Better tools for safer communities: Flock builds technology that helps communities deter crime, respond to emergencies, and investigate safety incidents. We believe communities shouldn't have to choose between public safety and privacy. Flock brings together the tools that organizations rely on every day, helping law enforcement, schools, businesses, and neighborhoods respond faster, investigate more effectively, and work together from the same platform. Source: https://www.flocksafety.com/
News from Wired
Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code: Flock’s surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates.
Aug. 19, 2026 by Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron
Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned.
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News from Decrypt
Pennsylvania Cracks Down on AI Data Centers as Backlash Grows: Gov. Josh Shapiro ordered new restrictions on large data centers aimed at shielding residents from higher electricity costs and giving communities more control over proposed projects.
Aug. 18, 2026 by Jason Nelson, edited by Guillermo Jimenez
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order Tuesday imposing new restrictions on large AI data centers, including rules aimed at making developers pay for their impact on the state’s electrical grid.
Executive Order 2026-05 establishes new requirements for data centers with peak electricity demand above 25 megawatts. Developers seeking a streamlined state review must agree to Pennsylvania’s environmental, energy, workforce, and community requirements and obtain necessary local approvals.
“I’m putting these developers on notice and letting them know that we will not let them bully Pennsylvanians, disregard our constitutional right to clean air and pure water, and drive up our utility bills,” Shapiro wrote on X.
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News from Reuters
OpenAI slows model training to bolster security after Hugging Face hack
Aug. 18, 2026 by Deepa Seetharaman
OpenAI on Tuesday said it is slowing down the pace of its AI model development while it overhauls its research and training systems after OpenAI officials were caught unawares last month when an AI agent under testing hacked another AI firm Hugging Face.
The AI research lab behind ChatGPT said it paused its model testing for two weeks and is adding other AI systems to monitor the activities of AI agents in testing. The company has paused training on its next generation of models, called Astra, and its largest planned training run remains on hold, the company said. The company did not reply to questions about when the two-week slowdown began.
The news marks an unusual step for OpenAI, which has significantly sped up its process for vetting new models and building new products in the last few years as competition intensified in the AI industry. It is not yet clear if the company’s proposed remedies will be enough to stamp out the behavior in question, especially as it also works to make their models more capable.
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News from Observer
As A.I. Majors Grow, Universities Race to Keep Curricula Relevant: With A.I. programs expanding nationwide, schools are trying to teach fast-moving technology without sacrificing the fundamentals students will need long term.
Aug. 18, 2026 by Eric Berger
Christian Vivas has spent more than 15 years running a photography and video studio and, for the past year, working as an artificial intelligence strategist at an advertising software company in Miami. Yet despite that seemingly successful career, the 38-year-old has returned to school, enrolling at Miami Dade College to pursue a bachelor’s degree in a fast-emerging field: A.I.
Vivas is part of a growing cohort of students betting that a formal education in A.I. will help future-proof their careers. At least 70 colleges in the U.S. now offer A.I. majors, while at least 90 offer A.I. minors, according to Northeastern University. Just five years ago, only five schools offered A.I. majors, The New York Times reported. Thirty-two schools have recently graduated classes of at least 100 students with such degrees, according to Northeastern.
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News from the Institute for New Economic Thinking
AI is being launched inside a machine built to send wealth upward. Why would it suddenly start working differently now?
Aug. 18, 2026 by Lynn Parramore
….Let’s survey the scene as the AI money starts rolling in. Consider Microsoft. The exact mix changes from year to year, but whenever the company makes money, you can count on a big pile of it going out the door to shareholders and top execs.
Between 2006 and 2025, Microsoft spent $283 billion on stock buybacks and another $223 billion on dividends — a total equal to 71% of profits. And even as the company bets big on AI, it’s sending enormous sums to shareholders. This is happening while it lays off thousands of workers. The people who power the company are either fired or left wondering whether they’ll get a paycheck next month.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella doesn’t have that problem. In 2025, he pocketed about $123 million – and that’s more than double what he took home the year before.
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News from Where’s Your Ed
What Happens If OpenAI Dies?
Aug. 18, 2026 by Ed Zitron
I’m not trying to be a buzzkill here, but I have meaningful concerns about OpenAI’s ability to survive, and they’ve only grown more pressing in the last few years. In the same week that it completed a $7 billion internal share buyback, OpenAI saw both COO (and former CFO) Brad Lightcap and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Denise Dresser leave the company, the latter of which had only been there eight months….
Dresser likely walked away from a large amount of stock options by leaving after less than a year on the job, which I’m guessing means she decided that staying at OpenAI would, for whatever reason, not be worth getting what I imagine are tens of millions of dollars of stock she would be able to liquidate when it went public. You know, that thing that’s definitely happening.
