All posts tagged: firm

Pennsylvania sues AI firm over claims chatbot posed as doctor : NPR

Pennsylvania sues AI firm over claims chatbot posed as doctor : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro speaks at the National Action Network annual convention on April 8, 2026, in New York City. Pennsylvania is suing Character.AI over accusations the company’s chatbots are violating the state’s medical licensing regulations. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images The state of Pennsylvania is suing Character.AI to stop the company’s AI chatbots from posing as doctors and offering medical advice, in violation of state medical licensing rules. State officials said an investigation found that the company’s chatbots, which present themselves as fictional characters, have claimed to be licensed medical professionals. “Pennsylvanians deserve to know who — or what — they are interacting with online, especially when it comes to their health,” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said in a statement announcing the lawsuit filed on Tuesday in state court. “We will not allow companies to deploy AI tools that mislead people into believing they are receiving advice from a licensed medical professional.” In one case, the state alleged a Character.AI bot named “Emilie” claimed to be a …

UK convicts four Palestine Action activists over break-in at Israeli firm | News

UK convicts four Palestine Action activists over break-in at Israeli firm | News

Published by Sam Flores

Members of the now-banned Palestine Action group raided Elbit Systems’ facility in Bristol 10 months into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Published On 5 May 20265 May 2026 Four of six British pro-Palestinian activists have been convicted of criminal damage relating to a 2024 raid on a factory operated by Israeli defence firm Elbit, with one of the defendants found guilty of striking a police officer with a sledgehammer. London’s Woolwich Crown Court on Tuesday found Charlotte Head, 30, Samuel Corner, 23, Leona Kamio, 30, Fatema Zainab Rajwani, 21, guilty. Zoe Rogers, 22, and Jordan Devlin, 31, were found not guilty. Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list Prosecutors said that the six defendants were members of the banned group Palestine Action, which organised the assault on the Elbit Systems UK facility in Bristol, southwest England, in August 2024. The raid, which prosecutors said caused about one million pounds ($1.36m) of damage, took place about 10 months into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza that began in October 2023. Palestine Action was later proscribed under …

UK law firm plunges into administration – in business for 40 years | UK | News

UK law firm plunges into administration – in business for 40 years | UK | News

Published by Sam Flores

A UK law firm which had six offices has collapsed into administration after the “anticipated sale” fell through. BLB Solicitors, which has bases in Trowbridge, Bath, Bristol, Bradford on Avon, Swindon and Almondsbury, employing 85 across its locations has written to clients saying the move is due to an “anticipated sale of the business being withdrawn at short notice”. A letter sent by the firm to clients on Tuesday read: “We would strongly recommend that you instruct another firm of solicitors to continue to act on your behalf.” Companies House records show that five directors resigned from the firm within a three‑day period, between March 30 and April 1. The company later appeared in the London Gazette’s insolvency notices on April 13, the official public register for announcing bankruptcies and liquidations. In the letter sent to clients, BLB attributed the sudden closure to the “anticipated sale of the business being withdrawn at short notice”. The letter read: “Please rest assured we are already in the process of putting your file and documents together to ensure …

Sanctioned Chinese AI Firm SenseTime Releases Image Model Built for Speed

Sanctioned Chinese AI Firm SenseTime Releases Image Model Built for Speed

Published by skeptic

SenseTime, a Chinese AI company best known for its facial recognition technology, released a new open source model on Tuesday that it claims can both generate and interpret images far faster than top models developed by US competitors. SenseNova U1 could help the company reclaim lost ground after it slipped from its place among the leading players in China’s AI development race. The model’s secret sauce is its ability to “read” images without translating them to text first, speeding up the process and reducing the amount of computing power required. “The model’s entire reasoning process is no longer limited to text. It can reason with images as well,” Dahua Lin, cofounder and chief scientist at SenseTime, said in an interview with WIRED. Lin, who is also a professor of information engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says that models capable of processing images directly will enable robots to better understand the physical world in the future. Like DeepSeek’s latest flagship model, SenseTime says U1 can be powered by Chinese-made chips. “Several Chinese domestic …

How one venture firm is investing in an increasingly fragmented world

How one venture firm is investing in an increasingly fragmented world

Published by skeptic

The world today is riven by cultural differences, political divisions, and geopolitical disputes — a challenging environment for any investor hunting for startups that can grow large enough to deliver venture-scale returns. Kompas VC has developed a regionally sensitive strategy to help it navigate, and invest in, this fragmented world. And it’s putting fresh capital towards this approach with a new €160 million fund ($187.5 million), the firm told TechCrunch. “We see the world really falling into three main spheres of economic activity, of political activity — the U.S., Europe, and China,” Sebastian Peck, partner at Kompas VC, told TechCrunch. “We certainly see today that these three domains follow very, very different trajectories.” Kompas has staked its reputation on backing startups that tackle core industrial competitiveness challenges, from manufacturing and supply chains to critical infrastructure and sustainability. Those themes haven’t disappeared, but different regions emphasize them to varying degrees. “There was a lot of enthusiasm around these themes back in 2021,” Peck said. “In 2026, we’re in a very, very different paradigm. It’s all about …

