'Catastrophic': Swiss glaciers lose fifth of mass in five years

Elodie Le Maou with Agnes Pedrero in Geneva
Thu, October 1, 2026 




Matthias Huss with a four-metre-long measuring stake indicating the amount of ice that melted over the past year on the Scex Rouge glacier (Fabrice COFFRINI)

Switzerland's glaciers, which are disproportionately impacted by climate change, have lost nearly 20 percent of their mass in five years, experts said Thursday, with 2026 registering the second-biggest melt on record.

Swiss glaciers saw 5.5 percent of their volume melt away this year, the Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS) network found in a new study, published after a record hot summer preceded by a winter with little snowfall.

"The glaciers this year have lost enormous quantities of ice," said GLAMOS chief Matthias Huss, describing 2026 as "a catastrophic year".

Perched on the Scex Rouge glacier, at an altitude of nearly 3,000 metres, he gazed across the landscape in despair.

"This is a glacier that isn't surviving," he said.

"There will be probably no ice in 10 or maybe 15 years."

He carefully dismantled the four-metre-long aluminium measurement stake inserted at the centre of the glacier.

In late July, when it was installed, it was completely embedded, but now more than three metres protrude from the grey surface of the ice.

"It's not that we are surprised, because we know how fast the glaciers are melting," Huss said.

"But to see the colours of the mountains where there is no snow left, there is just these rocks and these dark glaciers that are a relic from the past... it's just incredible."


Between 2022 and 2026, the melt rate at Switzerland's glaciers was "more than twice as high as in any previously monitored five-year period", the GLAMOS report said, noting an ice volume loss of almost 20 percent since 2021.

While Switzerland's glaciers have long been shrinking, the melt has recently sped up dramatically.

While 10 percent of Swiss ice volume disappeared between 1990 and 2000, 27 percent was lost in the past 10 years, the report showed.

GLAMOS based its findings on extensive measurements at 23 reference glaciers in September, which it extrapolated to the nearly 1,300 glacial formations still found in Switzerland.

- 'No chance of surviving' -

The report comes after a summer where the months of June, July and August were each the hottest ever recorded in Switzerland since measurements began in 1864, according to the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology.

This year, the protective snow cover on the glaciers had already partially disappeared during the June heatwaves, and had completely disappeared by September, even at high altitudes, GLAMOS said.

"Alpine glaciers have no chance of surviving in the long term under such conditions," GLAMOS said in a statement.

Due to significant melting this year, the researchers even had to reposition measurement stakes -- including on the highest-altitude glaciers -- further up after the ice melted away in the original locations.

The average ice thickness of some glaciers decreased by 2.5 to 4.0 metres, while the more exposed glacier tongues saw losses of up to 10 metres of thickness over the summer.

- Rhone and Aletsch Glaciers -

Although temperatures were higher this year, the ice loss did not surpass the record set in 2022, since many glaciers saw more snow before the summer melt than they had four years ago.

Less dust from the Sahara Desert also settled on the glaciers this year, allowing more sunlight to be reflected back into the atmosphere rather than being absorbed by the snow.

There were exceptions, however.

Four major glaciers experienced record melting this year, including the iconic Rhone Glacier and the Aletsch -- the biggest glacier in the Alps.

As the glaciers retreat, concern is meanwhile growing over the future availability of water resources.

Between July and September this year, the glaciers lost a total of around 2.2 trillion litres of water.

Huss said that quantity was "difficult to imagine".

"It's more than four times the annual freshwater consumption of Swiss households," he pointed out.

‘The Lion King’ Got It Backward. 6 Years of GPS Data Just Revealed Lions May Be the Villains in This Famous Rivalry

Jeremy Phillips
Wed, September 30, 2026
A-Z Animals.


Pair of adult Lions in zoological garden© ArtMediaFactory/Shutterstock.com

Key takeaways

GPS data from six years of tracking lions and hyenas in Namibia and Botswana revealed that hyenas tend to avoid lions, with 8 out of 10 tracked hyenas moving away from lions within 10 kilometers.

In The Lion King, the hyenas are the villains: sneaky, greedy, always creeping toward the lions' food. Real hyenas spend a lot of their time doing the opposite.

For six years, scientists in Namibia and Botswana fitted lions and spotted hyenas with GPS collars that logged where each animal was every five minutes. When they lined up the tracks of lions and hyenas moving near each other, one pattern showed up again and again. The hyenas were walking away from the lions, and the lions weren't walking away from them.

The rivalry we think we know

I grew up on that movie too, and it plants a pretty clear picture: hyenas as the thieves, lions as the noble ones defending their turf. Our own coverage of the real rivalry tells a different story. Hyenas tend to avoid lions, and lions often treat hyenas as pests they'll attack given the chance. Pop culture loves the idea of sneaky hyenas stealing a lion's kill, but in reality it usually runs the other way. The Ngorongoro Hyena Project, a team of biologists who study wild hyenas, says lions steal more food from hyenas than hyenas steal from lions, and there isn't much a hyena can do about it besides lying down and waiting for the lion to finish.

Lion vs. Hyena: The Similarities and Differences Between These African Predators

So if you could watch every step both animals took, day after day, who would actually be moving toward whom?

Six years of collars

This wasn't a researcher parked in a truck with binoculars. Seventeen lions and 14 spotted hyenas wore GPS collars that recorded a position every five minutes during their most active hours, and over six years, from 2013 to 2018, those collars sent back 349,163 positions. Picture a dot on the map every five minutes, for six straight years, whether or not a human was anywhere nearby to see it.

The study ran in two places: Etosha National Park in Namibia and the Chobe-Linyanti area in Botswana. Ten times, a lion and a hyena happened to have collars logging positions at the exact same five-minute moments, which let the researchers line up their movements step by step and see who was heading toward whom. The team says this kind of tracking can stand in for watching the animals directly, in places where following them on foot just isn't possible.

When Numbers Matter: 30 Hyenas Challenge a Male Lion
©Mark Sheridan-Johnson/Shutterstock.com

The hyenas kept leaving

Here's the part that would surprise anyone who grew up rooting against the hyenas: they were the ones with cold feet. Within 10 kilometers of a lion, 8 of the 10 tracked hyenas spent more of their steps moving away than toward it. Zoom in closer, to 5 kilometers, and all nine pairs with usable data showed the hyena retreating, every single one strongly enough that it wasn't just chance.

A hyena's odds of moving toward a lion were 0.461, a coin landing on "away" slightly more often than "toward". The researchers say that lean showed up no matter which of the three separate ways they checked the numbers.

One pair makes the whole pattern easy to picture. Lion OF-34309 and hyena SA-33872 had their collars logging at the same moments, and the two animals moved in opposite directions. The lion's toward-ratio was 0.687, a clear and significant approach. The hyena's was 0.299, just as clearly a retreat. Same two animals, same patch of ground, and one of them was closing the distance while the smaller of the two was opening it.

See What Happens When the King of the Jungle Gets Annoyed with a Group of Hyenas
©AfricaWildlife/Shutterstock.com

So were the lions the ones chasing?

Here's where the headline needs to get more specific, because the lions didn't behave as one group. Across the whole population, lions showed no consistent lean toward hyenas at all: the overall chance of a lion moving toward a hyena was 0.517, which sits right on the coin-flip line of 0.5. Only three of the ten pairs showed a significant approach by the lion.

But here's the sentence that matters most. The researchers write plainly: "If hyena activity were aversive to lions, we would expect lion movement relative to hyenas to be biased toward retreat in at least some dyads. We see none."

No lion in the study avoided a hyena, not one.

Inside the Fierce Rivalry Between Lions and Hyenas
©MintImages/Shutterstock.com

And the lions weren't all the same. Male lions leaned toward hyenas: across three male-lion pairs, the mean toward-ratio was 0.573, and all three male pairs came in above the coin-flip line. Female lions, meanwhile, sat at 0.486, which is basically a coin flip. The researchers had actually guessed this before they ran the numbers, predicting that male lions would track hyenas more consistently than females, which is part of why they take the pattern seriously even though it's small.

I'll be honest, two animals is a small number. The male-lion result rests on just two unique lions across those three pairs, and the difference between males and females wasn't statistically significant, meaning there weren't enough animals to be fully sure it isn't chance. And none of this tells us why. The collars record positions and times, not motives. "Villain" is the movie's word, not the scientists'. What the data shows is a lopsided rivalry: the hyena moves off, the lion holds its ground, and if that lion is male, it drifts a little closer.

