分类： technology

Across the United States, a new wave of devastating cyber fraud is taking hold, powered by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence that can replicate a human’s voice with unsettling, near-perfect accuracy. For victims like Buffalo, New York, resident Liz Benz, the experience remains traumatic even after the scam is exposed.

Benz, a 46-year-old insurance broker and mother of six, still remembers the gut punch of answering an unknown number one afternoon. On the line was a voice that was undeniably her 16-year-old son Fred, crying and shaken, begging for help. The caller told Benz that Fred’s friend had been shot dead, and Fred, who was attending a local high school football game, was being held hostage. To secure his release, Benz was ordered to withdraw a large sum of cash and drop it off at a nearby Walmart parking lot.

For 20 gut-wrenching minutes, Benz believed her son’s life was in danger. It was only when Fred sent a smiling selfie from the stands of the game that she realized she had fallen victim to an elaborate AI-powered scam. “Nothing could have prepared me to hear my son’s voice, and nothing could have convinced me that this was a scam until I saw my son with my own eyes,” Benz told AFP in an interview, her voice still shaking with the memory of the ordeal. “It was a good 20 minutes of terror.”

Benz is far from alone. As accessible AI voice cloning tools have become widely available online, U.S. law enforcement and consumer protection advocates are sounding the alarm over a sharp rise in family impersonation scams that exploit emotional panic to steal thousands of dollars from victims. According to Federal Bureau of Investigation data released in April, U.S. consumers lost more than $893 million last year to AI-enabled fraud schemes, including voice cloning scams.

What makes this threat particularly widespread is how easy it has become for even inexperienced cybercriminals to carry out these attacks. A simple internet search pulls up dozens of free voice cloning applications that can generate a hyper-realistic replica of a person’s voice using just a few seconds of original audio, which scammers can easily harvest from public social media posts, voicemail recordings, or online videos.

“It used to be somewhat hard to make these things. Now anyone can do it in seconds,” explained Brian Long, chief executive of Adaptive Security, a firm that specializes in AI fraud awareness training. “One guy in a room with a keyboard can make an infinite number of attackers. AI tools can build entire scam scripts off of short snippets of audio captured from public online content.”

The standard scam script follows a predictable, emotionally manipulative pattern: scammers place an urgent call claiming the target’s loved one has been arrested, injured in a car crash, or involved in a violent crime, and demands immediate payment to resolve the situation. To add credibility, scammers often layer in additional AI-generated voices impersonating police officers, attorneys, court clerks, or bank employees, creating a chaotic narrative that pushes victims to act before they can verify the story.

Cybersecurity experts note that scammers do not even need a perfectly replicated voice to succeed. A convincing distressed voice that triggers an immediate emotional reaction is often enough to bypass a victim’s critical thinking. “A distressed voice saying ‘mom, help me’ or ‘dad, I’ve been in an accident’ may only need to sound believable for a few seconds,” said Amit Gupta, vice president of product management at cybersecurity firm Pindrop. “The objective is not perfect voice replication. The objective is creating enough emotional uncertainty and urgency that the victim acts before verifying.”

Since Benz went public with her story, she has received hundreds of messages from other scam victims, most of whom choose to remain anonymous out of feelings of shame and embarrassment. Vulnerable populations, particularly elderly Americans, are disproportionately targeted in what have become known as “grandparent scams”, where scammers impersonate a grandchild in crisis.

FBI data shows that Americans over the age of 60 reported more than $7.7 billion in total fraud losses last year, a significant jump from 2023. For 73-year-old Philadelphia attorney Gary Schildhorn, who fell victim to a similar scam in 2020, the experience was equally shocking. Schildhorn received a call from an AI-generated voice impersonating his son Brett, who claimed he needed immediate bail money after a drunk driving arrest. Schildhorn rushed to his bank to withdraw the funds, only to get a call from his real son mid-transaction, alerting him to the scam.

“I will go to my grave swearing that it was your voice, it was your cadence, it was words you would use. There was no accent. It was you on the phone,” Schildhorn told AFP, recalling his conversation with his son after the incident. Like Benz, Schildhorn now partners with Adaptive Security to raise public awareness of the growing AI scam threat, and testified before the U.S. Senate in 2023 about his experience to push for stronger consumer protections.

As the global tech industry gathers in Taipei for the 2026 edition of Computex, one of the world’s largest annual technology trade shows, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has sparked industry-wide discussion with comments on worker compensation, just days ahead of his planned trip to South Korea. Huang’s remarks came in response to questions about a recent high-profile labor dispute at Samsung Electronics, where a looming strike by the company’s union was only avoided after leadership struck a last-minute bonus agreement with staff.

For many young aspiring footballers around the world, especially those from smaller clubs and under-served regions, breaking into professional football has long been a pipe dream. Traditional scouting networks focus heavily on established youth academies and known talent pools, leaving thousands of skilled players unseen and their professional dreams unfulfilled. Now, a new wave of artificial intelligence-powered football apps is upending this system, opening unprecedented pathways for hidden talent to catch the eye of top clubs across Europe and South America.

