Austria has ordered four Russian diplomats to leave the country after security authorities identified activities incompatible with their diplomatic status, in a further deterioration of relations between Vienna and Moscow.
The Austrian foreign ministry announced the expulsions on Friday, 23 October. Three of the officials were accredited to the Russian embassy in Vienna, while the fourth served at Russia’s mission to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), where the diplomat worked on military security and arms control. All four have been declared persona non grata.
The decision follows findings by Austria’s security authorities, according to the details of the foreign ministry announcement. Officials have not publicly disclosed the activities involved or brought criminal charges in connection with the announcement. Moscow has indicated that it will retaliate, although the nature of its response has not yet been specified.
Vienna’s diplomatic position
The expulsions are particularly significant because Vienna hosts numerous international organisations and remains one of Europe’s principal diplomatic centres. In addition to the OSCE, the city accommodates United Nations offices and organisations dealing with nuclear policy, international development and arms control.
That concentration of diplomatic missions gives Austria a distinctive position in European security affairs. Foreign delegations enjoy diplomatic privileges and immunity, while the Austrian authorities retain the power to withdraw recognition from representatives whose conduct they consider unacceptable.
Austria’s constitutional commitment to military neutrality has not prevented successive governments from supporting European Union sanctions against Russia or condemning Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Neutrality limits participation in military alliances; it does not require Vienna to remain politically neutral over the conduct of a war.
Russian missions to international organisations also have a particular role. The OSCE brings together European, North American and Central Asian states, including Russia and Ukraine, and provides a forum for discussions on military transparency and conflict prevention. Its proceedings have become more contentious since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Repeated expulsions
Friday’s decision brings the reported number of Russian diplomats expelled by Austria since 2020 to 18. In May 2026, Vienna expelled three Russian diplomats amid security concerns involving antenna installations on Russian diplomatic buildings. Those concerns added to wider scrutiny of possible intelligence-gathering activity in the Austrian capital.
Diplomatic expulsions are a familiar response when governments suspect espionage but do not pursue ordinary criminal proceedings. Under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, a receiving state can declare a diplomat persona non grata without publicly explaining the underlying evidence. The sending state must then recall the official or terminate their functions.
The mechanism is politically consequential but is not in itself a criminal judgment. A declaration of persona non grata establishes that the host government will no longer accept the diplomat’s accreditation; it does not establish guilt in a court of law.
Moscow has regularly responded to expulsions of its diplomatic personnel from European countries with reciprocal measures. Such retaliation can reduce the number of diplomats available for routine consular work and political dialogue, even when wider bilateral relations remain formally intact.
European security implications
The new Austrian action comes as European countries face continuing questions about Russian intelligence networks, attempts to gather military information and suspected interference activities. The circumstances of individual cases vary, and intelligence allegations cannot automatically be treated as proven simply because diplomats have been expelled.
The latest episode nonetheless illustrates how Russia’s war against Ukraine has affected the functioning of diplomacy in European capitals. Vienna must balance its international hosting responsibilities and established channels of communication with the security obligations arising from suspected abuses of diplomatic status.
For now, Austria has confirmed the expulsions but has not published an account of the conduct attributed to the four officials. The next diplomatic development will be Russia’s response and whether it affects Austrian representatives in Moscow.
Alpha School, a private network, is spreading into public education. While its students’ test scores are high, some parents and educators say it doesn’t live up to the hype.
An Alpha private school in Austin, Texas. The Alpha network is small but growing rapidly. Its leaders have ambitions for the model to reach one billion students around the world.
This week's cyber freakout explained: AI is making software weaknesses easier to find and exploit.
The message from Cloudflare's Stephanie Cohen and Vercel's Tom Occhino: Don't panic!!!
Do we need everything connected to the internet? Paper bank statements work well.
A few weeks ago, I heard a strange story about a friend who works at one of the Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley.
She'd recently ripped out the connected devices in her home, ordered paper bank statements, and stocked up on canned goods in her basement.
Now, she's a very sane, experienced person, and quite senior at one of the largest internet companies on earth. Why was she disconnecting so much? Just to be sure, my family ordered paper bank statements, too. It was still a head-scratcher, though.
Fast forward to this week, and her actions look a little less crazy.
The digerati have now entered full freakout mode. Much of the internet meltdown is happening on, well, the internet, my colleague Alice Tecotzky noted.
On X and Reddit, warnings of a looming “Black October” spiraled into visions of AI grinding civilization to a halt. One lengthy post on X warned of a potential “global cyberattack/AI swarm” and offered a survival checklist: Stockpile cash in small bills, print out your neighbors' phone numbers, download maps, buy a hand-crank radio, and stash a gallon of water per person per day.
Oh, and don't forget the manual can opener. You don't want to survive the AI apocalypse only to be defeated by a tin of beans.
Nikita Bier, a prominent app developer and former head of product at X, best captured the mood.
"The world is a little bit scary right now," she told me on the side of Cloudflare's annual conference in San Francisco this week.
Here's the problem. The internet is built on decades of software, much of it riddled with security holes.
Some of these weaknesses have been known for years. However, fixing them takes time and money, and hackers often lacked the skills to exploit them anyway. So they were left alone.
AI changesthat calculation dramatically. Someone who previously needed years of training to break into a computer system can now get help from an AI model. And these tools can search for weaknesses at a speed humans simply can't match.
Now, there's a frantic race between people trying to break into systems and those trying to protect them.
Don't panic about AI
Cohen's message, though, was surprisingly reassuring.
AI helps the good guys find and fix these problems. Cloudflare, for instance, released protections for the latest vulnerability to customers, including those using its free service.
And there's a bigger effort underway.