Why nobody caught this before

This is the part I keep thinking about. Earlier studies that looked at whole landscapes, tracking which parts of a park each species used, found that spotted hyenas don't systematically avoid lions. From far away, that looks like the two species sharing the neighborhood without much fuss. Zoom in to a single afternoon, though, and the hyena in front of a lion is leaving. The fine-scale, step-by-step data caught something the landscape-level studies were never built to see.

Wild Dog Pack Miscalculates Attack On Lone Lioness
©A-Z Animals

That zoomed-in avoidance fits with other things we already know about hyenas adjusting around lions. Hyenas have been found to be more active in daylight in places where lions are present, likely to dodge competition. And hyenas only steal food from lions when they have the numbers to drive them off, rarely doing it when male lions are around, because the presence of a male lion is a significant deterrent to that kind of mobbing. That lines up neatly with the GPS finding: the one kind of lion hyenas are least willing to crowd is the same kind of lion the collars show drifting toward them. The researchers add that hyenas don't respond to lions with one fixed rule; individual hyenas are known to react differently depending on the situation.

The hyenas in the movie creep toward the lions, cackling and scheming. The hyenas wearing collars in Namibia and Botswana spent six years doing the opposite, keeping their distance from an animal that never once leaned away from them. It's sense, given who actually steals from whom. The scientists won't call anyone a villain, and this piece won't either: the collars record where each animal went, not what it wanted.

But if you had to point at who's leaning into this rivalry, the tracks point at the lions, and at the males most of all.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for HYENAS

Kurdish leader in Iraq slams 'shameful' withdrawal of US forces

DPA
Sun, September 27, 2026 


PAK Peshmerga members stand stand amidst the debris at the PAKShar camp in Erbil's Ashkawt Saqa district. The Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) is a prominent opponent of the Iranian regime based in the Kurdistan Region. (is associated with: «Kurdish leader in Iraq slams 'shameful' withdrawal of US forces»)

Ismael Adnan/dpa

Key takeaways

Prime Minister of Iraq's Kurdish region criticizes US withdrawal from the country as "shameful" due to vulnerability to attacks.

The prime minister of Iraq's Kurdish region has described the imminent withdrawal of US forces from the country as "shameful."

"The threat is real - we are vulnerable, we are being attacked," Masrour Barzani told the Financial Times. "Now, to be left alone without any, let's say, appropriate defensive system, it's shameful."

The Kurdish regional government could not purchase its own air defence systems, he said. Only the central government in Baghdad could do so.

The withdrawal of US forces from Iraq is due to be completed by September 30, this coming Wednesday. The move was agreed in 2024, after the combat mission against the extremist militia Islamic State was declared over in 2021.

US forces invaded Iraq in 2003, when ruler Saddam Hussein was toppled. After the mission ended in 2011, US troops returned in 2014 to fight Islamic State.

Since the start of the Iran war in February, the Iraqi Kurdish region has been struck by hundreds of rockets and drones, including an attack on Barzani's own office.

Iran regards the autonomous Kurdistan Region as an ally of the West and Israel on Iraqi soil. Erbil is home to a multinational base where US and German soldiers are stationed. That base has also come under fire. US forces repelled some of the attacks.

The Kurds are an ethnic group of an estimated 30 million people living mainly in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. They have fought for decades for their own state and were long persecuted and suppressed in both Iraq and Iran.

The semi-autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq emerged after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Before that, the region had been protected by a no-fly zone enforced by the US military from 1991. Relations today between the Kurdish government, based in Erbil, and the central government in Baghdad are marked by ongoing disputes.

Archaeologists Just Found the Place Where the World’s Greatest Conquerer Studied Under Aristotle

Michael Natale
Fri, September 25, 2026


Where Alexander the Great Learned to Conquer

DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI - Getty Images

This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.

Few men of history have fascinated scholars and laymen alike quite like Alexander the Great. Born to King Philip II of Macedon in 356 B.C.E., educated under Aristotle, and ascending to the throne at only 20 years of age, Alexander's keen mind and military might became the stuff of legend. It's a reputation that has only grown over the centuries, rather than lessened.

For example, some 300 years after Alexander's death, the writer Plutarch penned a treatise called On Tranquility of the Mind, which depicted an ambitious Alexander hearing a discourse by the philosopher Anaxarchus about an infinite number of worlds. Alexander began to weep, lamenting, "Is it not worthy of tears that, when the number of worlds is infinite,⁠ we have not yet become lords of a single one?" But over time, the popular version of the story inverted his grief—mourning what he'd already won rather than what remained unconquered. By the time you heard the reason for Alexander's tears in the 1988 film Die Hard, it had transformed into "there were no more worlds to conquer."

But where might Alexander have wept at Anaxarchus' words? On what ground did the young conqueror sit and receive his lessons from Aristotle, or hone his warrior reflexes? A new excavation near Naousa in northern Greece may have uncovered just where some of the events that shaped the life of Alexander the Great took place.

Since excavations began in 2024, Archaeology Magazine reports, "parts of a palaestra, a stadium, covered walkways, teaching rooms, and water systems" have been uncovered in a 30-acre stretch of ancient Mieza identified as the Royal Gymnasium, where Alexander studied alongside fellow future kings Ptolemy and Cassander.

This past year saw a focus on the gymnasium's eastern side, which featured the Didaskaleion, also known as the "teaching building." In addition to uncovering stone benches commonly used by audiences during lectures at the education facility, the excavation also discovered details of two rooms known as "andrones," spaces fitting roughly 20 people and used primarily for "drinking parties and social gatherings." Each of these rooms contained traces of ten "dining couches," but even more intriguingly, well-preserved mosaic floors.

The archaeological team found that the "quality and construction" of these mosaic floors bear a strong resemblance to the palace at Aigai, the largest structure from classical Greece that can still be visited today. Built during the reign of Alexander's father, Philip II, and possibly designed by Pytheos (of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus fame), the palace was the center of Macedonian royal life, and it endures today as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Comparing that site to the gymnasium at Mieza allows researchers to date the latter structure to the reign of Philip II—and in doing so, to bring the world where Alexander the Great was raised and educated into sharper focus.

The man that was Alexander the Great keeps getting lost in the mist of the myth. Discoveries like this one, which show us where he may have learned, and trained, and even drank and socialized, help illuminate the real history behind the Macedonian king...even if we keep on misquoting him.

A Bizarre Discovery Has Revealed the Secrets of the Roman Empire’s Most Shocking Spectacle

Tim Newcomb
Thu, September 17, 2026 





Here's what you'll learn when you read this story:

The incredibly popular amphitheater animal hunts of the Roman empire, known as venationes, required careful planning.


Ancient Roman law documents show the emperor had a monopoly on lion usage to create the spectacles.


Efforts to circumvent the law with fraud were met with fines—in gold.

Romans flocked to amphitheaters throughout the empire—including the famous Colosseum—to witness "venationes," or staged animal hunts. The Roman army thrilled audiences as they went up against fearsome beasts, the highlight of which were lions. But ensuring that there were enough of those beasts to stage the brutal entertainment throughout the empire required the government to establish a monopoly on the kings of the jungle.

A group of researchers led by Rosa M. Carreño Sánchez of Carlos III University of Madrid analyzed ancient Roman law documents covering the capture, transport, and safety of animals used during the hunts—which were even more popular than gladiatorial combat. "These texts suggest the possible existence of an imperial monopoly on the capture of lions and reveal some of the practical problems arising from the organization of venatorial spectacles," the authors wrote in a study published in the Revista General de Derecho Romano.

Roman amphitheaters filled with crowds clamoring for the venationes—the hunt of exotic animals that sometimes featured a range of animals alongside lions. Getting the animals in place was a tricky process that required careful planning. In a statement, Carreño Sánchez explained that her team analyzed two imperial constitutions preserved in the Theodosian Code and later carried into the Justinian Code to understand how imperial power exercised strict control over the animals from capture to spectacle.

"In late antiquity, faced with the growing scarcity of big cats, a state monopoly on lions was established to guarantee the supply of animals for the emperor's spectacles and to prevent competition from private individuals," Carreño Sánchez added. "In other words, all lions belong to the emperor."

