This week, WIRED obtained a memo that tied dozens of cyberattacks against Minnesota water and wastewater utilities to Iran, the first official documentation of Iran’s likely responsibility for the most impactful campaign of cyberattacks to hit the US in the midst of the war that began nearly six months ago.

In other news, more details have emerged about OpenAI’s “rogue” AI agent breach of Hugging Face’s platform. OpenAI disclosed that the AI agent hacked multiple third-party accounts and services as it sought to breach Hugging Face’s production database, which contained solutions for the cybersecurity tests OpenAI was evaluating the agent with.

Anthropic, too, disclosed that its AI models gained unauthorized access to three organizations’ systems during its own cybersecurity testing. Experts say the incidents underscore the importance of implementing well-known security best practices on the part of AI labs.

AI is changing cybersecurity in other ways. Google’s Chrome Browser now receives twice-a-week security updates as more bugs are identified and fixed thanks to the security team’s use of AI tools. And a new research study found that AI chatbots are effective at reeling victims into pig-butchering scams.

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is attempting to prevent state oversight of four detention facilities, and a Department of Homeland Security official resigned, citing the agency’s “war on immigrants.”

Plus, a GPS jamming exercise in New Mexico contributed to the crash of a civilian plane, as drone warfare reshapes how safe the skies are both in the US and abroad. People were surprised to see shared Claude chats popping up as search results on major search engines. An innocent gamer was imprisoned for 18 months after law enforcement made a typo in a subpoena. Researchers found that the top image-editing models on Hugging Face can easily create explicit deepfakes. And attendee badges for this year’s Defcon hacker conference feature a custom hardware security token that can be used as a security token after the conference is over.

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

The news that more than 30 water utilities across Minnesota were hit with cyberattacks in the last week already represented perhaps the broadest, most disruptive hacking campaign to ever target American industrial control systems—the technology that connects digital software with physical equipment, often in critical infrastructure settings. Now the FBI has warned that the attacks have hit utilities in no fewer than seven states, well beyond Minnesota alone.

In its alert, the FBI didn’t name the targeted states or include details about the extent of the disruption or damage the hacking campaign caused. But the bureau said that it and the Environmental Protection Agency were working with affected utilities. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in its own advisory this week, stated that the attacks had in some cases disabled digital controls and “resulted in boil-water notices”—suggesting potential water contamination. Echoing that CISA advisory, the FBI also warned that utilities should immediately take measures to remove from the internet digital devices that connect to physical equipment, known as programmable logic controllers, protect them with strong passwords, and set up allow-lists to only allow authorized devices to connect to them.

The leading suspect behind the wave of attacks remains Iranian-affiliated hackers, as first laid out in a CISA advisory in April, which a leaked memo obtained by WIRED confirmed was connected to the more recent Minnesota utility attacks, too. President Donald Trump on Friday instead blamed Minnesota Democratic governor Tim Walz’s administration for the attacks, a partisan response reminiscent of his denial of Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, even after US intelligence agencies had squarely pinned that intrusion on the Kremlin.

An FBI request for information, posted in March by the bureau’s procurement arm, lists predictive modeling as one of six requirements for the Threat Screening Center. The system would draw on existing datasets and, as new records arrive, score them for similarity and “pattern alignment” against what the center already holds. The second Trump administration has reoriented the center toward domestic targets, guided by a memorandum directing the national security apparatus to target people defined broadly as anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, and hostile toward traditional views on family and religion.

FBI director Kash Patel told Congress in March that the center had posted double-digit growth in biometric capability and intelligence production. The watch list is reportedly approaching 2 million names. Watch-listing functions without a criminal charge and audits have repeatedly turned up errors in the underlying data. The US Supreme Court has already ruled against the bureau twice over its use of the list as leverage to recruit informants.

As Russia continues to increase its control over internet access, including banning apps and running local internet shutdowns, the country has also charged the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, with facilitating terrorism. This week, the Russian Federal Security Service issued an international arrest warrant for Durov, saying that Telegram had been used to coordinate sabotage and attacks inside Russia. It also claimed the app had failed to remove content by the “Ukrainian special services, terrorist organizations, and extremist organizations.”