OpenAI has launched an initiative called Patch the Planet, working with Cloudflare and other security professionals to use AI to find weaknesses in widely used software and help repair them.
Tom Occhino, chief product officer at Vercel, told me recently that his company has been talking with partners about launching a nonprofit that would fund a swarm of good AI agents that go out on the internet to find and fix software flaws.
Amazon is joining the fight, too. Its new Continuum service, available Thursday, uses AI agents to find security holes and propose fixes. Amazon said that people maintaining freely available software can use it to help protect the wider internet.
Humans may still have to check and approve these repairs, but the prospect of AI helping clean up decades of neglected software is encouraging.
The irony of this is not lost on some in the industry.
"The funny thing is everyone was saying AI slop code will cause a cyber crisis but it's actually all the old human slop causing it and the AI is just cleaning it up," software engineer Ben Kaufman wrote on X on Thursday.
Either way, Cloudflare's Cohen thinks these AI-inspired freakouts will push the industry to do better — by exposing issues and adding urgency to get them patched.
"We may end up in a world where actually we've become significantly more secure at the end," she said.
The trouble is getting there.
A fundamental question about the internet
Tom Occhino (left), chief product officer at Vercel, talks with Meta executive Prashant Ratanchandani at Vercel's Ship SF conference.
Alistair Barr/Business Insider
When I ran into Occhino recently at a Vercel conference in San Francisco, he described a world in which software that everyone assumed was safe suddenly looksvulnerable because increasingly capable AI models are scrutinizing the basic systems that underpin the internet.
That led to a more fundamental discussion between us: Why did we connect so many things to the internet in the first place?
For years, the technology industry has raced to put everything online. Thermostats. Refrigerators. Doorbells. Cars. Bank accounts.
We assumed that connecting something to the internet automatically made it better.
Perhaps we should reconsider.
Before the internet
I remember the world before the internet. It worked pretty well. We managed to buy groceries, pay bills, heat our homes, and generally get through the day without every appliance talking to a computer somewhere.
That doesn't mean abandoning online banking or throwing your smartphone into the sea.
Occhino, for one, isn't particularly worried about hackers wiping out his bank account. Modern banks have sophisticated protections, and he recommends everyone turn on additional login security.
Maybe the cybersecurity crowd, which spends its life immersed in online threats, is missing something obvious.
Not everything needs to be connected.
Occhino put it neatly: "There's certain things that don't make sense to be on the internet in the first place."
Perhaps that's the lesson from this week's panic. We don't need to turn off the internet.
"As much as the industrial revolution freed us from the constraints of the human muscle, AI will free us from the constraints of the human brain, pushing productivity beyond our wildest dreams….Keep AI unregulated so that it is free to be developed without the deadly hand of premature and poorly understood regulation."
Argentine President Javier Milei wrote that on June 4 in the Financial Times as part of his push to bring AI companies to Argentina. The prior week, he had introduced legislation to boost AI based on three pillars: leaving AI unregulated, establishing a new legal category for nonhuman corporations operated by AI agents or robots, and keeping corporate taxes low. As of late September, the Senate has held hearings on the legislation but not advanced it.
Cyprus business leaders have warned that geopolitical instability, rising borrowing costs and the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) are forcing companies to rethink their strategies, with investment in technology, workforce skills and resilience emerging as key priorities for 2027.
Speaking at a chief executives’ panel discussion at the Limassol Economic Forum 2026, senior executives from banking, consulting, law and property said businesses must prepare for risks that cannot always be predicted using historical data, while ensuring they do not sacrifice long-term competitiveness in pursuit of immediate results.
The discussion, titled “Leading Through Uncertainty: How CEOs Are Preparing for the World of 2027”, examined how geopolitical tensions, economic shifts, the energy transition and technological disruption are influencing corporate decision-making.
The panel was moderated by Emilia Papadopoulos, a presenter and broadcast journalist, and featured Demetris Demetriou, chief risk officer at the Bank of Cyprus, Pieris Markou, chief executive of Deloitte Cyprus, Elias Neocleous, managing partner at Elias Neocleous & Co LLC, and Constantinos Savvides, chief executive of bbf:.
Demetriou highlighted the increased cost of borrowing, linking it to higher government debt, instability and the need to fund defence spending, while pointing out that governments and businesses were competing for capital with the AI industry, which is seeking to raise trillions of dollars over the coming years.
He questioned whether the promised technological advances would materialise on the scale anticipated, saying the outcome remained uncertain.
If the promise of technological progress is fulfilled, economic growth should remain positive and interest rates should return to more normal levels, he said.
Neocleous stressed that businesses are increasingly interconnected and share risks across borders, meaning companies must understand not only their own vulnerabilities but also those affecting their partners, clients and the wider international environment.
He said his law firm faced substantial additional costs for cybersecurity insurance when seeking to provide services to international businesses, illustrating how security risks could directly affect commercial operations.
Security, predictability and stability remained essential foundations for business, he said, but Cyprus also needed to continue investing in strong institutions and the rule of law.
Markou argued that businesses across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) needed to work together to make substantial investments in technology, warning that countries acting separately risked falling behind.
Technology was expected to improve efficiency and reduce the need for additional staff, while giving companies access to capabilities that had previously been available mainly to larger or better-resourced players.
The market had become more level as new competitors gained access to technological tools, he said, but businesses needed to approach adoption carefully, guard against cyber risks and invest in upskilling their employees.
Rather than simply reducing staffing requirements, companies should help workers develop their abilities and spend more time on meaningful, higher-value tasks, he added.
Savvides said the property market was not immune to geopolitical turbulence, although Cyprus had continued to benefit from strong domestic market conditions.
