we have to do in our lives” and help us focus on the larger tasks that, so far, humans are better at undertaking, added Pitt Digital spokesperson Brady Lutsko. “When you are working with your own information, you can tell it what to include” — it won’t add misinformation from the internet or its own programming, as AI sometimes does. “If you have a draft, it will make your good work even better.”
“The human still needs to review and evaluate that this is useful and valuable,” Helfrich said of AI’s contribution to our work. “At this point we can say that there is nothing in AI that is 100 percent reliable.”
On the other hand, he said, “they’re making dramatic enhancements at a pace we’ve never seen in technology. … I’ve been in technology 30 years and I’ve never seen anything improve as quickly as AI.” In his own work, he said, “AI can help review code and provide test cases, reducing work time by 75 percent. You just have to look at it with some caution and just (verify) things.”
“Treat it like you’re having a conversation with someone you’ve just met,” Lutsko added. “You have some skepticism — you go back and do some fact checking.”
Lutsko emphasized that the University has guidance on Acceptable Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools as well as a University-Approved GenAI Tools List.
Pitt’s list of approved generative AI tools includes Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which is available to all students, faculty and staff (as opposed to the version of Copilot built into Microsoft 365 apps, which is an add-on available to departments through Panther Express for $30 per month, per person); Google Gemini; and Google NotebookLM, which Lutsko said “serves as a dedicated research assistant for precise analysis using user-provided documents.”
PittGPT joins that list today, Helfrich said.
Pitt also has been piloting Pitt AI Connect, a tool for researchers to integrate AI into software development (using an API, or application programming interface).
And Pitt also is already deploying the PantherAI chatbot, clickable from the bottom right of the Pitt Digital and Office of Human Resources homepages, which provides answers to common questions that may otherwise be deep within Pitt’s webpages. It will likely be offered on other Pitt websites in the future.
“Dive in and use it,” Helfrich said of PittGPT. “I see huge benefits from all of the generative AI tools we have. I’ve saved time and produced better results.”"
Joel Gunter, BBC ; Resignation and betrayal: What handing Donbas to Putin would mean for Ukraine
"For Ukrainians, polling shows security guarantees are an absolutely vital part of any potential agreement on territory or anything else.
"People in Ukraine will accept various forms of security guarantees," said Anton Grushchetsky, the director of Kyiv's International Institute for Sociology, "but they require them."
For Yevhen Tkachov, the emergency worker in Kramatorsk, exchange of territory could only be considered with "real guarantees, not just written promises".
"Only then, more or less, I am in favour of giving Donbas to Russia," he said. "If the British Royal Navy is stationed in the port of Odesa, then I agree."
As various paths to peace are floated and discussed, sometimes in the deal-making style preferred by President Trump, there is a risk of losing sight of the real people involved – people who have already lived through a decade of war and who may stand to lose even more now in exchange for peace.
Donbas was a place full of Ukrainians from all different walks of life, said Vitalii Dribnytsia, a Ukrainian historian. "We are not just talking about culture, about politics, about demographics, we are talking about people," he said.
Donetsk might not have the cultural reputation of somewhere like Odesa, Mr Drinytsia said. But it was Ukraine. "And any corner of Ukraine, regardless of whether it has some great cultural significance or not, is Ukraine," he said."
Marie-Rose Sheinerman , The Washington Post; Police nationwide are embracing a new first responder: Drones
"Law enforcement and drone industry leaders praise the technology as lifesaving, with the potential to help authorities in situations ranging from missing persons cases to active shooter incidents. But critics worry the programs encourage mass surveillance and violate the public’s privacy."
American Psychological Association; Ethical guidance for AI in the professional practice of health service psychology
"Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing rapidly and is increasingly being integrated into psychological practice. Many AI-driven tools are now available to assist with clinical decision-making, documentation, or patient engagement. These tools hold promises for improving access and efficiency, but they also raise ethical concerns that require careful consideration to safeguard patient well-being and trust.
