Top of the Day
AI Action Summit (Paris 2025)
Statement on Inclusive and Sustainable Artificial Intelligence for People and the Planet – https://www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-macron/2025/02/11/statement-on-inclusive-and-sustainable-artificial-intelligence-for-people-and-the-planet
Opening Address by Prime Minister Shri. Narendra Modi at the AI Action Summit, Paris – https://www.mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl/39020/Opening_Address_by_Prime_Minister_Shri_Narendra_Modi_at_the_AI_Action_Summit_Paris_February_11_2025
UN Secretary-General’s remarks at AI Action Summit – https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2025-02-11/secretary-generals-remarks-ai-action-summit-scroll-down-for-english
Speech by President von der Leyen at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit – https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/speech_25_471
(Newsweek) Vice President JD Vance warned Tuesday that “excessive regulation” would kill the rapidly growing artificial intelligence industry. In a speech at the Paris AI Action Summit, Vance challenged Europe’s regulatory stance on artificial intelligence and content moderation on Big Tech platforms, highlighting a growing divide between the United States, its allies and China on AI governance. – https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/jd-vance-exposes-ai-rift-with-allies-on-first-foreign-trip-as-vp/ar-AA1yPqcT?ocid=BingNewsSerp
(Global Times) World leaders seek common ground at Paris AI summit – https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202502/1328270.shtml
Geostrategies
Challenger and Incumbent Tools for U.S.-China Tech Competition
(Mark Thomas – Lawfare – 11 February 2025) On Jan. 20, Chinese company DeepSeek released its R1 model, defying American dominance of AI. The model, which was built through software optimization rather than expensive microchip investments, beats leading competitors like OpenAI in several metrics and costs a tiny fraction of their development expenditure. The model’s innovative approach spooked microchip investors, prompting the largest single-day market cap loss in U.S. history for Nvidia. DeepSeek is a harbinger of things to come. Regardless of which country takes the lead in AI, China will deploy its ample resources to lead the world in some, if not many, technological domains. – https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/challenger-and-incumbent-tools-for-u.s.-china-tech-competition
China’s technological ascent: Surpassing Western institutions
(Manoj Joshi – Observer Research Foundation – 10 February 2025) According to an index brought out by the prestigious scientific journal Nature, a Chinese regional university, the Sichuan University (SCU) in Chengdu, has recently overtaken Stanford University, MIT, Oxford and the University of Tokyo to emerge as the 11th top university in terms of science research output. The index assesses institutions by their contributions to articles in a slate of top-tier scientific journals. Nature’s Index measures five areas—biological sciences, chemistry, Earth and environmental sciences, health sciences, and physical sciences. While Harvard retains the top spot, the other nine universities on the list, followed by SCU, are all in China. While China has recently garnered global headlines because of the AI company DeepSeek, it has already gathered considerable momentum in the last decade by its efforts to become a science and technology power. – https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/china-s-technological-ascent-surpassing-western-institutions
Governance and Legislation
Digital Data and Advanced AI for Richer Global Intelligence
(Danielle Goldfarb – Centre for International Governance Innovation – 11 February 2025) From collecting millions of online supermarket prices to measure inflation, to assessing the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on low-income workers, digital data sets can be used to benefit the public interest. Using these and other examples, this special report explores how digital data sets and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) can provide timely, transparent and detailed insights into global challenges. These experiments illustrate how governments and civil society analysts can reuse digital data to spot emerging problems, analyze specific group impacts, complement traditional metrics or verify data that may be manipulated. AI and data governance should extend beyond addressing harms. International institutions and governments need to actively steward digital data and AI tools to support a step change in our understanding of society’s biggest challenges. – https://www.cigionline.org/publications/digital-data-and-advanced-ai-for-richer-global-intelligence/
Systemic Risk Assessments Hold Clues for EU Platform Enforcement
(David Sullivan – Lawfare – 11 February 2025) In late November 2024, 19 of the EU’s largest internet platforms and search engines—each with more than 45 million EU-based users—began satisfying some of the most innovative and far-reaching elements of the European Union’s flagship platform regulation, the Digital Services Act (DSA). The DSA regulates online intermediaries, seeking to reduce illegal and harmful content. As part of these regulations, companies must report on their assessment and mitigation of “systemic” risks, provide an independent audit of the service’s compliance with its DSA obligations, and develop a response to the audit’s findings. – https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/systemic-risk-assessments-hold-clues-for-eu-platform-enforcement
Frontiers
Will 2025 mark the beginning of practically useful quantum computers?
