Over 30 student activists came together on Monday afternoon to occupy the Gallup Building in Washington DC, home to a public-facing lobbying office belonging to ChatGPT developer OpenAI. Image: Earl Aguila for Futurism. Source: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/protesters-arrested-protest-openai-washington-dc
News from Livemint
WhatsApp is introducing Scam Detection, an AI-powered feature to identify scams before they can trick you.
Aug. 14, 2026 by Aman Gupta
WhatsApp is looking to tackle the increasing number of scams on the platform by using the power of artificial intelligence. The company on Thursday announced a new experimental feature called Scam Detection that uses on-device AI models to flag suspicious conversations. “As scam tactics evolve, from impersonation to social engineering to AI-generated lures, we’re always evolving as well, so that our protections stay ahead of scammers while protecting people’s personal messages with end-to-end encryption,” Meta wrote in a blog post.
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News from RAND
Can AI Change How We Deal with Disasters?
August 14, 2026
Disasters are growing more frequent, severe, and complex, stretching emergency management agencies thin. How might AI help? That question is at the heart of a new RAND study. The report is part of the AI for Disasters + Emergencies (AIDE) Initiative, a collaboration between the Markle Foundation, Aspen Digital, and RAND.
In particular, the RAND authors mapped the landscape of AI-enabled tools that could support emergency managers and others who support emergency management functions. The researchers identified more than 1,100 products, from tools for damage surveillance to platforms for volunteer coordination.
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News from SANS
New SANS report: AI use in security jumped from 50% to 78% YoY. Attackers kept pace.
Aug. 14, 2026
Security teams are adapting AI at unprecedented pace, but attackers are not lagging behind: 78% of orgs saw AI-enabled attacks, and 95% of leaders believe adversaries are already using AI. The 2026 SANS AI Survey Insights report breaks down where AI is paying off, where it’s lulling teams into a false sense of security, and why “formal AI governance” often means less than leaders think.
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News from AEI
Human-by-Law: The Legal Prohibitions That Will Limit Transformative AI
Aug. 13, 2026 by Will Rinehart
…Therapists and physicians, architects, engineers, crane operators, accountants, electricians, plumbers, pilots, pharmacists, and real-estate brokers all need licenses. In total, around a fifth of all jobs are staffed by people who have to be formally certified to perform a job.
And courts haven’t been especially amenable to automating these licenses. The US District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, for example, upheld a North Carolina restriction on drone operators, claiming their maps and models amount to illegal “surveying,” which is regulated by an occupational license in the state…. Our legal and regulatory system is suffused with interlocking requirements that create systemic human privilege…
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News from Decrypt
China’s DeepSeek Upgrades V4 Pro: Claude Fable Is Only 5% Better at 4,500% the Price: The April preview got benchmarked to death and landed 18 points behind Anthropic’s flagship. DeepSeek’s own numbers for the finished model tell a very different story.
Aug. 12, 2026 by Jose Antonio Lanz
….Across nine agent benchmarks where both models are scored, DeepSeek’s table puts Claude Fable 5 ahead by an average of 5.3%. On two of them, DeepSeek wins….Pricing is public on both sides, and this is where the comparison stops being close. Fable 5 runs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output. V4 Pro runs $0.435 and $0.87, with cached input at $0.003625. On blended rates that’s $30 against $0.65—roughly 46 times, or 4,600% of the cost. That’s the kind of spread that matters when you’re running a business and using AI tools at scale.
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News from Forbes
Gemini Becomes Google’s Fastest-Growing Product Ever After Hitting 1 Billion Monthly Users
Aug 11, 2026 by Antonio Pequeño IV
Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence assistant crossed 1 billion monthly active users, according to a Tuesday blog post, reaching the benchmark not long after OpenAI’s ChatGPT crossed the same threshold…. less than a month after the company reported 950 million monthly users in its latest earnings report… Google said 63% of users directly speak to Gemini as opposed to typing prompts, noting busy parents are “43% more likely to use voice for everyday tasks.” One in five interactions with Gemini involve screen sharing and live camera feeds, according to Google.
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News from Futurism
Protesters Arrested After Storming OpenAI Lobbying Office: “My friends chose to risk arrest to bring the fight to OpenAI.“
Aug. 11, 2026 by Joe Wilkins
Over 30 student activists came together on Monday afternoon to occupy the Gallup Building in Washington DC, home to a public-facing lobbying office belonging to ChatGPT developer OpenAI. Once inside the lobby, the demonstrators unfurled a massive banner reading “Stop Stealing Our Future,” while others held signs with messages like “OpenAI bought my Senator.” The demonstration lasted two hours, and ended when police stormed the lobby, arresting 13 protestors….
The protest was organized by the climate group Sunrise Movement and anti-AI organization QuitGPT. According to a joint statement shared with Futurism, Monday’s action is just one of many across over 20 states in August calling on politicians to “Dump Big Tech.”
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News from Techspot
Google is testing a new homepage that buries the search button for AI: The redesign adds “Create images,” “Ask about files,” and “Brainstorm” as new default options
August 11, 2026 by Alfonso Maruccia
…Google is being accused of abusing its monopolistic market position to turn the entire web into a Gemini-powered chatbot experience, which is already having extremely detrimental consequences for content creators and independent publications (like TechSpot).
Put in Google’s capable hands, the dead internet theory is now a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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News from OCCRO
Albania’s Cheerful ‘AI Minister’ Is the Product of a Government Agency Under Investigation for Massive Corruption
Aug. 11, 2026 by Lindita Çela
Last September, Albania made headlines around the world when it introduced the world’s first-ever “AI minister.” Diella, which means “Sun” in Albanian, was a chatbot that had been promoted to ministerial status. Her remit, Prime Minister Edi Rama announced, was to ensure that “public tenders will be 100 percent free of corruption.”… At the time, there were doubts over whether Diella could offer any real solution to Albania’s long-standing corruption problem.
It appears that some of the reservations may have been well-founded. Experts caution that Albania’s plan to use Diella as a buffer against corruption has flaws, given that information generated by AI is not inherently neutral, and that there has been little transparency so far on how the technology will be deployed. These concerns have been further compounded by an explosive corruption case inside the very agency that created the virtual assistant.
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News from ITEP
How Federal Tax Policy Can Address AI
Aug. 10, 2026 by Steve Wamhoff, Joe Hughes, Erika Frankel
Lawmakers are increasingly being called upon to use the tools at their disposal — particularly tax policy — to address the public’s concerns about artificial intelligence (AI)…. One set of concerns is that AI is like transformative technological changes that preceded it, meaning it may benefit society overall but may also cause massive disruptions to the environment, to families’ economic security, and to individuals’ sense of place in the world. Another set of concerns has to do with negative externalities of AI specifically, including energy consumption and other nuisances associated with AI data centers, the uncertainty surrounding any written words produced in an educational or workplace setting, and the “slopification” of media that nearly everyone consumes….
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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. These include both news stories that are entirely factual; and short stories, purely fictional. However, the private military organizations discussed in these short stories are real.
Example: “The Long Night at the Brass Lantern,” published August 14, 2026 by David Isenberg.
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