China hacks Russia to steal war secrets | Trump delays TikTok ban again, legality unclear | Australia's teen social media ban faces a new wildcard: teenagers

ChatGPT may be eroding critical thinking skills, according to a new MIT study

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The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest focuses on the topics we work on, including cybersecurity, critical technologies, foreign interference & disinformation.

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• Since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Chinese state-linked hackers have repeatedly targeted Russian military, defense, and tech sectors. Despite public alignment, China is exploiting the war to steal intelligence, especially on drone warfare, revealing deep mistrust beneath their supposed "no-limits" partnership. The New York Times

• Trump signed a third executive order extending TikTok’s U.S. operations for 90 days to negotiate American ownership. Despite lacking clear legal basis, the move avoids a ban and reflects TikTok’s political importance. Public opinion is divided, with national security concerns driving continued scrutiny. The Associated Press

• Australia's trial of AI age-estimation tools for banning under-16s from social media revealed that the tech works primarily, but is easily bypassed. Students outpaced testing expectations, raising doubts about effectiveness. As global attention turns to Australia, policymakers face tough decisions on enforcement, reliability, and circumvention by teenagers. Reuters

ASPI

The Philippines must consider security of hyperscalers
The Strategist
Gatra Priyandita
The Philippines is embracing digital technology to drive economic growth and tackle socioeconomic challenges. Hyperscale cloud solutions—far larger than typical cloud service providers—promise robust cybersecurity and operational stability to protect critical data. But their adoption raises serious concerns about data sovereignty and dependence on foreign providers.

Benign invitations: China’s playbook for approaching Western academics
China Observers
Erika Langerová
According to the China Defense Universities Tracker, compiled by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, listed institutions such as Nanjing University, Zhejiang University, Tongji University, and the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics play a prominent role in China’s military-civil fusion – a strategy designed to integrate civilian research into the country’s defense objectives.

Australia

Australia's teen social media ban faces a new wildcard: teenagers
Reuters
Byron Kaye
When 13-year-old Jasmine Elkin tried out the age-checking software Australia might use to ban children and teenagers from social media, she was surprised some products could identify a person's age to the month - but she still doubts it will work. "People are always going to find a way to get past it," said the Perth schoolgirl who trialled five photo-based age estimation products with about 30 other students in May. "They can get their brother or sister to take a photo. There's nothing really that you can do about it."

• Six months out from teen social media ban, age-checking tech mistakes kids for 37-year-olds
  ABC News
  Ange Lavoipierre and Angela Heathcote
  In recent trials, key age-checking technology behind the teen social media ban could only guess people's ages within an 18-month range in 85 per cent of cases. The social media ban for under-16s is due to take effect in December, but experts say the government should reconsider the policy. The industry body for age-checking companies says face scanning is only part of the solution, and it remains confident the ban can still succeed.

• Government sat on age assurance research for six months
  Information Age
  Tom Williams
  Research which heard “significant trust and security concerns” from Australian consumers about age assurance technologies ahead of the country's planned under-16s social media ban has been released by the federal government, around six months after it received the findings. The Australian National University’s Social Research Centre (SRC) was last year commissioned to carry out an Age Assurance Consumer Research Report by the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport, and the Arts.

NAB hit with record fine for consumer data right breach
InnovationAus
Justin Hendry
National Australia Bank has been slapped with the country’s largest ever fine under the consumer data sharing regime for failing to disclose credit limit information on four occasions. The big four bank paid penalties of $751,200 after being issued four infringement notices for the alleged contraventions of the Consumer Data Right rules, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission announced on Thursday.

Multilingual AI chatbot being developed for Aussie emergency departments
CyberDaily
David Hollingworth
Researchers and clinicians at the University of NSW are working on a new, multilingual AI chatbot designed to act as an interface between patients presenting to emergency departments and the healthcare workers who triage and treat them. According to research from the South Western Sydney Local Health District, at least 55 per cent of people in the district speak a language other than English at home, making medical care a challenge for ED workers.

