⚔️ China’s Z.ai Has Matched Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Resetting AI Race

China’s Zhipu AI (Z.ai) released its open-weight GLM-5.2, and security researchers have claimed that it matches Mythos in certain bug-finding and cybersecurity scenarios. While GLM lags behind models from Anthropic and OpenAI in other, more general tasks, it seems that China has dramatically reduced the gap in the capabilities between its models and those of the US.

Because GLM is an open-weight model, it can be downloaded and run by anyone on readily available hardware. That gives it great flexibility and allows power users deep access, but it also makes it ripe for abuse by bad actors who can run it with little oversight.

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🤖 IBM, Red Hat, and Deloitte Announce Lightwell Collaboration to Help Strengthen Open Source Software Supply Chain Trust

Deloitte, IBM, and Red Hat announced a collaboration to help protect the software supply chain against increasingly automated cyber threats. Deloitte joins the initiative as an integration collaborator for Lightwell, bringing its broader secured software supply chain architecture and cyber risk services to the large-scale enterprise open source security model deployed by IBM and Red Hat.

❗️Through this collaboration, the three organizations will coordinate across the software lifecycle to help clients manage security threats:

🟠Continuous Visibility & Discovery: Continuously mapping and scanning first-party, open source, and third-party software to identify exactly what code exists, where it runs, and which critical business functions it supports.

🟠Contextual Prioritization: Separating active threats from noise by analyzing severity, exposure, threat-chaining, and exploitability to inform operational decisions.

🟠Machine-Speed Remediation: Combining Red Hat and IBM’s automated patch validation with Deloitte’s orchestration services to rapidly coordinate, test, and deploy validated fixes into production repositories, limiting disruption. To achieve this, Deloitte will maintain a bench of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) to support ongoing remediation and maintenance of client applications.

🟠Ecosystem Trust & Compliance: Through the collaboration, the organizations will help enterprises manage upstream open source and vendor relationships, including pre-disclosure vulnerability handovers, while delivering continuous, evidence-based reporting for boards, auditors, and regulators.

“Exploits don't wait for manual patching processes, and neither can enterprise response,” said Adnan Amjad, Deloitte’s US Cyber leader.

“Together, we're enabling clients to operate at machine speed to identify, validate, and remediate vulnerabilities. This collaboration is about building the operational resilience needed to maintain trust across increasingly complex software ecosystems — creating systems that can withstand and neutralize risk without disrupting the business,” added Adnan Amjad.

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🧠 Scientists Discover the Brain Can Rewire Itself To Truly Multitask

Why does driving eventually feel effortless, while learning to drive demands total concentration? A new study from Georgetown University suggests the answer lies in the brain’s ability to rewire itself, shifting well-practiced skills into different neural circuits so they can be performed with less conscious effort.

⬇️ Under the right conditions, people may be capable of genuine multitasking rather than simply switching attention rapidly between tasks.

⚪️For the new study, participants learned to sort morphed images of cars into two groups by noticing small visual differences. Over 5 to 10 weeks, they completed more than 30,000 trials through a phone app that turned the sorting task into a game. Before and after training, the researchers scanned participants’ brains using fMRI and EEG.

⚪️At first, once participants had learned the sorting task, it activated the prefrontal cortex. That brain region supports executive function and deliberate thinking, but it is generally limited in how many tasks it can manage at once.

❗️After weeks of practice, brain scans showed a shift. The sorting process had moved into the temporal cortex, a region involved in memory encoding and the recognition of complex objects.

“We measure before and after training, so we can see that extensive training essentially put a category-selective area in the temporal lobe that was not there before. Experience remodels the brain to bypass that frontal bottleneck. The prefrontal cortex then stays free for whatever else you want to do, increasing your capacity,” Riesenhuber explained.

Moving a learned skill into the temporal cortex, while freeing the prefrontal cortex, may allow the brain to use established knowledge as a base for learning something new. 📚

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⚡️🇪🇸Spain to Phase Out Electricity Generation Tax, Government Says

Scrapping the 7% tax on power generation will help lower electricity bills for households and businesses while encouraging the shift from fossil fuels to clean-energy, the government said. The tax will be phased out by 2028.

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🤑 Ripple wants institutions to borrow against tokenized assets on XRPL

Ripple has proposed an XRPL Lending Protocol that would let institutions borrow against on-chain assets while keeping credit decisions off the blockchain.

⬇️ The system would pool single assets in “Single Asset Vaults” and automate loan mechanics at the base layer of the XRP Ledger.

The protocol has two parts. A Single Asset Vault pools a single asset, and the lending layer turns that pooled money into loans with set terms. Both are still proposals, defined in technical drafts known as XLS-65 and XLS-66, and remain subject to approval by the validators who run the network.

