Science Corporation, a start-up developing novel brain-computer interfaces (BCI), won approval from Europe’s medical device regulator to begin selling a device that restores vision lost from age-related macular degeneration.

The company said the device, called PRIMA, also received a designation from the US Food and Drug Administration that is the first step toward an expedited regulatory review, which could see the device used to treat two rare kinds of blindness.

Millions of people around the world suffer from age-related macular degeneration, which destroys the light-sensitive cells at the back of the eyes, making it difficult to read and recognize faces.

To use the device, patients suffering from this loss of vision undergo an hour-long outpatient procedure that plants a small chip in back of their eye. Then, they wear camera-equipped glasses that transmit a view of the world to the chip. Max Hodak, Science Corporation’s founder and CEO, says the product gives functional vision to people who have lost it.

“One of our patients in France finished a 300-page novel a little while ago, and sent us the book,” Hodak told TechCrunch. “We have a sketch on the wall [that] one of our patients drew of the Sydney Opera House. There are videos of patients playing crossword puzzles and filling in Sudoku.”

Hodak is known as the co-founder and former president of Neuralink, Elon Musk’s BCI start-up. He left in 2021 to start Science, with plans to develop a novel BCI based on a hybrid of silicon chips and living cells. But first, the company had to prove out its processes and develop a sustainable business.

“The thing that the space needs is a company making $100 million a year of revenue,” Hodak said. “There’s this risk that the whole thing enters a winter, and so we think it’s important to build a sustainable business as we develop these longer-term technologies.”

Hodak and his colleagues believe that sustainable business will be restoring vision to the blind, specifically patients whose conditions stem from problems with the light-detecting cells at the back of the eye. After exploring multiple approaches, they determined that Pixium, a French company that developed the PRIMA technology, had the right path forward, and acquired the firm in 2024. Science used its internal platform to build out the documentation and evolve the product to prepare it for regulatory approval and commercialization.

Each PRIMA device is expected to cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars; Science and its medical partners in Europe are currently in discussion with healthcare providers over reimbursement. The company is laying the groundwork to begin offering PRIMA in Germany, where its clinical trials were held, and could see the first procedure in September.

Science expects to continue improving the vision capabilities of PRIMA with a new chip, and the form factor of its glasses, which currently require a battery-pack to operate. The goal is to offer something like Meta’s AR glasses, but the power and compute requirements for PRIMA are more significant.

Science is also working with Dr. Murat Günel, chair of Yale Medical School’s Department of Neurosurgery, to develop procedures for human trials of a directly implanted bio-hybrid brain sensor.

Hodak says bringing PRIMA to market is “the most important thing for the company, because we don’t get to do the bio hybrid stuff long term if you don’t have a great vision business. That’s what’s really financing the rest of it — that’s the thing that investors know how to build spreadsheets around.”

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It helps if you know your past Saturday Night Live stars. Read on for all the answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Mother chicken
Answer: HEN

4A clue: Word after “leading” and “first”
Answer: LADY

5A clue: Just peachy … or a hint to the two letters that appear most often in this grid
Answer: DANDY

6A clue: Bryant of “S.N.L.” fame
Answer: AIDY

7A clue: Like overcooked chicken
Answer: DRY

NYT/Screenshot by CNET

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Helpful
Answer: HANDY

2D clue: Swirl of water
Answer: EDDY

3D clue: The Yankees, on scoreboards
Answer: NYY

4D clue: Supervillain’s hideout
Answer: LAIR

5D clue: ___ joke
Answer: DAD

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CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of “Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the ’70s and ’80s,” as well as “The Totally Sweet ’90s.” She’s been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She’s Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she’ll be first in line.

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AMD said it will also invest up to $5bn into Anthropic, marking its first equity investment into the AI giant.

Anthropic is teaming up with AMD for 2GW of its latest-generation chips in a bid to boost AI capacity and meet growing demands. The Wall Street Journal reported that the deal between the companies is worth “tens of billions of dollars”.

The partnership comes as Anthropic competes for enterprise market dominance for its AI tools and preps for a blockbuster initial public offering expected to value the company at more than $1trn.

As per the agreement, Anthropic will deploy up to 2GW of AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs in Helios rack-scale solutions. The first gigawatt is expected to be deployed in the first half of 2027.

The deal builds on Anthropic’s existing use of AMD chips and comes as demand for its Claude services sees no signs of stopping, with the company’s tech permeating across industries. For AMD, the deal represents a “major expansion” at the “centre of the global AI infrastructure buildout”, it said.

In addition, the two companies are launching a multi-year engineering collaboration to use Claude for software development at AMD. The chipmaker also announced an equity investment of up to $5bn in Anthropic – its first investment into the AI giant.

