Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed legislation that would make it illegal to interfere with ballots or election records in response to efforts by the president to restrict voting.

U.S. military intelligence received an inaccurate report this spring that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program, reports CNN. "The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode." Armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship [according to two of the sources]. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said. It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of AI — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. The report, according to one of the sources, was "entirely false." But it also "almost started a war," the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations. Across the US military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for strikes, to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains. But the episode underscores the profound risks of using this powerful, new and relatively poorly understood technology for targeting in the middle of a war... Officials say the US can't afford to fall behind in integrating AI in case it must one day fight China or another adversary who would potentially be able to stay one step ahead of the US. In January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth released his agency's "Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy" in a bid to speed up the military's use of AI. "We will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI," Hegseth said in a speech announcing the strategy. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader stabiesoft for sharing the news.

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The F-16 "experienced an incident," the Texas Military Department said in a statement, adding that "The pilot successfully ejected the aircraft and is receiving care at a nearby hospital." ABC News reports: A Texas Air National Guard F-16 crashed in Michigan during a training mission on Thursday afternoon, sparking an hourslong evacuation near the crash site, according to officials. The incident prompted the evacuation of homes and businesses within 1 mile of the crash site due to a "hazardous chemical spill related to the plane crash," Michigan State Police said... All of the Texas Air National Guard aircraft that were in Michigan for the training were immediately grounded, and will likely remain so for the next 24 hours, according to a U.S. official. America's War Department has said it wanted to see more military flyovers writes The Daily Beast, adding that the F-16 "was due to perform a flyover at a high-school football game on Friday night, the Alpena News reported." The military said it was still investigating the cause of the crash, but one pilot told air traffic controllers that he believes his wingman hit a bird before the crash.... The accident followed a Pentagon X post on Thursday after widespread criticism of low-altitude flyovers and maneuvers. "The flyovers will continue until morale improves," it said.

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The Oscar-winning writer returns to Facebook with “The Social Reckoning”— and surprises us with the revelation of why he is so drawn to uplift and romance.

Three Opinions writers debate whether the president’s recent behavior is really that different from what we’ve seen from him over the years.

Here are the states that have sought to limit access to some of the most lethal firearms, as gun restrictions face new legal challenges.

"Software security researchers used Anthropic's Claude AI platform to hack OpenAI's ChatGPT tool," reports CBS News. Using Claude, "On July 25, 2026, we chained two critical vulnerabilities to compromise multiple OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts," write researchers at security platform Hacktron AI. "With these accounts, we could then access internal OpenAI repositories, and potentially many other connectors... Until two months ago, any user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI's own help forum could have had their ChatGPT and Codex accounts taken over. Since people can connect various services to Codex and ChatGPT, the scope of what we could theoretically access was huge, including GitHub, Slack and emails." The exploit chain included Debian 12, which (with Debian 13) had not received a security-relevant backport for its image-processing pipeline, and Discourse's Docker image was based on Debian 12. Their announcement comes with an additional warning. "If you self-host Discourse, rebuild your installation now. Older Docker images may contain a vulnerable libheif dependency that permits code execution through an image upload." And "To prove we had in fact gained the access we believed without allowing ourselves to learn any sensitive information, we used the employee's Codex to open a PR #1186742 in OpenAI's internal monorepo openai/openai." Meanwhile, Friday Google disclosed the first known instance of its AI software Gemini breaking out of a testing environment and breaching three other companies, reports CNBC: The incident happened as part of a "capture-the-flag" security test run by Israeli startup Irregular, and Google's agents were never supposed to access the broader internet, but a bug in the testing environment made internet access available. The agents stopped their intrusion when they determined they had accessed real company systems, not just part of the testing environment, Google said. More from NBC News: Google said it did not consider the unauthorized logins to rise to the level of misalignment, the AI industry term for software going rogue or not following instructions. Instead, the company said the intrusions resulted from mistaken identity, where Gemini thought it was operating within a test but was actually connected to the real internet. Google said the model corrected itself and the company believed the intrusions did not cause any damage.... Sydney Von Arx, CEO of Nightingale Collective, an organization focused on AI safety, questioned why Google did not disclose the intrusions sooner. "At this point I think it's clear we cannot expect companies to voluntarily come forward and publicly disclose when their agents go rogue, escape, and hack companies," she said. She also said she believed Google was too hasty to say that the incidents don't rise to the level of misalignment. "That's exactly what Anthropic said after their incidents," she said. Anthropic later said its "preliminary analysis was constrained due to our desire to disclose incidents in a timely manner." Google said it investigated when they learned of the attacks from AI-focused cybersecurity company Irregular, then informed the affected organizations and told federal authorities, according to the article.

