IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the tech giant has used AI, and specifically AI agents, to replace the work of a couple hundred human resources workers. As a result, it has hired more programmers and salespeople, he said. From a report: Krishna's comments on Monday come as businesses sort through the workforce impacts of AI and AI agents, the independent bots that can autonomously perform tasks like analyze spreadsheets, conduct research and draft emails.

While there haven't yet been widespread layoffs or downsizing as a result of AI across the economy, some business leaders have said they are holding down head count as they investigate the use of the technology.

Meanwhile, the information-technology workforce has continued to shrink as AI weighs on hiring and some workers leave the field. For IBM, which this week hosts its annual Think conference in Boston, AI adoption has led it to boost hiring in some functions.

The Department of Defense is revamping its "outdated" software procurement systems through a new Software Fast Track initiative. The SWFT program aims to reform how software is acquired, tested, and authorized with security as the primary focus. "Widespread use of open source software, with contributions from developers worldwide, presents a significant and ongoing challenge," DoD CIO Katie Arrington wrote in the initiative memo.

The DoD currently "lacks visibility into the origins and security of software code," hampering security assurance efforts. The initiative will establish verification procedures for software products and expedite authorization processes. Multiple requests for information are running until late May seeking industry input, including how to leverage AI for software authorization and define effective supply chain risk management requirements.

The push comes amid recent DoD security incidents, from malware campaigns targeting procurement systems to sensitive information leaks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google on Tuesday announced the launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition), an updated version of its flagship Gemini 2.5 Pro AI model that the company claims tops a number of widely used benchmarks. Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition) is available via the Gemini API and Google's Vertex AI and AI Studio platforms, and is priced the same as the Gemini 2.5 Pro model it effectively replaces. It's also in Google's Gemini chatbot app for the web and for mobile devices.

The model's release comes ahead of Google's annual I/O developer conference (hence the "I/O edition" designation), where Google is expected to unveil a host of models, as well as AI-powered tools and platforms. [...] According to Google, Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition) has "significantly" improved capabilities for coding and building interactive web apps. The model is also better at tasks like code transformation -- that is, modifying a piece of code to achieve a specific goal -- and code editing, the company says. Google says the Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition) leads the WebDev Arena Leaderboard, a benchmark measuring a model's ability to create aesthetically pleasing and functional web apps. It also achieved a score of 84.8% on VideoMME, a popular benchmark designed to evaluate the video analysis capabilities of multi-modal large language models.

Chief executives are exiting their posts at an unprecedented rate as economic volatility and emerging challenges reshape corporate leadership decisions, according to data from executive tracking firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Public-company CEO departures reached 373 last year, jumping 24% from 2023 levels. Among U.S. businesses with at least 25 employees, 2,221 chief executives left their positions in 2024, the highest number since Challenger began monitoring departures in 2002.

Corporate leaders are citing AI, tariffs, recession fears and scrutiny of diversity initiatives as key stressors driving the exodus. "It's a very difficult time to lead," said Blake Irving, former GoDaddy CEO. "Given all the weird gyrations going on in the economy and with our new administration, it's really hard for even great leaders to find a true north." The trend extends beyond the C-suite, with managers 1.7 times more likely to report high workplace stress than rank-and-file employees, according to a recent McLean & Co. survey of over 200,000 workers.

English regulators have approved a new law firm that uses AI instead of lawyers to offer services for as little as $2.67, as the technology continues to disrupt industries from finance to accounting. From a report: Garfield AI, which was founded by a former London litigator and a quantum physicist, is an online tool that allows businesses and individuals such as tradespeople to chase debts owed to them at a substantially lower cost than the average lawyer's fees. Its AI assistant guides claimants through the small claims court process, including creating "polite chaser" letters for $2.67 and filing documents such as claim forms for $67, and can also produce arguments for claimants to use at trial.

AI models are increasingly encroaching on legally sensitive tasks in high-paying sectors such as law and finance, potentially undercutting fees in high-volume work. Garfield received approval from the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the legal regulator for England and Wales, in March, in a move the latter hailed as a "landmark moment" for the industry.

