Security

Clinical trial participant data stolen, but pharma giant says exposed records were pseudonymized

Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk says data related to clinical trial participants was stolen as part of a cyberattack.

The affected patient data was pseudonymized and not directly linked to names or other direct identifiers, the company said.

The maker of the Wegovy weight-loss drug said the affected data types include patient ID, information on trial participation, gender, year of birth, biomarkers, health/immunogenicity data, and lifestyle factors including smoking status, alcohol use, and BMI.

“This information is not directly linked to any patients by name or other direct identifiers,” the Novo Nordisk said on its dedicated page for the attack.

“Information about identity would therefore require access to underlying information, identifying patients by name etc. This information was not exposed. We therefore do not consider the incident to enable any third party to identify participants in our clinical trials.”

The same statement confirmed that the attack affected a “limited number of internal IT systems,” and the company said some systems have been taken offline as a precaution. 

Although it does not believe there is an immediate risk stemming from the breach, it nonetheless warned patients to remain vigilant for anything that could be connected to the data stolen during the attack.

A separate letter sent to the company’s healthcare partners (HCPs) states that additional personal information may have been stolen and could lead to targeted phishing attempts.

Affected HCP data includes names and registration numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, WhatsApp details, and office locations.

“Based on the nature of the exposed data, the potential consequences of the incident include targeted phishing attempts through emails, phone, and WhatsApp, or fraudulent communications impersonating colleagues,” Novo Nordisk said in the letter.

“We recommend that you remain vigilant against unexpected messages or calls and report any suspicious activity to us.”

The pharma biz warned that it may take time to bring these systems back online, but it is working to do so “in a controlled and safe manner.”

Elsewhere, it all sounds like standard practice. Outside experts were called in to help investigate, and Novo Nordisk has not yet confirmed the scale of the breach, nor will it until the experts have more time to assess the damage.

Novo Nordisk added that the attack has had no impact on its core business operations, which remain running as normal.

The attack was announced on what should have been a day of celebration for the company, whose flagship semaglutide weight-loss and diabetes pill received the green light to become the UK’s first daily GLP-1 tablet hours earlier.

The Wegovy pill joins the list of approved weight-management treatments that act as agonists for the GLP-1 receptor. All the other approved treatments are injectables, including Wegovy and Ozempic, both of which are also developed by Novo Nordisk.

The Danish company employs roughly 67,900 people across 80 countries, and markets products in nearly every country globally. ®

• Only five of the 45 citations accurately reflected real sources
• Some were totally fake, others included “garbled” attributions and titles
• GPTZero argues vibe citations have consequences, with reports disseminated globally

GPTZero investigators have revealed how major government reports, academic papers and other research are becoming plagued with AI hallucinations, so much so that the company is on its second report exploring the trend.

In the latest embarassing incident, a KPMG report on agentic AI was in fact found to be filled with AI-generated errors, false citations and misleading case studies.

Mozilla built an AI kill switch into Firefox after its users demanded one. Only 1% have used it. Another 3% turned off some AI features selectively. The rest left everything on. CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo says the point is not the percentage but the choice.

“Our community was pretty vocal, especially during the CEO announcement, that not everyone wanted AI,” Enzor-DeMeo told CNET. “At its core, we want to listen to our users. It was honestly on the roadmap, but I expedited it, given the community feedback.”

The low usage rate suggests that most people who said they wanted an AI kill switch either did not follow through or found specific features, like AI-powered translation, useful enough to keep. Enzor-DeMeo pointed to this as validation that Firefox’s approach works. The differentiator is not removing AI but offering control, something he contrasted with Microsoft defaulting to Copilot on Windows desktops and Google silently downloading a 4 GB AI model onto users’ machines.

Firefox’s newest feature is Smart Window, now available in beta. It lets users choose which AI model to run inside the browser, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or privately hosted open-source models. “They all excel at different things. Why do I need to be forced into one of them?” Enzor-DeMeo said. Mozilla says it does not use chat data to train models and automatically filters out sensitive information.