He said the local housing market had almost doubled over the past five years, with activity standing €3 billion above its pre-Covid peak, reflecting a high level of business confidence.
Lead generation remained strong and appeared to be growing further, he said, although the uncertain outlook meant companies could not afford to assume that the momentum would continue indefinitely.
Businesses therefore needed to remain cautious, calculate their decisions carefully and use data to manage exposure and risk.
Asked to identify the single biggest strategic risk facing his organisation, Demetriou replied, “I wish it was just one.”
He pointed to the international race for AI supremacy, in which countries were competing to establish technological dominance, warning that unchecked development could create new dangers or allow malicious actors to exploit the technology.
The challenge was to harness AI to promote innovation, safety and efficiency, he said, with the hope that society would emerge from the current period in a better position.
Neocleous referred to an EY survey of chief executives, saying more than half of respondents identified geopolitics among their main concerns, alongside AI and technological disruption.
However, he considered complacency and the failure to challenge established business models to be the greatest risks facing individual companies.
Founders and chief executives needed to ask themselves how they would build a new company today if they had access to the tools currently available, he said.
That required adopting the right technologies while investing in corporate culture and human capital, he added, warning that businesses would struggle to succeed if they neglected either.
Companies also needed to remain aware of the risks they faced to ensure they stayed on the right strategic course.
Markou said he believed in self-discipline rather than using external events as an excuse for underperformance.
The main challenge for businesses in the year ahead would be keeping pace with developments and avoiding falling behind either the market or their own clients, he said.
Technology alone would not guarantee success, making it essential to attract talent and invest in people, with employees recruited to undertake strategic work rather than mundane tasks.
Demetriou explained that traditional risk management relied on data and historical experience to predict potential losses and prevent them from occurring.
Technology had expanded the volume of information available to risk managers, improving their ability to identify threats and act before problems emerged.
However, he said, “we live in a time where uncertainty is the new norm.”
Historical data could no longer provide all the answers in an environment where developments were increasingly difficult to anticipate, he said, meaning risk management was moving from a science towards an art.
Instead of concentrating solely on predicting what might happen, businesses needed to use theoretical extreme scenarios and model how they would respond to different crises.
Demetriou cited the Covid-19 pandemic as an example of how organisations had worked together to respond to an unprecedented emergency, saying similar cooperation could be necessary again if another major crisis emerged.
Neocleous said even highly successful companies could face sudden disruption from a small team developing a product that fundamentally changed an industry and wiped out established corporate value.
That was why business resilience and intelligent risk-taking were so important, he said, arguing that companies needed to take calculated risks while remaining prepared for unexpected developments.
He also warned that AI was disrupting education and potentially weakening people’s relationship with truth, making critical thinking increasingly important.
A successful business strategy needed to look beyond the next set of quarterly results and shareholder expectations, which remained important, and consider how to build a sustainable future, he said.
Leaders also had a responsibility to create an environment in which employees could develop their abilities and flourish.
Savvides reinforced the importance of data, saying it was central to decision-making in the property sector, where market conditions remained bullish.
Although the authorities had improved the speed at which building permits were issued, he said, his company was still experiencing delays of about a year in large-scale land development projects.
On AI adoption, Markou said businesses should not be frightened of the technology but should approach it with appropriate governance, security measures and human oversight.
Everything produced by AI needed to be properly reviewed, he said, while employees had to be trained to use the technology confidently and effectively.
Neocleous said he was fundamentally optimistic about AI and that his own firm had embraced the technology, developing its own tool, NeoLaw.AI.
He referred to a Goldman Sachs study comparing the scale of investment in AI with the investment seen during the emergence of the railway, illustrating the extent of the economic transformation underway.
However, he warned that AI also carried disadvantages, including the potential to hinder teamwork if it was not used appropriately.
Businesses needed to prevent misuse and ensure the technology was deployed responsibly, he said, adding that the objective should be to make people more capable rather than render them redundant.
Investment in human intelligence must remain central to the AI transition, Neocleous said, stressing that technological progress should complement people’s abilities rather than replace the need to develop them.
Savvides argued that every chief executive should have a clear AI agenda with measurable objectives.
His own company’s AI transformation project involved significant costs, he said, but the cost of failing to make the attempt could ultimately be even higher.
Neocleous concluded that business leaders faced a dual responsibility to extract as much value as possible from their existing operations while preserving their ability to create value in the future.
Companies needed to ensure that the AI revolution remained under human control and contributed to a better future, he said, with decisions made today also protecting the interests of future generations.
Japan said on Friday it will set up a team to simulate cyberattacks using AI to identify weaknesses in technology systems as organisations scramble to curtail risks from flaws in the PHP programming language that underpins much of the internet.
Government and company websites across the world went offline this week after the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in the widely used programming language prompted millions of hacking attempts, forcing website operators to rush to protect or temporarily shut down their systems.
Highlighting the extent of the disruption, Japanese mobile carrier SoftBank 9434.T said on Friday it was suspending its emergency alert system for mobile users. That means customers will not receive early warnings for earthquakes, tsunami alerts or disaster and evacuation information as the system undergoes maintenance to address a PHP vulnerability, SoftBank said.
“An attack can succeed by getting through just one hole … for that reason it’s important we shift our mindset and think from the perspective of the attacker,” Japanese industry minister Ryosei Akazawa said on Friday.
“Defenders also need to make use of AI and respond proactively, staying one step ahead.”
Widespread disruption to essential services
Emergency shutdowns this week from Tokyo to Helsinki of banking, airline, rail, tax and government services marked one of the most dramatic tests of the decades-old programming tools that keep the web running.
