Government Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption News Stories in Major Media

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Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

In Europe, the weedkiller atrazine has been banned for nearly two decades because of its suspected links to reproductive problems like reduced sperm quality and birth defects. In the United States, it remains one of the most widely used pesticides, sprayed on corn, sugar cane and other crops, the result of years of industry lobbying. This week, a "Make America Healthy Again" commission led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is set to issue a report on the causes of chronic illnesses in the United States. And Mr. Kennedy, who worked for years as an environmental lawyer fighting chemical companies, wants the report to highlight the harms of pesticides like atrazine. "We're calling for a ban of 85 pesticides that have already been banned in other countries," said Zen Honeycutt, who leads a coalition of mothers opposed to pesticides and genetically modified organisms, at a national conference of Make America Healthy Again supporters. "Big Ag, Big Food, Big Pharma, the pesticide companies, all of these companies are the delivery mechanisms for toxins," said Tony Lyons, co-president of the newly established MAHA Institute, which hosted the MAHA conference. "Our government agencies shouldn't be protecting a handful of the most powerful companies on earth, protecting their profits over the welfare of its own citizens." The E.P.A. is currently updating its mitigation proposals for atrazine.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on toxic chemicals.

Jay Bhattacharya is no longer on the fringe. Bhattacharya is now the director of the National Institutes of Health, one of the most powerful figures in public health and biomedical research in the U.S. and across the globe. "The first and most important thing," he says in a new interview with POLITICO Magazine, "is that dissenting voices need to be heard and allowed." He praises the pardon of Anthony Fauci even as he effectively accuses the former public health official of engaging in a Covid cover-up. He endorses the creation of an independent commission to assess the pandemic response. He rejects the continued recommendation of mRNA vaccines for healthy young people. Do you believe the U.S. – or other countries – should do more to uncover the origins of Covid-19? "Yes, but I think the Chinese need to cooperate and they have not cooperated," [said Bhattacharya]. "There's enough evidence that I've seen from the outside that suggests that there was at the very least a cover-up of dangerous experiments that were done in China with – by the way – the help of the U.S. and also Germany and the UK. There was an international effort to try to supposedly prevent pandemics by finding viruses and pathogens in the wild [and] making them more transmissible. I think that was a very, very dangerous kind of utopian research agenda. I'm convinced that research agenda led to this pandemic through a lab leak in China, in Wuhan. But that was a global effort."

Note: Watch our Mindful News Brief on the cover-up of COVID origins. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on COVID and government corruption.

In the spring of 2025, central Illinois was swallowed by a wall of dust so dense it erased the horizon. This was not a natural disaster. It was the consequence of decades of extractive farming practices. The National Weather Service confirmed that the dust came from exposed agricultural fields–land left vulnerable by chemical-dependent, high-till farming practices that destroy soil structure, eliminate ground cover, and kill the living organisms that bind soil together. Similar dust-related incidents have been reported across the Midwest. Scientists and soil experts warn that without major shifts in land management, these events will become more frequent, more deadly, and more widespread. This is not simply about the weather. This is about how we farm. It is about how much living topsoil we lose every year, estimated globally at over 24 billion tons. Nearly a century ago, our nation faced a similar reckoning. During the 1930s, the Dust Bowl decimated the Great Plains. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ... created the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), now the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and established a network of local soil and water conservation districts across every county in America. He planted trees .... across the Midwest, recognizing that roots hold soil. The current Administration's response is the exact opposite. The Trump government has fired at least 1,700 NRCS employees whose very jobs have been to protect the soil.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in government and in the food system.

In President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, he also cautioned Americans about the growing power of a "scientific, technological elite." "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment project allocations and the power of money is ever present," warned Eisenhower. And he was right. Today, many of the people protesting the Trump administration's cuts to federal funding for scientific research are part of that scientific, technological elite. But there's a good chance that slashing federal spending will liberate science from the corrupting forces that Eisenhower warned us about. Thomas Edison's industrial lab produced huge breakthroughs in telecommunications and electrification. Alexander Graham Bell's lab produced modern telephony and sound recording, all without government money. The Wright Brothers–who ran a bicycle shop before revolutionizing aviation–launched the first successfully manned airplane flight in December 1903, beating out more experienced competitors like Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who had received a grant from the War Department for his research. Of course, government funding has led to major breakthroughs both during and after World War II. In an influential 2005 paper, Stanford University professor John Ioannidis flatly concluded that "most published research findings are false." He argued that the current peer review model encourages groupthink. "You end up with a monolithic view, and so you crush what's so important in science, which is different ideas competing in a marketplace of ideas."

