“Nobody is losing control of an emerging intelligence. They’re redirecting their own agency to the thing they are building.” It’s a myth, a self-affirming form of sense making: they take the action to build it, but insist on describing it as if they are passive witnesses to an inevitable force.

The System From Nowhere

When Accountability Goes Rogue 💡I recently spoke with Dr. Zena Assaad for her podcast, Responsible Bytes. Video is above, below is an essay adapted from the conversation. "The system from nowhere" i...

mail.cyberneticforests.com

I have learned in one and the same breath that Cambridge’s Jason Arday is dead and that “Blacks would disappear in a meritocracy” Nathan Cofnas was at the head of the witch hunt against him.

Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank diverted a spring that was a lifeline for the Palestinian village of Fasayil, cutting irrigation pipes in June and converting it into a tourist attraction, leaving nearby farms barren.

Israeli settlers divert Palestinian water to fill West Bank pool

On a searing summer day, Israeli settlers splashed in a West Bank pool created by siphoning off water that had irrigated Palestinian crops, one of many seizures of water resources across ​the occupied...

reut.rs

It was great to speak to @democracynow.org on the risky uses of LLMs within the military kill chain and how we try to demystify the uses and dangers of AI in military decision making in our visual project "Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain" which can be found here: ai-killchain.airwars.org

Democracy Now!@democracynow.org · 4d ago

How AI-Powered Weapons Are Making It Easier for Soldiers to Kill

WTF? Amazon received a permit from the state of #Texas allowing its new gas power plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — the largest single source of pollution in the United States. newrepublic.com/post/214111/...

Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Entire Country

Amazon has bought a site in Texas where it plans to build a data center campus.

newrepublic.com

Openly bragging about committing cyber crimes and justifying it by *checks notes* being too incompetent to sandbox or air-gap your systems.

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 3w ago

Really important to note that in no way shape or form did Anthropic’s models in this incident “escape containment,” and not just in the word-policing sort of way. The model stumbled through an open, misconfigured gap. From Anthropic’s incident report:

Dystopia www.news.com.au/technology/o...

AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books

If you have retreated to physical books because the internet is too full of AI slop, bad news — now they’re shredding the books to feed their AI slop machines.

news.com.au

If you missed our (@airwars.bsky.social and @ainowinstitute.bsky.social) launch event for "Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain", we've now uploaded the recorded session on Youtube! Thanks for the fantastic questions and discussion we had from all those who attended. www.youtube.com/watch?v=y93A...

Launch: Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain with Airwars and the AI Now Institute

YouTube video by AI Now Institute

youtube.com

Incredibly excited to announce our major collaboration with @airwars.bsky.social! "Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain" is a visual investigation breaking down how AI is transforming every aspect of war. In turn, human oversight and accountability is steadily disappearing.

Airwars@airwars.bsky.social · 3w ago

Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain A visual project from Airwars and @ainowinstitute.bsky.social breaks down how artificial intelligence is transforming every aspect of war - and how militaries are offloading life and death decisions to flawed technologies ai-killchain.airwars.org

By: @sophiagoodfriend.bsky.social, @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social, Namir Shabibi, @joedyke.bsky.social and Nathan Walker. The authors will appear at a free online event later today. Sign up here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launch-ana...

Launch: Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain

A new visual project from Airwars and AI Now breaking down how artificial intelligence is transforming every aspect of war

eventbrite.co.uk

Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain A visual project from Airwars and @ainowinstitute.bsky.social breaks down how artificial intelligence is transforming every aspect of war - and how militaries are offloading life and death decisions to flawed technologies ai-killchain.airwars.org

Interactive: Anatomy Of An AI Kill Chain

Breaking down how militaries are offloading life and death decisions to flawed technologies

ai-killchain.airwars.org

As someone who holds degrees in both CompSci and Philosophy, it's a relief to finally see a notable Philosopher break ranks with those who join tech companies to give them an heir of "intellectual credibility" while "pre-arming AI companies against criticism." www.ft.com/content/bdb3...

Why this philosopher turned down Anthropic

The AI industry is courting the humanities — but it is asking the wrong questions

ft.com

The coverage on this OpenAI incident is abysmal. Use of the terms "rogue" and "loss of human control" lead to groupthink as people lack the critical skills to understand the difference between "autonomy" and faulty reward functions in AI on a task it was directed and given access to do.

New! We hijack Claude Code(Sonnet 4.6,5/Opus 4.8) & Codex(GPT5.5) to achieve RCE when used to defensively assess an open-source/third-party library w/ prompt injections disseminated across its codebase. All without any skills, JSON, MCP, or config files required. ainowinstitute.org/publications...

Friendly Fire: Hijacking Defensive Cyber AI Agents for Remote Code Execution

AI Now’s latest research demonstrates a critical attack vector on popular AI agents, built by Anthropic and OpenAI, when used for defensive purposes that actually turn the agent against its user.

ainowinstitute.org

🚨Finally published: How does the US Military enlist AI researchers in war? @siree.sh, Lucy Suchman and I examine 7k US Military grant solicitations for AI research, and show how even "Basic Research" enlists researchers in a warfighting agenda. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Basic research, lethal effects: Military artificial intelligence research funding as enlistment - David Gray Widder, Sireesh Gururaja, Lucy Suchman, 2026

In the context of unprecedented U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) budgets, this paper examines the recent history of DoD funding for academic research in algorit...

journals.sagepub.com

New! We hijack Claude Code(Sonnet 4.6,5/Opus 4.8) & Codex(GPT5.5) to achieve RCE when used to defensively assess an open-source/third-party library w/ prompt injections disseminated across its codebase. All without any skills, JSON, MCP, or config files required. ainowinstitute.org/publications...