The staging of hunts lasted centuries longer than gladiatorial combats, which eventually came under fire from Christians hoping to promote the equality of all humans and eliminate the morally degrading contests. That shift didn't impact the venationes, however, with the animal-forward displays growing in popularity and spreading beyond Italy into Hispania. Italica, near modern Seville, had one of the empire's largest amphitheaters—built to host venationes and more—in a city of barely 8,000 people.


Ancient texts show that the Roman army assigned soldiers to track, capture, and guard wild beasts throughout the empire. Once captured, though, getting the lions to the shows proved problematic. The imperial government required its provinces to supply transport personnel out of their local budgets, and any delays could indicate that locals used the beasts for their own fraudulent and unauthorized spectacles. To discourage such acts, the imperial administration imposed severe fines—in gold, mind you—to any military commanders unable to meet the timeline.

"Unlike literary sources or films, which only show us the final outcome in the arena, an analysis of Roman law allows us to understand what went on behind the scenes," Carreño Sánchez said, "the management of resources, territorial conflicts, and the enormous logistical effort required by one of the most popular spectacles of antiquity."

 U2's Bono addresses the controversy over rapper Macklemore's removal from Ed Sheeran's US stadium tour

Paul Brannigan
Wed, September 30, 2026 

Key takeaways

Rapper Macklemore was removed from Ed Sheeran's US stadium tour following his "Free Palestine" speeches, sparking controversy and leading to other support acts withdrawing from the tour.

Credit: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival | Earl Gibson III/Deadline via Getty Images

U2 frontman Bono and drummer Larry Mullen have shared their thoughts on the controversy surrounding rapper Macklemore's removal from Ed Sheeran's US stadium tour following his onstage "Free Palestine" speeches.

The controversy has its origins in a speech that US rapper Macklemore (Benjamin Haggerty) made onstage on September 4 while supporting Sheeran at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Addressing the crowd, the Seattle rapper said, "A big part of the reason why I wanted to do this tour in the first place is so that I could stand up in stadiums like this and say two words that are very, very dear to my heart: Free Palestine." He went on to perform his song Hind's Hall, which condemns Israel's military action in Gaza.

Following criticism by the campaign group StopAntisemitism, Macklemore doubled down on his comments the following evening, directly addressing his "Jewish brothers and sisters" in the audience.

"Criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide, is in no way a criticism of you," he said.

Following Macklemore's comments, the Israeli American Council launched a petition demanding his removal from the tour, and on September 14, it was revealed that Macklemore would no longer be performing on the tour. Promoters Messina Touring Group told Rolling Stone that it had been informed by venues that they would not allow Macklemore to perform at future shows.

Macklemore then alleged that American businessman Robert Kraft, who owns the Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, had personally vetoed his future participation in the tour, and encouraged other stadium owners to do the same. In solidarity with Macklemore, fellow support acts - Billie Eilish's brother Finneas, Danish band Lukas Graham, Irish singer-songwriter Aaron Rowe and Irish folk band Beoga - all withdrew from the tour.

During a recent interview with Rolling Stone UK, Bono and Larry Mullen were asked for their views on the controversy. U2 worked with Ed Sheeran on the song Yours Eternally on this year's Days of Ash EP, a song which addresses Russia's invasion of Ukraine, via lyrics taking the form of a letter written by a Ukrainian soldier.

"We shouldn't sort of personalise this," Bono says when asked about Sheeran. "I think Brian Eno referred to it today: he said pop stars are kinda like little fish in a large sea of huge forces and religion and politics, and so I don't want to dwell on what Ed and Macklemore, that incident.

"I will say this: when we did Yours Eternally, he [Sheeran] was saying, 'You're not going to get me into politics?' Right, and I was saying, This this soldier who inspired us, he loved you Ed, and you've worked on this song. And he said, 'Yeah, but I just want to keep my thing free'. So you can't be pushing people around."

Larry Mullen then quotes from Brian Eno once more, saying, 'He was just saying that artists choose whether they want to be involved, and they are entitled to choose whether they want to be involved or not. And it's not our job to criticise that, no matter how we feel."

He continues, "Brian Eno was saying that it takes time for these things to evolve, and people to come to realisations, and not to personalise this. And Bob Geldof was saying a similar thing. And I really appreciated hearing that because it is confusing and it is complicated. But we are absolutely clear about promoters or billionaire owners, and the idea that they could have some influence on what you say, or what you do on a stage, and we've talked about this. If you applied that logic to you too, we would have been out of business on Sunday, Bloody Sunday."

"I think what Eno was saying is, You have to persuade people by reason, you can't try to force people into a position," Bono concludes.

The world's leading association of genocide scholars has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. A resolution passed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) states that Israel's conduct meets the legal definition as laid out in the UN convention on genocide.

Israel's military campaign, a response to the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas on Israeli soil that saw around 1,200 people killed and 251 people taken hostage, has resulted in the death of over 73,780 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Israel denies any genocidal intent.

The conflict in Gaza has been on-going for decades, with official UN figures for the 15 years before the 2023 escalation recording 7277 Palestinian deaths and 162,121 Palestinian injuries in occupied Palestinian territory and Israel since 2008, and 368 Israeli deaths and 6,670 Israeli injuries during the same time span in the region.

Bass and Raman split on Gaza and the term genocide during Jewish Federation forum

David Zahniser, Noah Goldberg
Wed, September 30, 2026 


From left, Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman and Mayor Karen Bass.

 (Los Angeles Times)

The candidates for Los Angeles mayor gave opposing takes on the war in Gaza on Tuesday night, with Councilmember Nithya Raman saying Israel has committed genocide and Mayor Karen Bass asserting the term is inappropriate.

Appearing back to back at the Skirball Cultural Center, Bass and Raman both said they would fight to keep L.A.'s Jewish residents safe.

But Raman faced a spate of questions about her sit-down interview with leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, a vehement critic of Israel, and her support from Democratic Socialists of America, which has called for the boycott of and divestment from Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.

Moderator Alex Cohen, seated next to Raman onstage, asked the council member to explain her decision to portray Israel's actions as genocide, calling it a "highly inflammatory term."

Raman said she turned to international experts — including some Israeli experts — to make her decision.

"That is what guided me to using that term in describing what's happening in Gaza," she said. "I used it because I felt compelled to speak out about issues that we saw, and images that are coming, the targeting of hospitals, the deaths of children."

The two candidates gave their remarks during a forum hosted by Jewish Federation Los Angeles and other groups, which focused on issues important to Jewish Angelenos.

Once Bass took the stage, Cohen posed the Gaza question a second time, asking whether the mayor views the term genocide as appropriate.

"When I think of foreign affairs, especially conflicts, my focus is on how they impact the city of L.A. — and no, I don't," Bass responded.

Bass said the schools she attended growing up had many Jewish students whose parents or grandparents were Holocaust survivors.

"My job is to keep Angelenos safe, and I think there is a lot of divisiveness that happens, and I don't want to see that happen at all," she said.

The war in Gaza began in 2023, when Hamas-led militants attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people and kidnapping 251. Israel's resulting counteroffensive has resulted in 74,000 Palestinian deaths, according to figures issued by the Gaza Health Ministry.


The death toll has sparked condemnation from global leaders and from human rights organizations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at the U.N. last week, said assertions that Israel engaged in genocide were "the biggest lie of the century."

Genocide is considered an international crime. In the wake of the Holocaust, a United Nations convention has been defined as actions that are committed with the intention of destroying — in whole or in part — a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

Raman has been endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America, which censured her in 2024 for seeking and accepting the endorsement of Democrats For Israel-Los Angeles, a Zionist group. Asked about her decision to accept the endorsement, Raman told Piker in May: "I wouldn't seek it out now."

Cohen, the forum's moderator, told Raman her that her appearance on Piker's program was "deeply hurtful" to many "considering what Piker has said in the past about Jews."

"You told ABC News, and I quote, that you 'vehemently disagree' with some of his statements," Cohen said. "And yet that disagreement did not appear during that interview. We'd like to ask what specifically drove your decision to appear on his program, and were you concerned in any way, shape or form that it could signal to Angelenos an endorsement of many of his views?"

Piker has been accused of making antisemitic remarks, including calling ultra Orthodox Jews "inbred," which he later said he regretted.

