Microsoft and OpenAI are locked in acrimonious negotiations partly because they cannot agree on what artificial general intelligence means, despite having written the term into a contract worth over $13 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. One definition reportedly agreed upon by the companies sets the AGI threshold at when AI generates $100 billion in profits. Under their partnership agreement, OpenAI can limit Microsoft's access to future technology once it achieves AGI. OpenAI executives believe they are close to declaring AGI, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called using AGI as a self-proclaimed milestone "nonsensical benchmark hacking" on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast in February.

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The Georgia Court of Appeals has overturned a trial court's order after finding it relied on court cases that do not exist, apparently generated by AI. The appellate court vacated the ruling in a divorce case involving Nimat Shahid's challenge to a divorce order granted to her husband Sufyan Esaam in July 2022. "We are troubled by the citation of bogus cases in the trial court's order," the appeals court stated in its decision, which directs the lower court to revisit Shahid's petition. The court noted the errant citations appear to have been "drafted using generative AI" and were included in an order prepared by attorney Diana Lynch. Lynch repeated the fabricated citations in her appeals briefs and expanded upon them after Shahid had challenged the fictitious cases. The appeals court found Lynch's briefs contained "11 bogus case citations out of 15 total, one of which was in support of a frivolous request for attorney fees." The court fined Lynch $2,500 for filing the frivolous motion.

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The effort by Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inner circle to limit access to him helps explain why it took him more than three weeks to drop his re-election bid after his disastrous debate performance.

China’s national champion carmaker BYD embodies a state-led industrial model that America may no longer be able to compete with.

President Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to Britain, which begins Tuesday, will be heavy on pageantry. But both he and Prime Minister Keir Starmer hope for practical results.

Bloody conflict has splintered many families in Myanmar over the past four years. But for one set of siblings, a surprise reunion was joyful, if bittersweet.

As the rebels have gained ground, they have detained thousands of prisoners of war. Their enemy, the junta, keeps few captives.

The two confronted an array of high-stakes Middle East issues. But first they took a victory lap, including the Israeli leader telling President Trump he had nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

“They have to be able to defend themselves,” the president said, appearing to signal a reversal after his administration paused some weapons transfers just last week.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Trey had struggled with alcoholism for 15 years, eventually drinking heavily each night before quitting in December. But staying sober was a struggle for the 36-year-old first responder from Atlanta, who did not wish to use his real name due to professional concerns. Then he discovered Alterd, an AI-powered journaling app that invites users to "explore new dimensions" geared towards psychedelics and cannabis consumers, meditators, and alcohol drinkers. In April, using the app as a tripsitter -- a term for someone who soberly watches over another while they trip on psychedelics to provide reassurance and support -- he took a huge dose of 700 micrograms of LSD. (A typicalrecreational doseis considered to be 100 micrograms.) "I went from craving compulsions to feeling true freedom and not needing or wanting alcohol," he says. He recently asked the app's "chat with your mind" function how he had become more wise through all his AI-assisted psychedelic trips. It responded: "I trust my own guidance now, not just external rules or what others think. I'm more creative, less trapped by fear, and I actually live by my values, not just talk about them. The way I see, reflect, and act in the world is clearer and more grounded every day." "It's almost like your own self that you're communicating with," says Trey, adding he's tripped with his AI chatbot about a dozen times since April. "It's like your best friend. It's kind of crazy." The article mentions several different chatbot tools and AI systems that are being used for psychedelic therapy. ChatGPT: "Already, many millions of people are using ChatGPT on a daily basis, and the developments may have helped democratize access to psychotherapy-style guidance, albeit in a dubious Silicon Valley style with advice that is often flush with untruths," reports Wired. The general-purpose AI chatbot is being used for emotional support, intention-setting, and even real-time guidance during psychedelic trips. While not designed for therapy, it has been used informally as a trip companion, offering customized music playlists, safety reminders, and existential reflections. Experts caution that its lack of emotional nuance and clinical oversight poses significant risks during altered states. Alterd: Alterd is a personalized AI journal app that serves as a reflective tool by analyzing a user's entries, moods, and behavior patterns. Its "mind chat" function acts like a digital subconscious, offering supportive insights while gently confronting negative habits like substance use. Users credit it with deepening self-awareness and maintaining sobriety, particularly in the context of psychedelic-assisted growth. Mindbloom's AI Copilot: Integrated into Mindbloom's at-home ketamine therapy program, the AI copilot helps clients set pretrip intentions, process post-trip emotions, and stay grounded between sessions. It generates custom reflections and visual art based on voice journals, aiming to enhance the therapeutic journey even outside of human-guided sessions. The company plans to evolve the tool into a real-time, intelligent assistant capable of interacting more dynamically with users. Orb AI/Shaman Concepts (Speculative): Conceptual "orb" interfaces imagine an AI-powered, shaman-like robot facilitating various aspects of psychedelic therapy, from intake to trip navigation. While still speculative, such designs hint at a future where AI plays a central, embodied role in guiding altered states. These ideas raise provocative ethical and safety questions about replacing human presence with machines in deeply vulnerable psychological contexts. AI in Virtual Reality and Brain Modulation Systems: Researchers are exploring how AI could coordinate immersive virtual reality environments and brain-modulating devices to enhance psychedelic therapy. These systems would respond to real-time emotional and physiological signals, using haptic suits and VR to deepen and personalize the psychedelic experience. Though still in the conceptual phase, this approach represents the fusion of biotech, immersive tech, and AI in pursuit of therapeutic transformation.