“Access to compute is central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers,” said Tom Brown, Anthropic’s chief compute officer and one of the company’s co-founders.

“By partnering with AMD across the stack, we are securing the capacity we need and optimising it for training and serving Claude. Running across a diversified range of hardware lets us map the right workloads to the right hardware.”

The company met with a positive reaction earlier this year following a major disagreement with the US government over the usage of its AI systems, which was followed by a temporary restriction on the export of some of its latest models.

“We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with Anthropic and deploy AMD Helios at gigawatt scale,” said Dr Lisa Su, the chair and CEO of AMD.

“This collaboration brings together Anthropic’s leadership in frontier AI with the full strength of AMD high-performance computing. Together, we will accelerate AI adoption at scale and establish Helios as a major platform for the next generation of AI infrastructure.”

Earlier this week, Anthropic’s $1.5bn settlement offer to quash a major AI copyright case against the company was approved. The company is set to pay around $3,000 to each of the creators behind some 500,000 individual pieces of work.

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SCIENCE

Object orbits a brown dwarf, which circles another star, confusing the cosmic taxonomy

Scientists may have found the first moon outside our Solar System – depending on what astronomers ultimately decide counts as one.

Either way, the groundbreaking research, published in Nature this week, promises a path to clearer sightings of so-called exomoons.

Kevin Hoy, a PhD student affiliated with Universidad Diego Portales and the European Southern Observatory in Chile, has found an object orbiting a brown dwarf, which in turn orbits a host star, which sits about 73 light-years from the Sun in the southern celestial hemisphere.

Brown dwarfs present a problem for astronomers. They fill the gap between gas giant planets – like Jupiter or Saturn – and the smallest stars. They are not massive enough to sustain the hydrogen fusion that powers the Sun and other main-sequence stars, although they can fuse deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen. That leaves the object found by Hoy and his collaborators in a definitional gray area.

“This is the first time, to our knowledge, this technique has produced evidence of satellites around a companion brown dwarf,” the paper said.

The first confirmed exoplanets were discovered orbiting a pulsar in 1992, but exomoons have so far proved elusive, despite there being hundreds in our own Solar System.

The researchers found that the new object, which for now they are calling an exosatellite, is decidedly unmoon-like, being at least as massive as Jupiter. The brown dwarf it orbits is around 30 times the mass of Jupiter.

“This system is somewhat hard to define using Solar-System-based words like ‘planet’ and ‘moon,’” Hoy said in a statement. “The exosatellite is clearly massive enough to be a planet, but it does not orbit a star, though it orbits an object that orbits a star. Being the third wheel in this system makes us want to call it a moon, even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system.”

The research team employed the radial velocity method used by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz to discover 51 Pegasi b in 1995, the first exoplanet found orbiting a Sun-like star. The technique detects the gravitational “wobble” induced in a host object – usually a star, but in this case a brown dwarf – by something orbiting it. Modeling of the data indicates that there is at least one orbiting satellite. Models for two satellites are possible but highly unstable. Whether a moon or not, the object has a minimum mass about nine-tenths that of Jupiter and completes an orbit every 170 days.

“Although it is uncertain whether this exosatellite will fulfil the presently undefined criteria for qualifying as an exomoon, it is a marked step towards that first uncontroversial detection, as advancing technology will allow the same method to be applied to less massive targets,” the paper says.

At roughly Jupiter’s mass, this is no forest moon of Endor. Finding something more like the moons in our own neighborhood will have to wait for sharper instruments. ®

Camille Hanson woke one night in March to a notification: Meta had flagged her Facebook and Instagram accounts for deletion. She and her husband ran an English-teaching business there with nearly a million followers. Meta said she had breached its rules on fraud and deception, the New York Times reported.

She appealed. A week later Meta denied it. “All your information will be permanently deleted,” the reply read. “You cannot request another review of this decision.” The Hansons run the business from Portugal, so it was, as her husband put it, like someone shutting your storefront overnight.

Humans out of the loop

In March, Meta said it would hand more power to AI to judge which accounts break its rules and to handle the appeals. Months later, it laid off thousands of staff, including people who did exactly that work.

More than 60,000 users have since signed a petition asking Meta to explain its bans and to let a human review appeals. Reddit forums have filled with the same complaint: an automated system deletes an account, and no person answers.

Meta’s defence

Meta rejects the idea that AI is worse than people. Spokesman Daniel Roberts said its new moderation tools make 13% fewer mistakes than human staff and catch 10% more violations. The five accounts the Times flagged, he noted, were all banned by Meta’s older tools.

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“We’re committed to making fewer enforcement mistakes and helping individuals protect their accounts, and AI is delivering on both,” he said.

The company has had a rough run with automation, though. In May, hackers turned its AI customer-service chatbot against 34,000 Instagram accounts. Staff also revolted over a program that tracked their keystrokes to train AI. It has faced chaos on its AI ad tools too.

