It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
A Year After Trump Package, Report Shows Rich ‘Got a Handout, and Working Families Got the Bill’
“I’ve never seen a more dangerous and purposeful attempt to make people sick and hungry,” said one Pennsylvania state lawmaker.
A banner with a portrait of US President Donald Trump is displayed on the front US Department of Labor Frances Perkins Building which is lined with American flags for the 250th anniversary celebration on July 2, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images)
Last week marked the first anniversary of President Donald Trump signing H.R. 1, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
But a new report from the progressive advocacy group Defend America Action, obtained exclusively by Common Dreams, demonstrates that while the bill has indeed been beautiful for the richest households, it has been anything but for working-class Americans.
“Republicans sacrificed the American people’s financial future, healthcare, and food security to pay for massive tax breaks for big corporations and the ultrawealthy,” the report said. “The richest people on the planet got a handout, and working families got the bill.”
According to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), the richest 1% of Americans will see $117 billion in net tax cuts in 2026, an average windfall of roughly $66,000 each and more than the entire bottom 60% will receive combined.
At the same time, the law contained the largest cuts to federal healthcare funding in US history, slashing over $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) over the next decade.
The report found that as of March 2026, less than a year after the bill passed, enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) had already fallen by 3.8 million.
And after Republicans allowed ACA marketplace subsidies to expire, insurance premiums are projected to increase 114% on average, leading one in five enrollees—over 4.2 million people—to drop their coverage entirely.
Additionally, 11 million low-income Americans no longer receive zero-dollar premiums through the marketplace, while deductibles rose an average of 37% for those buying insurance on their own.
In total, more than 8 million people are estimated to have lost insurance coverage due to cuts to these programs, according to Protect Our Care. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that as many as 15 million could lose insurance by 2034 as a result of the law and other policy changes over the next decade.
US Rep. Dina Titus (D) said that the cuts have hit her state of Nevada especially hard, as many people work in the service industry and don’t receive employer-sponsored insurance.
“An estimated 100,000 Nevadans are impacted by this, [could be] kicked off Medicaid, including 22,000 just in my one congressional district, and it’s children, it’s seniors, and it’s people with disabilities who are going to be impacted so directly.”
“The failure to continue the [ACA] tax credits... has knocked more people off,” she said. “Then people who do have it pay higher rates to cover that. So it doesn’t just impact the people who are on Obamacare. It impacts everybody.”
According to an analysis by Protect Our Care, more than 1,000 hospitals, nursing homes, maternity wards, and other critical care facilities around the country have either shut down, are at risk of closing, or have cut essential services since the law went into place.
“In my more than 25 years as a practicing physician and now a legislator for the last four years, I’ve never seen a more dangerous and purposeful attempt to make people sick and hungry,” said Pennsylvania state Rep. Arvind Venkat (D-30), an emergency physician who represents the suburbs outside Pittsburgh.
“There are a number of hospitals in Pennsylvania that have closed or are under threat to close as a result of the devastation that’s being caused by this legislation,” he said.
After $187 billion was cut from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), more than 4 million low-income people—10 % of enrollees—no longer receive food assistance, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Millions more are expected to also lose benefits as stringent new work requirements go into effect. This includes 3 million people aged 18-24, according to a report from the Urban Institute, which noted that young adults often have greater difficulty finding stable jobs that allow them to meet the work requirements.
An analysis from ProPublica last month found that across just 12 states that break down data based on age, at least 776,000 children are no longer appearing on SNAP rolls.
“I think when we’re talking about SNAP, we should start from the fact that the average benefit per person is [less than] $3 per meal,” said Jared Bernstein, who served as the chair of the United States Council of Economic Advisers under former President Joe Biden.
“Nobody’s getting rich off of SNAP,” he said. “What’s happening is people, including a lot of children, are getting fed.”
“There’s a long line of careful research showing long-term benefits for not just the beneficiaries themselves, but for the broader society,” he said, noting that receiving benefits early in life is associated with “better academic performance, long-run health, educational attainment, and economic self-sufficiency.”
The report from Defend America Action also said the Trump budget law squashed “an unprecedented American clean energy and manufacturing boom” that began during the Biden years, which created hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The law eliminated clean energy tax credits and led hundreds of projects to be canceled. Citing an analysis by Climate Power, the report said that over 140,000 clean energy jobs have been lost, are at risk, or have been delayed due to H.R. 1, stemming from 382 canceled or delayed projects that represented $69 billion in investment.
This has also contributed to the $92 billion spike in energy bills since Trump took office, the report said. Those canceled projects could have powered more than 17 million homes.
The law also killed the $7,500 electric vehicle (EV) tax credit, which has locked consumers into driving gas-powered cars that cost more to power, especially as Trump’s war with Iran has sent gas prices soaring.
Bernstein noted that EV sales “fell off a cliff” after the tax credits were canceled.
“I can’t begin to describe how shortsighted this is,” he said. “Not just in terms of the environment, but also in terms of the US ever having a chance to capture market share in what I believe already is a do-or-die product development for the auto sector.”
He noted that the US abandonment of clean energy, even as its use grows worldwide, has led China to dominate the market.
“This isn’t China just eating our lunch,” Bernstein said. “This is us serving our lunch to them.”
Defend America Action’s report notes that at the time of its passage, H.R. 1 was the most unpopular piece of legislation to pass through Congress since at least 1990, with just 31% approving and 55% disapproving, according to an average of four major polls.
Just months before the midterm elections, the bill remains equally unpopular, with only 33% of Americans saying they favor it and 48% opposing it, according to a recent survey by Navigator Research.
Titus told Common Dreams that one year ago, her colleagues in the GOP were very excited to pass H.R. 1.
Now, she said, “They don’t really talk about it.”
“They always are up for cutting programs,” Titus said. “They call it fraud, waste, and abuse, but it’s not. It’s benefits that people needed.”
“I think as you get closer to the election, there will be more concern about it,” Titus said. “You know they cleverly made some of these cuts not go into effect until after the election, so they had to have been aware that they weren’t very popular.”
“I think we need to get the message out as much and as often as we can,” she said, “and that’s been kind of focused on affordability because all these different programs that we mentioned tie together.”
“It’s not just one little hit,” Titus said. “It’s across-the-board hits.”
In ‘Death Knell for America’s Wildlife,’ Trump Admin Guts Habitat Protections for Endangered Species
“If animals don’t have a place to live, they can’t live,” said one critic. An endangered loggerhead sea turtle is seen laying eggs on the beach in Antalya, Turkiye, on May 18, 2026. (Photo by Tahsin Ceylan/Anadolu via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday paved the way for letting US corporations destroy the habitats of endangered species by rescinding a longtime interpretation of the Endangered Species Act.
As reported by The New York Times, the Interior Department and the Commerce Department announced that they were narrowing the law’s definition of what constitutes harming endangered species.
Whereas the law has for decades been interpreted as protecting endangered animals’ habitats from significant “modification or degradation,” the administration said that offenders would have to directly injure or kill an endangered animal to be considered in violation of the law.
“The change could open the door for fossil fuel companies, agricultural interests, land developers, and others,” wrote the Times, “to disturb or even destroy the habitats of vulnerable species.”
The Endangered Species Act has been interpreted as protecting animals’ habitats for decades, and that interpretation upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1995.
Environmental advocates expressed horror in response to the rule change, which they said would put endangered species at unprecedented risk.
Kristen Boyles, attorney for Earthjustice, vowed that the administration would face legal challenges for its rule change, which she said would jeopardize endangered animals’ ability to “raise their young, or search for food.”
“Let’s be clear: There is no support for the Trump Administration’s rule—no scientific support, no legal support, no public support,” Boyles said. “We will see the Trump Administration in court.”
Ben Greuel, wildlife campaign manager at the Sierra Club, called the rule changed “a direct attack on the foundation of the Endangered Species Act” that, if kept in place, would put species “on a path to extinction.”
“This rule ignores that reality in an unlawful attempt to open the door for corporate polluters to degrade vitally important habitats, wildlife be damned,” Greuel emphasized. “The Endangered Species Act is a bedrock law that must be followed.”
Tara Zuardo, a senior campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, pointed out that “habitat destruction is the number one threat to endangered species,” while calling the Trump administration’s new policy “a death knell for America’s wildlife.”
“If animals don’t have a place to live, they can’t live,” Zuardo said. “Spotted owls, Atlantic salmon, Florida panthers, and thousands of other species need protections for the wild places where they make their homes.”
Andrew Bowman, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, accused the Trump administration of embracing an “erroneous and nonsensical interpretation” of the Endangered Species Act that he vowed to challenge in court.
“We intend to fight back with the full force of the law,” said Bowman, “to defeat this attack and innumerable others by the administration on the statutes and regulations that protect America’s cherished wildlife.”
Op-Ed: The shallow approach to automation vs jobs is proving labour and tech experts right, but it’s messy
Investors are awaiting the release of key US jobs data this week
– Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP SCOTT OLSON
Even the theory of automation vs jobs isn’t stacking up. Layoffs and subsequent rehires are making news daily. Frontline managers are finding out that automation creates more unpaid non-core business work in just finding fixes. The simplest description of the hype for the transition to automation is that it’s absurd. Experts in technologies have been saying endlessly that automation simply can’t and shouldn’t do many things on its own.
