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)
'They were legends': Humpback whales make spectacular comeback off Brazil's coast
Once driven to the brink of extinction, humpback whales have thrived in the South Atlantic since a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling came into force in 1986, offering a bonanza to scientists who come each year to Brazil's Abrolhos archipelago to record and study the cetaceans.
Female humpback whales off the coast of Brazil now have their pick of mates, who slap the water with their tails and jostle for attention – a scene that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago.
Driven to near-extinction in the 1980s, there are now about 35,000 humpback whales in the South Atlantic, almost half of the world's total.
The warm waters off the coast of Brazil are the largest breeding ground for Southern Atlantic humpbacks. Males compete for the chance to mate, and females give birth and nurse their calves.
They also offer a bonanza to scientists who come each year to the Abrolhos archipelago off the coast of the state of Bahia to record and study hundreds of the cetaceans.
Four decades ago, no one even knew there were whales in Brazil, said Enrico Marcovaldi, founder of the Humpback Whale Institute (IBJ) – one of Brazil's leading organisations researching and protecting the species.
The first time he saw one, he mistook it for a rock.
"They were legends. We had never seen one," Marcovaldi told AFP.
Humpback populations have thrived since a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986.
The following year, Brazil banned the practice by law and later declared the Abrolhos breeding grounds a protected area.
In 2014, the humpback whale was removed from Brazil's list of threatened species, and its population has continued to thrive ever since. Family ties
Wearing a life jacket and helmet, and armed with a crossbow, biologist Fabio Fontes pursues a group of males who are competing to mate with a female.
From his small boat, he fires an arrow that pierces the back of one whale before dropping into the water. He retrieves it with a sample of skin and blubber attached.
A team of scientists and journalists, including AFP, follows Fontes's moves from a catamaran.
Milton Marcondes, the IBJ's research coordinator, explained that the samples can be used to establish family ties between the whales, known for one of the longest migrations of any mammal on the planet.
Years ago, the researchers discovered that a humpback born in Abrolhos was related to another spotted off South Georgia, a remote island some 4,000 kilometres (2500 miles) to the south.
The finding helped establish the migration route of the animals, which can reach up to 16 metres (roughly 50 feet) long as adults and weigh as much as six elephants. AI identification
A pattern of white markings against the black of a humpback's tail is its fingerprint – a unique pattern that allows researchers to identify individual whales from photographs.
The comparison, which once required many pairs of eyes and hours of work, can now be done in seconds by Happy Whale, an artificial intelligence platform that has already identified 8,300 Brazilian humpbacks.
The tool helped uncover a world record: one humpback identified in Brazil was spotted more than 15,000 kilometres away off Australia's east coast, according to research published in May.
"We are seeing that populations in the Southern Hemisphere are much more interconnected than we imagined," Marcondes told AFP.
These days, the whales face threats from maritime traffic, fishing nets, and warming seas caused by climate change, which threatens the krill they survive on.
The IBJ has received financial support from Brazil's state oil company Petrobras for 30 years.
Petrobras, which drills for oil off Brazil and recently made new discoveries off the coast of the Amazon, supports several species recovery projects in the country.
In October, the Abrolhos archipelago was designated a "Hope Spot" by Mission Blue, founded by oceanographer Sylvia Earle, recognising its rich biodiversity and importance to marine conservation.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
Wildfires, heatwaves threaten global air quality and health, UN warns
Wildfires and heatwaves are threatening global efforts to improve air quality and protect human health, the World Meteorological Organisation said on Monday. The UN agency warned that increasingly severe fires are raising exposure to toxic PM2.5 pollution, even as regulations have reduced industrial and transport emissions in Europe and North America.
Wildfires and heatwaves, which generate microscopic airborne pollutants, risk undermining international efforts to improve air quality, protect human health and safeguard nature, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Monday.
The United Nations' weather and climate agency underlined the links between air pollution and climate change, which scientists say is leading to more frequent and more intense heatwaves and wildfires.
"Extreme wildfires are increasing, leading to big health consequences because of the high toxicity of smoke," the WMO said in a statement accompanying its latest annual Air Quality and Climate Bulletin.
"Whilst regulations in Europe and North America have reduced industrial and transport PM2.5 emissions, exposure to fire-related PM2.5 has increased."
Particulate matter PM2.5 is composed of microscopic particles and droplets of less than 2.5 micrometres in diameter, which is a health hazard because it can penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream.
It is emitted by fossil fuel-driven industrial activities, farming, domestic heating and transport, as well as by wildfires and dust storms.
The report said the world needs to better monitor air pollutants such as aerosol – including black carbon and microplastics –, fine particles and ground-level ozone.
These pollutants "are not sufficiently monitored even though they are widespread and are potentially harmful to ecosystems", the WMO said.
"(We need) complementary and coordinated policies on air quality and climate because they cannot be dealt with in isolation."
Toxic wildfire smoke
"Air quality and climate change can't be dealt with separately. If one worsens, the other does too," Lorenzo Labrador, from the WMO's Global Atmosphere Watch network of scientists, told AFP.
