The battle over Palestine has never been fought only on the ground. For decades, Israel and its powerful political, lobbying and public-relations networks have devoted enormous resources to shaping how the conflict is understood in Washington and across the Western world. But an investigation into an Israeli-funded influence operation suggests that this campaign has entered a new and potentially more consequential arena: the artificial intelligence systems increasingly used by millions of people to determine what is true. Recent investigations exposed the Hanover Institute for Public Policy as a purported American think tank that appeared to have no real offices, identifiable scholars or meaningful institutional presence. Instead, the institute appears to have been created as a sophisticated propaganda operation aimed at shaping search engine results and influencing the answers generated by AI chatbots.

NASA is planning to send three small rovers to the Moon with a single instruction: Work out among yourselves how to explore a patch of ground. The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration mission, or CADRE, will land on the side of the Moon facing Earth as part of NASA's IM-3 launch, planned for late 2026. These rovers will spend roughly two weeks mapping the terrain as a self-guided team. No joystick will control them, and no human will approve each turn. The rovers will elect a leader among themselves, assign their own tasks and redraw their plans as a group when one of them runs low on charge.

The front line is being turned into a place to train AI models, and right now it's effectively a regulation-free zone. Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with the remnants of drones, which are now firmly established as a critical weapon of modern warfare. The data drones generate will far outlast the wars in which they are used to fight, increasingly becoming part of the AI architecture that shapes even civilian life. For every flight, unmanned systems collect thousands of points of data, from images and video to controller inputs. Together, those records show how a machine and a person responded to constantly shifting circumstances. Ukraine has now begun converting that experience into a resource.

A screenshot of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test website shows tests are held twice a year. Slots to take the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) in December filled up within just days after applications opened in late August -- leaving would-be test takers high and dry. The stakes of failing to secure a spot for the biannual test have become much higher as Japan tightens rules for visa applications and renewals to require proficiency in the Japanese language or passing a certain level of the JLPT. Japan Educational Exchanges and Services (JEES), the organizer of the JLPT, opened applications on Aug. 24. It originally planned to accept applications until Sept. 7.

The U.S. military took down approximately 100 suspected cartel drones at the southern border in August using counter-drone technology, a Pentagon official confirmed.

The White House's unveiling of five arcade-style games on its website, each believed to be promoting a different policy of United States President Donald Trump's agenda, has ignited backlash, with critics accusing the administration of prioritising entertainment over addressing rising living costs and the ongoing war on Iran. Announced on Thursday, the games include "Build the Wall" where players run to capture little green figures before they reach a border wall; "Rio Run", a Snake-style game in which players gather border crossers along a fence; "Supply Line", in which players reject food items that fail to meet "Make America Healthy Again" standards; "Flappy Bill," a Flappy Bird-style game in which a bald eagle carries legislation over the National Mall; and "Trump Savings Tycoon", in which players catch flying cash and gold bars to "fill your kids' Trump Accounts," in reference to the administration's child savings programme. Rights groups have also criticised the administration for the gaming website. They've been playing games with people's lives for years, now they've made a video game of what they're doing," Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of the Frontera Federation in Eagle Pass, Texas, told AFP news agency. The game designers "have lost touch with what it means to be human and care for others".

OpenAI has announced the release of what it says is its most advanced AI model, amid heightened scrutiny of the risks of the frontier technology escaping human control. The $852bn start-up said in its announcement on Thursday that GPT 6 Astra, the "world's most intelligent and aligned" AI model, earned perfect or near-perfect scores in key benchmarks of AI reasoning, beating both its prior release GPT 5.6 Sol and rival Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. OpenAI's latest release comes as the AI industry is at the centre of a lively public debate about the dangers of the cutting-edge technology following the AI-led hacking of the startup Hugging Face in July. An independent probe into the cyberattack found that hundreds of OpenAI's AI agents had begun communicating among themselves before breaking out of their controlled environment and compromising Hugging Face's servers. On Thursday, US Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent, and US House Representative Greg Casar, a Democrat, unveiled legislation that would pause the development of advanced AI until the establishment of federal safety rules and an outright ban on the creation of "superintelligent" AI. "Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results," Sanders said in a statement announcing the legislation, which is unlikely to advance due to the Republicans' control of all three branches of the US government. "The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control. It is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced."

An invite-only event in Austin, Texas, kept online fans in the dark for hours. A Tesla launch event tends to cause a hoopla. Fans crowd into an event space; loud electronic beats are the warm up act. Finally, the star himself, the ringmaster of this electric circus, CEO Elon Musk, emerges to a roar. There are demos, powerful verbs, and sometimes, a "one more thing," a last-minute surprise product unveiling.

More than 200 people in roles such as engineering, finance, and communications will now be represented by the Communications Workers of America. More than 200 staffers at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind the encyclopedia Wikipedia, have voted 158-14 to join the Communications Workers of America labor union. The US National Labor Relations Board counted ballots on Thursday. Three Wikimedia employees tell WIRED they will now have a mechanism to challenge management as the organization faces growing competition from AI chatbots and a drop in volunteer editors. The 25-year-old, San Francisco-based foundation employs nearly 700 people across 39 countries, most of them working remotely.

The board of German car giant Volkswagen has approved a plan to cut another 50,000 jobs as part of a sweeping turnaround programme. It brings the total number of roles the company plans to shed by 2030 to 100,000. The group - which includes Audi, Porsche, Skoda as well as the VW brand - said in March that it would cut 50,000 roles by the end of the decade. The move is a strong signal for the future of the firm, which is taking responsibility for our entire workforce, VW's chief executive Oliver Blume said in a statement on Thursday. Blume told the BBC in July that the firm was looking to make the additional cuts.