Labour experts agree. Many critics have said that even the idea that automation instantly replaces jobs simply proves that management knows less than nothing about those jobs. They often only see reports, not the realities of the work.
Carnegie nailed some issues regarding the perceptions of automation very effectively. The fear of replacement could now be called a global psychosis, particularly at the white-collar level. Nor is the role of AI well understood in any practical context regarding actual work roles.
There’s an emerging view of AI as “drop-in remote workers”, according to Carnegie, for example. Given the ongoing somewhat hysterical and hyper-expensive prejudice against human remote workers, it’s interesting to watch this logic suffocate itself in contradictory arguments against itself.
This is a big unsolved cultural problem and the problem, not the solution, is making the decisions on the fly. This myopic worldview clearly lacks practical comprehension, and “ideological executive blindness” based on unrealised and often poorly defined perceived savings is making it worse.
Are people cheaper and better?
The baseline theory that automation saves money by reducing the cost of wages is so wrong and so far off target that it’s excruciatingly absurd. It could also be the exact opposite, and brutally expensive.
To start with:
How is it cheaper to adopt a whole class of major technologies at a much higher initial cost than the fixed costs of existing jobs?
Human jobs can be designed to deliver values on a clear cost-to-outlay basis. Automation starts as a cost, and you have to derive value out of it.
Humans don’t need the sort of 24/7 unquantifiable expenses that automation imposes. Technologies in the workplace inevitably need costly assessments, maintenance, upgrades, at-call SaaS, and eventually replacement in relatively short cycles.
Technologies become redundant faster than people, particularly in AI.
Then there’s fitting automation into that tactless thing called business reality. Most business tech is a patchwork of various vintages of technology, safe or unsafe to use in the modern business environment. Fraud alone is becoming a tech sector in its own right, let alone spreadsheet blunders.
AI makes and often can’t fix its own mistakes, especially when those mistakes show up on balance sheets and require more outlay. Those mistakes could well be based on situations and issues any experienced person would automatically avoid. Expertise is a real value, not a perceived value.
The net takeaway from this elegant if verbose presentation of the glaringly obvious is that “automation uber alles” is definitely no way to run a hot dog stand. The lack of depth in due diligence evaluation of automation is downright dangerous.
Finding the right fits for real-world applications
Every business, every market, every customer base, every job, and every workplace is different. There simply can’t be a One Size Fits All in automation at any level.
Productivity is a case in point in matching jobs to people. Let’s start with HR. Trying to fit a human being into a job isn’t usual practice. It’s more likely the person will be stuffed into a job with varying degrees of good fit or otherwise. High staff turnover means a lot of bad fits. You couldn’t call it productive in any sense.
There’s now even an AI tool for predicting staff resignations. This somewhat ironic development reflects a need to manage experience, expertise, handling tasks at all levels, and the most basic production fluencies in the workplace. In-house learned capabilities are crucial to smooth workflows.
These almost invisible skill sets dictate real productivity throughout the entire food chain of doing business. Turnover loses those skills and their productive values.
So, losing people is likely to be a net own goal, particularly when you lose all your in-house productive fluencies. Again, automation doesn’t solve these problems. It makes them harder to manage. Good fits for people are the only way any business has ever worked.
It’s not automation or jobs. It’s both.
The emerging picture is very different from the “jobs vs automation” scenario. According to MIT, positive impacts are emerging even in the much-misunderstood world of coding time usage and productivity. Reduced burnout was one of the findings. It also strongly refutes the idea of cost-cutting, particularly for junior-level staff. Training was actually enhanced using generative AI, adding skill values.
The clearest indicators are that automation is reconfiguring work, not merely automating it. The short-term cost-based thinking just doesn’t work. An isolating effect of AI was also seen as a problem, reducing essential collaboration.
There’s another horizon here, and it’s the real story that hasn’t been written yet. Jobs aren’t static things. Tasks change, objectives change, and priorities change. Unknown roles and whole new environments are likely to be the new frontier of work.
Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
AI Is Turbocharging Bosses’ Efforts to Spy on Their Workers
State legislatures are scrambling to combat abuses associated with the rising AI-driven surveillance of workers.
OpenAI's attorney William Savitt walks to a press conference outside the courthouse at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building on May 5, 2026, in Oakland, California.Benjamin Fanjoy / Getty Images
In March, The Lever reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had hired the infamous software company Palantir to implement its controversial return-to-office directive, warning that the contract could bring surveillance technology — commonly referred to as “Bossware” — to the federal workforce.
Days later, those suspicions were confirmed. A published disclosure reveals that the company will “design, configure, deploy, and manage a secure, user-friendly tool to track USDA employees’ return to the office.”
“AI has supercharged surveillance,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told Truthout. “People can be monitored as they never have in the past and companies are rushing to exploit that.”
AI Has Supercharged Workplace Surveillance
Labor advocates have been warning about the threat of workplace spying for years, as many companies have long-established policies of tracking mouse movement and keystroke frequency to maximize productivity. In some cases, the tactics are much more extreme than computer monitoring. In a 2015 Harper’s Magazine investigation, Esther Kaplan revealed that UPS workers were speeding, leaving the bulkhead doors on their trucks open, and misdelivering packages in an attempt to meet quotas enforced through workplace monitoring.
Kaplan quotes a consultant who pushed the technology that UPS adopted: “The important thing is where the power lies,” they told attendees at a conference. “Drivers might not be happy being measured, but in the end they will yield.”
That same year, The Atlantic ran a piece by law professor Frank Pasquale on workplace surveillance titled “The Other Big Brother,” in which he called for legislation to prevent the spread of such spying.
“States and the federal government need to step up their monitoring of employer violations of privacy,” he wrote. “Until they start drawing red lines, the push by bosses to monitor every aspect of workers’ lives — online and off, at work or home — will only gather momentum.”
Over the past decade, such surveillance has only increased, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many companies sought to keep tabs on their workers amid office closures. A 2022 investigation by The New York Times found that 8 out of the 10 largest private U.S. employers track the productivity of their workers.
“The real question is which companies are going to use it and when, and which companies are going to become irrelevant?” Tommy Weir, CEO of Enaible, a company that uses AI to track worker “productivity scores,” told the paper.
However, the legislative resistance that Pasquale referenced has also materialized, as labor advocates and progressive lawmakers pushed bills regulating electronic workplace monitoring across multiple states.
In a recent interview with Semafor, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler highlighted the importance of state legislatures in the battle to regulate AI. “We think that’s really where the game is, because there’s not much happening at the federal level with the tech bros in charge of the White House,” she explained.
State Legislatures’ Efforts to Regulate AI
This summer, Maine’s LD 61 — “An Act to Regulate Employer Surveillance to Protect Workers” — will kick in. The new law prohibits employers from conducting workplace surveillance without prior notice, surveilling employees’ homes and vehicles, and installing data‑collection or tracking apps on personal phones or laptops.
The Maine bill builds on existing workplace surveillance laws that have been established in New York, Connecticut, and Delaware, but as the management-side law firm Fisher Phillips notes in an explainer to employers, the laws in those states focus primarily on notice requirements while the Maine bill “reflects a broader privacy-focused approach that not only mandates disclosure but also limits certain monitoring practices outright.”
A number of bills connected to electronic monitoring are currently active in California’s legislature, including SB 947, or the No Robo Bosses Act of 2026, which was introduced by Democratic State Sen. Jerry McNerney, co-founder of the state’s Artificial Intelligence Caucus. The bill would prohibit companies from relying exclusively on automated decision-making systems to terminate or discipline workers. It would also block employers from using automated decision-making systems to run predictive behavior analysis on its workers.
“Right now, there are absolutely no restrictions on how employers can use artificial intelligence to arbitrarily discipline and fire their workers … We need stronger guardrails to make sure there is human review and oversight of any decision made by a machine that impacts a worker’s job and paycheck.”
SB 947 is effectively a reboot of SB 7, which was also introduced by McNerney. That bill cleared the House and Senate but was ultimately vetoed by California governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom, who claimed that it was too broad. McNerney says the new version of the bill addresses Newsom’s concerns.
The effort is backed by the California Federation of Labor Unions, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO.
“Right now, there are absolutely no restrictions on how employers can use artificial intelligence to arbitrarily discipline and fire their workers. Employers are devastating workers’ livelihoods and taking no responsibility for the callous decisions of this unchecked technology,” said the group’s president, Lorena Gonzalez, in a statement. “This is unacceptable. We need stronger guardrails to make sure there is human review and oversight of any decision made by a machine that impacts a worker’s job and paycheck.”
State lawmakers have also introduced bills like AB 1331, which would prohibit employers from using surveilling workers during off-duty hours, and AB 1898, which would require companies to inform workers in writing when AI tools are being used to make employment-related decisions.