A Kafkaesque pattern

The wrongful bans often carry the worst possible label. Athenia Rodney, who has run the group JuneteenthNY for 17 years, had her accounts deleted over alleged child exploitation material. Her content, she said, is family friendly. Hackers had in fact seized her accounts.

To recover them she sent identity documents, complained to the FTC, and messaged Meta staff on LinkedIn. Nothing worked until the Times intervened. Meta restored one influencer, then banned him again days later for copyright, then reinstated him once more.

The European angle

The stakes are higher in Europe, where the same automated bans reach WhatsApp. The tech writer M.G. Siegler, banned three times, described his sudden WhatsApp lockout, with no warning or explanation. Much of the continent runs daily life through the app, from work to childcare.

Meta insists big decisions stay human. After 26 former staff sued, claiming an algorithm picked them for layoffs, Meta said such calls are “made by people, not AI.” Yet for millions of users, only a bot stands between them and deletion. The appeal is a bot too. The backlash is unlikely to fade while regulators sharpen their focus on platform accountability.

security

Sunday-to-Monday onslaught fuels speculation over AI-assisted bug reports

If you’re responsible for Linux security, someone just dumped a pile of work onto your desk: 432 Linux kernel CVEs were published across Sunday and Monday this week. Linux watchers at nixCraft pointed out the volume on Monday morning, and it didn’t take long for seasoned sysadmins to start expressing concerns.

Jan Schaumann, chief information security architect at Akamai Technologies, took to the OSS-SEC mailing list Tuesday to express concerns over the sheer volume of Linux kernel CVEs published in recent days. Aside from noting that the CVE system isn’t the best way to track security changes, Schaumann also wondered in his post whether there was any good way to deal with so many kernel security issues.

“This onslaught really shows it’s not feasible to attempt to prioritize individual kernel changes,” Schaumann said. 

“You might attempt to process this large set of changes by pointing an LLM at the intake and asking it to prioritize them,” he suggested, “but if it spits out a dozen today and another 25 the next, you haven’t won much.”

Schaumann also suggested waiting to see which ones emerge as serious issues and focusing on those in the weeks to come, or updating one’s entire fleet of Linux machines on a weekly basis. 

“I sure would like to be able to do [that], but reality keeps getting in my way,” Schaumann said. “I’m not sure what to do here going forward.”

In an email to The Register, Schaumann said that individually reviewing vulnerabilities for patching was already difficult enough before things rose to this level, and that automation may be the only option – but it’s not a great one. 

“Automated, regular, and frequent updates that pull in all changes within a given time window of tolerance seem to me the only reasonable approach, but that is very difficult for many large organizations,” Schaumann explained. Those orgs often rely on lengthy QA processes, slow and staged development cycles, and may even have contractual requirements for long-term support that make an automated approach an impossible one. 

The nixCraft team speculated on social media that AI bug reports are a likely reason for all those kernel CVEs, which wouldn’t be without precedent – Linus Torvalds himself said in May that the Linux kernel security mailing list had become “almost entirely unmanageable” due to AI-assisted bug hunting. Nonetheless, Torvalds has described AI as a useful tool for Linux development while still noting it can be a drag for maintainers, both from a workload standpoint and the fact “it keeps finding embarrassing bugs.”

On that note, it’s worth understanding what a Linux kernel CVE actually means – many of the vulnerabilities included in the Sunday-to-Monday batch are small in scope, but they’re vulnerabilities nonetheless.

As senior Linux maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman noted in a February blog post, the Linux kernel CVE team follows the CVE Program’s definition of a vulnerability: a weakness in a product that can negatively affect a system’s confidentiality, integrity, or availability.

“At the level that the Linux kernel runs, almost any type of bug that can affect a running system can be classified as a vulnerability,” Kroah-Hartman noted. The kernel team looks at every bugfix that is added to stable kernel releases, he added, and if it fixes an issue that meets that CVE criteria, a CVE is assigned. 

AI-assisted bug hunting has increased the volume of reports reaching Linux kernel maintainers. We reached out to the Linux kernel team, but didn’t hear back. Kroah-Hartman did tell The Register earlier this year that AI bug reports had become worthwhile in recent months, and he predicted they’re likely to keep adding to his workload. 

Unfortunately for Linux sysadmins, the position in which they find themselves in this current mess isn’t one that’s readily solved. CVEs might be a messy way to track and prioritize security updates, especially when hundreds of them are published over a short period, but without something better, it falls to IT and security teams to determine which vulnerabilities affect their systems and which kernel updates they need to deploy.

Hope you’ve got the coffee machine filled up: The onslaught is unlikely to ease if other recent patch cycles are any indication. ®

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