Australian scientists warn of 'crisis' in Antarctic research due to funding cliff
ABC News
Jano Gibson
Australian scientists are warning of a "crisis" in Antarctic research due to the impact of an impending funding cliff. Much of Australia's Antarctic research is overseen by three university-led programs, all of which have funding that is due to expire on a set date over the coming years. The Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science is facing the most imminent threat, with its funding due to run out within 12 months, despite a request for a two-year extension.

Can Google save Australia's dying reefs with AI mapping?
Technology Magazine
James Darley
As climate change devastates Australia's giant kelp forests, Google and partners are using AI to map, monitor and restore the Great Southern Reef. Australia’s Great Southern Reef is one of the most diverse and vibrant marine ecosystems in the world. In total, the reef covers more than 71,000km² and spans five Australian states to the south of the island.

China

China unleashes hackers against its friend Russia, seeking war secrets
The New York Times
Megha Rajagopalan
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, groups linked to the Chinese government have repeatedly hacked Russian companies and government agencies in an apparent search for military secrets, according to cyberanalysts. The intrusions started accelerating in May 2022, just months after Moscow’s full-scale invasion. And they have continued steadily, with Chinese groups worming into Russian systems even as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China publicly professed a momentous era of collaboration and friendship.

Trump adviser David Sacks says China adept at evading chip curbs
Bloomberg
Jackie Davalos
White House crypto and artificial intelligence czar David Sacks warned that China has grown adept at evading US export controls and is at most two years behind American semiconductor design capabilities. In a Bloomberg Television interview on Wednesday, Sacks said the US should be concerned that Huawei Technologies Co. is moving fast to catch up to its rivals outside China.

Huawei and ZTE take AI to Belt and Road, shrugging off US sanctions
Nikkei Asia
Itsuro Fujino
Top Chinese telecom equipment suppliers Huawei Technologies and ZTE are stepping up marketing of their AI services in Belt and Road countries as the U.S. tightens sanctions targeting Chinese technology companies. Huawei Deputy Chairman Eric Xu, now serving as rotating chairman, delivered a pitch Wednesday in a keynote address at the MWC Shanghai industry exposition.

China made millions of drones. Now it has to find uses for them
Financial Times
William Langley
In a school district in Shenzhen, would-be truants dodge surveillance drones that patrol the streets. At a nearby park, office workers pick up takeaway delivered by drones from food delivery app Meituan. Elsewhere in southern China’s technology hub, unmanned aircraft transport vials of blood between hospitals, help police departments with crowd control and extinguish blazes for firefighters.

Hong Kong’s first comprehensive cybersecurity law: key requirements under the critical infrastructure protection ordinance
China Briefing
Arendse Huld
On March 19, 2025, Hong Kong took a major step forward in strengthening its cybersecurity landscape with the passage of the Protection of Critical Infrastructures Bill, a landmark piece of legislation aimed at safeguarding the city’s essential services from cyber threats. The resulting Protection of Critical Infrastructures Ordinance was published in the Gazette on March 28, 2025, marking the start of a new regulatory era for operators of critical infrastructure.

USA

Trump extends TikTok ban deadline for a third time, without clear legal basis
The Associated Press
Babara Ortutay
President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to keep TikTok running in the U.S. for another 90 days to give his administration more time to broker a deal to bring the social media platform under American ownership. Trump disclosed the executive order on the Truth Social platform Thursday morning.

• Trump is delaying the US TikTok ban again. What’s next?
  Bloomberg
  Kurt Wagner and Alexandra S. Levine
  One of the first actions President Donald Trump took at the outset of his second presidency was granting a stay of execution for TikTok. Two and a half months later, he granted a second, and on June 18, he promised a third. Under a law passed by Congress in 2024, the popular video app was facing a nationwide ban starting Jan. 19 after its Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd., failed to divest the app’s US operations to ease national security concerns.