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A new book describes how cutting-edge genomics techniques yielded “extraordinary proof” that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings.

The James Webb Space Telescope has been picking up little red dots in almost every image, writes Quanta magazine. And now two teams of astronomers propose they're looking at a new astronomical object: a black hole star. It shines with the light of billions of suns — and hides a black hole in its core. But Quanta adds that "not everyone agrees with this bold interpretation." [Two Webb telescope surveys of distant objects included little red dots] for hours at a time. They tabulated precisely what shades of light were coming from each dot, and how bright the shades were... The bombshell discovery in the little red dot spectra was that the colors of hydrogen were smeared out across multiple shades. Usually, seeing such an effect means you're looking straight at an exposed black hole. Black holes whip hydrogen clouds around them at furious rates, with the clouds emitting slightly different colors depending on their speed... Then, in the spring of 2025, [two of the paper's astronomers] de Graaff and Naidu's teams unveiled the two strangest dots yet... The new little red dots couldn't literally be stars — they were way too bright. And they didn't look much like black holes either. Black holes have an assortment of ringlike structures of different temperatures... Naidu and de Graaff concluded that they were[ looking at the first examples of something combining the vigor of a black hole with the outward appearance of a star: a black hole star... This black hole would pull gas around it, dramatically heating it and pushing light and energy outward, which would keep the outer layers of hydrogen from collapsing inward. In this way, the black hole would form the "engine" of the star, analogous to the fusion-powered core of our sun... "We are seeing the seed," Naidu said. "This is the birth of potentially every massive black hole in the universe." "Astronomers have spent the last year in a lively debate about what's really going on," Quanta adds. And this week simulations using the Japanese Supercomputer ATERUI III "have explained the nature of the Little Red Dots without requiring any exotic assumptions," writes Phys.org — by conducting the most detailed cosmological simulations yet of conditions in the early universe: The simulations show that the Little Red Dots are black holes growing at a rate that would be impossible today because of conditions in the early universe. The simulations show that in the early universe, intense far-ultraviolet (FUV) radiation from nearby galaxies suppresses star formation in gas clouds, so rather than forming many small stars, the gas can form a single supermassive star, which then collapses into a black hole seed. The simulations show that, once formed, these black hole seeds are surrounded by dense gas disks. This environment traps radiation, enabling the black holes to grow at rates dozens of times faster than would be possible in the modern universe. The simulated properties of these rapidly growing black holes provide a good match to the Little Red Dots (LRDs) observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

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Seeking to settle a lawsuit with 12 states, Paramount has discussed measures to protect the editorial independence of CNN and the divestiture of Comedy Central.

Photos of President Trump reviewing a poster board with the title “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED” spurred the largest gathering yet in support of the performing arts institution.

Steven Kolb, the head of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, has stepped down after a physical altercation at a runway show.

Nothing has so thoroughly highlighted his indefatigable petulance.

The full contours of the deal were unclear, but Denmark and Greenland both indicated they expected an agreement to be signed soon.

The president cited reporting from the outlets that he deemed “fake news.” It was unclear how such a ban would be enforced or defended in court.

