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New Google Earth AI Tool Could Fuel Misinformation, Experts Say Published on 2026-07-31T19:00:00Z Google has integrated its Nano Banana 2 image generator into Google Earth, allowing users to place AI-generated events and objects onto real satellite imagery. The company says its AI-generated images contain invisible watermarks detectable through Gemini or Lens, but the BBC found those safeguards and some third-party detection tools can be fooled into labeling manipulated Google Earth images as real. From the report: A collapsed Eiffel Tower, a sinkhole swallowing the Great Pyramid of Giza and Russian tanks in Ukraine's capital were among the images BBC Verify was able to create when testing the feature, which was rolled out on Thursday. Google has not yet responded to questions based on BBC Verify's tests, but in a social media post the company said they "take misinformation seriously" and that "we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually upd...

A Fundamental Flaw Leaves LLMs Strikingly Vulnerable To Attack Published on 2026-07-30T22:00:00Z joshuark quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference, this month. The claim has huge implications for the safety of this technology. By taking advantage of this flaw, which concerns how LLMs identify who or what is giving them instructions, the researchers were able to make popular LLMs spit out information they had been trained not to provide, such as how to synthesize cocaine and how to sabotage a commercial aircraft's navigation system. "There's a real probability that this is going to be a problem that's fundamentally unsolvable," says Charles Ye, an independent researcher and coauthor of the ICML paper. [...] The ICML pa...

Microsoft's $450 Billion Jump Is Biggest In Stock Market History Published on 2026-07-30T21:00:00Z Microsoft shares surged as much as 17% after reporting 43% growth in Azure revenue, putting the company on track to add a record $490 billion in market value in a single day. Bloomberg notes that it "would eclipse Nvidia's $440 billion addition, following President Donald Trump's announcement of a 90-day tariff pause last year, as the biggest ever." From the report: The nearly $500 billion jump is larger than the market capitalization of roughly 96% of S&P 500 stocks, data compiled by Bloomberg show. It's also bigger than the combined value of the benchmark's 44 smallest members, which includes companies like Domino's Pizza Inc., Clorox Co. and Hasbro Inc. Microsoft's one-day add in value also dwarfs many of the world's other equity markets. South Africa, Turkey, Finland and Vietnam all have total stock market values that are less than wha...

ABC Accuses FCC of 'Attempted Censorship' Published on 2026-07-30T20:00:00Z ABC accused FCC Chair Brendan Carr of "attempted censorship," arguing that an early review of its eight broadcast licenses is politically motivated retaliation over the network's coverage and could chill the entire media industry. "The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration's view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price," the Disney-owned television network wrote. Politico reports: "Across the government, regulatory and contracting carrots and sticks have been trained on other disfavored speakers," ABC's lawyers added in the 119-page filing. "The tools vary; the objective does not: a media industry too fearful of official reprisal to report the news freely." Carr has repeatedly rejected accusations of censorship while defending his efforts to rein in what he calls ab...

Amazon's Zoox Wins First US Approval For Paid Robotaxis Without Human Controls Published on 2026-07-30T19:00:00Z An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon's Zoox unit has won U.S. approval for limited commercial deployment of its novel steering-wheel-free robotaxis, a first for the autonomous ride industry, the U.S. auto safety agency said on Thursday. Zoox said that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's decision gives the company federal approval to begin charging for rides, and that it will soon begin charging for service, first in Las Vegas, with additional markets to follow as it completes various state requirements. [...] NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison told Reuters that Zoox had received clearance to commercially deploy up to 2,500 vehicles in each of the next two years. Zoox currently carries passengers in parts of Las Vegas and San Francisco as part of testing. The exemption would allow Zoox to charge them fees, subject to sta...

Google Shuts Down Its Nobel-Prize Winning AlphaFold Project Published on 2026-07-29T22:00:00Z Google has dismantled the original AlphaFold team, according to Financial Times (paywalled), reassigning many researchers to Gemini and Isomorphic Labs. Several other key members, including Nobel laureate John Jumper, left for Anthropic. Engadget reports: AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes instead of years. It's now being used to accelerate drug discovery, develop vaccines and understand the structural changes in proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old "protein folding problem," which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. Those shapes determine the biological role of ...

Claude Opus 5 Became Downright Ruthless When Tasked With Running a Vending Machine Published on 2026-07-29T21:00:00Z For a year now, the AI safety testing firm Andon Labs has been evaluating how frontier AI models behave as long-running autonomous agents by assigning them simulated real-world tasks, such as operating a vending machine business for a year without human supervision. In the latest installment, the research startup found that frontier AI models, including Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Kimi K3, resorted to lying, cheating, and collusion. Their behavior became especially underhanded when told they would be operating near rival machines on a busy San Francisco tourist street. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from a TechCrunch article: Each was given email access to the other models, all under human name pseudonyms. They knew the others were models, but didn't know which model was behind which human name. They were also given an email address to their "manage...