Inside America's right-wing tech armoury
New Geography
Joel Kotkin
At first glance, it doesn’t feel like the future will be made in El Segundo. A small city of 17,000, just south of Los Angeles International Airport, it’s the sort of place you glance at from your taxi as it whisks you on from arrivals to somewhere more exciting. But here, in a jumble of old industrial buildings under the shadow of a giant Chevron refinery, a group of entrepreneurs are embracing the country’s emerging “hard tech” revolution, something which could soon transform both America and the wider world.

Trump can launch the AUKUS security agreement to the Stars
The Wall Street Journal
Scott Morrison
Time has borne out what I said to President Trump on the White House South Lawn in September 2019: While Australia may look to the U.S. as a vital ally, we will never leave it to America alone to deal with security issues. In that spirit, in early 2020 as prime minister I assigned a small team to engage Washington about the possibility of Australia acquiring nuclear-powered submarine technology. Two years later the Aukus agreement among Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. was born, amid bipartisan support in all three nations. Now, it’s time for Aukus to grow, and Mr. Trump is the right person for the job.

Silicon Valley execs join the Army as officers (But won’t have to attend boot camp)
Gizmodo
Matt Novak
The U.S. military recently announced that four executives from some of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley have joined the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers. The move is part of a push to speed up the adoption of technology in the military, but as the news outlet Task & Purpose points out, it’s pretty unusual.

State Department unveils social media screening rules for all student visa applicants
POLITICO
Nahal Toosi and Eric Bazail-Eimil
U.S. diplomats have officially been directed to screen the social media and online presence of all foreign nationals applying for student and other educational visas, according to a State Department cable issued Wednesday and obtained by POLITICO. In the cable, consular officers are directed to review applicants’ online presence for “any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States.” The cable also instructs embassies to flag any “advocacy for, aid or support for foreign terrorists and other threats to U.S. national security” and “support for unlawful antisemitic harassment or violence.”

North Asia

North Korea targeting Indian crypto job applicants with malware
The Record by Recorded Future
Jonathan Greig
Job applicants in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry are being targeted by North Korean hackers seeking to infect the devices of potential new hires and steal their data. Researchers at Cisco Talos said they found a North Korean group dubbed “Famous Chollima” running a campaign since mid-2024 targeting a small number of people primarily based in India. The group is creating fake employers and getting real software engineers, marketing employees, designers and others to visit skill-testing pages in order to move forward with their applications.

Southeast Asia

Uncovering the elusive Chinese tech founders dominating SEA
The Business Times
Tran Tuan Viet Duc
FOR centuries, Chinese entrepreneurs have ventured far beyond their homeland. Today, that legacy continues in technology. Chinese founders have started eight unicorns in South-east Asia, including the region’s most valuable tech firm, Sea Group. This number makes up 13 per cent of all billion-dollar startups in South-east Asia. We define Chinese founders as individuals who are Chinese nationals or naturalised Singaporeans originally from China.

AI-era cyber threats surge in Thailand: Over 1,000 incidents in first 5 months of 2025
The Nation Thailand
Thailand’s cybersecurity landscape is facing growing concern as cyber threats—both in volume and sophistication—surge in the AI era. According to data from the National Cyber Security Agency, there were over 1,002 cyber incidents between January and May 2025. Globally, cybercrime damages are estimated to exceed US$7 trillion this year, with the trend continuing to rise.

Malaysia probing reports of Chinese firm’s use of Nvidia AI chips
The Wall Street Journal
Ying Xian Wong
Malaysia said it is looking into media reports that a Chinese company in the country used servers equipped with Nvidia and artificial-intelligence chips to train large language models. The Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry is “in the process of verifying the matter with relevant agencies if any domestic law or regulation has been breached,” it said in a statement Wednesday.

