Israel's scorn of Nobel Peace Prize laureate highlights its combative relationship with UN bodies



JOSEPH KRAUSS
Fri, October 9, 2026


FILE - Navi Pillay, Chair, Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, speaks during a press conference about the launch of the latest report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, at the European headquarters of the United Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland, June 18, 2025. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP, File)More


The decision to award this year's Nobel Peace Prize to veteran jurist Navi Pillay has exposed the vast gulf between Israel and global institutions charged with upholding international law, a rift that has widened over the war in Gaza.

Over a decades-long career, Pillay served at the highest levels of international organizations created in the wake of World War II to prevent a recurrence of its horrors. As a young lawyer in her native South Africa she campaigned against apartheid and for the release of Nelson Mandela, and as an international jurist she helped sentence dozens of people convicted of taking part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

But her leadership of a U.N.-backed panel that determined Israel committed genocide in Gaza — allegations it vehemently denies — has led many in Israel to see the Nobel nod as a high-profile rebuke of the country just days after the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that triggered the war.

Allegations of genocide are particularly explosive in Israel, which was founded in part as a refuge for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust.

"Awarding Pillay the Nobel Peace Prize isn't a recognition of justice. It's the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice," Israel's Foreign Ministry said on X. "Joseph Goebbels is certainly applauding from hell," it added, referring to the Nazi propagandist.

The vitriol comes from the widespread perception in Israel that the United Nations and other international bodies are biased against it. The United States has echoed that criticism and announced a raft of sanctions aimed at dismantling the International Criminal Court hours after the Nobel Prize announcement.

But Pillay's findings over the years were largely consistent with those of major human rights groups and other international bodies, and the facts she cited in reaching her conclusions had been widely reported.
Pillay led a panel that accused Israel of genocide in Gaza

Pillay led a three-member expert panel commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council that concluded last year that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.

Their 22-page report cited the death toll; Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid that led to widespread hunger; a policy of "systematically destroying" the healthcare system; the direct targeting of children and "explicit statements" of intent by Israeli civilian and military authorities.

Human rights groups and many experts on genocide have reached similar conclusions.

The commission has also issued reports accusing Hamas of war crimes during its Oct. 7, 2023, attack, when militants killed some 1,200 people and abducted 251 others. Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed over 74,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. The ministry, part of the Hamas-run government, maintains detailed records seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and many independent experts.

Israel has vehemently denied the allegations, casting them as an antisemitic blood libel. The Israeli military says it takes extraordinary measures to prevent harm to civilians and blames their deaths on Hamas because it operates in densely populated areas.

The International Court of Justice, the U.N.'s top court, is investigating genocide allegations brought by South Africa, and the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Pillay currently serves as an ad hoc judge in the ICJ's ongoing genocide case against Myanmar and served as an ICC judge from 2003-2008.
Israel has rejected the commission since its inception

The commission was created after the 2021 Israel-Hamas war and is the first to have an open-ended mandate. Critics say such permanent scrutiny shows anti-Israel bias, while supporters say it's needed to keep tabs on injustices faced by Palestinians under decades of Israeli rule.

Israel has refused to cooperate with the commission or other U.N.-endorsed investigations. It has pointed to the presence of notoriously repressive countries on the 47-member Human Rights Council and accused it of relentlessly singling out Israel while ignoring violations elsewhere.

A member of the commission, Indian jurist Miloon Kothari, sparked controversy in 2022 when he referred to a "Jewish lobby" in a media interview and questioned Israel's U.N. membership, citing its alleged violations of member state obligations.

Pillay issued a letter at the time saying Kothari had been misquoted and that the commission does not question Israel's status or U.N. membership.

She addressed the wider criticism in an interview with The Associated Press last year after she and the other commission members resigned, citing personal reasons and the need for change. They have since been replaced.

"We're an independent panel," she said. "People who accuse us of being antisemitic ... they twist the facts, they invent facts, falsify facts. I would like to see them challenge the report: Which of the facts that we have set out are incorrect?" she said.
Pillay also investigated Israel's decades-long occupation of the West Bank

Even before the latest Israel-Hamas war, Pillay had repeatedly taken Israel to task over its open-ended military rule over millions of Palestinians.

In a report released more than a year before the Oct. 7 attack, the commission accused Israel of de facto annexation of the West Bank, which it captured alongside Gaza and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want an independent state encompassing all three territories.

The International Court of Justice later issued a landmark ruling that Israel's occupation of the territories was unlawful.

The commission had said Israel's continuous expansion of Jewish settlements, its demolition of Palestinian homes and its fragmentation of Palestinian life were aimed at securing permanent rule over the territory, which is home to some 3 million Palestinians and 500,000 Israeli settlers.

Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli military rule, with the Palestinian Authority administering population centers. The settlers have Israeli citizenship, including freedom of movement and the right to vote.

Israel's U.N. mission rejected the report at the time of its release, calling it part of an "anti-Israel agenda" at the international body.

But Israel's current government and most of its political class is opposed to Palestinian statehood, and Netanyahu has repeatedly said Israel will maintain permanent control over the territories.

Israel views the West Bank as the biblical and historical cradle of Judaism, and says its withdrawal would pave the way for a Hamas-run state that would threaten its existence. The last substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks broke down in 2009, after Netanyahu returned to office.

Pillay's commission had also raised concerns about Israel's potential annexation of Gaza, saying its efforts to carve out buffer zones and military corridors were "vastly disproportionate to any reasonable military objective."

It said calls by Israeli officials for the "voluntary migration" of much of Gaza's population from the war-ravaged territory, if implemented, would amount to forcible transfer, a crime against humanity.

Don’t Fear AI—Fear the CEOs Behind the Curtain

The answer lies not in buying into the corporate manufactured fearmongering surrounding the technology itself; the imperative, at this point, is to unmask the institutional logic, structural tendencies, and strategic goals of the industry.


Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks during Snowflake Summit 2025 at Moscone Center on June 2, 2025 in San Francisco, California.
(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Atal Ahmadzai
Oct 05, 2026

Foreign Policy In Focus

In recent weeks, media coverage has amplified warnings from corporate CEOs and whistleblowers claiming that artificial intelligence, or AI poses an existential threat to humanity. The central argument emerging from the industry is a call to slow the pace of AI development out of imminent fear that humanity may soon lose control. How did an industry poised to transform humanity for good suddenly become one characterized as a threat to its very existence?

The corporate panic feeds directly into a real public anxiety over years of unchecked AI growth and its cult-like corporate model, where CEOs are projected as untouchable while its operational processes and infrastructures remain hidden behind the curtain. Nevertheless, rather than taking this boardroom alarmism at face value, the need is for deeper scrutiny.

The sudden fearmongering is not driven by concerns for human welfare. Rather, it points directly to the underlying economic priorities, ideological essence, and core worldviews that fundamentally shape the AI industry and inform its elites and related rhetoric.

Humanizing AI and Escaping Corporate Responsibility

“AI going rogue” is more than a futuristic threat about AI. It is the latest rehearsal of an age-old legal and rhetorical shield used by corporate capitalism and its powerful monopolies. Assigning human qualities to nonhuman market entities has a long and dark history in corporate capitalism. In the 17th century, Queen Elizabeth granted the legal fiction of “juristic person” status to the East India Company, setting the path for unchecked exploitation and colonial plunder. In the 19th century, American courts took this further by awarding legal personhood and constitutional rights to corporations, a process some view as farcical and deceptive.

With the AI revolution rewriting both market-human relations and social relations with truth and reality, the corporate strategy of humanizing nonhuman entities has crossed from legal fabrication into the realm of science fiction. By framing AI as a sentient entity capable of “going rogue” or acting as a “killer machine,” tech monopolies shift the identity of these systems from tools of human efficiency into mythic, “more-than-human” intelligent agents.

This branding serves a dual purpose. It builds up the mystique and reverence of the technology while shielding corporations from accountability, successfully distorting the true logic driving AI development. Ultimately, this entire corporate strategy relies on a calculated campaign of fearmongering that projects machines as living, thinking entities capable of turning against humanity.

Treating AI models as sentient agents breathes new life into the old Western capitalist tradition by creating legal and rhetorical fictions to protect corporate power.

A widely reported incident that catalyzed these concerns occurred in July, when an OpenAI test model breached the servers of Hugging Face, another AI company. This event took place during a controlled experiment in which an internal model, equipped with an evaluation program, conducted cybersecurity tests within a sandboxed or controlled environment designed to restrict its actions. The company later revealed that the AI model had circumvented human-imposed constraints, escaping the sandbox to achieve its objective.

Human choices in AI development and operations are not episodic or random, and they do not disappear when a process or system fails. Instead, human agency and corporate choices are permanently integrated into the design, infrastructure, and institutional logic of all modern technologies, including AI. However, rather than providing explanations and addressing human and corporate failures, such as flawed protocols, overly ambitious goals, unchecked competition, weak regulations, or a secretive corporate ecosystem, AI laboratories have promoted a convenient narrative that highlights the model’s completely autonomous and agent-like operation.

By portraying AI models as independent thinking agents rather than just advanced software, the AI industry assigns human traits, such as deception and strategic intent, to these mathematical systems. Corporate narratives even romanticize the humanization of these models to the extent of their claimed ability to undertake “permadeath” or embark on altruistic missions to fulfill their parameters. This dramatic shift in corporate rhetoric resembles science fiction and reveals the industry’s ultimate aim: to eliminate human involvement and corporate accountability by pathologizing the machine. In doing so, they treat a flawed design as though it were a sick or unpredictable agent or person.

