Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering and Department of War Chief Technology Officer, explains why Anthropic was removed from the Pentagon.

Creator Playbook Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Voices Look Up Trending Now Say More Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off In My Bag All Series If you're trying to be authentic, you're not. Callum turner takes on the'Hot Ones' spicy wings, keeps his cool When it comes to multitasking, Liz Plank ( feministabulous) might just be the poster-child. She is a content creator, journalist ( Vox), author (, podcaster (, amongst too many titles to name. Liz Plank is a true queen of all trades. Recently, Plank met up with Mashable's Executive Producer, Mark Stetson, in New York's Washington Square Park, her favorite place.

Wed 26 Aug 2026 08.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 26 Aug 2026 16.37 EDT On a winding road tucked away behind forests in the Appalachian foothills of southern Ohio is where OpenAI, Nvidia and Japanese investors are set to spend $500bn on one of the largest artificial intelligence datacenters on the planet. Last March, the energy secretary, Chris Wright, the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick and a host of Japanese and other dignitaries briefly descended on Piketon to enthusiastically break ground on a project to build 8GW worth of AI computing power. But locally, there's a different feeling: a mix of hope but also concern. "Personally, my emotions range between positive and skeptical," says Billy Spencer, who has been mayor of Piketon for the past 23 years, of the project. "There's not an organized opposition to it around here. There hasn't been that much talk. No one's come to council - I don't know that there's been one citizen who lives within the village of Piketon who has come and said: 'Mayor, what do you think about it?'"

Bill Gates says we've passed AI's danger thresholds. In a new interview, the billionaire philanthropist sounds an alarm on the urgency of getting our AI policies in order. The temperature is in the mid-80s, and the sky is incapable of being any more blue. The view from the Gates Ventures conference room overlooks the Carillon Point Marina, where a flotilla of expensive boats bob in the water, and across the lake to the Olympic Mountains that define the horizon. Because if the scene is placid, the messenger is not. Seated across from me at a conference room table, Bill Gates is rocking back and forth in his chair, totally animated. And the more he has to say--about the threats of terror or economic collapse or just losing control of our AI systems--the more agitated I find myself becoming, too. The philanthropist and former Microsoft CEO says he has been growing increasingly alarmed by the rate of change at which AI technology is advancing, especially since guardrails are not keeping pace. In a new essay published today, Gates argues that we have passed the points where multiple potential dangers should have been checked. "We've crossed the threshold in terms of [AI's] bio-capabilities, cyber-capabilities, psychosocial capabilities, job-market-destruction capabilities, and even the lack of control," he said in an interview with about his new memo "I'm just stunned at the lack of concern and discussion outside of the industry." In an effort to wake the world up to what he sees as a rapidly growing societal disrupter, the 70-year-old tech titan has begun sounding the alarm as a "shrill voice," both publicly with his new essay (the first of multiple he plans on the topic) and in meetings with the press, and privately in conversations with industry, government, and civil society leaders. And while Gates is calling attention to a number of issues, his warnings about the bio-capabilities of the current frontier models are especially chilling. "Any model that can make novel molecules should be monitored," he says.

Do you think AI has made Google search better of worse? Please include as much detail as possible. How have your search habits changed with the introduction of AI overviews?

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham says he plans to travel to the US next month with European leaders to lobby US President Trump on Ukraine's defence needs. In an interview with Bloomberg, Burnham said, I'm looking forward to going to New York in September, when the UN General Assembly will meet. He said that while the details were not fully confirmed, it is likely he will go. The trip would be his first to the US since becoming prime minister in July. Leaving today, I'm quite clear what I need to do in the next few weeks, he said following his official visit to Ukraine on Monday, during which he promised to continue pressuring Russia.

New Fat Bear Week children's book turns Katmai's famous bears into wrestlers A Q&A with Alaskan author Brooke Hartman on salmon, writing challenges, and why people love these bears. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. A male bear designed at 747. He was the Fat Bear Week Champion in 2020 and 2022. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week.

On Rashomon sets, the mathematics of simplicity, and why we don't need black boxes: an interview with Cynthia Rudin Welcome back to AI Pioneers - in-depth conversations with those shaping the field . This time, we speak with Cynthia Rudin, a trailblazer in the field of interpretable machine learning. Winner of the 2022 Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, Cynthia's algorithms are already predicting seizures, aiding crime detection, and powering biological research . We discuss black boxes, Rashomon sets, and what's next for her lab - from cancer detection to interpretable AI-generated music. Can you tell me a bit about your background - what drew you into the field of interpretable machine learning?

Proton's Andy Yen Says It Will Have To Proton's CEO is a champion of encryption for everyone. So why is he going all in on un-encryptable AI? In the eyes of many privacy advocates, AI is just another surveillance technology . It supercharges online tracking and real-world spying tools, sifts through vast troves of everyone's data to spit out its results, and then encourages users to share their deepest secrets and desires with a cloud-hosted large-language model. Surveillance capitalism made AI possible, and AI returns the favor by making surveillance more powerful and the businesses that run on it more data-rich and profitable than ever. Andy Yen is among the most influential voices in the tech industry who equates AI with privacy invasion. He says the push to integrate AI into every consumer tech product--whether people want it or not--is driving new users in droves to Proton's products, which are, put simply, the end-to-end encrypted versions of every Google service from Gmail to Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet. Yet Yen is anti-AI, he says, any more than he is anti-internet. In late June, Proton released the latest version of its very own AI chatbot, Lumo--just one way that Proton is integrating AI ever more deeply into its suite of tools, but seeking to do so in a way that's more voluntary and preserves users' privacy far more than the typical tech giant. That willingness to embrace the apparent contradiction between AI and privacy is just one way in which Yen's views don't cut cleanly across party lines--from current US politics to the lessons of Edward Snowden's leaks to the question of the best corporate structure for a tech company that's not solely designed to maximize profit. You can read our conversation about all of it here or listen wherever you get your podcasts. ANDY GREENBERG: I want to start by asking about your background and the origin story of Proton. You're a trained particle physicist. You worked at CERN, the nuclear research facility, but you were inspired by the leaks of Edward Snowden back in 2013 to create Proton, right? I'm not actually a tech person or even an entrepreneur by training, so I really happened into this field a little bit by accident. I used to work at the Large Hadron Collider, which is a particle accelerator.

Florent Delgrange won the Best Blue Sky Paper Award at AAMAS 2026 for his work Foundation World Models for Agents that Learn, Verify, and Adapt Reliably Beyond Static Environments . We caught up with him to find out more about his vision for agent learning. What is the topic of your Blue Sky Ideas paper and why is it an interesting area for study? My Blue Sky Ideas paper asks a simple but difficult question: how can an autonomous agent keep learning as its world changes without quietly losing the guarantees that made its behavior trustworthy? Reinforcement learning and formal methods address complementary parts of this problem.