Technology
AI systems with ‘unacceptable risk’ are now banned in the EU

As of Sunday in the European Union, the bloc’s regulators can ban the use of AI systems they deem to pose “unacceptable risk” or harm.
February 2 is the first compliance deadline for the EU’s AI Act, the comprehensive AI regulatory framework that the European Parliament finally approved last March after years of development. The act officially went into force August 1; what’s now following is the first of the compliance deadlines.
The specifics are set out in Article 5, but broadly, the Act is designed to cover a myriad of use cases where AI might appear and interact with individuals, from consumer applications through to physical environments.
Under the bloc’s approach, there are four broad risk levels: (1) Minimal risk (e.g., email spam filters) will face no regulatory oversight; (2) limited risk, which includes customer service chatbots, will have a light-touch regulatory oversight; (3) high risk — AI for healthcare recommendations is one example — will face heavy regulatory oversight; and (4) unacceptable risk applications — the focus of this month’s compliance requirements — will be prohibited entirely.
Some of the unacceptable activities include:
- AI used for social scoring (e.g., building risk profiles based on a person’s behavior).
- AI that manipulates a person’s decisions subliminally or deceptively.
- AI that exploits vulnerabilities like age, disability, or socioeconomic status.
- AI that attempts to predict people committing crimes based on their appearance.
- AI that uses biometrics to infer a person’s characteristics, like their sexual orientation.
- AI that collects “real time” biometric data in public places for the purposes of law enforcement.
- AI that tries to infer people’s emotions at work or school.
- AI that creates — or expands — facial recognition databases by scraping images online or from security cameras.
Companies that are found to be using any of the above AI applications in the EU will be subject to fines, regardless of where they are headquartered. They could be on the hook for up to €35 million (~$36 million), or 7% of their annual revenue from the prior fiscal year, whichever is greater.
The fines won’t kick in for some time, noted Rob Sumroy, head of technology at the British law firm Slaughter and May, in an interview with TechCrunch.
“Organizations are expected to be fully compliant by February 2, but … the next big deadline that companies need to be aware of is in August,” Sumroy said. “By then, we’ll know who the competent authorities are, and the fines and enforcement provisions will take effect.”
Preliminary pledges
The February 2 deadline is in some ways a formality.
Last September, over 100 companies signed the EU AI Pact, a voluntary pledge to start applying the principles of the AI Act ahead of its entry into application. As part of the Pact, signatories — which included Amazon, Google, and OpenAI — committed to identifying AI systems likely to be categorized as high risk under the AI Act.
Some tech giants, notably Meta and Apple, skipped the Pact. French AI startup Mistral, one of the AI Act’s harshest critics, also opted not to sign.
That isn’t to suggest that Apple, Meta, Mistral, or others who didn’t agree to the Pact won’t meet their obligations — including the ban on unacceptably risky systems. Sumroy points out that, given the nature of the prohibited use cases laid out, most companies won’t be engaging in those practices anyway.
“For organizations, a key concern around the EU AI Act is whether clear guidelines, standards, and codes of conduct will arrive in time — and crucially, whether they will provide organizations with clarity on compliance,” Sumroy said. “However, the working groups are, so far, meeting their deadlines on the code of conduct for … developers.”
Possible exemptions
There are exceptions to several of the AI Act’s prohibitions.
For example, the Act permits law enforcement to use certain systems that collect biometrics in public places if those systems help perform a “targeted search” for, say, an abduction victim, or to help prevent a “specific, substantial, and imminent” threat to life. This exemption requires authorization from the appropriate governing body, and the Act stresses that law enforcement can’t make a decision that “produces an adverse legal effect” on a person solely based on these systems’ outputs.
The Act also carves out exceptions for systems that infer emotions in workplaces and schools where there’s a “medical or safety” justification, like systems designed for therapeutic use.
The European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, said that it would release additional guidelines in “early 2025,” following a consultation with stakeholders in November. However, those guidelines have yet to be published.
Sumroy said it’s also unclear how other laws on the books might interact with the AI Act’s prohibitions and related provisions. Clarity may not arrive until later in the year, as the enforcement window approaches.
“It’s important for organizations to remember that AI regulation doesn’t exist in isolation,” Sumroy said. “Other legal frameworks, such as GDPR, NIS2, and DORA, will interact with the AI Act, creating potential challenges — particularly around overlapping incident notification requirements. Understanding how these laws fit together will be just as crucial as understanding the AI Act itself.”

