Meta and other tech giants are pushing through structural changes at the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism that outside researchers allege will weaken oversight of an already embattled consortium. Six of the nine independent experts on the advisory board of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism --a consortium run by several of the biggest US tech companies--resigned on Monday, according to a letter seen by WIRED and interviews with four of the people. The tensions between the independent advisory committee and the GIFCT date back to an email the counterterrorism and free speech experts received in July from Meta's Nell McCarthy, a vice president overseeing content policy. For years, the group had advised the GIFCT on how to prevent platforms from becoming havens for the radical organizations and individuals blamed for some of the world's worst mass violence. But McCarthy wrote that while the consortium welcomed the experts' insights on violent trends, it no longer desired their scrutiny on the effectiveness of Big Tech's efforts to curtail violence.

United States President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping are set to meet in Washington, DC on Thursday for a summit that is expected to cover trade, artificial intelligence (AI), Taiwan and the US-Israel war on Iran. In advance of the talks, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington had proposed an AI " notification mechanism " with China - effectively a hotline to alert each other when AI incidents threaten national security. The meeting comes as leading AI companies warn about the technology's risks, while both superpowers push to accelerate their AI race. In this visual explainer, Al Jazeera compares the US and China's AI strength in computing power, AI models, spending and research. Who has more computing power?

A protester holds a sign during a protest outside of OpenAI headquarters calling for a pause in AI development, in San Francisco, California, March 2026. A protester holds a sign during a protest outside of OpenAI headquarters calling for a pause in AI development, in San Francisco, California, March 2026. Wednesday briefing: Why tech companies might be only too happy for us to believe AI will'kill us all' In today's newsletter: It is hard to tell fact from fiction when it comes to AI. What is really going on - and what should the government do about it? As a general rule, it pays to be suspicious of any gigantic company that claims it's developing a tool capable of destroying humanity.

Silicon Valley is shifting away from chatbot queries toward a future filled with resource-intensive agentic AI--and it's driving the data center buildout. Welcome back to Power Play! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season's biggest issue: data centers. If you've got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76. "What on earth are they building all of these data centers for?" an exasperated friend asked me recently.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks at a rally for Democratic candidates Saturday in Monroe, N.C. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.

OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman speaks at the G20 innovation ministerial summit in North Carolina on Wednesday. OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman speaks at the G20 innovation ministerial summit in North Carolina on Wednesday. The Times accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI's popular chatbot. Other newspapers have joined in the suit, first filed in 2023. A brief has advisory rather than legal weight but could bolster tech companies as they fight the claims.

Burnt out on wrist buzzes and notification overload? A new crop of minimalist wearables promises to collect your health data without demanding your attention. There's a new kind of gadget on shelves, designed for you to ignore it 99 percent of the time--it only needs attention when its battery is low. You rarely look at it or touch it, yet it collects health stats day and night so you can view them later on in an app, when you get the time--if you can find the time. They have been exploding of late and are only set to grab more attention in the coming months, with the promise of demanding less of your attention once you actually buy one.

I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen The answer is where you least expect it. New watermarks on Claude content are upsetting some people. Reactions reveal company priorities and human over-reliance on AI tools. To avoid possible watermarks, write it yourself (sorry!). Last week, Anthropic announced it would start watermarking text output from several of its LLMs via Claude to comply with Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which requires participating AI companies to provide transparency tools for AI-generated content.

Proton's Andy Yen Says It Will Have To Proton's CEO is a champion of encryption for everyone. So why is he going all in on un-encryptable AI? In the eyes of many privacy advocates, AI is just another surveillance technology . It supercharges online tracking and real-world spying tools, sifts through vast troves of everyone's data to spit out its results, and then encourages users to share their deepest secrets and desires with a cloud-hosted large-language model. Surveillance capitalism made AI possible, and AI returns the favor by making surveillance more powerful and the businesses that run on it more data-rich and profitable than ever. Andy Yen is among the most influential voices in the tech industry who equates AI with privacy invasion. He says the push to integrate AI into every consumer tech product--whether people want it or not--is driving new users in droves to Proton's products, which are, put simply, the end-to-end encrypted versions of every Google service from Gmail to Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet. Yet Yen is anti-AI, he says, any more than he is anti-internet. In late June, Proton released the latest version of its very own AI chatbot, Lumo--just one way that Proton is integrating AI ever more deeply into its suite of tools, but seeking to do so in a way that's more voluntary and preserves users' privacy far more than the typical tech giant. That willingness to embrace the apparent contradiction between AI and privacy is just one way in which Yen's views don't cut cleanly across party lines--from current US politics to the lessons of Edward Snowden's leaks to the question of the best corporate structure for a tech company that's not solely designed to maximize profit. You can read our conversation about all of it here or listen wherever you get your podcasts. ANDY GREENBERG: I want to start by asking about your background and the origin story of Proton. You're a trained particle physicist. You worked at CERN, the nuclear research facility, but you were inspired by the leaks of Edward Snowden back in 2013 to create Proton, right? I'm not actually a tech person or even an entrepreneur by training, so I really happened into this field a little bit by accident. I used to work at the Large Hadron Collider, which is a particle accelerator.

For years now, executives at companies that are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year into developing various artificial intelligence tools have insisted that the technology will ultimately mean people will spend less of their time working. An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025, external . Earlier this year, and just one year after that engineering director's prediction, OpenAI took up the challenge, in a manner of speaking. It formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself. However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there.