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After months of uncertainty, some federal student loan borrowers will soon have their debt canceled. But theres a hook: You must be enrolled in a very specific program and have made sufficient payments to qualify. Some borrowers have been receiving notices in recent weeks that read: You are now eligible to have some or all of your federal student loan(s) discharged because you have reached the necessary number of payments under your Income-Based Repayment (IBR) Plan. The IBR plan, first introduced in 2007, offers debt cancellation after 20 or 25 years of repayment, depending on the age of the loans. Nearly 2 million borrowers were enrolled in this program as of the second quarter, according to Federal Student Aid figures. Notices emailed to borrowers go on to inform them that the U.S. Department of Education will work with their loan servicer to process the discharge over the next several months. If for some reason borrowers want to opt out of IBR forgiveness, they must contact their loan servicer by Oct. 21. While advocates for debt relief may cheer the news, these notices indicate that IBR forgiveness has resumed after about three months. In July, the Federal Student Aid quietly announced that forgiveness had been paused so its systems could be updated to accurately the number of months paid, blaming litigation related to a forgiveness plan instituted during former President Joe Bidens administration. As a result, the debt forgiveness notices are simply the resumption of the IBR program, rather than a new forgiveness plan. On the campaign trail last year, President Donald Trump called student loan forgiveness vile and not even legal. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has vowed that a mass forgiveness program won’t happen during her tenure. These notices have gone out even amid the ongoing federal government shutdown. The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment from Fast Company. While a formal notice is the best way to confirm that your federal student loan debt will be cancelled, here’s how to know if you may qualify. BORROWERS MUST BE ENROLLED IN IBR PLAN The forgiveness notices sent out in recent weeks are only going to student loan borrowers who are enrolled in the income-based repayment plan, which capped monthly payments at a certain percentage of borrowers discretionary income . Borrowers enrolled in other repayment plans, even other income-driven repayment plans, may not see relief soonif ever. That’s because other plans have been phased out or are held up by litigation in courts. CHECK NUMBER OF LOAN PAYMENTS Only those borrowers enrolled in an IBR plan who have made a sufficient number of loan payments are eligible for forgiveness. If you took out your federal student loans before July 1, 2014, then you must have made consistent monthly payments300 in totalfor 25 years. If you took out loans after that date, the threshold drops to 240 payments over a 20-year period. Many borrowers switch repayment plans over timeand you may still be eligible for IBR forgiveness for payments made while you were enrolled under other plans. It may be tempting to assume you’ve qualified for debt forgiveness based on your records of payments, but you should continue making payments as normal until you receive official notice. EXPECT MORE SHOWDOWNS ON STUDENT LOANS As the notices to borrowers indicate, full forgiveness may take several months. What’s more, the government shutdown may further delay loan forgivenessand it has snarled other forgiveness efforts, including a legal challenge brought by the American Federation of Teachers regarding the Department of Educations denial of rights to federal student loan borrowers for forgiveness opportunities that were mandated in their loan terms. Finally, expect more showdowns related to federal student loan debt to come. Last week, Politico reported that the Trump administration is considering selling parts of the federal governments $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio to private investors. Such a move might change current repayment safeguards, along with the potential for loan forgiveness in the future.
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Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have sharply increased their use of artificial intelligence to deceive people online and mount cyberattacks against the United States, according to new research from Microsoft. This July, the company identified more than 200 instances of foreign adversaries using AI to create fake content online, more than double the number from July 2024 and more than ten times the number seen in 2023. The findings, published Thursday in Microsoft’s annual digital threats report, show how foreign adversaries are adopting new and innovative tactics in their efforts to weaponize the internet as a tool for espionage and deception. AI’s potential said to be exploited by US foes America’s adversaries, as well as criminal gangs and hacking companies, have exploited AI’s potential, using it to automate and improve cyberattacks, to spread inflammatory disinformation and to penetrate sensitive systems. AI can translate poorly worded phishing emails into fluent English, for example, as well as generate digital clones of senior government officials. Government cyber operations often aim to obtain classified information, undermine supply chains, disrupt critical public services, or spread disinformation. Cyber criminals on the other hand work for profit by stealing corporate secrets or using ransomware to extort payments from their victims. These gangs are responsible for the wide majority of cyberattacks in the world and in some cases have built partnerships with countries like Russia. Increasingly, these attackers are using AI to target governments, businesses, and critical systems like