The US Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said the UK will not require Apple to provide backdoor access to encrypted data as was mandated earlier this year. Apple had subsequently withdrawn its encryption feature for new users in the U.K and disabled it for users. Apple and the UK have not commented.
A few weeks ago, Salesforce Research released a tool to test AI agent performance when using MCP servers. They’ve now published results of their MCP-Universe benchmark, which show that leading LLMs including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Grok and Claude all fail more than half the time at real-life tasks such as location navigation, browser automation, and web search. Reality can be so annoying.
The US government plans one big health tracking system launching early next year and incorporating citizen health data culled from…everywhere – the federal government, medical providers, payors, and private sector technology companies. Purportedly, this will expedite care and facilitate processing. Questions abound: 1) Will patients understand privacy implications? 2) What control will they have? How else will the data be used – and who will have access??
CDP Zeta Global has unveiled Athena, a “superintelligent” voice-activated interface that delivers instant answers, smarter decisions, and agentic actions throughout the Zeta platform. It activates a suite of agentic apps that can adapt to each user’s specific goals and styles. Early access will begin later this year, with a suite of agentic apps to follow in the first half of next year.