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A chip-to-cloud assurance architecture enabling secure, resilient, and safe autonomy across robots, sensors, and humans.

ZTASP is a mission-scale assurance and governance platform designed for autonomous systems operating in real-world environments. It integrates heterogeneous systems—including drones, robots, sensors, and human operators—into a unified zero-trust architecture. Through Secure Runtime Assurance (SRTA) and Secure Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (SSTR), ZTASP continuously verifies system integrity, enforces safety constraints, and enables resilient operation even under degraded conditions.

ZTASP has progressed beyond conceptual design, with operational validation at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 7 in mission critical environments. Core components, including Saluki secure flight controllers, have reached TRL8 and are deployed in customer systems. While initially developed for high-consequence mission environments, the same assurance challenges are increasingly present across domains such as healthcare, transportation, and critical infrastructure.

Learning Outcomes for Audience

1. Explain the limitations of perimeter-based security models in governing distributed autonomous systems, and articulate why zero trust principles—particularly continuous verification and least-privilege access—are essential for multi-agent environments operating at the edge.
2. Describe the role of Secure Runtime Assurance (SRTA) in enforcing safety constraints on autonomous agents in real time, drawing on approaches from runtime monitoring, formal verification, and safety-wrapper architectures.
3. Evaluate how Secure Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (SSTR) enables context-aware decision-making across heterogeneous systems such as drones, ground robots, sensors, and human operators, and compare this with conventional coordination approaches.
4. Identify the key engineering trade-offs involved in designing chip-to-cloud assurance architectures—including latency, computational constraints on edge devices, communication resilience under degraded conditions, and trust propagation across distributed networks.

Click on the cover to download the white paper PDF and explore how continuous assurance enables trusted autonomy at mission scale.

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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.

In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined by Fadza Madzingira, a digital policy expert with a decade of experience at Meta, Salesforce, Ofcom and currently Twitch, where she leads the policy, outreach and education teams. Together, they discuss:

We’re still yet to find a Ctrl-Alt-Speech 2026 Bingo Card winner — could this week be your lucky day? Play along.

Filed Under: child safety, content moderation, greece, oversight board, trust and safety

Companies: meta, twitch

Apple is closing three of its retail stores this summer, including its first location to unionize. The tech company said it plans to permanently close Apple Store in Trumbull, CT, Escondito, CA, and Towson, MD. The Apple Store location in Towson, was the first where unionized workers and Apple reached a contract agreement back in 2024.

MacRumors published a statement from Apple confirming the closures. The company credited noting “the departure of several retailers and declining conditions” at the shopping centers where this trio of stores are housed as the reason for ending operations. “Our team members at Trumbull and North County will continue their roles at nearby Apple Retail stores,” the statement reads. “Towson employees will be eligible to apply for open roles at Apple in accordance with the collective bargaining agreement.” We reached out to the company for additional comment, and were sent the same statement.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which leads the union the Towson workers had joined, released a statement about the closure. “Apple’s claim that the collective bargaining agreement prevents relocation is simply false and raises serious concerns that this closure is a cynical attempt to bust the union,” the organization said. “We are exploring all legal options and will work with elected officials and allies to hold Apple accountable.”

In short: OpenAI has paused its Stargate UK data centre project, citing the high cost of industrial electricity in Britain and an unfavourable regulatory environment around AI copyright. The project, announced in September 2025 alongside Nvidia and Nscale, had planned to deploy 8,000 GPUs at sites in north-east England, scalable to 31,000 over time. OpenAI says it will move forward “when the right conditions” allow, though it has given no timeline. The pause is a significant setback for the UK government’s AI Growth Zones initiative and arrives as OpenAI prepares for a public listing.

What Stargate UK was supposed to be

Stargate UK was announced in September 2025 as a sovereign AI infrastructure project: a partnership between OpenAI, Nvidia, and British cloud provider Nscale to build data centre capacity in north-east England that would allow OpenAI’s models to run on local computing power. The sites earmarked were Cobalt Park near Newcastle and Blyth, both within the UK government’s designated AI Growth Zones, a framework the government had positioned as a centrepiece of its industrial strategy for artificial intelligence. The project was unveiled during US President Donald Trump’s state visit to Britain, giving it diplomatic as well as commercial significance. The initial phase involved off take of approximately 8,000 Nvidia AI processors, with an ambition to scale that to 31,000 GPUs over time,  capacity that would have enabled OpenAI to serve critical public services, regulated industries such as finance, and national security partnerships without routing data through US-based infrastructure. OpenAI never disclosed the total investment figure associated with the UK project. The broader US Stargate project remains on track with data centre construction under way across the United States, backed by a $40 billion bridge loan SoftBank secured to finance its participation, making the UK pause a geographic exception rather than a signal of retreat from AI infrastructure spending overall.

