Federal authorities have begun a criminal investigation into e-cigarette giant Juul Labs, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It’s not entirely clear what the investigation into the vaping company is all about, but according to the Journal, it’s being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. The investigation is the latest in a string of bad news for the vaping industry: Between bans on products, a myriad of investigations, and an increasing number of illnesses and fatalities linked to e-cigarettes, the government has been stepping up enforcement against vaping as a whole.
The reported investigation could have huge repercussions for vaping: Juul is the single-biggest e-cigarette company in the United States, dominating about three-quarters of the market last year.
The company has been under fire from all sides as of late — it’s facing probes from state authorities, along with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigations. Both state attorneys generals and the FTC are looking into whether Juul targets minors with its marketing and flavored e-cigarettes.
Along with a specific investigation into Juul, the FDA has launched a separate criminal probe into the recent spate of vaping-related illnesses and deaths. Eight people have died from vaping-related lung illness so far. The most recent confirmed death was announced by health officials in Missouri on Thursday. At the same time, at least 530 people suffered lung damage from vaping as of September 11, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The latest investigation is part of a recent focus on vaping by federal officials. One of the biggest clouds on the horizon for vaping could be President Donald Trump, who said earlier this month that his administration would ban flavored e-cigarettes in order to curb teen vaping. Several states, including Michigan and New York, have moved to ban flavored vaping products as well.
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.