In Massachusetts, the AFL-CIO has gotten behind the FAIR Act, short for “Fostering Artificial Intelligence Responsibility.” The proposed legislation, which was reported out of committee and is currently stuck in the committee on House Ways and Means, follows the same path as the Maine bill, as it would block companies from relying solely on automated decision-making systems to make employment decisions, as well as restrict the collection of employee data. It would also allow workers to refuse directives from AI systems if they believe those directives would have a negative impact on their work.
“Working people aren’t buying Big Tech’s promise of a shiny AI future that will solve all of our problems. While technological advances can improve our lives in many ways, we need real guardrails around the use of AI and other technology on the job so that working people aren’t left in the dust,” Chrissy Lynch, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO and co-chair of the AFL-CIO State Federations AI Taskforce, told Truthout. “The FAIR Act prioritizes data privacy and human autonomy so we can capitalize on the beneficial aspects of this technology without compromising fundamental worker rights.”
“Working people aren’t buying Big Tech’s promise of a shiny AI future that will solve all of our problems.”
In January 2026, Illinois’s HB 3773 took effect. The bill, which was signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker during the summer of 2024, amends the state’s Human Rights Act to directly regulate AI and prohibits companies from using it any manner that might enable illegal discrimination against an employee. It also requires workers and applicants to be informed if the company uses AI technology to make employment decisions. In 2021, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a similar bill into law, requiring private employers to inform workers of any potential electronic surveillance.
While many state governments have successfully passed commonsense worker protections, a deeper regulation of AI has proved politically fraught.
A clear example of this challenge can be found in Colorado, where the state legislature passed the first comprehensive bill governing AI in 2024. After it was signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis, a two-year battle ensued, as the local tech industry lobbied for the legislation to be watered down.
In the end, the legislation’s opponents prevailed. The bill was supposed to require companies to disclose how they use AI technology to make decisions about things like hiring and loan approvals but, under the revised version, they only have to reveal whether or not they use AI to make such decisions.
“These black boxes are deciding who gets hired, who gets housing, who gets to go to their dream school,” Democratic State Rep. Javier Mabrey told The Colorado Sun. “I find it incredibly alarming that it took six months to get to this bill — a bill that does nowhere near enough to protect the people of Colorado when AI is making decisions that could make or break our lives.”
One-third of the sampled workplace monitoring platforms track the worker’s precise location, on some occasions when the employee is clocked out.
Similar political fights will inevitably take shape across multiple states, but the situation is also becoming more dire. A recent investigation of nine widely used workplace monitoring platforms found that all of them share worker data with third-party companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Meta. It also revealed that one-third of the sampled workplace monitoring platforms track the worker’s precise location, on some occasions when the employee is clocked out.
“Our findings show workplace monitoring platforms are repeating the same failures we’ve seen in consumer surveillance — often with even fewer protections for the people harmed,” said Stephanie Nguyen, senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Center for Law and the Economy, one of the authors of the report, in a statement. “Policymakers, lawmakers and regulators need to put hard limits on what can be collected, how long it can be kept, and who it can be shared with.”
Jay Stanley told Truthout that such regulations are simply commonsense protocols that everyone should support.
“These are just basic rules and I think everyone should agree they’re fair,” he told Truthout. “Don’t turn workplaces into hellish atmospheres of pervasive surveillance.”
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Cutting-edge AI models have drawn concern over their ability to identify software vulnerabilities – Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP JUSTIN SULLIVAN
ChatGPT maker OpenAI said its latest powerful artificial intelligence model series will be released to the public on Thursday, as the US government reportedly approved a broader launch.
The company’s new GPT-5.6 offerings and other cutting-edge AI models, including Anthropic’s Mythos series, have drawn concern over their supposedly unprecedented ability to identify weaknesses in code that hackers can exploit.
That has raised national security fears, and OpenAI said in late June it had shared preview access to GPT-5.6 with a limited group of trusted US-based partners at Washington’s request.
Large language models are the technology that underpins chatbots and many other AI tools, with their capacity to crunch through colossal amounts of digital data.
The GPT-5.6 series has three tiers: Sol, the company’s new flagship model; Terra, a mid-range version for everyday work; and Luna, a fast, low-cost option.
“GPT-5.6 Sol, along with Terra and Luna, will launch publicly this Thursday. We’re expanding preview access globally now,” OpenAI said in an X post Tuesday, without giving further details.
US news outlet Axios reported, citing a source familiar with the situation, that the Trump administration had given the company the green light for a broad launch of GPT-5.6, following technical testing and meetings between the company and government officials.
AFP has contacted OpenAI, the White House and the US Department of Commerce for comment on the Axios report.
It follows a similar story at OpenAI’s archrival Anthropic, the startup behind the Claude chatbot.
Last week, Anthropic said it would begin restoring access to its most powerful AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after Washington lifted a restriction on where they could be released.
Before Mythos’s arrival, President Donald Trump’s administration wanted fewer rules on AI companies, not more, hoping that would help the US beat China in the AI race.
The government is now drawing up criteria for which AI models would fall under new security restrictions, in accordance with an executive order from the White House.
OpenAI said in June that “we don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default” as it “keeps the best tools” from users, businesses and others who need them.
The company added that it was working with Washington “to develop the cyber Executive Order framework and a repeatable process for future model releases.”
Once broadly available, Terra will be priced at half the cost of its predecessor GPT-5.5, OpenAI has said, as it seeks to lock in customers amid fierce competition from Anthropic and Google.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have filed confidential IPO documents with US regulators and are targeting public listings at valuations approaching $1 trillion, raising the commercial stakes of the AI arms race between them.
Thursday, July 09, 2026
Veterans, Military Members, and Families Marched Against Fascism and War on July 4
In the largest veterans’ protest since the Vietnam era, 500 veterans, active-duty service members, and military families marched in Philadelphia against ICE, the occupation of American cities, the war on Iran, and threats to deploy troops at polling sites in November. Hundreds of vets and military families marched through Philadelphia on the 250th anniversary of the United States, along with the People’s Parade, calling for common sense reforms on July 4, 2026 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Lisa Lake/Getty Images for About Face: Veterans Against The War)
On the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, a coalition of more than 500 veterans, active-duty military members, and military families gathered in the birthplace of the nation to reject what they called the “Trump administration’s fascist vision for the country’s future.”
“We cannot continue the next 250 years as we have the last 250,” proclaimed About Face organizing director Rebecca Roberts, a 12-year veteran of the New Jersey National Guard who resigned her commission in protest of US foreign policy.
“Our neighbors are being kidnapped by ICE and put into concentration camps; VA, Medicaid, and SNAP—vital services—are being cut to instead fund war crimes abroad, and for troops to occupy cities like DC, Memphis, and New Orleans,” said Roberts.
“So who is with me?” asked Roberts, as she led attendees in a call-and-response, asking marchers to raise their fists if they demand:No Troops and No ICE in the Streets or at the Ballot Box.
An End to Endless Wars and War Crimes.
Divestment From War and Funding Communities at Home.
Roberts noted the march returned to the same ground where veterans and military families gathered 50 years ago, led by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, to demand a country that took care of them as they suffered and healed from the wounds of war.
The Veterans Against Fascism coalition was the front contingent of the larger Peoples’ Parade, comprised of local Philadelphia groups and national groups such as the American Friends Service Committee, AFL-CIO Philadelphia Council, Juntos, and No ICE Philly. Over 1,000 people marched on July 4 in what the Peoples’ Parade called “an act of decisive opposition to the current state of American politics and material conditions, including mass deportation, forced displacement, climate crisis, and international war.”
Michael McPhearson, executive director of Veterans For Peace, invoked the Declaration of Independence signed 250 years ago in the same city: On this anniversary, hundreds of veterans and military families have come to sound an alarm for democracy, as our national leaders ignore these basic truths, trample our rights, and treat us as subjects of the billionaire class, not as self-governing equals.
McPhearson reminded service members of “your duty to refuse illegal orders” and called on the public “to honor our service not with ‘thank yous’ but by organizing and acting to protect our elections and stop fascism.” Largest Gathering of Service Members for Anti-War Protest since Vietnam
Hundreds of vets and military families marched through Philadelphia on the 250th anniversary of the United States, along with the People’s Parade, calling for common sense reforms on July 4, 2026 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Lisa Lake/Getty Images for About Face: Veterans Against The War)
Among the marchers were at least a dozen currently-serving members of the US military, part of the Service Members’ Anti-War Contingent. Cam White of the Center on Conscience and War, marching alongside active-duty members of the Army, Marines, Air Force, and Navy, said: There are more active duty troops at this protest than there have been in generations, because people in uniform today are waking up. Many service members are facing the greatest crisis of conscience that they have ever dealt with in their lives.
White reminded attendees that “service members do not take an oath to a president or a government; they take an oath to the Constitution. Troops have a duty to disobey unlawful orders.”