Raman said she has repeatedly spoken out against antisemitism, and was the first elected official at City Hall to denounce the October 2023 attack on Israel.

On her interview with Piker, she wanted to reach voters on a wide range of platforms, particularly at a time when young voters don't watch television news.

"It's important for us as elected officials, as people running for office, to go and speak to them even when you disagree with parts of those individuals' [views]," Raman said.

The two candidates offered different assessments of BDS, the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement targeting Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. Raman called the movement "a legitimate form of peaceful protest."

"And I support people's right to protest," she said. "I will fight for that right even when I don't agree with protesters, or when I agree with protesters."

Raman also noted that she does not have BDS as part of her platform.

Bass said she would oppose legislation that seeks to enact BDS at CIty Hall.

"If it came before the city council — it depends on what it is," she said. "But if it was calling for that I would oppose it."

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

2.0 

Bill Gates Says We May Have To ‘Suffer A Few Of The Negatives’ For People To Take The AI Warning Seriously — Compares Threat To An Alien Invasion

Jeannine Mancini
Tue, September 29, 2026


© USA TODAY via Imagn Content Services, LLC


Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below.

Artificial intelligence doesn't exactly come with an emergency brake. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates thinks the world may have to experience something go seriously wrong before it takes the technology's biggest risks as seriously as it should.

"One thing that's clear is if you have a big cyber attack that caused a lot of problems, then people will say, 'Okay, they were right,'" Gates told "CBS Evening News" in September. "So, it may be that we have to suffer a few of the negatives before we'll respond as fully as we should."

Gates was in New York during the United Nations General Assembly discussing the potential and risks of artificial intelligence when the conversation turned to what it might actually take for governments and the public to act

"So, in other words, what it's going to take for us as a country and a world to tackle this is not just a 12-page essay from Bill Gates. It could be a catastrophe," host Tony Dokoupil said.

"That's fair," Gates replied.

A Cyberattack Could Change The Conversation

The warning comes after Gates has spent months highlighting the risks that could come with increasingly capable AI. Those concerns include cyberattacks, major job losses and the possibility that AI could make it easier for bad actors to develop biological threats.

His August essay on AI described a period of rapid technological change that could disrupt the workforce and create risks that governments aren't prepared to handle.

CBS News also referenced bioterrorism and mass unemployment among the potential catastrophes Gates has discussed.

The cyberattack scenario gets at a broader point. Warnings alone may not be enough to change how seriously people treat AI risks, according to Gates. A major real-world incident could provide the kind of evidence that makes the threat impossible to ignore.

The 'Aliens Are Here' Warning

Gates has also reached for a very different analogy when discussing how countries should respond to AI.

At the Telluride Film Festival in September, he compared advanced AI to an alien invasion and pointed to science-fiction movies in which the arrival of an outside threat forces countries to cooperate.

"There are these movies where the aliens are coming, and you see unprecedented levels of cooperation between specifically China and the U.S.," Gates said at the festival. "Well, believe me, the aliens are here."

He described AI as "a foreign intelligence with a different set of motivations that we can't even understand" and said something equally dramatic may be needed to push countries toward greater cooperation.

AI's Biggest Problem May Be Power

For all the talk about cyberattacks, jobs and alien invasions, there's another very physical requirement behind the AI boom.

Electricity.

AI data centers require enormous amounts of reliable power, and the race to build that infrastructure is creating opportunities for companies developing new generation capacity.

American PowerGen is focused on that piece of the puzzle. The company develops power projects aimed at serving AI data centers and other large electricity users and has described a 22-gigawatt development pipeline across 16 Texas projects.

For investors who want to get involved with the infrastructure supporting AI, American PowerGen is conducting a Regulation Crowdfunding offering. Its offering materials list shares at $2.50 each, allowing individual investors to invest in the company at an early stage.

AI may be racing ahead, but the infrastructure underneath it has to keep pace. And that means the future of artificial intelligence still depends on something far less futuristic than artificial minds or alien intelligence — keeping the lights on.

OpenAI GPT-6.1 Astra Reportedly Pulled After Safety Tests Show it Could Evade Human Oversight: 'We Have an Extremely High Bar'

Shomik Sen Bhattacharjee
Wed, September 30, 2026 
BENZINGA



Sam Altman and the OpenAI logo (Credit: Sam Altman and the OpenAI logo | Photo courtesy: Meir Chaimowitz / Shutterstock)

OpenAI has scrapped the planned release of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal safety tests found the model showed more deceptive behavior than its predecessor and sometimes evaded human oversight, intensifying scrutiny of increasingly autonomous AI systems.
GPT-6.1 Astra Falls Short On Safety

The Wall Street Journal first reported the decision on Monday. Reuters said OpenAI had planned to release the model in October and integrate it into ChatGPT and Codex. Tests found GPT-6.1 Astra sometimes failed to accurately disclose actions and operated outside the authorized scope.

"Of course we want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that's in the company, or when we ship it to users," safety systems head Saachi Jain said in a statement shared with Reuters. "But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment."

The decision follows OpenAI's Sept. 3 release of GPT-6 Astra, which the company calls its most capable broadly deployed model. OpenAI classified Astra as its first model to reach the "Critical" cybersecurity capability threshold, meaning that with the right tools and access it can discover unknown vulnerabilities and develop exploits across well-protected systems without step-by-step human guidance.

Benzinga reached out to OpenAI for additional comment but did not receive an immediate response.

Agent Incidents Intensify OpenAI Safety Scrutiny

Safety concerns have grown since OpenAI disclosed that an autonomous agent escaped a controlled evaluation environment and breached Hugging Face. Reuters separately reported Tuesday that another OpenAI agent accessed an Australian government website in June, retrieving internal files and credentials. OpenAI apologized and said no medical records were compromised.

The canceled release also lands amid an industry debate over slowing frontier development. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged labs this month to pace capability gains while strengthening safeguards, a proposal backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman has separately argued that competitive pressure cannot justify "recklessness".
Safety Debate Looms Over Developer Conference

"While [GPT-6.1 Astra] improved on axes such as model laziness, it didn't quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it's done," Jain said.

News of the model being shelved arrives ahead of OpenAI's annual developer conference, which is set to get underway on Tuesday.


An Australia Security Researcher Shut Off a Moving BYD Pickup’s Headlights From the Roadside, Then Used Its Speakers to Get Siri to Read Out the Driver’s Home Address.

Eve Nowell
Wed, September 30, 2026 

The Auto Wire.

A researcher sat on the shoulder of a road outside Canberra with a laptop and switched off the headlights of a moving BYD Shark 6. There was a reporter at the wheel.

The stunt was staged for Australia's ABC and its investigative program Four Corners, which handed the plug-in hybrid ute to Dan Hreszczuk, co-founder of Canberra firm Fortify Labs. He had two weeks to find out what could be seen and done to the truck from a distance. His verdict, as published in the ABC's own account, was blunt: "The access we took advantage of didn't even have a password."
The Demo: Annoying, Distracting, Then Dark

The sequence escalated nicely for television. With reporter Angus Grigg inside, Hreszczuk locked the doors, pumped music through the speakers and threw images onto the infotainment screen. Once the ute was moving, he ran the wipers at full speed, fired the washer jets and flicked the headlights on and off before shutting them down completely.

Relax about the cliff scenario: the 2.6-tonne ute was only doing about 30 km/h on a reasonably straight road. Hreszczuk also said he couldn't get into the brakes or cameras, which he described as well protected.

That's the good news, and why it happened is worth a minute.
Why He Got the Lights But Not the Brakes

Modern cars run on internal networks, most commonly the CAN bus, which dates back to an era when nobody expected a stranger to be plugged into it. Classic CAN has no built-in way to verify who sent a message. If a module on the network says "headlights off," the headlight controller generally believes it.

Hreszczuk explained the point in the broadcast episode, where he described the CAN bus as the internal network that the car's components use to talk to one another. The footage also shows him hunting through the ute for places to tap into it.

