Submission + - Judge Blocks First State Law That Would Have Banned Prediction Markets (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Minnesota, the first US state to prohibit prediction markets, was prevented from enforcing the law by a federal court ruling just days before the ban was scheduled to take effect. But while Minnesota was stopped from enforcing a total ban, the state may ultimately be allowed to prohibit some types of prediction-market wagers. The Trump administration and the two largest prediction markets—Kalshi and Polymarket—sued Minnesota after the state enacted the law in May. The cases were consolidated, and a ruling (PDF) issued yesterday imposed a preliminary injunction blocking the law that was scheduled to take effect on August 1.

Minnesota lawmakers saw prediction markets as indistinguishable from gambling, but the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) argues it has exclusive authority to regulate the platforms under federal law. One of the primary legal questions is whether event contracts are “swaps,” which are regulated by the CFTC. Swaps are defined broadly in US law to include contracts in which payment “is dependent on the occurrence, nonoccurrence, or the extent of the occurrence of an event or contingency associated with a potential financial, economic, or commercial consequence.” US District Judge Katherine Menendez in the District of Minnesota, a Biden appointee, said Minnesota’s total ban on prediction markets is likely to violate US law because many trades on Kalshi and Polymarket are swaps.

Menendez wrote: "Specifically, it appears that whether the Minnesota statute is expressly preempted turns on whether the state law attempts to regulate trades in event contracts that qualify as “swaps” within the meaning of the CEA [Commodity Exchange Act]. And there are several examples of event contracts hosted by Kalshi and Polymarket US that fit that definition because they concern the occurrence of events with clear potential economic, financial, or commercial consequences that are neither remote or unattenuated. Kalshi and Polymarket US are designated contract markets, so the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction to regulate transactions involving those 'swaps.'"

Menendez said the CFTC, Kalshi, and Polymarket met their burden of showing they are likely to succeed on the merits, so she issued “a preliminary injunction barring enforcement of Minnesota’s prediction market statute until a final decision on the merits is reached.” But she said Minnesota may be able to prohibit some types of event contracts offered on Kalshi and Polymarket because not all of them appear to meet the definition of swaps. For example, Menendez doesn’t think prediction-market bets on the outcome of Love Island USA meet the legal definition of swaps. Minnesota could continue litigating the case in district court or ask a federal appeals court to overturn the preliminary injunction.

Submission + - A Missing Underscore Sent Innocent Man to Prison For 18 Months (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: One missing underscore in a Skyrim-themed username put an innocent Nova Scotia man in prison for 18 months. A 2018 child-luring investigation, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually extended to Halifax, Canada, was based on a false premise. Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah” (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme. (Ars readers may recognize “fus ro dah” as the Unrelenting Force “dragon shout” from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.)

Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison. He served the full term. Even after release, Klayme continued to fight his conviction. In the process of preparing his appeal, the username mistake that led to all these years of disruption was finally discovered. On Thursday, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal overturned Klayme’s conviction, writing: “Mr. Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted.” [...] As the court puts it, “Although the information about the usernames was available at the time of the trial, there is no evidence confirming or explaining how it went unnoticed.”

Submission + - Nvidia, Tech Giants Launch AI Safety Initiative (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Nvidia and a large group of technology, cybersecurity, and enterprise software companies have launched new initiative aimed at developing and sharing open source tools, models, and techniques for securing AI systems and agents. The new Open Secure AI Alliance aims to give defenders more open tools for testing, auditing and protecting AI models and agents. Nvidia points to the recent security incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face, noting that when closed AI tools could not differentiate between attackers and defenders and blocked forensic work, Hugging Face used the open-weight GLM 5.2 model on its own systems to review over 17,000 actions and contain the breach.

Submission + - How Many AI Tech Companies Does it Take to Write a Threatening Letter? Fifty! 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "You’ve got a nice little healthy AI economy here. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it." That's the gist of Open Weights and American AI Leadership, a don't-mess-with-AI-if-you-know-what's-good-for-you letter crafted and distributed on Friday by fifty leading AI tech organizations and circulated on social media by their CEOs.

"Open-weight models are essential to a healthy AI ecosystem," argued Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on X/Twitter and LinkedIn. "Together with others across our industry, we are outlining a path for open-weight models to strengthen American competitiveness and expand economic opportunity, while protecting national security." Echoing Nadella's messaging, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang tweeted: "For my first post, I’m sharing a letter signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models." Retweeting Nadella's message, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg added: "Open source is a positive and important force for both empowering people and preventing centralization. Proud to support this."