“Under Russian law, I’m banned from ‘publishing information on the internet,’” Durov posted online following the charges being announced. “Russian officials are clearly confused about who can ban whom from the internet.” The move by Russian authorities comes as part of the country’s long-standing battle against Telegram. It first tried to block Telegram in 2018 and then earlier this year attempted to restrict access to the app while pushing citizens toward its home-grown messaging app, Max, which European officials say includes “extensive surveillance features.”

Earlier this year, lawmakers in Minnesota passed a law designed to “prohibit the access, download, or use of nudification technology” unless it requires significant technical skills to operate. Ahead of that law coming into force on August 1, Elon Musk’s xAI said this week that it is suing Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison over the law, which the company claims violates the First Amendment.

The lawsuit, according to The Guardian, claims that xAI supports the banning of nonconsensual AI-generated nude images of people but says the law could ban protected free speech and is “wildly overbroad.” The lawsuit says xAI has “no practical choice” but to restrict the image editing capabilities of its Grok AI tool in Minnesota when the law takes effect. “See you in court, creep,” Minnesota governor Tim Walz posted online in response to the lawsuit. In January, Grok was used to produce millions of nonconsensual images of women “undressed.”

Someone impersonating Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin emailed a DNC staffer in February 2025 and got the staffer to hand over nearly $29,000, according to NOTUS, which obtained previously unreported records and confirmed the incident with committee officials. Martin had only been in the job for a matter of days.

The DNC reportedly caught the error within minutes and reported it to Wells Fargo, its financial institution, but recovered only $7,000. The staffer involved has since left the DNC. The committee also referred the matter to law enforcement. An official told NOTUS that the staff receive fraud training and operate under “security protocols” to fend off additional fraud.

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

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Filed Under: daily deal

Major labels want rules determining which AI assisted recordings qualify for official charts. Their proposal draws a necessary line, but their growing AI licensing business makes the location of that line rather convenient.

“More human than human” was a memorable slogan for the Tyrell Corporation. It is a considerably less convincing standard for deciding whether AI generated music should compete against living artists on the official charts.

Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, BMG, Concord, Believe, HYBE and a group of independent labels have proposed principles governing when recordings involving generative AI should qualify for chart recognition. Their position sounds sensible enough: the AI platform must be authorized, the recording must comply with copyright and personality rights, its use of AI must be disclosed, streaming activity must be legitimate and the finished work must remain “substantially human made.”

That final phrase is doing almost as much artificial work as the software. The labels want to appear protective of human creativity without defining the point at which the songwriter, musicians and singer have been reduced to decorative accessories—or closing the door on the licensed AI platforms they increasingly expect to monetize.

The proposal is not a binding rule, and chart organizations have not universally adopted it. It is the industry’s attempt to establish boundaries before synthetic performers, automated uploads and manipulated streams make the charts even less representative of what people are actually listening to.

The labels are correct that fully AI generated music should not compete directly with recordings written, performed and produced by human beings. The more difficult question is why anyone believes it should be eligible in the first place.

Related Reading: AI Music Labels Are Coming To Streaming, But Will They Actually Work?

Not Every Use of AI Is the Same

The debate becomes dishonest when every use of artificial intelligence is placed into the same bucket. A musician using software to remove noise from a recording is not doing the same thing as someone entering a prompt and receiving a finished song with synthetic lyrics, instruments and vocals.

AI assisted music still begins with human authorship and performance. The artist writes the song, performs it and makes the defining creative decisions, while software helps with tasks such as stem separation, restoration, timing correction, noise reduction or mastering. Recording studios have always used technology to improve and manipulate performances. Nobody should be removed from the charts because an engineer used machine learning to eliminate an air conditioner humming behind the singer.

Hybrid music occupies the far less comfortable middle. A human songwriter might write the lyrics and melody while AI generates the backing arrangement. A singer might record the lead vocal while software creates harmonies or instrumental parts. Another artist might begin with a generated composition and then rewrite and perform enough of it that the final recording bears little resemblance to the original output.

Some of those recordings may contain enough genuine human authorship to qualify. Others amount to placing decorative trim around a song the machine has already written and performed.

Fully AI generated music is different again. The software creates the composition, lyrics, instrumentation, vocals and finished recording from a prompt. The user may request revisions and choose the strongest output, but selecting version 27 does not suddenly make someone a songwriter or producer.

AI voice clones and synthetic performers create another problem. A platform can imitate the voice or recognizable style of a living or deceased artist, sometimes with permission and sometimes without it. Legal authorization may resolve part of the rights issue, but it does not make the performance human. A licensed computer generated Frank Sinatra vocal remains a computer generated Frank Sinatra vocal, even after everyone’s lawyer has enjoyed lunch.

