AI has been used to defraud people through everything from calling voters to faking celebrity giveaways. Now, the US Treasury Department claims machine learning AI has played a critical part in its enhanced fraud detection processes over the past year -- if a broken clock can be right twice a day, maybe AI can do something good one time? In a new release, the Treasury states it prevented and recovered "fraud and improper payments" worth over 4 billion over the last fiscal year (October 2023 to September 2024). This number represents a tremendous increase from the previous year, which reached just 652.7 million. One-fourth of the 4 billion apparently comes from recovery by "expediting the identification of Treasury check fraud with machine learning AI." Again, does it feel a bit like making a deal with the devil?

The United States has announced its latest round of sanctions against Iranian drone and missile production, this time focusing on firms and individuals who allegedly procured equipment for Tehran's drone programme. In a statement on Tuesday, the US Department of the Treasury said the targeted "procurement network" operates on behalf of Iran's Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL), which oversees firms involved in developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ballistic missiles. The latest sanctions came as US officials continued to accuse Iran of supplying Russia with drones for its invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022. The European Union has also targeted Iran's drone industry with sanctions. "Iran's well-documented proliferation of UAVs and conventional weapons to its proxies continues to undermine both regional security and global stability," Brian Nelson, the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the US Treasury, said in a statement.

Last week, researchers at Facebook's parent company Meta released BlenderBot 3, a "publicly available chatbot that improves its skills and safety over time". The chatbot is built on top of Meta's OPT-175B language model, effectively the company's white-label version of the more famous GPT-3 AI. Like most state-of-the-art AIs these days, that was trained on a vast corpus of text scraped from the internet in questionable ways, and poured into a datacentre with thousands of expensive chips that turned the text into something approaching coherence. But where OPT-175B is a general-purpose textbot, able to do anything from write fiction and answer questions to generate spam emails, BlenderBot 3 is a narrower project: it can have a conversation with you. That focus allows it to bring in other expertise, though, and one of Meta's most significant successes is hooking the language model up to the broader internet.