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Detectability in Diversity: Improved Canary Crafting for Privacy Auditing in One Run

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Privacy auditing aims to empirically assess privacy leakage in machine learning models using membership inference attacks (MIAs), and to derive lower bounds on differential privacy (DP) parameters. Recent one-run auditing methods address the high cost of standard approaches by relying on a single training run with multiple "canary" points whose inclusion or exclusion must be detected by the auditor. In this work, we study the problem of efficiently crafting canaries for one-run privacy auditing. Motivated by recent theoretical insights suggesting that interference between canaries contributes to weaker leakage estimates compared to multi-run methods, we propose to optimize canaries to be both highly detectable and minimally interfering. Our approach combines a greedy initialization based on influence functions with a bilevel optimization procedure that maximizes distinguishability while promoting diversity in embedding space, enabling the use of computationally efficient bilevel algorithms. Experiments show that our method achieves stronger privacy leakage estimates at a lower computational cost than existing canary crafting approaches.


Russia 'relentlessly targeting' critical infrastructure and democracy, GCHQ says

BBC News

Russia'relentlessly targeting' critical infrastructure and democracy, GCHQ says The UK is at a moment of consequence as Russia is relentlessly targeting critical infrastructure, the UK's largest spy agency will warn. GCHQ Director Anne Keast-Butler will set out threats facing the UK and the measures she believes need to be taken to confront them when she makes her inaugural public speech on Wednesday. Russia has been blamed for a string of espionage plots on British soil and, more recently, waging an undeclared'hybrid war' against the UK and other Nato countries. The Kremlin has denied the allegations. Keast-Butler says GCHQ is working tirelessly to fend off cyber attacks and counter what she calls reckless sabotage and assassination attempts.


Why the Vatican Invited Anthropic to the Pope's AI Encyclical Presentation

WIRED

When Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical on artificial intelligence at the Vatican on Monday, he invited Christopher Olah, cofounder of Anthropic, to speak. The move signaled an unprecedented alliance between the Catholic church and Silicon Valley. But to understand how this partnership came about, we need to go back to Anthropic's founding. Anthropic launched in 2021 after a group of OpenAI researchers, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, left to form a rival lab. They did so with a clear conviction: Artificial intelligence models were becoming too powerful to be developed exclusively according to the logic of competition and speed.


The Best Movies to Stream This Month (May 2026)

WIRED

Summer has arrived, which means its vacation season--and there are plenty of travel tips to be found among the best movies on streaming this May. A bloody ballet battle royale in Budapest in Prime Video's a visit to the picturesque (and definitely not haunted) Dutch forests in Shudder's, or an action-packed trip to Japan courtesy of Netflix's, are just some of the locations sure to give you wanderlust this month. If you fancy something a bit more tropical, then look no further than on Hulu--although director Sam Raimi's twisty survival horror might have you thinking twice before turning on your out-of-office emails. And, if the rising temperatures are already too much, the Antarctic chill of John Carpenter's classic, and its 1950s inspiration,, are both landing on Criterion. Here are WIRED's picks of the best movies to watch right now.


What Pope Leo XIV's First Encyclical Says About the Power of AI

WIRED

What Pope Leo XIV's First Encyclical Says About the Power of AI In, the Pope decries the concentration of technological power in a few global players. Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah shakes hands with Pope Leo XIV ahead of the presentation of the first encyclical. An algorithm decides what we see, another filters what we read, and still others enter into the processes that govern work, information, and collective choices. But the text is not conceived as an exclusively technological reflection. Pope Leo XIV places the issue of AI within the tradition of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and directly invokes--while updating it--the of Pope Leo XIII (published on May 15, 1891) in the year of its 135th anniversary.