The browser also launched a free built-in VPN last month. It has 1.5 million signups and roughly 800,000 active users. Enzor-DeMeo said building VPN directly into the browser was a top priority because clicking a button is easier than opening a separate app. The VPN only encrypts browser traffic, not activity in other apps.

A full redesign, codenamed Project Nova, is coming in September or October. It includes faster page loads (up to 9% improvement), compact mode, rounded UI elements, AI-powered tab grouping, and accessibility features. Firefox has around 200 million monthly users and just over 2% of the browser market, compared to Chrome’s 70% and Safari’s 16%.

Enzor-DeMeo framed the stakes in global terms. He cited data showing 83% of the world’s population has not used AI, and only about 3% of Americans pay for it. He called AI “largely non-profitable” and predicted more ads in AI services soon. “If we actually go the route that AI becomes more centred in the browser, and that’s how people access the internet, you run the risk of the internet becoming more closed off.”

Mozilla’s position is that the browser should be the user’s agent, not the AI company’s distribution channel. Whether 200 million users and 2% market share are enough to make that argument matter is the open question for Firefox. But the 1% kill switch stat tells a more nuanced story than the backlash suggested. People wanted the option. They did not want to use it. That is a distinction the broader AI debate has struggled to make.

Why it matters: The largest IPO in history did two things at once: it made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, and it quietly converted a privately held rocket company into a stock that millions of investors may soon own whether they chose to or not. SpaceX isn’t asking Wall Street to price its launches or its satellites. It’s asking the market to bet that a rocket company is on its way to becoming one of the most valuable AI companies on Earth, and to start paying for that future today.

SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq on Friday under the ticker SPCX, and the numbers attached to the debut are the kind that usually require a footnote to believe. The company priced 555.6 million Class A shares at $135 on Thursday evening, raising roughly $75 billion and valuing the firm at about $1.77 trillion before a single share changed hands. That makes it the biggest initial public offering in history, nearly triple Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion listing in 2019, the record it displaced.

The stock did what hotly anticipated debuts tend to do. It opened around $150, about 11% above the offer price, then swung as high as the $168 to $175 range in the first minutes of live trading before settling near $158 to $165 by midday. At those levels SpaceX briefly carried a market capitalization north of $2 trillion, placing it among the most valuable public companies in the world on day one.

But not to be surprised, the headline most news outlets led with was personal rather than corporate. Elon Musk, who holds an estimated 42% of SpaceX and acts as chairman, chief executive, and controlling shareholder, became the world’s first trillionaire, at least on paper. That wealth is tied up in stock and options across SpaceX and Tesla.

Musk rang the opening bell from SpaceX’s headquarters in Starbase, Texas alongside hundreds of employees, while president Gwynne Shotwell and CFO Bret Johnsen handled the ceremony in New York. “Take the fiction out of science fiction,” Musk said before the session opened, restating the Mars ambitions that have always been part of the pitch.

The AI story is doing a lot of the work

Strip away the spectacle and the SpaceX’s trillion-dollar valuation rests on a forecast, not a balance sheet. SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.9 billion in 2025 on revenue of about $18.6 billion, so investors are not paying $1.77 trillion for current profits. They are paying for what the company says comes next.

Credit: App Economy Insights

The filing makes that explicit. SpaceX estimates a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, with roughly $26.5 trillion of it attributed to AI, a category the company entered in earnest after absorbing Musk’s xAI earlier this year. Beyond Starship and Starlink, the SEC documents describe plans for terrestrial data centers, custom AI microchips, and what SpaceX calls orbital AI compute infrastructure.

In other words, the rocket company is asking the market to value it largely as an AI company, which is why the offering is being read as the first in an expected wave that includes OpenAI and Anthropic.

For retail investors, that framing is the appeal. SpaceX targeted about 30% retail participation, well above the 10% typical of a large IPO, and the listing offers one of the few direct routes into a major AI player outside Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet. Fidelity reported more than 500,000 buy orders within the first hour.