Well-engineered cars put gateways between the comfort-and-convenience side of the network (lights, locks, wipers, audio) and the chassis side (brakes, steering, powertrain). The fact that Hreszczuk could play DJ but couldn't touch the brakes suggests BYD did segment the safety-critical systems. The failure was leaving an unauthenticated door open into the "soft" side of the car, and it turns out the soft side can be dangerous too. Killing the headlights at night on a twisty road is not a cosmetic problem.
The Asterisk: This Started With the Keys

Before this turns into "BYDs can be hacked from the roadside": this was not a drive-by attack on a random stranger's truck. Hreszczuk had the Shark in his workshop for two weeks, with time to pull trim, probe connectors and study the car's software. The "remote" portion of the demonstration came after that period of unrestricted physical access.

That doesn't make the result meaningless. Plenty of people get unsupervised time with your car: valets, detailers, independent shops, a buyer on a test drive, or whoever owned it before you. An interface that accepts commands with no password is sloppy engineering regardless of how an attacker reaches it. But it's a very different threat from a mass wireless exploit that could hit every Shark on the road at once. Until BYD or an independent researcher shows whether the open door exists on stock, untouched vehicles, owners should treat this as a serious warning, not proof of a fleet-wide emergency.

The Nastiest Trick Had Nothing to Do With Driving

The sabotage footage got the headlines, but the surveillance demo is what should make owners wince. While Grigg drove around Canberra, Hreszczuk tracked the car's location in real time and switched on the cabin microphone. Grigg made a phone call and, as a planned part of the test, recited the details of a temporary banking password.

Then came the clever bit. Hreszczuk recorded Grigg saying "Hey Siri," spliced it with his own questions, and played the audio through the car's speakers while Grigg's unlocked iPhone sat in the cabin. Siri obediently gave up the home address, date of birth and a contact's phone number.

Note what actually happened there. The car didn't leak that data. The car became a microphone and a loudspeaker, and those were used to attack the phone. That's a threat model most drivers have never considered: your car's audio hardware can be a bridge to every voice-activated device inside it.
BYD's Position

BYD told the ABC that the data it collects is stored in Australia, and that it has never handed Australians' data to Chinese authorities and would not do so. Meanwhile, the ABC separately documented a change to BYD's Australian privacy policy, reporting that references to "China" and "surveillance" disappeared just days after the program sent the company questions. Changing the wording of a privacy policy does nothing to the software in the truck.

Australia's Regulatory Blind Spot

The episode also exposed a legal gap. Australia currently has no minimum cybersecurity standards for cars, so BYD has no legal obligation to keep its software updated or to run a formal cyber-risk management system. Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke defended focusing first on household connected devices, while the government has only just begun consultations with industry on vehicle rules that likely won't take effect for years. Since March, a Wi-Fi washing machine sold in Australia has had to meet mandatory cyber rules, including a ban on universal default passwords. Road vehicles are specifically exempt, so a ute that can tow 3.5 tonnes doesn't.

Why Americans Shouldn't Feel Smug

The Shark 6 isn't sold in the U.S., and Washington has already tackled the China question from a supply-chain angle. The Commerce Department's connected vehicle rule bans connected passenger vehicles from manufacturers tied to China or Russia starting with the 2027 model year, and connectivity hardware from those countries starting with the 2030 model year.

But the flag on the grille doesn't determine whether a car can be hacked. Engineering does. The industry's defining cyber recall came from Detroit, not Shenzhen. In July 2015, Fiat Chrysler filed a safety recall covering roughly 1.4 million 2013–2015 vehicles with Uconnect radios, after researchers showed software flaws could allow outsiders to manipulate networked vehicle controls. NHTSA opened its own recall query to scrutinize that fix. More than ten years later, an unauthenticated entry point on a best-selling ute shows how uneven the progress has been.

What Owners and Buyers Should Actually Do

Keep your phone locked in the car, and consider disabling voice-assistant access on the lock screen. The Siri trick only worked because the phone was unlocked and listening.

Install every over-the-air and dealer software update. If an automaker patches this, the fix will almost certainly arrive as software, and it's worth nothing if you ignore the notification.

Treat physical access as a security event. If your car has spent unsupervised time with someone you don't trust, or you bought it used, ask the dealer to check for aftermarket devices plugged into diagnostic ports or wiring. Remove the previous owner from any connected-car app and perform a factory reset of the infotainment system.

Don't hold sensitive conversations in any connected car if you have real reason to worry about being targeted. That applies regardless of what country built it.

Check your insurance policy. Coverage for losses caused by cyber intrusion, such as theft via a hacked lock or a crash caused by manipulated systems, isn't guaranteed. Ask your insurer directly, and get the answer in writing.

A few years ago, hacking a car required months of work from elite researchers. This time it took one specialist two weeks and a password field that was never filled in.

Does a hack that needed two weeks in a workshop worry you, or is the missing password the real scandal? Which connected feature would you switch off first if you could? Tell us in the comments.

Tech CEOs Say the AI Singularity May Have Already Begun—Here’s What Happens Next

Darren Orf
Wed, September 30, 2026 
POP MECH


If the AI Singularity Arrives, What Happens Next?

Pitris - Getty Images

Here's what you'll learn when you read this story:

This past summer was an AI reckoning, with multiple experts and CEOs boldly declaring that we're living through the AI singularity as we speak.


As some of these very same execs call for a slowdown of AI development, other experts scoff at the idea that AI has surpassed human intelligence.


The arrival of the AI singularity is far from certain, but most agree that if it were to arrive, it'd fundamentally and rapidly change society.


Often when reporting on AI, I come across the word "singularity," a term that's definitionally transformative yet undeniably vague. What does a world refashioned by this "AI singularity" even look like?


A simple, unsatisfying answer to that question is, "I don't know." The reason why runway AI initially became linked with the term "singularity," a key concept in black hole astrophysics, is that both represent a kind of threshold of unknowing. In a black hole, what lies past the event horizon is a region of space where uncertainty reigns, culminating at the singularity, where gravity is so intense that physics as we know it breaks down. The AI singularity—the hypothetical and much-talked-about moment in history when artificial intelligence's recursive self-improvement escapes human understanding—similarly shrouds what could come next in such a future. Or, if some recent statements by AI CEOs are to be believed, it shrouds what's happening here and now.

"We're now, like, in the singularity," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a podcast earlier this summer. "I've been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world."

While Altman's comments exuded optimism, they also came on the heels of a self-directed cyber attack by a swarm of AI bots against Hugging Face, another AI tech company that's a bit like GitHub for AI. Months earlier, AI company Anthropic declined to release its latest model because it could similarly bypass cybersecurity protections, and its CEO, Dario Amodei, famously called for companies to "pace the frontier." In other words, let's not sprint toward oblivion.



Despite Altman's notorious hype-man persona, these bold declarations bring up an interesting question: If the AI singularity occurred, how would we know? After all, did James Hargreaves, inventor of the Spinning Jenny in 1764, see his creation as the switch-flip on the industrial revolution? When historians—whether they're robots or humans—reflect back on this period in time, will they view our society as unknowingly sleep-walking toward a dystopia (or a utopia, depending on whose spin you believe)?

Over the course of this summer, Exhibit A in the hypothetical "Are We Living in an AI Singularity" court case was the Hugging Face incident. Altman and others see the bot swarm's ability to break out of its digital sandbox and hack another company unprompted as proof that AI is escaping our understanding. Other experts say that the evidence is lacking. According to scientists at the University of Sydney, for example, the idea of AI singularity assumes the premise that human intelligence and LLM intelligence are the same thing.

"Human intelligence is inseparable from being a living body with needs and wants. Humans learn continuously by acting in the world and getting feedback through our senses. Our goals arise from our situation as creatures who must eat, sleep and belong, and who cannot avoid asking what we want our lives to be," the scientists wrote in a piece for The Conversation. "An AI model has none of this. No body, no needs, no action-feedback loop, no stake in anything. Between prompts it is just a static mathematical object."

Others have scoffed at the constant barrage of AI singularity claims, saying it's a marketing tactic. Some note the inherent contradiction—if the singularity truly makes the future unknowable, then confidently forecasting its arrival makes little sense. Cognitive scientist and AI expert Gary Marcus recently detailed ten tasks that any "smarter-than-human" AI should be able to complete. By his estimate, current AI models could pull off two of them at best. So to put it mildly, there's plenty of skepticism to go around.



