Human-like AI agents such as robots and chatbots are becoming increasingly popular, but they present a variety of ethical concerns. The first concern is in how we define humanness, and how our definition impacts communities historically dehumanized by scientific research. Autistic people in particular have been dehumanized by being compared to robots, making it even more important to ensure this marginalization is not reproduced by AI that may promote neuronormative social behaviors. Second, the ubiquitous use of these agents raises concerns surrounding model biases and accessibility. In our work, we investigate the experiences of the people who build and design these technologies to gain insights into their understanding and acceptance of neurodivergence, and the challenges in making their work more accessible to users with diverse needs. Even though neurodivergent individuals are often marginalized for their unique communication styles, nearly all participants overlooked the conclusions their end-users and other AI system makers may draw about communication norms from the implementation and interpretation of humanness applied in participants' work. This highlights a major gap in their broader ethical considerations, compounded by some participants' neuronormative assumptions about the behaviors and traits that distinguish "humans" from "bots" and the replication of these assumptions in their work. We examine the impact this may have on autism inclusion in society and provide recommendations for additional systemic changes towards more ethical research directions.

This paper argues that autonomous AI cyber-weapons - Military-AI Cyber Agents (MAICAs) - create a credible pathway to catastrophic risk. It sets out the technical feasibility of MAICAs, explains why geopolitics and the nature of cyberspace make MAICAs a catastrophic risk, and proposes political, defensive-AI and analogue-resilience measures to blunt the threat.

Tariff exemptions are fundamental to attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into the manufacturing sector, though the associated administrative processes present areas for optimization for both investing entities and the national tax authority. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to empower tax administration by leveraging a synergistic integration of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Large Language Model (LLM) technologies. The proposed system is designed to first utilize OCR for intelligent digitization, precisely extracting data from diverse application documents and key regulatory texts such as tariff orders. Subsequently, the LLM would enhance the capabilities of administrative officers by automating the critical and time-intensive task of verifying submitted HS Tariff Codes for machinery, equipment, and raw materials against official exemption lists. By enhancing the speed and precision of these initial assessments, this AI-driven approach systematically reduces potential for non-alignment and non-optimized exemption utilization, thereby streamlining the investment journey for FDI companies. For the national administration, the benefits include a significant boost in operational capacity, reduced administrative load, and a strengthened control environment, ultimately improving the ease of doing business and solidifying the nation's appeal as a premier destination for high-value manufacturing FDI.

Understanding how complex societal behaviors emerge from individual cognition and interactions requires both high-fidelity modeling of human behavior and large-scale simulations. Traditional agent-based models (ABMs) have been employed to study these dynamics for decades, but are constrained by simplified agent behaviors that fail to capture human complexity. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities by enabling agents to exhibit sophisticated social behaviors that go beyond rule-based logic, yet face significant scaling challenges. Here we present Light Society, an agent-based simulation framework that advances both fronts, efficiently modeling human-like societies at planetary scale powered by LLMs. Light Society formalizes social processes as structured transitions of agent and environment states, governed by a set of LLM-powered simulation operations, and executed through an event queue. This modular design supports both independent and joint component optimization, supporting efficient simulation of societies with over one billion agents. Large-scale simulations of trust games and opinion propagation--spanning up to one billion agents--demonstrate Light Society's high fidelity and efficiency in modeling social trust and information diffusion, while revealing scaling laws whereby larger simulations yield more stable and realistic emergent behaviors.

These authors contributed equally to this work. Abstract --As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into online platforms and digital communication spaces, their potential to influence public discourse--particularly in contentious domains like climate change--demands systematic investigation. This study examines how LLMs naturally moderate climate change conversations through their distinct communicative behaviors, offering insights into their role as facilitators of civil discourse. We conducted a comparative analysis of conversational patterns between LLMs and human participants in climate change discussions across social media platforms. Our investigation employed five state-of-the-art models: three open-source LLMs (Gemma, Llama 3, and Llama 3.3) and two commercial systems (GPT -4o by OpenAI and Claude 3.5 by Anthropic). Through sentiment analysis, we assessed the emotional characteristics and discourse patterns exhibited by both LLMs and human users. Our findings reveal two key mechanisms through which LLMs moderate climate change conversations: First, LLMs consistently demonstrate emotional neutrality, with their responses significantly dominated by neutral sentiment compared to human participants who exhibit more polarized emotional expressions. Second, LLMs maintain notably lower emotional intensity across all interaction contexts, creating a stabilizing effect on conversational dynamics. These results suggest that LLMs possess inherent moderating capabilities that could enhance the quality of public discourse on controversial topics. By maintaining emotional equilibrium and reducing inflammatory rhetoric, LLMs may serve as valuable tools for fostering more constructive and civil climate change conversations online. This research contributes to our understanding of AI's potential role in improving digital discourse and offers implications for the design of AI-mediated communication platforms.

Cybersecurity organizations are adapting to GenAI integration through modified frameworks and hybrid operational processes, with success influenced by existing security maturity, regulatory requirements, and investments in human capital and infrastructure. This qualitative research employs systematic document analysis and comparative case study methodology to examine how cybersecurity organizations adapt their threat modeling frameworks and operational processes to address generative artificial intelligence integration. Through examination of 25 studies from 2022 to 2025, the research documents substantial transformation in organizational approaches to threat modeling, moving from traditional signature-based systems toward frameworks incorporating artificial intelligence capabilities. The research identifies three primary adaptation patterns: Large Language Model integration for security applications, GenAI frameworks for risk detection and response automation, and AI/ML integration for threat hunting. Organizations with mature security infrastructures, particularly in finance and critical infrastructure sectors, demonstrate higher readiness through structured governance approaches, dedicated AI teams, and robust incident response processes. Organizations achieve successful GenAI integration when they maintain appropriate human oversight of automated systems, address data quality concerns and explainability requirements, and establish governance frameworks tailored to their specific sectors. Organizations encounter ongoing difficulties with privacy protection, bias reduction, personnel training, and defending against adversarial attacks. This work advances understanding of how organizations adopt innovative technologies in high-stakes environments and offers actionable insights for cybersecurity professionals implementing GenAI systems.

