India's foreign minister has confirmed that he discussed his country's row with Canada over the killing of a Canadian Sikh leader with top United States government officials during a visit to Washington, DC, this week. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said on Friday that he laid out India's concerns about Sikh separatist movement supporters in Canada during talks a day earlier with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on September 18 that his government was investigating "credible allegations of a potential link" between Indian government agents and the June killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh leader in western Canada. "They [Blinken and Sullivan] obviously shared US views and assessments on this whole situation and I explained to them … the concerns which I had," Jaishankar said during an event on Friday morning at the Hudson Institute, a conservative US think tank. "Hopefully we both came out of those meetings better informed."

California would become the first state to require venture capital firms to disclose the race and gender of the founders of the companies they fund, under a bill currently awaiting governor Gavin Newsom's signature. The business community strongly opposes the legislation, characterizing it as an example of bureaucratic overreach. But civil rights groups and female entrepreneurs say it could go a long way toward equalizing opportunity in Silicon Valley, where startup capital overwhelmingly flows to white men. According to the business data firm PitchBook, companies founded by all-female teams accounted for just 2% of venture capital funding last year. Those led by Black women and Latinas received even less, 0.85%, according to a report from Project Diane, a research effort focused on female founders.

This week, it's Meta's turn to highlight AI during its device event. In this episode, Devindra and Cherlynn dive into all of the news from Meta's Connect 2023 event, where it unveiled Meta AI and accompanying celebrity-powered chatbots. Oh yah, and it introduced the Meta Quest 3 and new Ray-Ban smart glasses, too. More so than the metaverse and VR, it's really AI that Zuckerberg wants to push across all of Meta's apps and devices. And in other news, we discuss why the end of the WGA strike is a big deal for AI in Hollywood; ex-Microsoft exec Panos Panay officially heading to Amazon; and why the FTC is targeting Amazon over its potential ecommerce monopoly.

Just when Microsoft's buyout of Activision finally seemed to be near complete -- and we could focus on Google's legal tussles with the Department of Justice -- the Federal Trade Commission said it will revive its attempt to block the $69 billion deal in an adjudicative process. Microsoft received EU approval over the summer when the European Commission endorsed the deal as long as the tech giant could ensure "full compliance with commitments." Normally, the FTC drops its challenges to deals when efforts are lost in federal court. This move will not delay the deal, though in the worst-case scenario, Microsoft might have to sell off parts of the gaming company. Microsoft told Bloomberg it's not concerned about the move preventing its purchase.

"We needed weapons, and we needed them fast," 3D says, sitting beneath the stalactites in a dimly lit cave, somewhere deep in the jungle in eastern Myanmar. The space reverberates with the hum of 3D printers--the devices that gave 3D his nom de guerre. He spoke on condition that WIRED would not reveal his real name or show his face. "My parents would kill me if they would know what I'm up to," he says. Not only does 3D face the risk of arrest, torture, or execution for his part in the revolution, the military would not hesitate to arrest his parents if they were to discover 3D's identity.

"Father of the Video Game" Ralph Baer escaped Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany as a teen and served in the U.S. Army in WWII. After coming of age in tough times, he felt driven to bring "more fun and whimsy" into the world. Ralph Baer's childhood was stolen by the Nazis. The German-born Jew gained a semblance of revenge overseas, imagining a new way for children of all ages to play. Ralph Baer invented video games.

Netanyahu addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the world is on the cusp of an artificial intelligence revolution that could launch nations into prosperous times or lead to all-out destruction fueled by devastating high-tech wars. "The AI revolution is progressing at lightning speed," Netanyahu said during his U.N. General Assembly speech last week. "It took centuries for humanity to adapt to the agricultural revolution. It took decades to adapt to the industrial revolution. We may have but a few years to adapt to the AI revolution."

A combat drone dropped explosives on an electricity substation in a Russian village near the border with Ukraine, while Russia's Ministry of Defence reported shooting down more than a dozen Ukrainian drones over the Russian regions of Belgorod, Kursk and Kaluga. In the Russian village of Belaya, located less than 25km (16 miles) from the border, "a Ukrainian drone dropped two explosive devices on a substation", Kursk regional governor Roman Starovoyt said on the Telegram messaging app early on Friday. "One of the transformers caught fire. Five settlements and a hospital were cut off from power supply. Fire crews rushed to the scene," he said.

The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has announced the creation of an artificial intelligence security centre that will oversee the development and integration of AI capabilities within US defence and intelligence services. Director of the NSA and US Cyber Command, General Paul Nakasone, said on Thursday that US officials were aware of the increasing importance of AI in the national security landscape and the opening of the new centre was part of steps to "shape the future" of AI technology in the security, defence and intelligence sectors. "We maintain an advantage in AI in the United States today. That AI advantage should not be taken for granted," Nakasone said at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, where he spoke about the opening of the centre and the growing threat that China posed. The AI centre will be incorporated into the NSA's current Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, Nakasone said, where it will become the focal point for "promoting the secure adoption of new AI capabilities across the national security enterprise and the defence industry base".

As the reliability of cheap, off-the-shelf autonomous platforms increases, so does the risk posed by intelligent multi-agent systems to military operations. In the contemporary context of the Russo-Ukrainian war alone, we have seen autonomous aerial vehicles and surface vessels deployed both individually and in multitude to deliver critical effects to both sides. While there is a large body of literature on tactical level communications and interactions between agents, the exploration of high-level command and control (C2) structures that will underpin future autonomous multi-agent military operations is a less explored area of research. We propose a quantitative game-theoretic framework to study effective C2 structures in cooperative and competitive multi-agent swarming scenarios. To test our framework, we construct a virtual environment where two adversarial swarms compete to achieve outcomes comparable to real-world scenarios. The framework we present in this paper enables us to quickly test and interrogate different C2 configurations in multi-agent systems to explore C2 as a force multiplier when at a force disadvantage.