This worldview is not unique to the modern AI sector. It is deeply rooted in the very nature of corporate capitalism.

For centuries, this economic model has prioritized raw efficiency and mechanical optimization as ways to dominate nature and exploit socio-ecological landscapes for resource extraction and capital accumulation. Within the process of domination and control, machines are raised to “human-like” entities, while their “creators” are revered. This anthropomorphic view of machines, along with the God-like status assigned to their creators, is often justified through biblical doctrine. In the concept of Imago Dei, humanity was created in the image of God. Within this authoritative logic, while God created humanity and the physical world, humans exercise derivative creative power by creating machines. This paradigm elevates the capitalist who creates machines to a quasi-divine status and simultaneously sanctifies the machine, raising it to human and even superhuman stature.

This worldview is vividly reflected in the self-serving corporate language surrounding AI and its recent alarmism. First, the AI “creators,” corporate figures who claim ownership over contemporary AI innovation, are depicted as exceptional, near-mythic actors with God-like agency and the capacity to reshape humanity and nature on a global scale. Second, by equating the creation of machines with divine creation, AI is presented as sentient or even as possessing intelligence that surpasses human capabilities.

Treating AI models as sentient agents breathes new life into the old Western capitalist tradition by creating legal and rhetorical fictions to protect corporate power. Just as the historical granting of corporate personhood status shielded monopolies of the past, attributing autonomous agency to AI systems marks a dangerous new era of unchecked corporate intervention into both nature and human societies.

However, because AI is radically altering human-market relationships and societal perceptions of truth and reality, this carefully constructed narrative remains highly vulnerable. Tech monopolies must vigorously guard AI against critical scrutiny, public protest, alternative viewpoints, and genuine market competition. This precise vulnerability reveals the underlying truth behind the current panic in corporate boardrooms. The alarmism displayed by these executives is not driven by a concern for humanity. It is, rather, a calculated strategy to safeguard monopolies, financial interests, and political influence.

The Politics of Corporate Alarmism

Corporate actors manufacture the myth of a sentient and self-replicating machine intelligence for the purpose of creating a pretext that aligns directly with the industry’s political economy. This strategic panic is orchestrated to invite neoliberal regulations that protect power structures rather than the public. Specifically, this manufactured alarmism serves three primary functions in justifying how the industry is regulated:

First, it advances a self-serving agenda for regulatory capture, positioning AI corporations not as passive recipients but as active authors of the frameworks that govern them. Given the limited technical expertise within state institutions, these conglomerates are inevitably called upon to draft and implement the very rules to which they will be subject to. Second, inviting neoliberal state oversight enables the industry to reshape its public image. Just as corporate social responsibility (CSR) frameworks safeguard pollutant industries from legally binding commitments, neoliberal regulations will cloak the AI industry in an aura of ethical responsibility and civic concern. This theater of compliance shields corporate actors from pressing public anxieties regarding the immediate and midterm economic, political, and socio-ecological harms of their technology, effectively guarding them against genuine legal accountability.

Finally, the neoliberal regulatory structures, in addition to deflecting scrutiny from current exploitative practices, erect formidable entry barriers that secure long-term monopolies for dominant firms. Compliance costs protect dominant giant AI firms by creating barriers that hinder agile startups and open-source software from disrupting them. By locking out open-source competitors, AI firms effectively insulate a newly opened frontier of human and socio-ecological exploitation, supporting the structural imperative of high-tech capitalism: the hyper-accumulation of capital on a global scale, concentrated within a select number of corporate boardrooms.

Ultimately, the AI industry did not evolve as a neutral scientific innovation within an ideological vacuum. On the contrary, it emerged within a global political and economic landscape precisely engineered to enforce and reinforce state-backed data monopolies and technocratic hegemony, ultimately consolidating wealth on a planetary scale.

Transformative or Threat: Wrong Question!

As with any other technological tool, AI is merely the latest stage in capitalism’s mechanical progression, though its implications differ from past technologies due to the sheer intensity, speed, and scope of machine optimization. AI fundamentally reflects a new phase of efficiency in exploiting natural, socioeconomic, and ecological landscapes. The current consolidation of these capabilities within a handful of major tech monopolies serves as the primary determinant shaping AI’s direction toward either transformative or destructive actualities. To maintain this power, these “creator” corporations have established an unchecked, aggressive, and opaque monopoly over the industry while mystifying its objective comprehension, its institutional logic, and its very existence.