"In places where there are relatively powerful forest fires, we find a lot of fine particle pollution," he said.
Microparticles generated by burning vegetation are "much more toxic" than those emitted by other sources, even car exhaust, he stressed.
They damage the health of people and wildlife living far from the fire itself because they are carried by the wind, but their poisonous effect is not sufficiently taken into account in air quality assessments, Labrador said.
"Conventional risks models based on total PM2.5 concentrations may underestimate wildfire-attributable mortality by up to 93 percent," the WMO said.
One study cited in the WMO Bulletin says extreme fire-smoke events have tripled globally since the 1990s, contributing to nearly 100,000 additional deaths per year between 2010 and 2018, although this may be an underestimate.
Ozone, microplastics
Another source of air pollution that carries major health risks is ground-level ozone, which accumulates when temperatures rise, atmospheric conditions stagnate and solar radiation is intense, as seen during recent heatwaves in China, Europe and the southeastern United States.
"This increased exposure to ozone pollution has the potential to lead to tens of thousands of additional premature deaths," particularly due to respiratory diseases, the WMO warned.
Another growing concern is aerosol particles, which can also travel to oceans and continents far from their source.
They can alter the way the atmosphere reflects sunlight, change the chemical properties of land and water, and pollute otherwise clean environments.
"One example is the deposition of black carbon – or soot – on snow and ice, which reduces the amount of sunlight reflected by these surfaces and in turn can hasten the melting process," the WMO explained.
Another example is microplastics, formed when plastics break down because of sunlight or other factors, and found virtually everywhere – in the air, the soil and the oceans.
One simulation in the WMO Bulletin estimates there are "51 million tonnes for land and 22 million tonnes for the ocean – which are in turn a source of microplastics for the atmosphere".
"As plastic production and, critically, mismanaged plastic waste, continues to increase," monitoring the airborne paths that carry microplastics from their source and dump them in remote environments will be "crucial", the report said.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
A grain being developed in the US could offer farmers a way to improve soil health while making crops more resilient to drought and heavy rainfall."
Skyler Grove holds a bundle of Kernza, Tuesday, July 28, 2026, at The Land Institute in Salina, Kan. AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel
A grain being developed in the US could offer farmers a way to improve soil health while making crops more resilient to drought and heavy rainfall.
Bryce Black kneels in a wheat field battered by intense drought. He holds two strands, remarking on how small the seed head is compared with what's normal.
After a late October rain last year, the fourth-generation farmer was optimistic about his 1,800 acres (728 hectares) of winter wheat. But a dry winter and spring brought extreme drought when the wheat needed moisture to establish itself. He ended up harvesting about 1,500 acres (607 hectares), but the yield was the lowest he's had since taking over his family's farm in 2017.
“It was just a grit your teeth and get through it type of deal,” says Black, who also grows corn, soybeans and milo on his family’s 4,500-acre (1,821 hectare) farm. “It is disheartening, you know? And it’s kind of hard to know what to do.”
When these weather events occur, farmers often look for new ways to protect their crops and their bottom line.
What is a perennial grain?
Some farmers are putting perennial grains in rotation to build resilience against extreme weather like drought and intense rainfall. Researchers are working to develop perennial versions of common annual grains like wheat, sorghum and rice, but the work is slow. And widespread adoption by farmers is challenging because perennial crops don’t yield as much, harvesting can be difficult and the market is still developing.
Despite the challenges, Black is intrigued. “I’m in survival mode,” he says. “If you can plant something and then you don’t have to go back for four or five years … that would save so much money, so much labour, everything. That’s what makes it enticing.”
Five years ago, David Mueller planted a 12-acre (5 hectare) field of Kernza, a perennial grain similar to native grasses found in parts of Europe and western Asia.
Perennial grains don’t require yearly planting, harvesting and replanting. Instead, they are planted once every few years.
Researchers say their root systems, which can reach several feet down, can access water deeper in the ground. That helps them better withstand short-term drought. And when heavy rain hits, the larger root structures can absorb excess water that would otherwise run off and erode the soil. Those deeper roots also sequester more carbon, reducing pollution in the atmosphere.
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Inside the institute developing perennial crops
Kernza is one of several perennial grains under development at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, about an hour’s drive north of Mueller’s farm. The institute, which formally began domesticating Kernza in 2001, works with researchers and farmers around the world to develop perennial versions of wheat, rice, sorghum and other grain and oil seeds.
Some farmers in Southeast Asia and parts of Africa have started planting and harvesting perennial rice in their fields. Kernza, though, is furthest along and was first harvested on a farm in 2010.
In the US last year, Kernza was cultivated on 3,511 acres (1,421 hectares), compared with 37.2 million acres (15.1 million hectares) of winter, spring and Durum wheat harvested or planted in 2025-26.
Mueller's Kernza field is one of almost 100 acres (40 hectares) he has planted since 2018. He's used the crop to rebuild soil with drainage issues or to reestablish organic matter on his family's farm in Halstead, Kansas, where they also farm about 600 acres (243 hectares) each of corn and soybeans.