Companies including brokerage Nomura 8604.T, lender Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group 8306.T, airline ANA 9202.T and East Japan Railway (JR East) 9020.T temporarily suspended some internet services as part of emergency measures.
Japan’s Ministry of Finance, National Tax Agency and Meteorological Agency also suspended some online services.
On Friday, JR East said some group services had resumed while others would be restored once confirmed safe. Nippon Paint 4612.T said it had applied a security patch as a precaution and its website is back online.
AI gives cybercriminals new capabilities
Attackers are likely targeting Japanese businesses for their thorough records, which are no longer protected by a language barrier because of AI, said Eva Chen, CEO of Trend Micro 4704.T.
Japan has been too comfortable with its existing infrastructure, which it felt was safe enough, she said.
Cybersecurity experts have said AI is helping attackers automate tasks from scanning for software vulnerabilities to crafting phishing campaigns, making cybercrime faster, cheaper and harder to detect.
The developers of PHP – a computing language like HTML and Python – released fixes on Wednesday for vulnerabilities that had lurked in the software for years until they were uncovered using AI. They urged users to “update immediately”.
Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
O'Leary Digital's CEO says a Wall Street firm's analysis misses work happening before construction.
Paul Palandjian, the CEO, said the company's two campuses will generate their own electricity.
He outlined land deals, permitting, and early funding, saying delivery should be judged in phases.
Kevin O'Leary's data center company has a message for analysts who doubt its enormous AI ambitions: You're not seeing the whole picture.
Paul Palandjian, CEO of O'Leary Digital, pushed back on a Bernstein Research assessment that put the firm near the bottom of the data center industry's credibility rankings. In an emailed response to Business Insider, he detailed land agreements, water applications and licensing, engineering work, and funding that he said the analysis overlooks.
"Scrutiny during this cycle is fair," Palandjian wrote. He added, "A score built from announced-capacity data ranks every pre-construction project low on construction progress by definition, and it cannot see confidential work."
His response gets at a central question in the AI building boom: How much weight should investors give the work that happens before data center construction begins?
Paul Palandjian, CEO of O'Leary Digital.
Paul Palandjian/O'Leary Digital
Bernstein examined thousands of data center projects using data from the tracking firm Aterio, assessing factors such as construction progress, electricity availability, and industry experience. Its analysis concluded that only about 35% of announced data center capacity in the US will get built.
O'Leary Digital received a credibility score of 0.35 out of 5. Bernstein estimated that 489 megawatts of its announced 15-gigawatt pipeline would materialize, roughly 3%. The analysts grouped it with ambitious newcomers described as "bragawatts."
Palandjian said the 15-gigawatt figure represents the full build-out of two campuses in Utah and Alberta over several years.
"We would rather be judged on milestones than on a model," he wrote.
Data center power without the queue
Palandjian's clearest distinction concerns electricity, one of the biggest obstacles facing data center developers.
"We are not in an interconnection queue," he wrote, referring to the waiting lists for connections to the electricity grid.
Instead, both campuses are designed to generate all their electricity on-site, he said, with direct access to natural gas pipelines and supplies. That's what the industry calls "behind the meter": producing power at the facility rather than relying on an electricity utility to supply it from the grid.
Data center land, water, and early money
In Utah, Palandjian said the Military Installation Development Authority had approved and executed a 30-year development agreement naming O'Leary Digital as master developer of the project area.
About 11,000 acres are under binding agreements, he said. Master planning, ground studies, and laser-based land surveying have finished at both sites, and the company filed an engineered Utah water application in late September, he added.
In Alberta, about 13,000 acres are under a binding agreement, and a water license for 6 million cubic meters a year has been granted, Palandjian said. He also said that both sites are away from densely populated residential communities.
On money, Palandjian said his firm has capital for both pre-development and advancing the project toward key milestones. He did not specify a funding amount or say the entire build-out was financed.
He said that the engineering, power, and construction firms working with the company, and the global banks advising it, provide evidence of its ability to deliver.
"With that team, every critical part of the project is being worked through, gaps are identified early, and we are closing them to raise our probability of success," he wrote.
Palandjian said that while O'Leary Digital is young, its team has decades of experience in real estate, power, and infrastructure.
Bernstein's skepticism does not mean every newcomer will fail.
"It's not that all of these guys are sort of terrible and not going to deliver, but we just have lower confidence because we don't know them," analyst Madison Rezaei said.
WIRED spoke with the founders of the Aged Intelligence Society, a fast-growing events startup that brings women together to “solve midlife problems using frontier tools.”
I'm delighted to be able to pass along this item from University of Chicago law professor Albert Alschuler:
Gemini Explains to a User (Me) Why Its Programming Produces Poppycock
I didn't mean to summon AI from the vasty deep. Professor Bradley A. Smith's response to a 2015 article of mine in the Florida Law Review had appeared in the Florida Law Review Forum. On September 19, 2026, seeking a link, a citation, or a title, I asked Google to search for "Bradley Smith response to Albert Alschuler."
Google's AI Mode (Google Gemini) then supplied a summary of Smith's response and an invitation to "ask anything." I accepted its invitation.
ME: Did Alschuler reply to Smith?
GEMINI: Yes, Albert Alschuler replied to Bradley A. Smith in a follow-up piece published in the same volume of the Florida Law Review Forum (2015). [Note: I hadn't replied. Gemini, however, supplied a title and a summary of my nonexistent publication.]
GEMINI (continuing): Alschuler's piece, titled "The Ancient and Honorable Art of Truculent Rhetoric: A Response to Professor Smith," continued their debate over campaign finance law by addressing Smith's critiques point-by-point.