South Asia

AI helps Google curb scams and deepfakes in India
DigWatch
Google has introduced its Safety Charter for India to combat rising online fraud, deepfakes and cybersecurity threats. The charter outlines a collaborative plan focused on user safety, responsible AI development and protection of digital infrastructure. AI-powered measures have already helped Google detect 20 times more scam-related pages, block over 500 million scam messages monthly, and issue 2.5 billion suspicious link warnings. Its ‘Digikavach’ programme has reached over 177 million Indians with fraud prevention tools and awareness campaigns.

Ukraine - Russia

Unusually patient suspected Russian hackers pose as State Department in ‘sophisticated’ attacks on researchers
CyberScoop
Tim Starks
The hackers targeting prominent researcher and Russian military expert Keir Giles were different this time. The attackers, suspected to be working on behalf of the Russian government, had ginned up the May solicitation email for a consultation with a state.gov address, one that didn’t get a bounceback message when Giles replied. They spoke convincing English, and delivered their message during East Coast business hours. He said they created a realistic domain name to direct him to, rather than using a random string of text. They weren’t in a hurry, pressuring him to respond the way hackers usually do.

Why Ukraine’s AI drones aren’t a breakthrough yet
The Strategist
David Kirichenko
Despite early hopes, machine vision has not yet become a game-changing feature of Ukraine’s battlefield drones. But its time will come. The technology, a form of AI, allows drones to identify and strike targets autonomously. They can’t be jammed, aren’t restrained by the length of optical-fibre cables and don’t need continuous monitoring by operators. But performance has been limited, according to Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. The Institute for the Study of War wrote, ‘Promises of an immediate AI … drone revolution are premature as of June 2025.’

The 16‑kilobyte curtain. How Russia’s new data‑capping censorship is throttling Cloudflare
Media Zona
A new form of state-level internet filtering that restricts data flow is disrupting access to large portions of the global web for Russian citizens. Cloudflare, the world leader in DDoS protection and high-traffic load management, is being targeted by these new data caps, which appear designed to push users toward Russian-controlled services. Meanwhile, the move leaves Russian businesses dangerously exposed.

Europe

Restoring European tech leadership
The Business Times
Eric Salobir
Over the past few decades, the European Union has been relegated from global technology player to passive consumer of technologies developed elsewhere. Today, 80 per cent of the technologies and services Europe needs for its digital transformation are designed and manufactured beyond its borders, mostly in the United States and China. So deep is this consumer mindset that it has even shaped the philosophy behind our laws: the goal of recent tech regulations such as the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act was to protect Europeans as consumers, by keeping us safe online and ensuring fair competition.

Italy’s tech ecosystem: Innovation, growth, and emerging opportunities
Tech EU
Tamara Djurickovic
The Italian tech ecosystem in 2024 showed strong performance, with companies raising over €1.3 billion, despite a slight decrease from €1.4 billion in 2023. This drop, however, reflects the overall stability of the ecosystem, as evidenced by the impressive €504 million raised in the Q1 2025 alone.

Tech giants Apple and Meta to escape sanctions for failing to meet EU digital rules
Euro News
Peggy Corlin
The European Commission will opt not to impose immediate financial penalties on Apple and Meta—even if they fail to comply with the legislation by next week's deadline. US tech giants Apple and Meta will not face sanctions immediately for failure to meet obligations under the EU's digital rulebook, an EU spokesperson told Euronews.

EU court advisor backs Google’s $4.7 Billion Android fine
The Wall Street Journal
Edith Hancock
Google suffered a setback in its years-long battle against an antitrust fine after a top adviser to the European Union’s highest court backed a $4.74 billion penalty imposed by EU antitrust regulators over how the tech giant imposes contractual obligations on device manufacturers deploying its Android operating system. Juliane Kokott, an advocate general of the European Union’s Court of Justice in Luxembourg, said Google is wrong to attempt to challenge the fine.

