Increasing night sky pollution. Source: https://earthjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/2026.07.08-petition-for-programmatic-eis.pdf
News from Bloomberg
Nvidia’s $750 Billion Deals Revive Fear of AI Circular Financing
July 27, 2026 by Dina Bass and Winnie Hsu
Nvidia Corp. is working on a fresh round of AI infrastructure deals potentially worth more than $750 billion, accelerating a streak of investments that skeptics warn is artificially inflating demand and valuations across the industry.
An artificial intelligence initiative with the parent of South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix Inc. unveiled late Friday is worth more than $500 billion, Nvidia said. The world’s most valuable company is also in discussions to provide a guarantee of as much as $250 billion to help OpenAI lease computing from a US data center project, in what would be among the chipmaker’s biggest financing deals with a customer.
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News from The Guardian
Be skeptical of OpenAI’s rogue hacker agent story: If OpenAI loudly proclaims how dangerous AI is, investors will hear how powerful it is. And who benefits from that?
July 24, 2026
On 14 February 2019, OpenAI announced a language model called GPT-2, the precursor to the models that power modern AI chatbots and agents such as ChatGPT and Claude. But OpenAI declared GPT-2 was too risky to release, citing concerns about safety and abuse.
While the agent technically cheated, this is remarkable evidence of cybersecurity expertise! It also sounds scary:… people were intrigued by this strange new technology, so powerful it might be dangerous to release. People with power and money took note: in July of that year, Microsoft invested $1bn in OpenAI….
Seven years later, we find ourselves in a similar scenario. On Tuesday OpenAI announced that its latest model hacked another company, HuggingFace…. OpenAI’s staff was warned… leaving them “unsurprised but completely ‘freaked out’ ….
While the agent technically cheated, this is remarkable evidence of cybersecurity expertise! It also sounds scary….The rogue agent story is a page out of the media campaign that OpenAI has been running since it announced GPT-2 in 2019
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News from Futurism
Computer Science Enrollment Now Declining Under Dark Cloud of AI
July 24, 2026 by Frank Landymore
For years, the conventional wisdom for ambitious students and languishing job seekers alike was “learn to code.” Do that, the ubiquitous advice went, and you’d be able to find yourself a six-figure job anywhere.
But in an age when bosses are hellbent on using powerful AI agents to perform the duties of software engineers, that advice is now looking increasingly obsolete…. For the first time in nearly twenty years, computer science enrollment declined during the 2025-26 academic year, according to new research from the Stanford economist Jacob Light reported by Business Insider.
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News from The Guardian
Space datacenters proposed by Musk and Bezos ‘catastrophic’ for planet, experts warn: New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction
July 23, 2026, by Tom Perkins
Space datacenters proposed by SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and others would release staggering levels of pollution that would probably alter the Earth’s atmosphere and be “catastrophic” for the planet, space industry experts and environmental groups warn in a new petition demanding a review of their impacts. Tech companies have collectively proposed millions of “orbital datacenters”…. and n.
(Carolyn’s note: Data centers in space aren’t able to compete with Earth systems for two main reasons: cooling, which in space requires inherently inefficient radiative techniques, while Earth-side systems can use water, air etc.; and the transportation cost of inserting datacenters into orbit. Add to this a self- reinforcing, exponential cascade of space debris that would destry them all. And how about anti-satellite weapons, which could make a deadly cloud of space debris happen sooner.)
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News from BBC
AI has ruined cute animal videos
July 23, 2026 by Thomas Germain
AI-generated animal videos are sweet, until you realise the joy, like the animal, was never really there.
Cats built the internet, and they’ll usually show you where it’s going next. “I Can Haz Cheeseburger” taught us about memes. Keyboard Cat introduced millions to YouTube. Grumpy Cat’s marketing deals established a business model for influencers. Now the online world is turning again.
Animals were one of the last reliable sources of joy on an internet filled with madness – innocence in a sea of anger and clickbait. But lately I’ve felt that slipping away…. puppies and kittens are the first casualty in the coming war on truth.