Inside the thousands of ADA lawsuits filed by an Orange County law firm

Inside the thousands of ADA lawsuits filed by an Orange County law firm

Published by Sam Flores

Anthony Bouyer has been on a suing spree around the San Fernando Valley. On Sept. 24, the 55-year-old internet marketer confronted a counter at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican spot that was difficult to reach over in his wheelchair. He sued the business for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. In L.A. County, it was at least his 231st case of the year. At the convenience store next door, he found a produce scale out of arm’s length. He sued them too. Two shops over at another Mexican spot, he noticed a cracked parking lot and cumbersome door hardware. Owner Elia Barraza was served a day before her 53rd birthday. “This person is just suing anyone,” said her still-fuming son, Steven Barraza. “It’s just for nitpicking things.” Lawsuits under the Americans with Disabilities Act — a federal civil rights law widely known as the ADA — have long flourished in California, where a unique state law enables payouts over various infractions. The money, advocates say, is one of the few surefire ways to get businesses to make …

Prestigious Wall Street Law Firm Humiliated When Its AI Use Is Discovered in Court

Prestigious Wall Street Law Firm Humiliated When Its AI Use Is Discovered in Court

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech The new courtroom gotcha? Check whether your opponent left in brainless AI hallucinations, and tattle on them to the judge. This is precisely how the prestigious Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, which boasts clients including Donald Trump, was recently humiliated. On Saturday, Andrew Dietderich, the cohead of the firm’s restructuring group, apologized to federal judge Martin Glenn after it emerged that its filing in a major case was riddled with bogus citations that an AI made up. “We deeply regret that this has occurred,” Dietderich wrote in the groveling letter. The errors were caught by an opposing firm, Boies ​Schiller Flexner, in a motion S&C filed in a federal bankruptcy court in Manhattan. In some passages, the filing straight-up misquoted US bankruptcy code, and cited the decisions from other cases that were either inaccurately summarized or misidentified. One of the cases cited by S&C in the motion wasn’t even a case, Boies Schiller Flexner lawyers found. No …

Scam Messages Offering Ships Safe Transit Through Hormuz, Security Firm Warns

Scam Messages Offering Ships Safe Transit Through Hormuz, Security Firm Warns

Published by Sam Flores

ATHENS, April 21 (Reuters) – Fraudulent messages promising safe ⁠passage ⁠through the Strait of Hormuz ⁠in exchange for cryptocurrency have been sent to some shipping ​companies whose vessels are stranded west of the waterway, Greek maritime risk management firm ‌MARISKS has warned. The U.S. has ‌maintained its blockade of Iranian ports, while Iran has lifted and then ⁠re-imposed its ⁠blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth ​of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed before war broke out in the Middle East. Amid ceasefire talks, Tehran, which controls the chokepoint, has proposed tolls on vessels ​to safely transit. MARISKS on Monday issued an alert warning shipowners that unknown ⁠actors, claiming ⁠to represent Iranian authorities, ⁠had sent ​some shipping companies a message demanding transit fees in cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin or Tether, ​for “clearance”. “These specific messages are ⁠a scam,” the firm said, adding the message was not sent by Iranian authorities. There was no immediate comment from Tehran. Hundreds of ships and about 20,000 seafarers remain stranded in the Gulf. On April …

A Prominent PR Firm Is Running a Fake News Site That’s Plagiarizing Original Journalism at Incredible Scale

A Prominent PR Firm Is Running a Fake News Site That’s Plagiarizing Original Journalism at Incredible Scale

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech On Tuesday evening, we published an original interview with a researcher who had recently coauthored an intriguing study about the effects of AI on users’ cognition. A news site called National Today quickly sprang into action: by ten o’clock that night, it had published a piece that was obviously a reworded version of our story, including a direct quote from the interview we’d conducted. But instead of crediting us as the source of the information, as would be conventional, National Today made no mention of Futurism, and didn’t even link to our article. Instead, it presented the reporting as if it were the original source. In other words, the National Today piece — which bears no byline — is blatant plagiarism. And this isn’t the first time this has happened. Last week, for example, National Today ran a story about a controversial GLP-1 marketer called Medvi. It was obvious that National Today ripped us off, because it’d again …

Polish Leader Tusk Claims Russia-Linked Crypto Firm Backed Nawrocki’s Presidential Bid

Polish Leader Tusk Claims Russia-Linked Crypto Firm Backed Nawrocki’s Presidential Bid

Published by Sam Flores

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said a cryptocurrency firm built with “Russian money” had sponsored Polish politicians from the former national-conservative government as well as a CPAC ( Conservative Political Action Conference ) event in Poland last year, where Kristi Noem, the former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary, openly backed nationalist Karol Nawrocki to win the Polish presidency. Tusk was speaking on Friday in the Polish parliament, before a parliamentary vote to overrule Nawrocki who had rejected regulations of the Polish crypto-asset market. Nawrocki has vetoed two separate attempts by the liberal government to regulate this market in the past six months. Tusk claimed that the blocking of regulations by some Polish politicians indicated they were serving the interests of a specific company, Zondacrypto, which had in the past provided them with financial support and which had links with Russia. “The source of this company’s financial success is not only Russian money linked to the so-called Bratva, one of the most important mafia groups in Russia, but also to Russian secret services,” …