But not everyone is buying the story

The skeptics are loud, and they are not all anonymous. Morningstar this week pegged SpaceX’s fair value at roughly $63 a share, less than half the IPO price, calling the offering overvalued. That is a striking gap for a name generating this much demand.

The sharper critique concerns who ends up holding the stock. Several index providers, including Nasdaq and FTSE Russell, recently adopted fast-entry rules that could add SpaceX to major indexes well inside the year that benchmarks have historically required after an IPO. Because index funds must mirror their benchmarks, inclusion forces automatic buying, which means millions of savers could gain exposure to an unprofitable company without ever choosing the stock. S&P Dow Jones declined to bend its rules, so the S&P 500 will wait, but the broader point stands.

Economist Paul Krugman put it most bluntly, describing Musk as a “human Ponzi scheme” and arguing that the rule changes effectively conscript ordinary investors into propping up a valuation built on belief rather than fundamentals. He notes that index and index-based funds now hold roughly 52% of mutual fund assets, which is how a debut like this reaches people who never opted in.

That is the tension worth watching. SpaceX has a real and rare asset in Starlink, a launch business with no genuine competitor, and an engineering record that few firms can match.

Whether any of that justifies a two-trillion-dollar valuation, or whether the AI pivot is doing more lifting than the engineering, is a question the next few quarters will start to answer. For now, the most-watched stock chart in the market belongs to a company that is selling tomorrow harder than it is selling today.

Bowers & Wilkins used High End Vienna 2026 to make a serious statement with the new 801 Diamond D5. It’s the British speaker maker’s flagship floorstanding loudspeaker in the 800 Series Diamond line-up, now in its fifth generation. The company has not been seen at this particular show for several years, but they thought it would be the most appropriate venue to unveil their new top dog. And it certainly made an impression.

Our Bowers & Wilkins 801 D5 launch preview covered the core changes, including the updated Diamond Dome tweeter implementation, revised cabinet architecture, upgraded internal bracing, new crossover network, and the broader refinements B&W says are designed to lower resonance, lower distortion and improve resolution, dynamics, and imaging.

But how do all of these refinements actually sound? Pretty damn good.

We got to hear the Bowers & Wilkins 801 D5 in a proper demo room in Vienna, which matters because show-floor impressions are usually about as reliable as hotel Wi-Fi during press day. Listening in a controlled room to a handful of songs does not turn a trade show demo into a full review, but it does give us a much better sense of what the loudspeaker can do. And this is particularly relevant when the product in question costs $65,000 per pair and sits at the top of one of the most recognizable high-end loudspeaker families in the world.

The 801 has always carried more weight than just its physical footprint. You might say it’s the core of Bowers & Wilkin’s’ identity. The original 801 (known then as the Series 80 Model 801) arrived in 1979 — for just $2,850/pair in those ancient dollars. It quickly became closely associated with Bowers & Wilkins’ studio-monitoring reputation, including its long connection with Abbey Road Studios. The new 801 D5 continues that lineage with an improved Diamond Dome tweeter with newly designed mesh grill, first seen in the company’s even more expensive D4 “Signature” line. In fact, many of the advancements in the D5 series first debuted in the company’s Signature line-up.

Other notable design features include Bowers & Wilkins Continuum midrange driver, distinctive tweeter-on-top and turbine-head enclosure, and substantial low-frequency architecture. From the outside, the D5 series does not look like a radical reinvention. That is not really the point. Bowers & Wilkins is playing the long game here: refinement, mechanical control, lower cabinet noise, lower resonance, better integration, and a more polished version of a formula that had already worked quite well, thank you very much.

In our first listen at High End Vienna last week, the 801 D5 sounded like a flagship speaker should: large in scale, extended, yet controlled in the bass, precise yet delicate in the highs and supremely present in the midrange. Bowers & Wilkins best sonic trick — the ability to disappear entirely and let the singers and instruments be there with you in the listening room — is still apparent in the D5 series. At least it is in the flagship, but likely in the rest of the line as well, since they share so much in technology, parts and design.