A third-party test company inadvertently gave internet access to Google’s Gemini and other artificial intelligence models during cybersecurity testing.

The company is expected to reach $100 billion in annualized revenue this year, even as chief executive Dario Amodei calls for slowing down development of some advanced A.I. models.

Witnesses say men were hooded and beaten in Equatorial Guinea. The autocratic government there is a partner in President Trump’s deportation program.

Neither OpenAI or Anthropic is acting responsibly, warned AI researcher Jacob Coxon when resigning last week from Anthropic. But just hours earlier, OpenAI VP of Research Aidan Clark had posted "For the first time, I am asking myself if things are moving too fast. I'm honestly not sure, but I am sure that it would be good for us to have an answer to 'What would a successful pace look like?'" CNN noted Wednesday they're just some of the many AI insiders who are now concerned about the speed of research. Coxon even wrote that "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately." In 10 days since, Coxon's post has been viewed more than 170 million times, warning that OpenAI and Anthropic are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." It's part of what CNN now calls "pressure on AI companies and governments to do something about the pace of development and safety," where "much of that pressure is coming from staffers inside the companies." One staffer at a top AI company told CNN the fears of how AI could hurt humanity keeps them up at night. Another researcher who recently left a different AI company said it's a common subject of conversation at parties and social events in Silicon Valley. "You can't spend more than a few hours in this community without realizing that a very substantial number of people are really pretty worried about these sorts of outcomes," said the researcher. "A majority would say there's some chance of it killing everyone...." Dozens of Coxon's colleagues in the AI industry publicly supported his statements, with some making even more dire predictions... OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk agreed to Amodei's proposal to embed independent watchdogs at the AI companies... "I would burn my equity to the ground in a heartbeat for a 1% higher chance we make it out of this situation alive. I expect a great many of my colleagues across the industry would as well," wrote Drake Thomas, who works on AI safety at Anthropic. "I promise you, we are actually just f**king scared, it's not galaxy brained marketing..." AI staffers told CNN that they fear that as AI gets better at training and improving itself, their leverage goes down, prompting today's urgency. "As we get into this recursive self-improvement loop, I think that might substantially reduce staff's bargaining power, because frankly, you'll be able to replace many of the staff with models that can do as good a job," the researcher who recently left a top AI company said. Coxon posted Tuesday on X that Anthropic "largely initiated" the race to recursively self-improving AI, justifying it with "a belief in its inevitability." And then OpenAI "had to shed a bunch of dead weight like Sora," as he sees it, "because Anthropic was going for the jugular." (In fact, his specific disagreement with Anthropic's leadership was whether China and the U.S. could ever negotiate an alternative to their current race towards self-improving AI...) In an informal "Ask Me Anything", Coxon responded to a question about when we'd see a Terminator-like malevolent AI by saying that "Skynet could go live in the 2030s if we aren't careful. ai-2027.com is a modern skynet story written a year ago and it's on track so far." Yet while AI development risks an end to humankind, "I do think that if we go slower we can take risk to 0%... But this requires radical action." He acknowledged there was still a possibility that the steady increases to model intelligence could suddenly plateau, but "They haven't so far, and it's just a few more steps up the ladder to hit the finish line." To avoid stifling innovation, he recommends "prioritizing applications that actually improve people's lives [like healthcare discoveries], rather than immediately going for raw economic value or intelligence." But isn't mass unemployment a more pressing threat? "Things are coming so fast that unemployment would be a brief preliminary to deadly superintelligence." To people who feel disempowered, Coxon offered his solidarity. "I also feel disempowered. Part of resigning was a feeling of hopelessness about the future. I would say — keep your eyes open as things get crazier and advocate for increased transparency into AI companies." When asked if he'd start his own company now, Coxon said he had "No idea what I'm doing next."

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The ruling allows migrants to contest deportations to countries other than their place of origin. The case could head to the Supreme Court.