Accurate reconstruction of latent environmental fields from sparse and indirect observations is a foundational challenge across scientific domains-from atmospheric science and geophysics to public health and aerospace safety. Traditional approaches rely on physics-based simulators or dense sensor networks, both constrained by high computational cost, latency, or limited spatial coverage. We present the Temporal Radiation Operator Network (TRON), a spatiotemporal neural operator architecture designed to infer continuous global scalar fields from sequences of sparse, non-uniform proxy measurements. Unlike recent forecasting models that operate on dense, gridded inputs to predict future states, TRON addresses a more ill-posed inverse problem: reconstructing the current global field from sparse, temporally evolving sensor sequences, without access to future observations or dense labels. Demonstrated on global cosmic radiation dose reconstruction, TRON is trained on 22 years of simulation data and generalizes across 65,341 spatial locations, 8,400 days, and sequence lengths from 7 to 90 days. It achieves sub-second inference with relative L2 errors below 0.1%, representing a >58,000X speedup over Monte Carlo-based estimators. Though evaluated in the context of cosmic radiation, TRON offers a domain-agnostic framework for scientific field reconstruction from sparse data, with applications in atmospheric modeling, geophysical hazard monitoring, and real-time environmental risk forecasting.

Current LLM safety defenses fail under decomposition attacks, where a malicious goal is decomposed into benign subtasks that circumvent refusals. The challenge lies in the existing shallow safety alignment techniques: they only detect harm in the immediate prompt and do not reason about long-range intent, leaving them blind to malicious intent that emerges over a sequence of seemingly benign instructions. We therefore propose adding an external monitor that observes the conversation at a higher granularity. To facilitate our study of monitoring decomposition attacks, we curate the largest and most diverse dataset to date, including question-answering, text-to-image, and agentic tasks. We verify our datasets by testing them on frontier LLMs and show an 87% attack success rate on average on GPT-4o. This confirms that decomposition attack is broadly effective. Additionally, we find that random tasks can be injected into the decomposed subtasks to further obfuscate malicious intents. To defend in real time, we propose a lightweight sequential monitoring framework that cumulatively evaluates each subtask. We show that a carefully prompt engineered lightweight monitor achieves a 93% defense success rate, beating reasoning models like o3 mini as a monitor. Moreover, it remains robust against random task injection and cuts cost by 90% and latency by 50%. Our findings suggest that lightweight sequential monitors are highly effective in mitigating decomposition attacks and are viable in deployment.

Human Inspired Technologies Research Centre, Università degli Studi di Padova Abstract Artificial Intelligence ( AI) plays an essential role in healthcare and is pervasively incorporated into medical software and equipment . In the European Union, healthcare is a high - risk application domain for AI, and providers must prepare Instructions f or Use ( IFU) according to the European regulation 2024/1689 (AI Act) . To this regulation, t he principle of transparency is cardinal and requires the IFU to be clear and relevant to the users. This study test s whether these latter requirements are satisfied by the IFU structure . A survey was administered online via the Qualtrics platform to four types of direct stakeholders, i.e., managers (N = 238), healthcare professionals (N = 115), patients (N = 229), and Information Technology experts (N = 230). T he participants rate d the relevance of a set of transparency need s and indicated the IFU section addressing them . The results reveal differentiated priorities across stakeholders and a troubled mapping of transparency needs onto the IFU structure . Recommendations to build a locally meaningful IFU are derived. Keywords: transparency, AI A ct, healthcare, user - centeredness 1. Introduction The software called Artificial Intelligence is the object of recent regulation s and guidelines such as the European Union AI Act (Artificial Intelligence Act, 2024), the US AI Risk Management Framework (NIST USA, n.d.), or UNESCO's recommendations on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (UNESCO, 2022) . Overall, these initiatives aim to increase the trustworthiness of AI technology, especially in application domains where mistakes and misuse ha ve high costs for human well - being and rights . According to European law, health applications represent one such domain . To minimize the se risks, the AI Act prescribes that providers make available to users (or "deployers," in the regulation terminology) some Instructions for Use (IFU) about the systems' capabilities, limitations, and security . These instructions implement the obligation to transparency, facilitat ing an informed, responsible, and proper use of high - risk AI technology.

One goal of AI (and AGI) is to identify and understand specific mechanisms and representations sufficient for general intelligence. Often, this work manifests in research focused on architectures and many cognitive architectures have been explored in AI/AGI. However, different research groups and even different research traditions have somewhat independently identified similar/common patterns of processes and representations or "cognitive design patterns" that are manifest in existing architectures. Today, AI systems exploiting large language models (LLMs) offer a relatively new combination of mechanisms and representations available for exploring the possibilities of general intelligence. This paper outlines a few recurring cognitive design patterns that have appeared in various pre-transformer AI architectures. We then explore how these patterns are evident in systems using LLMs, especially for reasoning and interactive ("agentic") use cases. Examining and applying these recurring patterns enables predictions of gaps or deficiencies in today's Agentic LLM Systems and identification of subjects of future research towards general intelligence using generative foundation models.