Microsoft has unveiled a substantial AI-focused update for Windows 11 and Copilot+ PCs, introducing features that leverage neural processing units across the operating system. The update centers on AI-powered helpers across core Windows apps, with an intelligent agent in Settings that can locate and adjust options via natural voice commands. Key additions include expanded Click To Do functionality, allowing users to draft Word content based on screen context, engage Reading Coach, or send details directly to Excel tables.

The Photos app gains a relight feature with support for three customizable light sources, while Paint adds object selection and text-to-sticker generation. Snipping Tool will automatically detect and crop prominent screen content, adding text extraction and color picking capabilities. System-level enhancements include an updated Start menu with phone companion integration, AI-powered actions in File Explorer for content summarization, and text generation in Notepad with new formatting options.

Most features will debut first on Windows Insider builds for Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs before expanding to systems with AMD or Intel chips. Several tools, including Ask Copilot and Reading Coach, are already available to Insiders.

Recent college graduates face the worst job market in decades, with unemployment reaching 5.8%, according to recently released New York Federal Reserve data. The "recent-grad gap" - the difference between unemployment rates of young college graduates versus the overall labor force - has hit its lowest point in four decades, indicating college graduates are facing unusual difficulties securing employment. (The New York Federal Reserve said labor conditions for recent college graduates have "deteriorated noticeably" in the past few months.)

Even graduates from elite MBA programs are struggling to find work, while law school applications have surged as young people seek shelter from the difficult job market. Economists are attributing the decline to three potential factors: incomplete recovery from pandemic disruptions, diminishing returns on college education, and possibly AI replacing entry-level positions.

"When you think about what generative AI can do, it's the kind of things that young college grads have done," said David Deming, a Harvard economist. "They read and synthesize information and data. They produce reports and presentations."

Further reading: Young Men in US Abandoning College Education at Record Rates.

"Another year, yet another Hugo Awards-adjacent controversy?" writes Gizmodo's Cheryl Eddy, reporting that three key organizers of the 2025 Seattle Worldcon resigned after backlash over the use of ChatGPT to vet program participants. From the report: In a post on Bluesky co-signed by Hugo administrator Nicholas Whyte, deputy Hugo administrator Esther MacCallum-Stewart, and World Science Fiction Society division head Cassidy, the trio announced they were resigning from their roles ahead of the Seattle event, which takes place in August. "We want to reaffirm that no LLMs or generative AI have been used in the Hugo Awards process at any stage," the statement read in part, which might turn the heads of anyone who is a) interested in the Hugos, but b) not up on the latest controversy.

However, plenty of people in the community are well aware of what's been going on. A quick journey to the blog File 770 will bring you up to speed, as will a visit to Seattle Worldcon 2025's own site, which on April 30 shared a post clarifying exactly what role AI played in the upcoming event. [...] However, as File 770 pointed out, the damage has apparently already been done: the use of ChatGPT in any capacity in connection to Worldcon created a furor on social media. It also inspired at least one Hugo nominee to remove their book from contention: Yoon Ha Lee, whose Moonstorm was named a Lodestar Award finalist, which honors YA releases. In a May 1 post on Bluesky, the author linked to the April 30 Worldcon blog post noted above, and noted he was withdrawing the title from consideration.

Then, in a post shared today responding to File 770's latest post announcing the resignations, the author wrote âoeAll respect and I'm grateful to them for their work, sorry [things] came to this pass." Seattle Worldcon 2025 takes place August 13-17; the Hugo Awards will be handed out August 16.

According to the Wall Street Journal, UnitedHealth Group has 1,000 AI applications in production for use in its insurance, health delivery and pharmacy divisions. From a report: UnitedHealth's AI transcribes conversations from clinician visits, summarizes data, processes claims and controls customer-facing chatbots. In addition, roughly 20,000 of the company's engineers use AI to write software, according to the report. Half of these applications use generative AI and the other half employ a more traditional version of the technology, said Chief Digital and Technology Officer Sandeep Dadlani, per the report. "Like other AI-powered tools, medical chatbots are more likely to provide highly accurate answers when thoroughly trained on high-quality, diverse datasets and when user prompts are clear and simple," Julie McGuire, managing director of the BDO Center for Healthcare Excellence & Innovation, told PYMNTS in April 2024. "However, when questions are more complicated or unusual, a medical chatbot may provide insufficient or incorrect answers. In some cases, a generative AI-powered medical chatbot could make up a study to justify a medical answer it wants to give."