Note: "Trust the science" sounds noble–until you realize that even top editors of world-renowned journals have warned that much of published medical research is unreliable, distorted by fraud, corporate influence, and conflicts of interest. For more along these lines, read about how the US government turns a blind eye to the corporations fueling America's health crisis.

Uncle Sam conducted several pointless and destructive experiments on his own people during the Cold War. The most infamous was MKUltra, the CIA's project to develop procedures for mind control using psychedelic drugs and psychological torture. During Operation Sea-Spray, the U.S. Navy secretly sprayed San Francisco with bacteria to simulate a biological attack. San Francisco was also the site of a series of radiation experiments by the U.S. Navy. A 2024 investigation by the San Francisco Public Press and The Guardian revealed that the city's U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory had exposed at least 1,073 people to radiation over 24 experiments between 1946 and 1963. The tests came during a time when the effects of nuclear radiation were a pressing concern, and were conducted without ethical safeguards. Conscripted soldiers and civilian volunteers were sent into radioactive conditions or purposely dosed with radiation without their informed consent. The lab didn't bother following up. The Radiological Defense Laboratory ... closed in 1969. In 2013, whistleblowers brought a lawsuit against a decontamination contractor for cutting corners and faking results; in January 2025, the contractor agreed to pay a $97 million settlement. Scientists [there had] developed "synthetic fallout"–dirt laced with radioactive isotopes to simulate the waste created by a nuclear war. They had test subjects practice cleaning it up, rub it on their skin, or crawl around in it.

Note: Read about the long history of humans being treated like guinea pigs in science experiments. Learn more about the MKUltra Program in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has canceled plans to introduce new rules designed to limit the ability of US data brokers to sell sensitive information about Americans, including financial data, credit history, and Social Security numbers. The CFPB proposed the new rule in early December under former director Rohit Chopra, who said the changes were necessary to combat commercial surveillance practices that "threaten our personal safety and undermine America's national security." The agency quietly withdrew the proposal on Tuesday morning. Data brokers operate within a multibillion-dollar industry built on the collection and sale of detailed personal information–often without individuals' knowledge or consent. These companies create extensive profiles on nearly every American, including highly sensitive data such as precise location history, political affiliations, and religious beliefs. Common Defense political director Naveed Shah, an Iraq War veteran, condemned the move to spike the proposed changes, accusing Vought of putting the profits of data brokers before the safety of millions of service members. Investigations by WIRED have shown that data brokers have collected and made cheaply available information that can be used to reliably track the locations of American military and intelligence personnel overseas, including in and around sensitive installations where US nuclear weapons are reportedly stored.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

The U.S. intelligence community is now buying up vast volumes of sensitive information that would have previously required a court order, essentially bypassing the Fourth Amendment. But the surveillance state has encountered a problem: There's simply too much data on sale from too many corporations and brokers. So the government has a plan for a one-stop shop. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and "streamline" the use of commercially available information, or CAI, like location data derived from mobile ads, by American spy agencies, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as highly sensitive, that which can be "misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S. persons." The "Intelligence Community Data Consortium" will provide a single convenient web-based storefront for searching and accessing this data, along with a "data marketplace" for purchasing "the best data at the best price," faster than ever before. It will be designed for the 18 different federal agencies and offices that make up the U.S. intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, CIA, FBI Intelligence Branch, and Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis – though one document suggests the portal will also be used by agencies not directly related to intelligence or defense.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

In April of 1972, Russell Targ, a Columbia-trained physicist with an unusual interest in the paranormal, met with the Office of Scientific Intelligence, a secretive branch of the CIA that monitored biological warfare, nuclear weapons and guided missiles during the Cold War. Their Soviet enemies, who had likely been experimenting with drugs, hypnotism, yoga and black magic, were now reportedly moving inanimate objects with their minds. From a military standpoint, the implications were horrifying. So the U.S. government brokered a deal: For an initial investment of $874, or just under $7,000 in today's dollars, Targ and his colleague, fellow physicist Harold Puthoff, would test the feasibility of using psychic spies at their Menlo Park lab. The operation, called Stargate, would go on to explore whether ordinary civilians could locate clandestine military facilities across the world using their hidden third eye. According to archived news reports, in total, officials spent $20 million on the secret program. Almost immediately, "curious" data started to emerge: Subjects began describing secret locations thousands of miles away with frightening accuracy. Others reportedly levitated small weights with their minds, while some allegedly controlled temperatures and read information inside sealed envelopes. One man, Patrick Price, who later became known as the SRI's "psychic treasure," was especially prolific. "We want to make it clear," [Targ] told reporters in 1976, "that the functioning is ordinary, rather than extraordinary. It is a regular human capability."

