Australia regulator calls to add YouTube to teen social media ban
SHAUN TURTON
SYDNEY -- Australia's internet safety commissioner said Tuesday that she has recommended the government include YouTube in its impending ban on children under 16 accessing social media, casting doubt on a previous exemption.
Julie Inman Grant, head of the country's eSafety Commission, sent a letter to Minister for Communications Anika Wells recommending the Google-owned video-sharing platform not be included in draft rules that designate certain services as low risk and as promoting health and education.
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Japan Times
a day ago
- Japan Times
Indian firm shipped explosives to Russia despite U.S. warnings
An Indian company shipped $1.4 million worth of an explosive compound with military uses to Russia in December, according to Indian customs data, despite U.S. threats to impose sanctions on any entity supporting Russia's Ukraine war effort. One of the Russian companies listed as receiving the compound, known as HMX or octogen, is the explosives manufacturer Promsintez, which an official at Ukraine's SBU security service said has ties to Moscow's military. The official said that Ukraine launched a drone attack in April against a Promsintez-owned factory. The other Russian company is a subsidiary of Spanish explosives manufacturer Maxam, which is itself controlled by New York-based private equity firm Rhone Capital. The U.S. government has identified HMX as "critical for Russia's war effort" and has warned financial institutions against facilitating any sale of the substance to Moscow. According to the Pentagon's Defense Technical Information Center and related defense research programs, HMX is widely used in missile and torpedo warheads, rocket motors, exploding projectiles and plastic-bonded explosives for advanced military systems. The HMX sale to Russian firms has not been previously reported. Russian defense manufacturers have been working around the clock for the past several years to sustain President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, which intensified with Russia's full-scale invasion of its neighbor in 2022. India, which has recently forged closer ties with the United States in an effort to counterbalance China's growing influence, has not abandoned its longstanding military and economic ties with Moscow. India's trade with Russia — especially its purchases of Russian oil — has remained robust, even as Western nations have tried to cripple Russia's war economy with sanctions. U.S. President Donald Trump threatened earlier in July to hit nations with a 100% tariff if they continued purchasing Russian crude. Belousov and Singh shake hands before a group photo session for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Defense Ministers' Meeting in Qingdao, Shandong province, China, on June 26. | REUTERS The U.S. Treasury Department has the authority to sanction those who sell HMX and similar substances to Russia, according to three sanctions lawyers. HMX is known as a "high explosive," meaning it detonates rapidly and is designed for maximum destruction. There is no indication that the HMX shipments violated Indian government policy. One Indian official with knowledge of the shipments said that the compound has some limited civilian applications, in addition to its better-known military uses. India's foreign ministry said in a statement, "India has been carrying out exports of dual-use items taking into account its international obligations on non-proliferation, and based on its robust legal and regulatory framework that includes a holistic assessment of relevant criteria on such exports." The U.S. State Department did not comment on the specific shipments identified but said it had repeatedly communicated to India that companies doing military-related business are at risk of sanctions. "India is a strategic partner with whom we engage in full and frank dialogue, including on India's relationship with Russia," a spokesperson said. "We have repeatedly made clear to all our partners, including India, that any foreign company or financial institution that does business with Russia's military industrial base are at risk of U.S. sanctions." The State Department did not respond to a follow-up question regarding the financial stakes held by U.S. and Spanish firms in one of the Russian recipient companies. Russia's defense ministry did not respond to a request for comment. "While India has not typically been among the primary jurisdictions used for circumventing sanctions, we are aware that isolated cases can occur," Ukrainian presidential adviser Vladyslav Vlasiuk said. "We can confirm that the Russian company Promsintez has appeared on our radar in the past, including in connection with cooperation involving Indian counterparts," added Vlasiuk, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's top sanctions official. Two HMX shipments sent in December by Indian firm Ideal Detonators Private Limited, both of which were unloaded in St. Petersburg, have been identified in the Indian customs data. An Indian government official with direct knowledge of the shipments confirmed them. One shipment, worth $405,200, was purchased by a Russian company called High Technology Initiation Systems, or HTIS, the data showed. The other shipment, worth more than $1 million was purchased by Promsintez. Both purchasers are based in Samara Oblast, near the border of Kazakhstan in southern Russia, according to the data. HTIS says on its website it produces explosives for surface and underground mining and engineering projects. It describes itself there as a subsidiary of Madrid-based Maxam, which in turn is majority-controlled by Rhone Capital, a New York-headquartered private equity firm set up by former Goldman Sachs and Lazard bankers. A source familiar with Maxam's operations said the company is in the process of divesting its Russian subsidiaries and that HTIS operates independently. Ideal Detonators Private Limited, based in the Indian state of Telangana, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Promsintez, HTIS and Maxam. Rhone Capital declined to comment. While several Indian entities were sanctioned during the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden for supporting Russia's war effort, sanctions were applied sparingly due to geopolitical considerations, according to two U.S. officials who worked on sanctions under Biden. Under Trump, Russia-related sanctions work has slowed to a trickle, and it is not clear if the United States will take further action against Indian companies doing business with Russia's defense industry. Washington has long sought closer relations with India to pull the South Asian country away from China. Jason Prince, a partner at Washington-based law firm Akin, said the U.S. government often prefers to communicate its concerns privately to allies and only take punitive actions as a last resort.
