Daily Digest on AI and Emerging Technologies (28 January 2025)

Governance and Legislation

 

How might standard contract terms help unlock responsible AI data sharing?

 

(Lee Tiedrich, Elena Simperl, Gefion Thuermer, Thomas Carey-Wilson – OECD.AI – 27 January 2025) As artificial intelligence (AI) technology advances, reshaping industries and society, the urgency to develop robust frameworks for responsibly sharing data for AI use cases becomes increasingly clear. High-quality datasets fuel the AI systems that have made breakthroughs possible in healthcare, environmental protection, social welfare, and in other realms over the past years. Despite these potential benefits, significant barriers remain. For instance, data must be made available and shared ethically while navigating a complex array of legal requirements. Additional challenges—such as the infrastructure needed to store and process vast amounts of data and the substantial energy demands associated with it—lie beyond the scope of this discussion. Nonetheless, a confluence of ethical considerations and legal obligations can frequently compound with these other issues to slow progress. – https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/standard-contract-terms-responsible-ai-data-sharing

Report: agencies’ adoption of GenAI depends on safe and ethical principles

(Edward Graham – NextGov – 27 January 2025) Government agencies need to prioritize the responsible adoption of emerging capabilities like generative artificial intelligence as they pursue their technology modernization efforts, according to a report released last month by the IBM Center for The Business of Government. The analysis — which included interviews with officials in the U.S., Canada and Australia — outlined a framework for how government leaders can implement new capabilities while working to overcome challenges with harmonizing and replacing legacy systems. – https://www.nextgov.com/artificial-intelligence/2025/01/report-agencies-adoption-genai-depends-safety-standard-compliance/402526/?oref=ng-homepage-river

 

Data Privacy Week: EU Commission Data Transfer Case Has Implications for US Businesses

 

(Victoria Akosile – Infosecurity Magazine – 27 January 2025) Just over a week into the New Year, the EU General Court made a first-of-its-kind ruling that stands to potentially influence the enforcement of data transfer violations. The case was brought against the EU Commission by Thomas Bindl, a German citizen who alleged his data was unlawfully transferred outside of the EU via the Commission’s website between 2021-2022. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/opinions/eu-commission-data-transfer-us/

Trump’s Moves to Modernize U.S. Technology Policy

(Matt Pearl – Center for Strategic & International Studies – 27 January 2025) Developing technology policy is an incredibly complex task that normally takes decades. Looking at the CHIPS Act, for instance, the idea of bolstering the United States’ production capabilities in semiconductors was proposed in the 1980s, gained political momentum in 2020, was enacted by Congress in 2022, and will take several decades to implement. During his first week, President Donald Trump did not bring any technology policies to fruition. By issuing a flurry of presidential actions that will affect technology policy, however, he showed that the administration is eager to make significant changes soon. – https://www.csis.org/analysis/trumps-moves-modernize-us-technology-policy

Why nobody can see inside AI’s black box

(Abi Olvera – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – 27 January 2025) When you click a button in Microsoft Word, you likely know the exact outcome. That’s because each user action leads to a predetermined result through a path that developers carefully mapped out, line by line, in the program’s source code. The same goes for many often-used computing applications available up until recently. But artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models that power the likes of ChatGPT and Claude, were built and thus operate in a fundamentally different way. Developers didn’t meticulously program these new systems in a step-by-step fashion. The models shaped themselves through complex learning processes, training on vast amounts of data to recognize patterns and generate responses. – https://thebulletin.org/2025/01/why-nobody-can-see-inside-ais-black-box/#post-heading

 

Next-Gen Industrial Infrastructure

 

(Amani Abou-Zeid, Christophe De Vusser, Bandar Alkhorayef, Niclas Mårtensson, Huang Shan – WEF – 23 January 2025) The intelligent infrastructure market is expected to grow to $2 trillion over the next 10 years, bolstered by increasing private sector investment. Technologies such as AI, quantum and hyperconnectivity are blending the physical and the digital in an integrated approach to infrastructure, promising to transform industrial operations. How are smart infrastructure investments both meeting the increasing demand for infrastructure in industry and contributing to responsible and sustainable growth? – https://www.weforum.org/meetings/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2025/sessions/next-gen-industrial-infrastructure/

