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A Munich regional court has ruled (PDF) that Google can be held directly liable for false claims in AI Overviews. The case involved AI Overviews falsely linking two publishers to scams and shady business practices, with the court rejecting Google's argument that users could simply check the sources themselves. The Decoder reports: Google's AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results, the court argues. The AI rewrites and judges results "in its own words and according to its own st…

Seattle has enacted a one-year moratorium on new datacenters, making it the largest U.S. city to do so as the backlash against AI infrastructure grows across the country. The city council voted unanimously in favor of the ban. The Guardian reports: Lawmakers have framed the pause as an opportunity to draft regulations specifically targeting the electricity-hungry datacenters being built nationwide to serve the AI sector, and to protect local residents from environmental risks and rising electri…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ComputerWeekly: Microsoft has issued patches for about 200 flaws in its latest monthly Patch Tuesday drop, blasting past a previous record high of almost 170 common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) set in October 2025. Among a great many others, the latest update from Redmond fixes a total of 32 critical CVEs and three zero-day flaws. Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at TrendAI's Zero Day Initiative, said: "We are heading into a high-stakes su…

Commonwealth Fusion has published five peer-reviewed papers laying out the physics case for ARC, its planned 400 MW fusion power plant, which would follow the company's smaller SPARC tokamak now under construction. The papers suggest ARC could produce more energy than it consumes using high-temperature superconducting magnets, molten-salt heat extraction, and 15-minute fusion pulses. Ars Technica reports: ARC will be a tokamak that hosts fusion between hydrogen's two heavier isotopes, deuterium…

NASA has named Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano, Frank Rubio, and Andre Douglas as the crew for Artemis III, which has been reworked from a moon-landing mission into a roughly two-week Earth-orbit test of lunar landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin. NBC News reports: Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano, Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas are expected to launch into Earth orbit next year, with the goal of testing two commercially developed lunar landers that are slated to carry astronauts to the surfa…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to make it effectively impossible for people to buy what many call burner phones -- a phone not explicitly linked to your identity at the point of purchase -- which would impact privacy-conscious people, to domestic abuse survivors, to journalists, and many more. The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country's telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all ph…

The Pentagon has added Alibaba, BYD, Baidu, Unitree, and other Chinese companies to its list of firms it says support China's military, barring them from U.S. defense contracts. The companies and China's embassy deny the allegations. The Associated Press reports: Created in 2021 by a congressional mandate, the list (PDF) seeks to identify Chinese companies that the Pentagon considers to have links to the Chinese military -- not only those directly controlled by the Chinese military and security…

The European Commission has ordered Meta to temporarily restore free WhatsApp Business API access for rival AI chatbots while it investigates whether Meta's ban on third-party assistants abuses its dominant position. Meta says it will appeal, calling the move "regulatory overreach" that would let major AI companies use a paid WhatsApp product for free. The BBC reports: The EU said it began its investigation, in December 2025, after Meta banned third-party general-purpose AI assistants from the …

Anthropic is releasing Claude Fable 5, a Mythos-class AI model for enterprise customers and paid subscribers. The company says broader access is possible thanks to new safeguards that block high-risk requests in areas like cybersecurity and biology. "For us, it's really around what we call 'race to the top,' being able to provide this technology in a valuable fashion, and at the same time providing the right safety guardrails so that it can do asymmetrically more benefits than harm," Dianne Pen…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have analyzed a high-severity vulnerability in Linux that's able to escalate untrusted users to root by exploiting a bug you don't often see: a single errant character inside the kernel. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-23111, is located in nf_tables, a subsystem of the Linux kernel that provides packet filtering capabilities. It's used to manage firewall rules and replaces older subsystems such as iptables, ip6tables, arp…

The European Commission says Apple's decision not to launch Siri AI in the EU is Apple's alone, arguing that the company sought an exemption from Digital Markets Act interoperability rules instead of building a compliant privacy- and security-preserving solution. Apple, meanwhile, says regulators rejected its proposals and claims the DMA would require giving third-party AI systems overly broad access to users' devices. MacRumors reports: Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters in …

Meta says it will expand how it uses off-platform activity shared by other businesses to personalize Facebook and Instagram feeds as well as AI responses, not just ads. The change starts in July and can be disabled through the "Activity from other businesses" setting, though Meta says it is not collecting new data as part of the update. The Verge reports: For example, Meta says if you bought a tent online recently, you might see camping-related videos in your Reels feed. "We aren't collecting a…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Microsoft has shut down a wave of its own repositories on GitHub, including those related to Azure and AI coding agents, as it investigates a data breach, according to research from cybersecurity researchers and a statement given to 404 Media by Microsoft. Hackers planted malware that would harvest peoples' credentials when they opened it in AI coding tools like Claude Code or Gemini CLI, according to one set of researchers. The exact contours…

NHS England plans to roll out Microsoft Copilot to 505,000 clinicians and support staff after a 30,000-person pilot claimed the AI assistant saved users an average of 43 minutes a day on administrative work. The Register reports: The rollout won't happen overnight. NHS England said that each trust will receive a central allocation of licenses based on headcount, typically starting with around 2,000 Copilot seats, and that more than half a million staff are expected to have access by October 202…

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has given Apple, Google, and other tech firms until September to introduce device-level protections that prevent children from taking, sharing, or viewing explicit images. "If businesses do not comply within three months, legislation will be brought forward requiring the protection to be added to all phones and tablets sold in the UK," reports The Guardian. "Tech firms that fail to do so could face fines, and their senior managers could be made criminally liable."…