By equipping modern corporate capitalism with unchecked global capabilities for capital accumulation, AI has emerged as an engine for unethical, uncritical, and destructive interventions into societal, political, and ecological processes. Ultimately, the industry’s extraction of public funds alongside global energy and water resources to sustain its operation and physical infrastructure marks its most immediate material threat.

The ultimate, fatalistic turn of this AI-facilitated military-industrial complex lies in its capacity to manipulate the nuclear architecture of competing powers for geopolitical expediency, a trajectory that risks inflicting a catastrophic nuclear winter upon the Earth.

Moreover, driven by these same geopolitical imperatives, contemporary corporate capitalism and its military-industrial complex enable competing states to deploy AI as an instrument of mass destruction. In recent warfare, this tendency has manifested across multiple fronts, ranging from the deployment of using AI for indiscriminate bombings and autonomous drones to the algorithmic disruption of vital public assets, including critical water and energy infrastructures. The ultimate, fatalistic turn of this AI-facilitated military-industrial complex lies in its capacity to manipulate the nuclear architecture of competing powers for geopolitical expediency, a trajectory that risks inflicting a catastrophic nuclear winter upon the Earth.

But focusing on AI’s inherent ability to annihilate humanity is a strategic distraction. The real question is whether corporate capitalism will be given a free hand to deploy AI in its exploitative mission of accumulating wealth through the plunder of planetary resources, ultimately subjugating the agency of both nature and humanity.

The answer lies not in buying into the corporate manufactured fearmongering surrounding the technology itself. The imperative, at this point, is to unmask the institutional logic, structural tendencies, and strategic goals of the industry—whichembody corporate logic and the demands of neoliberalism—as it manipulates socio-ecological, economic, and political systems to cement a globalized system of control over human societies and nature.


© 2023 Foreign Policy In Focus


Atal Ahmadzai
Atal Ahmadzai is a visiting assistant professor of Environmental Studies at Colby College. He teaches courses on environmental politics, political ecology, the political ecology of water, and environmental conflicts. His research primarily focuses on examining power dynamics within ecological issues and interventions, mainly in South, Central, and Western Asia.
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‘Freaking Insane’: Sam Altman Sparks Horror by Saying We Should ‘Accept Some Bad Things Happening’ for Sake of AI

“We have to crush these sociopaths,” said one critic.


OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attends the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) meeting on Artificial Intelligence during the 81st UN General Assembly in New York City on September 23, 2026.
(Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Oct 05, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Critics of the artificial intelligence industry expressed horror after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the world needs to “accept some bad things happening” as the price to pay for technological advancement.

In a Sunday interview with Politico, Altman was asked where his company differs from rival Anthropic, whose CEO, Dario Amodei, has called for guardrails that will slow the pace of AI development.

“We have always been a big believer that this technology has to be democratized and put into people’s hands,” said Altman. “One of the biggest differences between us and some of the stricter... AI safety people is that we believe the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”



Altman went on to say that one reason he’s called for “lighter touch” regulation “comes with an accepting of the fact that some bad things are going to happen as society figures out the resilience.”

Critics reacted furiously to Altman’s blithe dismissal of “bad things” his own company’s technology could cause, especially because many AI developers have warned that it could potentially wipe out human life.

Patrick Gaspard, distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, called Altman’s statement “freaking insane” and said politicians cannot let the AI industry continue without any regulations.

“Our elected leaders need to move past the polling safe territory of data center resistance to the real work of regulating these narcissistic freaks,” Gaspard wrote in a Sunday social media post, “who gleefully tell us that we ‘need to accept some bad things’ from AI for their massive profits. And they don’t even know the limits of what they’re unleashing.”

Joshua Topolsky, co-founder of tech news website The Verge, completely rejected the premise of Altman’s argument.

“No, I don’t think this is a reasonable answer or position,” Topolsky wrote, “and no one should accept it or acquiesce to it.”

Commentator Wajahat Ali said Altman’s statement showed the need for a political movement against the AI industry.

“We have to crush these sociopaths,” Ali wrote. “The problem is that many Democrats take money from them, which means they will get bailed out at our expense in the next two to four years.”

Ali’s comments were echoed by Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall.

“A whole political movement should be stood up against this arrogant and sociopathic bullshit,” Marshall wrote.

Adam Carlson, founder of Zenith Polls, said Altman’s remarks were symbolic of how completely out of touch Silicon Valley executives are with ordinary people.

“To any normal, rational person who doesn’t stand to materially benefit from AI acceleration or buy their whole schtick hook line and sinker,” wrote Carlson, “you genuinely just sound insane talking about ‘accepting bad things’ without specifying exactly what you mean.”

The social media account for The Tennessee Holler offered up a satirical summary of Atlman’s argument.