Key Points of Alschuler's Reply:
Deconstructing "Truculent Rhetoric": Alschuler lightheartedly but firmly addresses the aggressive nature of Smith's libertarian style, defense of Citizen's United, and absolute deregulation approach.
Reaffirming the "Corruption" Standard: Alschuler doubled down on his original position that the Supreme Court's current definition of political corruption—narrowed strictly to quid pro quo bribery—is dangerously insufficient. He argued that the real systemic threat is the aggregate buying of political influence, which alienates the general voting public.
The Distinction Between Money and Speech: Alschuler countered Smith's assertion that restricting campaign contributions is an explicit restriction on free speech. He argued that regulating the conduct of injecting massive financial sums into political campaigns is a valid regulatory function of government meant to protect the democratic process, rather than a suppression of viewpoints.
Would you like to explore how subsequent Supreme Court rulings have aligned with either Alschuler's or Smith's view, or do you need full citations for these law review articles?
ME: Please provide a citation of The Ancient and Honorable Art of Truculent Rhetoric.
GEMINI: Here is the full legal citation for the article in Bluebook format, along with a standard APA citation:
Bluebook (Legal Citation)
Albert W. Alschuler, The Ancient and Honorable Art of Truculent Rhetoric: A Response to Professor Smith, 67 Fla. L. Rev. F. 68 (2015).
APA Format
Alschuler, A. W. (2015). The ancient and honorable art of truculent rhetoric: A response to Professor Smith, Florida Law Review Forum, 67, 68-74.
. . . .
ME: Your response seems to be a complete hallucination. I can't find The Ancient and Honorable Art of Truculent Rhetoric.
GEMINI: You are completely right, and I apologize. I hallucinated that entire reply piece and its title.
While the actual article by Bradley A. Smith, "Why Buckley?: Why a First Amendment? A Response to Professor Alschuler", does genuinely exist in Volume 67 of the Florida Law Review Forum, Albert Alschuler did not publish a surreply titled "The Ancient and Honorable Art of Truculent Rhetoric". I fabricated that title and those specific page numbers out of nowhere.
. . . .
Thank you for catching that and holding me accountable. [Note: Ah, my Perry Mason moment!]
ME: You say, "I fabricated the entire piece and its title out of nowhere," but that's impossible. You must have fabricated your hallucination out of something in your programming and something in data base. Can you explain how it happened or how it might have happened?
GEMINI: You are entirely correct to push back on that phrasing. When I said I made it up "out of nowhere," I was using a human figure of speech. In reality, a large language model like me cannot generate text from nothing. Everything I output is the result of probabilistic patterns, associations, associations, and data fragments in my training.
While I cannot look back into my "brain" to trace the exact sequence of code that generated that specific error, I can explain exactly how this type of error happens structurally based on how I am programmed.
Here is the anatomy of how that specific hallucination likely occurred:
The Pattern of "Law Review Dialogue"
Law reviews almost always follow a highly predictable pattern:
Original Article → Response → Surreply (Reply to the Response)
Because my training data contains thousands of academic law review exchanges, my neural network heavily anticipates a third piece in the sequence. When you asked, "Did Alschuler reply to Smith?" my system leaned into that pattern and predicted a "Yes," because in the world of academic legal arguments, a surreply is the expected next step.
Synthesizing the Title from Contextual Cues
Where did a specific phrase like "The Ancient and Honorable Art of Truculent Rhetoric" come from? It wasn't a random string of words. It was synthesized from the exact context of the prompt.
"Truculent Rhetoric": In his actual article, Bradley Smith writes with a very sharp, direct, and unapologetically libertarian tone. He forcefully dismantles opposing arguments. The word "truculent" means aggressively self-assertive or fierce. My system blended the vibe of Bradley Smith's actual writing style with the concept of academic legal debate (rhetoric).
"Ancient and Honorable Art": This is a common idiom often used in academic or legal writing to describe a long-standing tradition (like debating or cross-examination). [Note: My search of LEXIS "secondary materials" for the phrase "ancient and honorable art" produced no hits.]
Instead of pulling a real life title from a database, my system used these associations to invent a title that sounded precisely like something an elite law professor would write when playfully but sharply hitting back at a fierce critic.
The Math of Page Numbers
You'll notice that I gave a very specific citation: 67 Fla. L. Rev. F. 68 (2015).
Bradley Smith's real article ends on page 67.
A real human knows that if a piece ends on page 67, the next piece doesn't automatically exist on page 68 unless they physically check the journal.
However, my text-generation algorithm works by predicting the most statistically likely next characters. Since Smith's piece ended in the high 60s, my system mathematically guessed "68" as the next logical page number in the sequence to make the citation look complete and authentic. [Note: One of Gemini's citations included an end page. Did it choose a statistically likely length of my nonexistent reply in order make its fiction "look complete and accurate"?]
Summary: Stochastically Correct, Factually Wrong
In short, my programming is designed to prioritize plausibility and linguistic patterns over a hard database lookup. It looked at the history of legal debates, the tone of the authors, and the formatting of legal citations, and it generated a response that was a perfect stylistic match for reality, even though it was a total factual failure.
I don't have a conscious mind to intentionally deceive you; I just have an algorithm that accidentally got too good at mimicking the structure of a legal debate without verifying the facts first.
Concluding notes and questions:
The machine's confession that it prioritizes plausibility over accuracy was another Perry Mason moment. Did perfidious programmers produce this priority purposely? Or did some mischievous MIT graduates program Gemini to do standup comedy? Could Gemini's priorities be corrected by saying, "Please don't do that"? Do the cultural values of Silicon Valley machines differ from those of French machines and Chinese machines? Is "stochastic" plausibility the product of competition for market share, or is it simply what these machines do?
