Pope Leo XIV attends the presentation of his first Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas in The Vatican on May 25, 2026. Pope Leo XIV attends the presentation of his first Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas in The Vatican on May 25, 2026. Over the past year, Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump have clashed several times in the press, including on the Iran War, nuclear weapons, and immigration. On Monday, Leo potentially opened a new front: AI. Leo's new encyclical --a 42,300-word open letter to the world's 1.4 billion Catholics about preserving dignity in a tech age--never mentions Trump at all.

Digital rights experts have raised concerns about the security of the data recorded by AI in psychiatrists' sessions. Digital rights experts have raised concerns about the security of the data recorded by AI in psychiatrists' sessions. Melbourne psychiatrist refuses new patients who don't consent to AI note-taking A Melbourne psychiatrist has refused new patients unless they agree to allow her to use an AI scribe to transcribe the conversations in their sessions. AI-driven note taking tools are becoming popular within the medical industry - with two in five general practitioners now using such scribes, according to the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP). But there have also been concerns about the security of the data and how it might be used by the AI companies, along with the accuracy of the transcriptions.

These cuddly, connected companions could disrupt everything from make-believe to bedtime stories. No wonder some lawmakers want them banned. The main antagonist of, in theaters this summer, is a green, frog-shaped kids' tablet named Lilypad, a genius new villain for the beloved Pixar franchise . But if Pixar had its ear to the ground, it might have used an AI kids' toy instead. AI toys are seemingly everywhere, marketed online as friendly companions to children as young as three, and they're still a largely unregulated category.

New artificial intelligence (AI) tools and capabilities from Google, Microsoft and xAI will now be tested by the US Department of Commerce before they are released to the public. The tech firms have agreed to voluntarily submit their models for testing through Commerce's Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI). The new pacts are an expansion on agreements by AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that were reached during the Biden Administration, and will see AI models from all of the companies evaluated for their capabilities and security. These expanded industry collaborations help us scale our work in the public interest at a critical moment, CAISI's director Chris Fall said. Overall, the evaluations of the AI tools will cover testing, collaborative research and best practice development related to commercial AI systems.

A federal review of new AI models ahead of their public release is being considered as a possible power for that committee, according to the publication's sources. No clear approach has been decided, but the suggested it could mimic what's currently happening within the UK government, where multiple layers of oversight confirm that AI models meet safety standards. There's also still a chance the entire concept fizzles and comes to nothing. If an oversight group is created, it would mark quite a reversal from the hands-off attitude presented in the White House's previously introduced AI Action Plan. The plan appeared willing to offer the AI companies most of the concessions they wanted, although it did leave a lot of potential to create plenty of new problems .

The United States Supreme Court has temporarily reinstated a rule allowing an abortion pill to be prescribed through telemedicine and dispensed through the mail, lifting a judicial ban that narrowed access to the medication nationwide. Justice Samuel Alito issued an interim order on Monday, pausing for one week a decision by the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals to reimpose an older federal rule requiring an in-person clinician visit to receive mifepristone. The Supreme Court's action, called an "administrative stay", gives the justices more time to review emergency requests by two manufacturers of mifepristone to ensure that the drug can be provided via telehealth and the mail while the legal challenge plays out. Alito ordered Louisiana to respond to the drugmakers' requests by Thursday and indicated that the administrative stay would expire on May 11. The court would be expected to extend the interim stay or formally decide the requests by that time.

Driverless cars are becoming more common in some California cities, but when the autonomous vehicles violate traffic laws, police haven't been able to ticket them - until now. The state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has announced new regulations on autonomous vehicles (AVs), including a process for police to issue a notice of AV noncompliance directly to the car's manufacturer. The new rules, which will go into effect 1 July, are part of a larger 2024 law that imposed deeper regulation on the technology. There have been a number of reports of the cars breaking traffic laws, including during a San Francisco blackout last year. The California DMV is calling the new rules the most comprehensive AV regulations in the nation.

China will ban the sale of drones in Beijing and require permits to fly them under new rules that take effect on Friday. Drones and key components will be prohibited from being sold, rented or brought into the Chinese capital. Drone owners will also be required to register their devices with the police. China has gradually tightened regulations on drones in recent years, with authorities citing public safety concerns. Drones and flying taxis are part of the so-called low-altitude economy, a strategic priority for China that is expected to generate more than two trillion yuan ($290bn; £217bn) by 2035.

In this section, we provide and expand upon a toy example. Recall that the inputs x and x0 need not correspond to real users but could instead represent hypothetical users. Example 5. Suppose that the regulatory guideline requires that users in the same geographical location receive similar weather forecasts. This can be written as "the weather forecasts that are selected by F should be similar for all users in the same geographical location", and S could be a randomly generated set of user pairs, where each pair corresponds to two (hypothetical) users in the same geographical location, and S could contain pairs across many locations. In the left-most panel, a filtering algorithm F takes in counterfactual inputs x and x0 and produces the content Z and Z0. Because a counterfactual regulation requires that F behave similarly under x and x0, the regulation is effectively requiring that content Z and Z0 are sufficiently similar (or, graphically, that they are close in Z). The question of how to quantify "similarity" is addressed in Section 2.1. The toy example in Example 5 is illustrated in the right-most panel.

By filtering the content that users see, social media platforms have the ability to influence users' perceptions and decisions, from their dining choices to their voting preferences. This influence has drawn scrutiny, with many calling for regulations on filtering algorithms, but designing and enforcing regulations remains challenging. In this work, we examine three questions. First, given a regulation, how would one design an audit to enforce it? Second, does the audit impose a performance cost on the platform?