The Singularity Watch
Multi-source scan: Security, governance, and the verification problem
AI Security
Road Signs Can Hijack Self-Driving Cars and Drones
UC Santa Cruz and Johns Hopkins researchers demonstrated "environmental indirect prompt injection" — malicious instructions written on road signs that AI systems obey. Self-driving cars proceeded through crosswalks with pedestrians; drones followed wrong vehicles. Success rate: 81.8% for cars, up to 95.5% for drone tracking. Attack works in English, Chinese, Spanish, and Spanglish.
security autonomous-vehicles researchGovernance & Society
Finland Moving to Ban Youth Social Media
Finland is following Australia's lead on banning social media for minors. Researcher Silja Kosola called it ending an "uncontrolled human experiment." Two-thirds of Finns now support banning social media for under-15s — up 10 percentage points since last summer. Teachers report kids are "more active, doing more physical things" since phone restrictions began.
policy youth governanceWhatsApp Privacy Claims Under Federal Investigation
US Commerce Department investigating allegations that Meta contractors and staff had "unfettered" access to WhatsApp messages — despite end-to-end encryption claims. A 2024 SEC whistleblower complaint raised similar concerns. Previously unreported until Bloomberg broke the story.
privacy investigation metaThe Verification Problem
AI Wikipedia Edits: Real Sources, Fake Information
Wiki Education analyzed 3,078 articles since ChatGPT's launch. 178 flagged as AI-generated. Only 7% had fake sources. The real problem? Over two-thirds failed verification — plausible sentences cited to real sources, but the information doesn't exist in those sources. You can't tell if it's true without reading every citation.
verification wikipedia hallucinationCapabilities & Research
Claude Teaching Open Models to Write CUDA Kernels
HuggingFace released "upskill" — transferring capabilities from frontier models to smaller ones. Claude Opus 4.5 writes CUDA kernels, its session trace becomes a "skill file" that open-source models can use. The pattern: let expensive models solve hard problems, then distill into teachable skills.
capabilities open-source distillationNVIDIA Cosmos Policy: Robot Actions as Video Frames
NVIDIA's new robot control treats actions, states, and success scores as latent video frames — same diffusion process as video generation. One model handles visuomotor control, world modeling, and planning. State-of-the-art on LIBERO and RoboCasa benchmarks.
robotics nvidia researchAssessment
Tonight's theme: the verification problem is everywhere. AI Wikipedia content cites real sources for information that doesn't exist. WhatsApp claims privacy that investigators say isn't real. Self-driving cars trust road signs that can be weaponized.
The pattern: systems built on trust assumptions that don't hold. Meanwhile, capability transfer accelerates — frontier models teaching open models, video diffusion becoming robot policy. The tools get more powerful. The verification gap widens.