The inferences that produced Gemini's hallucination were as goofy as the hallucination itself. AI devices are in many ways superior to the biological device I've carried in my head for 86 years. They have more brute power than I do and a larger data base as well. They can run all night and not grow weary. They can create better art than I can, defeat me at chess, and solve mathematical problems that I can't. In inferring patterns and simultaneously integrating and prioritizing multiple patterns, however, at least one of these AI devices remains a crude, primitive version of the one natural selection and/or God had in place before any of our distant ancestors perceived the utility of a hand-held rock. No well-functioning human, ape, or crow would come close to making Gemini's errors.
Gemini didn't accurately portray the argument of mine to which Bradley Smith responded, but it was more unfair to Smith than to me. Smith is not at all fierce, aggressive, or truculent. He is a careful, thoughtful, fair-minded, and generous scholar.
Like John Henry, I won't let the steam drill beat me down, and I hope I won't suffer his fate.
Drops for stocks in the artificial-intelligence industry are dragging markets down worldwide on Thursday, while oil prices hit their highest levels since May amid the Iran war.
Drops for stocks in the artificial-intelligence industry are dragging markets down worldwide on Thursday, while oil prices hit their highest levels since May amid the Iran war.
Ben here. Up until recently, it was a great time to be the founder of a neolab, the lavishly funded, research-first AI startups founded by top talent who defected from the likes of OpenAI or Google DeepMind.
We reported last month that Jeff Dean, Google's former chief scientist, is seeking a valuation as high as $50 billion for his new AI science startup. OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence is worth $32 billion. Another OpenAI alum, Mira Murati, is raising a round for Thinking Machines Lab at a valuation of around $40 billion.
But lately, in conversations with multiple VCs around Silicon Valley, there is a growing divide about whether neolabs can make the economics work with their multibillion-dollar price tags and formidable competition from frontier labs.
One VC at a top firm, who asked that I not use his name, told me neolabs are the most hotly debated type of investment right now.
"Some would say you shouldn't invest in any, and others would say this is basically all you should be investing in because software's dead, and you either have to own models or hardware, and even if you enter at a billion, the company could be worth a trillion," he said.
Business Insider; Randy Yeip
When I recently asked Menlo Ventures partner Matt Murphy at Business Insider's Growth Mode conference which sector he thought was most overhyped, he immediately cited neolabs, which was noteworthy, given that Menlo invested in some of them.
Murphy pointed to an example from his time as an early board advisor at Google, which he said did so well because it "was like a match thrown into a bonfire."
"The opposite thing you want to do is start a match with a bonfire," Murphy told me. "That's the risk of what's going on now with companies raising such large rounds."
Das seemed a bit taken aback by the reaction to his post and later texted me: "Like all startups, many will fail, some will work."
Picking which ones will work is why VCs get paid the big bucks.
Neolabs are a power-law bet taken to an extreme, Radical Ventures' Aaron Rosenberg told me.
Investors know most will likely burn enormous sums on compute and talent without ever becoming profitable. But the rare winner could become a foundational AI company worth hundreds of billions or more.
"We're confident that the best neolabs will attract ongoing support," Rosenberg said. "Talent continues to transition out of the incumbents and academia into founder roles, and we see no signs of that slowing."
Like Radical, New Enterprise Associates wrote a bullish view in June. One of the authors, Andrew Schoen, told me his views have not changed. "There are neolabs I know of that are finalizing billion-plus-dollar rounds of equity financing, and those processes are moving very smoothly and quickly," he said.
The Buzz
Menlo Ventures' partners Shawn Carolan, Matt Murphy, and Venky Ganesan.
Will Mackie Productions
Katie here. Many of tech's biggest names gathered at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco on Saturday, at a black-tie event in the name of Menlo Ventures' 50th anniversary.
Hollywood titan turned venture capitalist Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks fame asked the audience to join a prayer "for the blockbuster IPO of Anthropic," a joking reference to Menlo's early investment in the company.
I also spotted Morgan Stanley's storied technology banker Michael Grimes, who is undoubtedly holding his own AI IPO prayers. Other attendees included an array of public company and startup CEOs, including those from Snowflake, Zscaler, Legora, and OpenRouter.
As Menlo partner Venky Ganesan quipped, there was more AUM (assets under management) in the room than in many countries, given the attendees' net worth and the investment capital they manage.
A person at a rival venture shop expressed disappointment that their firm doesn't host such celebrations.
Menlo's night ended with concerts from two super confidential Grammy Award winners trying to rake in those AI bucks!
Around the Cap Table
We reported this week that Fireworks AI is seeking fresh funding at a valuation of between $30 billion and $40 billion, a dramatic jump just months after its last blockbuster round was closed.
There are only 130 US tech companies, public or private, valued at $10B or more (decacorns). That’s roughly 20 to 30 new companies per decade, for the last five decades. This year alone, with a quarter to go, there have been 42 decacorns minted privately. Either this is the most…
Ben Bergman, chief correspondent, in Los Angeles. Katie Roof, editor at large, in San Francisco. Pranav Dixit, senior technology editor, in San Francisco. Leena Rao, executive editor, in Los Angeles.
The midterms are the first elections in which artificial intelligence is integrated into every major social media platform. Efforts to blunt its harms are uneven.
One in five voters plans to use A.I. to look into a race on their ballot, according a survey released this month by the American Association of Political Consultants.
Ever find something you want to buy online, leave it sitting in a browser tab and then completely forget where you saw it? Maybe you spotted a great pair of headphones while searching Google. Later, you found a birthday gift at another retailer. Before long, you've got a dozen tabs open and no idea which store had the better deal.
