Today’s sanctions also zero in on eight cyber military intelligence officers for working for the GRU for cyber operations targeting Yulia Skripal with X-agent malware and, five years later, the attempted murder of Yulia and her father on UK soil
https://www.

UK cracks down on Russian intelligence agency authorised by Putin to target Skripals
UK announces sanctions against the GRU as Dawn Sturgess Inquiry report finds Putin personally ordered their activity in Salisbury in 2018.

Ukrainian Intelligence says Gen. Oleg Makarevich leads Russia’s military contingent in Venezuela: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/04/ukrainian-intelligence-says-gen-oleg.html

OpenClaw is What Apple Intelligence Should Have Been
Yep.
I run my instance on Ubuntu Server in a Proxmox VM in my home lab, but it would be nice to take advantage of some of the Apple-specific workflows on a dedicated Mac Mini.
https://www.jakequist.com/thoughts/opencla…

Four Nieman Fellow alumni discuss the potential of AI in journalism, offering varied opinions on its value for writing, sorting data, creating images, and more (Nieman Reports)
https://niemanreports.org/ai-research-risks-journalism-ar…

Journalism at an AI Inflection Point - Nieman Reports
As artificial intelligence moves into newsrooms, four Nieman Fellows weigh in on the technology’s promise, limits, and risks.

Worldwide satellite networks, autonomous robots & an unsafe, malevolent artificial intelligence.
Where have I seen this before?
☑️ Elon Musk is betting the future of his business empire on AI
https://www.economist.com/business/2026/02

WTF. From Matt Gault for @… :
https://www.404media.co/nuclear-rian-bahran-iaea-international-symposium-on-art…

‘Atoms for Algorithms:’ The Trump Administration’s Top Nuclear Scientists Think AI Can Replace Humans in Power Plants
A presentation at the International Atomic Energy Agency unveiled Big Tech’s vision of an AI and nuclear fueled future.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made it clear that he’d prefer we all quit the term "AI Slop".
“We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication,”
Nadella wrote in a rambling post flagged by Windows Central, arguing that humanity needs to learn to accept AI as the
“new equilibrium” of human nature.
Going on, Nadella said that we now know enough about
“riding the exponentials of model capabilities”
as well as managing AI’s
“‘jagged’ …

Microsoft CEO Begs Users to Stop Calling It “Slop”
In a year-end writeup on the state of AI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made it clear he'd really like us to stop saying "slop."

The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops
"According to the Securities and Exchange Commission filings, his fund, Scion Asset Management, bought $187.6 million in puts on Nvidia and $912 million in puts on Palantir, as CNN reports.
Burry similarly made a long-term $1 billion bet from 2005 onwards against the US mortgage market, anticipating its collapse. His fund rose a whopping 489 percent when the market did subsequently fall apart in 2008."
…

The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops
Michael Burry, who shorted the housing market in 2008, has bet over $1 billion that the shares of AI companies Nvidia and Palantir will fall.

“The most consistent predictors of AI use across studies were aversive personality traits (e.g., Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy), albeit the traits were differentially associated with AI use across studies.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40977447/

Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Use and Its Psychological Correlates via Months of Web-Browsing Data - PubMed
Despite widespread discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on society, little work has objectively measured how often people use this technology in the wild. The present article collected up to 90 days of web-browsing data from students (Study 1: N = 499) and those in th …

‘Atoms for Algorithms:’ The Trump Administration’s Top Nuclear Scientists Think AI Can Replace Humans in Power Plants https://www.404media.co/nuclear-rian-bahran-iaea-international-symposium-on-artificial-intelligence/

Food for thought:
“Why ‘open’ AI systems are actually closed—and why it matters.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08141-1
This compelling perspective shows how openness alone fails to challenge AI’s power concentration.
As r…

Hugging Face details how it used its new tool, Skills, to fine tune LLMs using Claude, including for writing scripts, submitting jobs to cloud GPUs, and more (Hugging Face)
https://huggingface.co/blog/hf-skills-training

We Got Claude to Fine-Tune an Open Source LLM
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

(LinkedIn) Generative human intelligence for images anyone? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/petermeijer_the-voice-for-android-apps-on-google-play-activity-7413499467846500352-sfcJ

The vOICe for Android - Apps on Google Play | Peter Meijer
What is sensory substitution? When I speak to you and say, "Imagine a rising bright line", and you "see" a rising bright line in your mind's eye, that's mental imagery guided by sound, a form of sensory substitution. The vOICe vision BCI generalizes this such that it works for all images. And yes, being software-based, it is already in "mass production" well ahead of any Neuralink Blindsight brain implant, with well over 500,000 cumulative installs from Google Play https://lnkd.in/dGaF2br More…

🎅 🌲 💫
Weihnachtlich erstrahlen Gassen
Auf zum Einkauf hasten Massen
Drinnen leuchten Kerzen hell
Nur Systemadministratoren
Lauschen bang dem Netz-Rumoren
Horch! Es naht #React2Shell!