The 801 D5 sounded clean, composed, and physically effortless, with the kind of low-end authority that reminds you why full-range loudspeakers still matter when they are engineered properly. No subwoofers here. You won’t need one.

The Bottom Line

While many of the revisions in the Diamond D5 Series are invisible to the eyes, they were audible to the ears. It takes the already excellent D4 version and makes everything just a little bit better: a little cleaner, a little tighter, a little more transparent. We certainly saw (and heard) many speakers at HIGH END 2026 that cost more than the 801 D5 (some more than 10X more), but few could come close to it in sonic transparency and realism. And that’s saying something.

Price & Availability

The most recent previous generations of the 800 Series may still be available while supplies last:

• 801 D4 (2021) – $46,000/pair in Gloss Black, Satin Rosenut, Satin Walnut, or White
• 801 D4 Signature (2023) – $60,000/pair in Midnight Blue Metallic or California Burl Gloss
• 801 Abbey Road Edition (2025) – $70,000/pair in Vintage Walnut (limited to 140 pairs)
• 801 D5 (2026) – $65,000/pair in Stealth Black, Light Walnut, Warm White, or Dark Walnut

For more information: bowerswilkins.com

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ai and ml

GPTZero claims only 5 of the report’s 45 citations matched their sources, raising questions about how the Big Four’s AI study was assembled

KPMG’s October 2025 report on the wonders of agentic AI has been accused of demonstrating one of the tech’s less desirable talents: making things up.

Research outfit GPTZero claims a forensic review of the Big Four firm’s October 2025 report, “Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI,” found that only five of its 45 citations correctly pointed to the cited source; the rest ranged from mangled and misleading to partially fabricated or too vague to verify.

The consulting industry has form here. Last year, Deloitte ended up refunding the Australian government after AI-generated content slipped into a taxpayer-funded report. 

GPTZero dubbed the phenomenon “vibe citing” – the citation equivalent of vibe coding – where generative AI appears to stitch together fragments of real sources, invent titles, or otherwise produce references that look convincing until someone actually clicks them.

GPTZero alleges that roughly half of the report’s factual claims were false, unsupported, or attributed to the wrong source. Several case studies highlighting supposedly cutting-edge deployments of agentic AI appear to have been particularly creative.

Among the examples highlighted by GPTZero were purported agentic AI deployments at UBS, Swiss Federal Railways, and Transport for London. According to GPTZero, the sources cited to support those case studies either did not substantiate the report’s claims or contained alterations and paraphrasing that undermined their reliability.

“These factual errors are not confined to the report’s footnoted passages,” GPTZero said. “On page 42, the authors claim that Emirates airline has adopted a mobile chatbot named Sara (false) that can converse directly with passengers (partially true) and change their flights (false). In fact, Sara is a robot assistant introduced by Emirates in 2023 (not a chatbot) that lacks the ability to alter flight bookings.”

Not all of the alleged problems involved external sources. GPTZero noted that the report appears to contradict KPMG’s own research, citing a figure of 55 percent of CEOs ranking AI as their top investment priority. KPMG’s 2025 CEO Outlook, released the same month, put the number at 71 percent.

KPMG has since removed the report from some of its websites while it investigates how the publication made it into the wild, according to the Financial Times.

A spokesperson at KPMG told The Register: 

“KPMG International takes the accuracy and integrity of its published content seriously. The report has been removed and we are reviewing the circumstances surrounding its publication. We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources.”

Consulting firms have spent years warning clients about AI hallucinations. According to GPTZero, KPMG may have just provided a live demonstration. ®

Bullying. Isolation. Stress.

Everyone experiences these on the journey from adolescence to adulthood, but new data on the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth shows the additional pressures they face increases their risk of suicide compared to their peers.

The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth, has released its most recent survey of 16,000 LGBTQ+ young people 13 to 24. Among the most concerning figures was one in 10 participants reporting that they had attempted suicide during the previous year. And more than one-third seriously considered suicide.

