KABUL, Afghanistan – An Afghan Defense Ministry official says a U.S. drone strike in northeastern Kunar province has killed Pakistan Taliban chief Mullah Fazlullah. Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammad Radmanish tells The Associated Press in a telephone interview Friday that Fazlullah and two other insurgents were killed early Thursday morning. According to a statement attributed to U.S. Forces-Afghanistan spokesman, Lt. Col Martin O'Donnell, the U.S. carried out a "counterterrorism strike" Thursday near in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan targeting "a senior leader of a designated terrorist organization." The statement did not say whether the strike had killed anyone and did not identify Fazlullah as the target. Radmanish said the attack took place in Marawara district, near the border.

Government intelligence agencies have a plan to build computers that store information inside DNA and other organic molecules. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a group within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that develops technologies for U.S. intelligence services, announced plans to develop "tabletop"-sized machines that can store and retrieve data from large batches of polymers -- a term that refers to a wide variety of long, stringlike molecules. Polymers can store data in the sequence of individual atoms or groups of atoms. The project, which was reported by Nextgov, is an attempt to solve a basic problem of the modern era: the vast and growing costs of data storage.

Recent advances in computing power, algorithms, and sensor technology in recent years have combined to rapidly expand the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI). Applications exist not only in private sector industries like healthcare, finance, and retail, but in public sector settings like criminal justice and national security as well. To discuss these issues, Governance Studies hosted the ninth annual A. Alfred Taubman Forum on Public Policy at the Brookings Institution on June 12. The event featured three panels of AI experts that drew from Brookings fellows, academia, government, and industry. The panelists discussed the challenges and opportunities of AI in national security, economic, and public policy contexts.

Google says it will no longer permit its artificial intelligence, or AI technology to be used in any activities involving weapons. The company's chief executive officer, Sundar Pichai, announced the decision in an internet post. He wrote that the new policy was one of several newly-launched "principles" aimed at guiding the company's AI work in the future. The principles are a set of ethical guidelines covering the company's development and sale of AI technology and tools. Google says it will no longer design or launch AI for weapons or other technologies whose main purpose is to cause harm to people.

There are some frequent stereotypes you'll hear about Russian men, mainly that they're all a bunch of alcoholic football soccer fans who die early because of their love for vodka, leaving behind some of the most beautiful women on the planet who outlive them by ten years on average. While the stereotypes have some serious merit, Russia isn't just about hard drinking, chasing skirts, and hooliganism. All that vodka fuels some of the world's brightest minds, like Russia's fearless leader, Vladimir Putin, who believes that artificial intelligence will be the key to global supremacy. As China and the US are fighting for AI supremacy and the EU is scrambling to catch up, Russia's growing its footprint in AI with a seemingly low-key approach. Hearing less about Russian AI companies doesn't mean they don't exist though.

BEIJING – China's navy carried out drills in the South China Sea to simulate fending off an aerial attack, state media said on Friday, as China and the United States trade barbs over who is responsible for heightened tensions in the disputed waterways. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed concern during a visit to Beijing on Thursday over China's efforts to militarize the seas. His remarks came after a flurry of U.S. activity in the region, including reports last week that U.S. Air Force B-52 bombers had flown near disputed islands that drew a sharp rebuke from China. China's navy carried out a simulated missile attack in an unspecified area of the South China Sea using three target drones making flyovers of a ship formation at varying heights, the official army newspaper said. The drills were part of efforts by an also unspecified training base to prepare for real-life combat against aerial targets after China's leadership said some training failed to prepare troops effectively, the paper said.

A Phys.org article states that Army researchers are making huge strides in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) that can support U.S. soldiers on the battlefield. Their latest development is an affordable yet capable AI assistant that can reportedly help human troops learn more than 13 times faster than normal training methods. Featuring vastly improved machine learning capabilities, the AI will be installed upon the Army's future ground combat vehicles. It is intended to help a human soldier spot important clues, recognize the developing situation, and come up with a solution to the problem on the fly. The AI would reportedly help preserve American lives during the chaos of combat.

NEW DELHI: The government is looking to tweak the existing intellectual property regime to make it more flexible and widen its scope to encourage research and innovation in artificial intelligence (AI). A high-level task force will soon be set up to examine and issue appropriate modifications to the existing intellectual property regulatory regime pertaining to AI. The government has chalked out a plan to use AI to improve India's social indicators. The proposed task force will have representatives from stakeholder ministries and departments like information and technology, company affairs, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion and the Niti Aayog. "The current IP regime with its stringent and narrowly focussed patent laws is posing a challenge to AI applications given the unique nature of AI solution development," a senior government official told ET.

Google may be pitching its artificial intelligence and machine learning tools for a new military project. The search giant has been winding down its involvement with the Pentagon's controversial Project Maven, but Google's Cloud team is now talking with members of the US special operations community, according to Defense One. A document distributed last month at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference (SOFIC) in Tampa, Florida described how Google Cloud's AI tools could be used by some special operations forces. Google has been winding down its involvement with the Pentagon's controversial Project Maven, but its Cloud team is now talking with the US special operations community The US Special Operations Forces include specialized units of the military like the Green Berets and the Navy SEALs, among others. 'As part of the Special Operations mission to turn captured enemy material into actionable intelligence, Commands are tasked with collection, exploitation, and dissemination of unclassified material to include documents, images, audio, and video,' according to the document, which was obtained by Defense One. It also notes how Google Cloud's machine learning application programming interfaces (APIs), storage resources and other technologies can help'accelerate exploitation of valuable unclassified intelligence material.'

A Portland woman recently told a local news outlet that her Amazon Echo device had gone rogue, sending a recording of a private conversation to a random person in her contact list. On Thursday, two senators tasked with investigating consumer privacy sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding answers. In the letter, Republican senator Jeff Flake and Democratic senator Chris Coons, who serve respectively as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, ask Bezos to explain how exactly the Amazon Echo device listens to and stores users' voices. The senators also seek answers about what the company is doing to protect users from having that sensitive information misused. The letter, which was reviewed by WIRED, comes in the midst of what Flake calls a "post-Facebook" world, referring to the data privacy scandal in which Facebook says the data of as many as 87 million Americans may have been misappropriated by a political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica.