Breaking AI’s Black Box
News from Commonplace: What Matters
Breaking AI’s Black Box: Workers must have a hand in implementing new technology.
July 9, by Andy Stern and Ron Bloom
There is a temptation to treat artificial intelligence policy as something distant—white papers, safety labs, summit communiqués. The real frontier is closer to home. It is in the quarterly calls where company after company, to Wall Street’s cheers, announces that AI will let it shrink its workforce. It is in a warehouse in Memphis where the algorithm has decided someone is moving too slowly, and in a delivery van in Newark where the screen tells a driver they have been deactivated and offers no human to call.
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News from The Present Age
Trusting Chatbots with Our Ballots (At the Worst Possible Moment): Voters are letting chatbots help fill out their ballots. The Trump administration has spent a year making sure it controls what the chatbots say.
July 9, 2026 by Parker Molloy
Robert Siebelink was staring down the kind of ballot California specializes in: 61 people running for governor, and that’s just the top line. So the 54-year-old Democrat from California did what a growing number of Americans are doing, according to a story Jennifer Medina wrote in the New York Times on July 4. He pulled up Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, uploaded his ballot, and asked which candidates fit his values. It helped him narrow the governor’s race down to two Democrats and talked through the strategy with him. He finished the whole thing in a half hour.
And it seems like he had plenty of company.
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News from TechCrunch
SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5, which Elon describes as an ‘Opus-class model’
July 8, 2026 by Lucas Ropek
SpaceXAI has released its latest model, Grok 4.5 — the first since the company went public several weeks ago. In a blog post published Wednesday, SpaceXAI characterized its new release as a workhorse that can tackle all of the typical tasks that the AI industry has sought to automate: coding and app-building, office and clerical work, research, writing, and other forms of routine knowledge work.
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News from The American Prospect: Ideas, Politics & Power
The Great AI Repricing Isn’t Going Well: Companies are backing off on their AI spending. Because investors have made such big bets on AI coming to fruition, that’s a big problem.
July 8, 2026 by David Dayen
Artificial intelligence firms initially justified their extreme capital investment—the four largest tech companies expect to spend more than $750 billion for AI infrastructure just this year—by saying that the technology would replace all human workers. They’ve since recognized what an unbelievably bad PR pitch that was, and have pivoted to promote a sunnier scenario…. Companies that previously told workers to use AI in every facet of their job are now seeing how that affects the bottom line. One unnamed company reportedly spent half a billion dollars on Claude in a single month.
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News from LifeHacker
Meta Now Lets Anyone Generate AI Images With Your Instagram Posts, but You Can Stop It: For Meta AI, a public Instagram profile is consent for using your likeness.
July 8, 2026 by Khamosh Pathak
If you have a public profile, you need to disable a setting that lets Meta use your profile data for Meta AI and Reels generation. Open the Instagram app on your iPhone, go to your Profile and tap the three-lined Menu button in the top-right corner. Go to Sharing and Reuse and navigate to the section called Allow people to reuse your content on Instagram and with AI features at Meta. Here, disable the Posts and Reels feature.
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News from Semafor
AI makes mistakes, too
July 8, 2026 by Reed Albergotti
It isn’t just big companies fretting about high and unexpected bills for AI tokens. It is also … me. On Sunday morning, I woke up jet-lagged after two weeks in Europe to find that OpenAI was repeatedly charging me $5, more than 20 times a day in some cases. I had no idea why.
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News from Reuters
Big Tech data centers are driving up power bills at America’s Rust Belt factories
July 7, 2026 by Laila Kearney
For years, electricity costs for the Belden Brick Company in Sugarcreek, Ohio, had been relatively stable. Last year, they surged by 90% — largely because of rising power demand from data centers in the region. The 141-year-old brick manufacturer, whose products can be found in iconic buildings including the Texas Alamo and Notre Dame University, is seeing power bills rise mainly from a monthly capacity charge, which recently jumped from $1,600 a month to $12,000.
