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Committee explores nuclear solutions to AI demand

Committee explores nuclear solutions to AI demand

E&E Newsa day ago

House Science, Space and Technology Committee lawmakers will meet this week to discuss how nuclear energy could help meet a projected surge in demand from artificial intelligence operations.
The Energy Subcommittee hearing — to be led by Chair Randy Weber (R-Texas) — continues Republicans' early focus and significant concern regarding supply and demand in the 119th Congress. They believe baseload energy sources, such as nuclear and fossil fuels, need to be built at a rapid pace to offset a surge in intermittent, renewable energy generation that could put grid reliability at risk.
Indeed, transmission providers are forecasting an 8.2 percent growth in electricity load over the next five years primarily due to AI data center proliferation. That's equivalent to hooking up nearly 50 million homes to the grid by 2029.
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But whether nuclear energy can actually meet that demand remains a point of debate among energy and policy experts.

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Democrats ignored border politics. Now the consequences are here.
Democrats ignored border politics. Now the consequences are here.

Washington Post

time8 minutes ago

  • Washington Post

Democrats ignored border politics. Now the consequences are here.

Democrats have gotten the border issue so wrong, for so long, that it amounts to political malpractice. The latest chapter — in which violent protesters could be helping President Donald Trump create a military confrontation he's almost begging for as a distraction from his other problems — may prove the most dangerous yet. When I see activists carrying Mexican flags as they challenge ICE raids in Los Angeles this week, I think of two possibilities: These 'protesters' are deliberately working to create visuals that will help Trump, or they are well-meaning but unwise dissenters who are inadvertently accomplishing the same goal. Democrats' mistake, over more than a decade, has been to behave as though border enforcement doesn't matter. Pressured by immigrant rights activists, party leaders too often acted as if maintaining a well-controlled border was somehow morally wrong. Again and again, the short-term political interests of Democratic leaders in responding to a strong faction within the party won out over having a policy that could appeal to the country as a whole. When red-state voters and elected officials complained that their states were being overwhelmed by uncontrolled immigration over the past decade, Democrats found those protests easy to ignore. They were happening somewhere else. But when red states' governors pushed migrants toward blue-state cities over the past several years, protests from mayors and governors finally began to register. But still not enough to create coherent Democratic policies, alas. It's open season on former president Joe Biden these days, and he doesn't deserve all the retrospective criticism he's getting. But on immigration, he was anything but a profile in courage. Security advisers including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas wanted tougher border policies starting in 2021. But political advisers such as chief of staff Ron Klain, who sought amity with immigration rights progressives in Congress and the party's base, resisted strong measures. Though Biden was elected as a centrist, he leaned left — and waited until the last months of his presidency to take the strong enforcement measures recommended earlier. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump played shamelessly on public anxieties about the border. Some of his arguments, like claims that hungry migrants were eating pets, were grotesque. They were simply provocations. But Biden and Kamala Harris didn't have good answers, other than indignation. They had straddled the issue through Biden's term, talking about border security but failing to enact it, and the public knew it. Democrats finally came up with a bipartisan border bill in 2024 that would have given the president more authority to expel migrants and deny asylum claims, and more money to secure the border. Republicans, led by Trump, were shameless opportunists in opposing the bill. They didn't want Biden to have a win. In the end, Democrats didn't have the votes — or, frankly, the credibility on the issue. Biden took executive action in June 2024, limiting entry into the United States. But it was too late. He could have taken that action in 2021. Since Trump took office in January, he has been building toward this week's confrontation in the streets. ICE raids have steadily increased in cities with large migrant populations, as have nationwide quotas for arrests and deportations. Trump declared a national emergency on Inauguration Day that gave him authority to send troops to the border to 'assist' in controlling immigration. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem seized every photo opportunity to convey a militarized approach to the coming clash. Over these months, the immigration issue has been a car crash skidding toward us in slow motion. Since his first term, Trump has clearly wanted a military confrontation with the left over immigration or racial issues. Gen. Mark A. Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, helped talk Trump out of invoking the Insurrection Act in 2020 to contain the unrest that followed the death of George Floyd. But this time, Trump faces no opposition. He is surrounded by yes-men and -women. The saddest part is that Democrats still have no clear policy. Some blue-state mayors and governors have pledged to provide 'sanctuary' for migrants, but they don't have good arguments to rebut Trump's claim they're interfering with the enforcement of federal law. In some cases, sanctuary has meant refusing to hand over undocumented migrants convicted of violent crimes, former DHS officials tell me. That's wrong. The courts have limited Trump's most arbitrary policies and his defiance of due process, but not his authority to enforce immigration laws. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) this week chose sensible ground to fight, by filing a lawsuit challenging Trump's authority to override gubernatorial power by federalizing National Guard troops when there isn't a 'rebellion' or 'invasion.' There is no evidence of such extreme danger — or that local law enforcement in Los Angeles can't handle the problems. But Newsom's smart pushback doesn't get Democrats out of addressing an issue they've been ducking for more than a decade: Do they have the courage to enforce the border themselves? Over the long run, taking border issues seriously means more immigration courts, and more border-control people and facilities — and a fair, legal way of deciding who stays and who goes. But right now, it means Democratic mayors and governors using state and local police to contain protests, so that troops aren't necessary — and preventing extremists among the activists from fomenting the cataclysm in the streets that some of them seem to want as much as Trump. Yes, of course, we need new bipartisan legislation to resolve the gut issue of how to protect the 'dreamers' and other longtime residents who show every day that they want only to be good citizens. But on the way to that day of sweet reason, Democrats need to oppose violence, by anyone — and to help enforce immigration policies that begin with a recognition that it isn't immoral to have a border.