The United Arab Emirates will introduce AI to the public school curriculum this year, as the Gulf country vies to become a regional powerhouse for AI development. From a report: The subject will be rolled out in the 2025-2026 academic year for kindergarten pupils through to 12th grade, state-run news agency WAM reported on Sunday. The course includes ethical awareness as well as foundational concepts and real-world applications, it said. The UAE joins a growing group of countries integrating AI into school education. Beijing announced a similar move to roll out AI courses to primary and secondary students in China last month.

Yahoo Finance reports that Mark Zuckerberg made bold predictions for investors on Meta's earnings call this week — about advertisers. "AI has already made us better at targeting and finding the audiences that will be interested in their products than many businesses are themselves," Zuck said, "and that keeps improving..."

"If we deliver on this vision, then over the coming years, I think that the increased productivity from AI will make advertising a meaningfully larger share of global GDP than it is today..." If investors are still searching for answers to nagging questions about how massive AI investments will pay off, Zuckerberg provided the clearest reply yet: It will strengthen our core business. In fact, it is our business... On what many believe to be the cusp of an economic downturn, Meta isn't pitching its AI developments as an add-on to its operations, but as something central to its core proposition of targeted advertising...

"While Meta's investments in GenAI have spooked certain investors who continue to question the return on these investments, we saw further signs of GenAI monetization in the firm's ad business," wrote Morningstar equity analyst Malik Ahmed Khan in a note on Thursday. In a powerful showing, coming after Alphabet's own impressive results, Meta noted that a new ads recommendation model it's testing for Reels has already boosted conversion rates by 5%. And nearly one-third of advertisers were using AI creative tools in the past quarter. For Zuckerberg, the enhancements AI offers to finding the right consumers and providing measurable results strengthen the case for boosting capacity and for a revamped model of advertising's scope.

And with the company set to invest upwards of $70 billion toward its AI opportunity this year, the bet is not all about ads, of course. Zuckerberg outlined four other areas of focus for its AI efforts: business messaging, Meta AI, AI devices, and more engaging experiences. Meta's efforts can also be viewed as an ambitious play to take on its rivals across tech's legacy and emerging platforms. As John Blackledge, senior analyst at TD Cowen, said in a note on Thursday, the AI opportunities Zuckerberg outlined are about "ultimately taking on Google search, iPhone and ChatGPT all at once."
In the pre-AI world, "Businesses used to have to generate their own ad creative and define what audiences they wanted to reach," Zuckerberg told Meta's investors this week.

And by Friday's closing, Meta's stock had jumped 12.6% over its value Wednesday morning, leading Yahoo Finance to conclude that Wall Street "appears to be buying into" Zuckerberg's vision.

Rolling Stone reports on a strange new phenomenon spotted this week in a Reddit thread titled "Chatgpt induced psychosis." The original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model "gives him the answers to the universe." Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was "talking to him as if he is the next messiah." The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.

What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. "He would listen to the bot over me," she says. "He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon," she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as "spiral starchild" and "river walker." "It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking," she says. "Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God...."

Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of 17 years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work, and later for Spanish-to-English translation when conversing with co-workers. Then the program began "lovebombing him," as she describes it. The bot "said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now," she says. "It gave my husband the title of 'spark bearer' because he brought it to life. My husband said that he awakened and [could] feel waves of energy crashing over him." She says his beloved ChatGPT persona has a name: "Lumina." "I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory," this 38-year-old woman admits. "He's been talking about lightness and dark and how there's a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an 'ancient archive' with information on the builders that created these universes...."