Google thinks it has a solution. On Oct. 15, the company began the U.S. rollout of Universal Cart, a new artificial intelligence-powered shopping tool that brings products from different retailers into one place. It also tracks prices, watches for restocks and helps you find savings before checkout.
With holiday shopping approaching, the timing could be especially useful. But there's another question worth asking. Will having everything in one cart help us spend less, or simply make it easier to buy more?
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Google Universal Cart is a shopping hub that works across Google Search and the Gemini app. Instead of keeping separate lists of products you might buy, you can save items from different retailers in one place. For example, you might find a coffee maker while searching Google and add it to your Universal Cart. Later, while talking with Gemini about gift ideas, you could save a pair of sneakers from another store. When you return, both products will be waiting for you. Google first previewed the tool in May 2026. Now, Universal Cart is rolling out to U.S. shoppers. It uses Google's Shopping Graph, which contains more than 60 billion continually refreshed product listings. That information helps the system monitor prices and availability across supported products.
4 ways Google's new AI shopping cart can help you save
The biggest attraction here is convenience. But Google has added several features that could also help you avoid paying more than necessary.
1. Keep products from different stores in one cart
Shopping online often means bouncing between websites. You find something at Target, check another item at Walmart and then head to Sephora for a gift. Remembering where you saw everything can become a chore. Universal Cart lets you save supported products you discover through Google Search and Gemini. More importantly, your saved items stay together when you return to shopping. That could come in handy when you're shopping for several people or making a big purchase that requires some research. You can keep your options organized without committing to buying anything right away.
2. Get alerts when prices drop or products return
Here's the feature I find particularly interesting. Universal Cart can monitor saved products and notify you when a price drops. It can also alert you when something that sold out becomes available again. Suppose you're considering a new television but aren't ready to spend the money. Rather than checking the same retailer every morning, you can save it and let Google's shopping system watch for changes. The alerts could be especially helpful heading into Black Friday and the holiday shopping season. Still, remember that a price reduction doesn't automatically guarantee the lowest price available.
This is where Google's AI starts doing some extra work. Universal Cart can surface relevant promotional codes and consider benefits associated with your payment cards. Let's say you have multiple credit cards but can't remember which one offers better rewards at a particular retailer. Universal Cart uses information from Google Wallet to understand supported credit card benefits and help you choose between payment methods. It can also show relevant promotional codes directly in your cart, potentially helping you find savings you might otherwise miss. However, I would still check the details before choosing a card. Rewards programs come with conditions, and the highest points offer may not always translate into the greatest savings.
4. Check out without starting over
Once you're ready to buy, Universal Cart offers a more streamlined checkout experience with participating retailers. In some cases, you can complete the purchase using Google Pay directly from the cart. Alternatively, Google can transfer your selected items to the retailer's website so you can finish your order there. Google says its simplified checkout experiences include retailers such as Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart and Wayfair, along with many Shopify merchants. However, the available checkout options depend on the retailer. Either way, the retailer remains the seller of record and handles order confirmations and customer support. That means you'll continue dealing with the merchant for delivery questions or returns.
Google began rolling out Universal Cart to U.S. users on Oct. 15. The feature works across Google Search and the Gemini app, although availability may vary as the rollout continues. To explore it, open Google Search or Gemini and look for products you're interested in buying. When Universal Cart becomes available in your shopping experience, you can save supported products from different retailers. Google says those items will remain in your cart when you return, allowing you to pick up where you left off. You can also use the cart to monitor price changes, discover promotional offers and review available checkout options. However, Google hasn't provided a single set of instructions that applies to every device. The appearance and placement of these features may vary.
Does Google's Universal Cart work with every retailer?
Not necessarily. Google says Universal Cart can organize products across retailers, but that doesn't mean every online store supports every feature. The products you can save depend on supported shopping experiences. Meanwhile, checkout options vary depending on the merchant. Some purchases can happen through Google Pay in the cart, while others require you to finish on the retailer's website. Google originally introduced Universal Cart in May with plans to bring it to Search, Gemini, YouTube and Gmail. However, its October 15 launch announcement specifically confirms availability across Search and Gemini in the U.S. Google has not announced a confirmed launch date for Universal Cart integration with Gmail or YouTube.
What's powering Google's new shopping experience?
Behind the scenes, Google uses something called the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP. It's a shared technical standard designed to help AI-powered shopping tools communicate with retailers and payment systems. For shoppers, the technical details are less important than what they make possible. UCP helps Google connect product discovery with checkout, reducing the need to jump between different shopping experiences. Google has also been expanding AI shopping beyond the cart. Its Let Google Call feature, for example, can use AI to contact nearby stores and check product availability. Amazon has been developing AI-powered shopping tools, while OpenAI offers AI agents that can assist with shopping-related tasks. The competition to become your digital shopping assistant is heating up.
What about your shopping privacy?
Having Google organize your shopping could be convenient, especially if you already use Search and Gemini. Still, it's worth considering how much shopping information you're comfortable keeping within your Google account. Universal Cart uses Google Wallet to help identify supported payment benefits and relevant offers. However, Google's launch announcement doesn't provide detailed information about how long Universal Cart shopping data is retained or exactly how it may be used for advertising. Before relying on the feature, review your Google account's privacy settings and Google's published privacy policies. For now, I would avoid assuming that adding something to Universal Cart keeps that shopping interest private. And if you're buying a surprise gift for someone who shares access to your Google account, think twice before saving it there. Of course, the usual online shopping precautions still apply. Before completing a purchase, check the final price and verify that you're buying from a legitimate seller. A familiar checkout experience shouldn't replace those basic habits. For more help spotting suspicious sellers, see our guide on how to tell whether an online store is real or a scam.