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Most passengers had been required to remove their footwear at checkpoints since 2006, a policy later eased only for members of trusted traveler programs.

In a court filing, the tax agency said a decades-old ban on campaigning by tax-exempt groups should not apply to houses of worship speaking to their own members.

Saniyah Cheatham is said to have hanged herself early Saturday after she was arrested in an assault case. Friends said she had been in good spirits a day before.

Wimbledon's use of AI-powered electronic line-calling has sparked backlash from players who say the system made several incorrect calls, affecting match outcomes and creating accessibility issues. "This is the first year the prestigious tennis tournament, which is still ongoing, replaced human line judges, who determine if a ball is in or out, with an electronic line calling system (ELC)," notes TechCrunch. From the report: British tennis star Emma Raducanu called out the technology for missing a ball that her opponent hit out, but instead had to be played as if it were in. On a television replay, the ball indeed looked out, the Telegraph reported. Jack Draper, the British No. 1, also said he felt some line calls were wrong, saying he did not think the AI technology was "100 percent accurate." Player Ben Shelton had to speed up his match after being told that the new AI line system was about to stop working because of the dimming sunlight. Elsewhere, players said they couldn't hear the new automated speaker system, with one deaf player saying that without the human hand signals from the line judges, she was unable to tell when she won a point or not. The technology also met a blip at a key point during a match this weekend between British player Sonay Kartal and the Russian Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, where a ball went out, but the technology failed to make the call. The umpire had to step in to stop the rally and told the players to replay the point because the ELC failed to track the point. Wimbledon later apologized, saying it was a "human error," and that the technology was accidentally shut off during the match. It also adjusted the technology so that, ideally, the mistake could not be repeated. Debbie Jevans, chair of the All England Club, the organization that hosts Wimbledon, hit back at Raducanu and Draper, saying, "When we did have linesmen, we were constantly asked why we didn't have electronic line calling because it's more accurate than the rest of the tour."

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Though Zohran Mamdani scored a resounding victory in New York City’s Democratic primary, some in his own party are strategizing about how to defeat him in November.

Fubo has agreed to pay $3.4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit (PDF) accusing it of illegally sharing usersâ(TM) personally identifiable information and video viewing history with advertisers without consent, allegedly violating the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). Ars Technica reports: As reported by Cord Cutters News this week, instead of going to trial, Fubo reached a settlement agreement [PDF] that allows people who used Fubo before May 29, which is when Fubo last updated its privacy policy, to receive part of a $3.4 million settlement. The settlement agreement received preliminary approval on May 29, and users recently started receiving notice of their potential entitlement to some of the settlement. They have until September 12 to submit claims. Fubo said in a statement: "We deny the allegations in the putative class lawsuit and specifically deny that we have engaged in any wrongdoing whatsoever. Fubo has nonetheless chosen to pursue a settlement for this matter in order to avoid the uncertainty and expense of litigation. We look forward to putting this matter behind us."

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The White House rebuked critics for raising questions about the administration’s efforts to shrink federal agencies that deal with disaster preparedness and response.

