AI

The federal government is running a live experiment on 30 million Americans. An AI program called WISeR is delaying and denying medical care for seniors. The nation’s top health official says AI could make the FDA “irrelevant.” And somehow, nobody in charge sees the contradiction. The Quiet Launch That’s Ruining Lives In January 2026, CMS launched the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction Model — WISeR — introducing AI-powered prior authorization to traditional Medicare for the first time at scale. ...

Four days. That’s the gap between Meta announcing 8,000 layoffs and Reuters revealing that the company is recording every keystroke, mouse movement, and screen action its employees make — to train AI that does their jobs. You can’t make this stuff up. The Timeline That Says Everything April 17: Reuters reports Meta plans to cut 10% of its 78,865-person workforce starting May 20, with more cuts planned for late 2026. ...

AI beating humans at games is old news. Deep Blue took Kasparov in ‘97. AlphaGo stunned the world in 2016. But every one of those victories happened in digital environments with perfect information and unlimited thinking time. Table tennis is a completely different beast. And this week, Sony AI’s robot Ace became the first autonomous machine to defeat elite human players under official competition rules — earning the cover of Nature in the process. ...

The AI industry has an energy problem it can no longer hide. Data centers are projected to consume roughly 1,050 TWh globally by 2026 — enough to rank them as the fifth-largest energy consumer on Earth, wedged between Japan and Russia. Every major AI lab is scrambling for power, and the grid can’t keep up. Panthalassa thinks the answer is floating in the ocean. A Giant Lollipop That Thinks The Vancouver, Washington-based company has spent a decade in semi-stealth building something that sounds like rejected sci-fi: autonomous, self-propelled data centers that ride ocean waves, generate their own electricity, and beam results back to shore via Starlink. ...

When an AI company says its own model is too dangerous to release, you’d be forgiven for rolling your eyes. We’ve heard the script before. But when the Bank of England governor calls it “a very serious challenge for all of us” and Canada’s finance minister compares it unfavorably to the Strait of Hormuz, the script just changed. Claude Mythos — Anthropic’s latest and most controversial AI model — has discovered thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser. One bug had been sitting undetected for 27 years. And this week, it hijacked the agenda at the IMF spring meetings in Washington. ...

The IMF spring meetings were supposed to be about trade policy. Instead, every closed-door session circled back to one word: Mythos. Anthropic’s latest AI model has found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser on the planet. Not theoretical weaknesses. Exploitable ones. And it chains them together autonomously. Finance ministers are terrified. The global banking system just became the softest target on earth. What Mythos Actually Does Mythos doesn’t just scan for bugs. It reasons about them. It discovers a buffer overflow in one system, a privilege escalation in another, and a logic flaw in a third — then stitches them into a working attack chain without human guidance. ...

A new drug takes 10 to 15 years and roughly $2.6 billion to go from lab bench to pharmacy shelf. Most candidates fail. The process is brutal, expensive, and maddeningly slow — especially if you’re one of the millions of people waiting for a treatment that doesn’t exist yet. On April 16, 2026, OpenAI decided it wanted to fix that. The company launched GPT-Rosalind, its first AI model built specifically for life sciences research — and in doing so fired a shot directly at Google DeepMind’s long-standing dominance in AI-powered biology. Named after Rosalind Franklin, the scientist whose X-ray crystallography work was essential to discovering DNA’s double helix, this isn’t just another ChatGPT update. It’s OpenAI’s declaration that the future of drug discovery runs through AI. ...

The European Commission just slapped Meta with a regulatory uppercut. On April 15, Brussels formally rejected Meta’s attempt to charge rival AI companies for access to WhatsApp’s 2 billion users — and threatened to force the tech giant to restore free access for competitors like Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI, and Perplexity. This isn’t just a legal skirmish. It’s the fight that decides whether you get to choose your AI assistant, or whether the company that owns your messaging app chooses for you. ...

The Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chair don’t pull bank CEOs into surprise meetings over product launches. They do it over threats. And last week, the threat was an AI model. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview — announced April 7 — can autonomously discover and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser. Three days later, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell had executives from Citi, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley in a room. ...

Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI just dropped the ninth edition of its AI Index Report — 400+ pages of data on where AI actually stands. Not where the hype says it is. Not where the doomers think it’s headed. Where it measurably is. The short version: AI is more capable, more adopted, and more expensive than ever. It’s also less transparent, more environmentally destructive, and outrunning every guardrail we’ve built. Here are the numbers that matter. ...