(Prateek Tripathi – Observer Research Foundation – 10 February 2025) A major impediment facing quantum computing was that of scalability, the ability to significantly increase the number of qubits in a quantum computer. This has been particularly difficult in light of error correction, which has been a problem pretty much since the genesis of quantum computers. There have been several attempts to address the issue, but none of them panned out. In 2024, however, some developments have shown real promise. In particular, in a paper recently published in Nature, Google has claimed that it has been able to surmount this obstacle using its “Willow” quantum processor, thereby paving the way for large-scale quantum computers to become a practical reality in the near future. – https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/will-2025-mark-the-beginning-of-practically-useful-quantum-computers
Security
Russian bulletproof hosting service Zservers sanctioned by US for LockBit coordination
(Jonathan Greig – The Record – 11 February 2025) A Russian service used to facilitate ransomware attacks by LockBit hackers has been sanctioned by U.S. authorities. The company, Zservers, offers bulletproof hosting — which allows cybercriminals to avoid law enforcement while renting IP addresses, servers and domains used for disseminating malware, forming botnet armies and carrying out other tasks related to fraud and cyberattacks. – https://therecord.media/zservers-russia-bulletproof-hosting-us-uk-sanctions
PowerSchool breach exposed special education status, mental health data and parent restraining orders
(Suzanne Smalley – Infosecurity Magazine – 11 February 2025) Sensitive student information including special education status, mental health details, disciplinary notes and parent restraining orders were exposed in the recent hack targeting PowerSchool, highlighting how easily troves of unique personal data can be obtained by hackers. PowerSchool, an education software company, told Recorded Future News that about 6,500 of its more than 18,000 clients were impacted in the hack announced last month. Although PowerSchool has not said how many individuals are affected, the hacker allegedly behind the incident reportedly claimed they obtained data belonging to 62.4 million students and 9.5 million teachers. – https://therecord.media/powerschool-breach-exposed-special-ed-status-mental-health-data
New Chinese Hacking Campaign Targets Manufacturing Firms to Steal IP
(Kevin Poireault – Infosecurity Magazine – 11 February 2025) Check Point is set to reveal a new Chinese cyber campaign targeting suppliers of manufacturers in “sensitive” domains in the US and across the globe. In an exclusive interview with Infosecurity at the firm’s CPX 2025 conference, Lotem Finkelsteen, Check Point’s Director of Threat Intelligence & Research, said his team was working on a new investigation into a Chinese hacking group. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/new-chinese-hacking-ip-theft/
DDoS Attack Volume and Magnitude Continues to Soar
(James Coker – Infosecurity Magazine – 11 February 2025) DDoS attacks have surged in volume and magnitude in the second half of 2024, according to a new report by Gcore. The cybersecurity firm found that DDoS attacks rose by 56% in H2 2024 compared to H2 2023. There was also a 17% increase in the total number of attacks compared with H1 2024. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/ddos-attack-volume-magnitude/
Ransomware Gangs Increasingly Prioritize Speed and Volume in Attacks
(Alessandro Mascellino – Infosecurity Magazine – 11 February 2025) Advanced evasion techniques have been observed to be the new normal among ransomware groups in 2024, as groups like Lynx, Akira and RansomHub grew more agile. Rather than focusing on high-profile targets, they pursued a quantity-over-quality approach, striking more businesses at a faster rate. According to the 2025 Cyber Threat Report, published today by Huntress, this shift is further reflected in their speed. While the firm determined the average time-to-ransom (TTR) was just under 17 hours, Akira and RansomHub operated much faster, typically deploying ransomware in around six hours. – https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/ransomware-gangs-prioritize-speed/