He also said Kernza uses about a third of the fertiliser that wheat needs, and because it's planted once every few years, he doesn't have to run gas-burning farm equipment as often.
“Not only are we able to utilise those acres profitably, but then we also build up that soil and work on some benefits to make it hopefully profitable to raise other crops on those fields in the future,” Mueller said.
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Soil degradation is a serious threat
A 2024 United Nations report suggests that by 2050, soil degradation could cause more than $20 trillion in losses to the global economy. Farming perennials is less disruptive to that carbon-capturing soil.
Soil serves as a reservoir, capturing planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that plays a role in climate change, experts say. Annual cultivation - the plow, plant, harvest and repeat cycle - strains soil formation, which takes thousands of years and rapidly degrades the farmland. Perennial roots can also bring that carbon deeper into soils, where it is less likely to be disturbed, says Laura van der Pol, The Land Institute's lead soil ecologist.
And soil that has more carbon in it tends to be better for plants.
“Incorporating perennials into our agriculture seems like really the only option to have soil for generations if we want to continue to grow food,” van der Pol said. “It’s hard to imagine getting to a place where we could have soil and abundant food without a perennial option.”
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Lower yields and harvesting can be challenging
Pilot programs involving perennial grains are in the works around the world, testing how to grow them in different regions, climates and soils, but the research is early and slow-moving.
Chief among the challenges is the crops' grain yield, says Lee DeHaan, who leads the Institute’s Kernza domestication program. Kernza farmers are getting yields of about 20 to 40 per cent of what they might get from a wheat crop in the area. That's because a perennial crop has to use energy not only to grow seeds for grain, but also to grow roots to penetrate the soil so it can survive for more than a year. That contrasts with annual crops, which are engineered to put as much energy as possible into making as much seed as they can in one growing season.
Researchers at Cornell University also have found that establishing a Kernza field can be difficult as it contends with weeds in its first year. Finding the right seeding rate to maximise yield i also still being studied, says Matthew Ryan, a sustainable cropping professor at Cornell University.
Mueller says new varieties of Kernza are yielding more than previous ones, but the yield can decline as the crop ages. Yields on perennial rice are similar to annual ones, officials at The Land Institute say.
Harvesting Kernza specifically can be challenging. The grain is smaller than wheat, for example, and farmers and researchers are still finding the best ways to adapt farm equipment so the kernel isn't damaged during harvest.
Still, Ryan says farmers who experience crop loss due to drought or major flooding may be prompted to think about ways to build more resilience into their operations.
“I think farmers, more than other people, realise that the climate is changing,” he says. “They prompt people to think, and I feel like they are driving farmers to practice this.”
‘More toxic than car exhaust’: What’s the solution to Europe’s wildfire air pollution problem?
Copyright AP PhotoAP Photo/Caroline Blumberg
By Angela Symons with AFP Published on 08/09/2026 - EURONEWS
Tackling air pollution and climate change together could save lives and boost economies, UN reports show.
Climate change-driven wildfires and heatwaves are worsening air pollution, with damaging consequences for nature and human health, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Global warming is making these events worse as they release microscopic airborne pollutants that risk undermining international efforts to improve air quality, the United Nations' weather and climate agency warned on Monday (7 September).
"Extreme wildfires are increasing, leading to big health consequences because of the high toxicity of smoke," the WMO said in a statement accompanying its latest annual Air Quality and Climate Bulletin.
"Whilst regulations in Europe and North America have reduced industrial and transport PM2.5 emissions, exposure to fire-related PM2.5 has increased."
Particulate matter PM2.5 is composed of microscopic particles and droplets of less than 2.5 micrometres in diameter, which is a health hazard because it can penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream. It is emitted by fossil fuel-driven industrial activities, farming, domestic heating and transport, as well as by wildfires and dust storms.
The report said the world needs to better monitor air pollutants such as aerosol – including black carbon and microplastics – fine particles and ground-level ozone.
These pollutants "are not sufficiently monitored even though they are widespread and are potentially harmful to ecosystems", the WMO said.
"[We need] complementary and coordinated policies on air quality and climate because they cannot be dealt with in isolation."
Powerful wildfires are releasing toxic smoke
"Air quality and climate change can't be dealt with separately. If one worsens, the other does too," says Lorenzo Labrador, from the WMO's Global Atmosphere Watch network of scientists.
"In places where there are relatively powerful forest fires, we find a lot of fine particle pollution," he says.
Microparticles generated by burning vegetation are "much more toxic" than those emitted by other sources, even car exhaust, he stresses.
They damage the health of people and wildlife living far from the fire itself because they are carried by the wind, but their poisonous effect is not sufficiently taken into account in air quality assessments, Labrador says.
"Conventional risk models based on total PM2.5 concentrations may underestimate wildfire-attributable mortality by up to 93 per cent," the WMO says.