Datadog Expands AI Security Capabilities to Enable Comprehensive Protection from Critical AI Risks
Datadog Expands AI Security Capabilities to Enable Comprehensive Protection from Critical AI Risks

Associated Press

time11 minutes ago

  • Associated Press

Datadog Expands AI Security Capabilities to Enable Comprehensive Protection from Critical AI Risks

Launch of Code Security and new security capabilities strengthen posture across the AI stack, from data and AI models to applications New York, New York--(Newsfile Corp. - June 10, 2025) - Datadog, Inc. (NASDAQ: DDOG), the monitoring and security platform for cloud applications, today announced new capabilities to detect and remediate critical security risks across customers' AI environments -from development to production-as the company further invests to secure its customers' cloud and AI applications. AI has created a new security frontier in which organizations need to rethink existing threat models as AI workloads foster new attack surfaces. Every microservice can now spin up autonomous agents that can mint secrets, ship code and call external APIs without any human intervention. This means one mistake could trigger a cascading breach across the entire tech stack. The latest innovations to Datadog's Security Platform, presented at DASH, aim to deliver a comprehensive solution to secure agentic AI workloads. 'AI has exponentially increased the ever-expanding backlog of security risks and vulnerabilities organizations deal with. This is because AI-native apps are not deterministic; they're more of a black box and have an increased surface area that leaves them open to vulnerabilities like prompt or code injection,' said Prashant Prahlad, VP of Products, Security at Datadog. 'The latest additions to Datadog's Security Platform provide preventative and responsive measures-powered by continuous runtime visibility-to strengthen the security posture of AI workloads, from development to production.' Securing AI Development Developers increasingly rely on third-party code repositories which expose them to poisoned code and hidden vulnerabilities, including those that stem from AI or LLM models, that are difficult to detect with traditional static analysis tools. To address this problem, Datadog Code Security, now Generally Available, empowers developer and security teams to detect and prioritize vulnerabilities in their custom code and open-source libraries, and uses AI to drive remediation of complex issues in both AI and traditional applications-from development to production. It also prioritizes risks based on runtime threat activity and business impact, empowering teams to focus on what matters most. Deep integrations with developer tools, such as IDEs and GitHub, allow developers to remediate vulnerabilities without disrupting development pipelines. Hardening Security Posture of AI Applications AI-native applications act autonomously in non-deterministic ways, which makes them inherently vulnerable to new types of attacks that attempt to alter their behavior such as prompt injection. To mitigate these threats, organizations need stronger security controls-such as separation of privileges, authorization bounds, and data classification across their AI applications and the underlying infrastructure. Datadog LLM Observability, now Generally Available, monitors the integrity of AI models and performs toxicity checks that look for harmful behavior across prompts and responses within an organization's AI applications. In addition, with Datadog Cloud Security, organizations are able to meet AI security standards such as the NIST AI framework out-of-the-box. Cloud Security detects and remediates risks such as misconfigurations, unpatched vulnerabilities, and unauthorized access to data, apps, and infrastructure. And with Sensitive Data Scanner (SDS), organizations can prevent sensitive data-such as personally identifiable information (PII)-from leaking into LLM training or inference data-sets, with support for AWS S3 and RDS instances now available in Preview. Securing AI at Runtime The evolving complexity of AI applications is making it even harder for security analysts to triage alerts, recognize threats from noise and respond on-time. AI apps are particularly vulnerable to unbound consumption attacks that lead to system degradation or substantial economic losses. The Bits AI Security Analyst, a new AI agent integrated directly into Datadog Cloud SIEM, autonomously triages security signals-starting with those generated by AWS CloudTrail-and performs in-depth investigations of potential threats. It provides context-rich, actionable recommendations to help teams mitigate risks more quickly and