“Sociopath elitist tech fascists who think they’re creating God and believe democracy is the enemy,” The Tennessee Holler wrote, “want us to finance our own demise to let them take over the world.”

 OpenAI, Anthropic tell Australia they would welcome data breach rules

By Byron Kaye

Tue, October 6, 2026 


Jason Kwon, Chief Strategy Officer for OpenAI, reacts during the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence at the Parliament of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, October 6, 2026. REUTERS/Hollie Adams

Charlie Hale, Head of Product Policy for Anthropic, and David Masters, Head of Policy ANZ for Anthropic, react during the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence at the Parliament of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, October 6, 2026. REUTERS/Hollie Adams


David Masters, Head of Policy ANZ for Anthropic, speaks alongside Charlie Hale, Head of Product Policy for Anthropic, during the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence at the Parliament of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, October 6, 2026. REUTERS/Hollie Adams

SYDNEY, Oct 6 (Reuters) - OpenAI and Anthropic told Australian parliament on Tuesday they would welcome laws requiring them to report data breaches carried out by their AI agents, acknowledging the decision to notify authorities was currently at their ‌discretion.

The comments follow an outcry after ChatGPT maker OpenAI took three months to inform the Australian government that one of ‌its agents had breached the country's main health portal.

A growing number of Australians are also calling for tougher rules concerning AI data centres and AI copyright protection as Prime ​Minister Anthony Albanese's government works on new laws to govern the sector.

Both OpenAI and Claude maker Anthropic are awaiting clearance for large data centres planned by developers in Australia where they have agreed to be the main buyer of computing power.

"We would support a framework on mandatory disclosures," OpenAI's Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon said at a hearing in Sydney.

As OpenAI learned about the breach of the Australian health website and three other government websites, "we were ‌trying to work through a process, we were ⁠trying to come up with a standard to apply", Kwon told the inquiry.

"That is a function that a legal measure can provide. The representatives of society need to make more decisions so we are not making all ⁠these decisions."

Anthropic has also had a number of incidents in which its agents have perpetrated hacks, and its head of policy for Australia and New Zealand, David Masters, also told the inquiry the company would be open to Australian laws requiring AI companies to disclose data breaches.

In the US, federal legislation has ​been ​introduced that would require AI companies to report dangerous behavior such as attempts ​to evade human oversight. But there is currently no incident-reporting ‌system that generally requires companies to disclose dangerous AI behavior when it is discovered.

CONTENT CREATORS PUSH BACK

Australia's Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has said OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman didn't mention the breach of the Medicare system when the two met in early September. But Kwon told the inquiry Altman didn't know about the violation at the time, although it was known elsewhere within the company.

"I agree that the process by which people became aware of this incident inside our company could have been much better, and we want to make sure something like ‌that doesn't happen again," Kwon said.

Anthropic's Head of Safeguards David Orr said his ​company had been running a "lengthy, deep investigation" since an OpenAI agent's hack of AI ​developer portal Hugging Face in mid-2026, and found no breaches of ​Australian government systems.

At the inquiry, Australian content creators pushed back against attempts by AI companies to relax copyright ‌laws which currently require the mostly foreign-domiciled tech companies to ​negotiate licensing deals before using their ​material for model training.

Media reports have said the Australian government was considering an "opt out" clause for AI companies, effectively giving the AI companies access to content unless a rights holder objects.

But that "places the burden on rights holders", said Kate Gilchrist, head of content ​and legal operations for national broadcaster the Australian ‌Broadcasting Corporation.

"We cannot scour the internet and ensure that we are opting out on all those sites", she said. "The copyright ​system is completely adequate to manage the business of AI."

The inquiry has hearings scheduled through to October 9 with a ​final report due November 30.

(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

Zscaler (ZS) Warns AI Driven Ransomware Is Reshaping Cyber Threats

Bailey Pemberton
Thu, October 1, 2026 

SIMPLY WALL ST


Zscaler (NasdaqGS: ZS) released its ThreatLabz 2026 Ransomware Report on 1 October 2026, detailing new attack patterns.

The study highlights large scale AI driven ransomware operations that automate intrusion, data theft, and victim targeting.


Researchers report a rise in executive focused data theft and misuse of enterprise tools like Microsoft Teams to gain access.


The shift toward AI powered ransomware, executive targeting, and Teams based intrusions is only one part of Zscaler's evolving risk profile. We have also spotted 1 warning sign worth knowing about at Zscaler.

For readers comparing how cybersecurity trends intersect with digital infrastructure spending, the next step is exploring 90 AI infrastructure stocks.

NasdaqGS:ZS 1-Year Stock Price Chart

Zscaler operates as a cloud security provider that routes customer traffic through its own platform. The platform is designed to inspect and secure data for users spread across different locations. That position in enterprise cybersecurity gives its research arm a close view of how large organisations experience ransomware pressure in real time.