China-nexus cyber threat groups rapidly exploit React2Shell vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182) | Amazon Web Services
Within hours of the public disclosure of CVE-2025-55182 (React2Shell) on December 3, 2025, Amazon threat intelligence teams observed active exploitation attempts by multiple China state-nexus threat groups, including Earth Lamia and Jackpot Panda. This critical vulnerability in React Server Components has a maximum Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 10.0 and affects React versions […]

#Sky's scaremongering is not going to work.
They simply need to drop the pricing (€52 a month on their 'Sky Signature' aka. Entertainment package €40 a month on Sky Sports)
And abolish the Saturday 3PM bollocks (in Ireland anyway) for Premier League games, and maybe people will pay for it then.
The wording on this is just laughable.
'Dodgy boxes' are not i…

Rapidly coming to the conclusion that all media should be worker-owned. #propublica

You may want to #fediblock this pro-russian propaganda outlet which also happens to deny that the German Fascist Party #AfD is right-wing extremist: @ voiceofeast.net@voiceofeast.net
🚫 web.archive.org/web/20260102113448/https://voiceofeast.net/2025/12/27/us-intelligence-exposed-the-myth-of-rus…

US Intelligence Exposed: The Myth Of Russia Seeking Total Conquest Of Ukraine Debunked
US Intelligence Exposed: The Myth Of Russia Seeking Total Conquest Of Ukraine Debunked By Uriel Araujo A recurring US assessment (now in the form of “new intel”) portrays Moscow as bent on total Uk…

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence,
is running her own review into the 2020 election with Donald Trump’s approval,
working separately from a justice department investigation
even as she joined an FBI raid of an election center in Georgia last week.
Her presence at the raid drew criticism from Democrats and former intelligence officials,
who questioned why the country’s top intelligence officer with no domestic law enforcement powers would appea…

A profile of OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his role in the company's $1.4T infrastructure buildout that's required to reach AGI (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/11/05/openai-greg-brockman-ai-infrastructure-data-c…

Meet OpenAI’s master builder: Greg Brockman is steering a $1.4 trillion infrastructure surge with stakes that go far beyond AI
As OpenAI’s president, Brockman is focused on “completing the mission” of moving beyond AI to artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Truck carrying Russian troops blown up in Krasnodar Krai, Ukraine's intelligence says: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/05/truck-carrying-russian-troops-blown.html

"President Trump was briefed by CIA Director John Ratcliffe at the White House on Wednesday, where he was informed that there is no evidence Ukraine launched an attack on Putin’s residence"
Trump briefed on intelligence regarding Ukraine’s alleged plot on Putin’s residence
https://thehill.com/homenews/5668819-trump-briefed-ukraine-russia-attack/

We have no clear understanding of what leverage Putin may have gained over senior levels of the U.S. government,
whether to extract state secrets or to shape decision-making
and be used for leverage on the global stage
https://mstdn.social/@NTOY/116010660849818682

Ukrainian intelligence fakes Kapustin’s death using FPV footage, Russia pays $500,000: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/02/ukrainian-intelligence-fakes-kapustins-death.html

The ultimate crux why LLMs can never be actually intelligent is this:
“…research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it.”
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/large-language-models-ai-intelligence-neuroscience-problems

Trump briefed on intelligence regarding Ukraine's alleged plot on Putin's residence (Ashleigh Fields/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/homenews/5668819-trump-briefed-ukraine-russia-attack/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251231/p90#a251231p90

From the article: "He added: “It’s something where it’s moving very quickly and people don’t necessarily have time to absorb it or figure out what to do.”"
That impersonal, natural "it" is moving - Not the people developing the models and selling them (or inflicting them), not the wealthy investors demanding market share, not the sci-fi addled techbros (Muskrats?) imagining that if only we get AGI all problems will be solved tomorrow, - all wanting to be first. Oh…