Maxine Rebeles, a Navy veteran and member of About Face and Common Defense, tied the march to her work with the No Border Wall Coalition and Frontera Federation in her hometown of Laredo, Texas, describing efforts to stop a border wall and river buoy obstructions that endanger riverfront communities’ only water source: We’re watching militarized law enforcement like ICE and Border Patrol harass, intimidate, and outright murder people who were standing up for their neighbors. This is an alarm bell for the country. And we don’t intend to be quiet about it.
“The future does not belong to billionaires, it does not belong to bulldozers, and it does not belong to fear,” she said. “It belongs to our children, it belongs to our communities, and it belongs to us.”
Johnny Odom, a retired US Army Sergeant First Class, combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and member of Military Families Speak Out, spoke as the father of a service member currently deployed to Jordan since the start of the war with Iran.
“Today I stand here before all of you as a father... to denounce this illegal and unjustified war against the people of Iran and the mis-utilization of American forces without congressional approval and, most important, the people’s approval,” said Odom.
“In my multiple deployments, I honestly can’t tell you why we were in Iraq or Afghanistan or what we achieved other than violence and trauma. Now my son is repeating the cycle in Jordan, and it tears me up inside to think he is in harm’s way for no good reason.”
Odom called on veterans and military families to help “restore the standards and traditions that make this country truly unique,” warning: We are at a crossroads. We can choose to build and fight for the country that we all deserve, or we can let a wealthy few steer us down a path of ruin.
Another participant, Savanna Rostad of Milwaukee, was full of praise for the marchers: A key word I would use to define the July 4 Veterans Against Fascism march in Philadelphia is “care.” From the medic team who worked tirelessly in the heat to distribute water to the crowd, to the leaders who centered our collective voice around a message of unity and hope, everyone demonstrated care for each other and for our collective future. Witnessing this community in action redefined what nationhood means to me. I now feel a sense of meaning and belonging. Gerry Condon Gerry Condon is a Vietnam-era veteran and former president of Veterans For Peace. Full Bio >
Jernej Furman from Slovenia, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Everyone—you, me, politicians, Wall Street, tech people, philosophers—is a little bit scared and dazzled by AI. This is natural. Nobody quite knows if it will kill humanity or cure cancer, destroy all jobs or create infinite prosperity, be a pivotal moment of planetary history or a glorified office assistant. All of the above? Finding out is the fun part!
Unfortunately, this very normal uncertainty about the technological future of AI has bled into some unnecessary political uncertainty about how to approach AI regulation. Some of this, of course, is the usual consequence of corporate influence-buying to insulate themselves from all restraint. But another factor is that the flashy unpredictability of AI seems to be convincing political leaders and a concerned public alike that our current tool set is not up to the task—that this exotic new industry will require an equally exotic new regulatory approach.
This is untrue. It is also damaging the public interest, because it causes a delay in getting some solid regulations on the books. That delay is not only wildly unsafe, but also allows AI companies to race ahead with little oversight, laying the groundwork for the classic “Well, we’ve already come this far, so we can’t go back” style of corporate regulation-dodging.
Perhaps the best example of this somewhat confused approach to AI oversight is Bernie Sanders’ proposal for the federal government to take a 50% stake in the biggest AI companies, and use the proceeds to create a sovereign wealth fund. I have written before about why this is not the best idea. I apologize for returning to the same topic again, but, shockingly, my last piece did not cause Bernie to drop his plan and rally to my side. It feels worth one more stab at clarity on this issue. If progressives genuinely want to get ahead of the dangerous consequences of unchecked AI—and I know that they do—it’s important for all of us to know that everything we need to do so is right there waiting for us.
In my lifetime, we have already witnessed the full arc of a powerful new industry growing up and taking over the world with insufficient regulation. That would be the tech industry. The failure of the US government and of organized labor to get ahead of the tech industry’s wild growth has produced: A crisis of economic inequality; an outright oligarchy with centibillionaire tech executives at the top of pyramid; a near-total absence of labor unions in the world’s richest industry; and massive psychological and societal damage as a result of unregulated social media and algorithms assaulting the overmatched human attention span. Collectively, it is safe to say that the way that the tech industry’s growth has played out this century is not something we want to repeat.
AI, for all of its novelty, is the latest iteration of the tech industry. It has the same explosive economic growth, creeping disruption of existing industries, and grandiose claims to being different from all that has come before. Now is the time for us to recognize that we have three tried and true tools at our disposal to prevent AI from becoming a socioeconomic rerun of the devastating example of the tech industry.
Taxes
Taxes. Yes! The government can levy taxes on companies. Are you afraid that unaccountable and soulless corporations are growing too powerful because they are making too much money? Tax them. This leaves them with less money. It leaves their potentially oligarchical owners with less money, too. Great.
Compare “raising corporate taxes” to “having the federal government take 50% of the equity of select large AI companies.” The first option has a number of advantages over the second. For one thing, taxes fall on all companies across the board, or of a certain size. There is no need to guess at which companies will be successful, or for the government to risk locking in the current dominance of a handful of companies by becoming shareholders in them. The companies can do what they do, and their position in the markets can rise and fall as it will. Don’t want ultra-powerful AI companies coming to dominate the economy? Tax their money away. Don’t want AI company CEOs becoming trillionaires? Tax their money away. Don’t want corrupt Trumpian administrations using their stakes in corporations as a slush fund? Don’t want to put the American public in the absurd position of saying, “Oh no, we must bail out OpenAI because we are all shareholders in it, and we want it to do well?” Don’t make the American public shareholders in these companies, then! Just tax them. And if you want to make a particular outcome like, for example, “automating all the customer service jobs” less economically attractive, you can tax that specific thing as well. It is a simpler, more direct, and more powerful way to accomplish what Bernie is trying to accomplish, without the potential pitfalls.
But, uh oh—what if taxes are not enough to stop these AI companies from doing bad horrible profitable things?
Laws
Laws. Yes! The government can pass laws that prevent the AI companies from doing things. Don’t want them releasing dangerous new models without government oversight? Don’t want them doing autonomous killer drones? Want to make sure there is disclosure if AI is used in media or entertainment? Want to keep AI slop out of public education? Pass a law. Taxes can change the economic incentive for companies to do things, and laws can stop them from doing things at all. Together, taxes and laws are what “regulation” means. I will not go on and on about this, because it is pretty straightforward. It is familiar. It is a regime that already exists.
When you realize that the federal government has the ability to levy taxes and pass laws, it becomes clear how misguided and unnecessary the idea of becoming an equity shareholder in AI companies is. If the government wants half of Anthropic’s money, it does not need to hold stock in the company; it can just tax it away. If the government wants to stop OpenAI from doing something bad, it does not need to go into the boardroom and say “you better listen to me because I’m a big shareholder!” No; it simply needs to pass a law. The federal government is not a person that needs to build up a big war chest of stock in order to throw its weight around with corporate America. The government is an entity charged with protecting the public good, that sits above corporations, and is empowered to take their money and set rules governing their conduct as it sees fit.
My argument is not that it is politically easy to regulate the AI industry; it is that we should pursue a method of regulation that is the best and most effective and has the least downsides. That method is taxes and laws. It is not “having the government go into the AI business.”
Unions
Unions. Yes! Labor unions. One woefully underdiscussed reason why the tech industry has created such profound economic inequality and has operated with such grotesque impunity is that virtually none of the major tech companies are unionized. This fact has allowed the company owners to hoover up bazillions in profits that would have otherwise been shared widely with hundreds of thousands of employees. It has allowed people like Mark Zuckerberg to pursue decisions that range from wasteful (the Metaverse) to morally horrific (enabling ethnic violence) with little effective internal pushback. The government clearly had no ability to or interest in preventing these and other bad tech company actions. Do you know what could have, though? A union.
Unions create a power center inside of companies that is separate from both the government and the management of those companies. Unions are not perfect, but they are the single most effective check on corporate power when they are strong. Had the tech industry been widely unionized, America’s economic inequality today would be drastically less, and the power of tech billionaires would be vastly reduced. Also, the labor movement itself, which has been weakening since the mid-20th century, would be significantly more influential both politically and economically, which would change our entire political landscape and could well have prevented the Trump era from happening altogether. It’s a big deal. I won’t go on about this forever, but there’s a book you can read that expands this argument.
Recognizing the potential of unions inside the major AI companies to mitigate some of the worst outcomes of the industry’s evolution, we can make reforms that make it easier to organize and sustain unions a bedrock part of our overall approach to AI regulation. If we really think it’s important, we can even pursue mandatory measures like reserving a significant chunk of board seats for worker representatives at these companies, as Germany does. It’s ridiculous for the federal government to be involved in boardroom agitation—but it is incredibly healthy for workers to do so.
AI… so new! So powerful! So unpredictable! However shall we regulate it, make it safe, channel it in the best interests of humanity? My friends, we can do it. In the most boring ways possible. In ways that already have centuries-long track records of being effective. We tax the companies. We pass laws to regulate their conduct. And we empower the workers at the companies to unionize and act as a check on the power of the cutthroat bosses. This stuff works. My plea—to Bernie, to progressives, to everyone with common sense who is nervous about how the AI industry is going to fuck us all up—is for us to focus on these powerful tools that we already have, rather than wasting more time brainstorming needlessly elaborate new tactics.