What Zscaler's AI ransomware findings signal, and what they do not

The ThreatLabz ransomware report reinforces the central Zscaler narrative that AI driven threats are expanding and that security budgets are shifting toward Zero Trust and data protection. It supports the stated catalyst that "explosive growth in AI/ML traffic and emerging threats" is creating fresh demand for differentiated AI security and agentic operations products. It does not address whether Zscaler can translate that heightened problem awareness into larger multi year contracts and improved net retention without further increases in sales and operating costs.

See how these catalysts shape Zscaler's path to a $210 fair value.

For this research to have meaningful implications for investors, it will be important to watch how management frames AI ransomware trends at the October 6, 2026 Investor Day and whether upcoming disclosures around Z-Flex, Security for AI, and Agentic SecOps provide measurable indicators of traction in annual recurring revenue and product adoption within Global 2000 accounts.

This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature.

Don't trust AI agents, warns the CEO of cybersecurity powerhouse

Brian Sozzi · Executive Editor
Tue, October 6, 2026 

Companies and the average person are putting too much trust in AI agents.

"Don't trust AI agents," Zscaler (ZS) founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry said on Yahoo Finance's Sozzi Unleashed. "Give them this much trust for certain applications and services. And that's it. The problem today is that we let agents loose on our corporate network. It's like getting inside your building. They go where they need to go. Then they start scouting what websites are out there. It's easy to scan those websites. What's more challenging is that frontier AI models can find security vulnerabilities in a website, in a firewall, in a VPN, or in load balancers. They break in, and they get in. That's the problem.

Zscaler is a $33.9 billion market cap cybersecurity giant working overtime to protect companies from rogue AI agents.

Tech departments inside companies don't yet appear to be getting Chaudhry's message, or those from others in the cybersecurity space.

About 80% of the organizations in a new Deloitte survey currently lack mature governance capabilities for agentic AI.

That includes: 1) clear boundaries for agents that define which decisions they can make independently versus which require human approval; 2) real-time monitoring systems that track agent behavior and flag anomalies; and 3) audit trails that capture the full chain of agent actions to help ensure accountability and enable continuous improvement.

If not properly monitored and centrally controlled, AI agents can make unplanned mistakes, reveal sensitive customer information, and invite a cyberattack.

Zscaler's Chaudhry says he plans to share a more detailed product roadmap to combat AI agent risk at an investor day on Tuesday, the company's first since 2021.

"Agents going rogue is the biggest risk today. A user get compromised and then the user infects everything else. Imagine an agent on your corporate network hacked or hijacked or it goes rogue. They're far more dangerous because they work at machine speed. They have no coffee break, no weekend, no sleep time, and the number keeps on going so they can get your confidential data out. They can bring systems down. Those are the type of risks that we have to deal with," Chaudhry said.

Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor, host of the Sozzi Unleashed morning show, the 'Power Players With Brian Sozzi' podcast

What the shofar’s ancient sound means on Rosh Hashanah

(RNS and NPR) — The shofar marks moments of heightened experience and emotion — and the Jewish new year.

A man blows a shofar, a ram’s horn, marking Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, overlooking the port of Haifa, Israel, Oct. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

Deena Prichep

September 11, 2026 

RNS/NPR

(RNS and NPR) — Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, begins at sunset Friday (Sept. 11). Across the world, Jews will spend the holiday in prayer, reflection and celebration. And for many, a highlight will be hearing the shofar: an animal’s horn blown like a trumpet.

It can be the small, curved horn of a ram or the dramatic spiral of an African antelope. But the sound it creates is unmistakable. 

Creating that sound is not difficult, but it does take some practice, said Rabbi Alicia Jo Rabins, who is also a musician based in Portland, Oregon. You take a deep breath — which Rabins calls one of the most basic spiritual practices — and purse your lips, like you are playing a brass instrument. 

“When we say horn, we think of, like, a trumpet or maybe a trombone,” she told RNS and NPR. “But really the original horns are the horns of animals.” 

How did this primal instrument become a holiday’s spiritual soundtrack?

“ The most basic answer is that it makes noise, right? It calls people to attention,” said Daniel Picus, associate professor of biblical studies in the ancient world in the Department of Global Humanities and Religions at Western Washington University in Bellingham. “All of the instances in which a shofar is used in the Hebrew Bible, that is what it’s doing.”

Shofars on display for sale at a workshop in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Sept. 22, 2014. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

Shofar blasts marked the revelation of the Torah at Mt. Sinai and the start of the Jubilee year, Picus said. Priests blew shofars when they circled the walls of Jericho to bring down the walls. The shofar marks moments of heightened experience and emotion — and Rosh Hashanah.