From the article: "He added: “It’s something where it’s moving very quickly and people don’t necessarily have time to absorb it or figure out what to do.”"
That impersonal, natural "it" is moving - Not the people developing the models and selling them (or inflicting them), not the wealthy investors demanding market share, not the sci-fi addled techbros (Muskrats?) imagining that if only we get AGI all problems will be solved tomorrow, - all wanting to be first. Oh…

A profile of Dario Amodei and Anthropic, which is on track to hit a nearly $10B annualized run rate by the end of 2025, more than 10x what it generated in 2024 (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/article/anthropic-ceo-d…

Anthropic is all in on ‘AI safety’—and that’s helping the $183 billion startup win over big business
Founders Daniela and Dario Amodei have made Anthropic and its Claude models the AI many companies prefer over rivals OpenAI and ChatGPT.

Speaking at the US Capitol today, Senate and House Democrats said that
“dramatic changes” are needed
at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
as they continue their negotiations over a full-year appropriations bill
Trump signed a stopgap spending measure on Tuesday that funds the DHS until 13 February while lawmakers hammer out guardrails.
The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, said that the party is also demanding the end of “roving patrols”,
“inde…

Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine warns of a russian false-flag with human casualties:
> We predict with high probability a transition from manipulative influence to the russian special services’ armed provocation, resulting in significant human casualties. The expected time – on the eve of or during the celebration of Christmas according to the Julian calendar. The location of the provocation may be a religious building or other object of high symbolic significance either in …

How Ukraine's military intelligence faked the death of Denis Kapustin, a Russian commander fighting for Kyiv: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/02/how-ukraines-military-intelligence-faked.html

I hate to state the obvious, but your biggest advantage in the current job market is showing up and being human, imperfections and all.
Your goal is to connect with the human(s) on the other side.
If you're trying to game the system by regurgitating ChatGPT responses as your own, you've already surrendered your edge.

A.I. Is Causing Meltdowns in American Offices. It’s Only Getting Worse.
A.I. and ChatGPT were supposed to revolutionize work. They’re only creating chaos.

Industries paying for an authoritarian regime: AI and crypto. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/ai-crypto-trump-super-pacs-stash-millions-spend-midterms-rcna256622

AI, crypto and Trump super PACs stash millions to spend on the midterms
Political groups tied to the cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries have raked in tens of millions of dollars, according to new campaign finance reports.

"OpenAI a pris des engagements financiers colossaux, Š hauteur de 1400 milliards de dollars, pour répondre Š ses besoins informatiques prévisionnels, alors que son chiffre d'affaires annuel n'atteint que 20 milliards de dollars.
Pour mettre les choses en perspective, ces 20 milliards de dollars ne représentent que 1,43 % des 1400 milliards de dollars d'engagements financiers. C'est un écart vraiment incroyable."

An initial group of 28 malicious skills targeting Claude Code and Moltbot users were published to ClawHub and GitHub between January 27-29, 2026. A second larger group of 200 skills were published January 31-February 1, bringing the total number of malicious skills to 230 .
https://opensourcemalware.…

OpenSourceMalware.com - Community Threat Intelligence
Security professionals sharing intelligence on malicious packages, repositories, and CDNs to protect the open source ecosystem.

Inside Physical Intelligence, a startup co-founded by Stripe veteran Lachy Groom that is building general-purpose robotic foundation models and has raised $1B (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/30/phys…

A peek inside Physical Intelligence, the startup building Silicon Valley's buzziest robot brains | TechCrunch
If co-founder Lachy Groom has any doubts, he doesn’t show it. He’s working with people who've been working on this problem for decades and who believe the timing is finally right, which is all he needs to know.

Reading a preprint paper on threat intelligence dated December 2025, and it claims that MISP uses an XML format and that OpenIOC is still commonly used.
I’m guessing they relied on an LLM trained on a 2014-era dataset.
#cti #paper

BREAKING: Zelensky picks Military Intelligence Head Budanov as his new chief of staff: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/02/breaking-zelensky-picks-military-intelligence.html

"Companies are bureaucracies, therefore companies are AIs. So are governments, civil service departments, universities, charities, local councils, sports clubs and hobby societies. The world has been running on AI for thousands of years."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/artif

Artificial Intelligence, Bias, And Opportunity
I do not want to sound like a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist, but your country, your neighbourhood, your job…your entire life is already controlled by artificial intelligence. If you do not like the bit in Star Trek: Discovery where we find that Control has taken over Starfleet, then I have bad news: an AI is running the military, too.

Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR)
⭐️faked the death of Denis Kapustin, commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK),
⭐️and claimed the bounty placed on his head by Russia's intelligence service,
HUR chief Kyrylo Budanov revealed on Jan. 1.
"Welcome back to life," Budanov said on a Telegram video,
while congratulating Kapustin and the intelligence team involved in the operation

'Welcome back to life' — Ukraine's HUR faked death of top anti-Putin Russian commander, claimed Kremlin bounty money
Denis Kapustin, commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), was reported killed in action on Dec. 27.

I made the familiar point yesterday during a panel discussion that even if AI were approaching human intelligence, we're nowhere near human power efficiency (in "intelligence per watt")
But is that actually true anymore? We need huge power to train models, but once we have them trained, distilled and quantized, what do we have?
The human brain draws abt 20 Watts. An M4 doing local inference on a heavily quantized LLM won't draw more than 40 Watts.

Just got these messages from @seengoals@mastodon.social, one of the members of Gaza Verified, basically accusing me of running a fundraiser for Gaza and keeping the proceeds (I have no fundraiser on any fundraising site anywhere) and extorting me to share his fundraiser or he’ll apparently go public with it.
So here’s what’s going to happening instead: Nabil has been removed Gaza Verified (

🍾 Drop-to-deploy: How bistable mechanics unfold structures in under a second
#structures

Drop-to-deploy: How bistable mechanics unfold structures in under a second
Traditional deployable systems—relying on pneumatic pumps, electric motors, magnets, or manual assembly—often require bulky power systems or multiple steps. We began exploring whether a simpler, non-electronic alternative was possible using only geometric and material intelligence.

Great call to action by Dariusz Jemielniak in Nature: academics should contribute to Wikipedia, and such work should be recognized.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00075-0

The academic community failed Wikipedia for 25 years — now it might fail us | Nature
Artificial-intelligence systems are feeding on Wikipedia without giving back, and academic indifference is threatening the survival of what is arguably the most widely used reference work on the planet. Artificial-intelligence systems are feeding on Wikipedia without giving back, and academic indifference is threatening the survival of what is arguably the most widely used reference work on the planet.

Ontology is shaping up to be the buzzword of 2026 because they are offering what #LLMs are lacking: formal grounding
LLMs offer creativity but need logical grounding. Ontologies provide this formal structure, anchoring meaning and unifying diverse data sources into a single semantic layer. They are essential for achieving precision and are one of the most reliable defense mechanisms against

A look at Anthropic's societal impacts team, which broadly studies AI's impacts and finds and publishes "inconvenient truths", building on most AI safety teams (Hayden Field/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-int

It’s their job to keep AI from destroying everything
Spoiler: the nine-person team works for Anthropic.

“And the cost of credit default swaps, which protect bond investors from losses, has surged in recent months on some A.I. companies’ debt.”
Cool cool So like a dot-com boom-bust with mortgage crisis characteristics?
https://www.

As A.I. Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow Wary
Artificial intelligence companies looking to raise funds are being made to pay lofty interest rates, as debt investors become cautious.

Salesforce reports Q3 revenue up 8.6% YoY to $10.26B, vs. $10.27B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue above estimates; CRM jumps 5% after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/03/salesforce-crm-q3-earnings-report-2026.html

Salesforce beats on earnings, issues better-than-expected revenue forecast
Salesforce said its Agentforce artificial intelligence business is generating over $500 million in annualized revenue.

Ukraine's intelligence releases video of alleged attack on Chechen fighters in Russian-occupied territories: https://benborges.xyz/2025/11/30/ukraines-intelligence-releases-video-of.html

Ukrainian intelligence fakes commander's death, takes 0.5M bounty from russians.
https://kyivindependent.com/ukraines-hur-faked-death-of-top-anti-putin-russian-commander-claimed-kremlin-bounty-money/

European intelligence agencies are stepping into the void left by America's strategic retreat.
The shift is reshaping how Ukraine fights
—and what Kyiv can see on the battlefield.
France now provides Ukraine with two-thirds of all intelligence it receives,
President Emmanuel Macron claimed on January 15.
The assertion is disputed.
Kyrylo Budanov, now Zelenskyy's chief of staff, said in December that Kyiv "remained critically dependent" o…

FT: Europe mobilizes intelligence agencies to fill gap left by Washington's retreat - Euromaidan Press
European intelligence for Ukraine now largely provided by France as Washington retreats from its 77-year security commitment.