Note: Read more about the CIA's psychic spies. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the mysterious nature of reality.

Department of Defense spending is increasingly going to large tech companies including Microsoft, Google parent company Alphabet, Oracle, and IBM. Open AI recently brought on former U.S. Army general and National Security Agency Director Paul M. Nakasone to its Board of Directors. The U.S. military discreetly, yet frequently, collaborated with prominent tech companies through thousands of subcontractors through much of the 2010s, obfuscating the extent of the two sectors' partnership from tech employees and the public alike. The long-term, deep-rooted relationship between the institutions, spurred by massive Cold War defense and research spending and bound ever tighter by the sectors' revolving door, ensures that advances in the commercial tech sector benefit the defense industry's bottom line. Military, tech spending has manifested myriad landmark inventions. The internet, for example, began as an Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now known as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) research project called ARPANET, the first network of computers. Decades later, graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page received funding from DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and U.S. intelligence community-launched development program Massive Digital Data Systems to create what would become Google. Other prominent DARPA-funded inventions include transit satellites, a precursor to GPS, and the iPhone Siri app, which, instead of being picked up by the military, was ultimately adapted to consumer ends by Apple.

Note: Watch our latest video on the militarization of Big Tech. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI, warfare technology, and Big Tech.

The US military may soon have an army of faceless suicide bombers at their disposal, as an American defense contractor has revealed their newest war-fighting drone. AeroVironment unveiled the Red Dragon in a video on their YouTube page, the first in a new line of 'one-way attack drones.' This new suicide drone can reach speeds up to 100 mph and can travel nearly 250 miles. The new drone takes just 10 minutes to set up and launch and weighs just 45 pounds. Once the small tripod the Red Dragon takes off from is set up, AeroVironment said soldiers would be able to launch up to five per minute. Since the suicide robot can choose its own target in the air, the US military may soon be taking life-and-death decisions out of the hands of humans. Once airborne, its AVACORE software architecture functions as the drone's brain, managing all its systems and enabling quick customization. Red Dragon's SPOTR-Edge perception system acts like smart eyes, using AI to find and identify targets independently. Simply put, the US military will soon have swarms of bombs with brains that don't land until they've chosen a target and crash into it. Despite Red Dragon's ability to choose a target with 'limited operator involvement,' the Department of Defense (DoD) has said it's against the military's policy to allow such a thing to happen. The DoD updated its own directives to mandate that 'autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems' always have the built-in ability to allow humans to control the device.

Note: Drones create more terrorists than they kill. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on warfare technology and Big Tech.

In 2003 [Alexander Karp] – together with Peter Thiel and three others – founded a secretive tech company called Palantir. And some of the initial funding came from the investment arm of – wait for it – the CIA! The lesson that Karp and his co-author draw [in their book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West] is that "a more intimate collaboration between the state and the technology sector, and a closer alignment of vision between the two, will be required if the United States and its allies are to maintain an advantage that will constrain our adversaries over the longer term. The preconditions for a durable peace often come only from a credible threat of war." Or, to put it more dramatically, maybe the arrival of AI makes this our "Oppenheimer moment". For those of us who have for decades been critical of tech companies, and who thought that the future for liberal democracy required that they be brought under democratic control, it's an unsettling moment. If the AI technology that giant corporations largely own and control becomes an essential part of the national security apparatus, what happens to our concerns about fairness, diversity, equity and justice as these technologies are also deployed in "civilian" life? For some campaigners and critics, the reconceptualisation of AI as essential technology for national security will seem like an unmitigated disaster – Big Brother on steroids, with resistance being futile, if not criminal.

Note: Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and intelligence agency corruption.

Before signing its lucrative and controversial Project Nimbus deal with Israel, Google knew it couldn't control what the nation and its military would do with the powerful cloud-computing technology, a confidential internal report obtained by The Intercept reveals. The report makes explicit the extent to which the tech giant understood the risk of providing state-of-the-art cloud and machine learning tools to a nation long accused of systemic human rights violations. Not only would Google be unable to fully monitor or prevent Israel from using its software to harm Palestinians, but the report also notes that the contract could obligate Google to stonewall criminal investigations by other nations into Israel's use of its technology. And it would require close collaboration with the Israeli security establishment – including joint drills and intelligence sharing – that was unprecedented in Google's deals with other nations. The rarely discussed question of legal culpability has grown in significance as Israel enters the third year of what has widely been acknowledged as a genocide in Gaza – with shareholders pressing the company to conduct due diligence on whether its technology contributes to human rights abuses. Google doesn't furnish weapons to the military, but it provides computing services that allow the military to function – its ultimate function being, of course, the lethal use of those weapons. Under international law, only countries, not corporations, have binding human rights obligations.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and government corruption.