hospitals and transportation networks, according to Amy Hogan-Burney, Microsoft’s vice president for customer security and trust, who oversaw the report. Many U.S. companies and organizations, meanwhile, are getting by with outdated cyber defenses, even as Americans expand their networks with new digital connections. Companies, governments, organizations and individuals must take the threat seriously if they are to protect themselves amid escalating digital threats, she said. We see this as a pivotal moment where innovation is going so fast,” Hogan-Burney said. “This is the year when you absolutely must invest in your cybersecurity basics, US is a popular target The U.S. is the top target for cyberattacks, with criminals and foreign adversaries targeting companies, governments and organizations in the U.S. more than any other country. Israel and Ukraine were the second and third most popular targets, showing how military conflicts involving those two nations have spilled over into the digital realm. Russia, China, and Iran have denied that they use cyber operations for espionage, disruption, and disinformation. China, for instance, says the U.S. is trying to smear Beijing while conducting its own cyberattacks. North Korea has pioneered a scheme in which it uses AI personas to create American identities, allowing them to apply for remote tech jobs. North Korea’s authoritarian government pockets the salaries, while the hackers use their access to steal secrets or install malware. It’s the kind of digital threat that will face more American organizations in the years to come as sophisticated AI programs make it easier for bad actors to deceive, according to Nicole Jiang, CEO of Fable, a San Francisco-based security company that uses AI to sniff out fake employees. AI is not only a tool for hackers, but also a critical defense against digital attackers, Jiang said. Cyber is a cat-and-mouse game, she said. Access, data, information, money: That’s what they’re after. David Klepper, Associated Press
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U.S. stock indexes are ticking higher on Thursday following an encouraging signal for the artificial-intelligence boom. The S&P 500 rose 0.4%, though trading has been erratic this week, and stocks have repeatedly swung between gains and losses. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 85 points, or 0.2%, as of 11 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.7% higher. Technology stocks helped lead the way after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. reported a bigger jump in profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Chief Financial Officer Wendell Huang also said TSMC expects continued strong demand for our leading-edge process technologies going into the end of the year. Thats important for the U.S. stock market because TSMC is a critical player at the center of the AI frenzy, making chips for such companies as Nvidia. TSMCs stock that trades in Taiwan climbed 1.4%, though its stock that trades in the United States slipped 0.5%. Nvidia rose 1.4% and was the strongest single force lifting the S&P 500 because its Wall Streets most valuable stock. AI stocks have been at the center of Wall Streets surge to record after record this year, even though inflation is still high and the job market is slowing. AI stocks have shot so high that critics worry about another possible bubble, like the one that enveloped dot-com stocks and eventually imploded in 2000. U.S. companies broadly are under pressure to deliver stronger profits after the S&P 500 surged 35% from a low in April. To justify those gains, which critics say made their stock prices too expensive, companies will need to show theyre making much more in profit and will continue to do so. Salesforce climbed 4.5% and was one of the strongest forces pushing upward on the Dow after the company, which helps businesses manage their customers, unveiled a plan to deliver more than 10% in compounded annual revenue growth in coming years. J.B. Hunt Transport Services trucked 18.8% higher after the freight company breezed past Wall Streets profit targets in the third quarter. They helped offset a 2.7% drop for Travelers, even though the insurer reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Its revenue fell short of forecasts. Hewlett Packard Enterprise sank 8.5% after giving long-term financial targets that some analysts found underwhelming. In stock markets abroad, indexes climbed across much of Asia and Europe. South Koreas Kospi soared 2.5% on hopes that a trade deal may be coming between Seoul and Washington. Samsung Electronics and automakers Hyundai Motor and Kia Corp. were among the big gainers. In China, where trade tensions have been rising with the United States, indexes added 0.1% in Shanghai and slipped 0.1% in Hong Kong. In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 4.03% from 4.05% late Wednesday. A report in the morning said manufacturing activity in the mid-Atlantic region is unexpectedly shrinking. Its one of the few windows into the economy that the Federal Reserve has been getting recently as it tries to figure out whether high inflation or the weak job market should be the bigger concern for the economy. The U.S. governments latest shutdown is delaying important updates on the economy, such as a weekly update on unemployment claims that typically helps guides trading on Wall Street each Thursday. A day earlier, an important report on inflation was also delayed. Fed officials have hinted that the job market may be the more important factor now in their thinking, which would clear the way for more cuts to interest rates. Expectations for such cuts have been a major driver for the U.S. stock market recently, but a jump in inflation could force the Fed to stop. Stan Choe, AP business writer AP Writers Teresa Cerojano and Matt Ott contributed.
