Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a force for good in our future, that much is obvious from the fact that it's being utilized to advance things like medical research. The thought that somewhere out there, there's a James Bond-like villain in an armchair stroking a cat and using generative AI to hack your PC may seem like fantasy but, quite frankly, it's not. Cyber security experts are already scrambling to thwart millions of threats by hackers that have used generative AI to hack PCs, steal money, credentials, and data, and, with the rapid proliferation of new and improved AI tools, it's only going to get worse. The type of cyberattacks hackers are using aren't necessarily new. They're just more prolific, sophisticated, and effective now that they have weaponized AI.

"We've got an open consultation but that consultation is fixed and inadequate," she said. The government has proposed four options in its consultation. It describes such an outcome as "the primary object of this consultation". "Why have a preferred choice if it is an open consultation?" said Kidron. "What I say to MPs is, if you are members of a government that has put all its chips on growth, why is that same government undermining creative industries that bring 126bn to the UK economy and is giving away for free the property rights of 2.4 million people who work in those industries? The creative industries impact every constituency, region and nation," she said.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance warned global leaders and tech CEOs at a Paris summit on artificial intelligence on Tuesday that "excessive regulation" would kill the rapidly growing AI industry. In his first foreign trip as vice president, Vance also said the Trump administration will "ensure that AI systems developed in America are free from ideological bias," and that the United States would "never restrict our citizens' right to free speech." "Now, at this moment, we face the extraordinary prospect of a new industrial revolution, one on par with the invention of the steam engine,'' Vance said. ''But it will never come to pass. If overregulation deters innovators from taking the risks necessary to advance the ball.''

The stated goal of DOGE's actions, per a statement from a White House spokesperson to the New York Times on Thursday, is "slashing waste, fraud, and abuse." As I point out in my story published Friday, these three terms mean very different things in the world of federal budgets, from errors the government makes when spending money to nebulous spending that's legal and approved but disliked by someone in power. Many of the new administration's loudest and most sweeping actions--like Musk's promise to end the entirety of USAID's varied activities or Trump's severe cuts to scientific funding from the National Institutes of Health--might be said to target the latter category. If DOGE feeds government data to large language models, it might easily find spending associated with DEI or other initiatives the administration considers wasteful as it pushes for 2 trillion in cuts, nearly a third of the federal budget. But the fact that DOGE aides are reportedly working in the offices of Medicaid and even Medicare--where budget cuts have been politically untenable for decades--suggests the task force is also driven by evidence published by the Government Accountability Office.

Elon Musk has long railed against the U.S. government, saying a crushing number of federal investigations and safety programs have stymied Tesla, his electric car company, and its efforts to create fleets of robotaxis and other self-driving automobiles. Now, Musk's close relationship with President Donald Trump means many of those federal headaches could vanish within weeks or months. On the potential chopping block: crash investigations into Tesla's partially automated vehicles; a Justice Department criminal probe examining whether Musk and Tesla have overstated their cars' self-driving capabilities; and a government mandate to report crash data on vehicles using technology like Tesla's Autopilot. The consequences of such actions could prove dire, say safety advocates who credit the federal investigations and recalls with saving lives. "Musk wants to run the Department of Transportation," said Missy Cummings, a former senior safety adviser at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "I've lost count of the number of investigations that are underway with Tesla.

Europe will cut back on regulation to make it easier for artificial intelligence to flourish in the region, French President Emmanuel Macron told an AI summit in Paris on Monday, urging investment in the EU -- and more specifically in France. The European Union's digital chief Henna Virkkunen also promised that the bloc will simplify its rules and implement them in a business-friendly way. As U.S. President Donald Trump has torn up his predecessor's AI guardrails to boost U.S. competitiveness, pressure has built on the EU to pursue a lighter-touch approach to AI regulation to help keep European companies in the technology race.

A group of investors led by Elon Musk is offering about 97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit behind OpenAI, escalating a dispute with the artificial intelligence company that Musk helped found a decade ago. Musk and his own AI startup, xAI, and a consortium of investment firms want to take control of the ChatGPT maker and revert it to its original charitable mission as a nonprofit research lab, according to Musk's attorney Marc Toberoff. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly rejected the unsolicited bid on Musk's social platform X, saying, "no thank you but we will buy Twitter for 9.74 billion if you want." Musk bought Twitter, now called X, for 44 billion in 2022. Musk and Altman, who together helped start OpenAI in 2015 and later competed over who should lead it, have been in a long-running feud over the startup's direction since Musk resigned from its board in 2018.

Leading artificial intelligence assistants create distortions, factual inaccuracies and misleading content in response to questions about news and current affairs, research has found. More than half of the AI-generated answers provided by ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity were judged to have "significant issues", according to the study by the BBC. The errors included stating that Rishi Sunak was still the prime minister and that Nicola Sturgeon was still Scotland's first minister; misrepresenting NHS advice about vaping; and mistaking opinions and archive material for up-to-date facts. The researchers asked the four generative AI tools to answer 100 questions using BBC articles as a source. The answers were then rated by BBC journalists who specialise in the relevant subject areas.

The focus of our work is improving the interpretability of anomalies in climate models and advancing our understanding of Arctic melt dynamics. The Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets are experiencing rapid surface melting and increased freshwater runoff, contributing significantly to global sea level rise. Understanding the mechanisms driving snowmelt in these regions is crucial. ERA5, a widely used reanalysis dataset in polar climate studies, offers extensive climate variables and global data assimilation. However, its snowmelt model employs an energy imbalance approach that may oversimplify the complexity of surface melt. In contrast, the Glacier Energy and Mass Balance (GEMB) model incorporates additional physical processes, such as snow accumulation, firn densification, and meltwater percolation/refreezing, providing a more detailed representation of surface melt dynamics. In this research, we focus on analyzing surface snowmelt dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet using feature attribution for anomalous melt events in ERA5 and GEMB models. We present a novel unsupervised attribution method leveraging counterfactual explanation method to analyze detected anomalies in ERA5 and GEMB. Our anomaly detection results are validated using MEaSUREs ground-truth data, and the attributions are evaluated against established feature ranking methods, including XGBoost, Shapley values, and Random Forest. Our attribution framework identifies the physics behind each model and the climate features driving melt anomalies. These findings demonstrate the utility of our attribution method in enhancing the interpretability of anomalies in climate models and advancing our understanding of Arctic melt dynamics.

This increased awareness has translated into guidelines, laws, and investments, such as the European Green Deal [84] or the Inflation Reduction Act in the US [106]. Many companies have used the financial incentives offered by states, and the guidelines and legislation to make significant steps towards sustainability [109]. At the same time, this growing attention also generated an advertising opportunity for companies that aim to promote themselves as environmentally aware and responsible. Indeed, some companies have been found to deliberately manipulate their data and statistics to appear more environment-friendly. The Diesel Scandal around the Volkswagen car company is a prominent example [116]. However, such cases are not the norm. More commonly, companies avoid outright data manipulation but present themselves in a misleadingly positive light regarding their environmental impact - a practice called greenwashing.