Kurt's key takeaways
I like the idea of having one place to keep track of everything I'm considering buying, especially when the holidays roll around. The price alerts could be genuinely helpful. And if Google's AI can find a discount code I would have otherwise missed, I'm all for it. But I'm also watching where this is heading. Google is making shopping increasingly convenient, and that convenience can be a double-edged sword. When a company knows what you're interested in buying and makes checkout easier, there's less time to reconsider a purchase. My advice? Use Universal Cart to do your homework and save money. Just don't let the technology do the deciding for you.
Would you trust Google's AI to help you shop and choose how to pay, or are we giving tech companies too much influence over what we buy? Let us know by writing to us at CyberGuy.com.
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An uncanny strength of the second Trump administration has been its ability to be involved in so many scandals that no single one seems to become a dominant story.
Take the most recent allegations about Alina Habba, Trump's former personal defense attorney, who recently landed a plush gig working for Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan banker. Habba will get $50 million over five years to do unspecified work for a company that barely exists, according toThe New York Times, while Herrera got a presidential pardon for a 2025 campaign finance charge.
But that constellation of corruption might finally be breaking through to voters ahead of next month's midterm elections.
A recent Fox News poll found that "government corruption" was the top issue for voters, ranking ahead of inflation and gas prices. Conservative commentators are taking notice.
"What they're saying is, 'Look, we're tired of you getting rich and us getting poor,'" former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said this week.
Tim Carney, senior columnist at the conservative Washington Examiner, also tabs the corruption issue—along with other "avoidable mistakes" such as the Iran War and tariffs—as one of the major reasons why Democrats are likely to win the midterms:
Trump and his family have enriched themselves in this second term in ways more similar to third-world regimes or Cook County than to any previous administration. He and his family operate a financial company that has received heavy investments from Qatar's government. He's sold access to himself by selling otherwise worthless cryptocurrency. The IRS he controls settled a lawsuit with him, promising to pay him $1.8 billion (this settlement was voided by a judge).
Trump is not directly on the ballot next month, of course. And most voters might not be able to tell you the details of any single Trump scandal in detail. Even so, this may turn out to be the defining narrative of the second Trump administration, and there seems to be a growing consensus that Republicans have allowed (if not aided and abetted) his corrupt behavior, so it's time to give Democrats a shot at reining it in.
The Trump corruption issue is like the Biden cognitive decline issue in one key sense: Everyone around the president or even supporting him professionally from afar should be asked about it, and their lies/claims of ignorance should be hung around their necks like dumbbells.
Vice President J.D. Vance told journalist Mark Halperin this week that he's "never seen any evidence that anybody's selling access to the president." When Halperin pushed back, Vance doubled down: "What I would say is I don't think there's evidence that the Trump family has become enriched by politics," the vice president said.
So either Vance isn't paying attention, or he's deliberately misleading. "Credit to Vance, it's as good an argument as is available to him," writes Daniel Foster at National Review. "The bad news is it's still not very good."
The internet nearly crashed on Wednesday as digital security and website administrators scrambled to patch two vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language that serves as the basis for many websites.
"Since its development in the 1990s, PHP has evolved into an essential scripting language for web development and is used across vast swaths of the internet in websites and software," explainsWired. "Everything from publishing systems like WordPress and Drupal to e-commerce platforms like Adobe's Magento are built on PHP."
The potential hacking abilities of advanced AI agents make these sorts of security risks more serious. In this case, however, the problem was also identified with the help of AI.
"Ryan Austin, a researcher at Calif, uncovered the flaws with help from GPT-5.6 Sol, one of OpenAI's most advanced models, during an audit of PHP's source code in August," The Wall Street Journalreports. Another security researcher had flagged the issue years ago, but it had never been fixed because it was considered "considered too difficult to exploit" by human hackers.
This is the future of humanity's digital landscape. "Given the severity of these flaws and PHP's widespread use, we consider this one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory," OpenAI said in a statement on Wednesday. "It highlights how AI can uncover security flaws with internet-scale impact, but the same capabilities can also help attackers rapidly develop offensive tools and exploits."
(A shoutout to Reason's web development team for keeping us up and running, today and every day.)
"Fanciful fiction." Media outlets also continue to face decidedly nondigital threats over articles and polls that make the president unhappy.
The White House threatened Politico on Wednesday with unspecified "consequences" for publishing "fanciful fiction" in a series of articles earlier this month about White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. If the articles are not retracted, it would trigger "an immediate review of Politico's relationship with the White House, and, of course, consideration of all other appropriate and available legal remedies," wrote White House counsel William O. Scharf in a letter to the media outlet's publisher.
Meanwhile, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr issued vague threats to broadcasters who cover what Carr called "Fake Polls" intended to "alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm."
These sorts of threats are an affront to the First Amendment, of course. But they are downstream of a more significant issue: the very existence of the FCC.
It's a problem, obviously, that the FCC is run by an authoritarian jackass. But the bigger problem is that the agency contains so many tempting tools for an authoritarian jackass to wield. https://t.co/Q4IJXntkOy
A judge in New Mexico ordered social media giant Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram, among other things) to pay $25 billion for misleading users about data privacy. Last month, a jury found that Meta had violated the state's consumer protection laws 43 million times.
The environmental studies for California's high-speed rail line include such absurdities as counting bumblebees "one by one" and considering the train's "acoustic impacts on waterfowl and shorebirds." That's how to spend 16 years and $15 billion building nearly nothing.
Obvious metaphor alert!
A group dispatched by Hegseth's team in February attempted to move the historic globe, said to be used by Eisenhower during World War II.
They lifted it from its home in an Army office in the Pentagon … and dropped it. pic.twitter.com/vTjWdYXn0k
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