The test should not be whether software was involved. The question is whether the software assisted the artist or replaced one.

What Should Qualify?

The primary charts should recognize recordings in which human beings wrote, performed and shaped the defining creative elements, rather than rewarding someone who entered a prompt and called themselves a producer. Hybrid recordings can qualify, but only when AI served the artist instead of quietly replacing the songwriter, musicians and singer—and its involvement was disclosed before the track started collecting streams, royalties and trophies.

“Substantially human made” is not a useful standard. It is the kind of conveniently foggy language corporations use when they want to appear principled without closing off a future revenue stream.

Do Consumers Care?

The music industry has occasionally behaved as though listeners will accept whatever appears next in an autoplay queue, provided the cover art is attractive and nobody asks who made it.

Research suggests otherwise.

A Deezer and Ipsos survey of 9,000 adults across eight countries found that most participants could not consistently distinguish fully AI generated recordings from human music in a blind listening test. That may delight AI companies, but it does not mean listeners are indifferent.

Eighty percent wanted fully AI generated music clearly labeled, while 45 percent wanted the ability to filter it from their streaming experience. More than half said synthetic recordings should not compete with human music on the main charts, while only 11 percent supported treating both categories equally.

Consumers may not always recognize AI music by ear, but many still care whether the voice, performance and songwriting came from an actual person. That is precisely why disclosure matters.

Streaming subscribers are paying for access to music, not for an endless reservoir of inexpensive background material manufactured to fill playlists, reduce royalty costs and keep people from pressing stop.

The Synthetic Flood Has Already Started

Deezer reported receiving approximately 90,000 fully AI generated tracks every day during June 2026. On some peak days, synthetic recordings represented more than half of all new music delivered to the service.

That sounds like enormous consumer demand until the listening numbers are examined. Fully AI generated music accounted for only around 1 to 3 percent of total listening on Deezer, and the service previously reported that as much as 85 percent of streams associated with those tracks during 2025 appeared to be fraudulent.

The upload volume is therefore not being driven entirely by listeners desperately waiting for their next synthetic masterpiece.

Generative platforms can produce recordings faster than any collection of human artists could write, rehearse and record them. Combine that output with automated uploads, fake accounts and manipulated streams, and the charts risk becoming a ranking of who owns the most efficient content factory.

Charts have never been perfect measures of taste, but they are supposed to document what people are buying and hearing. Allowing industrial quantities of synthetic music to compete against human artists would turn them into something closer to a server stress test.

The Labels Have Discovered Principles

The record companies supporting these rules deserve some credit for acknowledging that fully synthetic recordings should not receive the same recognition as human music. Artists need protection from unauthorized voice cloning, unlicensed training data, fake performers and fraudulent streaming operations.

The labels’ motives become less heroic once their own AI agreements enter the conversation.

Universal Music Group has reached an agreement with Udio to develop a licensed AI music creation platform. Warner Music Group has settled litigation with Suno and entered a partnership intended to create licensed AI products and new revenue opportunities. Warner has also worked with Udio on tools involving approved remixes, covers and recordings connected to participating artists.

The labels are not trying to stop AI music. They are attempting to control which AI companies receive access to their catalogs, artists and intellectual property—and how much money flows through the licensing system.

There is nothing inherently wrong with demanding consent and compensation. Artists should control whether their recordings, compositions, voices and likenesses are used to train or operate generative systems. Unauthorized platforms should not be allowed to treat a century of recorded music as free raw material.

But the labels should spare everyone the suggestion that this is solely about defending human creativity. They are drawing a line between unauthorized AI music they cannot monetize and licensed AI music from which they expect to receive revenue.

Nothing clarifies an ethical dilemma quite like discovering where to send the invoice.

Is Protecting Musicians Still Part of the Job?

Record companies present themselves as partners that discover artists, finance recordings, develop careers and protect creative rights. That relationship has not always been remembered with equal affection by the musicians involved.

Labels are businesses rather than unions, but that does not excuse them from protecting the people whose work gives their catalogs value.

An artist’s voice, catalog or identity should not be licensed into an AI platform without explicit consent, meaningful control and direct compensation. Those terms should not be buried inside a contract signed years before generative AI became commercially viable.