❗️The features are available to test on a development network but are not live.

Aimed at institutional use and competing with protocols like Aave and Compound, Ripple argues its fixed, network-level rules offer more predictable risk than crypto-native governance models.

The XRPL Lending Protocol (XLS-65, XLS-66) proposals are subject to validator approval in the coming weeks. Infrastructure providers and developers can begin integrating and testing on a testnet from Monday. 🚀

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🇨🇳 China Pushes All School Levels to Teach AI in Xi’s Tech Drive

China has announced a formal plan to integrate AI across all levels of schooling, aligning its education system with President Xi Jinping’s campaign to dominate advanced technologies. The State Council released a five-year blueprint on Monday including a plan to make AI a core capability for every student, echoing Xi’s earlier call to cultivate high-tech talent.

The plan urges efforts to “promote AI education throughout all educational stages, improve students’ AI literacy and enhance their ability to identify and solve problems”.

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🇺🇸 Governor Newsom announces a first-of-its-kind partnership to provide Anthropic's tools to California state agencies.

Governor Gavin Newsom today announced that the state has entered into a partnership with leading California-based AI company Anthropic, a first-of-its-kind collaboration that will help support state workers and responsibly adopt AI to make state services more effective, user-friendly, and efficient.

"This partnership is about using technology the California way: responsibly, transparently, and in service of people. AI should not replace the human work of government; it should help our workers move faster, solve problems more effectively, and deliver better results for Californians," Governor Gavin Newsom

Through the agreement, state agencies may access Anthropic’s AI productivity assistant, Claude, at a 50% discounted price, coupled with free workforce training as well as expert GenAI technical assistance and workflow input from Anthropic developers. The agreement also provides the same discounted offer for California’s local governments, including cities and counties.

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🏢 Google Cloud to Offer Specialist AI Models for Science Research

Google will start offering specialist AI models from software company SandboxAQ through its cloud service, expanding enterprise and research access to technology designed to accelerate drug discovery, materials science and semiconductor manufacturing.

Google will add SandboxAQ’s so-called large quantitative models to its cloud marketplace, allowing researchers to combine Google’s Gemini language models with AI systems trained on scientific equations and laboratory data. Unlike large language models, which excel at generating text, large quantitative models are trained on numerical data to help solve problems in chemistry, biology and physics.

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⚡️🇺🇸Kids’ safety package wins House approval

The House overwhelmingly passed legislation Monday night designed to provide greater protections to children online. The vote was 267-117, enough to pass the legislation, known as the KIDS Act H.R. 7757 (119).

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🏦 Wall Street's BNY expands stablecoin services for institutions, starting with Circle's USDC

NY, the world's largest custody bank overseeing $59 trillion in assets, is deepening its ties with Circle (CRCL) as the Wall Street bank ramps up its stablecoin services.

➡️ The bank said Monday that USDC will become the first stablecoin supported on its Digital Asset Custody platform. Clients will be able to hold USDC in custody at BNY and instruct Circle to convert U.S. dollars into the stablecoin or redeem USDC back into dollars through the bank.

The move expands BNY's role in the USDC ecosystem. The bank already serves as the primary custodian of the reserves backing the stablecoin. The new offering lets institutions manage both their cash and digital assets through a single platform.

❗️BNY said it plans to support additional stablecoin issuers over time.

"As digital assets become increasingly integrated into financial markets, institutions need infrastructure that seamlessly works across traditional and blockchain-based systems," said Carolyn Weinberg, chief product and innovation officer at BNY.

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🤑 XRP Ledger Foundation Partners with VS1 Finance to Develop Compliant Lending Framework

The XRP Ledger Foundation has partnered with VS1 Finance to create an open-source reference application aimed at simplifying the creation of compliant lending services while reducing development costs, thereby facilitating the establishment of regulated lending platforms on the XRP Ledger by financial institutions.

➡️ The application utilizes native XRP Ledger components, eliminating security risks associated with external smart contracts, as network validators verify the application logic, ensuring compliance and supporting KYC and AML requirements.

❗️By releasing the framework as open-source software, developers and financial institutions can customize and integrate the code according to their needs, thus lowering technical and regulatory barriers and accelerating institutional capital adoption on the XRP Ledger.

VS1 Finance is preparing to issue tokenized corporate bonds within the National Bank of Georgia's regulatory sandbox, with insights gained from this initiative expected to influence the compliance architecture of the lending framework, further enhancing the XRP Ledger's institutional infrastructure. 🚀

#Stellar

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⚡️🇺🇸🇮🇷Witkoff, Kushner Set to Hold Indirect Talks With Iran in Qatar

Qatar said Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff had arrived in Doha as part of ongoing peace negotiations between the US and Iran and as the countries try to calm tensions over the Strait of Hormuz.

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