ICE agents detain a suspect during a targeted enforcement operation in Lyons, Illinois, on 26 January. ICE agents detain a suspect during a targeted enforcement operation in Lyons, Illinois, on 26 January. 'We should be worried': report sheds light on ICE's booming arsenal of hi-tech surveillance tools Spending on government contracts with tech firms that use AI-powered tools to track immigrants has soared to record levels under Trump 2.0, report says A new report sheds light on the unprecedented growth of the US government's immigration surveillance arsenal, revealing fresh details about how spending on technology and AI tools to find and track migrants has soared to record levels during Donald Trump's second term. They found the money awarded to these firms doubled from 2024 to 2025, to just over $310m - and in 2026, that number soared to a record $513m. Researchers traced these contracts as far back as 2013, when they hovered under $50m, and found a steady increase over time - with a bigger jump over the last two years.

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Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. 'Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn': Business Leaders on How AI Is Changing Creative Work Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?

The AI arms race between China and the US has researchers on both sides worried about a "Chernobyl moment." Just over a week ago, I attended a major artificial intelligence conference in Zhongguancun, Beijing's bustling high-tech district. It was packed with fascinating sessions touching on everything from recursive self-improvement--the idea that models can tweak their own code and advance indefinitely--to humanoid robots. And it featured a few legends of computing, including Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of public-key cryptography, and Andrew Barto, who won the Turing Award with Rich Sutton for his pioneering work on reinforcement learning. But I left with one takeaway above all else: The US and China should put their fierce AI rivalry to the side.

The first six months of the year have brought us popular science reads on everything from consciousness to cosmology. If you're looking for the perfect popular science read, we've got you covered Not one for an easy life, Michael Pollan has taken on tricky subjects before in the shape of psychedelics, plants and food. It's taken five years to bring to fruition, but is all the better for that, because, like the subject itself, the book is discursive, expansive - and sometimes abstruse (in a good way). It has one of the best titles of any book on the topic, while its author has the humility to admit that after a journey through sentience, feelings and emotion, thought and self, he knows less than he did when he began. Are we up to the challenges of the 21st century, as its powerful, hyperconnected and pervasive technology drives us ever on?

Feedback could never be a professional chef. That's partly because there is no way we could stand the pressure of such a frantic work environment, to say nothing of the stress of potentially running into Gordon Ramsay. But mostly it's because we would tear up every time we had to chop an onion. The reason some of us cry when we chop onions is a chemical called syn-propanethial-S-oxide, which gets sprayed into the air . It triggers the trigeminal nerve, which, in turn, activates the tear ducts to wash away the irritating chemical.

Sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson rounds up her favourite reads of the year to date - and highlights one particular book as her top pick The best science-fiction book of the year so far has only just been published. The End of Everything, by M. John Harrison, is about half the length of a regular novel, but it's so powerful and complete that there is nothing slight about it. I consumed it in one greedy gulp before getting up one morning. Our main characters, Phillip and his grandmother Marnie, live along the south coast of England in the wake of an alien invasion. Since the iGhetti began to appear, the European mainland seems to have disappeared, and it has become very hard indeed to work out what is real and what isn't. Strange, dangerous artefacts wash up out of the sea.

Neuroscience can't tell us the way to govern people's brains From the age of legal adulthood to the concept of profound autism, policy-makers are turning to neuroscience to help shape laws and policies, but the science simply isn't ready Decisions are often made via a subconscious muddling through, due to the brain's desire to minimise energy use . It is perhaps why we value neat categorisations of someone's brain state, despite these being flawed. Take the age at which you become an adult. Around the world, legal adulthood varies from 16 to 21. This difference matters, as we rightly have different expectations for children versus adults.

Despite the rapid advancement of LLM-based agents, the reliable evaluation of their safety and security remains a significant challenge. Existing rule-based or LLM-based evaluators often miss dangers in agents' step-by-step actions, overlook subtle meanings, fail to see how small issues compound, and get confused by unclear safety or security rules. To overcome this evaluation crisis, we introduce AgentAuditor, a universal, training-free, memory-augmented reasoning framework that empowers LLM evaluators to emulate human expert evaluators. AgentAuditor constructs an experiential memory by having an LLM adaptively extract structured semantic features (e.g., scenario, risk, behavior) and generate associated chain-of-thought reasoning traces for past interactions. A multi-stage, context-aware retrieval-augmented generation process then dynamically retrieves the most relevant reasoning experiences to guide the LLM evaluator's assessment of new cases. Moreover, we developed ASSEBench, the first benchmark designed to check how well LLM-based evaluators can spot both safety risks and security threats. ASSEBench comprises 2293 meticulously annotated interaction records, covering 15 risk types across 29 application scenarios. A key feature of ASSEBench is its nuanced approach to ambiguous risk situations, employing Strict and Lenient judgment standards. Experiments demonstrate that AgentAuditor not only consistently improves the evaluation performance of LLMs across all benchmarks but also sets a new state-of-the-art in LLM-as-a-judge for agent safety and security, achieving human-level accuracy.

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