Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

AI researchers and labs have advanced by leaps and bounds in evaluating AI models for everything from safety and compliance to sycophancy and alignment. But it appears companies and developers are faced with a new, specific need: making sure their AI system behaves as intended for their specific product or service. In a bid to make that testing process simpler, Microsoft on Tuesday took the wraps off ASSERT, short for Adaptive Spec-driven Scoring for Evaluation and Regression Testing. The open source framework, Microsoft says, makes evaluating application-specific AI behavior easy by using AI to turn high-level, natural-language descriptions of goals,…

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used a conference keynote on Tuesday to defend against one of the biggest challenges to the company’s massive AI datacenter buildout: Community backlash.AI data centers have become such a political flashpoint that more people in a recent Gallup poll said they’d rather live near a nuclear reactor. The data center boom has received criticism over growing power costs, environmental concerns, and the potential impact of AI on jobs.Microsoft in January released a plan to build what the company called “community-first” AI infrastructure, making promises including that its data centers won’t raise electricity rates for residents.”How do…

Martin Scorsese has signed on as a partner and adviser to AI image-generation startup Black Forest Labs, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. The caveat is that one of the world’s most famous living directors is using the tech solely for storyboarding. “For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards,” he said in a statement to the Times. The tool, he said, helps him communicate his vision to cinematographers and production designers far faster and more efficiently. Black Forest Labs is a 70-person outfit headquartered not in San Francisco, but in Freiburg, Germany, the closest major city to…

In the first weeks of 2026, OpenClaw spread through the AI world like a sonic boom, introducing many of the industry’s most ambitious technologists to the joy and chaos of an unrestrained AI agent. The project’s momentum tailed off after OpenAI scooped up its founder, but the influence is still being felt — particularly at Microsoft. Now Microsoft is launching Scout, a new AI assistant meant to bring the power and flexibility of OpenClaw into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Built on the OpenClaw framework, Scout is an always-on agentic assistant, designed to work alongside the user with a persistent identity…

Google announced on Tuesday that Android is launching fake call detection to protect against AI deepfake impersonation scams. The feature is rolling out globally in Phone by Google to Android 12+ devices this month, starting with Pixel devices. As people increasingly refuse to answer calls from unknown numbers, scammers are shifting their tactics by spoofing trusted phone numbers and using AI deepfake technology to sound like authority figures, family members, or employers. For example, a person may receive a phone call showing the caller ID “Mom,” and the voice may sound exactly like her, but the caller is actually a…

As AI agents grow ever more capable, enterprises racing to put them to work across applications, workflows, and products face a new challenge: ensuring an agent does what it’s supposed to do when it’s deployed across different environments. Microsoft is trying to solve this problem with a new open source standard called Agent Control Specification (ACS) that aims to give developers a more consistent and granular way to control what AI agents are allowed to do. The specification essentially lets developer, compliance, and security teams define their own policies for agents to follow. The rules can define what the agent…

Hackers say they tricked Meta’s AI chatbot into giving them access to other people’s Instagram accounts — and all they had to do was ask.Over the weekend, people said they hijacked multiple Instagram accounts by asking Meta’s support chatbot to link a target’s Instagram account to a new email address, according to videos and screenshots of the interactions circulating online. The demonstrations show the chatbot saying it had sent a verification code to the new email. After the person entered the code, the chatbot displayed an option to reset the account’s password.The accounts of Barack Obama’s White House account, the…

Amazon was sued on Monday over alleged privacy violations from its Ring doorbell cameras. The class action lawsuit, filed in Seattle by Virginia resident Charles Sigwalt, claims that Ring’s Familiar Faces feature stores images of passersby without consent. Ring announced the Familiar Faces feature last September and faced pushback from consumer protection organizations like the EFF, as well as Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). But the company moved forward with its plans to launch the feature in December. Familiar Faces lets Ring users identify people who regularly come to their home through AI facial recognition. That way, if a regular guest,…

President Donald Trump on Tuesday privately signed a scaled-back executive order that would give AI and tech companies a brief window to let the federal government voluntarily review AI models.The order comes after the federal government has had repeated conversations with leading AI companies, including Anthropic, about cybersecurity. The startup said in April that it was limiting the release of Claude Mythos due to concerns that the AI model was too adept at finding software and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Anthropic, which has confidentially filed for an initial public offering, said last week that it would soon release Mythos-level models to its customers.A…

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday designed to give the government a chance to review powerful AI models before they are released.  The order asks certain AI companies to voluntarily submit their new models to the government for testing or evaluation 30 days before releasing the products to the public. A previous draft of the order had called for a voluntary review up to 90 days in advance, though AI industry insiders had pushed for something closer to a two-week window. Trump had been slated to sign the more demanding version of the order in late May,…