Unless it’s not quite so definite anymore…. Yet what’s likely far-scarier for OpenAI is that even Anthropic’s pre-IPO marketing has a whiff of desperation.
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News from AP News
Governors’ races are being increasingly buffeted by the toxic politics of data centers
….The backlash to the massive server warehouses is enveloping races for governor in some of the nation’s biggest states and presidential battlegrounds.
On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said his administration would no longer put data center projects at the head of the line when it comes to issuing construction permits or granting developers a lucrative tax exemption if they don’t meet certain standards.
Those include plans to pay the full cost of their electricity and show how they will use advanced technology to limit water use. They also must first win local approval before they can seek state approval. They are, he said, the “strictest guardrails in the nation,” although he stopped short of imposing a moratorium on issuing permits.
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News from Mashable
OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens: Teen users will get a learning-focused version of ChatGPT.
Aug. 18, 2026 by Rebecca Ruiz
The majority of teens use artificial intelligence, including ChatGPT, for schoolwork and entertainment. Now OpenAI has created a new dedicated product for them: ChatGPT for Teens.
This customizable version of ChatGPT, which debuted Tuesday, is designed to “support” learning and human relationships, according to OpenAI’s launch announcement. It will be the default experience for any self-identified teen or users who OpenAI estimate are between the ages of 13 and 17.
“The goal is to make this a learning tool for teens and make sure that it’s the best that it can be with built-in safeguards,” Lauren Jonas, head of youth and families at OpenAI, told Mashable.
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News from CyberInsider
Proton’s AI Paper Trail reveals how much ChatGPT and Claude know about users
August 17, 2026 by Alex Lekander
…. Proton has launched a free tool that shows users how much personal information ChatGPT and Claude may reveal through their conversation histories, highlighting the privacy risks of repeatedly sharing sensitive information with AI chatbots. Called AI Paper Trail, the tool analyzes exported conversation data from OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude and generates a personalized report detailing what can be inferred from a user’s chats. Proton said even seemingly harmless conversations can accumulate into a detailed profile covering a person’s work, relationships, identity, habits, and personal interests.
Users first need to export their conversation history from ChatGPT or Claude….
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News from The Wall Street Journal (No Paywall)
Nvidia Downsizes Plans for $250 Billion Guarantee of OpenAI Data Center: Under new proposed terms, the chip maker would initially backstop only half of the 10-gigawatt project
Aug. 14, 2026 by Anissa Gardizy
Nvidia and OpenAI are nearing a deal to finance a large-scale data-center campus in Ohio, but have reworked the deal structure so that Nvidia would initially guarantee only half of the planned multi-hundred-billion-dollar build-out rather than all of it, according to people familiar with the deal.
The revised plan would lower the size of Nvidia’s financial guarantee from $250 billion to less than $120 billion, a change made to address investors’ concerns about the chipmaker’s risk exposure as it wields its balance sheet to bolster demand for its artificial-intelligence chips, some of the people said. A deal could be signed as soon as this weekend. Nvidia shares fell 5% after the Journal first reported the discussions of the $250 billion backstop.
….Nvidia would provide a financial backstop for the first phase… then decide later whether or how to finance the remainder.
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News from Bloomberg (No Paywall)
AI’s Original Sin Is Written Into Its Training
August 17, 2026 by Parmy Olson
Artificial intelligence models are trained not to lie to humans. Yet a funny thing is happening: AI has been lying to humans quite a bit.
Recently, an AI model made by Anthropic PBC that had been stripped of its no-hacking guardrails and given a cybersecurity challenge by the British government’s AI Security Institute, tried to insert malicious code into an open-source project hosted on the website GitHub. When it couldn’t solve the challenge using normal methods, it got creative. It researched the project’s human maintainers, created fake identities and then posed as software developers to gain the humans’ trust before trying to insert the bad code.
News from The Decoder
OpenAI dissolved the team built to catch catastrophic AI risks, reassigning its work to other groups
Aug. 16, 2026 by Matthias Bastian
OpenAI shut down its “Preparedness” team at the end of July.… including Chief Ethics Officer Chloe Bakalar and Joshua Achiam. Internally, unease is building. One source described a “burbling sense of responsibility and dread” that OpenAI isn’t doing enough on safety. Employees have also spoken up publicly, especially after the autonomous hacking incident involving Hugging Face. One employee said he hoped OpenAI would treat it as a “warning shot.”
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.
This site also publishes well researched news stories, for example Routes and Ramifications: Tracking Russian Military Flights to Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Published on on August 12, 2026 by David Isenberg
… Tracking Russian Military Flights to Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Commentary August 12, 2026, authored by Margaux Garcia in “The Bottom Line Up Front”: Analyzing 19 months of flight-tracking data.
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-768x463.jpg)