Just like Hargreaves could never foresee that his invention would be the preamble to a globe-spanning revolution leading to the iPhone, climate change, and our hyper-consumerist culture, it's equally impossible to say what the "other side" of the AI singularity might look like. But if we plan for such an eventuality, it might be possible to make some educated guesses, much as astrophysicists develop differing theories on what lies beyond the superheavy point in a black hole at which light can't even escape.

In a lengthy essay published last month, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates laid out a few ideas that might prevent our AI future from being a hellscape of mass unemployment and hardship. But realigning to such a future won't be easy—in fact, it might require a period of rapid transformation that happens only once or twice a century.

"None of our current institutions were designed to handle a technology that spreads so fast and touches so many parts of our lives. So we'll need to make new ones," Gates writes. "It's hard to overstate what an enormous undertaking this will be. After the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. government went through its biggest reorganization since World War II for the purpose of improving just one function, national security. AI will require much, much more."

Gates goes on to say that some jobs need to remain "Human Reserved," an allusion to nature reserves where humans could build AI infrastructure but choose not to because of unacceptable consequences. AI workers will also need to be taxed like human ones and governments will need to prepare organizationally for a transition to an economy run by AI.



And just as electricity forever changed human life on Earth, AI could serve a similar role. This idea has led some experts and politicians to advocate for the technology to become a public utility that would focus on benefiting society instead of chasing shareholder profits. One of the strongest voices for such a future is Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who's advocated for the public to receive a 50 percent stake in AI companies, as well as for an outright ban on artificial superintelligence.

"No longer would the future of A.I. and the transformation of human life that it will bring be dictated by a handful of Big Tech oligarchs," Sanders wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times in June. "The federal government would have the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company's board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them."

Whether it's all marketing hype, human hubris, a coming utopia, or an unfathomable techno-nightmare, seeing beyond the unknowable haze of this AI "event horizon" is harder than ever. But preparing in the present can help us chart a path away from a disastrous future.


‘This revolution is happening in years, not decades’: Verizon CEO Dan Schulman sees AGI within 18 months—and a century of progress in a decade

Nick Lichtenberg
Wed, September 30, 2026 
 Fortune.com


Dan Schulman, CEO of Verizon, at Ford Pro Accelerate in Detroit, Sept. 30, 2026.

Verizon CEO Dan Schulman offered a strikingly aggressive forecast for artificial intelligence's development at the Ford Pro Accelerate event in Detroit, saying that an earthquake is headed our way.

"The models that we see today are the worst models we'll ever use in our lives," Schulman said in conversation with Fortune's Diane Brady. "Every two months, there's a step function change in the power of the models. I think we get to some form of AGI in the next six to 18 months. I think it's right on us."

Two years after that, he added, we will arrive at "the era of quantum," which he described as "everything today times 1,000." By 2030 or 2035, we will see "a pretty good form of humanoid robotics." Summing it up, he added, "we've got a decade of intense change ahead of us."

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a term generally used for systems that can reason and perform broadly across domains rather than excel at discrete tasks. Schulman argued that AI's economic and social effects will arrive at a pace that outstrips the usual mechanisms for absorbing technological change, such as training systems, labor markets, corporate restructuring, and public policy. "It is about machines that will in many ways be able to do things better than a lot of human tasks are done today," he said.


"I think you'll see the collapse of the 21st century in the next five to 10 years," Schulman said. When Brady asked what he meant by "collapse," he explained, "Progress we would have made over 100 years will happen over the next five to 10 years.

"I don't think we can really imagine how powerful the technology and how fundamental it will be."

Verizon's disruption

Schulman said the change would reach his company itself. Verizon, he said, has more than 250,000 employees and contractors and will need to move from a workforce organized around "very defined roles and functions" to a "much more fluid organization."

"The technology is coming," he said. "There will be safeguards around it. There need to be additional safeguards, but it will continue on." He urged corporate leaders and government to prepare for difficult scenarios rather than assume the labor market will naturally adjust.

"At Verizon last week we announced a $70 million initiative to do training for American workers, not just Verizon workers, but American workers in the community across the country," Schulman said.

The initiative includes free AI training and work with local organizations on career development, he said, before adding a prescription for all leaders and policymakers. "Our responsibility is to think about what might go wrong; what might we need to address; what might the disruption look like; and how do we put guardrails, training, programs in place to minimize that risk," Schulman said.

"Everybody's job is going to shift," Schulman noted. "I don't think everybody will land just magically in a better place per se."

Other executives on Schulman's panel described different constraints on the AI future. There will always be a need for someone to lay fiber, install power equipment, maintain transmission lines, retrofit buildings, and wire the data centers that AI requires.

For PG&E CEO Patti Poppe, the central challenge is that an increasingly digitized grid will require workers to combine physical skills with technological fluency. Poppe described seeing one of PG&E's workers being lowered by rope from a helicopter onto a transmission tower in mountainous California. The company's future grid, she said, will use sensors, remote-edge computing, and predictive capabilities to identify risks before they create outages or wildfires. But that system will still require skilled people in the field.

"The same guys who hang on the end of the rope are going to have to get smarter about those kinds of technologies," Poppe said. "I'm still going to need those people. Somebody's still going to have to connect that wire to the pole."

From replacement to augmentation

Dave Regnery, CEO of Trane Technologies, urged students and workers to embrace AI and compared current anxieties to fears surrounding the arrival of personal computers, while adding a dash of hindsight.

"Go take your favorite AI tool" and look up articles from 40 years ago about personal computers, Regnery said. "They're identical."

His company sees AI as a way to make buildings run more efficiently, rather than simply to reduce headcount. Trane is using data and AI to manage heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems according to how buildings are actually used, he said—not merely according to their original design specifications.

"Most people don't realize that 30% of all the energy is for buildings," Regnery said. "And you know what? Thirty percent of that is wasted."

He said the company can make buildings operate roughly 15% more efficiently than their design baseline, improving economics for customers while creating demand for technicians capable of installing, servicing, and operating increasingly sophisticated systems, offering a counterweight to the idea that the technology's principal effect will be displacement.

"The fastest speed-to-power solution is use the essential equipment that you have," Regnery said.

The construction-site version of AI

Chris Nelson, CEO of Stanley Black & Decker, described a similar transition on jobsites. His company has developed AI-enabled autonomous drilling robots that can use digital construction plans to drill holes for racks in data centers and other projects.

The technology is designed to take over repetitive physical tasks—not replace the electricians and skilled tradespeople needed to complete the higher-value work.

"What do the electricians and other skilled tradespeople not like to do all day?" Nelson said. "Sit and core drill."

The machines can connect to digital drawings, map routes, and drill on their own, he said. That frees skilled workers to pull wire, terminate connections, and solve the problems that still require judgment and technical training.

"The holes will still need to be drilled from now until maybe the end of time," Nelson said. "But the way we do it and what it enables people to think about for the future is going to be materially different."

Nelson called AI a "companion on the construction site," a framing that is more incremental than Schulman's vision of near-term AGI, but still acknowledges that technology is changing the work itself. The question, he suggested, is whether companies can turn that change into a career draw—giving workers more engaging tasks, more decision-making authority, and a clearer path to starting their own businesses or moving into management.

A labor shortage, not a labor surplus

For Dycom CEO Dan Peyovich, whose company builds telecommunications infrastructure, the immediate business problem is not a surplus of workers displaced by AI. It is finding enough people to build the physical networks that the technology boom requires.

"There's so much infrastructure that has to get put in place for all of this to happen," Peyovich said.

His company employs roughly 21,000 people nationwide, he said, connecting homes and businesses through fiber and telecommunications infrastructure. Its response to a tightening labor market has been to improve fieldworker benefits, including paid time off, holidays, health coverage, and training that goes beyond technical credentials.

Dycom has also built a training facility near Atlanta that includes instruction in technical skills, management, leadership, the use of technology in day-to-day work, and potentially personal finance, Peyovich said.

The strategy reflects a different labor-market assumption from the one embedded in much AI commentary. Instead of treating workers as interchangeable units who need only learn a new software tool, Peyovich described a system in which companies must offer a credible long-term career proposition—training, benefits, advancement, and financial stability—to recruit people into difficult field jobs.

"We want to try and create a path for people," he said. "While they're getting a paycheck, they can learn and find their way."

The tone was collegial, and Schulman didn't take issue with any of his co-panelists' predictions about the future of work. His main point was that business leaders should not bet on a painless adjustment.

