On February 4, Google updated its “AI principles,” a document detailing how the company would and wouldn’t use artificial intelligence in its products and services. The old version was split into two sections: “Objectives for AI applications” and “AI applications we will not pursue,” and it explicitly promised not to develop AI weapons or surveillance tools.
The update was first noticed by The Washington Post, and the most glaring difference is the complete disappearance of any “AI applications we will not pursue” section. In fact, the language of the document now focuses solely on “what Google will do,” with no promises at all about “what Google won’t do.”
Why is this significant? Well, if you say you won’t pursue AI weapons, then you can’t pursue AI weapons. It’s pretty cut and dry. However, if you say you will employ “rigorous design, testing, monitoring, and safeguards to mitigate unintended or harmful outcomes and avoid unfair bias,” then you can pursue whatever you want and just argue that you employed rigorous safeguards.
Similarly, when Google says it will implement “appropriate human oversight,” there’s no way for us to know what that means. Google is the one who decides exactly what appropriate human oversight is. This is a problem because it means the company isn’t actually making any promises or giving us any solid information. It’s just opening things up so it can move around more freely — while still trying to give the impression of social responsibility.
Google’s involvement in the U.S. Department of Defense’s Project Maven in 2017 and 2018 is what led to the original AI principles document. Thousands of its employees protested the military project, and in response, Google did not renew the agreement and promised to stop pursuing AI weapons.
However, fast-forward a few years and most of Google’s competitors are engaging in these kinds of projects, with Meta, OpenAI, and Amazon all allowing some military use of their AI tech. With the increased flexibility of its updated AI principles, Google is effectively free to get back in the game and make some military money. It will be interesting to see if Google’s employees will have anything to say about this in the near future.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?