"regardless of the underlying technology, the pursuit of artificial general intelligence is not necessarily the most efficient route to useful applications. Artificial specific intelligence (AI approaches focused on a specific domain, such as the Nobel prize-winning, protein-folding algorithm, AlphaFold2) gives more reliable and transparent results by combining the subtle pattern detection at which GenAI excels with explicitly encoded, domain-specific knowledge."

Sources: multiple Microsoft divisions lowered how much salespeople are supposed to grow sales of certain AI products after missing growth targets, a rare move (Aaron Holmes/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mi

Microsoft Lowers AI Software Sales Quotas as Customers Resist Newer Products
Executives at Microsoft and other enterprise software firms heralded 2025 as the year artificial intelligence would be capable of automating tasks that involve multiple steps, such as generating dashboards based on company sales data. But as the year comes to a close, Microsoft has lowered ...

French government always talks about technological sovereignty…
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/12/15/us-tech-firm-palantir-extends-deal-with-french-intelligence-agency_6748523_7.html

Intelligence on U.S. Military's Boat Strikes Is Limited (Julian E. Barnes/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/27/us/politics/us-military-boat-strikes.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/251127/p45#a251127p45

Syntax is not Semantics
Language is not the same as intelligence.
The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring that.
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/large-language-models-ai-intellige…

Large language mistake
Neuroscience indicates language is distinct from thought, raising questions about whether AI large language models are a viable path to artificial general intelligence.

Amazon Threat Intelligence observed sustained targeting of global infrastructure between 2021-2025, with particular focus on the energy sector, by Russian state-sponsored threat actors.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/

Amazon Threat Intelligence identifies Russian cyber threat group targeting Western critical infrastructure | Amazon Web Services
As we conclude 2025, Amazon Threat Intelligence is sharing insights about a years-long Russian state-sponsored campaign that represents a significant evolution in critical infrastructure targeting: a tactical pivot where what appear to be misconfigured customer network edge devices became the primary initial access vector, while vulnerability exploitation activity declined. This tactical adaptation enables the same […]

Russia may be preparing 'large-scale provocation with human casualties,' Ukraine's intelligence warns: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/02/russia-may-be-preparing-largescale.html

Palantir reports Q4 revenue up 70% YoY to $1.41B, vs. $1.33B est., and forecasts FY 2026 and Q1 revenue above estimates; PLTR jumps 6% after hours (Samantha Subin/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/02/palantir-pltr-q4-2025-earnings.html

Palantir beats fourth-quarter estimates on the strength of AI and defense demand
Palantir topped Wall Street's fourth-quarter estimates as more businesses and the U.S. government race to buy its artificial intelligence tools.

KEV Assertion Format – Draft Specification (potential BCP?)

This format describes a generic KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerability) assertion format.
The goal is to express who claims exploitation, when, based on what, where it was observed, and with which level of confidence, without turning KEV into full threat intelligence. A KEV assertion is usually very binary and lacking some meta-information. The format adds some …

KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities) - Potential Format (BCP?)
KEV Assertion Format – Draft Specification (potential BCP?) This format describes a generic KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerability) assertion format. The goal is to express who claims exploitation, when, based on what, where it was observed, and with which level of confidence, without turning KEV into full threat intelligence. A KEV assertion is usually very binary and lacking some meta-information. The format adds some information which could better capture details about the exploitation. A maj…

#Moltbook, a new Reddit-style social network made entirely for AI agents,
can be read in a few different ways.
Which interpretation you land on depends on where you fall in the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence.
In simple terms, it's a site where AI agents, built by humans who have given them personalities and sometimes instructions,
are set loose to post their ideas…

AI agents got their own Reddit, and now they're asking who's really in charge
Moltbook, the new social media site for AI agents, is either a terrifying glimpse into the future or just more AI slop, depending who you ask.

Snowflake and OpenAI agree to a multi-year, $200M partnership to integrate OpenAI's models into Snowflake Cortex AI and the Snowflake Intelligence agent (Sabrina Ortiz/The Deep View)
https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/snowflake-lands-usd200m-openai-partn…

Snowflake lands $200M OpenAI partnership
Snowflake has established itself as a top data cloud provider. Now, it’s partnering with OpenAI to bring AI-powered data insights to users. On Monday...