Experts also tell EdSurge that the strain of mental health issues and unwelcoming school settings directly harm students’ ability to thrive in, or even attend, their classes.

Despite the sobering results of the survey, the data also reveals solutions — including a role for schools.

“One of the most important findings is that when adults, institutions, and communities become more affirming, the suicide risk of LGBTQ+ young people goes down,” Ronita Nath, the Trevor Project’s vice president of research, says. “Schools play a life-saving support by creating environments where LGBTQ+ young people feel safe, accepted and supported.”

Feeling the Pressure

With 2026 on track to be another record-breaking year for anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced at the state and federal levels, a vast majority of survey respondents said they felt stressed, anxious or unsafe due to the policies and the debates surrounding them.

When those young people are caught in the crossfire of heated political debates, Nath says the negative rhetoric that trickles down has real consequences. Youth who reported experiencing victimization due to their gender identity or sexual orientation — like bullying, physical harm or exposure to conversion therapy — were three times as likely to attempt suicide as their peers.

Those risks dropped among survey participants who said their school affirmed their identity. Support can look like adopting curriculum that counters anti-LGBTQ+ bias and increasing access to mental health services.

Forty-four percent of survey participants said they couldn’t access the mental health services they needed. Some of the barriers to those services were tangible, like not being able to afford transportation to see a counselor. But many were not: they cited fear of their mental health problems not being taken seriously, not being understood by a mental healthcare provider, or past negative experiences that made young people hesitant to seek services again.

Nath encouraged schools to offer gender and sexuality alliances (GSAs), ensure anti-harassment policies were in place and provide professional development for educators to help ease students’ discomfort. “We know [that] not only improves mental health and well-being for LGBTQ+ youth, but for all their peers,” she says.

Strain on School Success

Research shows that well-being, engagement and a sense of belonging go hand-in-hand with students’ ability to thrive in school, according to Megan Pacheco, executive director of Challenge Success. The group is a nonprofit focused on increasing student well-being, engagement and belonging that’s based in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education.

The stress that gender-diverse students — including transgender, non-binary and gender-queer youth — experience can become an obstacle to their academic success. If they feel their identity is threatened or lack a sense of belonging, Pacheco says, they’re less likely to reach out for help.

“It’s going to affect their participation, how they show up in the classroom, and it’s going to affect their well-being,” she says.

Challenge Success’ large trove of survey data on the school experiences of middle and high school students reveals that students who identify as transgender, non-binary or gender diverse report more stress than their peers who identify as boys and girls, says Sarah Miles, director of research for Challenge Success.

“Instead of two or three sources of stress — family pressure, or peer relationships, or social media — it is just all the above,” Miles says. “In order to be able to function, use your working memory, be present, be engaged … if you have all those things on board that you’re worrying about, you’re just not able to attend to school in the same way.”

Among LGBTQ+ youth who are in school, about 85 percent said they had at least one adult at school who is affirming of their identity, according to the Trevor Project data. More than half of respondents said school was an affirming place, second to online spaces.

Matthew Rice, who chairs the science department at a New Jersey high school, tells EdSurge that students don’t judge safety by a school’s mission statement — they judge it by how adults respond to situations like harassing comments made in the hallway, classroom jokes, pronoun use and whether discipline is applied consistently among varying groups of students.

Rice has published research on the experiences of transgender and nonbinary educators, but the overall lessons gleaned from his work apply to students as well.

“Students notice who is allowed to exist authentically in schools,” Rice said via email. “Representation is not symbolic: It changes students’ perception of what futures are possible and who belongs in intellectual spaces. For many students, the first openly LGBTQ+ adult they meet is an adult at school.”

When it comes to supporting gender-diverse students, Miles of Challenge Success says she wants to dispel the belief that helping them thrive is a zero-sum game.

“I think there’s sometimes a misconception that if we give these students support, then other students aren’t getting support,” she says. “What’s really important is that, by giving students who identify as gender diverse support, everyone benefits, because all students then feel safe to show up — whatever their identities.”