The story of 18-year-old Brazilian Leonardo “Leo” Veiga perfectly illustrates this revolution. Stuck playing for a little-known local club in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, Veiga had all but abandoned his hope of going pro. Out of options, he decided to take a chance on Footbao, a AI-powered football talent scouting app developed by a Swiss startup. The app invites young players to upload phone-recorded videos of their match and training performances, which AI algorithms then analyze, score, and share with professional scouts and club officials. Footbao had partnered with Italian club Lecce to offer a multi-day training opportunity with the club’s youth side to the app’s highest-scoring players. Veiga earned a spot in the invite group, impressed on-site Lecce scouts with his skill, and today holds a contract with the youth academy of Serie B club Spezia. “AI opened a new door,” Veiga told AFP from his new base in Italy. “I thought, I’m going to download the app and give it a try. If nothing happens, it doesn’t matter because nothing else is working out for me. But what if something does happen?”

Veiga is far from the only young player whose career has been transformed by this technology. Footbao, founded just two years ago in 2023, has already been used by roughly 120,000 players worldwide, the vast majority of them based in Brazil — the world’s largest exporter of elite football talent. According to Footbao chief executive Nick Rappolt, the company’s data suggests between 14,000 and 15,000 currently active users have the raw ability to earn spots at professional clubs or youth academies. After launching in Brazil, the firm has expanded operations to Colombia and Argentina, with plans to enter additional South American markets in the coming year. For Rappolt, the core mission of AI-powered scouting is to democratize access to professional football: traditional scouting networks are limited by geography and network, meaning huge pools of talent fly entirely under the radar of top development programs. AI removes those barriers by giving any player with a phone a shot at being discovered.

Footbao is not the only company chasing this opportunity. German startup CUJU, another player in the AI scouting space, takes a slightly different approach: instead of relying on user-uploaded match and training footage, CUJU guides users through structured in-app drills designed to test core technical skills, then analyzes footage of those exercises. Launched in 2023, the app has already been downloaded more than 160,000 times. CUJU marketing director Sven Muller explained that even top professional clubs maintain huge databases that only include players who have already been scouted. There is a massive gap in reliable performance data for young talent in the earliest stages of their development, and AI fills that gap by turning simple phone-recorded clips into actionable, standardized performance data that scouts can trust.

The technology is already driving major progress for women’s football, a segment that has historically been far under-scouted compared to the men’s game. In Sao Paulo, 14-year-old Marcela Geremias de Lima worked through CUJU’s wall-kicking drill, designed to measure ball control and movement speed, and uploaded her footage to the app. After her high score earned her an invitation to a scouting tournament in front of top club representatives, she won a spot in the Under-15 side of Corinthians, one of the most successful women’s football clubs in South America, with six Copa Libertadores titles to its name. The exercises “help you improve” and mean “you can be seen from anywhere in the world,” de Lima said. With Brazil set to host the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup, industry leaders expect this AI-driven scouting to accelerate the growth of women’s football by unlocking a wave of new young female talent that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Top Brazilian clubs are already starting to partner with these AI platforms to expand their own recruitment pipelines. Santos, the legendary Brazilian club that launched the careers of icons Pele and Neymar, announced a partnership with Footbao in late 2024 to identify new young prospects. Santos president Marcelo Teixeira called the partnership a key way to “expand our search for athletes” beyond the club’s existing scouting network. Even for clubs that have not yet formalized partnerships, the technology is changing how youth development leaders think about recruitment. Joao Paulo Sampaio, head of youth development at Palmeiras — the club that produced current global sensation Endrick and other top young talents — notes that top prospects are traditionally recruited at extremely young ages, locking out players who develop later or come from less connected regions. AI acts as a equalizer that gives overlooked players a second shot. While Palmeiras does not currently work with AI scouting firms, Sampaio says the pre-selection work these companies do provides a valuable new tool for overstretched scouts, who often receive dozens of unvetted talent videos each week that they lack the capacity to review.

The fast-growing artificial intelligence sector just marked another major milestone Monday, when Anthropic—the developer of the popular Claude chatbot—announced it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering with U.S. regulators. The move comes as generative AI firms across Silicon Valley race to secure massive capital to support the breakneck expansion of an industry that continues to reshape global technology.

A confidential initial filing allows a company to share its offering documentation with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for preliminary review, keeping sensitive financial performance and internal business data private until much later in the IPO process. In an official statement, Anthropic confirmed the filing and noted that the option to go public will become available once the SEC completes its review. The company added that the timeline, number of shares to be offered, and per-share price range will remain undetermined for now, with the final offering ultimately contingent on prevailing market conditions and other unforeseen factors.