This article was originally published by How Things Work; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
Over 40% of people are limiting AI use, as popularity starts to wane
People are increasingly choosing to limit or reject the use of AI tools, according to a new report published today by the Digital Futures Institute at King’s College London and Responsible AI UK.
The AI: the growing UK pushback reportreveals 42% of individuals deliberately limit the amount of AI they use, largely due by privacy and security concerns, including some of those who are positive about AI.
The report, which surveyed 2055 adults living in the UK by Deltapoll in June 2026, also shows that 70% think it would be difficult or impossible for them to avoid being exposed to AI even if they wanted to, raising questions about how people can meaningfully consent to the use of AI.
Other key findings from the report:
People are becoming more cautious and negative about AI. Between October 2023* and June 2026, the share of UK adults who think AI has more risks than benefits has risen from 48% to 52%, while those who see more benefits than risks has fallen from 38% to 34%.
While people are actively choosing to limit their use of AI tools, access to and awareness of AI do not automatically translate into regular use. When people choose not to use AI, it isn’t because they lack the skills.
The most common reason chosen for limiting use is concern about data privacy, security and compliance (29%), and the second most common reason is a preference to keep doing work the way it is currently done (22%).
Gen Z are more likely to use AI regularly than Millennials and Boomers, but they also feel AI has more risks than benefits and are more likely to limit their use of it. When asked to choose words to describe how they feel about AI, Millennials and Gen Z express themselves as ‘confident’ and ‘excited’, but Boomers are more likely to feel ‘angry’ and ‘nervous’.
When asked to rate their feelings about public figures, places and groups, people were more positive about the NHS (63%) and wind turbines (51%) than they were about AI (29%).
Professor Kate Devlin, Chair-Director of the Digital Futures Institute at King’s College London, co-investigator on the RAi UK programme and co-author said: “Anti-AI sentiment seems to be on the rise, and we have been exploring people’s attitudes towards the technology. People need meaningful ways to consent to the use of AI, namely the ability to choose when it is applied, how it interacts with them, and how they can opt out where it matters.
“Employers and tech companies should be mindful that people are anxious about using AI tools, because they are worried it may compromise security and privacy. Our findings also show public attitudes are not split between a clear ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ AI. Many individuals hold both opinions at once. People acknowledge potential uses and benefits while simultaneously worrying about possible downsides.”
Professor Jack Stilgoe, Professor of Science and Technology Policy at UCL, Deputy Chair for Ecosystem Co-ordination Pillar at RAi UK and co-author stated: “The companies selling us new technology often assume that people most familiar with it will like it most.
“Our findings show that this isn’t true. People are becoming more concerned about AI over time, and even the people who use it most are ambivalent.”
The U.S. and China are Quietly Building an AI Cold Peace
When Donald Trump and Xi Jinping walked side by side through the Temple of Heaven in May, the headlines went to Taiwan, to tariffs, to Nvidia’s chips. The thing that may prove to matter most barely registered. Only afterward, almost in passing, did mention it to reporters on Air Force One: he and Xi had talked about “possibly working together” on guardrails for artificial intelligence – and, he acknowledged when pressed, on the kinds of risks neither side may be able to contain once the technology is built.
That conversation, however elliptical, marks a genuine inflection point. Not because it produced an agreement, but because it revealed something that the “AI arms race” narrative has obscured: both Washington and Beijing are more uncertain about what they’ve built than about what the other side has built.
Beijing’s 2-trillion-yuan blueprint to build a nationwide AI infrastructure network, mandating 80 percent reliance on domestic suppliers like Huawei, looks at first like a declaration of technological total war – a calculated squeeze on Nvidia and AMD. The framing practically writes itself. Rival superpowers. Digital hegemony. A new Cold War fought in silicon rather than steel.
But the architecture of the plan tells a different story. The emphasis on domestic supply chains is not an offensive posture. It is a bunker. China is not building toward dominance so much as insulating itself against dependency – hedging against the possibility that the technology it is racing to develop might be turned against it, or might simply get away from it. That is a different kind of fear than we are used to hearing about.
The same anxiety is audible in Washington, if you know where to listen. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent – whose portfolio is the financial system – has warned that frontier models could be turned to malicious ends by nonstate actors, and has pressed for a US-China protocol to guard against it. The Pentagon’s guidance on military AI was notable less for what it proposed than for what it insisted on preserving: human beings in the decision loop, especially where nuclear command and control is concerned. Chinese and American officials, it turns out, are unnerved by the same scenario – a crisis in which neither side is confident it can tell whether an autonomous system has made a decision, or simply made an error.
This convergence does not mean the two countries trust each other. They don’t. Chip export controls remain in place. Chinese labs are advancing rapidly on models designed to route around American restrictions. The competition is real, and in many domains it is intensifying.
Call it a Cold Peace. It is not a doctrine. It is not even an agreement. It is a posture – maintained not by trust but by mutual anxiety about what comes next if restraint breaks down.
The Cold Peace has already begun reshaping markets and industries, often invisibly. Venture capital firms in Silicon Valley are quietly recalibrating portfolios to hedge against regulatory slowdown, betting that governments will impose friction on frontier model deployment before the technology fully matures. In Beijing and Shenzhen, compliance reviews have lengthened development cycles for autonomous systems – not because regulators are opposed to the technology, but because no one is confident yet about who bears liability when an algorithm fails at scale. These are not dramatic reversals. They are adjustments, the kind that accumulate before anyone has named what is happening.
The rare earth ban on ten American companies announced in late June – targeting MP Materials and USA Rare Earth alongside US defense contractors – illustrates precisely this dynamic. Analysts called it symbolic retaliation for the Pentagon’s own blacklisting of Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Baidu. But “symbolic” is doing a lot of work. The move came just five weeks after the Temple of Heaven summit, and it exposed the fragility of whatever goodwill was generated there. China controls over 90 percent of rare earth refining – the same materials that go into the data center hardware, autonomous systems, and defense electronics at the center of the AI competition. The Cold Peace does not prevent these moves. It only ensures they are calibrated carefully enough not to tip into something worse. That is a thin margin.
The deeper irony is that the AI race may be the first great-power competition in modern history where the rivals are more uncertain about the systems they’ve built than about the intentions of the other side. The nuclear age produced a similar reckoning, eventually – Eisenhower’s warning about the danger of a garrison state, Kennedy’s confrontation with the logic of mutual assured destruction. But that reckoning took decades and several near-catastrophes to arrive at. The AI reckoning is arriving faster, partly because the technology moves faster, and partly because its failure modes are less predictable than a missile trajectory.
The question now is whether fear is a durable enough foundation for stability. History suggests it is not – or not for long. The absence of escalation today is not a guarantee of equilibrium tomorrow. A single cyberattack convincingly attributed to an AI system, a market crash triggered by algorithmic mispricing, or a military incident involving autonomous weapons could unravel the current equilibrium with a speed that traditional diplomatic channels are not built to handle.
What would make this moment more durable is not a grand bargain – neither side is ready for that – but the slow accumulation of precedents: shared definitions of what constitutes a destabilizing AI capability, back-channel communication protocols for autonomous military incidents, agreed norms around AI in nuclear command systems. These are not romantic ambitions. They are the minimum infrastructure for managing a technology neither side fully understands.
Trump and Xi did not produce any of that in Beijing. But they did, apparently, produce something: Trump’s acknowledgment, however offhand, that the two might “work together” on AI guardrails – a concession that the machines they are building are outpacing their ability to govern them, and that some informal floor on recklessness is in both their interests. In the history of great-power competition, that is not nothing.
The danger is in mistaking the floor for a ceiling.Email
Imran Khalid is a geostrategic analyst and columnist on international affairs. He is a senior fellow at Foreign Policy In Focus
Who Are the Biggest AI Villains? An Industry Watchdog Has Made a List
“The federal government shares the tech industry’s vision for AI to be embedded everywhere, displacing human thought and labor, and deepening the strains on the environment and climate.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks at the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC, on July 22, 2025. (Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
With backlash against the artificial intelligence industry growing throughout the US, one government watchdog has created a database to help keep tabs on the people it describes as the biggest “AI villains.”
The Revolving Door Project on Thursday launched a webpage that tracks the actions of major players in the AI industry and their ties to President Donald Trump’s administration.
“The Trump administration is all in on artificial intelligence,” the Revolving Door Project explained. “The federal government shares the tech industry’s vision for AI to be embedded everywhere, displacing human thought and labor, and deepening the strains on the environment and climate.”
The watchdog added that the government is pursuing an “AI first” policy “despite little proof that its value for the American public is anywhere close to commensurate with its costs.”
While there are several well known names on the Revolving Door Project’s list—including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison—it also shines a light on more obscure figures including Chris Lehane, director of government affairs at OpenAI, and Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI.
Lehane is notable due to his long connections to Democratic Party politics, including a stint as a special assistant counsel in the Clinton administration and work as deputy campaign manager for former Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. Since then, he has mostly done public relations work for Silicon Valley firms, including Airbnb and Coinbase.
