A humanoid robot is displayed at the Humanoids Summit in Tokyo on Thursday. Amid growing anticipation of physical artificial intelligence, robots are increasingly being seen as a viable option to fill labor gaps. This topic was one of the major agendas during the two-day Humanoids Summit in Tokyo, which ended on Friday. "In Japan the United States globally, we just don't have the birth rates to sustain the workforce that we need," said Brendan Schulman, vice president of policy at Massachusetts-based robotics company Boston Dynamics during a speech at the event. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

BYD debuts China's most advanced EV chip in smart-driving push BYD on Thursday unveiled what it calls China's first automotive-grade 4-nanometer chip for self-driving cars. BYD, the world's largest electric vehicle maker, unveiled a series of technology advances, including what it calls China's first automotive-grade 4-nanometer chip for self-driving cars. The semiconductor breakthrough approaches the lead of Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies, which currently makes chips with a geometry of 7 nm but has pledged to debut 1.4 nm chips by 2031. It's designed to allow BYD's computer-assisted driving to stand out from a crowded Chinese EV market that includes rivals such as Xpeng and Xiaomi. Facing eight months in a row of falling sales and intense competition for more advanced charging and intelligent driving technologies, BYD is looking to spark more demand for its vehicles.

Anthropic's rise came by doubling down on delivering generative artificial intelligence to enterprise clients rather than general users. Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said Thursday it had raised $65 billion in a new funding round that values the Claude maker at $965 billion, more than its archrival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. The latest fundraising round confirms Anthropic's place as one of the most significant players in AI, with the startup led by Dario Amodei having drawn fans for its coding powers and state-of-the-art models. Anthropic's rise came by doubling down on delivering generative AI to enterprise clients rather than general users, the path initially chosen by OpenAI. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Japan is one of many locations in Asia where Chinese companies access American AI chips -- by renting hardware that's owned by foreign firms and installed in overseas data centers. Taiwan prosecutors suspect that three individuals successfully smuggled at least one shipment of Nvidia artificial intelligence chips to China after first exporting them to Japan, people familiar with the matter said. The trio was detained last week by Taiwan's Keelung District Prosecutors Office for allegedly falsifying documents related to exports of Super Micro Computer servers containing advanced Nvidia chips, which the U.S. has barred from sale to China without a license from Washington. The move marked the island democracy's first public crackdown on AI chip diversion after years of pressure from the U.S. to take a more active role in curtailing China's tech access. When Taiwan authorities apprehended the three defendants -- who've now been officially detained -- they also seized about 50 servers for which they accuse the trio of preparing fraudulent export documents. But at least one shipment had already gone through Taiwan customs, according to the people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to speak about an ongoing criminal investigation.

Utilizing artificial intelligence and robots -- and more specifically humanoids -- is crucial in making up for Japan's labor shortage. This was the dominant talking point at the Humanoids Summit on Thursday when the two-day event kicked off in Tokyo. Hosted by a California-based robotics company of the same name, it is the first time the summit, which was previously held in Silicon Valley and London, is being held in Asia. It is expected to draw 2,000 attendees from 30 countries and 300 companies, according to the organizers. Japan was chosen for its "foundational role in the global robotics ecosystem for decades," said Terence Bennett, executive director of the Bay Area Robotics Association, in his opening remarks.

Realistic AI-created content to require labels during Japan's election campaigns Aisawa Ichiro of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party speaks during a meeting of lawmakers Wednesday held to discuss the use of AI in election campaigns. The ruling and opposition parties agreed Wednesday to require videos and images related to election campaigns made using artificial intelligence to be labeled as "AI-created," as part of efforts to tackle misinformation on social media during campaign periods. The requirement will apply to videos and images that may be mistaken for those not generated by AI, while those that can be clearly identified as made using AI will be excluded. The parties aim to submit a bill that defines the requirement to parliament during its current session, set to end in July, to put the rule in place ahead of unified local elections next spring. The bill will add a provision to the public offices election law to prohibit internet users from harming the fairness of elections by spreading false information about candidates. Whether to impose penalties on offenders remains to be determined.

Iran and U.S. trade airstrikes after Trump dismisses report of Hormuz deal DUBAI/WASHINGTON - Iran's Revolutionary Guard said on Thursday it targeted a U.S. airbase after the U.S. military carried out what a Washington official said were strikes targeting an Iranian drone operation near the Strait of Hormuz, hours after U.S. President Donald Trump rejected a report he was close to a compromise deal with Tehran. The escalation in hostilities highlighted threats to the tenuous ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran that took effect in early April, dampening hopes for a peace deal and sending oil prices surging again. A U.S. official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about military operations, said the military shot down four Iranian attack drones and struck a ground control station in the port city of Bandar Abbas that was about to launch a fifth drone. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right. With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories.

The total number of US Customs and Border Protection device searches jumped by 17 percent over the 2024 fiscal year, but more invasive forensic searches remain relatively rare. Over the Past year, United States Customs and Border Protection staff searched more phones and electronic devices at the border than ever before, according to new statistics published by the government agency. Phone searches jumped around 17 percent during the past 12 months--with a marked increase over the past six months. Newly published CBP figures show that for the full fiscal year of 2025--running from October 2024 to the end of September 2025--border agents conducted around 55,424 searches of electronic devices. This is up from around the 47,000 searches that were completed during the government's 2024 fiscal year.

Kai Zhang, PhD, Xiaoqian Jiang, PhD The University of Texas Health Science Center, McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, Houston, TX, USA Abstract: In the era of big data, there is an increasing need for healthcare providers, communities, and researchers to share data and collaborate to improve health outcomes, generate valuable insights, and advance research. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law designed to protect sensitive health information by defining regulations for protected health information (PHI). However, it does not provide efficient tools for detecting or removing PHI before data sharing. One of the challenges in this area of research is the heterogeneous nature of PHI fields in data across different parties. This variability makes rule-based sensitive variable identification systems that work on one database fail on another. To address this issue, our paper explores the use of machine learning algorithms to identify sensitive variables in structured data, thus facilitating the de-identification process. We made a key observation that the distributions of metadata of PHI fields and non-PHI fields are very different. Based on this novel finding, we engineered over 30 features from the metadata of the original features and used machine learning to build classification models to automatically identify PHI fields in structured Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. We trained the model on a variety of large EHR databases from different data sources and found that our algorithm achieves 99% accuracy when detecting PHI-related fields for unseen datasets.

But since then, labor participation has declined sharply, with around 3.4 million fewer workers participating in the job market than immediately before the pandemic, according to the chamber. Companies of all shapes and sizes have struggled to cope with the mounting labor shortage, and have seemingly tried everything to remedy it, from reducing operating hours to offering employees previously unheard-of perks. Now new data suggests that American companies are leaning more on something else to combat the lack of human workers: robots. For the third consecutive quarter, U.S. robotics sales numbers have hit a record high, according to figures out this week by the Association for Advancing Automation, a trade group also known as A3. The U.S. robotics industry sold 12,305 units last quarter, a 25% bump from the same period in 2021 and 6% higher than in the first quarter of this year.