The energy cost problem

The most concrete obstacle OpenAI identified is the cost of electricity in Britain. UK industrial electricity prices are among the highest of any IEA member state,  more than four times those in the United States, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. For a data centre drawing 100 megawatts, that differential is not a line-item concern but a structural one: the economics of running large-scale AI inference workloads at a site where power costs four times as much as they do in Virginia or Texas are fundamentally different, and that gap compounds as capacity scales. The problem is not simply a matter of electricity tariffs. Grid connection requests in the UK surged from 41 gigawatts in November 2024 to 125 gigawatts by June 2025, with an estimated 75 gigawatts of that queue attributable to data centre projects. Buildings can be constructed in 18 to 24 months; grid connections take three to eight years. That mismatch means that even if a project clears the financial hurdle, it faces an infrastructure queue that the current regulatory and planning framework has not been designed to process at AI-infrastructure speeds. The UK government’s AI Growth Zones policy, published in November 2025, was intended in part to address exactly this bottleneck, but the zone designations do not resolve the underlying grid constraints, and OpenAI’s decision to pause suggests that the policy framework has not yet translated into the conditions that would make the investment viable.

The copyright sticking point

The regulatory concern OpenAI cited alongside energy costs points to a separate and more politically charged problem: the UK’s unresolved approach to AI copyright. UK lawmakers have been working to update the rules governing how AI models are trained on copyrighted material. The government’s preferred approach, a broad text and data mining exception with an opt-out mechanism for rights holders, was rejected by the majority of respondents to the government’s own consultation, with creative industries, publishers, and news organisations arguing that a broad exception would allow generative AI companies to train on their works without compensation or meaningful consent. The consultation produced no consensus, and the government has since delayed any legislative change. For OpenAI, which trains large language models on text scraped from the internet, the uncertainty about whether that training will be lawful, and on what terms, is a material business risk. A UK data centre is not simply a power facility,  it creates legal jurisdiction. If the UK eventually adopts a copyright framework that restricts training data use more tightly than the US, operating infrastructure in Britain could expose OpenAI to liability or compliance costs that do not apply to its US operations. The pause allows OpenAI to wait for that regulatory picture to clarify before committing capital.

A pause, not a cancellation, and the IPO context

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

OpenAI’s statement was calibrated to leave the door open. “We continue to explore Stargate U.K. and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment,” the company said, framing the decision as contingent rather than final. The timing, however, is notable. OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation in late March 2026, extending participation to retail investors for the first time in a move widely interpreted as groundwork for a public offering analysts expect as early as the fourth quarter of 2026. Companies approaching an IPO typically tighten their capital allocation discipline, avoid open-ended international commitments that could weigh on reported cash burn, and reduce exposure to projects with uncertain timelines. Pausing a data centre project that faces both energy cost headwinds and an unresolved copyright regime fits that pattern. The UK government, which had promoted Stargate UK as a signal of international investor confidence in Britain’s AI ambitions, described the decision as disappointing and said it remained in dialogue with OpenAI. OpenAI’s international Stargate expansion has not been without complications elsewhere either, its Abu Dhabi data centre plans drew an explicit threat from Iranian authorities amid escalating regional tensions, suggesting that sovereign AI infrastructure projects carry geopolitical risk profiles that are becoming a distinct factor in OpenAI’s site selection calculus. Meanwhile, Oracle appointed a new CFO this week to manage its $50 billion data centre construction programme as the central operating partner in the US Stargate project,  a contrast that illustrates where AI infrastructure spending remains active and where it is being reconsidered. The year 2025 established infrastructure access and energy as the primary competitive variables in AI,  and for the UK, OpenAI’s pause is a signal that it has not yet solved either.

Gemini is getting a new feature in the form of notebooks, further integrating with NotebookLM, Google announced on Wednesday.

NotebookLM is easily one of Google’s best AI tools available. It allows you to add sources to a notebook and ask questions or generate a series of outputs, based only on the material you’ve given it, making it self-contained. 

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It’s different from the Gemini chatbot on its own, which will search the entire internet for an answer. NotebookLM’s answers are grounded only in your sources. It’s great for studying for school, getting prepped for work and even creative inspiration. There’s no wrong way to use it, and its flexibility lends itself to be explored, so it comes as no surprise that it’s getting further integrated into Google’s own chatbot.

Late last year, Google allowed you to add a NotebookLM notebook into Gemini so it would have all the context you added. Google says to look at notebooks as personal knowledge bases. You can add files, past chats and documents on a particular subject, and you can always jump back into that conversation with Gemini and pick up where you left off. Having a dedicated space to keep things in one place is great on its own for Gemini, but you can use those notebooks in NotebookLM, too. 