 

Security

Hidden Text Salting Disrupts Brand Name Detection Systems

(Alessandro Mascellino – Infosecurity Magazine – 27 January 2025) A new report has revealed a surge in the use of so-called “hidden text salting” techniques to evade email security measures in the latter half of 2024. This method, also known as “poisoning,” allows cybercriminals to bypass spam filters, confuse email parsers and evade detection engines by embedding invisible elements in the HTML source code of emails. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/hidden-text-salting-disrupts-brand/

 

For $50, Cyberattackers Can Use GhostGPT to Write Malicious Code

(Jai Vijayan – Dark Reading – January 27, 2025) A recently debuted AI chatbot dubbed GhostGPT has given aspiring and active cybercriminals a handy new tool for developing malware, carrying out business email compromise scams, and executing other illegal activities. Like previous, similar chatbots like WormGPT, GhostGPT is an uncensored AI model, meaning it is tuned to bypass the usual security measures and ethical constraints available with mainstream AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. – https://www.darkreading.com/cloud-security/cyberattackers-ghostgpt-write-malicious-code

Texas county issues disaster declaration following cyberattack

(Jonathan Greig – The Record – 27 January 2025) A Texas county government that serves about 40,000 residents is suffering from a cyberattack that forced officials to declare a disaster over the weekend. On Friday, Matagorda County’s Emergency Operation Center published a statement warning that a cybersecurity breach had been discovered “involving a virus that has affected several internal systems.” Matagorda County Judge Bobby Seiferman issued a declaration of disaster based on the security breach. – https://therecord.media/texas-county-disaster-declaration-cyberattack

Brazil bans iris scan company co-founded by Sam Altman from paying citizens for biometric data

(Suzanne Smalley – The Record – 27 January 2025) Brazilian data privacy regulators say they are prohibiting Tools for Humanity (TFH), a biometric identity company co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, from paying citizens for iris scans. TFH has been offering cryptocurrency to Brazilians who consent to the scans. The country’s National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) said on Friday that it determined such payments interfere with a person’s decision to grant consent for access to sensitive personal data. – https://therecord.media/brazil-iris-scan-data-privacy-tools-for-humanity

OpenAI rival DeepSeek limits registration after ‘large-scale malicious attacks’

(Jonathan Greig – The Record – 27 January 2025) Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek said it planned to limit signups after seeing malicious attacks on the services it provides. The company — which drew headlines over the last week for offering a powerful rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT — reported issues starting on Monday morning that caused degraded performance. “Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek’s services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service,” the company said on a status page. “Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding and support.” – https://therecord.media/deepseek-limits-registration-blames-malicious-attacks

 

New Phishing Campaign Targets Mobile Devices with Malicious PDFs

(Alessandro Mascellino – Infosecurity Magazine – 27 January 2025) A newly uncovered phishing campaign is targeting mobile users with advanced social engineering tactics and malicious PDF files designed to compromise sensitive data. The campaign, which impersonates the United States Postal Service (USPS), employs a never-before-seen obfuscation technique to deliver its malicious payload. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/phishing-campaign-targets-mobile/

 

CISOs Boost Crisis Simulation Budgets Amid High-Profile Cyber-Attacks

(Kevin Poireault – Infosecurity Magazine – 27 January 2025) Most CISOs plan to enhance their crisis simulation capabilities in 2025 to better prepare for potential full-scale cyber crises, according to a new study by Hack The Box. Of the 200 UK and US-based CISOs surveyed, 74% said they plan to increase their crisis simulation budgets in 2025. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/ciso-boost-crisis-simulation/

Subaru Bug Enabled Remote Vehicle Tracking and Hijacking

(Phil Muncaster – Infosecurity Magazine – 27 January 2025) Security researchers have revealed how attackers could exploit a vulnerability in Subaru vehicle infotainment systems to remotely track and even unlock and start connected cars. Ethical hacker, Sam Curry, explained in a blog post late last week that he found an arbitrary account takeover flaw in the admin portal for Subaru’s Starlink in-vehicle service, enabling him to hijack a Subaru employee account. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/subaru-bug-remote-vehicle-tracking/

 

Data Privacy Week: Box CPO Highlights the Evolving Role of Privacy Professionals in the Age of AI

(James Coker – Infosecurity Magazine – 27 January 2025) The field of privacy has become a critical business issue, requiring substantial attention and investment. This trend has been driven by surging digital data collection and a plethora of data protection legislation designed to govern how vast quantities of sensitive information is managed and secured. The surging use of generative AI in businesses has added another dimension to managing personal and other sensitive data. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/interviews/box-cpo-privacy-pros-ai/

 

Can National Security Keep Up with AI?