A $500 million lawsuit filed Monday in Washtenaw County Circuit Court is taking aim at the Michigan Department of Corrections, alleging that prison officials subjected hundreds of incarcerated women to illegal surveillance by recording them during strip searches, while showering, and even as they used the toilet. At the heart of the case is a deeply controversial and, according to experts, unprecedented policy implemented at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility, the only women's prison in Michigan. Under the Michigan Department of Corrections policy directive, prison guards were instructed to wear activated body cameras while conducting routine strip searches, capturing video of women in states of complete undress. The suit, brought by the firm Flood Law, alleges a range of abuses, including lewd comments from prison guards during recorded searches, and long-term psychological trauma inflicted on women, many of whom are survivors of sexual violence. Attorneys for the 20 Jane Does listed on the suit and hundreds of others on retainer argued that this practice not only deprived women of their dignity, but also violated widely accepted detention standards. No other state in the country permits such recordings; many have explicit prohibitions against filming individuals during unclothed searches, recognizing the inherent risk of abuse and the acute vulnerability of the people being searched. Michigan, the attorneys said, stands alone.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

In 2009, Pennsylvania's Lower Merion school district remotely activated its school-issued laptop webcams to capture 56,000 pictures of students outside of school, including in their bedrooms. After the Covid-19 pandemic closed US schools at the dawn of this decade, student surveillance technologies were conveniently repackaged as "remote learning tools" and found their way into virtually every K-12 school, thereby supercharging the growth of the $3bn EdTech surveillance industry. Products by well-known EdTech surveillance vendors such as Gaggle, GoGuardian, Securly and Navigate360 review and analyze our children's digital lives, ranging from their private texts, emails, social media posts and school documents to the keywords they search and the websites they visit. In 2025, wherever a school has access to a student's data – whether it be through school accounts, school-provided computers or even private devices that utilize school-associated educational apps – they also have access to the way our children think, research and communicate. As schools normalize perpetual spying, today's kids are learning that nothing they read or write electronically is private. Big Brother is indeed watching them, and that negative repercussions may result from thoughts or behaviors the government does not endorse. Accordingly, kids are learning that the safest way to avoid revealing their private thoughts, and potentially subjecting themselves to discipline, may be to stop or sharply restrict their digital communications and to avoid researching unpopular or unconventional ideas altogether.

Note: Learn about Proctorio, an AI surveillance anti-cheating software used in schools to monitor children through webcams–conducting "desk scans," "face detection," and "gaze detection" to flag potential cheating and to spot anybody "looking away from the screen for an extended period of time." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

In recent years, Israeli security officials have boasted of a "ChatGPT-like" arsenal used to monitor social media users for supporting or inciting terrorism. It was released in full force after Hamas's bloody attack on October 7. Right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to arrest hundreds of Palestinians ... for social media-related offenses. Many had engaged in relatively low-level political speech, like posting verses from the Quran on WhatsApp. Hundreds of students with various legal statuses have been threatened with deportation on similar grounds in the U.S. this year. Recent high-profile cases have targeted those associated with student-led dissent against the Israeli military's policies in Gaza. In some instances, the State Department has relied on informants, blacklists, and technology as simple as a screenshot. But the U.S. is in the process of activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools Israeli authorities have also used to monitor and criminalize online speech. In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department was launching an AI-powered "Catch and Revoke" initiative to accelerate the cancellation of student visas. Algorithms would collect data from social media profiles, news outlets, and doxing sites to enforce the January 20 executive order targeting foreign nationals who threaten to "overthrow or replace the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and the erosion of civil liberties.

While attempting to control the weather might sound like science fiction, countries have been seeding clouds for decades to try to make rain or snow fall in specific regions. Invented in the 1940s, seeding involves a variety of techniques including adding particles to clouds via aircraft. It is used today across the world in an attempt to alleviate drought, fight forest fires and even to disperse fog at airports. In 2008, China used it to try to stop rain from falling on Beijing's Olympic stadium. But experts say that there is insufficient oversight of the practice, as countries show an increasing interest in this and other geoengineering techniques as the planet warms. The American Meteorological Society has said that "unintended consequences" of cloud seeding have not been clearly shown – or ruled out – and raised concerns that unanticipated effects from weather modification could cross political boundaries. And there have been instances when cloud seeding was used deliberately in warfare. The United States used it during "Operation Popeye" to slow the enemy advance during the Vietnam War. In response, the UN created a 1976 convention prohibiting "military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques". A number of countries have not signed the convention. Researcher Laura Kuhl said there was "significant danger that cloud seeding may do more harm than good", in a 2022 article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Note: Regenerative farming is far safer and more promising than geoengineering for stabilizing the climate. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on geoengineering and science corruption.