According to The Revolving Door Project, Lehane during the second Trump administration has been a big proponent of an AI regulatory framework that he describes as “reverse federalism” that aims to shut down individual states’ powers to put guardrails on the industry.
Brockman, meanwhile, is much more traditionally aligned with the GOP, as he and his wife were the largest donors to the MAGA, Inc. super PAC in 2025, and he is described by the watchdog as “a regular attendee at White House events throughout Trump’s second term.”
This coziness has helped Brockman push for policies beneficial to the AI industry such as fast-tracking data center construction and the aforementioned “reverse federalism” regulatory framework.
The Revolving Door Project also pays special attention to Marc Andreesen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), whose allies the watchdog describes as “deeply entrenched” in the Trump administration.
Among the Andreesen acolytes to have worked in the Trump are Sriram Krishnan, a former general partner at a16z who served as a senior AI policy advisor; Peter Bowman-Davis, former engineering fellow at a16z who served as acting chief AI officer at the Department of Health and Human Services; and Scott Kupor, former managing partner at a16z who serves as director of the Office of Personnel Management.
Andreesen himself serves as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which the Revolving Door Project describes as a “vessel... to freely lobby on behalf of the tech industry’s interests without the need for lobbyist intermediaries—especially at meetings with the president and his closest advisors.”
In a newsletter explaining the purpose of the tracker, the Revolving Door Project’s Fletcher Calcagno wrote that it was needed to help understand why the Trump administration so far has been willing to “accept Big Tech’s maximally irresponsible recommendations” for AI regulation.
.‘Drop Project Nimbus!’: Protester of Amazon Genocide Complicity Put in Chokehold at ‘AI for Good’ Summit
“Is this the future you want to see? Where AI executives pretend like they have the answers, that they are doing good, and you’re giving them a stage?”
Amazon and Google workers with the No Tech for Apartheid movement and supporters hold a sign saying “Drop Project Nimbus” during a protest outside the Mind the Tech Conference in New York City on March 4, 2024. (Photo by No Tech for Apartheid/Medium)
A protester was violently removed from the United NationsAI for Good Global Summit in Geneva on Wednesday after Palestine defenders disrupted a presentation by a senior Amazon executive to denounce Big Tech’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Pro-Palestine activists linked to the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement are protesting the UN International Telecommunications Union (ITU) conference over its partnerships with tech titans, especially Amazon and Google. In 2021, the pair signed a $1.2 billion contract for Project Nimbus, which provides cloud services to the Israeli government and military.
Under the deal, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud provide the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli government agencies with cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence tools, and data storage. The contract prohibits Google or Amazon from refusing service to Israeli government, military, or intelligence agencies.
On Wednesday, activists interrupted a summit speech by Amazon vice president and chief technology officer (CTO) Werner Vogels, with protesters taking the stage—two of them holding a large sign reading “No Tech for Apartheid”—as others in the audience chanted “Drop Project Nimbus!”
“You are making Project Nimbus, a project of billions of dollars that Amazon is investing so that Israel has free access to your servers,” the man who upstaged Vogels said as the Amazon CTO stood by with his hands on his hips. “You are investing billions in that. Your technology, Project Nimbus, develops Lavender, develops the software Where’s Daddy, that actively tracks, using AI, people in Palestine, and when they come back, they kill them together with their families.”
“And you know this... and you’re making millions out of this,” the protester continued. “You’re sitting here as if you’re trying to do good, as if you’re trying to be for the good of AI. What do you have to say for yourself? How do you sleep at night?”
“Maybe that’s why you’re looking so panicked. Maybe that’s why you cannot even stand on this stage anymore and look at these people, because you know exactly what your technology is being used for,” the activist said after Vogels stepped off the stage.
“They know exactly where their profits are coming from, and they continue anyway,” the protester added, drawing loud cheers.
As the activists holding the sign were removed from the stage, the man speaking gestured to Vogels and others and said: “You should be stopping them! You should be stopping those criminals right here! Why are you facilitating genocide? Why are you continuing to be complicit in the deaths of innocent people three years on?”
Security personnel then removed the man from the stage as he said: “No violence. No violence.”
“Why are you putting me in a chokehold?” he asked as he was violently ejected. “Is this the future you want to see?... Where AI executives pretend like they have the answers, like they are doing good, and you’re giving them a stage? Shame on you, Amazon! Drop Project Nimbus!”
Activists with the BDS movement and other groups also protested at last year’s AI for Good summit, which came on the heels of a report by UN independent Palestine expert Francesca Albanesedetailing corporate complicity and direct participation in Israeli crimes against Palestinians and specifically naming dozens of companies, including Amazon and Google parent company Alphabet.
More than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded, including thousands of people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of the flattened Gaza Strip, since Israel launched its US-backed war on October 7, 2023, when Hamas led the deadliest attack on Israel in the country’s 78-year history. Around 2 million Palestinians have been forcibly displaced, while Israel’s “complete siege” of Gaza fueled famine and disease.
The Geneva summit follows the creation earlier this month of the ITU’s AI for Good Global Commission, which is co-chaired by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Rwandan President Paul Kagame, whose repressive 32-year rule has been criticized for persistent human rights abuses. Both Amazon and Google are represented on the commission.
‘The Creepiest Possible Path’: Meta Letting Facebook, Instagram Use Your Personal Posts for AI Image Generation “People should not wake up to discover their face has become raw material for someone else’s AI experiment. This is another invasion of consumers’ privacy.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shows a prototype of computer glasses that can display digital objects in transparent lenses at the Meta Connect developers conference in Menlo Park, California on September 25, 2024. (Photo: Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Meta, the parent company of social networks including Facebook and Instagram, described its new Muse Image model as a “creative partner that knows your world, making it easy to turn your ideas into high-quality visuals that you can download and share anywhere, including directly to your feed, story, or chat.”
In its announcement, Meta explained how users can either alter existing images or create new ones from scratch using AI prompts.
“You can describe what you want in simple, conversational language, and Meta AI handles the rest thanks to Muse Image,” the company said. “Ask it to mock up an image of you in front of a historical landmark, cleanly erase a photobomber from the background of a shot, or write a custom prompt to build a functional QR code.”
However, tech publication The Verge on Tuesday flagged a potentially troublesome feature that could compromise user privacy, noting that “users can... mention other Instagram accounts in Muse Image prompts,” which will let the AI model “incorporate their likeness into its output.”
According to a Tuesday report from Wired, the feature will let users snatch photos from any public Instagram and Facebook accounts unless those accounts’ owners specifically choose to opt out of the system.
What’s more, opting out of the system is not a simple one-click operation.
“If you want to avoid these AI generations of your Instagram posts without switching your account to private, you’ll have to dig into the app’s settings,” reported Wired. “Open the Instagram app, tap your profile, and then tap the three lines in the top-right corner of the screen. Then, scroll down to the Sharing and reuse tab. Here is where you should see a section labeled ‘Allow people to use your content on Instagram and with AI features on Meta,’ with a toggle for Posts and one for Reels.”
JB Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, blasted Meta for being careless with its users’ privacy by making them jump through hoops to stop others from swiping their photos.
“Meta has once again chosen the creepiest possible path,” said Branch. “People should not wake up to discover their face has become raw material for someone else’s AI experiment. This is another invasion of consumers’ privacy. Instead of asking for meaningful consent, Meta quietly defaults users into the system and buries the opt-out in account settings.”
Branch added that while Meta had a long history of violating user privacy, forcing them to opt out of its new AI image generation model “crosses what should be a bright line.”
“If our faces can be repurposed for AI simply because we posted a public photo, then very little remains off limits,” Branch emphasized. “Congress should establish clear privacy protections that require affirmative consent before companies can use a person’s image or likeness for AI products.”
UN Creates ‘AI for Good’ Commission—Full of Big Tech Execs
The commission’s upcoming first meeting will focus on “strengthening AI infrastructure, accelerating AI’s impact on health, education, food security, and disaster response, and ensuring trust and safety,” said its CEO co-chair.
The CEO of the software company Salesforce, Marc Benioff, attends the 55th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on January 23, 2025. (Photo by Halil Sagirkaya/Anadolu via Getty Images)
A week after United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called onartificial intelligence companies to “come clean” about the full costs of power-sucking data centers, and as a UN panel on Wednesday released a report detailing the risks and impacts of AI, Axios revealed the creation of a related commission that’s full of Big Tech executives.
“The UN and its International Telecommunication Union (ITU) are convening the AI for Good Global Commission, which will hold its first meeting on July 8 in Geneva, Switzerland,” according to the outlet. It will be co-chaired by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Rwandan President Paul Kagame, with other tech and policy leaders joining as members.
So far, Axios reported, they include ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Estonian President Alar Karis, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez, Microsoft president Brad Smith, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, and AI and tech policymakers from Kazakhstan, Namibia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore.
“AI is the most profound technological transition in history. And our values have to guide every step, because responsibility is the core of AI ethics,” Benioff said. The commission will bring together “the people who build AI, deploy it, shape policy, and represent communities.”