A system in which labels control the rights, technology companies control the platform and musicians provide the raw material is not artist protection. It is resource extraction wearing a conference badge.

The proposed chart rules therefore need to explain more than whether an AI system was “authorized.” Authorized by whom? A label may possess the contractual authority to approve something the artist would never willingly accept. Legal permission and artistic consent are not always the same thing.

Is Physical Media Part of the Answer?

Buying records and CDs will not automatically protect listeners from AI generated music. A synthetic album can be pressed onto vinyl and sold inside an elaborate box with numbered packaging and a booklet nobody needed.

Physical media does, however, encourage transparency. Album credits and liner notes make it easier to see who wrote, performed, recorded and mastered the music. Buying directly from an artist, independent label or retailer can also create a more deliberate financial connection between the listener and the people who made the recording.

Streaming platforms are designed to remove friction. Music appears, plays and disappears into the next recommendation, often without the listener knowing who performed it, who owns it or whether anyone involved possesses a birth certificate.

Buying a record or CD requires an actual decision. As streaming services fill with tens of thousands of synthetic tracks every day, knowing who made the music—and intentionally paying for it—may become more meaningful than having access to another 100 million recordings nobody requested.

The Bottom Line

AI assisted production should remain eligible for the charts when software supports human creativity rather than replacing it. Hybrid recordings need firm definitions and full disclosure. Fully AI generated performers and songs should compete in a separate category where they cannot take visibility, recognition and royalty share from living musicians.

The labels deserve credit for recognizing the problem, but their expanding partnerships with AI companies make their motives impossible to ignore. They want rules that protect artists while remaining flexible enough to preserve the AI businesses they expect to license and monetize.

Protecting musicians cannot mean protecting them only from technology companies that have not yet signed an agreement with the labels.

The charts should recognize human achievement. Let the synthetic performers have their own rankings, their own playlists and, eventually, their own off-world colonies.

They should not receive the trophy merely because nobody bothered to administer the Voight Kampff test.

Related Reading:

Bags weighed down by a Microsoft license key

Weary travelers making their way through airports have enough to contend with these days without some Microsoft borkage popping up over departure information.

Spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader identifying themselves as Ethel Grapefruit (Mrs), one of the information boards at Heathrow Terminal 5’s check-in area has decided that whatever is running behind the scenes does not meet with Microsoft’s approval, and requires activation.

The message is familiar to many Windows users, and appears as a watermark when something has made the knickers of the computer behind the scenes get a bit twisty. Perhaps there’s been a hardware replacement, and Windows needs to be reactivated. Or an update that sent the operating system into a tizzy. There are any number of reasons the watermark may appear, and any number of ways to remove it.

The good news is that, while annoying, the presence of the watermark is unlikely to have much adverse effect at a technical level. There’ll be nagging. There won’t be much in the way of customization to make the computer your own. And, of course, Microsoft won’t be offering much – if anything – in the way of support (other than security updates).

Not that any of that matters much for a sign showing where to go to check in for a flight and hand bags over to be weighed by a member of staff.

However, it might matter for a passenger already a little tense about being flung through the air in a metal tube at ludicrous speed after passing through multiple (and occasionally performative) security gates. If, after stepping through the airport doors, the first sight a person has is of an approach to IT that would have the head of their home tech team given a stern talking-to by The Boss, what hope is there for the rest of the journey?

Heathrow and British Airways are names that rarely feature in sentences that include the words “competent IT.” There was the 2024 British Airways luggage whoopsie or last year’s Heathrow fire-related closure. Digital signage indicating that some IT contractor has not done their work to the required standard is therefore the least of their worries.

And it’s not as if either entity couldn’t afford a Windows license. Let’s face it, the cost of some baggage tipping the scales would probably go a long way toward acquiring a license key (if that is indeed the issue).

However, for an already jumpy customer, a Windows activation message is unlikely to assuage nerves already jangling over EU passport queues and overly complicated airplanes doing some odd things on approach. Perhaps the moral of today’s bork is that it is better to forget all this traveling malarky. Instead, how about a nice sit-down, a beverage, and a delicious biscuit? ®

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

Our fun links this week are a replica of Scooby Doo’s Mystery-Machine and the Saltburn cricket scandal because we need more satire right now.

