President Trump has said the US is on the verge of a deal with Iran around 40 times since the war began. But this time feels different. I asked @ksadjadpour and @ianbremmer what to expect from a potentially imminent deal between the US and Iran to end the war:

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. radar.cloudflare.com/traffic…

NEW: malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner. Cleanest practical example I can think of for why over-indexing on first order safety alignment is risky. When closed (and open) models ship with aggressive refusals, they will be sprinkled with second-order blindspots that attackers will discover...and exploit. We are only in the earliest days of attackers leveraging these features, and it wouldn't surprise me if users systems that need to handle complex cybersecurity issues demand that models be less safety-blunted. In the weeds: @SocketSecurity's post also shows why intention matters in how you design a malware analysis pipeline to avoid prompt manipulation. H/T to colleagues that shared this with me socket.dev/blog/mini-shai-hu…

China has done it again. A company called Yueban built a robot toilet that literally drives itself to your bed The new “Xiaoban” robot toilet has features such as: one-tap summon, autonomous navigation, washing/drying, automatic waste disposal, odor control, and self-cleaning

A Japanese TV crew filmed a 26 year old Tokyo office worker for a feature on quiet quitting. He had not spoken to his manager in four months. AI wrote his reports, his meeting summaries and every reply his boss received, while he collected a full salary. On camera he said the line everyone screenshotted: talking to my boss is a hassle, so I push the conversation into AI and I do not speak. His story was simple. The tasks were menial and led nowhere. He raised it once. His boss told him: I cannot even change your duties. So he stopped asking. Then he stopped doing. The crew thought that was the story. It was not. Pause at 1:27. The camera holds on his laptop for four seconds. Read the prompt he typed. Everyone read the beginning: write the overview of the internal portal project and my duties in it. Almost nobody read the last verb. The verb was not summarize. The verb was invent. There was no project. AI invented the overview, his role in it, the lessons learned. His boss read the document and sent back notes. AI answered the notes. The man watched the thread grow and thought: he is really trying. For months the boss has been holding up one half of a conversation with nobody on the other side. The boss who could not change his duties never noticed the duties had already changed hands. He still rides the same train every morning. He still sits in meetings with his camera off. He still passes his performance reviews. He still has not heard his manager's voice since February. The crew came to record the honest opinion of young people. They left with a man who stopped working months ago, inside a company that still has not noticed. The boss replied to AI again this morning. He watched. He thought: he is really trying.

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…

India’s fertility rate has fallen below replacement for the first time in the country’s history, declining from a TFR of 2.3 to 1.9 in just a decade. Delhi’s fertility rate now sits at 1.2, lower than Finland’s. Follow: @AFpost

Here are some ways in which the world has gotten better.

Top: Meals that were served on a Japanese warship during an overseas anti-piracy deployment to the Gulf of Aden. Bottom: Meals that American sailors and marines are reportedly being served during their ongoing deployment near Iran.

“With U.S. support to Ukraine waning, Moscow was of the mind that it could prevail as long as Europe remained paralyzed,” writes Ivan Krastev. But after a change in government in Hungary, Russia must rethink its European strategy. foreignaffairs.com/hungary/o…

東京最大規模の日用品ストア「ハンズ渋谷店」、2026年11月に閉店😱 timeout.jp/.../シ�%… 「賃貸借契約満了に伴うもの」と公式発表。1978年9月に開業以来、48年の歴史に幕を下ろす。

The bias in favour of boys is shrinking in developing countries even as a preference for girls emerges in the rich world economist.com/briefing/2025/…