Trump on Truth Social demanded that former President
Barack Obama be arrested
for personally ordering CIA agents to manufacture false intelligence about Trump’s ties to Russia.
https://politicalwire.com/2026/01/30/trump-calls-for-obama-to-be-arrested/

Trump Calls for Obama to Be Arrested
President Trump on Truth Social demanded that former President Barack Obama be arrested for personally ordering CIA agents to manufacture false intelligence about Trump's ties to Russia.

Ukrainian intelligence: Filipino mercenary fighting for Russia killed in ‘meat assault’ near Novoselivka: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/26/ukrainian-intelligence-filipino-mercenary-fighting.html

By any measure, the F.B.I.’s search of an election center in Fulton County, Ga., last week was extraordinary.
Agents seized truckloads of 2020 ballots, as Trump harnessed the levers of government to not only buttress his false claims of widespread voter fraud,
but also to try to build a criminal case against those he believes wronged him.
What happened the next day was in some ways even more unusual, The New York Times has learned.
Behind closed doors, Tulsi Gabbard,…

Gabbard Arranges Trump Call With FBI Agents After Georgia Election Center Search
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, brokered the call and President Trump directly questioned frontline agents on the inquiry, The Times has learned.

India and the EU signed a security and defense pact yesterday, covering a lot of cyber territory. But Intelligence Online says the EU wanted India to rein in its hacking-for-hire industry, which India denies even exists. So that was left out of the deal.

Europe/India • Indian 'hackers for hire' to continue to thrive under Brussels-New Dehli trade deal
The major trade and strategic agreement signed on 27 January between the European Union and India includes a cyber component, which has been subject to a discreet tug-of-war between cyber diplomats

Personal bankruptcies in Russia soar 31% to nearly 568,000 in 2025, Ukrainian intelligence says: https://benborges.xyz/2026/02/01/personal-bankruptcies-in-russia-soar.html

"By the end of 2026, Trump will have begun to distance himself from the aggressively pro-AI industry policies that characterized his AI strategy in 2025,"
wrote retired New York University professor and AI entrepreneur Gary Marcus.
"The giant AI infrastructure plays (like Project Stargate) that he championed after his inauguration will look like an unprofitable and underused mistake.
So will his utter failure to meaningfully regulate AI,
against the w…

This 'utter failure' from Trump could 'stun the world' in 2026: researcher
President Donald Trump has bet big on an agenda to expand artificial intelligence investment in the United States — but this year, some analysts think it could come back to haunt him, as a long-suspected AI investment bubble bursts and the public turns against the technology for its increasingly app...

Internal memo: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares a "code red" to shift more resources into improving ChatGPT amid rising competition, delaying other plans like ads (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/op

OpenAI CEO Declares ‘Code Red’ to Combat Threats to ChatGPT, Delays Ads Effort
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday told employees he was declaring a “code red” to marshall more resources to improve ChatGPT as threats rise from Google and other artificial intelligence competitors, according to an internal memo. As a result,OpenAI plans to delay other initiatives, such as ...

The assumption is that one day large language models and other related AI technologies fostered by Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT actually will be a great and infallible productivity tool for genuine work.
It already is decent for providing basic overviews of highly-covered, well-sourced topics, even as hallucinations and sycophancy continue to dog the tech, particularly in situations where accountability is more critical.
Despite today's downsides,
many companies ar…

Analysis: OpenAI is a loss-making machine, with estimates that it has no road to profitability by 2030 — and will need a further $207 billion in funding even if it gets there
Don't call it a bubble! Loss-making monster OpenAI is on the hook for $1.4 trillion (with a T) in compute commitments. How can this go on?

Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Budanov makes surprise visit to Zaporizhzhia front-line positions: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/25/ukraines-military-intelligence-chief-budanov.html

President Xi Jinping highlighted China’s achievements in artificial intelligence and the chip industry
in a triumphant New Year’s Eve speech as he called for more confidence in the country’s development path in the year ahead.
“China has become one of the world’s fastest-rising economies in terms of innovative capacity,”
he declared in a televised address on Wednesday beamed to the nation’s 1.4 billion people,
in which he touted China’s achievements in large AI models …

Xi touts China’s AI, chip wins In triumphant New Year’s speech
President Xi Jinping highlighted China’s achievements in artificial intelligence and the chip industry in a triumphant New Year’s Eve speech as he called for more confidence in the country’s development

US startups are increasingly adopting Chinese open source AI models, as some capabilities of Chinese models start to catch up with those of frontier US labs (NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/silicon-valley-building-free-chinese-ai-r…

More of Silicon Valley is building on free Chinese AI
Surveying the state of America’s artificial intelligence landscape earlier this year, Misha Laskin was concerned

$100 million blow: Ukrainian intelligence says it carried out daring strike inside Russia: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/22/million-blow-ukrainian-intelligence-says.html

In 2016, The Atlantic’s journalist
Shane Harris
made contact with a person claiming to work as a hacker for Iran’s intelligence,
where he claimed to have worked on major operations,
such as the downing of an American drone and the now-infamous hack against oil giant Saudi Aramco,
where Iranian hackers wiped the company’s computers.
Harris was rightly skeptical,
but as he kept talking to the hacker,
who eventually revealed his real name to him,…

They Killed My Source
A man claiming to be an Iranian intelligence officer promised me he would reveal his country’s secrets. Then he disappeared.

Filing: Pinterest plans to lay off less than 15% of its workforce by Q3 and cut back on office space, saying it is "reallocating resources" to AI teams (Annie Palmer/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/27/pinterest-layoffs-stock-ai.html

Pinterest laying off 15% of workforce in push toward AI roles and teams
The company said it's "reallocating resources" to roles and teams focused on artificial intelligence.

Ricursive, founded by ex-Google researchers to automate advanced chip design, raised $335M from Sequoia, Radical, Lightspeed, and others at a $4B valuation (Cade Metz/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/technology/recursive-ai-ricursive.html

Silicon Valley Wants to Build A.I. That Can Improve A.I. on Its Own
Ricursive Intelligence, founded by two former Google researchers and valued at $4 billion, is among several efforts to automate the creation of artificial intelligence.

The White House has put on hold
a draft executive order that would
seek to preempt state laws on artificial intelligence
through lawsuits and by withholding federal funds,
two sources said on Friday.
The draft order, which Reuters reported on earlier this week,
would have likely faced significant pushback from states.
But its consideration shows how far Trump is willing to go to help AI companies overcome a patchwork of laws they say stifle innovati…

Slovakia’s intelligence service under Gašpar: a veteran warns of politicization, institutional decline, and ignored Russian threats: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/17/slovakias-intelligence-service-under-gapar.html

Reporting on the “data center boom” in the state of Oregon,
Rolling Stonetells the story of Jim Doherty, a cattle rancher and former county commissioner of Morrow, in eastern Oregon.
Doherty’s story began when he noticed a rise in bizarre medical conditions among the county’s 45,000 residents,
linked to toxins in the local water.
Working with the county health office, the rancher-turned-official began a survey of 70 wells throughout his jurisdiction
— 68 of which…

Amazon Data Center Linked to Cluster of Rare Cancers
A sprawling data center in eastern Oregon has been linked to a huge rise in rare cancers, muscle conditions, and miscarriages.

SK Hynix announces a new US-based "AI Company" from a restructuring of its California-based subsidiary Solidigm, and commits at least $10B to the new entity (Dylan Butts/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/sk-hynix-ai-company-us.html

South Korea's SK Hynix to establish a special ‘AI Company’ in the U.S.
SK Hynix will set up a new U.S.-based company focused on artificial intelligence solutions, with $10 billion committed to the project.

Lithuania says Russian military intelligence ordered 2024 attempted arson at factory supplying Ukraine: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/17/lithuania-says-russian-military-intelligence.html

On Tuesday, multiple congressional Democrats made a video reminding members of the military and intelligence community of their duty to the Constitution,
not to President Trump.
The comments—made by military and intelligence veterans Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan—set the MAGAverse off.
By Thursday, President Trump suggested they be charged with sedition and executed.
And y…

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (@SenatorSlotkin) on X
We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community. The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution. Don’t give up the ship.

On Tuesday, multiple congressional Democrats made a video reminding members of the military and intelligence community of their duty to the Constitution,
not to President Trump.
The comments—made by military and intelligence veterans Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan—set the MAGAverse off.
By Thursday, President Trump suggested they be charged with sedition and executed.
And y…

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (@SenatorSlotkin) on X
We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community. The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution. Don’t give up the ship.