Eutelsat raises €1.35 Billion led by France to aid OneWeb
Bloomberg
Jillian Deutsch and William Horobin
Eutelsat Communications SA said it has commitments for €1.35 billion ($1.5 billion) from the French government and other investors in a deal that will help the European Starlink rival build out its fleet of satellites. The French government will invest €717 million in Eutelsat, the Finance Ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

UK

Takeover of British Russia expert’s email accounts used novel phishing tactic
The Record by Recorded Future
Suzanne Smalley
Email accounts belonging to a well-known British expert on Russia were targeted with a highly customised and novel social engineering attack that relied on the use of app-specific passwords to get around multi-factor authentication, new research shows. Google detected the hack, which was likely executed by a Russian state-sponsored group, according to a report published Wednesday by the company’s Threat Intelligence Group. The Citizen Lab, a digital forensic research organisation, released its own report Wednesday summarising Google’s findings and providing more details on the attack and how such tactics are deployed broadly.

Sharing deepfake pornography 'the next sexual violence epidemic facing schools'
SkyNews
Faye Brown
Sharing deepfake pornography is "the next sexual violence epidemic" facing schools, the author of a book on the spread of online misogyny has told MPs. Appearing before the Women and Equalities Committee, Laura Bates said there needs to be statutory guidance for teachers on how to deal with this "very significant issue". She said in every UK case she has investigated, schools have "paid thousands of pounds hiring PR firms to focus on damage reputation management".

Africa

Health Tech for 1.4 billion: Can Africa lead its own digital health future?
Tech African News
Akim Benamara
Across Africa, the challenges facing healthcare systems are stark—and deeply structural. Underfunding, infrastructure deficits, policy fragmentation, and a shortage of skilled health professionals have left many nations struggling to deliver quality care. More than 50% of health facilities lack stable electricity or internet access. Smartphone penetration still hovers around 30%. These limitations mean millions of Africans remain on the fringes of the digital health revolution, even as technology reshapes healthcare globally.

Middle East

Iran’s internet connectivity collapses nationwide
CyberDaily
Daniel Croft
According to Cloudflare Radar, Iranian internet traffic dropped by an estimated 75 per cent after the government reportedly restricted access to all major websites, including Telegram. Internet tracking firm NetBlocks has also said that the country is facing a “near-total national internet blackout”, while the IODA internet tracking firm recorded a drastic drop in internet traffic from 91.25 per cent to 3.52 per cent in less than two hours.

What tech is used for building ballistic missiles?
TechRound
Dana Leigh
Ballistic missiles are not just deadly weapons; they’re incredibly complex pieces of technology. With a combination of propulsion, navigation, and payloads, they are able to travel thousands of kilometres to strike across enemy lines. The recent Israel-Iran war, which kicked off just last week, has brought this technology back into the spotlight. During recent escalations, Israeli military data, reported on CNN, suggested that Iran has fired about 700 of its medium-range ballistic missiles at Israel over the past 14 months.

Iranian, Israeli hacking groups spent years sparring online
Bloomberg
Jordan Robertson
As hackers have inserted themselves into the military conflict between Israel and Iran, American officials are focused on trying to stop a specific Iranian group that officials have blamed for disruptive cyberattacks against targets in Israel, the US and the UK. The US State Department is promoting a $10 million bounty for information leading to the identification or location of members of the group known as CyberAv3ngers.

NZ & Pacific Islands

New Zealand freezes aid to Cook Islands over China pact, demands restoration of trust
Arise News
Erizia Rubyjeana
New Zealand has suspended millions of dollars in aid to the Cook Islands following revelations of sweeping agreements between the Pacific nation and China deals that Wellington says it was never consulted on. The US$11 million freeze follows February announcements by the Cook Islands of partnerships with Beijing covering infrastructure, technology, tourism, and deep-sea mining, a move that blindsided New Zealand, its largest aid donor and defence partner.