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Technology
How to use Apple’s new event planning ‘Invites’ app

Apple has released a new app called Invites that is designed to make it easy to create custom invitations for events using an iPhone or on the web. Invites is Apple’s version of Partiful, a popular invitation app that was crowned Google Play’s Best App of 2024.
Invites lets you create and share invitations, RSVP to events, contribute to Shared Albums, and curate event soundtracks.
To create an invitation, you need an iCloud+ subscription, which costs 99 cents per month. However, anyone can RSVP, regardless of whether they have an Apple Account or Apple device.
In this post, we’ll walk you through the process of creating an event, adding a shared album or playlist, and sending out your invitation to guests.
How to create an event invite

You can create an event in Apple Invites using the app on your iPhone or on the web at iCloud.com. Whichever route you choose, the process is essentially the same.
If you’re on the app, you need to tap the plus sign in the upper-right corner to create an event. If you’re on the web, you need to select “New Event” in the upper-right corner.
From here, tap the “Add Background” option, then choose “Photos” to select an image from your library. Or, tap the “Camera” option to take a new photo for the background. Apple also offers a selection of backgrounds for you to choose from.
Alternatively, you can use Apple’s Image Playground to produce original images for the background. To use the Image Playground integration in Invites, you will need an iPhone that is compatible with Apple Intelligence, which means you need an iPhone 15 Pro and up.
Once you have added a background image, tap “Event Title” to enter the name of your event and then choose a font style.
Then, tap “Date and Time” to choose the day and time the event starts and ends. You can also choose to set it as an all-day event. After you set a date, the weather forecast for that date will be added to the invitation.
Next, tap “Location” to search for a location or tap a suggested location. You have the option to enter a name for a location, such as “Emily’s House.” When you set a location, Invites will automatically add Apple Maps information to the invitation.
Finally, you can enter a description for the event, using Apple Intelligence’s Writing Tools to help you write out the description, if you’d like. Again, your device will need to be compatible with Apple Intelligence in order to use the feature.
Once you have created your event, you can tap the “Preview” option to see what it looks before sending it to your guests.
How to create a Shared Album or Playlist for your event invite

While the above steps cover the basics of creating an invite for an event, Apple offers two other features that can take your invitations to the next level.
You can create a “Shared Album” where attendees can contribute photos and videos from within an invite. The idea behind the feature is to give attendees a way to save their memories and relive the event at a later time.
To do so, you need to tap the “Create Album” option. The name of the Shared Album will be the name of the event, but you can change it if you’d like.
You can also create an event soundtrack by selecting the “Add Playlist” option. Attendees can then choose to add songs to the playlist before or during the event. It’s worth noting that you need an Apple Music subscription to create a shared playlist. As with Shared Albums, your playlist will have the name of your event, but you can edit it.
How to invite guests to your event

There are two ways to invite guests to your event. You can either share the invite as a public link or send it to specific people from your contact list.
You need to select “Invite Guests” to start sending out invitations. If you select the “Messages” or “Mail” apps, you can send a public link directly through those apps. If you select “Share Link,” you can send the invite to guests through any app in your iOS share sheet. If you tap “Copy Link,” you can paste the link for your invitation anywhere.
To invite a contact, tap the “Choose a Guest” option, search for a name, or choose someone from your list of contacts, and then share the link with them.
After you have created an event and invited guests, you can share a note that everyone on the guest list can see. For instance, you can let guests know if you have changed the location for the event, or you can send them a reminder to bring umbrellas if the forecast is calling for rain.
To do so, select your event and then tap “Send a Note.” Once you have written out your note, tap the “Send Note” button.