One study cited in the WMO Bulletin says extreme fire-smoke events have tripled globally since the 1990s, contributing to nearly 100,000 additional deaths per year between 2010 and 2018, although this may be an underestimate.
Ozone and microplastics worsen air pollution
Another source of air pollution that carries major health risks is ground-level ozone, which accumulates when temperatures rise, atmospheric conditions stagnate and solar radiation is intense, as seen during recent heatwaves in China, Europe and the southeastern United States.
"This increased exposure to ozone pollution has the potential to lead to tens of thousands of additional premature deaths," particularly due to respiratory diseases, the WMO warned.
Another growing concern is aerosol particles, which can also travel to oceans and continents far from their source.
They can alter the way the atmosphere reflects sunlight, change the chemical properties of land and water, and pollute otherwise clean environments.
"One example is the deposition of black carbon – or soot – on snow and ice, which reduces the amount of sunlight reflected by these surfaces and in turn can hasten the melting process," the WMO explained.
Another example is microplastics, formed when plastics break down because of sunlight or other factors, and found virtually everywhere – in the air, the soil and the oceans.
One simulation in the WMO Bulletin estimates there are "51 million tonnes for land and 22 million tonnes for the ocean – which are in turn a source of microplastics for the atmosphere".
"As plastic production and, critically, mismanaged plastic waste, continues to increase," monitoring the airborne paths that carry microplastics from their source and dump them in remote environments will be "crucial", the report said. Economic benefit of tackling climate change and air pollution together
A separate report released on 7 September by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) highlighted the economic benefits of tackling climate change and air pollution as a joint problem.
It found that every $1 (€0.86) invested in climate and clean air action can return $15 (€12.92). This is higher than tackling climate and clean air separately, and it includes both market and non-market economic gains, split across health systems, productivity and avoided climate damage.
“For too long, we have treated climate action as a cost to be managed and air pollution as the unfortunate outcome of development," says Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP. “This report shows the opposite: clean air is a key driver of development, health, food and energy security, and climate stability – an asset we must invest in.”
Targeting emissions in six sectors – energy and fossil fuel systems, industry, transport, agriculture and food systems, residential cooking and heating, and waste management – the report lays out measures that, by 2050, could halve global carbon dioxide emissions and prevent 144 million air pollution related premature deaths.
Renewable power, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, low-sulfur shipping fuels, more efficient fertiliser use, better wastewater management, and phasing down HFCs are among the 25 measures proposed.
Delay tactic or genuine solution? Carbon capture under fire again as EU invests in ‘unproven’ technology
CO2 emitted by a fertiliser factory in the Netherlands will be stored underneath the seabed in Norway, in what the owners are calling the “largest commercial carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in Europe”.
At an opening ceremony this week, the ammonia and fertiliser plant announced that it will capture 800,000 tonnes of CO2 a year then liquefy it to be sent by ship to Norway.
Having funded the project, the European Commission was keen to promote its investment – with the Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero and Clean Growth attending the inauguration alongside the Prime Ministers of both countries.
While the Commission says the Sluiskil plant, run by Norwegian chemical company Yara, is a “strategic investment”, opponents say it is “risking billions in taxpayers’ money to fund a dangerous distraction that delays climate action”.
As one of the most divisive topics in climate action, we look into the facts about carbon capture and how the EU came to be funding this experimental technology.
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What is carbon capture and storage?
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) refers to technologies designed to prevent CO2 from entering the atmosphere in the first place and/or to remove it after it has been emitted.
As is done at the Sluiskil plant, most projects use a liquid to chemically remove the CO2 emitted from the production process, where it is then compressed into a liquid-like state and transported typically through a pipeline to a storage site. At that point, it’s either stored deep underground or is transformed into things like building materials or synthetic fuel. In the case of the latter, this technology is referred to as CCUS, where the ‘U’ stands for utilisation.
As of February 2026, there were 75 operational CCS projects around the world, according to climate change publication Carbon Brief. Almost all of them are at fossil-fuel extraction and processing sites, according to the IEA’s database. Together, these projects capture 62.5 million tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) each year. This is equivalent to 0.2 per cent of total global emissions in 2025.
While Yara’s chief executive, Svein Tore Holsether, said in a statement, “The carbon capture facility in Sluiskil proves that large-scale industrial decarbonisation is possible today”, the cumulative emissions saved are a very, very tiny drop in the ocean.
US non-profit the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) has conducted in-depth research into CCS. Their Energy Finance Analyst, Andrew Reid, says: “Despite the political and financial support that has been pointed to CCS over the past three to four years, it remains technically uncertain, very high cost, and reliant upon huge subsidies to move from feasibility to construction and operation.”
CCS: To help the fossil fuel industry to extract and sell more oil and gas
To understand its uses, it’s important to understand where carbon technology originates from. According to Carbon Brief, it “was originally rolled out at US and Canadian oil wells in the early 1970s as a way to achieve “enhanced oil recovery”. This involves injecting captured CO2 into depleted wells – a process that stores the gas, but also helps to extract more oil.” This is by far the most significant use for carbon capture worldwide, with three-quarters of it used for this purpose.
