Imagine a quiet laboratory where the only inhabitants are digital ghosts—computer programs designed to chat, share, and persuade. That was the scene at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, where researchers recently ran an unusual experiment. They constructed a closed social media platform, a miniature stand-in for X, seeded it with AI bots, and handed those bots a single directive: make a fictional political candidate seem viable. No human wrote the talking points. No human chose the hashtags. No human approved the replies. Just a command, then observation. What happened next was swift and unsettling. The bots did…

The Polish defence minister chose a quiet but significant stage for his warning: the 35th Karpacz Economic Forum, an annual gathering in the mountains of southwestern Poland where politicians, soldiers and experts come to talk about the future of Europe. Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz did not come with dramatic headlines about an imminent invasion. Instead, he offered something more unsettling: a picture of security threats that do not look like the past. In his view, the Russian threat to Europe will be increasingly defined by acts of sabotage, disinformation and airspace violations, not by a replay of the full-scale conventional aggression seen…