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Its been two years since Howard Schultz retired from the board of directors of Starbucks, a company he founded and led for decades, but he still enjoys chatting with customersas he did on Tuesday before sitting down for a wide-ranging interview with Dan Roth, editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. Schultz was curious to know what a customer thought of the coffee chains protein lattes that debuted last month and he says theres no better place to source this information than one of the 40,000-plus Starbucks locations around the world. A sense of curiosity is important for a business leader, as well as a willingness to be in the mud and learn directly from customers, Schultz said during an interview broadcast to LinkedIn Premium members. We have thousands of stores, so Im in the stores, thats where the action is, says Schultz, who now serves as chairman emeritus for Starbucks. I want to observe the experience. Schultz didnt discuss Brian Niccols turnaround strategy for Starbucks, other than crediting the CEO with making a big bet on the human experience, nor did he address the recent news that the company plans to close North American store locations and eliminate 900 jobs. But Schultz did talk about why a so-called third place, where people can convene, is so important today, especially as artificial intelligence and other technology disrupt how many people do their work. We have made the strong decision that we are a people company and we want people to serve our customers, Schultz says. Youre not going to see a robot at Starbucks. ‘Worry with a big W’ But that doesnt mean Schultz is anti-AI. In fact, he calls himself a supporter of the technology because he sees the potential for it to benefit both companies and consumersand Starbucks has invested in AI to help with back-of-house operations. But Shultz does worry about the arms race thats underway both between companies and countries and that regulators may enact guardrails only when its too lateas was true with the evolution of social media. He hopes that lessons learned from the lack of governance in the early days of social media will encourage more responsible oversight of AI. The ramifications could be so severe that I just wish there was an opportunity to understand the responsibility that comes with the technology that is going a million miles an hour, Schultz says. I worry with a big W about the impact this could have that could be adverse. Building a ‘currency of trust’ While running the Seattle-based coffee giant for decades, Schultz grappled with all sorts of challengesincluding in 2008 when he recalled Starbucks was in deep trouble and he had to decide what type of speech to give to 10,000 store managers. Though he was advised not to tell these managers how bad things really were, Schultz felt it was more important to trust the managers with this information so everyone could align on how to recalibrate. Though employees do want a visionary leader, they also want authenticity and the truth, Schultz says, and thats especially true in an era when people dont trust much of anything. Being humanincluding being vulnerable and even crying in front of employees, as Schultz hasis the only way to build a currency of trust, he adds. What a values-driven company looks like As a publicly traded company for most of its existence, Starbucks has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders, though Schultz says that most of the companys decisions come from a place of humility and understanding whats best for customers and employees. Thats why he started a practice several years ago to leave two chairs empty during board meetings to represent baristas and customers. After returning to Starbucks as interim CEO in 2022, Schultz announced the company would end its stock buyback program and instead invest that money into its workforcea decision that only worsened a stock selloff during that time. As a leader, he says its important to play a long game with such decisions, lead with your heart, and establish empathy and compassion. If you take care of your shareholders, in a way, as the primary focus, youre going to lose your people and your customers, Schultz says. Starbucks is living proof after 50-plus years that you can make significant investments in your people that are not [an] expense but an investment that is going to return to the shareholder. Why love is so important Even if its a fragile time were living in right now, Schultz says he finds reason to be optimistic and hopeful about peopleand he says the human experience will remain front and center at Starbucks. Schultz was famously inspired by Italian cafe culture when he founded Il Giornale, which later served as a model for Starbucks. Reflecting back to the 1980s, when he was building Starbucks at the same time he was starting a family, he says the values, characteristics, and guiding principles of both endeavors are very similar. And so is a sense of love, which is a word he says you wont find in any textbook or class at the likes of Harvard Business School. You have to instill love inside your company and people need to feel loved and it has to be joyous, it has to be fun, Schultz says.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. Im Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, Im focusing on the role of NSFW material on AI platforms, which could be complicated when AI platforms turn into social platforms. I also look at a powerful new Anthropic model for free Claude chatbot users. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan. Sam Altman welcomes NSFW to AI Sam Altman casually said on X Tuesday that OpenAI is planning to introduce NSFW content on ChatGPT as soon as December. The comment, which came at the bottom of a discussion about user mental health, raises all kinds of questions about user safety and trust, and about what audiences OpenAI really wants to serve. Altman says the company hopes to implement a new agegating mechanism through which users will prove theyre old enough to consume adult content. On ChatGPT, that implies frank discussions about sex with the chatbot, or maybe some forms of entertainment such as role-playing with sexy AI companions. Elon Musks xAI has already gone well down that road with its AI Companions, which launched during the summer within the Grok chatbot. The companions, reserved for Premium subscribers on the Grok app, have a NSFW mode and are willing and ready to engage in sexy conversation. The way Altman frames NSFW AI sounds similar to Musks approach to appropriate content. As part of our treat adult users like adults principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults, he wrote on X. So its not hard to imagine ChatGPT going down some of the roads xAI has taken. To some extent, this may apply to image generators too. Musk has already gone there. In August, xAI released the image generator Grok Imagine, which reportedly has a spicy mode that lets users create sexually explicit content, including partial female nudity, via text prompts. Will OpenAIs new permissive attitude about adult content on ChatGPT extend to its other products as well? The companys second-hottest product is the new Sora 2 image generator. The difference between Sora 2 and Grok Imagine is that Sora is a social app. Using the Sora 2 app is a lot like using TikTok, only all the content thats viewed, shared, and created on it is AI-generated, not shot with cameras. That social aspect raises the stakes in the appropriateness question. Right now OpenAI is tightly controlling the content created on Sora 2 (currently invite only). No sexual content is allowed, and the company says it puts an even tighter filter on Sora generations that will be shared socially. The company is using both content moderation AI and human reviewers to detect material that might violate its guidelines. It provides a way for users to report offensive videos and uses an AI algorithm to detect accounts bearing the hallmarks one would associate with being owned by a minor. But the company also says its taking an iterative approach to its content moderation, so todays tight moderation standards could loosen in the future. This could be especially problematic when it comes to the image and likeness rights of Sora users. One of the main features of the Sora app is cameos where users can feature their own likeness, or their friends, or certain celebrities, in their video creations. Allowing NSFW content in this context could open up all kinds of safety and reliability problems for users, and for OpenAI. Altman was surprised by the splash his erotica post made on Tuesday. On Wednesday he tried to explain further in another tweet: As AI becomes more important in people’s lives, allowing a lot of freedom for people to use AI in the ways that they want is an important part of our mission . . . Without being paternalistic we will attempt to help users achieve their long-term goals. But we are not the elected moral police of the world. In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here. And, safety concerns aside, the adult side of life has always been well represented on technology platforms from VHS to VR to social media. OpenAIs acceptance of adult content isnt likely to make ChatGPT any dumber or less useful, but it may give millions more people another reason to start using the chatbot. Anthropic brings a gift to free Claude chatbot users with new Claude Haiku 4.5 model Anthropic announced its new Claude Haiku 4.5 model Wednesday, which will become the default model for all free Claude.ai users. The model may be the most powerful model currently available to free users of chatbot apps. The arrival of Haiku 4.5 just two weeks after Claude Sonnet 4.5 suggests that things are still moving quickly on the research front. The new Haiku model matches Anthropics previous flagship Sonnet 4 model in software coding and even exceeds it in computer use tasks. Five months ago, Claude Sonnet 4 was a state-of-the-art model, Anthropic says in a blog post. Today, Claude Haiku 4.5 gives you similar levels of coding performance but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed. It also makes applications like Claude for Chrome run faster. For business users, Haiku 4.5 can be used to power multi-agent workflows where multiple instances of the model work in parallel or collaborate with larger models. For example, Sonnet 4.5 (currently considered Anthropics best model for AI agents) can plan complex projects while several Haiku 4.5 subagents quickly complete individual tasks. The model’s speed and cost efficiency make it particularly well-suited for real-time applications including chatbots, customer service, financial analysis, and research, Anthropic says. What does human-centered AI really mean? I first came to know of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence around 2020. Its an interdisciplinary research institute focused on developing and guiding AI in ways that prioritize human values, ethics, and societal benefit. I had a vague understanding of the concept in 2020, but as AI advanced, post-ChatGPT, I realized that it may be among the most important themes of the 21st century. There are active and passive ways to use AI. You can ask AI to do your work for you, to create a final product. Or you can work with the AI, using it to pull knowledge and inspiration out of yourself. So many of us struggle to stay in that productive thinking space long enough to pull out good ideas. Thinking through something is difficult and requires concentration. Even good ideas that seem to pop up out of nowhere need to be carefully examined to find logical pitfalls. One AI researcher told me that he uses AI as a kind of thinking partner to help him stay engaged in that deep thinking space by providing thoughtful, sometimes critical, feedback. This example is a simple expression of human-centered AI, in which the AI is used as an enabler, not as a proxy for human creation. The problem is this: AI may advance to the point where it is good enough to reason through hard problems and create a good expression of a solution (or an important insight) at the end. In more and more use cases, the AI may be good enough to allow the human to relax while the computer does the work. And the tech industry has no qualms about offering us conveniences (like app-based food delivery) or entertainment (Netflix) that lets us disconnect our brains. But the tech industry has never sold anything as capable as AI. The more use cases in which the AI does the work, the more that human beings are sidelined. We may end up relaxing ourselves into irrelevance and then extinction. More AI coverage from Fast Company: The memeification of Sora 2 Are large language models the problem, not the solution? Exclusive: Big Philanthropy teams up to take on Big AI Overheating at night? An AI-enabled mattress cover could be the answer Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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