Google subsidiary DeepMind has accomplished some amazing things over the past couple of years, from beating humans at their own game to saving its parent company money on its electricity bill. Now, however, it’s coming under major scrutiny because of the specifics of a deal with the United Kingdom’s National Health Service.
DeepMind forged a deal with the NHS that gave it access to health records from over 1.6 million patients, but the United Kingdom government’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, is investigating the arrangement, according to a report from The Verge.
The sticking point seems to be whether DeepMind had the legal right to handle personally identifiable medical records belonging to NHS patients without asking for permission on an individual basis. This kind of access is legal under U.K. law, but only so long as the entity involved is providing direct care to the patients in question.
DeepMind maintains that it is providing direct care, so there’s nothing wrong with the deal. However, the U.K. government’s National Data Guardian has argued that the company usage of the data — testing out a smartphone app called Streams — falls outside the boundary of direct care.
The Streams app is able to detect if patients are suffering from life-threatening kidney problems and help medical professionals administer the necessary treatment, according to a report from Sky News. It’s easy to understand the contribution that DeepMind is making to this important project, but there’s still a gray area from a legal perspective.
A spokesperson for the Royal Free, the organization that brought DeepMind on board with the project, has stated the importance of lessons learned from a “pioneering” project such as this. Meanwhile, a representative from DeepMind has reiterated that none of the information shared with the company would ever be used for commercial purposes, or to further Google’s products, services, or ads.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.