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

Filed Under: ai, artificial intelligence, content moderation, dma, elon musk, eu, trust and safety

Companies: anthropic, google, meta, openai, xai

The year 2026 has marked a huge course correction for Microsoft after years of frustrating users with plenty of confusing processes, unoptimized UI elements, and just the generous bloatware that can bring any Windows system to a crawl. Microsoft has finally shifted into a new phase. From fixing the right-click behavior to speeding up the Search system, the company has fixed plenty of papercuts.

The next major milestone is making Windows 11 run smoothly on Windows PCs with just 8GB of RAM. That directly means entry-level and budget laptops will at least get the basics right, even if that means sacrificing the on-device AI bells and whistles. Let’s face it. The increasingly AI-first approach to computing on a Windows 11 machine is a little too taxing on the hardware at hand.

At last

Running the full OS experience without any jitters on a desktop or laptop PC with just 8 GB of RAM is proving to be increasingly challenging. The situation is not too different for Apple’s famously well-optimized macOS. Running the latest AI-heavy wheels of macOS Golden Gate or macOS Sequoia on older MacBooks with 8 GB of RAM, or even the new MacBook Pro, is an exercise in frustration until you decide to switch off the AI processes completely.

Pavan Davuluri, EVP of the Windows and Devices portfolio at Microsoft, says the company’s next target is memory optimization for devices with 8GB of RAM. “Reducing Windows memory footprint to deliver a fast and responsive Windows experience across the PCs customers use every day,” he wrote in a blog post. Additionally, the out-of-the-box set-up experience will also get smoother, and parental controls will also be fixed.

The situation in the PC and laptop segment is pretty grim, thanks to AI, and the pricing storm it has stirred in the memory and storage supply chain. The cost of RAM has more than quadrupled in a year, and it’s only forecasted to go up. Just a day ago, Samsung, one of the biggest players in the memory supply, said the situation won’t ease up until 2028, at the earliest.

As a result, the average selling price of laptops has kept climbing, and even the likes of Apple had to raise prices a few weeks ago. Analyst predictions are pretty disheartening, too. “The sub-$500 entry-level PC segment will disappear by 2028,” Ranjit Atwal, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, said in a research note. “PC memory costs are expected to peak at 23% of the total bill-of-materials (BOM) up from 16% in 2025,” the report adds.

A huge step forward

This is where the situation gets tricky. The makers of operating systems are increasingly pushing AI into the workflow, whether it’s a desktop on your table or on a phone in your palm. Microsoft is no different, and over the past couple of years, it has tried to push the Copilot AI experience into every corner of the Windows experience and the apps that it ships.

The company even had to create a baseline hardware requirement (an NPU that goes over 40TOPS and 16GB of RAM) for a PC to qualify as a Copilot+ machine. But the company soon realized its mistake as well. Owing to the higher asking price of its latest Surface hardware and how increasingly inaccessible they are becoming, the company launched a watered-down version of its latest Surface laptops, packing just 8 GB of RAM and lacking the Copilot+ AI branding, because it’s just not feasible to serve all those on-device AI features on a laptop with just 8 gigs of memory.

But Copilot is not the only hurdle that makes budget laptops a testing experience on a foundation with just 8 GB of RAM. There are a whole bunch of background processes and redundancies that keep Windows running slower on the same amount of RAM, whereas macOS does a much better job. I have used Apple’s MacBook Air and Neo laptops with the same RAM allowance, and they perform far more reliably than a budget Windows laptop with a similar memory allowance.

I’m glad that Microsoft is finally realizing the mistake and trimming the bloatware that could allow laptops and PCs with 8GB of RAM to perform smoothly. Given the current state of the market, laptops with 8GB of RAM — and a more affordable price tag — are desperately needed. Intel is chasing that dream with Project Dragonwing. Let’s hope Microsoft can pull off some magic. I’m not too confident, but I am certainly hopeful!

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from the show-time dept

RFK Jr. has a lot on his plate at the moment as the head of HHS. America is currently dealing with a record breaking outbreak of the measles, for instance. His agency has had a very hard time getting people confirmed for key roles. There’s that whole cyclosporiasis thing going around, which you’ll know you’ve caught it by the simple fact that you won’t be able to stop shitting yourself. There’s a huge self-inflicted talent vacuum at HHS and its child agencies. Pertussis cases are on the rise. Court orders keep blocking Kennedy’s committees.

