The artificial intelligence boom has benefited chatbot makers, computer scientists and Nvidia investors. It’s also providing an unusual windfall for Anguilla, a tiny island in the Caribbean.

ChatGPT’s debut nearly two years ago heralded the dawn of the AI age and kicked off a digital gold rush as companies scrambled to stake their own claims by acquiring websites that end in .ai.

That’s where Anguilla comes in. The British territory was allotted control of the .ai internet address in the 1990s. It was one of hundreds of obscure top-level domains assigned to individual countries and territories based on their names. While the domains are supposed to indicate a website has a link to a particular region or language, it’s not always a requirement.

Google uses google.ai to showcase its artificial intelligence services while Elon Musk uses x.ai as the homepage for his Grok AI chatbot. Startups like AI search engine Perplexity have also snapped up .ai web addresses, redirecting users from the .com version.

Anguilla’s earnings from web domain registration fees quadrupled last year to $32 million, fueled by the surging interest in AI. The income now accounts for about 20% of Anguilla’s total government revenue. Before the AI boom, it hovered at around 5%.

Anguilla’s government, which uses the gov.ai home page, collects a fee every time an .ai web address is renewed. The territory signed a deal Tuesday with a U.S. company to manage the domains amid explosive demand but the fees aren’t expected to change. It also gets paid when new addresses are registered and expired ones are sold off. Some sites have fetched tens of thousands of dollars.

The money directly boosts the economy of Anguilla, which is just 91 square kilometers and has a population of about 16,000. Blessed with coral reefs, clear waters and palm-fringed white sand beaches, the island is a haven for uber-wealthy tourists. Still, many residents are underprivileged, and tourism has been battered by the pandemic and, before that, a powerful hurricane.

Anguilla doesn’t have its own AI industry though Premier Ellis Webster hopes that one day it will become a hub for the technology. He said it was just luck that it was Anguilla, and not nearby Antigua, that was assigned the .ai domain in 1995 because both places had those letters in their names.

Webster said the money takes the pressure off government finances and helps fund key projects but cautioned that “we can’t rely on it solely.”

“You can’t predict how long this is going to last,” Webster said in an interview with the AP. “And so I don’t want to have our economy and our country and all our programs just based on this. And then all of a sudden there’s a new fad comes up in the next year or two, and then we are left now having to make significant expenditure cuts, removing programs.”

To help keep up with the explosive growth in domain registrations, Anguilla said Tuesday it’s signing a deal with a U.S.-based domain management company, Identity Digital, to help manage the effort. They said the agreement will mean more revenue for the government while improving the resilience and security of the web addresses.

Identity Digital, which also manages Australia’s .au domain, expects to migrate all .ai domain services to its systems by the start of next year, Identity Digital Chief Strategy Officer Ram Mohan said in an interview.

A local software entrepreneur had previously helped Anguilla set up its registry system decades earlier.

There are now more than 533,000 .ai web domains, an increase of more than 10-fold since 2018. The International Monetary Fund said in a May report that the earnings will help diversify the economy, “thus making it more resilient to external shocks.

Webster expects domain-related revenues to rise further and could even double this year from last year’s $32 million.

He said the money will finance the airport’s expansion, free medical care for senior citizens and completion of a vocational technology training center at Anguilla’s high school.

The income also provides “budget support” for other projects the government is eyeing, such as a national development fund it could quickly tap for hurricane recovery efforts. The island normally relies on assistance from its administrative power, Britain, which comes with conditions, Webster said.

Mohan said working with Identity Digital will also defend against cyber crooks trying to take advantage of the hype around artificial intelligence.

He cited the example of Tokelau, an island in the Pacific Ocean, whose .tk addresses became notoriously associated with spam and phishing after outsourcing its registry services.

“We worry about bad actors taking something, sticking a .ai to it, and then making it sound like they are much bigger or much better than what they really are,” Mohan said, adding that the company’s technology will quickly take down shady sites.

Another benefit is .AI websites will no longer need to connect to the government’s digital infrastructure through a single internet cable to the island, which leaves them vulnerable to digital bottlenecks or physical disruptions.

Now they’ll use the company’s servers distributed globally, which means it will be faster to access them because they’ll be closer to users.

