Israeli authorities arrested several individuals and charged two with using classified information to place bets on the prediction market platform Polymarket, according to an NPR News report. The charges stem from suspicions of using military secrets to wager on military operations. The investigation is ongoing, and the specific trades under scrutiny have not been disclosed.
The arrests and charges, reported on February 12, 2026, involve a civilian and a military reservist who have been indicted for bribery and obstruction of justice, NPR News reported. The report also indicated that an undisclosed number of others were arrested for placing Polymarket wagers based on classified information. Prosecutors have not yet identified which specific trades are under investigation.
In other news, the AI landscape continues to evolve rapidly. Chinese companies are increasingly delivering AI models that rival the performance of leading Western models at a lower cost, according to MIT Technology Review. The firm Moonshot AI recently released its open-weight model, Kimi K2.5, which performed closely to Anthropic's Claude Opus on some benchmarks, but at a fraction of the price. Alibaba's Qwen family of models has also overtaken Meta's Llama on Hugging Face, after ranking as the most downloaded model series in 2025 and 2026.
Meanwhile, cybersecurity researchers are facing new challenges. According to MIT Technology Review, a file uploaded to VirusTotal in late August last year contained a new strain of ransomware that employed sophisticated techniques. Cybersecurity expert Anton Cherepanov and his colleague Peter Strýček inspected the sample and realized they had never come across anything like it before.
In other developments, a new report from Congress has raised concerns about children with mental health conditions being held in juvenile detention instead of receiving treatment, as reported by NPR News. The report, "Prolonged Incarceration of Children Due to Mental Health Care Shortages," was released by the staff of Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans. The report is based on a survey sent to administrators of public juvenile detention facilities around the country.
Finally, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has a unique work schedule, according to Fortune. Hassabis, who sold his AI company DeepMind to Google in 2014, works a second shift after his first workday. "I do try and get six hours, but I have unusual sleeping habits I sort of manage during the day," Hassabis said on Fortunes Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. He packs his day with back-to-back meetings.
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