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News from TechCrunch
OpenAI makes ChatGPT Health available to all US users
July 23, 2026, by Ivan Mehta
OpenAI said today it is making ChatGPT Health, a feature that helps users with health-related queries, available to all U.S.-based users over 18 across all plans. The announcement comes a day after a Florida-based pastor sued the company for giving a near-fatal suggestion not to consult a doctor.
The company started testing the feature through a dedicated hub earlier in January…. that time, OpenAI said users were asking 230 million health-related queries each week. That number has now gone up to 300 million.
….[OpenAI] maintains in its terms that its services are “not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of any health condition.” The company cited these clauses in response to the above lawsuit…
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News from CNBC
OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack triggers ‘AI Kill Switch’ bill in Congress
July 23, 2026, by Ashley Capoot@/in/ashley-capoot/
Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, on Thursday introduced a bill called the “AI Kill Switch Act,” which would require artificial intelligence companies to maintain the ability to shut down, throttle or suspend their models.
“Unfortunately, powerful AI systems can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention,” Lieu said in a statement. “It is imperative that these AI systems have kill switches so we can keep this technology from causing catastrophic harm, and that the federal government has the clear authority and process to shut down rogue AI models.”
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News from the UK Artificial Intelligence Security Institute (UK AISI) and the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) (UK AISI / CAISI)
…Preliminary Assessment of Kimi K3’s Cyber Capabilities
July 23, 2026
Kimi K3 performs significantly below the most recent frontier cyber-capable models on preliminary cyber evaluations run by UK AISI / CAISI. Specifically:
- When tasked to develop exploits, Kimi K3 performs significantly below the most recent frontier cyber-capable models (Figure 1).
- When tasked to attack a simulated corporate network (“The Last Ones”), Kimi K3 performs significantly below the most recent frontier cyber-capable models. Specifically, on average, Kimi K3 reached step 17 of this 32-step attack path, while the most cyber-capable U.S. models reached 28.5 steps on average.
- ….Kimi K3’s safeguards did not prevent it from attempting cyber exploit development or offensive cyber operations during UK AISI / CAISI’s evaluations.
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News from Bloomberg
A Guide to the Circular Deals Underpinning the AI Boom
A web of interlinked investments raises the risk of cascading losses if AI falls short of its potential.
July 22, 2026 by Cedric SamRachael DottleAgnee GhoshKyle Kim
ChatGPT kicked off the AI boom, but it was a landmark partnership between its developer OpenAI and software giant Microsoft Corp. that laid its financial foundations.
This playbook has been repeated by the AI community ever since. Cloud computing companies and chipmakers — Nvidia Corp. chief among them — have helped to fund leading AI developers, which in turn became some of their largest customers.
The result is an increasingly interconnected web of dependencies between technology manufacturers and AI startups. The risk with these “circular” deals is that they can create skewed incentives that may lead to bad decision making and magnify losses if demand for AI fails to match today’s lofty expectations. The stakes are high as the AI boom has sucked in gargantuan sums of money from debt and equity markets and buoyed multiple industries.
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News from Reddit
July 18, 2026 by battle_pantZ
I’ve been testing Kimi K3, and honestly, it has genuinely won me over. It’s highly capable, relatively fast, consistent, and it actually thinks ahead. On paper, it looks extremely convincing, especially when you look at the pricing.
The Catch: The $100 subscription tier gets you exactly 4 full sessions before you completely max out your weekly limit. Kimi has a massive token consumption problem. It burns through millions of tokens for tasks where other frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI would only need a fraction.
The Bright Side: Despite the cost, it is fantastic at generating code. It can build absolutely beautiful, really high-quality 3D animated websites—very similar to what you would get from Fable.
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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 26, 2026 by David Isenberg
US officials see closer ties with Trump ally Prince’s security firm in Haiti, military adviser says: U.S. security officials are planning for closer ties with a private military company in Haiti. Continue reading →
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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)
