Illinoisans now will have access to a large collection of high-quality digital information and educational resources for free by going to their local library or the Illinois State Library’s website. The Illinois Reliable Information Sources, or IRIS, program was announced by Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias. The state entered a contract with EBSCO Information Services—a digital library resource program used by universities, schools and libraries—to provide access to more than 50 of their databases to all Illinois residents. It could not be immediately determined how much money went into the program. While it’s common for libraries to have resources for research, not all libraries are able to pay for these kinds of services.

Verizon announced the next step in its ongoing transformation, replacing complexity and friction with simplicity and true customer choice. The company is putting its customers first—existing and new—by redefining loyalty and eliminating activation and upgrade fees. As part of the customer-centered reboot, Verizon is also launching “Verizon Simplicity,” the industry’s most simple and cost-effective plan. With Simplicity, there are no network tiers; everyone gets Verizon’s best 5G network. Also available starting today, the company launched Verizon One, a streamlined plan that combines Mobility and Home on one bill with taxes and fees included.

The Trump administration says it wants American AI to dominate the world. But its decision to force Anthropic to abruptly cut off access to one of its most advanced models risks sending foreign governments and companies a very different message: Don't build your future on US AI. The last month of AI policymaking has been a blur of zigs and zags by the administration. First, President Trump delayed an executive order that would have created a voluntary reporting system for advanced AI releases. He said he didn't want to threaten America's lead over China. A few weeks later, the White House issued a slimmed-down executive order that explicitly barred mandatory government licensing. Then, the administration placed Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 under export controls, a move critics said amounts to a licensing system by another name. The move against Anthropic—which came as the Pentagon is already tangling with the company—has some foreign governments doubting they can depend on US AI.

A tiny snippet of user-generated text as short as 13 words long is often enough to manipulate the AI agents that power tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search, new research shows. The study suggests that it is trivially easy for brands to inject promotional content on sites like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia with the end goal of poisoning or manipulating the output of AI tools. The preprint research, done by Hal Triedman, Tingwei Zhang, and Vitaly Shmatikov of Cornell University, is called “Deep-research agents can be poisoned via user-generated content” and provides a mechanism and research basis for a problem that has been noticed by Reddit moderators and Wikipedia editors, namely that their websites are getting flooded with promotional content from brands trying to do AEO, or AI-engine optimization. This style of promotional content has become a booming industry, in which brands try to promote their product by seeding the websites that AI tools most often cite and scrape from with inauthentic and spammy content. 

Three key themes emerge in our report this year around structural access, formats for consuming the news, and trust levels amongst audiences. The first central theme is the intensifying ‘platformisation’ of news consumption. Social media and video networks are now the most widely used sources of news globally, ahead of both TV news and news organisations’ own online properties in terms of the proportion of people using them weekly. The second theme is born of the first. News consumption on these platforms is marked by the growing importance of online video and the rise of creators and influencers as part of the news environment. For many audiences, these sources complement rather than replace traditional news, but they are redrawing the format, tone, and accessibility of journalism and the public. We are also witnessing the first meaningful steps towards the integration of artificial intelligence into news journeys. The third key takeaway from our findings this year points to trust levels amongst audiences. Trust dropped significantly in 29 of the 48 markets we surveyed, and overall trust levels have fallen to their lowest since we started tracking this metric. From a period of relative stability, these drops are significant and perhaps reveal an institutional fragility shaped by wider political, social, and technological forces.