Pope Leo made me rethink how I use AI

PCWorld

PCWorld examines Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI, which emphasizes that artificial intelligence reflects creator biases and lacks genuine empathy or real-world experience. The Pope calls AI a "valuable tool that requires vigilance," advising users to adopt a more thoughtful, slower-paced approach when interacting with models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. This papal guidance encourages users to actively consider when, why, and what they ask AI systems, recognizing their limitations despite sophisticated responses. Delving into Pope Leo XIV's exhaustive treatise about humanity and AI, I was struck by a recurring theme: AI simulates fundamental human traits that it doesn't actually possess. For starters, AI lacks the grounding we humans get from our real-world experiences, Pope Leo noted in his first encyclical, which was released Monday by the Vatican. Yes, AI models like ChatGPT (or more specifically, GPT), Claude, and Gemini are trained on mountains of data that seemingly represent the entirety of human knowledge. But all that data is just that: data.


'Leave Kyiv': Why Russia's latest Ukraine threat is a major escalation

Al Jazeera

'Leave Kyiv': Why Russia's latest Ukraine threat is a major escalation Russia has urged foreigners to leave in Ukraine's capital Kyiv, and warned of more strikes on the city, suggesting a major escalation in its more-than-four-year-long war on Ukraine. In a statement issued on Monday, Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it planned to target "decision-making centres and command posts" and drone manufacturing facilities in the Ukrainian city in a series of strikes. The ministry's statement also urged Kyiv residents to avoid all military and administrative infrastructure facilities in the capital, which could be potential targets. A later statement said that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had advised US Secretary of State Marco Rubio of the plan and urged him to evacuate his embassy staff from Kyiv. Moscow said these planned strikes were in response to a drone strike on a student dormitory in Starobilsk, in the Russian-occupied Luhansk region of Ukraine, which killed at least 18 people. The threats come just days after Russian drone and rocket strikes on Kyiv on Saturday night killed at least four people and injured about 100 others.


'We can stitch together our past': the AI-generated time-travellers vlogging from history

The Guardian

AI-generated vloggers like Chloe VS History (left) and Nova VS History are, their creators say, 'taking an already-proven format and applying it to history' AI-generated vloggers like Chloe VS History (left) and Nova VS History are, their creators say, 'taking an already-proven format and applying it to history' The content creators behind channels like Chloe VS History are using AI tools to'bring history to life in a really visceral way' "I have just arrived in Tudor London, 1536," a young woman in a green puffer jacket tells the camera. "I'm going to check in at my room in the inn, get into the market. Then, later I am meeting the actual king - yep, Henry VIII - in person." On YouTube and other social platforms, users are flocking to watch AI-generated "history influencers", characters that vlog their travels to historical settings. One of the most popular channels is Chloe VS History, with more than 610,000 Instagram followers and 15m views on YouTube.


AI Agents Plunged the Tech World Into Chaos. Here's Exactly How That Happened

WIRED

Here's Exactly How That Happened The definitive story of how Claude Code and OpenClaw kicked off computing's biggest transformation possibly ever. "Hi, my name is Peter, and I'm a Claudeholic." It was August 2025 and Peter Steinberger was addressing a meetup in London called Claude Code Anonymous. Steinberger and some fellow addicts had arranged the event to network with people like themselves--techies swept up by coding tools such as Anthropic's paradigm-busting Claude Code. "I dedicate pretty much all my waking time to this, yet it doesn't feel enough," he told the gathering in a cozy, brick-walled room. A few months later, Anthropic released a new version of Claude Code, and the ranks of Claudeholics exploded . Called Opus 4.5, it could handle more complicated programming tasks, retain much more in its memory, run for many hours on end, and manage a team of AI subagents. Anthropic has what it describes as a "notoriously difficult" take-home exam for prospective engineering hires; in a head-to-head comparison of those people and its models, Anthropic claimed that Opus 4.5 "scored higher than any human candidate ever," which "raises questions on how AI will change engineering as a profession."


AI-powered version of Ozzy to appear in city

BBC News

A new AI-powered avatar of Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne could make its first UK appearance in Birmingham. Osbourne's wife Sharon and son Jack announced plans for the hyper-real version of the Birmingham-born singer at an expo in the US last week. Talking to Ed James on BBC Radio WM, she said that plans for the avatar were brilliant. I've seen the tests that they've done of Ozzy and you can see every pore on his face, his beard's coming through, it's that detailed, she said. Osbourne died in July aged 76, less than three weeks after he had performed at Villa Park with Black Sabbath.