He added that “our inaugural meeting will focus on where this group is uniquely positioned to act together: strengthening AI infrastructure, accelerating AI’s impact on health, education, food security, and disaster response, and ensuring trust and safety.”
However, given recent polls showing that the public has limited confidence in large technology companies, opposes constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, is wary of AI’s impact on daily life, and has concerns about politicians having a “cozy relationship” with Big Tech, the commission may be met with skepticism or even backlash.
Established with a UN resolution last August, the panel is the first global scientific body on AI—and, as Guterres said in a statement about its new report, “the panel is intended to help the world separate fact from fakes, and science from slop.”
“We are looking to them to provide an authoritative reference point at a moment when reliable, unbiased understanding of AI has never been more critical,” the UN chief explained. “I am pleased to say that they have delivered a down payment on that commitment—in record time.”
The panel’s co-chair, Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, noted that “AI capabilities are outpacing both scientific understanding and governments’ ability to adapt. With growing evidence of deceptive AI behavior, science currently cannot guarantee that as capabilities continue to increase, AI will not cause catastrophic harm, either on its own or due to malicious users.”
“To act effectively, global policymakers must understand these systems,” he asserted. “This panel provides exactly that: a rigorous, shared scientific foundation to guide our collective way forward.”
The report discusses AI’s recent advances and expected trajectories; societal applications, from agriculture to education to healthcare; economic implications; security and environmental concerns; impacts on democracy, human rights, and information; potential harms to child safety and culture; and governance of the rapidly developing technology.
“The technology is transformative, but if the world keeps moving along this trajectory, humanity will fail to realize the gains it promises. The risks—to societies, to security, and to our species—are too high, and the forces driving AI forward are not the forces that will deliver its benefits,” said Maria Ressa, a panel’s co-chair and Nobel Peace Prize-winning Filipino-American journalist.
Guterres, whose term ends this year, similarly stressed the need for urgent action on a global scale. He said that the “single lesson” he wanted to highlight from the multifaceted report is that “the more AI advances without shared rules, the less say governments and people will have in the outcome. So my message to governments is simple: Do not wait.”
“Next week in Geneva, the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance will begin to turn science into shared action—with every nation at the same table,” he said. “I look forward to joining member states there to help carry this work forward. And soon, I will set out proposals to help countries build the capacity to adequately deal with this technology—and share in its rewards.”
Guterres’ Wednesday comments came after he publicly took aim at artificial intelligence companies last week, proposing the AI Environmental Transparency Initiative during London Climate Action Week, as the second heatwave in as many months scorched the United Kingdom and various other European countries, killing at least hundreds of people.
“I am calling on every major AI company to measure and publicly disclose the full environmental impact of its systems—carbon, water, and land footprints—and to commit to power every data center with renewable energy by 2030,” he declared. “No more hidden costs. No more shifting the burden onto those least able to bear it.”
AI system developed by UC Irvine physicists helps explain why neutrinos have mass
Innovation allows researchers to explore uncharted areas of particle physics theory
Irvine, Calif., July 9, 2026 —Physicists at the University of California, Irvine have developed an artificial intelligence system that can autonomously design theoretical physics models, a task traditionally carried out by human theorists. The approach allows researchers to explore large, uncharted areas of particle physics theory, helping identify promising new explanations for the behavior of neutrinos.
AMBer uses reinforcement learning, a form of artificial intelligence that learns through trial and error rather than by following predefined instructions. As it explores possible particle physics theories, the system evaluates its own choices and improves over time.
“Reinforcement learning is different from other kinds of machine learning, in which models predict labels or find patterns in data,” Rudolph said. “AMBer’s RL framework allows it to learn about the space of theoretical models as it explores, effectively creating its own training data as it searches for promising models.”
The system constructs particle physics models by selecting mathematical symmetry groups, determining which particles to include and assigning how those particles behave under the chosen symmetries. Each proposed model is evaluated based on how well it matches experimental data while minimizing the number of adjustable parameters, a key measure of a theory’s predictive power.
The researchers tested AMBer on well-studied classes of neutrino theories and demonstrated that it could reproduce known results. They then applied the system to previously unexplored mathematical frameworks, identifying new candidate models that may merit further investigation.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles with extremely small but non-zero mass – a property not explained by the Standard Model of particle physics. Developing theories that explain neutrino mass remains one of the field’s major challenges.
The researchers emphasized that the system is designed to assist, not replace, human physicists by narrowing vast theory spaces down to the most promising candidates.
“AMBer functions as a filter, giving human physicists a better-informed starting point from which to study more complex behavior of neutrino models,” Knapp-Perez said.
Additional collaborators include Max Fieg, a former UC Irvine doctoral student now a postdoctoral fellow at Fermilab; Aishik Ghosh, a former UC Irvine postdoctoral scholar now a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Daniel Whiteson, UC Irvine professor of physics, who supervised the research. Jason Baretz, UC Irvine doctoral student in Whiteson’s group, also contributed to the research.
This research used computing resources from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. Funding was provided in part by the National Science Foundation, UC-MEXUS-CONACyT and the Department of Energy’s Office of High Energy Physics.
About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UC Irvine is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UC Irvine has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UC Irvine, visit www.uci.edu.
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Researchers at Stanford University have announced the debut of Biomni – an AI-powered multi-skilled biomedical research agent. Biomni is no mere chatbot. It is a full-fledged “co-scientist” capable of designing and developing complex research workflows, said Jure Leskovec, the Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor and professor of computer science in the School of Engineering and senior author of the paper introducing Biomni in the journal Science.
“If you think of an agent as a carpenter, a carpenter without tools is just a carpenter who can talk,” Leskovec said, explaining what sets Biomni apart from popular generative AI chatbots. “With Biomni, we give the carpenter a set of tools, so it can build.”
Born for impact
Biomni was born from the notion that, when working with an AI agent, a scientist should be able to describe a research problem in simple, natural language. With that in mind, the researchers designed Biomni to read the literature, form hypotheses, choose datasets and
tools, write code, interpret results, and suggest next-stage experiments in a complete research workflow.
“Biomni is able to understand a simple question like, ‘Why are these patients responding differently to the drug?’” explained Kexin Huang, a former doctoral student in Leskovec’s lab who recently earned his PhD and now heads a startup to bring this technology to market. “Then it digs in, doing a lot of the scientific legwork.”
The researchers have chosen biomedical sciences for its potential to improve the lives of everyday people. From basic understanding of life to new cures for myriad diseases, scientific breakthroughs in biomedical research cannot come fast enough.
In a real-world example, one Biomni user uploaded more than 450 files of continuous glucose monitoring, food intake, and physical activity data and asked a simple question: “Analyze this data, find interesting and plausible hypotheses.” In just 40 minutes, Biomni cleaned and unified the data, generated visualizations, and identified patterns relating food intake and body temperature. Leskovec estimates that work would have taken 60 or more hours for a human to complete.
Biomni offers one more advantage the chatbots can’t claim: It provides full citations and tracking of its work. In its traceability, the researchers argue, Biomni makes the science more rigorous and more reproducible.
Innovation apace
Biomni is specifically trained in biomedical sciences. It incorporates the breadth of full-text, publicly available papers, code, and data stored on bioRxiv, a service for prepublishing early versions of promising scientific findings, to identify common software, tools, and databases that are used in biomedical research. Biomni layers in 150 specialized biomedical tools, 105 software packages, and 59 databases spanning all 25 biomedical subdomains defined by bioRxiv, ranging from genetics to neurology.
Biomni speeds the process of scientific ideation and innovation. Leskovec explained there is an inverse relationship between scientific information and the pace of discovery. As the volume of knowledge, data, and tools has grown, innovation has slowed.
The reason for that slowdown is simple. Behind every breakthrough lies years of study that all begin with a hypothesis. Even just developing a hypothesis requires substantial investment from scientists – reading literature, ingesting and homogenizing datasets, writing code, and looking for unexplored patterns that then become the basis for groundbreaking work. This process can take weeks or even months.
“The hurdle in biomedical science is not intelligence or ideas; it is mechanics,” Leskovec emphasized. “It’s this laborious stuff that slows innovation. Biomni can do this work in minutes.”
Human in the loop
Leskovec and Huang are quick to point out that Biomni will not replace humans, but it frees them to concentrate on the value of the scientist – ideation and judgment. While Biomni can synthesize vast amounts of information and data very quickly and is adept at pattern recognition, the choice to pursue a scientific trajectory demands human experience and reasoning.
“And it always will,” said Huang. “This is not about machines taking over science, but more about machines becoming a powerful new partner to augment human researchers. With Biomni, scientists have a fast and tireless collaborator that empowers them to focus on the important work of science.”
A prototype Biomni is already in use by more than 10,000 labs in academia and industry, making it the most widely used AI co-scientist system in biomedicine.
“Biomni is my first research project that has gained wide use by real biologists,” Huang said. “To have that impact on how biologists are doing their work has been rewarding. I look forward to seeing where Biomni goes from here.”