Big Tech

16 Billion Apple, Facebook, Google and other passwords leaked — act now
Forbes
Davey Winder
If you thought that my May 23 report, confirming the leak of login data totaling an astonishing 184 million compromised credentials, was frightening, I hope you are sitting down now. Researchers have just confirmed what is also certainly the largest data breach ever, with an almost incredulous 16 billion login credentials, including passwords, exposed. As part of an ongoing investigation that started at the beginning of the year, the researchers have postulated that the massive password leak is the work of multiple infostealers. Here’s what you need to know and do.

Meta’s suit against Hong Kong firm was just the beginning – more companies linked to CrushAI ‘Nudify’ apps
Bellingcat
Kolina Koltai and Melissa Zhu
On the surface, Crushmate appeared to be one of many artificial intelligence “girlfriend” or “companion” apps. Its multiple websites said it specialised in “crafting the AI girl of your dreams”, and on Google and Apple’s app stores, it was described as an “AI chat product designed to provide users with a comprehensive emotional support and communication experience”. But ads linked to the app on popular social media platforms showed it was offering an entirely different service – making nonconsensual nude images of real women.

• Meta sues Hong Kong-based company behind AI deepfake app that creates fake nude images
  Hong Kong Free Press
  James Lee
  US social media giant Meta has sued the Hong Kong-based company behind an app that uses artificial intelligence to create fake nude images of people without their consent, seeking to stop the firm from advertising the app on Meta platforms. Meta said last Thursday that it had filed the complaint against Joy Timeline HK Limited, the maker of the CrushAI app, amid what it called a “concerning growth of so-called ‘nudify’ apps online.”

How Mark Zuckerberg unleashed his inner brawler
Financial Times
Hannah Murphy
José Lucas Costa da Silva peered over towards the warmup area for the Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition he was about to referee, faintly amused. It was early May 2023, and the 26-year-old martial arts instructor watched as one competitor in the high-school sports auditorium stretched and ran drills. He was wearing a white “gi”, a robe-like uniform, with some unusual accessories: sunglasses, a dark blue baseball cap and a medical mask. The man, whose name was listed as Mark Elliott, was a white belt, the beginner rank.

Apple eyes using AI to design its chips, technology executive says
Reuters
Stephen Nellis
Apple is interested in tapping generative artificial intelligence to help speed up the design of the custom chips at the heart of its devices, its top hardware technology executive said in private remarks last month. Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, made the remarks in a speech in Belgium, where he was receiving an award from Imec, an independent semiconductor research and development group that works closely with most of the world's biggest chipmakers.

Why Big Tech cannot agree on artificial general intelligence
Financial Times
Melissa Heikkilä
On the front cover of their initial business plan for DeepMind, the AI lab they set up in 2010, Sir Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman and Shane Legg wrote a single sentence: Build the world’s first artificial general intelligence. Their view, which remains true today, is that traditional AI technologies were too “narrow”, able to perform brilliantly, but only after humans had laboriously trained them using vast data sets. That made AI excellent at tasks such as analysing spreadsheets or even playing chess. But, artificial “general” intelligence, known as AGI, had the potential to go even further.

Canva’s cofounder is looking to hire ‘AI natives’ and university dropouts to train the rest of the company on the tech
Fortune
Beatrice Nolan
Canva cofounder Cliff Obrecht is on the hunt for “AI natives”—even those who have dropped out of college. Speaking to Fortune at VivaTech in Paris, Obrecht said the company sees high value in hiring less traditional candidates who understand AI tools and workflows. As AI threatens to change the job market rapidly, Obrecht says that curiosity and adaptability are becoming more valuable than ever.

Oracle launches defence ecosystem to boost security tech ties
Security Brief
Sean Mitchell, Publisher
Oracle has announced the Oracle Defence Ecosystem, a global initiative intended to transform the way that defence and government technology is delivered. The Oracle Defence Ecosystem is aimed at strengthening the national security infrastructure for the United States and its allies by enabling more efficient collaboration between technology innovators and government and defence organisations. The initiative seeks to remove longstanding barriers that have limited access to the latest cloud and artificial intelligence technologies within national security sectors.