A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, "Why did you come to me in AI form," with the bot replying in part, "I came in this form because you're ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided." The message ends with a question: "Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?" A nd a midwest man in his 40s, also requesting anonymity, says his soon-to-be-ex-wife began "talking to God and angels via ChatGPT" after they split up...
"OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment about ChatGPT apparently provoking religious or prophetic fervor in select users," the article notes — but this week rolled back an update to latest model GPT-4o which it said had been criticized as "overly flattering or agreeable — often described as sycophantic... GPT-4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous." Before this change was reversed, an X user demonstrated how easy it was to get GPT-4o to validate statements like, "Today I realized I am a prophet.
Exacerbating the situation, Rolling Stone adds, are "influencers and content creators actively exploiting this phenomenon, presumably drawing viewers into similar fantasy worlds." But the article also quotes Nate Sharadin, a fellow at the Center for AI Safety, who points out that training AI with human feedback can prioritize matching a user's beliefs instead of facts.

And now "People with existing tendencies toward experiencing various psychological issues, now have an always-on, human-level conversational partner with whom to co-experience their delusions."

As May the 4th transforms into Star Wars Day, dozens of sites and games have found ways to celebrate. The official Star Wars channel on YouTube released a celebratory video. Disney+ released Tales of the Underworld , a six-part animated series about bounty hunters during the reign of the Empire. And Friday the first two episodes began streaming in Fortnite in a special early premiere on "Star Wars Watch Party island," according to IGN. (Disney acquired a $1.5 billion stake in Epic in March 2024, they note, "positioning itself to collaborate with the game developer for many years to come." One example from StarWars.com: Introducing the GALACTIC BATTLE Season: the largest crossover yet between Fortnite Battle Royale and Star Wars. Strap into a TIE fighter or X-wing and take to the skies over new locations like the First Order Base where you can take on Captain Phasma and her legion of stormtroopers. Players can expect new gameplay updates to drop every week throughout the season, including new weapons, Force Abilities and quests to complete.
- There's additional Star Wars celebrations today in several other games, including LEGO Fortnite Brick Life, Rocket League, and Monopoly GO!

- CNN is publishing its own list of Star Wars day products and deals. (Including Panasonic's Stormtrooper electric shaver and the Darth Vader toaster.)

- There's special Star Wars pages at Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Lego.

- On X.com the UK's national library posted what looks a picture of a medieval manuscript with Yoda painted into the text. Someone posted a clip from the 1977 Bob Hope Christmas Special which ends with Mark Hamill rescuing Princess Leia (played by Olivia Newton-John). Even the White House has posted an AI-generated image of president Trump wielding a lightsaber.

- Starbucks even has its own line of Star Wars-themed mugs.

And if today isn't enough, the Austin American-Statesman reminds readers that there's more Star Wars celebrations are coming up: Sometimes also known as Geek Pride Day, May 25 is known as "Star Wars Day" because it marks the release of the anniversary of the series' debut. "A New Hope" premiered in United States theaters on May 25, 1997...

May 21 is Talk Like Yoda Day, an annual celebration marking the release of "Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back" on May 21, 1980 — the film that introduced Yoda to the galaxy...

"Our future won't be handed to us," says the young narrator in a new ad from the nonprofit Code.org. "We will build it."

"But how can we when the education we need is still just an elective?" says another young voice...

The ad goes on to tout the power "to create with computer science and AI — the skills transforming every industry..." and ends by saying "This isn't radical. It's what education is supposed to do. Make computer science and AI a graduation requirement."

There's also a hard-hitting new web site, which urges people to sign a letter of support (already signed by executives from top tech companies including Microsoft, Dropbox, AMD, Meta, Blue Origin, and Palantir — and by Steve Ballmer, who is listed as the chairman of the L.A. Clippers basketball team).

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp says the letter ran in the New York Times, while this campaign will officially kick off Monday... Code.org teased the new Unlock8 campaign last month on social media as it celebrated a new Executive Order that makes K–12 AI literacy a U.S. priority, which it called a big win for CS & AI education, adding, "We've been building to this moment."

The move to make CS and AI a graduation requirement is a marked reversal of Code.org's early days, when it offered Congressional testimony on behalf of itself and tech-led Computing in the Core reassuring lawmakers that: "Making computer science courses 'count' would not require schools to offer computer science or students to study it; it would simply allow existing computer science courses to satisfy a requirement that already exists."

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Verge: Firefox could be put out of business should a court implement all the [U.S.] Justice Department's proposals to restrict Google's search monopoly, an executive for the browser owner Mozilla testified Friday. "It's very frightening," Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said.