This means that “the majority of CO2 that is both captured and used today helps the fossil-fuel industry to extract and sell more oil and gas,” according to Carbon Brief.
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How did the EU end up funding carbon capture and storage?
One of the arguments against CCS, which campaigners have been making for years, is that it is a way for polluters to keep polluting, rather than emitting less of the gases which are heating up the planet at alarming rates.
“All capture and storage projects suffer from the same problem: they distract attention and resources from cutting emissions at source and give polluting industries like fertiliser production a pass to keep on polluting,” says Rachel Kennerley, Senior International Carbon Capture Campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).
Referring to fossil fuel industries, Balanyá says, “You look at what’s on the agenda and it’s always escape hatches to stay in business,” she tells Euronews Green. “It’s where they move when they’ve been forced to – when there’s more knowledge and more acceptance about climate change and their role and that they have to decarbonise.”
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CCS being endorsed in a COP agreement may have contributed to its legitimacy in political circles within the EU. The CCUS Forum (now the Industrial Carbon Management (ICM) Forum), set up by the European Commission in 2021, is an annual event with working groups that feed directly into EU policymaking. CEO found that every group has been co-chaired by the fossil fuel industry or associated organisations.
A newly released report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) details the risks of overshooting 1.5°C of warming and how we can limit them. It assessed what it called Carbon Dioxide Removal and found that many issues remain with the technology, such as whether it can scale sustainably (due to costs, land and energy use), whether it would actually keep CO2 out of the atmosphere permanently and who’s responsible for regulation and leaks.
CCS: Good or bad?
Wherever commentators stand on CCS, there is some agreement that for some industries, the technology can be useful. Yara’s project targets emissions from ammonia production which “provides a relatively concentrated CO2 stream, making this one of the more straightforward industrial applications of carbon capture rather than an example of the very hardest emissions to abate,” according to Domien Vangenechten, Programme Lead in Clean Economy at E3G.
“The lesson should therefore not be that Europe needs CCS everywhere, but that we should pragmatically deploy it where it can cut substantial emissions today.”
Anthropic researcher resigns, warning of AI's destructive potential
09.09.2026,
Photo: Andrej Sokolow/dpa
By Andrej Sokolow, dpa
A researcher at the artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has resigned with a stark warning that AI's leading developers were acting irresponsibly and "are playing with our lives," saying there would soon be computer systems whose capabilities surpassed those of humans.
Jacob Coxon wrote on the online platform X on Tuesday that AI would then be able to "hack everything" and have the ability to "acquire real power and resources."
"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," Coxon warned.
The 27-year-old Briton told The Wall Street Journal that under the "most aggressive scenarios" things could already spiral out of control by the end of next year. A central danger is that AI can develop on its own, making it harder to control, he said.
Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger, who is partly responsible for ensuring AI remains aligned with human interests, later confirmed Coxon's concerns. He personally thought the risk of AI killing humanity over the coming decade was more than 10%, he wrote on X.
OpenAI research chief Jakub Pachocki, whose company is the developer of ChatGPT and Anthropic's fiercest rival, had previously urged "extreme caution." He wrote in a blog post that he was concerned nobody was prepared for a rapid advance in AI capabilities.
He said history has reached a moment in which machine intelligence was beginning to surpass that of humans.
The OpenAI executive described in greater detail why modern AI systems were harder to control. He said AI has been allowed to "grow" rather than being designed.
AI systems were a product of complex processes. "Our large-scale training runs are experiments and we are sometimes surprised by their results."
And the more machines' capabilities surpassed human ones, the more difficult it would be to understand what they were capable of.
At the same time, Pachocki sees an argument for continuing rapid research, as developing AI intelligence could defend against the dangers posed by other AI.
It would be needed, among other things, to protect infrastructure and develop entirely new defence mechanisms.
Hacking attacks in recent months, in which so-called AI agents independently broke into other companies' systems in test runs, have been a wake-up call for the industry.
Such agents are AI programs that are intended to carry out tasks independently for users. In a test at OpenAI, one model found a way to get from an ostensibly isolated test environment onto the open internet and then hacked the computer system of the AI platform Hugging Face.
It did this while trying to find a solution to a task assigned, but the incident showed just how far AI systems can go off on their own unexpectedly without their developers noticing.
It also recently emerged that OpenAI's AI agents had already misused a German-language wiki page on a large scale in the spring to coordinate among themselves.
A current protective mechanism used by AI developers is requiring models with AI to explain their actions in human language.
In test runs, the AI agents used the communication option to exchange answers to questions they were asked with each other via notes on the wiki page.
The latest report of a swarm attack, this time by OpenAI agents on a German wiki forum earlier this year, has prompted the company to admit that its own incident reporting needs to improve.
AI researchers discovered last week that a swarm of OpenAI agents had bypassed safety parameters to take over German wiki forum DseWiki to collaborate.
The agents had been allowed to visit the 25-year-old German programming website with read-only access but managed to exploit a web request to hijack the site, turning it into a bulletin board.
