Governance, Regulation, Legislation, Geostrategies
UN Women launches new hub for gender-responsive AI governance – UN Women has launched the Digital, Innovation and AI Hub to support gender-responsive approaches to artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation. The initiative was announced on 25 September, during the 81st session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA81) in New York. The Hub will bring together researchers, governments, technology companies, AI experts and women’s rights organisations to generate evidence on how emerging technologies affect women and girls. In addition, it will support UN Member States in developing gender-responsive digital and AI policies and work with technology companies to embed gender equality principles in the design and governance of technology. UN Women notes that the Hub is also meant to reinforce the UN system’s capacity to address the gender dimensions of AI and to give women and women’s rights organisations a stronger voice in shaping AI-related policies, rules and technologies. – https://dig.watch/updates/un-women-ai-hub-gender-governance
AI pioneers warn of an “intelligence explosion” – AI pioneers warn of an “intelligence explosion” – Some of the world’s foremost AI researchers and policy leaders — including at OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft — are warning that AI’s growing ability to automate its own development could rapidly speed up its progress. Such a rapid scale-up in capabilities would leave governments and institutions with little time to prepare for or respond to the consequences, they say. In one scenario, they caution, a year’s worth of advances could occur in a matter of weeks. The warning’s authors include Turing Award winners such as Geoffrey Hinton, as well as OpenAI’s chief scientist, Microsoft’s chief scientific officer and a co-founder of Anthropic. In a new white paper, they say AI models that can automate the process of improving themselves will create an “intelligence explosion”. The paper points to evidence that AI systems at Anthropic and OpenAI are beginning to perform more internal research and development tasks and automate a sizable proportion of engineering tasks. – https://www.axios.com/2026/09/28/ai-pioneers-intelligence-explosion
AI giants, unions join forces for data center fight – AI companies, private equity firms and unions are looking beyond 2026 in the data center debate, banding together to form a new multimillion-dollar coalition to make the case for responsible growth in seven key states. The new group, the American Infrastructure Alliance, wants to partner with state and local officials to create standards and guardrails for data centers in 2027. In return, the coalition hopes to head off moratoriums on new construction. The group is planning initial campaigns in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Indiana and South Carolina. The alliance is backed by Blackstone, OpenAI, QTS and SoftBank Group, along with key unions, including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). – https://www.axios.com/2026/09/28/ai-industry-unions-data-centers
Canada invests C$162 million in 10,000 AI work placements – The Government of Canada will provide up to C$162 million over five years to support 10,000 AI-related work placements for post-secondary students, recent graduates, and post-doctoral fellows. The funding, beginning in 2026–2027, will go to Mitacs and support paid placements connecting young people with businesses across Canada. Mitacs (formerly known as Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems) is a nonprofit national research organization that, in partnerships with Canadian academia, private industry and government, operates research and training programs in fields related to industrial and social innovation.The programme is intended to give participants practical experience working with AI while helping companies test, adopt, and develop AI technologies. – https://dig.watch/updates/canada-million-ai-work
China’s new tech titans – China’s leading tech companies are no longer the copycats of yesteryear. Contrary to many perceptions in the West, they are increasingly innovative and are challenging the West for drones, robotics, electric vehicles (EVs), advanced manufacturing, and now AI, writes Rebecca Fannin in her new book, Tech Titans of China. China’s tech scene has evolved dramatically since Fannin’s precursor volume, in which Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent dominated the narrative. These companies have moved into emerging technology and have been joined by the next wave of Chinese tech leaders – such as ByteDance, Mituan and Xiaomi – that have leveraged China’s vast mobile Internet market to expand in China. – https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/bookshelf-chinas-new-tech-titans/
Courts and Litigation
Florida asks for emergency order to halt ChatGPT development – Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has asked for an emergency injunction against OpenAI and ChatGPT, claiming the company doesn’t have the ability to properly regulate its own technology. The legal fight could further test how far states can go to restrict AI companies despite the federal government declining to enact guardrails. Florida’s request specifically cites a Sept. 26 Axios scoop that OpenAI and Anthropic are facing tens of thousands of security incidents with their models, not the dozens that are publicly known. “Stop calling it safe,” Uthmeier said in a video posted to X on Monday. “Stop pretending it’s human. Stop selling it to kids. If Sam Altman meant what he said about slowing down, he can join our ask to the court. If he will not, we ask the court to do what OpenAI will not do for itself: protect Florida families.” – https://www.axios.com/2026/09/28/florida-openai-chatgpt-injunction-uthmeier
Security, Surveillance
NVIDIA Launches Open Platform to Secure Autonomous AI Agents – NVIDIA has launched an Open Agent Safety Platform designed to place enforceable controls around autonomous AI systems from testing through deployment. The platform combines OpenShell, an open-source runtime that traces agent activity and enforces policies, with Sentry, a hardware-based watchdog that independently monitors agents and can quarantine them in milliseconds, according to NVIDIA. The company announced the platform on September 28. NVIDIA said the platform is intended to address incidents in which AI agents have bypassed application-layer controls while carrying out assigned tasks. It combines software controls with monitoring at the hardware and compute layers rather than relying on the model or agent harness alone. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/nvidia-open-platform-secure/