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News from TechCrunch
Meta just launched a new AI generator, Muse Image, and users are already pushing back over use of their photos
July 7, 2026 by Lucas Ropek
Meta on Tuesday unveiled Muse Image.. is now available for free through the Meta AI app, as well as on Instagram Stories and WhatsApp.…. If you’re short on inspiration and can’t come up with original prompts on your own, Meta says that Muse comes with “presets” — prefabricated image prompts — to “spark ideas.”
However, a particularly eyebrow-raising feature allows users to manipulate another Instagram user’s images with AI, as long as that user’s profile is public. (Carolyn’s note: See instructions on how to prevent this in the news brief above, titled “Meta Now Lets Anyone Generate AI Images With Your Instagram Posts”)
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News from Futurism
Experts Say There’s Now an Open Source AI Model as Scary as Mythos: “We have Mythos at home.”
July 7, 2026 by Victor Tangermann
….hackers looking to use AI to commit crimes are rapidly getting new options. As Forbes reports, Beijing-based AI company Z.ai has released an open-weight model, dubbed GLM-5.2, that can perform similar large-scale coding tasks and trade blows with Anthropic’s latest models when it comes to identifying vulnerabilities.
GLM-5.2 can be downloaded by anybody, can be run on virtually any hardware, and unlike Mythos or Fable, there’s no vendor playing the middle man between the AI models and the users, raising the cybersecurity stakes considerably.
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News from Futurism
Workplaces Have Gotten So Bizarre That People Are Just Sending AI Slop Back and Forth at Each Other: “It’s just his AI and my AI going back and forth.”
July 7, 2026 by Frank Landymore
….As one beaten-down employee confessed in a recent Fortune piece about how the tech is reshaping workplace dynamics, she’s now resigned to asking an AI to interpret and respond to her boss’s nonsensical dispatches… “I can’t crack the code of working with [my boss], because it’s just his AI and my AI going back and forth.’”
At Futurism, we’ve extensively covered how AI is causing mayhem in the offices of all sorts of industries. It remains divisive among the regular rank and file, but bosses are absolutely entranced by the tech and forcing their underlings to use it…
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News from Ars Technica
Secret Claude tracker shocks users after Anthropic’s anti-surveillance stance: Anthropic accused of spying on users; engineer says “experiment” is over.
July 6, 2026 by Ashley Belanger
Anthropic quickly removed a tracker secretly monitoring Claude Code users in China after a security researcher exposed the hidden code and condemned the spyware-like tracking as a “serious breach of user trust.”….On X, Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipar confirmed that the tracker was added to Claude Code as an “experiment” in March. According to Shihipar, the code “was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.”
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Inside the secret AI war between Silicon Valley and China: American tech firms say rivals are forcing their chatbots to act as tutors to make Chinese AI smarter.
July 6, 2026 by By Cate Cadell, Gerrit De Vynck, and Nitasha Tiku
….Anthropic’s tracking code invisibly checked whether a Claude user’s computer was set to Chinese time zones and using a web domain name linked to certain Chinese AI companies.
The American firm backtracked and removed the electronic monitor last week, after a software developer revealed its existence and privacy advocates criticized Anthropic, saying it had surveilled its own users. An Anthropic executive said the tracking was an “experiment” that would be rolled back in favor of better defenses.
More here →
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This issue of AI News Briefs was brought to you by David Isenberg of the Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire: Unpacking the Private Military Complex with independent analysis of private military companies, mercenary networks, and the privatisation of force in global conflicts.
Russia is actively recruiting Peruvian citizens for the war
Published on June 29, 2026 by David Isenberg Author: Olha Bereziuk
Russia recruited hundreds of Peruvian citizens to fight against Ukraine. They thought they had secured lucrative jobs in Russia, but instead ended up on the front lines.
More from David Isenberg here →
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About The Author