APA’s Ethical Guidance for AI in the Professional Practice of Health Service Psychology (PDF, 126KB) was developed specifically for health service psychologists who want to ethically integrate AI into their practice. This document offers practical considerations and recommendations tailored to real-world clinical settings.
Whether you’re exploring new technologies or seeking guidance on tools already in use, this resource is designed to help you navigate the evolving landscape of AI while staying aligned with ethical responsibilities in psychological care."
JESSICA GROSE , The New York Times; Don’t Let Silicon Valley Move Fast and Break Children’s Minds
"On June 12, the toymaker Mattel announced a “strategic collaboration” with OpenAI, the developer of the large language model ChatGPT, “to support A.I.-powered products and experiences based on Mattel’s brands.” Though visions of chatbot therapist Barbie and Thomas the Tank Engine with a souped-up surveillance caboose may dance in my head, the details are still vague. Mattel affirms that ChatGPT is not intended for users under 13, and says it will comply with all safety and privacy regulations.
But who will hold either company to its public assurances? Our federal government appears allergic to any common-sense regulation of artificial intelligence. In fact, there is a provision in the version of the enormous domestic policy bill passed by the House that would bar states from “limiting, restricting or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, A.I. systems or automated decision systems entered into interstate commerce for 10 years.”"
Olivia George, The Washington Post; What happens after you ask Trump to ‘have mercy’? Threats, praise and hope.
"Last month, Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Oklahoma) introduced a resolution calling for the House to recognize Budde’s sermon as a “display of political activism and condemning its distorted message.”
Budde, according to the resolution, promoted “political bias instead of advocating the full counsel of biblical teaching.”
On Sunday, after the service, she pondered the lawmaker’s action.
“It isn’t political activism for a pastor to ask for mercy,” she said. “It is an expression of Christian faith and the teachings of Jesus.”"
Anne Ford, American Libraries; Stolen Pages: On the 20th anniversary of a confounding crime
"Less than two months after the robbery, Allen, Borsuk, Lipka, and Reinhard were arrested and the stolen items recovered undamaged. All four robbers confessed. All pled guilty to six federal charges, among them conspiracy to commit robbery, aiding and abetting the theft of objects of cultural heritage, and interstate transportation of stolen property.
“BJ Gooch’s ordeal had become a cause célèbre among librarians, many of whom wrote letters to the judge arguing against leniency,” wrote Falk in the Vanity Fair article about the case. In the end, Allen, Borsuk, Lipka, and Reinhard each received a sentence of seven years and three months in federal prison with no possibility of parole.
Press Release, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); NEH Awards $2.72 Million to Create Research Centers Examining the Cultural Implications of Artificial Intelligence
"The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced grant awards totaling $2.72 million for five colleges and universities to create new humanities-led research centers that will serve as hubs for interdisciplinary collaborative research on the human and social impact of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
As part of NEH’s third and final round of grant awards for FY2024, the Endowment made its inaugural awards under the new Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence program, which aims to foster a more holistic understanding of AI in the modern world by creating scholarship and learning centers across the country that spearhead research exploring the societal, ethical, and legal implications of AI.
Institutions in California, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Virginia were awarded NEH grants to establish the first AI research centers and pilot two or more collaborative research projects that examine AI through a multidisciplinary humanities lens.
The new Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence grant program is part of NEH’s agencywide Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence initiative, which supports humanities projects that explore the impacts of AI-related technologies on truth, trust, and democracy; safety and security; and privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. The initiative responds to President Biden’s Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, which establishes new standards for AI safety and security, protects Americans’ privacy, and advances equity and civil rights."
Sonita Lontoh, Directors & Boards; Ethical and Responsible AI: A Governance Framework for Boards
"Boards must understand what gen AI is being used for and its potential business value supercharging both efficiencies and growth. They must also recognize the risks that gen AI may present. As we have already seen, these risks may include data inaccuracy, bias, privacy issues and security. To address some of these risks, boards and companies should ensure that their organizations' data and security protocols are AI-ready. Several criteria must be met:
It's important to understand that all these attributes build on one another. The more ethically governed, secure, free of bias and enriched a company's data is, the more accurate its AI outcomes will be."