The IPO announcement comes only days after Anthropic closed a massive new private funding round that raised $65 billion in fresh capital and pushed the company’s valuation to $965 billion. The figure puts the OpenAI rival just shy of the historic $1 trillion valuation threshold, cementing its status as one of the most valuable and influential players in the global generative AI landscape. Unlike many competitors that prioritize consumer-facing tools, Anthropic has built its market reputation by focusing on delivering enterprise-grade generative AI solutions to business clients, a strategy that has driven steady commercial growth. Currently, Anthropic’s valuation already outpaces that of OpenAI, which carried an $80 billion valuation in a March 2024 funding round and is also preparing its own imminent IPO filing.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and a team of fellow industry veterans, Anthropic has carved out a distinct niche in the crowded AI race by positioning itself as a safety-first alternative to leading platforms. The company’s Claude large language model ecosystem, which includes the widely used Claude Code developer coding assistant, has helped push Anthropic’s projected annual revenue to $4.7 billion, a rapid climb for a company less than four years old.

Despite its strong commercial momentum, Anthropic has faced significant growing pains alongside its success. A global shortage of advanced AI chips and server infrastructure has left the company struggling to meet soaring market demand for its products, with a number of users recently voicing complaints that their usage quotas are exhausted far too quickly, forcing them to pay steep premium fees to continue accessing services.

To address its pressing computing capacity gap, Anthropic has struck a series of major supply deals in recent months, securing multiple gigawatts of additional computing power from industry leaders including Amazon, Google and Broadcom. Most notably, the company signed a surprise partnership last month with billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who is currently locked in a high-profile legal battle with OpenAI and its founding leadership. Under the agreement, Musk will lease Anthropic access to his underutilized Colossus data centers, located in Memphis, Tennessee at the facility built for his xAI AI lab—creator of the Grok chatbot—for $1.25 billion per year.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI’s upcoming public offerings are set to follow SpaceX, another Musk-led company that absorbed xAI earlier this year, to public markets. SpaceX’s IPO is on track to begin trading as soon as June 12, with the company targeting a roughly $175 billion valuation in what will become the largest IPO in global history if it proceeds as planned.

Beyond infrastructure challenges, Anthropic is also navigating an ongoing legal conflict with the U.S. Department of Defense. The Pentagon recently designated Anthropic a supply chain risk after the company refused to grant the U.S. military unrestricted access to its core AI models. Anthropic has pushed back against the designation, calling it unconstitutional retaliation for the firm’s decision.

The high-stakes world of commercial space exploration faced a dramatic and costly setback on Thursday night, when Blue Origin’s next-generation New Glenn rocket erupted into a massive fireball during a pre-launch ground test at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The incident, which occurred at approximately 9:00 pm local time (0100 GMT Friday), left no reported injuries but has sent ripples of concern across the global space industry, threatening timelines for both Jeff Bezos’s private space ambitions and NASA’s flagship Artemis Moon mission program.

Standing 98 meters (321 feet) tall, New Glenn is the most powerful launch vehicle ever developed by Blue Origin, designed to carry crewed missions, heavy commercial payloads, and key components for NASA’s lunar landing efforts. While routine testing anomalies are not uncommon in rocket development, industry experts note that full-scale explosions of this magnitude remain rare. Post-incident photos released on Friday confirm that the blast caused severe damage to both the rocket itself and the Cape Canaveral launch pad it was testing on. Florida Congressman Mike Haridopolos, whose district encompasses the Cape Canaveral space complex, told Fox News Friday that reconstruction work on the damaged facility will require a significant amount of time, adding further uncertainty to Blue Origin’s operational timeline.

In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman released a statement via social media platform X acknowledging the incident. He reaffirmed NASA’s commitment to supporting a full, transparent investigation into the root cause of the anomaly, which is being conducted jointly by Blue Origin, NASA, and the U.S. Space Force. The New Glenn rocket will remain grounded indefinitely throughout the course of the investigation, and Blue Origin has declined multiple requests from Agence France-Presse for additional details on the scope of damage, investigation progress, or revised launch timelines.

The stakes of this setback extend far beyond Blue Origin’s corporate goals. Just days before the explosion, NASA awarded Blue Origin a major contract to develop a second lunar lander for the Artemis program, a move intended to create redundancy for the initiative after SpaceX, NASA’s primary lunar lander contractor, faced repeated delays to its own Starship development. The Artemis program, which aims to return the first American astronauts to the lunar surface since the Apollo program, currently targets a crewed landing by the end of 2028, with a critical in-orbit rendezvous test between lunar landers and a main spacecraft scheduled for 2027. Clatyon Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, notes that any extended delay to New Glenn’s development could throw NASA’s carefully calibrated mission schedule off track.

The explosion also marks the second major malfunction for Blue Origin in just over a month, following a satellite launch failure caused by a rocket anomaly in March. Beyond the lunar program, the incident also threatens progress on Amazon’s Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation designed to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink. Project Kuiper relies heavily on New Glenn rockets to launch hundreds of its broadband satellites into orbit, meaning delays to the rocket program will likely push back the commercial rollout of Bezos’s satellite internet initiative.

This is not the first time a catastrophic rocket explosion has occurred at Cape Canaveral; a decade ago, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded during pre-launch ground testing, destroying a $200 million communications satellite that was set to be deployed. While many in the space sector have expressed confidence that Blue Origin will ultimately recover from the setback, the immediate impact of Thursday’s blast is expected to reshape near-term plans for both U.S. commercial space development and NASA’s lunar exploration agenda.