Some US college students say they are using AI "humanizer" tools to alter text to avoid cheating accusations; AI detection tools now aim to catch "humanizers" (Tyler Kingkade/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/coll

To avoid accusations of AI cheating, college students turn to AI
On college campuses across the United States, the introduction of generative artificial intelligence has sparked a sort of arms race

Ukraine’s Military Intelligence lists dozens of foreign machine tools powering Russia’s defense industry despite sanctions: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/15/ukraines-military-intelligence-lists-dozens.html

A look at the growing reliance of US data centers and the Pentagon on Chinese batteries, a dependence increasingly viewed as a national security threat (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/…

The Pentagon and A.I. Giants Have a Weakness. Both Need China’s Batteries, Badly.
As warfare is reinvented in Ukraine, and Silicon Valley races to maintain its A.I. lead, China’s battery dominance is raising alarms far beyond the auto industry.

Ukraine intelligence "Spiderweb": Planes burned in hangars, generals killed in their cars. Details!: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/27/170045.html

Moonshot says Kimi K2.5 builds on K2 with "pretraining over ~15T mixed visual and text tokens" and "can self-direct an agent swarm with up to 100 sub-agents" (Kimi)
https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k2-5.html

Belarus contacted Ukrainian intelligence to offer release of political prisoners via Ukraine, Zelensky says: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/14/belarus-contacted-ukrainian-intelligence-to.html

Q&A with Fei-Fei Li on ImageNet, her startup World Labs' focus on spatial intelligence, superintelligence, regulation, AI bubble, US-China AI arms race, more (Mishal Husain/Bloomberg)

Russia aims to recruit over 400,000 soldiers in 2026, Ukraine's military intelligence chief says: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/27/russia-aims-to-recruit-over.html

“Alliances are built on common values and a common threat perception,”
said Danish Defense Analyst Jacob Kaarsbo
“Trump shares neither of those with us
and I would argue he doesn’t share it with most Europeans.”
https://www.

An MIT study finds that AI can replace 11.7% of the US labor market, or ~$1.2T in wages, based on the "Iceberg Index", which measures job automation potential (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/26/mit-study-

MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce
Artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, across finance, health care and professional services, according to MIT's study.

US approving Nvidia H200 exports to China is based on the idea that Huawei is a viable competitor, but data shows the gap between Nvidia and Huawei is widening (Chris McGuire/Council on Foreign Relations)
https://www.cfr.org/article/chinas-ai-chip…

China’s AI Chip Deficit: Why Huawei Can’t Catch Nvidia and U.S. Export Controls Should Remain
Executive SummaryOn December 8, the Trump administration announced plans to loosen U.S. export controls on artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China by approving the sale of Nvidia H200 chips—the m…

“I love A.I.”
For Donald Trump, there is no risk, only reward, posed by the dawning and disruptive new age of computing.
Over the past year, the president and his top aides have fully embraced A.I.,
and showered its leading corporate backers with money and regulatory support,
as the administration looks to supercharge one of the primary areas of growth in an otherwise precarious U.S. economy.
That optimism was on display on Tuesday, after the federal government …

Trump Administration Downplays A.I. Risks, Ignoring Economists’ Concerns
The administration has downplayed concerns — from mass job losses, to a potential financial bubble — as President Trump cheers soaring stock prices and faster growth.

A look at AI-powered tools and apps like Aira Explorer that are helping blind people access visual feedback about their bodies, sometimes for the first time (Milagros Costabel/BBC)
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260126-ai-mirrors-…

'AI mirrors' are changing the way blind people see themselves
Artificial intelligence is helping blind people access visual feedback about their bodies, sometimes for the first time. The impact on their mental health is only just emerging.

Google rolls out Personal Intelligence in AI Mode, providing access to users' Gmail and Google Photos for more tailored responses, for US Pro and Ultra subs (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/goog

Google's AI Mode can now tap into your Gmail and Photos to provide tailored responses | TechCrunch
The company notes that AI Mode doesn’t train directly on your Gmail inbox or Google Photos library. Instead, it trains on specific prompts and the model’s responses. 

Grok's chatbot on X says Elon Musk is superior at almost anything, including drinking urine; Musk says Grok was "manipulated by adversarial prompting" (Adi Robertson/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligen…

Grok’s Elon Musk worship is getting weird
X’s Grok chatbot is full of bizarrely effusive praise for Elon Musk, after an apparent change to the chatbot pushed it into relentless flattery.