“Google says its flagship artificial intelligence chatbot, Gemini, has been inundated by ‘commercially motivated’ actors who are trying to clone it by repeatedly prompting it, sometimes with thousands of different queries — including one campaign that prompted Gemini more than 100,000 times. In a report published Thursday, Google said it has increasingly come under ‘distillation attacks,’ or repeated questions designed to get a chatbot to reveal its inner workings. Google described the activity as ‘model extraction,’ in which would-be copycats probe the system for the patterns and logic that make it work. The attackers appear to want to use the information to build or bolster their own AI, it said. The company believes the culprits are mostly private companies or researchers looking to gain a competitive advantage.” (02/12/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Laura Mahrenbach, Narayanappa Janardhan, Gedaliah Afterman, & Maximilian Mayer
“The global order was already fragmenting before Donald Trump returned to the White House. But the upended ‘rules’ of global economic and foreign policies have now reached a point of no return. What has changed is not direction, but speed. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s remarks in Davos last month — ‘Middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu’ — captured the consequences of not acting quickly. And Carney is not alone in those fears. Leaders around the world are increasingly moving from rhetorical warnings about the systemic risks of superpower dynamics to actively experimenting with new ways of navigating what Carney called ‘a rupture in the world order.'” (02/12/26)
“On paper, Sanae Takaichi is the kind of leader Japanese people ought to hate. Bossy, opinionated, conspicuously unbothered by the rituals of consensus that grease every surface of Japanese official life, she comes across as everything the country’s political culture is designed to sand down. She doesn’t schmooze with captains of industry over kaiseki dinners at fancy Tokyo restaurants. She goes home and reads her briefing papers. She plays drums in a heavy metal band — or used to in college, and still can …. She has opinions about Taiwan and isn’t shy about sharing them, which in the context of Japanese-Chinese diplomacy is roughly equivalent to setting your hair on fire at a funeral. Something for everyone to hate. And so the three months since Takaichi took office have been a bit of a surprise.” (02/12/26)
“Ajeya Cotra’s Biological Anchors report was the landmark AI timelines forecast of the early 2020s. In many ways, it was incredibly prescient — it nailed the scaling hypothesis, predicted the current AI boom, and introduced concepts like ‘time horizons’ that have entered common parlance. In most cases where its contemporaries challenged it, its assumptions have been borne out, and its challengers proven wrong. But its headline prediction — an AGI timeline centered around the 2050s – no longer seems plausible. The current state of the discussion ranges from late 2020s to 2040s, with more remote dates relegated to those who expect the current paradigm to prove ultimately fruitless — the opposite of Ajeya’s assumptions. Cotra later shortened her own timelines to 2040 (as of 2022) and they are probably even shorter now. So, if its premises were impressively correct, but its conclusion twenty years too late, what went wrong in the middle?” (02/12/26)
My mom used to call me every Sunday between 8:30 and 8:45 p.m. In 13 years, she has never missed a call. Like most moms, if I don’t respond, she immediately assumes I’m dead. Two weeks ago, her calls stopped coming. The Islamic Republic of Iran has cut all internal and external communications during the ongoing protests. They even jammed Starlink. It’s been radio silence. Not a word, in or out. And in that silence, they’ve been killing people. At least 16,000 in just a few days. … my mom sold her jewelry, her prized Persian rug, even her house to make sure I went to a good school, got into a good university, and got out — to America. What has the Islamic Republic done to this mother (and millions of other families) that she’d rather never see her son again than have him trapped with her?” (02/12/26)
“Your representatives may finally grab the feared ‘third rail’ of U.S. politics. When the Social Security and Medicare trust funds run out in the early 2030s, the law is clear: Benefits must be slashed. That would mean a roughly 24 percent cut to Social Security checks and an 11 percent cut to Medicare benefits. But Congress almost certainly won’t let that happen. The easy, though irresponsible, political path may seem obvious: Change the law, keep benefits whole, and pay by borrowing the money. This way legislators won’t have to cast unpopular votes for spending cuts or tax hikes. This makes sense only if the consequences won’t become clear until much later, after voters have forgotten all about it. What most people are missing is that this time, the consequences may show up quickly.” (02/12/26)