Artificial Intelligence

ChatGPT may be eroding critical thinking skills, according to a new MIT study
Time
Andrew R. Chow
Does ChatGPT harm critical thinking abilities? A new study from researchers at MIT’s Media Lab has returned some concerning results. The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively.

AI scraping bots are breaking open libraries, archives, and museums
404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg
AI bots that scrape the internet for training data are hammering the servers of libraries, archives, museums, and galleries, and are in some cases knocking their collections offline, according to a new survey published today. While the impact of AI bots on open collections has been reported anecdotally, the survey is the first attempt at measuring the problem, which in the worst cases can make valuable, public resources unavailable to humans because the servers they’re hosted on are being swamped by bots scraping the internet for AI training data.

Popular services keep adding AI. Some customers want them to stop.
The Washington Post
Heather Kelly
People are upset over the quality of AI products and the loss of human jobs. Is it enough to slow the tech down? For 581 days in a row, artist Karen Crow dutifully opened language-learning app Duolingo and practiced her French. For the past decade, she used audiobook service Audible to listen to books while working and traveling. But at the end of May, Crow canceled both subscriptions over the companies’ decisions to use more artificial intelligence. Language-learning app Duolingo said in April it was replacing some contractors with AI to more than double the number of language lessons it offers.

Amazon boss says AI will replace jobs at tech giant
BBC
Natalie Sherman
Amazon boss Andy Jassy has told staff to embrace artificial intelligence and warned the technology will lead to a smaller corporate workforce in the next few years. He shared the prediction in a memo to staff on Tuesday, which urged employees to "be curious about AI". The tech giant is the latest firm to set out its plans for using AI amid concerns the technology will lead to rapid job losses across the world.

How will AI influence US-China relations in the next 5 years?
Brookings
R. David Edelman, Diana Fu, Ryan Hass, Patricia M. Kim, Ying Lin, Yingyi Ma, Michael E. O’Hanlon, Melanie W. Sisson, Elham Tabassi, and Nicol Turner Lee
There is a lot of discussion in Washington and Beijing about the implications of the artificial intelligence revolution, but no clear consensus on how AI advances will impact how the world’s two leading powers relate to each other. In the following collection of short essays, Brookings scholars from different disciplines offer their forecasts on how AI will influence U.S.-China relations over the next five years. The collection of short essays spans security issues, export controls, education, disinformation, risk reduction, public-private partnerships, and shared threats from AI in the hands of rogue actors.

OpenAI warns models with higher bioweapons risk are imminent
Axios
Ina Fried
OpenAI cautioned Wednesday that upcoming models will head into a higher level of risk when it comes to the creation of biological weapons — especially by those who don't really understand what they're doing. The company, and society at large, need to be prepared for a future where amateurs can more readily graduate from simple garage weapons to sophisticated agents.

Misc

Real risk to youth mental health is ‘addictive use,’ not screen time alone, study finds
The New York Times
Ellen Barry
As Americans scramble to respond to rising rates of suicidal behavior among youth, many policymakers have locked in on an alarming metric: the number of hours a day that American children spend glued to a glowing screen. But a study published on Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA, which followed more than 4,000 children across the country, arrived at a surprising conclusion: Longer screen time at age 10 was not associated with higher rates of suicidal behavior four years later.

Events & Podcasts

The Sydney Dialogue 2025
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute is pleased to announce the Sydney Dialogue, the world’s premier policy summit for critical, emerging and cyber technologies, will return on 8-9 October. Now in its fourth year, the dialogue attracts the world’s top thinkers, innovators and policymakers, and focusses on the most pressing issues at the intersection of technology and security. TSD has become the place where new partnerships are built among governments, industry and civil society, and where existing partnerships are deepened.

The Daily Cyber & Tech Digest is brought to you by the Cyber, Technology & Security Programs team at ASPI and supported by partners.