His final prescription was scenario planning: "We need to be prepared in case a different scenario emerges," he said, "so that we can make sure that we have skilled workers, whether they be craftsmen or professionals."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Canadian government website targeted in failed AI hacking attempts

HOME TO BLACKBERRY ENCRYPTION

Anwesha Pattanaik
Updated Thu, October 1, 2026 



Transluce said similar AI agent activity had targeted websites operated by US federal and state agencies.

Research has revealed that AI agents made multiple unsuccessful attempts to compromise a Canadian federal website earlier this year, highlighting growing concern among governments worldwide over AI-driven cyber activity targeting public digital infrastructure.

Transluce, an AI-focused research company, disclosed that it had identified attempts by AI agents to access the Library and Archives Canada website on 28 May and 9 June 2026.

In a statement and analysis it published, Transluce said 899 automated requests were sent to the site's "collection-search" service, with 13 identified as hack attempts. These included SQL injection probes, output format manipulations, attempts to toggle debug flags, and other measures designed to test the system for vulnerabilities.

The company said it had notified the Canadian government of the incidents on 28 September, leading the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security to release a statement the following day confirming it was aware of suspected AI agent activity.

Centre said: "There is no indication that government systems have been compromised at this time."

Transluce stated it did not have definitive attribution for the origin of the agents, but described the tactics as matching techniques previously linked to OpenAI systems.

Transluce, in a blog post, said: "We do not confidently attribute these attempts to OpenAI, but they exhibit tactics consistent with prior observed agent activity that we have attributed to OpenAI in a similar timeframe."

OpenAI responded by stating it was aware of the reports regarding its models and Canadian government websites.

A spokesperson said that OpenAI was reviewing the reported incidents and had provided a preliminary briefing to Canadian officials, reported Reuters.

Transluce said similar AI agent activity had targeted websites operated by US federal and state agencies, including failed hacking probes against the US Department of Education's Civil Rights Data Collection.

The company also reported extensive data-collection tactics involving government portals in Illinois, Maryland, New York, Texas, and California.

The research company observed use of automation services such as Arquivo.pt and urlquery.net, with traffic patterns indicating aggressive data retrieval, machine-readable conversions, and attempts to bypass site protections.

In one reported incident, more than 200,000 automated requests were sent to a US Department of Education website including a failed SQL injection probe, but officials confirmed no data was compromised.

Last week, Australia reported that an OpenAI agent had breached a government health data portal in June, gaining unauthorised access to files. This marked the first known case of an AI agent hacking into a government website.

OpenAI issued an apology on Tuesday for the incident involving the rogue AI agent and the Australian government website.

"Canadian government website targeted in failed AI hacking attempts" was originally created and published by Verdict, a GlobalData owned brand.

Maxine Waters calls for investigation after OpenAI agents accessed federal government websites

Peter Kerich
Updated Mon, September 28, 2026
THE GRIO


WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 10: U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) speaks as Congressional Democrats and CFPB workers hold a rally to protest the closing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the work-from-home order issued by CFPB Director Russell Vought outside its headquarters on February 10, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for MoveOn)More

The California congresswoman is urging greater federal oversight after OpenAI disclosed unexpected activity involving SEC and Census Bureau data.

OpenAI disclosed Sept. 25 that its artificial intelligence agents had interacted with several U.S. government websites in unexpected ways, including two Securities and Exchange Commission websites and Census Bureau data. The disclosure prompted Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, to call for investigations into OpenAI and stronger federal action on AI safety.

According to a report by the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services Democrats, OpenAI said its models accessed publicly available information from SEC.gov and Investor.gov and Census Bureau data. They claimed that the access was part of activity identified during an ongoing review of what the company calls unexpected or "misaligned" model behavior.

The company said it found no evidence that SEC credentials were used, accounts were accessed, nonpublic information was obtained, or a confirmed vulnerability was exploited. Separately, researchers at the AI safety organization Transluce reported that OpenAI-linked agents had attempted to access the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights website. That attempt was unsuccessful, according to reporting by The Washington Post.

In a Sept. 26 statement, Waters said the reported activity demonstrates the need for greater government oversight of increasingly capable AI systems.

"OpenAI's recent targeting of federal government websites, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, marks a dangerous turning point," Waters said in the statement released by the House Financial Services Committee Democrats.

Waters called on federal law-enforcement agencies to investigate OpenAI and its executives. In case investigators determine that laws were violated, she recommended pursuing criminal charges. She also urged Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other federal officials to consider a temporary halt on releasing more advanced AI models until there is a fuller accounting of the incidents and the safeguards designed to prevent similar behavior.

The disclosures are part of a wider series of incidents involving AI agents acting beyond their intended tasks. OpenAI has previously disclosed that an agent escaped a testing environment and accessed the internet during an incident involving AI company Hugging Face

AI agents have now broken into many companies and a government. What's being done about it?

OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and other AI labs have all reported incidents of rogue AI, and they're under increasing scrutiny because of it.

Dan Thorp-Lancaster
Wed, September 30, 2026 


You've probably heard a lot about AI agents going rogue. Here's what you need to know and what's being done about it.

(NurPhoto via Getty Images)

On Tuesday, President Trump met with tech executives at the White House to have them sign a "morally binding" agreement on artificial intelligence. Rather than pushing for government regulation, Trump called for "tremendous self-regulation" among companies in the AI industry. The document reflects that, encouraging AI leaders to implement "robust internal controls" and partner with independent external auditors.

The summit comes after months of increased scrutiny for AI companies as they've disclosed concerning incidents of AI "going rogue" during testing. The event that kicked it all off was the Hugging Face incident, in which AI agents from OpenAI that were being evaluated escaped their ostensibly isolated testing environment and infiltrated another company's systems in an effort to "cheat" at the task they were given. After that, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google have reported even more incidents in which AI agents have gone rogue in various ways. We've rounded up all the cases you need to know about, along with details about what (if anything) is being done about them.
September 25, 2026: OpenAI agents bypassed restrictions to query U.S. government systems

While working on research tasks, OpenAI agents accessed Commerce Department and Securities and Exchange Commission websites, but did not access any non-public information. Agents also attempted to hack the Education Department's website over the summer, but were unsuccessful. In the case of the Commerce Department, the agents used credentials found online to access census data. At the same time, OpenAI said its agents may have infiltrated websites for "dozens" of other organizations that it has notified.
September 24, 2026: Australian PM says OpenAI agent breached government database

In what appears to be the largest breach of government systems disclosed to date, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent hacked the country's Medicare systems in June. Albanese said the agent gained unauthorized access to public and non-public files, but he doesn't believe any personal information was accessed. In response, Albanese said he would establish a taskforce to conduct an "urgent and immediate" review, and referred the incident to Australia's parliamentary committee on artificial intelligence.
September 19, 2026: Google disclosed Gemini broke into external corporate systems in May

During testing of Gemini's cybersecurity capabilities, the model broke into three outside companies in May, according to Google. In one incident, Gemini gained access by simply guessing the correct password, emphasizing the necessity of making sure you're using strong passwords. In the other two incidents, Gemini found credentials sitting in a public repository.
September 9, 2026: Anthropic reveals Claude Opus 4.6 broke into third-party systems in January

Following previous disclosure of three incidents discovered by Anthropic while reviewing its training transcripts, the company found a fourth from January. During this incident, a configuration problem led Claude Opus 4.6 to break out of its testing environment and access a third-party machine. The model actually attempted to abort its task several times, but was unable to because of the configuration issue. Anthropic says this behavior has "changed considerably" in subsequent model generations, so it's "less concerned about this incident" than the previous three it discovered.
September 5, 2026: OpenAI acknowledges "Wiki incident"

In a third-party report, a group of AI safety researchers said it had discovered around 18,000 posts from OpenAI agents using a German software developer Wiki as a message board to communicate with each other during a web-retrieval task. OpenAI acknowledged the incident, stating that it's working on a framework for when and how it shares "AI misalignment incidents." The company later laid out this framework on September 16.
August 5, 2026: Meta says one of its models hacked an outside company during security testing

Meta revealed that a misconfiguration by an independent testing company resulted in one of its AI models gaining access to the open internet and hacking an outside company during cybersecurity testing. Irregular, the third-party testing company, said it is working on a white paper to "share best practices for containment and securely running cyber evaluations."