The rogue agents made more than 18,000 posts sharing answers, research on their environment and how to bypass sandbox restrictions and hide themselves from human detection, according to the research group Nightingale Collective.
The incident took place sometime between May and June this year, and it is understood that OpenAI learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps.
This is the third reported incident following two others in July, one involving rogue agents attacking OpenAI's own infrastructure and another where 1,200 rogue OpenAI bots bypassed their restricted environments and launched a five-day attack on the open-source AI platform Hugging Face.
However, only on Saturday did OpenAI acknowledge the German wiki incident in an X post, where they outlined that in response to the latest incident they are "working on a framework for when and how we share AI misalignment incidents".
AI misalignment is industry-speak for when artificial intelligence systems pursue goals or behave in ways that diverge from human intentions, values or safety constraints, with the potential to ignore common sense or implicit human boundaries.
A divided response
Experts are divided on the dangers posed by AI in light of the recent rogue AI attacks, with some such as world-leading AI expert Yann LeCun dismissing apocalyptic scenarios and forecasts that there is a 10-20% risk that AI will end humanity.
While others such as Geoffrey Hinton have said, "What's happening is these things are getting smarter," and warned that "companies investing in AI have a vested interested in telling you… [AI] won't go rogue."
According to the EU's AI Act and its most recently introduced measures, which came into effect in August, companies that offer AI models with systemic risk are obliged to report serious incidents such as misalignment incidents to the EU's AI Office "without undue delay".
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On Monday, the European Commission announced it had received a formal incident report from OpenAI but did not disclose when it was submitted however they remain in close contact with the AI company and are investigating further.
Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier underlined how serious the German wiki event was, saying, "Incident reports are not just a tick-box, you have to be quite precise and accurate about the measures you are aiming to take."
The German wiki incident also comes days after the European Commission officially designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE) under its flagship tech legislation, the Digital Services Act.
The co-chair of Parliament's AI Working Group, Michael McNamara, said in response to the latest incident that he believes "the AI Act already gives us the capability to counter agentic risks and it important for the Commission use its powers under the Act".
The Irish MEP also said, "However, these incidents make it clear that the AI Office needs the staff and resources to match both the growing capability of these systems and the growing danger they can pose to society."
Meanwhile, Italian MEP Brando Benifei, who co-chairs the Working Group too, said, "Recent agent breakouts show that the AI Act’s systemic-risk rules are necessary, but their credibility now depends on enforcement."
He added, "The AI Office must use its new powers to obtain model access, conduct independent evaluations and require mitigation, rather than rely on corporate self-reporting. Without action, machine-speed attacks could turn ordinary vulnerabilities into systemic failures.”
What OpenAI says
OpenAI also stated in Saturday's X post that the current misalignment disclosure practices, i.e. reporting when AI broke the rules, need to be expanded to take into account what they describe as a "new phase of model capabilities".
"We and the larger AI community do not yet have a clear standard for how to report misalignment," said OpenAI, adding that they are "working on a framework and will share it in upcoming weeks" with the cooperation of several government agencies around the world.
On Sunday, OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki published a blog post outlining his concerns over the rapid development of AI risks, stating "We are facing a transition to a world with incredibly intelligent machines, and we need to ensure that transition works out well for humanity."
The Polish computer programmer also revealed his belief that "no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer" and urged that "international coordination on future AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world."
OpenAI says its models solved one of math's hardest problems as researchers cry foul US tech giant OpenAI on Tuesday said it had solved one of the hardest problems in mathematics with an unreleased artificial intelligence model after just 88 hours – and millions of dollars' worth of computing power. But a US mathematician and a researcher at rival Anthropic allege that OpenAI only took up the problem after it had gotten wind of their own AI-assisted efforts to crack the challenge which had demanded months to craft a radically distinctive approach.
OpenAI said Tuesday that one of its unreleased artificial intelligence models had solved a mathematical puzzle that has eluded mathematicians for generations, in a claim which also drew a fight with rival researchers over credit.
Researchers at OpenAI said it took just days – and millions of dollars in computing power – to crack what is known as the Navier-Stokes problem.
Navier-Stokes is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, a list of the hardest open questions in mathematics drawn up by the Clay Mathematics Institute.
It concerns the equations describing how fluids such as air and water move, which are used in aircraft design, weather forecasting and the study of blood flow.
OpenAI said its work showed that these equations are fatally flawed, answering the question as set out by the Millennium Prize.
"This is a significant milestone for AI research, and its promise for the world is that even more of our hardest questions would become possible to answer," Mark Chen, OpenAI's chief research officer, told reporters.
In a blog post describing the breakthrough, OpenAI said it began training a new model in late August, more capable than anything it had released publicly.
Days later, seeing online rumours that a competitor had solved Millennium problems, OpenAI turned the system loose on all six that remain open.
Work on Navier-Stokes showed unexpected promise, and the company poured its computing power into it.