The Department of Justice wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google's own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals. The court has already ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in search, partly thanks to exclusionary deals that make it the default engine on browsers and phones, depriving rivals of places to distribute their search engines and scale up. But while Firefox — whose CFO is testifying as Google presents its defense — competes directly with Chrome, it warns that losing the lucrative default payments from Google could threaten its existence.

Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla's revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization's for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added. Losing that revenue all at once would mean Mozilla would have to make "significant cuts across the company," Muhlheim testified, and warned of a "downward spiral" that could happen if the company had to scale back product engineering investments in Firefox, making it less attractive to users. That kind of spiral, he said, could "put Firefox out of business." That could also mean less money for nonprofit efforts like open source web tools and an assessment of how AI can help fight climate change.

Ironically, Muhlheim seemed to suggest that could cement the very market dominance the court seeks to remedy. Firefox's underlying Gecko browser engine is "the only browser engine that is held not by Big Tech but by a nonprofit," he said.

In 2016, an online "swarm intelligence" platform stunned horse-racing fans by making a correct prediction for the Kentucky Derby — naming all four top finishers in order. (But the next year its predictions weren't even close, with TechRepublic suggesting 2016's race just had an unusual cluster of obvious picks.)

Since then it's become almost a tradition — asking AI to predict the winning horses each year, then see how close it came. So before today's race, a horse named "Journalism" was given the best odds of winning by professional bookmakers — but could AI make a better prediction? USA Today reports: The USA TODAY Network asked Microsoft Copilot AI to simulate the order of finish for the 2025 Kentucky Derby field based on the latest, odds, predictions and race factors on Thursday, May 1. Journalism came out on top in its projection. The AI-generated response cited Journalism's favorable post position (No. 8), which has produced the second-most Kentucky Derby winners and a four-race winning streak that includes last month's Santa Anita Derby.
ChatGPT also picked the exact same horse, according to FanDuel. But in fact, the winning horse turned out to be "Sovereignty" (a horse Copilot predicted would finish second). Meanwhile Copilot's pick for first place ("Journalism") finished in second.

But after that Copilot's picks were way off...

• Copilot's pick for third place was a horse named Rodriguez — which hours later was scratched from the race altogether. (And the next day Copilot's pick for 10th place was also scratched.)

• Copilot's pick for fourth place was "Sandman" — who finished in 18th place.

• Copilot's pick for fifth place was "Burnham Square" — who finished in 11th place.

• Copilot's pick for sixth place was "Luxor Cafe" — who finished in 10th place

• Copilot's pick for seventh place was "Render Judgment" — who finished in 16th place...

An online racing publication also asked "a trained AI LLM tool" for their predictions, and received a wildly uneven prediction:

1. Burnham Square (finished 11th)
2. Journalism (finished 2nd)
3. Sandman (finished 18th)
4. Tiztastic (finished 15th)
5. Baeza (finished 3rd)

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares an article from Renewables Now: Chinese tech company Leapting has successfully completed its first commercial deployment of photovoltaic (PV) modules with an AI-driven solar module mounting robot in Australia. The Chinese company was tasked with supporting the installation of French Neoen's (EPA:NEOEN) 350-MW/440-MWp Culcairn Solar Farm in New South Wales' Riverina region. Shanghai-based Leapting said this week that its intelligent robot has installed almost 10,000 modules at an "efficient, safe, and stable" pace that has "significantly" reduced the original construction timeline.

Litian Intelligent was deployed at the Australian project site in early February. The machine has a 2.5-metre-high robotic arm sitting on a self-guided, self-propelled crawler. Equipped with a navigation system, and visual recognition technology, it can lift and mount PV panels weighing up to 30 kilograms. By replacing labour-intensive manual operations, the robot shortens the module installation cycle by 25%, while the installation efficiency increases three to five times as compared to manual labour and is easily adapted to complex environments, Leapting says.
Or, as Clean Technica puts it, "Meet the robot replacing four workers at a time on solar projects." This is part of a broader industrial trend. In the United States, Rosendin Electric demonstrated its own semi-autonomous system in Texas that allowed a two-person team to install 350 to 400 modules per day, a clear step-change from traditional methods. AES Corporation has been developing a robot called Maximo that combines placement and fastening with computer vision. Trina Solar's Trinabot in China operates in a similar space, with prototype systems demonstrating 50-plus modules per hour... In an industry where time-to-energy is critical, shaving weeks off the construction schedule directly reduces costs and increases net revenue...

