Technology

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A newly established Hungarian company is spending hundreds of thousands of euros on advertisements attacking Hungary’s opposition leader Péter Magyar and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—far exceeding its reported income and without revealing the source of its funding. Meta eventually removed a wave of similar ads targeting Viktor Orbán’s opponents for violating its terms of service—but only after profiting from displaying them to millions of users.

Data centers, cornerstones of the EU’s digital ambitions, are expanding rapidly across the continent. Public responses to this digital prioritization vary dramatically. Some communities embrace them as engines of development; others push back, citing threats to the environment and their quality of life.

During yesterday's "Winning the AI Race" summit, President Trump weighed in on the debate surrounding AI and copyright, noting that it is "not doable" for AI companies to pay for all copyrighted content used in model training. This stance, shared amidst ongoing AI copyright lawsuits, aims to keep the U.S. competitive in the global AI landscape, especially against countries like China.

To hear health officials in the Trump administration talk, artificial intelligence has arrived in Washington to fast-track new life-saving drugs to market, streamline work at the vast, multibillion-dollar health agencies, and be a key assistant in the quest to slash wasteful government spending without jeopardizing their work.

“The AI revolution has arrived,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared at congressional hearings in the past few months.

“We are using this technology already at HHS to manage health care data, perfectly securely, and to increase the speed of drug approvals,” he told the House Energy and Commerce Committee in June. The enthusiasm — among some, at least — was palpable.

Weeks earlier, the US Food and Drug Administration, the division of HHS that oversees vast portions of the American pharmaceutical and food system, had unveiled Elsa, an artificial intelligence tool intended to dramatically speed up drug and medical device approvals.

Yet behind the scenes, the agency’s slick AI project has been greeted with a shrug — or outright alarm.

Six current and former FDA officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal work told CNN that Elsa can be useful for generating meeting notes and summaries, or email and communique templates.

But it has also made up nonexistent studies, known as AI “hallucinating,” or misrepresented research, according to three current FDA employees and documents seen by CNN. This makes it unreliable for their most critical work, the employees said.

“Anything that you don’t have time to double-check is unreliable. It hallucinates confidently,” said one employee — a far cry from what has been publicly promised.

“AI is supposed to save our time, but I guarantee you that I waste a lot of extra time just due to the heightened vigilance that I have to have” to check for fake or misrepresented studies, a second FDA employee said.

Currently, Elsa cannot help with review work , the lengthy assessment agency scientists undertake to determine whether drugs and devices are safe and effective, two FDA staffers said. That’s because it cannot access many relevant documents, like industry submissions, to answer basic questions such as how many times a company may have filed for FDA approval, their related products on the market or other company-specific information.

All this raises serious questions about the integrity of a tool that FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary has boasted will transform the system for approving drugs and medical devices in the US, at a time when there is almost no federal oversight for assessing the use of AI in medicine.

“The agency is already using Elsa to accelerate clinical protocol reviews, shorten the time needed for scientific evaluations, and identify high-priority inspection targets,” the FDA said in a statement on its launch in June.

But speaking to CNN at the FDA’s White Oak headquarters this week, Makary says that right now, most of the agency’s scientists are using Elsa for its “organization abilities” like finding studies and summarizing meetings.

The FDA’s head of AI, Jeremy Walsh, admitted that Elsa can hallucinate nonexistent studies.

“Elsa is no different from lots of [large language models] and generative AI,” he told CNN. “They could potentially hallucinate.”

Walsh also said Elsa’s shortcomings with responding to questions about industry information should change soon, as the FDA updates the program in the coming weeks to let users upload documents to their own libraries.

Asked about mistakes Elsa is making , Makary noted that staff are not required to use the AI.

“I have not heard those specific concerns, but it’s optional,” he said. “They don’t have to use Elsa if they don’t find it to have value.”

Challenged on how this makes the efficiency gains he has publicly touted when staff inside FDA have told CNN they must double-check its work, he said: “You have to determine what is reliable information that [you] can make major decisions based on, and I think we do a great job of that.”

So-called ‘Pay or Okay’ systems are on the rise in Europe. First introduced by newspapers in Austria and Germany, Meta adopted the approach for Instagram and Facebook in 2023. By now, many websites across Europe are using similar systems. Instead of giving users a genuine choice whether to accept or reject ad tracking, ‘Pay or Okay’ systems ask for a payment if you want to refuse “consent”. This leads to “North Korean consent rates” of 99.9%. Many news companies claim that the approach is necessary to finance quality media. In reality, digital advertising makes up at best 10% of the revenue of European press. Given the upcoming guidelines by the EDPB on this topic, this report analyses the industry’s arguments and the actual economic impact of ‘Pay or Okay’.

• Researchers identified hundreds of posts violating EU sanctions on the social media platform X.
• X is categorised as a “Very Large Online Platform” (VLOP) under the Digital Services Act (DSA), and as such is legally obligated to mitigate systemic risks on their platform and investigate illegal content reports from users.
• A sample dataset of 125 clear sanction-violating posts were reported to X using the “Report EU Illegal Content” form on the platform. These included, for instance, programmes from the Russian state broadcaster RT. Only 57% of the reports of illegal content received acknowledgement receipts, breaching DSA obligations.
• Only one of the reported posts was removed, and for the remaining cases, X responded via email, stating that no violation of EU law was found, despite clear evidence to the contrary.
• There were 7 responses made by the platform within 2 minutes or less, potentially indicating automated reviews.
• In the case of content from the sanctioned Russian influence operation Doppelgänger, posts were deleted despite the platform’s initial response claiming no action would be taken.
• The results of this reporting experiment suggest that X’s current moderation mechanisms are insufficiently equipped, or that the platform is potentially unwilling to enforce sanction-related policies at scale.

Tesla on Wednesday reported a drop in its profit during the second quarter, as the electric vehicle maker continues to struggle despite CEO Elon Musk's pivot back to focusing on his companies after his controversial role leading the Trump administration's government cost cutting efforts.

The company's electric vehicle sales have been flagging, and earlier this month it reported a drop of 13.5% in the quarter, compared with the same period a year ago. On Wednesday, Tesla said its net income also suffered, slumping 16% year-on-year.

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