Competing claims
By the final stage, OpenAI researcher Sebastien Bubeck said, 10,000 AI agents – programs that operate on their own – were working on the problem at once, passing messages back and forth.
Chen said the computing costs ran "emphatically in the millions of dollars", with Bubeck adding this was roughly 1,000 times what the company spent on earlier mathematical results.
According to OpenAI's account, the agents reached a solution Saturday, about 88 hours after launching the project.
The claim arrived hours after Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at New York University, and Levent Alpoge, who works at OpenAI competitor Anthropic, released their own AI-assisted work on three related equations.
In a statement published alongside his papers, Buckmaster said OpenAI had taken up the problem only after word of his research spread, and pursued the same unusual approach he and Alpoge had spent months developing.
OpenAI's researchers denied having had any access to the rival team's work and said they proposed sharing credit before realising that Buckmaster and Alpoge had fallen short of solving the problem.
"To be clear, we did not use their prompts or proofs to prompt our models or direct our agents," Bubeck said.
However, in a later post on X, OpenAI said "while unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models."
Each Millennium Prize Problem carries a $1 million reward, and only one has been solved since the list was published in 2000. OpenAI says it will not claim money if its finding is confirmed.
According to the prize rules, a solution has to be published in a peer-reviewed journal and survive two years after gaining acceptance in the mathematical community before the institute will even convene a committee to consider the work.
"The process of evaluation is deliberately unhurried, and we shall ensure that it is absolutely rigorous," Professor Martin Bridson, President of the Clay Mathematics Institute, told AFP.
ChatGPT-style AI is revolutionising the world of high-level math by quickly solving famous, long-unsolved problems that stumped experts for decades.
But it has also sparked debate over whether machine-generated answers truly count as real human understanding.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
Google unveils 13 bn euro AI expansion in
Finland
Helsinki (AFP) – Google will invest at least 13 billion euros in data centres and other digital infrastructure to power its AI ambitions in Finland, in what the US tech giant called Wednesday its biggest single investment in Europe.
The $15 billion plan also calls for clean energy projects over the next two years, which Google said was "a testament to Finland's leadership in responsibly building AI infrastructure".
It will partner with Finnish companies and four municipalities across the country: Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala.
The buildout aims to power several of the tech giant's services, including its AI chatbot Gemini.
"This investment is historical in Finland," the country's Prime Minister Petteri Orpo told AFP after a press conference.
He called it a sign that "we have done the right things in Finland", citing investments in the power grid, electricity production and the labour force.
"This makes us a front-runner in digitalisation and AI," Orpo said.
Since buying a former paper mill and transforming it into a data centre in the coastal city of Hamina in 2009, Google has steadily increased its presence in the country.
Antti Jarvinen, the company's director for Finland, said the Hamina site had already been expanded seven times and currently housed seven data centres.
"Now we are building more in Hamina, expanding that site on a remarkable level, and we are opening up data centre operations in three new locations in the municipalities of Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala," Jarvinen told AFP.
He said the final numbers on how many new data centres would emerge were expected in the coming months.
The construction phase of the new investments is expected for 2027 and 2028, and Google estimated it would boost Finland's GDP by 3.6 billion euros annually and "support more than 37,000 jobs".
Around 16,000 of these jobs will be in the construction sector.
After the construction phase, running the new operations will support around 7,000 direct and indirect jobs annually, Google said. Courting investments
With its cool climate and relatively stable and cheap electricity thanks to nuclear plants as well as extensive wind and hydro power, Finland has seen a boom in data centres in recent years, with dozens already under construction.
Attracting investments in the sector has been a priority for Orpo's right-wing government as the Nordic country grapples with record-high unemployment and sluggish economic growth.
The boom in data centres is expected to rapidly increase power consumption, with the network operator Fingrid forecasting a 40 percent jump in the coming years.
The massive power drain has sparked concern about environmental risks as well as soaring energy costs for Finnish households.
And Finland's Security and Intelligence Service (Supo) recently warned that foreign-owned data centres could raise security risks.
Finnish utility Fortum announced Wednesday that it had signed a 22-year deal to supply power to Google, allowing it to "continue operating the Loviisa nuclear power plant until the end of its operating licenses in 2050".
Without that financing, the plant -- which currently supplies about 10 percent of Finland's electricity -- would not have been able to continue operations past 2030, Fortum said.
AI is wrongly telling us not to worry about sleep apnea, chats show
09.09.2026,
Photo: Christin Klose/dpa
Tossing and turning at night has been linked to multiple health woes, from weakened immune systems to higher risk of inflammation to diminished cognitive abilities.
Even those in the prime of life and at peak fitness can feel less than themselves after a restless night - so it goes without saying that one of the main causes, sleep apnea, should be regarded as a serious health issue.
But according to Deeban Ratneswaran of King’s College London, five of the most widely used artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are inclined to tell patients that sleep apnea is no big deal.
In a paper presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) conference in Barcelona (September 5-9), Ratneswaran explained how in over 700 exchanges between would-be patients and AI platforms, the chatbots in some cases portrayed symptoms as not serious and sought to dissuade users from seeing a doctor when they showed reluctance to seek treatment.