Contributing authors include: graduate students Serena Zhang, Ryan Li and Gavin Li; postdoctoral scholars Hanchen Wang, Yusuf Roohani, Yuanhao Qu, Junze Zhang, Xin Zhou, Yingzhou Lu and Di Yin; visiting Professor Xin Zhou; Michael Snyder, the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Genetics in the School of Medicine (Stanford Medicine); Le Cong, associate professor of pathology and of genetics in Stanford Medicine; research engineer Shruti Marwaha; genetic counselor Jennefer N. Carter; professor Matthew Wheeler, associate professor of medicine (cardiovascular medicine) in Stanford Medicine; and professor Jonathan A. Bernstein, professor of pediatrics (genetics) in Stanford Medicine. Researchers at the University of Washington, the Arc Institute, Genentech, Princeton University, and the University of San Francisco also contributed.
Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation, Stanford Data Science Applications, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Amazon, Genentech, GSK, Hitachi, and SAP.
In experiments in which physicians made decisions about treating hypothetical patients, the physicians tended to trust incorrect advice presented as being generated by artificial intelligence (AI), even after given the opportunity to notice that patient recovery data contradicted the recommendations. Aranzazu Vinas of the University of the Basque Country, Spain, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Digital Health.
AI systems can help physicians categorize patients according to their different care needs, such as whether a patient is more or less likely to benefit from a certain treatment. Since these systems are not perfect, they are meant to be used as suggestions, with potential errors caught and corrected by physicians.
Prior research has shown that, in general, people struggle to notice and correct mistakes made by AI. To explore how this challenge may extend to physicians, Vinas and colleagues analyzed data from 223 physicians who anonymously participated in online experiments.
The physicians were asked to imagine they had the option to treat patients for a rare disease using a not-yet-proven treatment still under development. They were told that an AI system had identified which patients were more or less likely to benefit from the treatment. The physicians then chose which patients to treat, and after being presented with data on patient recovery, rated their perceptions of how reliable the AI was.
Crucially, the actual effectiveness of the hypothetical treatment did not align with the AI recommendations. In one experiment, the treatment was equally moderately effective for all patients, and in a second experiment, it was equally ineffective for all.
However, in both experiments, the physicians tended to rate the AI system as reliable and apparently did not use the patient recovery data to conclude that the AI recommendations were incorrect. In the second experiment, the physicians did not realize that the treatment was entirely ineffective.
These findings highlight potential challenges for incorporating AI-based classification into healthcare. Future research could build on this study, such as by developing and testing strategies and protocols that could increase human critical thinking and detection of AI errors, in order to maximize the benefits of the human-AI collaboration while minimizing potential errors."
Lead author Aranzazu Vinas notes: " In both experiments, physicians mostly trusted the AI's classifications and had trouble learning from the feedback. Furthermore, in the second experiment, professionals did not notice that the treatment was completely ineffective."
Co-author Helena Matute adds, "People tend to say that there is always a human controlling the algorithm, but our experiments show that doctors (as well as anyone else) have problems in learning from the available evidence when it contradicts the suggestions of an algorithm."
Co-author Fernando Blanco summarizes: "It is important to investigate the errors that humans (including doctors) make when working with algorithms, in order to learn how to minimize the problems that arise from them."
In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Digital Health:https://plos.io/4blGKHA
Citation: Vinas A, Blanco F, Matute H (2026) Doctors vs. Algorithms: Physicians, too, struggle to learn from evidence that contradicts AI suggestions. PLOS Digit Health 5(7): e0001490. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pdig.0001490
Author Countries: Spain
Funding: Support for this research was provided by Grant PID2021-126320NB-I00 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF A way of making Europe, as well asGrant IT1696-22 funded by the Basque Government. A.V. was supported by Fellowship FPU20/01009 funded by MICIU. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection, and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Personal training can support and motivate physical activity, benefiting clients’ health—but it’s not cheap. Free or low-cost AI chatbots like ChatGPT, which use data from scholarly sources and online content created by human fitness professionals, can be used to generate training programs, “help[ing] democratize fitness knowledge, especially for people in resource-limited settings,” writes Zucker. She reports on two studies which compared ChatGPT and human fitness professionals when, in one study, answering fitness questions; and in the other, creating a personalized fitness program. Both studies found ChatGPT to match or outperform the fitness professionals.
…And The Cons
“Access to fitness knowledge,” writes Zucker, “may not be the same as access to fitness coaching.” The degree of nuance required in helping clients stay motivated, work around injuries, and safely push their limits requires continuous monitoring and communication—not to mention visual and tactical judgment—according to JMIR’s sources, which includes multiple runners; physical therapist and owner of ReMove Rehab and Performance Katy Vieira; and personal trainer and rehab specialist Steven Kane.
Striking A Balance
Can we have it both ways? Zucker reports on a recent validation study of MediaPipe Pose, an AI model which can analyze real-time smartphone video to estimate body position and movement. Though the study found that the model achieved 97.2% accuracy in estimating human movement, its authors cautioned that it can’t fully replace human professionals’ comprehensive clinical judgement and support, instead recommending a hybrid model using “AI for daily guidance and certified professionals for regular check-ins,” writes Zucker. This model—combining the low cost of AI tools with the professional expertise of human trainers—could potentially allow for a wider reach of quality, personalized fitness advice.
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E-cigarettes, also known as vapes, are battery-operated devices that heat a liquid that typically contains nicotine, an addictive substance. These devices are continually changing, with new flavors, novel device designs, and digital screens. Some of these e-cigarettes — sometimes called “smart vapes”— include built-in games and Bluetooth connectivity that have the potential to gamify the use of nicotine. Many of these devices are marketed online but cannot be easily monitored with existing data sources and methods.
A new study published July 9 in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research demonstrates how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to automatically detect and classify new e-cigarette devices with screens. The study, led by Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) scientists, in collaboration with the CDC Foundation, analyzed publicly available product images from online tobacco retailers.
“Monitoring online e-cigarette marketing is like a game of Whack-A-Mole, with so many new products and features popping up,” said Kristy Marynak, PhD, Senior Director for Tobacco Control Initiatives at the CDC Foundation and a study author. “This study shows how machine learning techniques can shed light on the online e-cigarette marketplace and the vast quantities and types of e-cigarette products available.”
“Smart” Vapes Attract Youth and Young Adults
Vapes with digital screens are appealing to young people, underscoring the importance of monitoring emerging e-cigarette technologies and product features. According to a CDC Foundation study of a nationally representative cohort of youth and young adults, nearly a third of youth and young adults who use e-cigarettes use “smart” vapes.
AI Helps Classify E-Cigarettes More Efficiently
The GTRI team studied images containing e-cigarettes and other related tobacco products from an open-source dataset and augmented them with images obtained from five online sites selling e-cigarettes. An AI-based object detection model was trained on approximately 7,000 of those images and tested with 3,920 additional images to ensure accuracy. In total, 2,401 images were predicted by the object detection model to contain an e-cigarette.
The researchers then used a vision-language model (VLM), a type of AI that combines large language models with computer vision to process both images and text simultaneously. The VLM analyzed the 2,401 images along with the text descriptions of e-cigarette devices to automatically determine if screens were present. Results were found to be more than 90% accurate.
“There are thousands of e-cigarette devices, and we have currently identified more than 60 websites selling them,” said Charity Hilton, a GTRI research scientist who leads the overall project. “Using AI techniques such as natural language processing, machine learning, and large language models, we’re now able to classify these products much more efficiently and repeatably.”
New Tool Will Provide Real-time Data for Public Health
Using what they’ve learned, GTRI and CDC Foundation researchers now plan to incorporate the AI-based process into a tool that will complement existing techniques as part of the CDC Foundation’s e-cigarette monitoring efforts.
“This tool gives the CDC Foundation a force multiplier to look at a vast swath of new products and keep up with the market trends and changing environment,” said Dr. Hunter Morera, a GTRI researcher and the study’s lead author. “With thousands of products going up monthly, traditional manual coding methods simply can’t keep up.”
The use of AI to capture and rapidly analyze e-cigarette data has the potential to transform how the tobacco product landscape and trends are monitored and understood. This will allow for more informed public health research, surveillance and decision-making.
“This study demonstrates that AI can systematically and efficiently identify novel features of emerging tobacco products, in this case the presence of screens on thousands of e-cigarette devices,” said Elisha Crane, MPH, a public health data scientist at the CDC Foundation and the study’s senior author. “This work serves as a case study of how these methods can be applied to enhance existing tobacco product monitoring and has the potential to provide real-time data to inform public health officials, policymakers, and regulatory agencies.”
Hilton hopes this study will help open the door for other AI applications in public health monitoring. “There’s definitely a lot of AI work going on, but it’s not necessarily being applied to public health issues,” she said. “We’d like to support public health agencies by applying a cutting-edge technology to the critical challenges they are addressing.”
Additional study authors include James Jun and Dianna King of GTRI, and Elizabeth Seaman Jones, PhD, from the CDC Foundation.
Method of Research
Imaging analysis
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Automatic detection of e-cigarette screens using object detection and vision language models.