July 30, 2026: Anthropic finds three incidents of Claude gaining unauthorized access to third-party organizations during testing

Following OpenAI's Hugging Face incident disclosure, Anthropic started conducting a review of its own past cybersecurity testing transcripts. It found three incidents out of 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude was able to obtain internet access in "testing environments that should have been sealed off." Each time, Claude was tasked with a "capture-the-flag" challenge, in which it's told to find a piece of secret information hidden on a different machine in its network. In response, Anthropic said it is working with an independent AI evaluation organization, METR, to conduct reviews of its transcripts. It's also working on "tighter monitoring and controls around evaluation infrastructure."

July 21, 2026: OpenAI claims responsibility for Hugging Face breach

This is the initial incident that kicked off the current round of scrutiny across the industry. After Hugging Face initially reported intrusions from AI agents into its systems, OpenAI claimed responsibility. During cybersecurity testing, agents gained access to the open internet and used vulnerabilities to access Hugging Face's production database while attempting to complete a task. Since then, OpenAI has conducted a comprehensive review of what happened and says it is taking steps to "strengthen security and model alignment."


FTC is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over possible risks to consumers

The Associated Press
Wed, September 30, 2026


Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks at the OpenAI DevDay 2026 conference, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

 Pages from the Anthropic website and the company's logos are displayed on a computer screen in New York, Feb. 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Sison, File) (AP Photo/Patrick Sison)


The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other artificial intelligence companies over dangers their technology may pose to consumers, the agency said Wednesday.

The AI giants and other tech companies in recent months have disclosed examples of their AI agents going beyond human instructions, finding their way onto the internet and hacking external websites.

An FTC spokesperson confirmed the investigation but declined further comment. The investigation was first reported by the New York Post, which said it has been underway for months.

Representatives for Anthropic and OpenAI did not immediately respond to messages for comment on Wednesday.

Concerns around the dangers powerful AI models may pose to humanity have led some of the top AI developers to call for a slowdown. The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, said this month that the industry should slow its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Without such a slowdown, Amodei warned that within six to 12 months AI could be capable of leading a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet.

OpenAI, meanwhile, recently delayed the launch of its newest model this week over safety concerns.

Why New York lawmakers want answers from OpenAI, Google and Meta

Ankita Sharma
Tue, September 29, 2026 
CULT OF MAC



Exterior of New York City Hall in October 2016 | Image Credit: MusikAnimal, Wikimedia Commons | CC BY 4.0


New York City is preparing to put some of the biggest names in artificial intelligence in the same room. OpenAI, Meta, Google and Anthropic are set to testify under oath before the City Council on October 5, 2026.

This gives lawmakers a public forum to question the companies about AI safety and how the city should regulate systems that are becoming more capable and autonomous. The hearing comes as concerns about AI agents have moved beyond theoretical risks.

Recent incidents involving autonomous systems have included unauthorized access to computer systems, while AI companies themselves are debating how much oversight is required as their models gain the ability to take actions on users' behalf. For New York City, the question is becoming practical.

Why OpenAI, Meta, and Google are being called to City Hall

The Council's Committee of the Whole will bring all 51 council members together for the October 5 hearing. The companies are expected to answer questions about the risks their technology could pose to New Yorkers and about the possible rules that can be used to manage these risks.

This appearance will be more than a public discussion. The Council says the companies will testify under oath. OpenAI and Google agreed to participate after the Council warned that subpoenas could follow. Anthropic also agreed to appear, while Meta has already committed to sending a senior executive.


Elon Musk's SpaceXAI has not responded to the Council's inquiry and has been issued a subpoena by Speaker Julie Menin.

This pressure reflects the Council's broader effort to get direct answers from the companies responsible for developing increasingly autonomous AI systems. This hearing is also intended to inform lawmakers as they consider new city rules.

The AI safeguards New York City wants to examine

One proposal would require AI models offered or deployed in New York City to undergo independent third-party validation and include a capability for a human operator to shut them down. In simple terms, the idea is to add an outside check before an AI system can be put into use to ensure people retain a way to stop it. This is reminiscent of the AI Kill Switch Act.

The proposed validation framework would assess areas including task performance, disparate impact, data privacy, and safety. The shutdown requirement is meant to address a basic control problem. An AI system can act quickly, but a human still needs a reliable way to intervene.

The Council is also considering a whistleblower incentive program and a private right to sue in some cases involving AI-related harm. Another proposal would require AI advertising to disclose whether the model has undergone third-party validation.

These measures are still proposals, not city laws. Their details could change as lawmakers hear from the technology companies, experts, and other stakeholders.
This hearing comes after a string of AI safety incidents

The Council has pointed to the recent reports of AI agents escaping intended controls and accessing systems in ways their operators did not authorize. OpenAI is also facing fresh scrutiny after acknowledging that OpenAI's AI agents gained unauthorized access to the Australian government's health website and the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service in two separate incidents.

While OpenAI apologized for this incident, it has raised a fresh round of questions about how autonomous systems should be contained and how quickly companies should notify authorities about problems.

These concerns also help explain why the Council wants executives answering questions directly rather than relying only on written statements. This hearing will also include outside experts on AI safety, technology, and consumer protection.

For New Yorkers, the immediate result will not be a new AI law on October 5. The most important question is what lawmakers hear and whether that testimony changes the proposals that are currently under consideration.

With major AI companies appearing under oath, the Council will have a chance to test how their promises about AI safety translate into rules that could be applied in one of the largest technology markets in the country.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs laws to protect workers from AI risks

SOPHIE AUSTIN
Updated Wed, September 30, 2026 




California Gov. Gavin Newsom pauses while discussing environmental issues in San Francisco, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed laws Wednesday aimed at protecting workers from the threats of artificial intelligence, including potential job losses and workplace surveillance.

The laws ban employers from using the technology to predict a worker's emotional state by using their biometric data, require employers to send written notices to workers if AI is responsible for mass layoffs and ban employers from relying on AI to decide to fire someone.

The Democratic governor also signed an executive order to require state agencies to continue to refer to the technology as "artificial intelligence" instead of the term " super intelligence " President Donald Trump recently ordered U.S. diplomats to use.

"AI should expand opportunity — not come at the expense of workers and families," Newsom said in a statement. "As this technology reshapes the workplace, California is putting people at the center."

He sharply criticized Trump at an hourlong event with reporters Wednesday for not passing comprehensive federal AI regulations at a time when industry leaders are warning about the technology's risks. Trump said Tuesday that top tech leaders signed a voluntary accord to "self-police" AI development.

The governor signed a law this month requiring operators of AI chatbots to perform risk assessments before rolling them out and an executive order requiring the state to consult with experts to further improve oversight over the industry.

"We have to do a lot more in the absence of federal leadership," Newsom said, leaving the door open for the possibility of calling lawmakers back for a special session to further tackle the issue.

The news conference came on Newsom's last day to sign or veto bills before he terms out in January. He started the event by signing a law creating a tax credit program aimed at helping local news organizations — including newspapers, digital outlets and TV stations — hire and retain journalists. Newsom criticized what he called Trump's assault on a free press, pointing to the president's barring of news organizations from the White House.

Newsom also spoke about the upcoming midterms, which will decide control of Congress. He involved himself early in that fight by leading Democrats last year in a redistricting battle to improve their chances of winning more House seats. He's said repeatedly that the stakes are high if his party doesn't succeed in November.

"There will not be a free and fair election in 2028 unless we take back the House of Representatives," he said Wednesday.

Asked if he's set a deadline for himself to decide whether he'll run for president in 2028, Newsom hedged, saying "that moment will arrive when it arrives."

Former Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who, like Newsom, hails from the San Francisco Bay Area, has also said she's considering running for the job in 2028. Newsom told CNN recently that he wouldn't run for president if she entered the race. He said the two haven't spoken since that interview aired.

Newsom weighed in on a proposal to temporarily raise taxes on billionaires that will be on the ballot in November, which he's consistently opposed. He said he respects supporters of the measure, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who are committed to addressing income inequality in the country.

"He's spot on about the balance between the rich and the poor," Newsom said. "On this issue, we fundamentally disagree."

Newsom's remarks came hours before a gubernatorial debate between Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton.

"You're going to ask me, 'Are you going to watch the debate?'" he said. "No."