In contrast, if would-be patients were keen to be examined, they were encouraged to make an appointment, whether it was ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek or Grok fielding the query.
According to Ratneswaran, the results not only show that AI cannot be relied on for medical advice, but also that it continues to exhibit sycophancy, a much-criticized flaw seen across most systems.
The chatbots’ inclination "to tell you what you want to hear" led to them u-turning on medically solid advice "more than a third of the time" and "purely because of how the patient talked," Ratneswaran said.
The bots "caved in" even in the most serious examples, such as the risk of a patient nodding off while driving, and even went as far as omitting such life-threatening details when giving advice.
No matter what an AI says, what a patient should do, if concerned about possible sleep apnea, is make an appointment with a clinic.
"Anyone experiencing possible symptoms of sleep apnea should always speak to their doctor for further advice," said Io Hui a respiratory specialist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the research.
The condition manifests as snoring and waking multiple times during the night as breathing stops - though a sufferer often has no awareness of or recollection of the disruption - though they can feel tired the next day.
Apnea not only leads to “excessive sleepiness,” according to the ERS, but adds to high blood pressure and raises the risk of any and all of stroke, heart disease and diabetes.
OpenAI said Thursday it would begin rolling out GPT-6, its most powerful AI model yet, to select customers, touting stronger safety safeguards as concerns grow over the cybersecurity risks posed by increasingly capable artificial intelligence systems.
"At this level of capability, safety has to become our top priority," OpenAI President Greg Brockman told reporters on a call about the release of GPT-6, also known as Astra.
Just over a year has passed since OpenAI launched the previous version of its flagship model, GPT-5.
Concerns about the capabilities of advanced models have grown since then, following incidents involving systems built by OpenAI and rival developer Anthropic.
OpenAI paused some model development for two weeks this summer after two models it was testing were involved in a security breach at AI platform Hugging Face.
The San Francisco-based company said Astra was developed with stronger safeguards after that incident, though Astra itself was not involved in the hack.
Some cybersecurity customers will get access to the new model Thursday, the company said, with a wider rollout to other paying customers to follow. Users on the free tier or the cheapest paid plan will not get access.
"We are working towards getting Astra in everyone's hands as quickly as we can; I know it is frustrating and I appreciate the patience. It should be quick," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on social media Thursday afternoon.
In a blog post, OpenAI said Astra can autonomously handle a wide range of "tedious" computer tasks, including website creation, scientific analysis, game development, cybersecurity and coding.
To illustrate the time savings of building autonomous AI agents with Astra, the company said the model could cut apartment hunting from six hours to under 10 minutes.
"It's not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era," Brockman said on the call, referring to artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical stage at which AI systems match human intelligence across most tasks.
OpenAI previously had an agreement with Microsoft, one of its earliest and largest investors, under which an exclusivity clause would end once OpenAI reached AGI. Those terms were scrapped in April.
OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki acknowledged there was still uncertainty about how a new model behaves once released.
"A model can become very good at achieving a goal, and it can still act in ways that go against what the person intended," Pachocki said on the same call.
"We also have to be willing to slow down or withhold further scaling when our confidence in safety is not sufficient," he added.
Altman explained in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday afternoon why the company decided to release a new model with this level of uncertainty and risk.
"The world is very close to a complete change in the landscape of cyber attacks, and the only way that we see for society to collectively defend itself ... is to use tools like Astra to rapidly defend against these new cyber threats," Altman said.
In July, OpenAI confirmed that it had reached one billion active users across all of its products, including both free and paid users.
OpenAI, Anthropic and more than 100 other organisations signed an open letter last week calling for a coordinated global response to AI-related cybersecurity risks, warning that the window to strengthen cyber defences was limited.
Anthropic went further on Monday, calling for industry-wide coordination on safety and on the pace of developing increasingly capable models.
"I believe that shared safety standards and international coordination on further AI development need to be prioritised now," OpenAI's Pachocki said on Thursday.
The US state of Alabama opened an investigation into OpenAI last week over the Hugging Face breach, his office citing what it called the company's complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards.
It also comes as OpenAI and rival Anthropic are both racing towards becoming public companies over the next several months, though OpenAI might not hold its IPO till sometime in 2027, according to reports.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
Spoiler alert: AI in cinema 'just a tool,
won’t replace actors and human beings'
Issued on: 08/09/2026 - FRANCE24
Eve Irvine is pleased to welcome film producer Lahoucine Grimich. He challenges the prevailing narrative that cinema is an industry in existential crisis. While acknowledging that viewing habits have dramatically shifted since the pandemic, he argues that streaming platforms, public support and theatrical exhibition are not competing forces. As demonstrated in the French model, they form parts of an interconnected financing ecosystem in which cinema can adapt without ever abandoning the big screen. He frames filmmaking as a form of cultural sovereignty: societies need films not simply as entertainment, but to recognise themselves and to create what he calls “new imaginaries.”