“It goes from milliseconds to microseconds,” Mohan said.
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WASHINGTON — China-based DJI sued the U.S. Defense Department on Friday for adding the drone maker to a list of companies allegedly working with Beijing’s military, saying the designation is wrong and has caused the company significant financial harm.

DJI, the world’s largest drone manufacturer that sells more than half of all U.S. commercial drones, asked a U.S. District Judge in Washington to order its removal from the Pentagon list designating it as a “Chinese military company,” saying it “is neither owned nor controlled by the Chinese military.”

Being placed on the list represents a warning to U.S. entities and companies about the national security risks of conducting business with them.

DJI’s lawsuit says because of the Defense Department’s “unlawful and misguided decision” it has “lost business deals, been stigmatized as a national security threat, and been banned from contracting with multiple federal government agencies.”

The company added “U.S. and international customers have terminated existing contracts with DJI and refuse to enter into new ones.”

The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

DJI said on Friday it filed the lawsuit after the Defense Department did not engage with the company over the designation for more than 16 months, saying it “had no alternative other than to seek relief in federal court.”

Amid strained ties between the world’s two biggest economies, the updated list is one of numerous actions Washington has taken in recent years to highlight and restrict Chinese companies that it says may strengthen Beijing’s military.

Many major Chinese firms are on the list, including aviation company AVIC, memory chip maker YMTC, China Mobile 0941.HK, and energy company CNOOC.

In May, lidar manufacturer Hesai Group ZN80y.F filed a suit challenging the Pentagon’s Chinese military designation for the company. On Wednesday, the Pentagon removed Hesai from the list but said it will immediately relist the China-based firm on national security grounds.

DJI is facing growing pressure in the United States.

Earlier this week DJI told Reuters that Customs and Border Protection is stopping imports of some DJI drones from entering the United States, citing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

DJI said no forced labor is involved at any stage of its manufacturing.

U.S. lawmakers have repeatedly raised concerns that DJI drones pose data transmission, surveillance and national security risks, something the company rejects.

Last month, the U.S. House voted to bar new drones from DJI from operating in the U.S. The bill awaits U.S. Senate action. The Commerce Department said last month it is seeking comments on whether to impose restrictions on Chinese drones that would effectively ban them in the U.S. — similar to proposed Chinese vehicle restrictions. 
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The Tana River delta on the Kenyan coast includes a vast range of habitats and a remarkably productive ecosystem, says UNESCO. It is also home to many bird species, including some that are nearly threatened. Residents are helping local conservation efforts with an app called eBird. Juma Majanga reports.
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U.S. federal prosecutors are stepping up their pursuit of suspects who use artificial intelligence tools to manipulate or create child sex abuse images, as law enforcement fears the technology could spur a flood of illicit material.

The U.S. Justice Department has brought two criminal cases this year against defendants accused of using generative AI systems, which create text or images in response to user prompts, to produce explicit images of children.

“There’s more to come,” said James Silver, the chief of the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, predicting further similar cases.

“What we’re concerned about is the normalization of this,” Silver said in an interview. “AI makes it easier to generate these kinds of images, and the more that are out there, the more normalized this becomes. That’s something that we really want to stymie and get in front of.”

The rise of generative AI has sparked concerns at the Justice Department that the rapidly advancing technology will be used to carry out cyberattacks, boost the sophistication of cryptocurrency scammers and undermine election security. 

Child sex abuse cases mark some of the first times that prosecutors are trying to apply existing U.S. laws to alleged crimes involving AI, and even successful convictions could face appeals as courts weigh how the new technology may alter the legal landscape around child exploitation. 

Prosecutors and child safety advocates say generative AI systems can allow offenders to morph and sexualize ordinary photos of children and warn that a proliferation of AI-produced material will make it harder for law enforcement to identify and locate real victims of abuse.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit group that collects tips about online child exploitation, receives an average of about 450 reports each month related to generative AI, according to Yiota Souras, the group’s chief legal officer.

That’s a fraction of the average of 3 million monthly reports of overall online child exploitation the group received last year.

Untested ground

Cases involving AI-generated sex abuse imagery are likely to tread new legal ground, particularly when an identifiable child is not depicted.

Silver said in those instances, prosecutors can charge obscenity offenses when child pornography laws do not apply.