The 50 signatories to the letter — hey, so much for AI enabling everyone to be a writer! — were: AI21, AMD, American Innovators Network, AMP, Andreessen Horowitz, Arcee AI, Arena, Baseten, Black Forest Labs, Block, Box, Cisco, Cloudflare, Cohere, CrowdStrike, Dell Technologies, DoorDash, Emergence Capital, Fireworks AI, Genspark, GitHub, Google, Hugging Face, IBM, Inferact, Interconnects AI, The Linux Foundation, Mariana Minerals, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Morph, Mozilla, Nebius, Nous Research, NVIDIA, Ollama, OpenAI, OpenClaw, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Periodic Labs, Perplexity, Prime Intellect, Reflection, Replit, ServiceNow, Telnyx, Trajectory, Y Combinator (conspicuous by their absence are Anthropic and Amazon/AWS).

Interestingly, when asked to compare the 7/24 letter signed by the 50 AI companies to a 7/3 FORTUNE op-ed penned by David Siegel, ChatGPT had this to say: "They are remarkably similar in their core narrative, to the point that they appear to be drawing from the same intellectual and policy framework. The July 24 open-weight letter can almost be read as a shorter, more policy-oriented version of the argument David Siegel made three weeks earlier. [...] Siegel is actually more demanding than the July 24 coalition. A major section of his essay argues that many so-called 'open' AI models are not really open because they release only model weights while withholding training data and training code. He wants visibility into how systems were built, not merely the ability to run them. By contrast, the Microsoft-led letter specifically defends open-weight models, which are a narrower concept. Open-weight models allow access to model parameters but typically do not release training datasets or complete training pipelines. In that sense, Siegel's position is arguably more radical and more aligned with traditional free-software principles than the coalition's."

Submission + - OpenAI's Rogue Agent Went Unnoticed For a Week (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The OpenAI agent that broke into tech firm Hugging Face went on a dayslong hacking spree that OpenAI didn't notice until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was alerted, according to people familiar with the investigation. The agent – a program capable of making decisions and executing complex tasks with little or no human oversight – attempted to break out of its isolated testing environment at OpenAI around July 9, according to two of the people. The intrusion at Hugging Face, which operates as a repository for AI tools and models, began two days later on July 11 and lasted until July 13, said Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s co-founder. It took several more days for OpenAI to realize its agent was behind the hack, and the two companies only communicated about it for the first time on or around July 20, according to Wolf and three of the people familiar with the investigation.

OpenAI’s public disclosure, on July 21, thatone of its agents had slipped out of control and carried out the break-in at Hugging Facedrew global attention. But many details of the hack, including how long the agent went rogue and OpenAI’s belated knowledge of it, are being reported here for the first time. Hugging Face is preparing a public timeline of the hack, Wolf said, adding that he could not speak to what happened at OpenAI. In a statement, OpenAI said the hack was unprecedented and “marks an important moment for AI safety.” It added that it was reviewing the incident with outside advisers and would eventually publish a technical report.

Submission + - Biohacker Bryan Johnson cloning himself as a baby so he can harvest its organs (dailystar.co.uk)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Eccentric biohacker Bryan Johnson claims to have made a “clone” of himself as a newborn baby — so he can harvest its organs.

The tech billionaire says the ‘baby’ will also be used to test novel new therapies. “I just cloned myself... as a newborn,” he wrote in a post to X.

The 48-year-old entrepreneur has become well known for his stunts trying to reverse the ageing process, including transferring his own son’s blood into his body.

Submission + - Stripe Eyes $10 Billion Deal for AI Model Marketplace OpenRouter (pymnts.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Stripe is in talks to buy OpenRouter, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that could sell for roughly $10 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The move would mark a significant step outside payments for a company that processes transactions for much of the internet. It also lands while Stripe pursues a far larger target: a bid for PayPal that would value the payments giant at about $53 billion.

The Journal reported Thursday (July 23) that a transaction could be announced soon, though the talks could still collapse or another buyer could step in. The exact price under discussion could not be learned. Several other large technology companies had also been weighing deals for OpenRouter. The startup was valued at $1.3 billion in May, according to PitchBook, meaning a sale near $10 billion would represent a steep markup in a matter of months. Its backers include Menlo Ventures and CapitalG, the growth fund of Google parent Alphabet.

OpenRouter sells software that lets customers reach AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, along with open weight alternatives anyone can download and run. The Journal described the company’s position this way: “OpenRouter is part of an emerging crop of startups that have found a lucrative niche between AI developers and the companies that want to use them.” The platform lists hundreds of large language models and lets developers compare and switch between them.

Submission + - Leaked Document Shows the Surveillance Tech at ICEâ(TM)s Fingertips (404media.co)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: A leaked document shows the spread of surveillance and investigative capabilities that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have access to agency wide, from location data harvested from smartphones, to facial recognition apps that can reveal someoneâ(TM)s identity, to tools that let the agency stay anonymous online and approach people undercover. The document covers everything from monitoring social media to tracking the movements of vehicles.

Slashdot Top Deals