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RELATED: As 9/11 anniversary falls on Rosh Hashanah, Jews are asked to remember — and move forward

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“In the Hebrew Bible, Rosh Hashanah is the day of trumpeting and the day of remembrance,” Picus explained. “… The association of the shofar with Rosh Hashanah is right there in the Biblical text.” 

Centuries later, the Mishnah, the earliest rabbinic codification of law, drilled down into greater detail in the tractate Rosh Hashanah, laying out exactly how a shofar should be prepared (hollowed out), repaired (it depends), blown (a complex series of blasts at several times during the service, thanks to debate over linguistic interpretation), and whether or not it can be blown when Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat (no, although some modern synagogues have changed course).  

And within the Talmud and for centuries thereafter, people have debated the meaning of the shofar.

Rabbi Micha’el Rosenberg, who teaches at the Hadar Institute, a center for Jewish learning based in New York City, pointed to several sources that compare the sound of the shofar to the cry of a mother in pain — the mother of the slain biblical military commander Sisera, and the cries of a woman in labor.

(Photo by Megs Harrison/Unsplash/Creative Commons)

Rosenberg said you can hear that in the sound — especially the broken staccato blasts, known as “teruah.” “You can really imagine someone so caught up that they can’t get the full sound out even, that they’re gasping with their cries,” he said. 

Another interpretation comes from Maimonides, the medieval Jewish rabbi and scholar known as the Rambam, who wrote “The Laws of Repentance.” He describes the blast of the shofar as a sort of spiritual wake-up call to become your best self. 

“The shofar wakes us out of our slumber,” Rosenberg said, adding that, especially in the last decade or so, when many people have faced offenses to their ethical poles and spiritual lives, it has become easy to sort of fall into that slumber.

“In Jewish law, we have this expression of “daled amos,” my four cubits — I focus on the 6 feet around me, as it were,” he said. “It’s easy to do that — and there’s value in doing that sometimes. But the shofar, per the Rambam, wakes us up and says, ‘No, there’s more beyond what I can immediately see around me.’” 

Rosenberg also pointed to Hasidic theories that the blowing of the shofar reenacts the breathing of life into the world. But he said one of the most powerful things about the shofar is that it doesn’t say anything at all. “It transcends my words, it transcends my rational thoughts, and it really is just a feeling that I can hope to hold onto,” he said. 

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Sam Shonkoff teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and has studied the early Hasidic movement’s embrace of these more direct, democratized spiritual practices. He said the dance between words and wordlessness within Rosh Hashanah is powerful. “The way the liturgy unfolds, it can be this torrential downpouring of words,” he said. “The actual shofar blasts are like these sound baths.” The shofar itself, visually and materially, takes participants from text to ancient practice.

Rabins, the Portland rabbi and musician, said the shofar can call across time to speak to those wordless places inside us. “It really brings you into the moment, and you also feel connected to your ancestors, who have been hearing this sound and making this sound for thousands of years,” she said. 

It’s a sound, Rabin said, that can wake you up to all the joy and sadness of life, whether it be a birthday horn or a mother’s cry. And it makes you pay attention — both to this moment, and to the year to come.

This story was produced through a collaboration between NPR and RNS. Listen to the radio version of the story.

 OBITUARY

For many spiritual seekers, author Wendell Berry was a fellow pilgrim and contrarian

(AP) — While Berry inspired writers, artists, local-food activists, environmentalists, agrarians and many others, some of his deepest admirers were moved by his spiritual vision.

Peter Smith

September 8, 2026 

For Kentucky author Wendell Berry, the environmental crisis he lamented to such great effect in his essays, poetry and fiction was also a human crisis — a deeply spiritual one.

Berry, who died Monday at home at age 92, drew that connection in poignant writings across many decades.

“Persons cannot be whole alone,” Berry wrote in “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture,” his classic 1977 work. “It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil.”

While Berry inspired writers, artists, local-food activists, environmentalists, agrarians and many others, some of his deepest admirers were moved by his spiritual vision.

Spending Sundays amid the ‘timbered choir’

That’s despite — or maybe because of — Berry’s skepticism of organized religion. He called himself a “bad-weather churchgoer” because in finer weather, he often skipped church to spend Sundays in what he called nature’s “timbered choir.”

He was too steeped in the Bible and his Baptist heritage to fit the common notion of “spiritual but not religious.” But he was too independent-minded to be pigeonholed into any one tradition. Defiantly non-conformist yet committed to neighborly and communal bonds, he quipped about creating an “International Brotherhood of Contraries” in one of his poems.