Prosecutors indicted Steven Anderegg, a software engineer from Wisconsin, in May on charges including transferring obscene material. Anderegg is accused of using Stable Diffusion, a popular text-to-image AI model, to generate images of young children engaged in sexually explicit conduct and sharing some of those images with a 15-year-old boy, according to court documents.

Anderegg has pleaded not guilty and is seeking to dismiss the charges by arguing that they violate his rights under the U.S. Constitution, court documents show.

He has been released from custody while awaiting trial. His attorney was not available for comment.

Stability AI, the maker of Stable Diffusion, said the case involved a version of the AI model that was released before the company took over the development of Stable Diffusion. The company said it has made investments to prevent “the misuse of AI for the production of harmful content.”

Federal prosecutors also charged a U.S. Army soldier with child pornography offenses in part for allegedly using AI chatbots to morph innocent photos of children he knew to generate violent sexual abuse imagery, court documents show.

The defendant, Seth Herrera, pleaded not guilty and has been ordered held in jail to await trial. Herrera’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.

Legal experts said that while sexually explicit depictions of actual children are covered under child pornography laws, the landscape around obscenity and purely AI-generated imagery is less clear. 

The U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 struck down as unconstitutional a federal law that criminalized any depiction, including computer-generated imagery, appearing to show minors engaged in sexual activity. 

“These prosecutions will be hard if the government is relying on the moral repulsiveness alone to carry the day,” said Jane Bambauer, a law professor at the University of Florida who studies AI and its impact on privacy and law enforcement.

Federal prosecutors have secured convictions in recent years against defendants who possessed sexually explicit images of children that also qualified as obscene under the law. 

Advocates are also focusing on preventing AI systems from generating abusive material. 

Two nonprofit advocacy groups, Thorn and All Tech Is Human, secured commitments in April from some of the largest players in AI including Alphabet’s Google, Amazon.com, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms, OpenAI and Stability AI to avoid training their models on child sex abuse imagery and to monitor their platforms to prevent its creation and spread. 

“I don’t want to paint this as a future problem, because it’s not. It’s happening now,” said Rebecca Portnoff, Thorn’s director of data science.

“As far as whether it’s a future problem that will get completely out of control, I still have hope that we can act in this window of opportunity to prevent that.”
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In a year with over 60 national elections worldwide, concerns are high that individuals and entities are using deepfake images and recordings to contribute to the flood of election misinformation. VOA’s Rio Tuasikal reports on some potentially dangerous videos made using generative AI.
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Meta’s independent content watchdog said Thursday there were “serious questions” about how the social media giant deals with anti-immigrant content, particularly in Europe. 

The Oversight Board, established by Meta in 2020 and sometimes called its “supreme court,” launched a probe after seeing a “significant number” of appeals over anti-immigrant content. 

The board has chosen two symbolic cases — one from Germany and the other from Poland — to assess whether Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is following human rights law and its own policies on hate speech. 

Helle Thorning-Schmidt, co-chair of the board and a former Danish prime minister, said it was “critical” to get the balance right between free speech and protection of vulnerable groups. 

“The high number of appeals we get on immigration-related content from across the EU tells us there are serious questions to ask about how the company handles issues related to this, including the use of coded speech,” she said in a statement. 

The first piece of content to be assessed by the board was posted in May on a Facebook page claiming to be the official account of Poland’s far-right Confederation party. 

An image depicts Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk looking through a peephole with a black man approaching him from behind, accompanied by text suggesting his government would allow immigration to surge. 

Meta rejected an appeal from a user to take down the post despite the text including a word considered by some as a racial slur. 

In the other case, an apparently AI-generated image was posted on a German Facebook page showing a blond-haired blue-eyed woman, a German flag and a stop sign. 

The accompanying text likens immigrants to “gang rape specialists.”  

A user complained but Meta decided to not to remove the post.  

“The board selected these cases to address the significant number of appeals, especially from Europe, against content that shares views on immigration in ways that may be harmful towards immigrants,” the watchdog said in a statement. 

The board said it wanted to hear from the public and would spend “the next few weeks” discussing the issue before publishing its decision. 

Decisions by the board, funded by a trust set up by Meta, are not binding, though the company has promised to follow its rulings. 
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