accurately. It also helps organizations save time and costs by providing preliminary investigations and guiding Security Operations Centers to focus on the threats that truly matter. Finally, Datadog's Workload Protection helps customers continuously monitor the interaction between LLMs and their host environment. With new LLM Isolation capabilities, available in preview, it detects and blocks the exploitation of vulnerabilities, and enforces guardrails to keep production AI models secure. To learn more about Datadog's latest AI Security capabilities, please visit: Code Security, new tools in Cloud Security, Sensitive Data Scanner, Cloud SIEM, Workload and App Protection, as well as new security capabilities in LLM Observability were announced during the keynote at DASH, Datadog's annual conference. The replay of the keynote is available here. During DASH, Datadog also announced launches in AI Observability, Applied AI, Log Management and released its Internal Developer Portal. About Datadog Datadog is the observability and security platform for cloud applications. Our SaaS platform integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, user experience monitoring, cloud security and many other capabilities to provide unified, real-time observability and security for our customers' entire technology stack. Datadog is used by organizations of all sizes and across a wide range of industries to enable digital transformation and cloud migration, drive collaboration among development, operations, security and business teams, accelerate time to market for applications, reduce time to problem resolution, secure applications and infrastructure, understand user behavior and track key business metrics. Forward-Looking Statements This press release may include certain 'forward-looking statements' within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or the Securities Act, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended including statements on the benefits of new products and features. These forward-looking statements reflect our current views about our plans, intentions, expectations, strategies and prospects, which are based on the information currently available to us and on assumptions we have made. Actual results may differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements and are subject to a variety of assumptions, uncertainties, risks and factors that are beyond our control, including those risks detailed under the caption 'Risk Factors' and elsewhere in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings and reports, including the Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 6, 2025, as well as future filings and reports by us. Except as required by law, we undertake no duty or obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this release as a result of new information, future events, changes in expectations or otherwise. Contact Dan Haggerty [email protected] To view the source version of this press release, please visit

Treasury Sec. Bessent leaves London, but U.S.-China trade talks continue
Treasury Sec. Bessent leaves London, but U.S.-China trade talks continue

CNBC

time13 minutes ago

  • CNBC

Treasury Sec. Bessent leaves London, but U.S.-China trade talks continue

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday he is departing ongoing trade talks with China because he has to travel to Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress the next day. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will remain in London to continue the negotiations with Beijing, which are still underway after two lengthy days of talks, Bessent said. Lutnick said earlier that the parties were "trying to finish" by Tuesday evening. The talks have been "productive," Bessent said as he left the ornate Lancaster House near Buckingham Palace where the discussions are taking place. The remaining negotiators "are continuing as needed with the Chinese delegation," he added. The two economic superpowers are meeting for the second time in as many months as they seek to sort out key differences during a volatile moment in their ongoing trade war. The discussions are expected to center on hashing out an agreement to ease U.S. controls on exports to China in exchange for Beijing committing to free up its export of key minerals known as rare earths. Disputes over rare earths and export controls emerged in the weeks after trade talks in Geneva, Switzerland, led both sides to temporarily pare back most of the tariffs on each others' goods. The Chinese delegation included Vice Premier He Lifeng, Commerce Minister Wang Wentao and top trade negotiator Li Chenggang.

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