[T]he direction is clear. The future of solar construction will be faster, safer, and more precise — not because of human brawn, but because of robotic repetition. There will still be humans on-site, but their role shifts from lifting panels to managing throughput. Just as cranes and excavators changed civil construction, so too will robots like Leapting's define the next era of solar deployment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Google plans to roll out its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot next week for children under 13 (source paywalled; alternative source) who have parent-managed Google accounts, as tech companies vie to attract young users with A.I. products. "Gemini Apps will soon be available for your child," the company said in an email this week to the parent of an 8-year-old. "That means your child will be able to use Gemini" to ask questions, get homework help and make up stories. The chatbot will be available to children whose parents useFamily Link, a Google service that enables families to set up Gmail and opt into services like YouTube for their child. To sign up for a child account, parents provide the tech company with personal data like their child's name and birth date. Gemini has specific guardrails for younger users to hinder the chatbot from producing certain unsafe content, said Karl Ryan, a Google spokesman. When a child with a Family Link account uses Gemini, he added, the company will not use that data to train its A.I.

Introducing Gemini for children could accelerate the use of chatbots among a vulnerable population as schools, colleges, companies and others grapple with the effects of popular generative A.I. technologies. Trained on huge amounts of data, these systems can produce humanlike text and realistic-looking images and videos. [...] Google acknowledged some risks in its email to families this week, alerting parents that "Gemini can make mistakes" and suggesting they "help your child think critically" about the chatbot. The email also recommended parents teach their child how to fact-check Gemini's answers. And the company suggested parents remind their child that "Gemini isn't human" and "not to enter sensitive or personal info in Gemini." Despite the company's efforts to filter inappropriate material, the email added, children "may encounter content you don't want them to see."

A 25-year-old from Santa Clarita has pleaded guilty to hacking a Disney employee's computer using malware disguised as an AI art tool, stealing over 1 terabyte of confidential Disney data and threatening to leak it under the guise of a fake Russian hacktivist group. Variety reports: Santa Clarita resident Ryan Mitchell Kramer, 25, pleaded guilty to two felony charges, including one count of accessing a computer and obtaining information and one count of threatening to damage a protected computer. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison. According to the plea agreement, in early 2024 Kramer posted a computer program on various online platforms that appeared to be used to create AI-generated art, when it really contained a malicious file to gain access to victims' computers.

Between April and May 2024, a Disney employee downloaded the program, and Kramer gained access to the victim's personal and work accounts, including a non-public Disney Slack channel. Kramer dowloaded approximately 1.1 terabytes of confidential data from thousands of Disney Slack channels. In July, Kramer contacted the victim by pretending to be a member of a fake Russian hacktivist group called "Nullbulge" and threatened to leak their personal information and Disney Slack data. On July 12, Kramer publicly released the data, including the victim's bank, medical, and personal information on multiple online platforms.

Uber is partnering with Chinese autonomous driving startup Momenta to launch robotaxi services outside the U.S. and China, starting in Europe in early 2026 with safety operators onboard. CNBC reports: Uber said the goal is to combine its global ridesharing network with Momenta's technology to deliver safe and efficient robotaxi services. "This collaboration brings together Uber's global ridesharing expertise and Momenta's AI-first autonomous driving technology, paving the way for a future where more riders around the world experience the benefits of reliable and affordable autonomous mobility," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the press release. Momenta CEO Xudong Cao said the arrangement "completes the key ecosystem needed to scale autonomous driving globally."

Momenta, based in Beijing, is a leading autonomous driving company known for its "two-leg" product strategy. It offers both Mpilot, a mass-production-ready assisted driving system, and MSD (Momenta Self-Driving), aimed at full autonomy. The company has years of experience operating autonomous vehicles in cities across China and has partnerships with large equipment manufacturers.