Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

The now-viral X post from Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue reads, at first, like satire. She told her OpenClaw AI agent to check her overstuffed email inbox and suggest what to delete or archive.   The agent proceeded to run amok. It started deleting all her email in a “speed run” while ignoring her commands from her phone telling it to stop.  “I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb,” she wrote, posting images of the ignored stop prompts as receipts.   The Mac Mini, an affordable Apple computer that sits flat on a desk…

In a new study, researchers found microplastics deep inside prostate cancer tumors, raising more questions about the role the ubiquitous pollutants play in public health.The findings — which come from a small study of 10 men — were presented Monday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s Genitourinary Cancers Symposium and have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.In the study, researchers analyzed tissue samples taken from 10 men with prostate cancer, with an average age of 65, whose prostate had been removed as part of their treatment for the disease. They also analyzed noncancerous tissue taken from the…

With OpenAI on the verge of finalizing a new $100 billion round, and Anthropic just closing its own monster $30 billion raise, one thing is clear: The concept of investor “loyalty” is only hanging on by a thread.  At least a dozen direct investors in OpenAI were announced as backers in Anthropic’s $30 billion raise earlier this month, including Founders Fund, Iconiq, Insight Partners, and Sequoia Capital.  Some dual investments are understandable if they come from the hedge fund or asset manager worlds, where their focus is still largely investing in public stocks (competitors or not). These include D1, Fidelity,…

Anthropic says its Chinese competitors are stealing from the AI startup to gain an edge in the global AI race.On Monday, Anthropic said three of China’s biggest AI labs, DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot AI, were “illicitly” using Claude “to improve their own models,” through a process known as distillation.”These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication,” Anthropic said as part of its lengthy statement on Monday. “The window to act is narrow, and the threat extends beyond any single company or region. Addressing it will require rapid, coordinated action among industry players, policymakers, and the global AI community.Anthropic said the…

I’ve seen some silly predictions about the future of work lately. If you’re worried about AI destroying jobs, take a quick trip through Anthropic’s careers page. It’s one of my favorite spots on the internet right now.Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is among the loudest voices warning that AI could erase many white-collar jobs. He’s been especially outspoken about coding, given Anthropic’s Claude Code is so powerful.A successful editor once told me to focus on what people and companies do, not what they say. So let’s look at the jobs Anthropic is trying to fill right now.Top of the list: software…

Anthropic is accusing three Chinese AI companies of setting up more than 24,000 fake accounts with its Claude AI model to improve their own models. The labs — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — allegedly generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through those accounts using a technique called “distillation.” Anthropic said the labs “targeted Claude’s most differentiated capabilities: agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding.” The accusations come amid debates over how strictly to enforce export controls on advanced AI chips, a policy aimed at curbing China’s AI development.  Distillation is a common training method that AI labs use…

As a product VP at Google Cloud, Michael Gerstenhaber works mostly on Vertex AI, the company’s unified platform for deploying enterprise AI. It gives him a high-level view of how companies are actually using AI models, and what still needs to be done to unleash the potential of agentic AI. When I spoke with Gerstenhaber, I was particularly struck by one idea I hadn’t heard before. As he put it, AI models are pushing against three frontiers at once: raw intelligence, response time, and a third quality that has less to do with raw capability than with cost — whether…

OpenAI is beefing up partnerships with four major consulting giants as the AI company looks to grow its enterprise business in 2026. OpenAI announced on Monday the “Frontier Alliance,” a signal that the AI lab is willing to try different approaches to get enterprises to meaningfully adopt its technology. The alliance includes multi-year partnerships between OpenAI and four major consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture and Capgemini, to sell its enterprise products. OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team will work with the consulting giants to help them implement OpenAI’s enterprise-focused technologies like OpenAI Frontier into customers’ tech stacks. The…

Being an expert birdwatcher is more than a hobby. It’s a pastime that may alter the structure and function of your brain. And these changes may enhance cognition even as you age, new research suggests.In a Canadian study of 58 adults, the brains of expert birders, compared with those of novices, were more dense in areas related to attention and perception. Such tissue density may indicate increased communication between neurons, and these structural differences were associated with more accurate bird identification.The findings were published Monday in JNeurosci, the Journal of Neuroscience.“Our brains are very malleable,” said lead author Erik Wing,…

Being an expert birdwatcher is more than a hobby. It’s a pastime that may alter the structure and function of your brain. And these changes may enhance cognition even as you age, new research suggests.In a Canadian study of 58 adults, the brains of expert birders, compared with those of novices, were more dense in areas related to attention and perception. Such tissue density may indicate increased communication between neurons, and these structural differences were associated with more accurate bird identification.The findings were published Monday in JNeurosci, the Journal of Neuroscience.“Our brains are very malleable,” said lead author Erik Wing,…