Notebooks make it easier to keep all the information on a particular subject in one place and give Gemini everything it needs without having to manually add details all over again. Now, that integration goes even further, and you can create notebooks directly in Gemini. 

Notebooks can be synchronized between Gemini and NotebookLM, making the data in one tool instantly available in the other. This means you can add artifacts to the notebook in Gemini and immediately have the option to create a Video Overview, Infographic or other outputs within NotebookLM. Having the same synced notebook in both tools allows you to use each tool in its own way with the same database.

When the feature is available, you’ll see a new notebooks section in the side menu bar of Gemini, allowing you to quickly create one or access others you’ve made in the past. 

Google is rolling out Notebooks in Gemini to AI Ultra, Pro and Plus plans on the web, and will expand access to mobile, more countries across Europe and free users in the coming weeks. 

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced on Thursday his office will investigate OpenAI for its alleged harm to minors, potential to threaten national security, and its possible link to a shooting that took place at Florida State University last year.

“ChatGPT may likely have been used to assist the murderer in the recent mass school shooting at Florida State University that tragically took two lives,” Attorney General Uthmeier said in a video posted to social media.

On the day of the FSU shooting last April, the suspect allegedly asked ChatGPT how the country would react to a shooting at FSU, and what time it would be busiest at the FSU student union. These messages could potentially be used as evidence against the suspect in an October trial about the shooting.

The attorney general cited further concerns about ChatGPT’s encouragement of suicide in certain instances, which have been documented in multiple lawsuits brought by families against OpenAI. He also mentioned his concern that the Chinese Communist Party could use OpenAI’s technology against the United States.

“As big tech rolls out these technologies, they should not — they cannot — put our safety and security at risk,” he said. “We support innovation. But that doesn’t give any company the right to endanger our children, facilitate criminal activity, empower America’s enemies, or threaten our national security.”

OpenAI is throwing its support behind an Illinois state bill that would shield AI labs from liability in cases where AI models are used to cause serious societal harms, such as death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1 billion in property damage.

The effort seems to mark a shift in OpenAI’s legislative strategy. Until now, OpenAI has largely played defense, opposing bills that could have made AI labs liable for their technology’s harms. Several AI policy experts tell WIRED that SB 3444—which could set a new standard for the industry—is a more extreme measure than bills OpenAI has supported in the past.

The bill would shield frontier AI developers from liability for “critical harms” caused by their frontier models as long as they did not intentionally or recklessly cause such an incident, and have published safety, security, and transparency reports on their website. It defines a frontier model as any AI model trained using more than $100 million in computational costs, which likely could apply to America’s largest AI labs, like OpenAI, Google, xAI, Anthropic, and Meta.

“We support approaches like this because they focus on what matters most: Reducing the risk of serious harm from the most advanced AI systems while still allowing this technology to get into the hands of the people and businesses—small and big—of Illinois,” said OpenAI spokesperson Jamie Radice in an emailed statement. “They also help avoid a patchwork of state-by-state rules and move toward clearer, more consistent national standards.”

Under its definition of critical harms, the bill lists a few common areas of concern for the AI industry, such as a bad actor using AI to create a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon. If an AI model engages in conduct on its own that, if committed by a human, would constitute a criminal offense and leads to those extreme outcomes, that would also be a critical harm. If an AI model were to commit any of these actions under SB 3444, the AI lab behind the model may not be held liable, so long as it wasn’t intentional and they published their reports.

Federal and state legislatures in the US have yet to pass any laws specifically determining whether AI model developers, like OpenAI, could be liable for these types of harm caused by their technology. But as AI labs continue to release more powerful AI models that raise novel safety and cybersecurity challenges, such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, these questions feel increasingly prescient.

In her testimony supporting SB 3444, a member of OpenAI’s Global Affairs team, Caitlin Niedermeyer, also argued in favor of a federal framework for AI regulation. Niedermeyer struck a message that’s consistent with the Trump administration’s crackdown on state AI safety laws, claiming it’s important to avoid “a patchwork of inconsistent state requirements that could create friction without meaningfully improving safety.” This is also consistent with the broader view of Silicon Valley in recent years, which has generally argued that it’s paramount for AI legislation to not hamper America’s position in the global AI race. While SB 3444 is itself a state-level safety law, Niedermeyer argued that those can be effective if they “reinforce a path toward harmonization with federal systems.”

“At OpenAI, we believe the North Star for frontier regulation should be the safe deployment of the most advanced models in a way that also preserves US leadership in innovation,” Niedermeyer said.

Scott Wisor, policy director for the Secure AI project, tells WIRED he believes this bill has a slim chance of passing, given Illinois’ reputation for aggressively regulating technology. “We polled people in Illinois, asking whether they think AI companies should be exempt from liability, and 90 percent of people oppose it. There’s no reason existing AI companies should be facing reduced liability,” Wisor says.