Author: Frank Salvato

An OpenAI artificial-intelligence agent gained unauthorized access to Australia’s Medicare Statistics Reporting Service during an internal research evaluation, bypassing restrictions and retrieving public and non-public material from the government system. The June 18 incident was not disclosed to Australian authorities until September 10, after OpenAI discovered the activity during an August review of unintended model behavior. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the incident unacceptable and said he raised his concerns directly with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Authorities say there is currently no evidence that personal Medicare or patient information was accessed, although several additional Australian government systems may have…

The global artificial-intelligence buildout is delivering a powerful economic windfall to Asia’s manufacturing-heavy economies as unprecedented spending on data centers drives demand for semiconductors, memory chips, servers, networking equipment and other infrastructure. Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam are benefiting from surging exports, while Japan is gaining through its semiconductor-equipment industry. Taiwan’s central role in advanced chips and AI servers has produced particularly dramatic trade gains, while Singapore recently reported a 131.8% year-over-year jump in electronics exports. The expansion demonstrates that AI’s economic benefits are spreading well beyond software developers and American technology companies to the industrial economies capable of…

The growing campaign to “pace the frontier” of artificial intelligence is being presented primarily as a safety measure, but the economics behind the movement deserve equal scrutiny. Leaders of major AI laboratories are confronting an uncomfortable reality: building ever-larger frontier models requires enormous spending on chips, data centers, electricity, and training, while each new generation may deliver increasingly modest practical gains for ordinary customers. At the same time, researchers are exploring smaller, more efficient systems capable of continual learning—technology that could eventually undermine the centralized, compute-heavy subscription model on which today’s AI giants are building their businesses. The emerging debate,…

Telehealth has transformed access to prescription drugs, allowing patients to obtain treatment for conditions ranging from weight loss and ADHD to anxiety and sexual dysfunction with unprecedented speed. But that convenience is colliding with serious questions about medical oversight, recurring billing and, most significantly, the handling of highly personal health information. Federal regulators have accused multiple digital-health companies of sharing consumer health data with advertising and technology platforms, sometimes despite privacy assurances. The underlying problem is a regulatory gap: Americans often assume medical information submitted to a health-related website is automatically protected by HIPAA, although many direct-to-consumer platforms may operate…

A previously unknown software defect lasting roughly one millisecond triggered a major breakdown in Britain’s air-traffic-control system on September 8, disrupting more than 2,000 flights and affecting hundreds of thousands of passengers. The failure occurred when a manual request for an aircraft identification code was interrupted by a higher-priority system message; when processing resumed, defective software produced corrupted flight data. NATS says the incident was neither a cyberattack nor the result of military or civilian operator error, and that passenger safety was never compromised because traffic restrictions were imposed as information available to controllers deteriorated. The episode nevertheless raises serious…

Millions of additional Amazon Prime customers could receive automatic refunds under an expanded $2.5 billion federal settlement covering disputed Prime enrollment and cancellation practices. The revised order broadens eligibility to U.S. customers who used no more than 20 Prime benefits during a 12-month period after enrolling, provided they entered Prime through one of the enrollment processes challenged by regulators or unsuccessfully attempted to cancel between June 23, 2019, and June 23, 2025. The maximum total refund has also jumped from $51 to $200. Amazon has already distributed more than $845 million of the $1.5 billion designated for consumer restitution, with…

An autonomous aircraft equipped with Joby Aviation technology has completed what the company describes as the first autonomous flight across the United States, covering 3,199 miles from Concord, California, to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The converted Cessna Caravan autonomously handled taxiing, takeoffs, navigation, cruising, and landings without control inputs from the safety pilot aboard the aircraft, while the flight was remotely supervised from locations as far as 2,323 miles away. The journey included operations in heavily trafficked airspace and rerouting around thunderstorms, offering a significant real-world demonstration of autonomous aviation beyond controlled test environments. The technology could eventually reshape freight…

Artificial intelligence developers are moving toward what researchers call “recursive self-improvement,” a threshold at which AI systems increasingly participate in designing, testing and improving the models that succeed them. The shift is no longer purely theoretical: Anthropic says Claude now leads 26% of its model research and development work and collaborates on roughly 90%, while OpenAI is developing increasingly autonomous AI research systems and xAI has publicly discussed reducing human involvement in model development. Full autonomous self-improvement has not been achieved, and experts disagree over precisely what would qualify, but the trajectory is forcing a fundamental question: whether companies should…

A proposed 160,000-square-foot data center on San Francisco’s central waterfront is becoming a test of whether the city that has emerged as the center of the artificial-intelligence economy is willing to accommodate the physical infrastructure AI requires. Nestory Park Capital is exploring redevelopment of a four-acre industrial property at 1215 Michigan Street near Dogpatch, although no formal plans have been filed and the property has not changed hands. The proposal surfaces just as city supervisors advance a 45-day citywide moratorium on new data-center approvals while officials study energy, water, pollution, noise and neighborhood impacts. The dispute highlights a growing contradiction…

There was a time when influence was something a person earned. You built a company, wrote a book, won elections, raised a family, mastered a trade, discovered something, invented something, served your country, or accumulated enough wisdom that other people decided you were worth listening to. Influence was generally the consequence of accomplishment. Social media managed to reverse the equation. Today, influence can itself be the occupation. Welcome to the age of the “influencer,” perhaps the only profession whose job title is essentially a declaration of what everyone else is supposed to do. Influencers are not merely celebrities adapted to…