On March 12th, Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a press release about an "enhanced" operation that the agency had conducted the previous week in New Mexico. Forty-eight people were arrested in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Roswell. Twenty of them had been "arrested or convicted of serious criminal offenses," which included homicide, sexual assault, drug trafficking, and shoplifting. Others had committed "immigration violations such as illegal entry and illegal re-entry," and twenty-one had final orders of removal issued by an immigration judge. On March 16th, the New Mexico chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with two oversight agencies within the Department of Homeland Security: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. "ICE has not identified any of the 48 individuals," the letter said. "ICE has not indicated where any of them are being detained, whether they have access to counsel, in what conditions they are being held, or even which agency is holding them." In the past two and a half months, ICE has ended a long-standing policy discouraging arrests at schools, places of worship, and hospitals; its officers have also allegedly entered residences without warrants, arrested U.S. citizens by mistake, and refused to identify themselves while whisking people away on the streets of American cities.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption.

The Department of Homeland Security is effectively gutting key civil rights offices within the agency, slashing the number of staff at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. Each of these offices was created by Congress, but DHS has decided to move ahead anyway, saying they "have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles." Four days later, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts student with a valid F-1 visa, was pulled off a sidewalk in Massachusetts and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. The Department of Homeland Security, whose agents surround Ozturk in the video, has a long history of civil and human rights abuses. DHS is home to the largest law enforcement cohort in the United States. Its agents have extraordinary powers to stop, arrest, and detain citizens and noncitizens alike throughout the country. When Congress created DHS in 2002, it ... created the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) to provide oversight to guard against abuses. Every year, CRCL files a report to Congress. In its fiscal year (FY) 2023 report, for example, CRCL reported that it received over 3,000 allegations of misconduct and opened 758 investigations into issues ranging from treatment of travelers at airports to discrimination by DHS law enforcement to sexual abuse in DHS custody to deaths in DHS custody.

Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.

When a military judge threw out a defendant's confession in the Sept. 11 case this month, he gave two main reasons. The prisoner's statements, the judge ruled, were obtained through the C.I.A.'s use of torture, including beatings and sleep deprivation. But equally troubling to the judge was what happened to the prisoner in the years after his physical torture ended, when the agency held him in isolation and kept questioning him from 2003 to 2006. The defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, is accused of sending money and providing other support to some of the hijackers who carried out the terrorist attack, which killed 3,000 people. In court, Mr. Baluchi is charged as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. He is the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of masterminding the plot. The judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, wrote that it was easy to focus on the torture because it was "so absurdly far outside the norms of what is expected of U.S. custody preceding law enforcement questioning." "However," he added, "the three and a half years of uncharged, incommunicado detention and essentially solitary confinement – all while being continually questioned and conditioned – is just as egregious" as the physical torture. Prosecutors are preparing to appeal. But the 111-page ruling was the latest blow to the government's two-decade-old effort to hold death penalty trials at Guantánamo Bay by sweeping aside a legacy of state-sponsored torture.

Note: Learn more about US torture programs in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.

2,500 US service members from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit [tested] a leading AI tool the Pentagon has been funding. The generative AI tools they used were built by the defense-tech company Vannevar Labs, which in November was granted a production contract worth up to $99 million by the Pentagon's startup-oriented Defense Innovation Unit. The company, founded in 2019 by veterans of the CIA and US intelligence community, joins the likes of Palantir, Anduril, and Scale AI as a major beneficiary of the US military's embrace of artificial intelligence. In December, the Pentagon said it will spend $100 million in the next two years on pilots specifically for generative AI applications. In addition to Vannevar, it's also turning to Microsoft and Palantir, which are working together on AI models that would make use of classified data. People outside the Pentagon are warning about the potential risks of this plan, including Heidy Khlaaf ... at the AI Now Institute. She says this rush to incorporate generative AI into military decision-making ignores more foundational flaws of the technology: "We're already aware of how LLMs are highly inaccurate, especially in the context of safety-critical applications that require precision." Khlaaf adds that even if humans are "double-checking" the work of AI, there's little reason to think they're capable of catching every mistake. "‘Human-in-the-loop' is not always a meaningful mitigation," she says.

Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on warfare technology and Big Tech.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.