Following a week of X and YouTube complaints, Apple has further reduced the transparency of its Liquid Glass design in the latest iOS 26 developer beta, making navigation bars, buttons, and tabs more opaque to improve readability. The Verge reports: "iOS 26 beta 3 completely nerfs Liquid Glass," AppleTrack developer Sam Kohl says in a post on X. "It looks so much cheaper now and feels like Apple is backtracking on their original vision." Others ask Apple to "stop ruining" Liquid Glass and call the new design a "step backwards." Some users in the beta found that the transparency level can vary depending on the app they're using. This is still just a developer beta, so it's likely that Apple will continue to make tweaks before it releases iOS 26 to the public in September.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: For someone who says she is fighting AI bot scrapers just in her free time, Xe Iaso seems to be putting up an impressive fight. Since she launched it in January, Anubis, a "program is designed to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of requests that flood in from AI companies," has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times, and is being used by notable organizations including GNOME, the popular open-source desktop environment for Linux, FFmpeg, the open-source software project for handling video and other media, and UNESCO, the United Nations organization for educations, science, and culture. [...] "Anubis is an uncaptcha," Iaso explains on her site. "It uses features of your browser to automate a lot of the work that a CAPTCHA would, and right now the main implementation is by having it run a bunch of cryptographic math with JavaScript to prove that you can run JavaScript in a way that can be validated on the server." Essentially, Anubis verifies that any visitor to a site is a human using a browser as opposed to a bot. One of the ways it does this is by making the browser do a type of cryptographic math with JavaScript or other subtle checks that browsers do by default but bots have to be explicitly programmed to do. This check is invisible to the user, and most browsers since 2022 are able to complete this test. In theory, bot scrapers could pretend to be users with browsers as well, but the additional computational cost of doing so on the scale of scraping the entire internet would be huge. This way, Anubis creates a computational cost that is prohibitively expensive for AI scrapers that are hitting millions and millions of sites, but marginal for an individual user who is just using the internet like a human. Anubis is free, open source, lightweight, can be self-hosted, and can be implemented almost anywhere. It also appears to be a pretty good solution for what we've repeatedly reported is a widespread problem across the internet, which helps explain its popularity. But Iaso is still putting a lot of work into improving it and adding features. She told me she's working on a non cryptographic challenge so it taxes users' CPUs less, and also thinking about a version that doesn't require JavaScript, which some privacy-minded disable in their browsers. The biggest challenge in developing Anubis, Iaso said, is finding the balance. "The balance between figuring out how to block things without people being blocked, without affecting too many people with false positives," she said. "And also making sure that the people running the bots can't figure out what pattern they're hitting, while also letting people that are caught in the web be able to figure out what pattern they're hitting, so that they can contact the organization and get help. So that's like, you know, the standard, impossible scenario."

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Waymo has launched new "road trips" to Philadelphia and New York City, "signaling the Alphabet-owned company's interest in expanding into Northeastern cities," reports TechCrunch. While these trips don't guarantee commercial launches, they follow a pattern that previously led to deployments in cities like Los Angeles. Other road trips this year are planned for Houston, Orlando, Las Vegas, San Diego, and San Antonio. From the report: Typically, the trips involve sending a small fleet of human-driven vehicles equipped with Waymo's autonomous driving system to map out the new city. Then Waymo tests the vehicles autonomously, though still with a human behind the wheel, before taking any data and learnings back to its engineers to improve the AI driver's performance. In some cases, these road trips have led to commercial launches. In 2023, the company made a road trip to Santa Monica, a city in Los Angeles County. The company now operates a commercial service in Los Angeles, including Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Hollywood. For its Philadelphia trip, Waymo plans to place vehicles in the most complex parts of the city, including downtown and freeways, according to a spokesperson. She noted folks will see Waymo vehicles driving "at all hours throughout various Philadelphia neighborhoods, from North Central to Eastwick, University City, and as far east as the Delaware River." In NYC, Waymo will drive its cars manually in Manhattan just north of Central Park down to The Battery and parts of Downtown Brooklyn. The company will also map parts of Jersey City and Hoboken in New Jersey. Waymo applied last month for a permit to test its AVs in New York City with a human behind the wheel. The company has not yet received approval.

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