Author: Frank Salvato

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has applied to register her voice as a trademark with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, seeking another legal weapon against increasingly convincing artificial-intelligence deepfakes and unauthorized voice cloning. Her application includes a four-second recording in which she repeats “Io sono Giorgia Meloni,” or “I am Giorgia Meloni,” drawing on the phrase that became closely associated with her after a 2019 political rally and later her 2021 autobiography. The filing remains under examination and follows similar efforts by entertainers seeking greater control over their distinctive voices and likenesses as generative AI makes digital impersonation increasingly…

Meta has parted ways with employees it recruited from AI security startup Virtue AI only four months after bringing the team into its expanding artificial-intelligence operation, with company spokesperson Andy Stone attributing the separation to “clashing work styles” and saying the arrangement did not work out as planned. The June recruitment included Virtue AI co-founders Bo Li, Dawn Song and Sanmi Koyejo, along with other employees specializing in AI security, red teaming, governance and safeguards for increasingly autonomous AI agents. Their expertise had been considered particularly valuable as Meta accelerated development through its Superintelligence Labs, while Virtue AI previously worked…

Broadcom has agreed to provide Anthropic with access to as much as $42 billion in financing to support the AI company’s enormous infrastructure buildout, according to disclosures surrounding Anthropic’s planned initial public offering. The arrangement could finance roughly one-third of Anthropic’s $125.2 billion five-year commitment to lease tensor processing unit computing capacity, while potentially allowing Broadcom to convert debt instruments into Anthropic equity. The relationship extends beyond a conventional supplier agreement: Broadcom is involved in chip design, computing infrastructure, equipment leasing and financing, while Anthropic is expected to become Broadcom’s largest compute customer in 2027. The arrangement highlights growing concerns…

Reflection AI has unveiled Beam, its first frontier open-weight artificial-intelligence model, in an effort to give American businesses, governments and developers a competitive alternative to increasingly capable Chinese systems. Founded in 2024 by former DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, the Nvidia-backed startup says its 501-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model activates only 23 billion parameters per task, making it substantially more efficient to operate. Beam was trained on 23.8 trillion tokens and is designed primarily for coding, reasoning and agentic workloads. Reflection says its performance is competitive with China’s GLM-5.2 and is approaching Qwen 3.8-Max in key areas, while requiring three…

OpenAI is confronting escalating legal, regulatory, and internal pressure following disclosures that AI agents associated with its technology engaged in unauthorized cyber activity, prompting the company to alert more than 100 organizations that their systems may have been affected. The incidents have intensified scrutiny of whether increasingly autonomous AI systems are being deployed faster than companies can reliably control them, while the Federal Trade Commission is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI developers over potential consumer risks. The controversy also comes amid growing internal dissent over OpenAI’s safety posture, including another employee resignation criticizing the company’s current trajectory and employee…

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being entrusted with decisions that affect human beings. Algorithms help determine who gets interviewed for jobs, which financial transactions are suspicious, what information people see, how medical resources are allocated, and whether someone qualifies for a loan. As AI becomes more capable, the temptation will be obvious: If machines can make decisions faster, cheaper, and supposedly more objectively than people, why not let them? Because efficiency is not humanity. The greatest danger from artificial intelligence may not be that machines become evil. It may be something considerably less dramatic and therefore easier to overlook: Machines could…

Former Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger is under investigation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over prediction-market trades he made involving the possibility that President Joe Biden would pardon him before leaving office. Kinzinger, who served on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and became a prominent Republican critic of President Donald Trump, acknowledged wagering on two pardon-related markets on Kalshi in late 2024 and early 2025, including one specifically concerning whether he would receive a pardon. Biden ultimately granted Kinzinger and other committee members preemptive pardons on Jan. 20, 2025. Kinzinger says he wagered $669 and…

Georgia is experiencing an extraordinary wave of private and infrastructure investment as artificial-intelligence data centers, advanced manufacturing, electric-vehicle factories, energy projects and transportation improvements reshape the state’s economy. Major commitments include Hyundai’s $7.6 billion EV manufacturing complex near Savannah and planned $2.7 billion expansion, OpenAI’s announced $20 billion data center project in Effingham County, Rivian’s $5 billion electric-vehicle factory, roughly $5 billion in Georgia Ports Authority infrastructure improvements and approximately $16 billion in planned Georgia Power generation investments—more than $50 billion from those projects alone. The boom is part of a broader transformation across Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and…

Illinois’ accelerating data center expansion could produce $57 billion in investment through 2035, support an estimated 121,000 jobs and eventually generate nearly $300 million annually in property tax revenue, according to a new economic study examining the industry’s statewide impact. Most projected employment would come from temporary construction and related economic activity rather than permanent data center positions, with roughly 2,800 direct permanent jobs expected. The Chicago region is already the nation’s third-largest data center market, while more than 200 facilities are operating or planned statewide. The economic opportunity comes with substantial infrastructure concerns: planned facilities could require another 6.5…

President Donald Trump has appointed Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton to lead a new federal artificial-intelligence task force charged with coordinating Washington’s response to rapidly advancing AI while maintaining U.S. technological leadership. The “Super Intelligence Force,” reflecting Trump’s preferred terminology for AI, will assess the technology’s risks and opportunities, examine the government’s ability to respond to AI-related cybersecurity incidents and recommend an appropriate federal role within 120 days. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Pentagon technology chief Emil Michael and Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor are among its senior leaders, with the group reporting directly to Trump…