(Xue Lan, Nick Clegg, Katie Drummond, Ian Bremmer, Henna Virkkunen, Sir Jeremy Fleming – WEF – 23 January 2025) New technologies are reshaping the global security landscape, with countries and companies racing ahead with AI innovations alongside questions over dual-use risks, system misuse, or military applications. How can leaders from the private and public sectors work together to put in place safeguards for rapidly advancing technologies? – https://www.weforum.org/meetings/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2025/sessions/where-does-civilian-ai-end-and-military-ai-begin/

Defense, Intelligence, and Warfare

Pentagon prepares to expand in-theater data processing pilot

(Courtney Albon – Defense News – 27 January 2025) The U.S. Defense Department is laying the groundwork to expand a pilot program started in 2023 to provide more data processing capabilities to military units operating outside of the U.S., according to a senior official in the Pentagon’s Chief Information Office. As combatant commands around the globe integrate more sensors and uncrewed systems, there’s a growing need for computing and storage capabilities. The Joint Operational Edge, or JOE, cloud initiative aims to provide commanders with the computing capabilities they need to crunch the swaths of data those sensors are gathering and identify key intelligence insights. – https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2025/01/27/pentagon-prepares-to-expand-in-theater-data-processing-pilot/

 

ChatNC3: Can the US trust AI in nuclear command, control and communications?

(Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. – Breaking Defense – 24 January 2025) As the US military experiments with AI for everything from streamlining contract documents to coordinating global operations, there’s one area that’s remained off-limits: nuclear command and control. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given the obvious fears of a WarGames-like accidental apocalypse. But what if the Pentagon at least let AI help in nuclear crises, in a contained and limited way, by using algorithms to process incoming intelligence on a potential strike more quickly, giving the human beings involved — and ultimately President Donald Trump — precious additional time to make the most difficult decision imaginable? Last fall, no less a figure than the four-star chief  of nuclear forces, Gen. Anthony Cotton of US Strategic Command, argued publicly that “advanced AI and robust data analytics capabilities provide decision advantage and improve our deterrence posture.” – https://breakingdefense.com/2025/01/chatnc3-can-the-us-trust-ai-in-nuclear-command-control-and-communications/

Protecting European AI-Related Innovations: Preventing Their Use in China’s Military Advancements

(The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies – 20 January 2025) Over the past years, China’s rapid military modernisation has caused alarm in the United States, Asia and Europe. China’s self-stated goals express its intent to leap to a position of leadership and self-sufficiency in artificial intelligence (AI)-based and enabled technologies, with major implications for the military domain. If the US-China military balance of power in the Indo-Pacific definitively tips in China’s favour, this could have far-reaching consequences for security in East Asia, as well as globally. After all, both East Asian democracies and Europe rely on US military power for their protection. In turn, Europe depends on East Asia as the world’s manufacturing hub. In this context, the US and its allies, partly because of US pressure, have resorted to unilateral and plurilateral controls on exports, foreign investment screening and more restrictive knowledge security policies. – https://hcss.nl/report/protecting-european-ai-related-innovations-preventing-their-use-in-chinas-military-advancements/

Frontiers

 

What Is Sci-Fi, What Is High-Tech?

 

(Raquel Urtasun, Tom Oxley, Nita Farahany, Anthony Jules, Yossi Vardi – WEF – 24 January 2025) Neurotechnology extends the possibilities of our brains, autonomous systems take us where we need to go and robots are becoming a part of our daily life. These technologies are not just the backdrop of futuristic novels, they are creating a world previously confined to the imaginations of science-fiction writers. What are the key future technologies that once seemed unbelievable and how are they poised to reshape everyday life in 2035? – https://www.weforum.org/meetings/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2025/sessions/what-is-sci-fi-what-is-high-tech/

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