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Technology
Trump ends legal battle over Twitter ban

President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the company formerly known as Twitter appears to be over.
Trump sued the social media platform for banning him in the aftermath of January 6, 2021, when Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. While a federal judge dismissed the suit in 2022, the then-former president’s lawyers continued to appeal.
Soon after the judge’s ruling, Elon Musk (who has become a key Trump ally) acquired Twitter (now known as X), and reinstated Trump’s account. Facebook and other platforms subsequently reinstated Trump, as well — although he still does most of his social media posting on Truth Social, which is owned by Trump Media & Technology Group.
A court filing states that all parties are asking the court to dismiss the case. The filing does not offer any details about the agreement between Trump and X, except to say that both sides will bear their own costs.
In January, Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle a similar lawsuit over Trump’s ban from Instagram and Facebook.

A blog which focuses on business, Networth, Technology, Entrepreneurship, Self Improvement, Celebrities, Top Lists, Travelling, Health, and lifestyle. A source that provides you with each and every top piece of information about the world. We cover various different topics.
Technology
Anthropic CEO says DeepSeek was ‘the worst’ on a critical bioweapons data safety test

Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei is worried about competitor DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company that took Silicon Valley by storm with its R1 model. And his concerns could be more serious than the typical ones raised about DeepSeek sending user data back to China.
In an interview on Jordan Schneider’s ChinaTalk podcast, Amodei said DeepSeek generated rare information about bioweapons in a safety test run by Anthropic.
DeepSeek’s performance was “the worst of basically any model we’d ever tested,” Amodei claimed. “It had absolutely no blocks whatsoever against generating this information.”
Amodei stated that this was part of evaluations Anthropic routinely runs on various AI models to assess their potential national security risks. His team looks at whether models can generate bioweapons-related information that isn’t easily found on Google or in textbooks. Anthropic positions itself as the AI foundational model provider that takes safety seriously.
Amodei said he didn’t think DeepSeek’s models today are “literally dangerous” in providing rare and dangerous information but that they might be in the near future. Although he praised DeepSeek’s team as “talented engineers,” he advised the company to “take seriously these AI safety considerations.”
Amodei has also supported strong export controls on chips to China, citing concerns that they could give China’s military an edge.
Amodei didn’t clarify in the ChinaTalk interview which DeepSeek model Anthropic tested, nor did he give more technical details about these tests. Anthropic didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment from TechCrunch. Neither did DeepSeek.
DeepSeek’s rise has sparked concerns about its safety elsewhere, too. For example, Cisco security researchers said last week that DeepSeek R1 failed to block any harmful prompts in its safety tests, achieving a 100% jailbreak success rate.
Cisco didn’t mention bioweapons but said it was able to get DeepSeek to generate harmful information about cybercrime and other illegal activities. It’s worth mentioning, though, that Meta’s Llama-3.1-405B and OpenAI’s GPT-4o also had high failure rates of 96% and 86%, respectively.
It remains to be seen whether safety concerns like these will make a serious dent in DeepSeek’s rapid adoption. Companies like AWS and Microsoft have publicly touted integrating R1 into their cloud platforms — ironically enough, given that Amazon is Anthropic’s biggest investor.
On the other hand, there’s a growing list of countries, companies, and especially government organizations like the U.S. Navy and the Pentagon that have started banning DeepSeek.
Time will tell if these efforts catch on or if DeepSeek’s global rise will continue. Either way, Amodei says he does consider DeepSeek a new competitor that’s on the level of the U.S.’s top AI companies.
“The new fact here is that there’s a new competitor,” he said on ChinaTalk. “In the big companies that can train AI — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, perhaps Meta and xAI — now DeepSeek is maybe being added to that category.”

A blog which focuses on business, Networth, Technology, Entrepreneurship, Self Improvement, Celebrities, Top Lists, Travelling, Health, and lifestyle. A source that provides you with each and every top piece of information about the world. We cover various different topics.
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