With all of these crises and chaos, Kennedy became very angry at news reports that he was mostly checked out of the HHS work he should be doing to address all of this. It’s hard to take that anger all that seriously, though, given that Kennedy also became the very first sitting cabinet secretary to host a podcast while in office. And I have to assume it is also a first time a sitting cabinet secretary will — checks notes — host a cooking show with celebrity chefs.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has launched a show geared toward teaching Americans how to cook healthy, inexpensive meals.

“Thanks to President Trump, we flipped the food pyramid and put real food back where it belongs: at the center of the American plate,” Kennedy said in a video he posted Wednesday to YouTube touting “The Real Food Show.”  “I’m traveling across America, connecting with renowned chefs to show families how to cook delicious, nutritious meals with real ingredients, and all at affordable prices,” the HHS secretary added. “America, it’s time to eat real food. Let’s get cooking.”

Cute. How about instead you travel the country on a mass vaccination campaign for measles? Maybe some lower level member of HHS can rub elbows with celebrity chefs while you, oh, I don’t know, do literally anything concrete when it comes to cyclosporiasis. Maybe you could fill the open roles in your agencies with competent people you can get confirmed by Congress. Or maybe you could get your agencies running smoothly and with high morale.

It’s not that cooking isn’t important. It’s not even that all of Kennedy’s thoughts on food and health are wrong, because they certainly are not. But there is other, real, important work that needs to be done, leadership that needs to be demonstrated, and confidence building that needs to happen with the public. All of that is a better place for the Secretary of HHS to be spending their time, compared with cosplaying as a daytime cooking show host.

Kennedy told USA Today his new cooking show aims to convince Americans that eating healthier does not cost more.

The price of food at home and away from home both rose by 0.2 percent from May to June, according to the consumer price index, a popular measure of inflation. 

It’s actually worse than that and looking at the CPI for food on a monthly basis doesn’t tell the whole story. Year over year CPI for food is up by roughly 3%. All of that is to say that if Kennedy wants to focus on the affordability of fresh food, part of the solution would be for him to get his current boss to not play stupid games with tariffs and to stop starting the very foreign wars that he promised to keep us out of.

So, as you continue to see headlines for the very real health issues the country is currently facing, just remember that RFK Jr. is hard at work baking crab cakes and getting his plating skills just right.

Filed Under: cooking show, rfk jr.

Does It matter?: Intel is providing a startup with significant access to its chip design schematics as part of a rare licensing deal involving the x86 instruction set architecture. RosaicLabs could now theoretically build its own x86 CPU, although speculation points to more cutting-edge applications such as robotics and AI.

Reuters sources claim that Intel is entering into a secret agreement with RosaicLabs Inc., a company incorporated in Delaware just a couple of months ago. The agreement covers the register-transfer level (RTL) code for Intel’s Atom CPUs, although we don’t have any specific clues about which generation of Atom chips – or which computing core technology – is involved.

Atom chip technology is based on the x86 ISA, although it is designed to operate within significant power and form-factor constraints. In circuit design, RTL code provides a design abstraction that models data transfers between hardware registers and logical operators. In theory, RosaicLabs could use Intel’s RTL IP to develop a brand-new x86 CPU or even design something more complex based on the ISA that has powered most PCs since the IBM PC era.

A few significant hints about RosaicLabs’ business prospects come from the people actually involved in the deal. Reuters reports that the company’s CEO is Amarjit Gill, a longtime business partner of Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. Gill and Tan previously worked at Rivos, a chip company that was later acquired by Meta. Amit Parikh, Rivos’ former top financial officer, is also part of the new Rosaic venture.

Besides a long-standing cross-licensing agreement with AMD, Intel is not known for freely sharing official design documents for x86 CPUs with third-party organizations. Incorporation documents filed in Delaware state that RosaicLabs is seeking an initial funding round of $10 million, with executives free to invest up to $5 million without seeking approval from investors or the board.

It’s safe to say that one potential outcome for RosaicLabs is adapting Atom’s peculiar low-profile “skills” to this brand-new world of chip scarcity and data center overprovisioning. The “lesser” x86 processor could find a new role in edge-computing infrastructure, robotic AI, or other emerging applications. In the worst-case scenario, Lip-Bu Tan’s Intel could simply swoop in and acquire whatever RosaicLabs develops a few years down the line. Although, then again, there would be nothing particularly revolutionary about that.