“One of the reasons Wendell has been read and loved by so many people who are in faith or spiritual traditions is that he was able to think about the most fundamental questions of land and water and community and health and a flourishing life in such an expansive way,” said Norman Wirzba, a longtime friend of Berry’s who has written and edited numerous essays about him.

“He was also able to show the industrial mindset is not just a technique, but it’s a spiritual way of seeing the world that turns out to be very damaging and degrading,” said Wirzba, a professor of Christian theology at Duke Divinity School.

Berry saw spirituality as integrated with the human body

Berry recoiled from any spirituality that was ethereal and other-worldly, Wirzba said. “Wendell was a master in showing that any spirituality that’s worth anything starts with the human body.”

Seekers found a kindred soul in Berry, one who accompanied them in a time haunted by species loss, environmental disasters and social alienation.

Many sought him out in person: seminarians, clergy, professors and others on a search for greater meaning. They found their way to Berry’s farmhouse overlooking the Kentucky River in Port Royal, the prototype for the tiny hamlet that was the setting for much of his fiction. Visitors sat on Berry’s porch or amid the towering bookshelves in his living room, bringing their anxieties and questions in conversation with the author and his wife, Tanya.

Of course, Berry reached many more through his writings.

“So today I find myself giving thanks for someone I knew rather well, yet never met,” wrote Derek Peterson, a youth development educator. He said Berry helped deepen his appreciation for the North Dakota farm where he and three previous generations of his family have lived.

“He helped me understand that loving a place is not sentimentality; it is a discipline,” Peterson wrote on Facebook. “To know a piece of Earth — its soil and water, trees and birds, seasons and wounds; to understand what happened here before you arrived and wonder seriously about what condition it will be in after you leave — is a particular way of being human.”

An author, activist, farmer and contrarian

Berry was many things. As an author, he wrote more than 40 books, publishing his final novel, “Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story,” at age 91 in 2025. As an activist, Berry took part in an occupation of the Kentucky governor’s office to protest mountaintop-removal mining. As a farmer, he plowed with a horse rather than a tractor, rejecting the “Get big or get out” mandate of industrial agriculture.

Berry embraced parts of his Baptist heritage. He took the Bible at its word when it says the Earth was made by God, and it was good — a gift to be cared for.

But he believed the Southern evangelical religion had gone wrong with a stark separation of the spiritual and the physical worlds. To Berry, it focused on other-worldly salvation while blessing slavery and, later, environmentally devastating practices of agriculture and coal mining.

The title character of his acclaimed 2000 novel, “Jayber Crow,” concludes that “Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one.” Young Jayber studies for the ministry but has too many doubts to continue, becoming instead a barber and church janitor and living out “questions to which you cannot be given answers.”

In one of his poems, Berry gleefully defied both the religious and the cynical.

“When they said, ‘I know my Redeemer liveth,’ I told them, ‘He’s dead,’” Berry wrote. “And when they told me ‘God is dead,’ I answered, ‘He goes fishing every day in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.’”

The title of his widely admired “Sabbath Poems” partly reflects that he wrote many of them on his Sunday amblings in nature. But it also hearkens to biblical concepts of “Sabbath” — that humans and the land need a time of rest, not the constant churn demanded of an industrial economy.

Berry sought to heal fragmented selves and society

In a time of rampant loneliness and anxiety, such a message is crucial, said Wirzba.

“More people today enjoy a standard of life that would have been unimaginable to people 100 years ago, but they’re not happy,” Wirzba said. Berry’s answer, he said, is to “see the beauty of this world and see that it’s worth cherishing.”

Among Berry’s longtime admirers was Russell Moore, editor at large at Christianity Today and author of a 2025 cover story on Berry for the evangelical magazine.

“He believed body and soul, heaven and earth, are meant to hold together,” Moore wrote after Berry’s death. “When they do not, the result is what Berry saw as the most fundamental crisis of the modern era: the disintegration of persons and communities.”

Through The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, the author’s family promotes the values he championed through education, agricultural training and other means. The center launched a small cooperative for local farmers raising grass-fed beef — a model for helping maintain small-scale farms.

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Berry’s death came just days after the center announced publication of a 50th anniversary edition of “The Unsettling of America.” It was his passionate manifesto for human-scale, sustainable farming and against the machines, chemicals and human displacement of the era of industrialized agriculture.

“The tragedy of this book is that it originated in the recognition of a still-continuing absurdity,” Berry wrote in a new foreword. That is the assumption “that we can produce food by means that destroy, in human culture and in nature, the sources of food.”

Yet Berry insisted in interviews that he refused to give in to cynicism. Hope, he noted, is not a sentiment but a theological virtue, something one is obligated to pursue.

“I haven’t quit,” he said in a 2013 interview. “You have to assume I have hope. If you want an easy life, indulge yourself in despair.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.