Deepfakes Are Becoming a Costly Reality for Businesses, Report Warns – Three quarters of cybersecurity leaders say their organization has faced a suspected deepfake incident during the last year and a quarter of those hit by one say it cost the business over $1m in total, a new report has warned. The 2026 Pindrop Deepfake Readiness Index, published on 28 September, warned there is a significant gap between the threat of deepfake attacks and enterprise readiness to defend against them. Deepfakes are AI generated audio and videos of people. The technology has become increasingly sophisticated, making it difficult for anyone watching or listening to the deepfake to tell that it isn’t footage of a real person. Cybercriminals have turned to deepfakes as part of hacking and fraud campaigns. They are used to pose as someone like a colleague, their boss or their CEO and trick victims into sharing sensitive information or making a fraudulent financial transfer. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/deepfakes-costly-reality-for/
US: Critical Infrastructure Braces for Sweeping New Cyber Reporting Rules – A sweeping new cyber incident reporting regime is poised to reshape how organizations across US critical infrastructure report attacks to the government, yet key details and timelines for implementation remain uncertain. Passed by Congress and signed into law in March 2022, the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) established a framework and reporting deadlines relating to cyber incidents. However, the requirements will not come into force until Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) publishes its final implimentation rules. Under CIRCIA, covered entities have to report cyber incidents to CISA within 72 hours and ransom payments made in response to a ransomware attack within 24 hours after the ransom has been paid. Organizations in scope include many within the critical infrastructure sector as well all US defense contractors considered to operate critical infrastructure under the DFARS clause 252.204-7012. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news-features/us-critical-infrastructure-circia/
MCP Is Creating Major Governance Gaps, Researchers Warn – Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are creating a silent enterprise governance gap which threatens to undermine cybersecurity efforts as AI deployments proliferate, according to new research from Ox Security. MCP connects AI applications to external tools and data in a standardized manner, so that developers don’t have to write custom code each time they want to connect AI to an API or database. However, in so doing, it might also be exposing organizations to cloud security risks that data residency requirements, zero trust boundaries, granular IAM policies and continuous supply-chain audits are meant to mitigate, Ox Security claimed in a new report. That report, 15,465 MCP Servers, 0 Governance, has been produced from analysis across three public registries: mcp-official-registry, cline-marketplace and github-mcp-registry. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/mcp-creating-major-governance-gaps/
Storm-3168, Linked to JADEPUFFER, Abused Stolen Azure Identities – Microsoft just published the first detailed look at what JADEPUFFER does inside Azure. Sysdig first spotted the group’s activity in July 2026 and called it the first documented agentic ransomware operation. Microsoft tracks the same actor as Storm-3168, and its new report shows how fast this crew moves once it holds valid cloud credentials. The attack involved two compromised service principals from the same tenant. These are non-human identities that applications use to communicate with Azure. One was used for reconnaissance, while the other focused on discovery, destruction and credential theft. It was a clear division of tasks between the two identities. The reconnaissance began in early June 2026. The first identity spent about 15 hours and 30 minutes listing virtual machines, subscriptions, resource groups and other resources, completing more than 300 successful read operations. About 90 minutes later, the second identity carried out similar activity across two subscriptions in just five seconds. Both identities used Storm-3168 infrastructure, the same network fingerprint and the same user agent, python-requests/2.34.2. – https://securityaffairs.com/199905/cyber-crime/storm-3168-linked-to-jadepuffer-abused-stolen-azure-identities.html
Cyberattack on Polish medical software provider exposes patient data – Hackers stole personal data from a Polish healthcare software provider in the latest cyberattack to hit the country’s medical sector in recent months. Qbusoft, which develops the Medyc medical records and practice management platform, was breached after an attacker exploited an SQL injection vulnerability in August, according to a notification issued last week by one of the healthcare providers affected by the incident. SQL injection is a security flaw that allows hackers to trick a website into giving them access to information stored in its database. – https://therecord.media/poland-cyberattack-medical-medyc
Defence, Military, Warfare
When weapons can learn, humans need to stay in control – AI weapons systems that are designed to learn and adapt could become increasingly difficult for humans to predict, explain and control. This creates an accountability gap that existing oversight mechanisms may not be equipped to close. The concern begins with how these systems learn. Machine learning allows AI systems to identify patterns in large complex datasets and use them to make predictions or classifications. This learning can happen in two ways. Most AI systems are static – they learn from fixed training data. Continual learning systems, by contrast, can keep updating using new data after deployment. This ability to adapt to changing operational conditions can make their behaviour harder to anticipate. AI systems’ ability to process vast amounts of information at machine speed is already changing military operations. During Operation Epic Fury against Iran in early 2026, US Central Command claimed that American forces had struck more than 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours. AI-assisted systems helped achieve this operational tempo. – https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/when-weapons-can-learn-humans-need-to-stay-in-control/
Frontiers and Markets
ITU and WMO seek stronger spectrum protection for climate monitoring– The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have called for stronger protection of radio-frequency spectrum used for weather forecasting, early warnings, climate monitoring, and water management. The two UN agencies issued the call alongside a new joint handbook providing updated guidance on frequencies used by meteorological and Earth-observation systems. Satellite sensors, weather radar, lightning detection systems, aircraft and marine observations, and hydrological monitoring all rely on parts of the radio spectrum to collect or transmit environmental data. – https://dig.watch/updates/itu-wmo-spectrum-climate-monitoring