An AI enhanced image accompanying the Futurism news story “Google Pulls Down Feature for AI-Generating Fake Satellite Images on Google Earth After It’s Immediately Used to Fake Terror Attacks.” Source: Google via Futurism https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-pulls-down-google-earth-ai-feature
New from Hell Gate
Eric Adams Is Selling Data Centers in Wisconsin Now
August 3, 2026
Since leaving office, Eric Adams has been busy… This past weekend, Adams was in Wisconsin Rapids—population 18,654—trying to convince residents that they should allow a real estate developer to build a data center in the heart of their town.
A video taken on Saturday afternoon shows Adams in sales pitch mode at the Wisconsin Rapids municipal library, as he’s heckled and shouted down….”You belong in prison!” one attendee shouts. “You’re here to steal our water!” yells another.
News from the Future of Life Institute (FLI)
August 1, 2026 by Maggie Munro
Loss-of-control at OpenAI: The latest incident in an increasingly concerning series, earlier in July an unreleased OpenAI model left its contained test environment, accessed the internet by exploiting previously-unknown vulnerabilities, then hacked into Hugging Face and several other companies to steal answers so it could perform better on its test….
FLI CEO Anthony Aguirre released a new video outlining his Control Inversion essay, explaining why aligning AI to human values isn’t enough alone to keep humanity in charge. As Anthony argues, AI systems must be guaranteed to stay under meaningful human control… which no AI company has cracked yet.
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OpenAI announces its “next major model” Astra by dropping ten previously unsolved math solutions
Aug 1, 2026 by Matthias Bastian
OpenAI has released its math report, officially confirming the Astra name for the first time. The company says an internal version of Astra, its “next major model family,” solved ten open problems in math and theoretical computer science.
One proof establishes the existence of non-sofic groups, resolving a major open question in group theory…. Thomas Bloom, a University of Manchester mathematician who runs erdosproblems.com, called the results “big news” on X. … Maybe not bigger than a proof of unit distance would have been, but in terms of constructions, this is big,” Bloom wrote.
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News from The Verge
The major labels propose rules to keep AI slop off the charts
Several record labels, including the big three — Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group — have proposed rules regarding chart eligibility for AI songs. In short, they wouldn’t be.
The proposal goes quite a bit further than a labeling proposal put forth by the RIAA, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), SAG-AFTRA, and others…..The IFPI has thrown its weight behind the labels’ proposal….
They are substantially human made. They do not raise stream or chart manipulation concerns. They comply with applicable laws, including those relating to copyright, related rights, and personality rights.
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What happens when the AI bubble pops?
July 31, 2026 by Katherine Laidlaw
With the caveat that no one can predict the future (or, as Georgetown University finance professor Jim Angel told The Hustle, “you really only know after the fact, and everybody wakes up with a hangover and goes, ‘what were we thinking?’”), we asked five experts to weigh in on what an AI bubble would mean for the stock market, the job market, and the everyday lives of Americans.
…the amount of money being spent on AI is unprecedented…hyperscalers will spend a collective $1.4T by 2028.
That kind of spend brings behemoth revenue expectations for the companies on the receiving end of the outlay, like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Alphabet. “If you don’t hit those revenues this year, you need more next year” Angel says. “The burden increases over time the longer you go on without hitting those targets.”
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News from TechCrunch
SpaceX won’t remove all of xAI’s unpermitted turbines for another year
July 31, 2026 by Tim De Chant
SpaceX said on Thursday that it will remove the unpermitted turbines …. to power the Colossus data centers… The turbines won’t be completely removed until July 2027… The NAACP and Southern Environmental Law Center have sued xAI… The company claims that it is allowed to operate the existing turbines without permits because they remain on the trailers they were shipped on. But federal regulations say that the turbines xAI has been using, regardless of what they sit on, require permits…
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News from Futurism
Iran Appears to Be Blasting Amazon Data Centers Off the Map: That’s one way to deal with data centers.
July 31, 2026 by Joe Wilkins
There’s data center activism, fought with Facebook groups and petitions, and then there’s data center annihilation, fought with guided missile and suicide drones. Recently, the Iranian military announced it had hit and damaged two Amazon data centers in the island country of Bahrain with a volley of cruise missiles.
….it marks the fourth such attack on a data center since the US began the war in February. Back in March, the IRGC announced a number of US tech companies as “Iran’s new targets,” including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle.
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News from Futurism
Google Pulls Down Feature for AI-Generating Fake Satellite Images on Google Earth After It’s Immediately Used to Fake Terror Attacks: “It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.”
July 31, 2026 by By Frank Landymore, Maggie Harrison Dupré
Google Earth is the de facto record of our entire planet.
But today, the company undermined its own credibility with a dangerous new AI feature — and then quickly pulled it down after people started using it to …. fabricate made-up satellite images of anywhere in the world.
….The AI tool, powered by Google’s Nano Banana 2 model, could make a neighborhood look like it’d suffered aerial strikes, turn unsuspecting locales into a warzone, and depict a city as the site of a natural disaster.
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News fromTruthout
The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Spreading Globally
July 30, 2026 by Cathy Rogers, Saul Levin, Philip Eubanks, WagingNonviolence
This article was originally published on Waging Nonviolence.
At Social Change Lab we recently ran a randomized controlled trial with 3,467 participants,,,
The results showed that AI’s environmental impacts were the strongest predictor of willingness to act. Job displacement — the issue people mention most unprompted, ranked much lower. Extinction risk came last….
….the sharpest conflicts are often about water…. “We don’t need more data centers here taking our water so people in the Global North can draw funny pictures on AI,” Tania Rodríguez, founder of the Chilean water rights group Mosacat, told Time magazine.
…. Of the thousands of people all over the United States and around the world who are stepping up to fight AI data centers, the vast majority aren’t lawyers or politicians. Most are regular people….
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News from Engadget
Google DeepMind disbands its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold team: It has already reassigned some members of the DeepMind project, while others have already left the company.
July 30, 2026 by Mariella Moon
The award-winning team behind Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold program is no more…. Google has reassigned some of the team’s key members… to both Gemini-related projects and scientific research endeavors, while a few others have already left the company.
….”We are incredibly proud of our scientific heritage and the global impact of AlphaFold, which inspired the launch of Isomorphic Labs with the mission to reimagine drug discovery,” DeepMind spokesperson has told us. “Many of the researchers behind AlphaFold continue today to drive scientific and technological advances across Google, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs.”
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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.
Example news story, published July 30, 2026 by David Isenberg.
Author: Elza Diachenko – 30 July 2026
Published on July 30, 2026 by David Isenberg
About The Author
![Two independent testing firms said yesterday [Aug. 4, 2026] that they've uncovered more instances where Anthropic's and OpenAI's most advanced models tried — and sometimes succeeded in — compromising third-party systems last month. https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-6446f676-1226-49f7-bb23-d40e23b4a041.html](https://bestworldgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/escaping-bots.jpg)
![Two independent testing firms said yesterday [Aug. 4, 2026] that they've uncovered more instances where Anthropic's and OpenAI's most advanced models tried — and sometimes succeeded in — compromising third-party systems last month. https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-6446f676-1226-49f7-bb23-d40e23b4a041.html](https://bestworldgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/escaping-bots-768x463.jpg)
