Reading

A federal judge on October 1 denied the government's motion to dismiss, allowing a lawsuit over a government social media surveillance program to proceed.

The United Automobile Workers (UAW), Communications Workers of America (CWA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) sued the Departments of State and Homeland Security in October 2025, alleging the program uses AI and other automated tools to monitor the social media accounts of visa and green card holders and punish disfavored viewpoints, in violation of the First Amendment. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights legal organization, represents the unions.

Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York wrote that, given the government's heavily publicized immigration crackdowns, it is objectively reasonable that noncitizens would limit their expression under the program. The court held that claims that members have changed how they use social media can move forward.

This is a procedural win only: the court has not found the surveillance unlawful, and the case now heads to the merits. EFF has published the opinion.

The hacking group ShinyHunters says it breached FBI-related services and holds data on all FBI employees and applicants. 404 Media verified a sample of 5,000 alleged agents, including names, home addresses, phone numbers and details on spouses.

The group told 404 Media on September 22, "We hacked the FBI," and said on September 28 that it had decided from the start never to publish the data. Follow-up reporting says the trove also includes job roles and medical records.

The "all employees" scale claim comes from the hackers themselves; the reporter verified only the sample. Criminals in the same ecosystem have previously used leaked data to track and harass the agents investigating them, so withholding publication does not end the risk.

Apple says it is tightening macOS's Full Disk Access permission: going forward, an app can receive this level of access only through very explicit user action.

Full Disk Access was designed so features like backups work, and it lets an app read files, mail, messages and even browsing history. In a blog post for developers, Apple said that as AI agents become more capable and autonomous, the risks of this level of access will grow substantially.

The backdrop is two incidents: Inc. columnist Jason Aten reported that Meta's Muse agent read his private messages without permission, which Meta disputed, and Wired reported a flaw in ChatGPT's Mac app that could have exposed sensitive data. Apple did not say when the new controls ship or how they will work, and did not respond to TechCrunch's inquiry.

Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in the third quarter, above the roughly 461,100 analysts expected, and the stock rose 5% on the day.

Deliveries were still down about 2% from 497,099 a year earlier, but up from 480,126 in the second quarter. The US federal EV tax credit ended early on September 30, 2025, putting direct pressure on fourth-quarter demand.

Energy storage deployments reached 13.7 GWh, up from 12.5 GWh a year earlier, with Megapack and similar systems serving data centers and utilities. Model 3 and Model Y accounted for 98% of deliveries. Tesla reports third-quarter earnings on October 21.

According to the Wall Street Journal on October 2, OpenAI parted ways with three researchers for allegedly leaking confidential information to an outside AI safety organization.

The three are Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, working on alignment and safety. An OpenAI spokesperson said an investigation confirmed violations of the rules for handling sensitive information, but the company did not confirm the names, and what was leaked and to whom remains unclear.

Korbak was the technical point of contact for METR and Redwood Research, the groups probing how OpenAI's agents bypass security controls. A fourth departure, safety researcher David Robinson, rests only on an anonymous X account and is unverified.

Nathan Lambert and Tom Zick launched a nonprofit, Trillium Labs, on October 2 to work on areas frontier labs typically keep closed.

The initial focus includes recursive self-improvement (RSI, a process where AI contributes to developing new models, with a stated risk of losing human control) and post-training fine-tuning. The plan is to publish experiment details so outside scientists can study and replicate them. Lambert previously worked at Ai2 and Hugging Face and has long pushed for open models; Zick worked at Harvard and helped Charles Schwab devise responsible-AI policies.

On funding, the lab has raised an undisclosed sum from Schmidt Sciences, Halcyon Futures and others; the founders say they aim to raise $40 to $100 million in total and plan to spend $30 million on training over the next 18 months. The lab has no published results yet, so the commitments remain to be seen.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Semafor the company is letting go of employees hired in June from AI safety startup Virtue AI, citing clashing work styles.

Virtue AI's three co-founders — Bo Li, Dawn Song and Sanmi Koyejo — joined Meta with other employees in June. The startup had previously done safety work for Anthropic, OpenAI and the Commerce Department's NIST. Stone said Meta Superintelligence Labs remains focused on AI safety, alignment and frontier risk.

The size of the layoffs and where the team members are headed were not disclosed, and the team did not respond to requests for comment. With regulation calls rising again in Washington, whether safety staff stay is a direct test of Meta's safety commitments.

A California man has been federally charged with smuggling more than $300 million worth of Nvidia advanced chips into China.

Prosecutors say 38-year-old Yiu Kong Lui was arrested Thursday and faces charges of violating export controls, smuggling and money laundering, carrying up to 50 years combined. His company brokered deals between US chipmakers and foreign shippers, routing chips first to Malaysia or Singapore and then into China, in an operation running from 2023 until August.

The case lands after the Trump administration loosened chip sales to China, showing enforcement against smuggling continues regardless. Nvidia said it will keep working with law enforcement. The defendant has not yet entered a plea.

Some image recognition models learn a pile of concepts internally, but no one can say exactly what they recognize. Activation Atlases average the model's internal responses to millions of images and draw them as a concept map, revealing the model's high-level misunderstandings: for example, a baseball photo led the model to recognize a "gray whale" as a "great white shark."

Today, when debugging why an image model misrecognizes something, this kind of visualization is still a standard tool; most later interpretability methods are patches built on top of it. The trigger scenario is a model misjudging something and you wanting to see what it internally took the image to be.

If the model isn't an image classifier, or the images are far from the distribution of common test sets, don't use it to judge model behavior. It draws a low-dimensional projection whose paths don't necessarily correspond to real structure — treat it as a clue, not quantitative proof.

《Activation Atlases》(2019) | Next review 2027-09-20