The Mainichi
a day ago
- The Mainichi
Trump's order to block 'woke' AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots
(AP) -- Tech companies looking to sell their artificial intelligence technology to the federal government must now contend with a new regulatory hurdle: prove their chatbots aren't "woke." President Donald Trump's sweeping new plan to counter China in achieving "global dominance" in AI promises to cut regulations and cement American values into the AI tools increasingly used at work and home. But one of Trump's three AI executive orders signed Wednesday -- the one "preventing woke AI in the federal government" -- also mimics China's state-driven approach to mold the behavior of AI systems to fit its ruling party's core values. Several leading providers of the AI language models targeted by the order -- products like Google's Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot -- have so far been silent on Trump's anti-woke directive, which still faces a study period before it gets into official procurement rules. While the tech industry has largely welcomed Trump's broader AI plans, the anti-woke order forces the industry to leap into a culture war battle -- or try their best to quietly avoid it. "It will have massive influence in the industry right now," especially as tech companies "are already capitulating" to other Trump administration directives, said civil rights advocate Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, senior director of The Leadership Conference's Center for Civil Rights and Technology. The move also pushes the tech industry to abandon years of work to combat the pervasive forms of racial and gender bias that studies and real-world examples have shown to be baked into AI systems. "First off, there's no such thing as woke AI," she said. "There's AI technology that discriminates and then there's AI technology that actually works for all people." Molding the behaviors of AI large language models is challenging because of the way they're built. They've been trained on most of what's on the internet, reflecting the biases of all the people who've posted commentary, edited a Wikipedia entry or shared images online. "This will be extremely difficult for tech companies to comply with," said former Biden official Jim Secreto, who was deputy chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, an architect of many of Biden's AI industry initiatives. "Large language models reflect the data they're trained on, including all the contradictions and biases in human language." Tech workers also have a say in how they're designed, from the global workforce of annotators who check their responses to the Silicon Valley engineers who craft the instructions for how they interact with people. Trump's order targets those "top-down" efforts at tech companies to incorporate what it calls the "destructive" ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion into AI models, including "concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism." For Secreto, the order resembles China's playbook in "using the power of the state to stamp out what it sees as disfavored viewpoints." The method is different, with China relying on direct regulation through its Cyberspace Administration, which audits AI models, approves them before they are deployed and requires them to filter out banned content such as the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989. Trump's order doesn't call for any such filters, relying on tech companies to instead show that their technology is ideologically neutral by disclosing some of the internal policies that guide the chatbots. "The Trump administration is taking a softer but still coercive route by using federal contracts as leverage," Secreto said. "That creates strong pressure for companies to self-censor in order to stay in the government's good graces and keep the money flowing." The order's call for "truth-seeking" AI echoes the language of the president's one-time ally and adviser Elon Musk, who frequently uses that phrase as the mission for the Grok chatbot made by his company xAI. But whether Grok or its rivals will be favored under the new policy remains to be seen. Despite a "rhetorically pointed" introduction laying out the Trump administration's problems with DEI, the actual language of the order's directives shouldn't be hard for tech companies to comply with, said Neil Chilson, a Republican former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission. "It doesn't even prohibit an ideological agenda," just that any intentional methods to guide the model be disclosed, said Chilson, who is now head of AI policy at the nonprofit Abundance Institute. "Which is pretty light touch, frankly." Chilson disputes comparisons to China's cruder modes of AI censorship. "There is nothing in this order that says that companies have to produce or cannot produce certain types of output," he said. "It says developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments. That's the exact opposite of the Chinese requirement." So far, tech companies that have praised Trump's broader AI plans haven't said much about the order. OpenAI on Thursday said it is awaiting more detailed guidance but believes its work to make ChatGPT objective already makes the technology consistent with what the order requires. Microsoft, a major supplier of email, cloud computing and other online services to the federal government, declined to comment Thursday. Musk's xAI, through spokesperson Katie Miller, a former Trump official, pointed to a company comment praising Trump's AI announcements as a "positive step" but didn't respond to a follow-up question about how Grok would be affected. Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Palantir didn't immediately respond to emailed requests for comment Thursday. AI tools are already widely used in the federal government, according to an inventory created at the end of Biden's term. In just one agency, U.S. Health and Human Services, the inventory found more than 270 use cases, including the use of commercial generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini for internal agency support to summarize the key points of a lengthy report. The ideas behind the order have bubbled up for more than a year on the podcasts and social media feeds of Sacks and other influential Silicon Valley venture capitalists, many of whom endorsed Trump's presidential campaign last year. Much of their ire centered on Google's February 2024 release of an AI image-generating tool that produced historically inaccurate images before the tech giant took down and fixed the product. Google later explained that the errors -- including one user's request for American Founding Fathers that generated portraits of Black, Asian and Native American men -- was the result of an overcompensation for technology that, left to its own devices, was prone to favoring lighter-skinned people because of pervasive bias in the systems. Trump allies alleged that Google engineers were hard-coding their own social agenda into the product, and made it a priority to do something about it. "It's 100% intentional," said prominent venture capitalist and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen on a podcast in December. "That's how you get Black George Washington at Google. There's override in the system that basically says, literally, 'Everybody has to be Black.' Boom. There's squads, large sets of people, at these companies who determine these policies and write them down and encode them into these systems." Sacks credited a conservative strategist for helping to draft the order. "When they asked me how to define 'woke,' I said there's only one person to call: Chris Rufo. And now it's law: the federal government will not be buying WokeAI," Sacks wrote on X.
Japan Today
a day ago
- Japan Today
Britain, Australia to deepen AUKUS commitment, economic ties
FILE PHOTO: Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks to media after arriving at Shanghai Pudong International Airport in Shanghai, China, July 12, 2025. Albanese has travelled to China for a six-day visit. AAP/Lukas Coch via REUTERS/File Photo By Kirsty Needham Australia and Britain's defence and foreign ministers arrived for talks in Sydney on Friday on boosting cooperation, including deepening the two countries commitment to the AUKUS nuclear submarine partnership. Britain's Foreign Minister David Lammy and Defence Secretary John Healey were met by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Sydney, where talks are expected to focus on boosting trade ties and progressing the AUKUS partnership for Britain and Australia to build a new class of nuclear-powered submarine. The United States is reviewing the trilateral agreement struck in 2021, and has pressed Australia to increase defence spending to counter China's military build-up in the Indo Pacific region. A new British-Australian treaty will underpin each country's submarine programmes and is expected to be worth up to 20 billion pounds ($27 billion) to Britain in exports over the next 25 years, Britain's Ministry of Defence said. "AUKUS is one of Britain's most important defence partnerships, strengthening global security while driving growth at home," British defence minister John Healey said in a statement. The treaty "confirms our AUKUS commitment for the next half century," he added. Following the Australia-United Kingdom Ministerial Consultations (AUKMIN), ministers are scheduled to travel to the northern garrison city of Darwin, where the British aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales has arrived for the Talisman Sabre war games. As many as 40,000 troops from 19 countries are taking part in the Talisman Sabre exercises held from July 13 to August 4, which Australia's military has said are a rehearsal of joint war fighting that contribute to stability in the Indo-Pacific. Britain has significantly increased its participation in the exercise co-hosted by Australia and the United States, with 3,000 troops taking part. © (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2025.
