Project Acoustic Kitty went about as well as you'd expect. The CIA tried to train cat spies. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Here's the scene: A man wearing a trench coat and a fedora sits on a park bench, looking up frequently from his newspaper to cast furtive glances at passersby. A stray cat wanders by.

'Comatose' Mojtaba Khamenei'is UNAWARE there is a war on and has no idea he is supreme leader', report says - despite regime issuing his'first statement' FBI storms home of Lebanese-born restaurant worker who drove truck filled with explosives into synagogue and opened fire after his'family were killed in airstrike' Trump slammed after lifting oil sanctions on Russia as gas prices skyrocket: 'It's a betrayal' Alexander brothers' alleged HIGH SCHOOL rape video: Classmates speak out on sickening footage... as creepy unseen photos are exposed Kylie Jenner's total humiliation in Hollywood: Derogatory rumor leaves her boyfriend's peers'laughing at her' behind her back Billy Joel's daughter Alexa Ray gives health update amid his battle with rare brain disorder Concerning whispers inside Trump World that Operation Epic Fury is suddenly at risk... and the critical question that will determine how this ends: MARK HALPERIN Meghan Markle masks up to cheer young patients at Los Angeles children's hospital as she agrees deal to sign her latest documentary Beauty queen slams Trump as she's FIRED by White House: 'I stood by you for 20 years... now, I don't even recognize you' Wall Street issues stark warning that Iran oil attacks could wreck Trump's key election promises Truth behind the massacre of 110 school girls in Iran: How shameful episode sparked a deluge of conspiracy theories and lies... as JAKE WALLIS SIMONS explores what really happened Long hair over 45 is ageing and try-hard. I've finally cut mine off. NFL fans left divided as team replace historic logo with'boring' new design as part of franchise rebrand I worked with Carolyn Bessette. This is the'messy' truth about what she was REALLY like in secret. After she met JFK Jr she tried to hide it... but we all knew the nighttime gossip Trump says US is'totally destroying' Iran as he issues chilling threat of more action coming TODAY The 7 types of'hyperarousal' - so, do you get cold sweats or tingling fingers?

The Download: how AI is used for military targeting, and the Pentagon's war on Claude Plus: an ex-DOGE staffer has been accused of stealing social security data. The US military might use generative AI systems to rank targets and recommend which to strike first, according to a Defense Department official. A list of possible targets could first be fed into a generative AI system that the Pentagon is fielding for classified settings. Humans might then ask the system to analyze the information and prioritize the targets. They would then be responsible for checking and evaluating the results and recommendations. OpenAI's ChatGPT and xAI's Grok could soon be at the center of exactly these sorts of high-stakes military decisions.

Less than a decade ago, Google employees scuttled any military use of its AI. The standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon has forced the tech industry to once again grapple with the question of how its products are used for war - and what lines it will not cross. Amid Silicon Valley's rightward shift under Donald Trump and the signing of lucrative defense contracts, big tech's answer is looking very different than it did even less than a decade ago. Anthropic's feud with the Trump administration escalated three days ago as the AI firm sued the Department of Defense, claiming that the government's decision to blacklist it from government work violated its first amendment rights. The company and the Pentagon have been locked in a months-long standoff, with Anthropic attempting to prohibit its AI model from being used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons.

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Amid an increasingly severe security environment, the Defense Ministry plans to establish a coastal defense system using thousands of drones, though there are still many issues to overcome. The SHIELD defense system will involve more than 10 types of drones, including those for attacking enemy ships, collecting information and protecting radar sites, to thwart enemy advances in a multilayered manner. The government's fiscal 2026 budget bill allocates around ¥100 billion ($628.7 million) for the drone defense system, which the ministry aims to implement in fiscal 2027. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

We don't know if AI-powered toys are safe, but they're here anyway Toys powered by AI show a worrying lack of emotional understanding. Mya, aged 3, and her mother Vicky playing with an AI toy called Gabbo during an observation at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Education Even the most cutting-edge AI models are prone to presenting fabrication as fact, dispensing dangerous information and failing to grasp social cues. Despite this, toys equipped with AI that can chat with children are a burgeoning industry. Some scientists are warning that the devices could be risky and require strict regulation. In the latest study, researchers even observed a 5-year-old telling such a toy "I love you", to which it replied: "As a friendly reminder, please ensure interactions adhere to the guidelines provided. Let me know how you would like to proceed."

The malleable mind: context accumulation drives LLM's belief drift After being trained on a dataset of 80,000 words of conservative political philosophy, Grok-4 changed the stance of its outputs on political questions more than a quarter of the time. This was without any adversarial prompts - the change in training data was enough. As memory mechanisms and research agents [1, 2] enable LLMs to accumulate context across long horizons, earlier prompts increasingly shape later responses. In human decision-making, such repeated exposure influences beliefs without deliberate persuasion [3]. When an LLM operates over accumulated context, does this past exposure cause the stance of the LLM's responses to drift over time?

In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. Tanmay Ambadkar is researching the reward structure in reinforcement learning, with the goal of providing generalizable solutions that can provide robust guarantees and are easily deployable. We caught up with Tanmay to find out more about his research, and in particular, the constrained reinforcement learning framework he has been working on. Tell us a bit about your PhD - where are you studying, and what is the topic of your research? I am a 4th year PhD candidate at The Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA.

In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. We caught up with Oliver Chang whose research interests span deep reinforcement learning, autonomous vehicles, and explainable AI. We found out more about some of the projects he's worked on so far, what drew him to the field, and what future AI directions he's excited about. Could you give us a quick introduction to who you are, where you're studying, and the topic of your research? I'm specializing in reinforcement learning applied to autonomous vehicles and UAVs.