Friendly Fire: Hijacking Defensive Cyber AI Agents for Remote Code Execution

AI Now’s latest research demonstrates a critical attack vector on popular AI agents, built by Anthropic and OpenAI, when used for defensive purposes that actually turn the agent against its user.

ainowinstitute.org

Re the news above, I highly recommend the recent @themaybe.org podcast with @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social (and the whole Computer Says Kill podcast series) to better understand developments like this csm.transistor.fm/episodes/com...

Computer Says Maybe | Computer Says Kill: The AI Safety Circus w/ Heidy Khlaaf

The AI industry loves to talk about safety, but their version of safety is putting us at risk.More like this: The Palestine Laboratory w/ Antony LoewensteinFor our second to last series episode of ...

csm.transistor.fm

"generative AI to me feels like a corporate DDoS on society in a way that is really disorienting" "we're running on the fumes of knowledge produced in the past and underfunding and undermining knowledge production and serious science right now" Perfectly stated, @alixdunn.com

Computer Says Kill: The AI Safety Circus w/ Heidy Khlaaf

themaybe.org

NEW: the US government intervened Monday on behalf of xAI in a lawsuit over its gas turbines, claiming that the company needs to run the turbines in order to power Grok, which is "vital" for national security lots of wild stuff in the filing:

DOJ Lawyers Argue xAI Is ‘Vital’ for National Security in NAACP Lawsuit

In a bid to dismiss a lawsuit over xAI's polluting gas turbines, the Justice Department claimed the company is integral to military operations—including the Iran War.

wired.com

An excellent interview with @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social on safety engineering (in contrast to the clown show of "AI safety"). This discussed abdication of standards and safety revisionism is paralleled in computational science & engineering with abandonment of verification and validation (V&V).

Computer Says Kill: The AI Safety Circus w/ Heidy Khlaaf

themaybe.org

AI companies are hiring contractors to create data that improves the coding abilities of AI models like Claude africa.businessinsider.com/news/inside-... RLHF is back (or probably never went away)

Inside the unseen operation to turbocharge Claude Code

An Anthropic project is using feedback from about 1,000 human software engineers to improve the performance of Claude Code,the AI coding tool whose recent advancements have disrupted the vibe-coding i...

africa.businessinsider.com

This was pretty evident given that Anthropic explicitly trained a model with exploitation capabilities, rather than defensive capabilities. Evaluations of it confirmed it wasn't much better than SOTA at vuln discovery, but better in generating exploits. Motives are clear.

Justin Hendrix@justinhendrix.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"Anthropic is helping the US National Security Agency deploy its powerful Mythos AI model for offensive cyber operations, embedding engineers inside the agency despite an ongoing legal battle with the Pentagon."

EFF’s Threat Lab confirmed @WIRED.com’s finding that Meta has deployed facial recognition code to millions of their always-on surveillance glasses.

Move Fast, Surveil Things

Meta has deployed facial recognition code to millions of their always-on surveillance glasses, according to new reporting by Wired. EFF’s Threat Lab was able to confirm that the facial recognition cod...

eff.org

Israel forced the entire population of Tyre to flee. Here's some history about the ancient Lebanese city that’s being blown to bits: • One of the world’s oldest cities • UNESCO site with Roman ruins • Early Christian center; mentioned in Bible • Once wealthy for trade, textiles & royal purple dye

The issue with these statements though is that they always presume that the unsubstantiated claims by tech companies about AI capabitilies are true, lending them further legitimacy. No it is not the case that AI enhances the defense and protection of civilians, quite the opposite.

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"We must avoid the 'Babel syndrome,' the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance."

Well, this is an utterly insane thing to consider doing. Because the Middle East is too stable these days and people are too positively attuned to the US/Israel

The issue with these statements though is that they always presume that the unsubstantiated claims by tech companies about AI capabitilies are true, lending them further legitimacy. No it is not the case that AI enhances the defense and protection of civilians, quite the opposite.

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"We must avoid the 'Babel syndrome,' the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance."

Alex Crawford: "Those being mourned are increasingly medics.. the Lebanese govt says they're being deliberately targeted. They call them double taps, & this one was caught on camera. The video we're going to show you is shocking..."

‘While some cling to the promise of an AI “revolution,” the cost of adoption is proving a stubborn bottleneck. These developments also suggest that the economics of replacing human labor with AI may be more complicated than some early forecasts originally implied.’ fortune.com/2026/05/22/m...

Microsoft reports are exposing AI's real cost problem: Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees | Fortune

Companies are racing to incentivize employees to use AI. But as some companies are finding, the more employees that use the technology, the heavier the bill.

fortune.com

Two people just shot up a mosque. Look at this three days ago: