The City of New York has officially warned consumers about AI-powered scams — specifically voice cloning and deepfake videos — that use artificial intelligence to impersonate family members and friends in urgent requests for money.

What the City Is Warning About

NYC DCWP's consumer protection page outlines two specific AI scam types now targeting residents:

1. Voice Cloning Scams

Scammers use AI to manipulate recordings found on social media, creating realistic voice clips that sound like panicked loved ones asking for emergency money.

Red flags the City wants you to watch for:

• Contacted out of the blue with urgent requests
• Pressured to act immediately — no time to think
• Money requested via wire transfer, gift cards, payment apps, or cryptocurrency (methods that make recovery nearly impossible)
• Requests for personal or private information
• Instructions to keep the call secret

2. Deepfake Video Scams

AI-generated videos that impersonate real people, often with telltale signs:

• Jerky or unrealistic movements
• Shifts in lighting or skin tone
• Strange or absent blinking
• Shadows around the eyes
• Out-of-character requests for money or information
• Stilted language, strange word choices, choppy sentences

How NYC Says to Respond

The City's advice is practical and actionable:

Ask questions they can't answer. A scammer may sound like your loved one, but they won't know private details only the real person would know. Ask them to confirm information that isn't publicly available.

Hang up and call back. Don't redial the number that called you — call the person's trusted number directly. If you can't reach them, contact another family member or friend to verify.

Stop and think. Urgency is the scammer's most powerful tool. Pause. Consider the situation rationally before acting.

Be wary of what you share online. Scammers harvest personal information from social media to make their impersonations more convincing. Make accounts private and be mindful of what you post.

Report it. File a report with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) at reportfraud.ftc.gov. The FTC uses these reports to investigate and build cases against fraud operations.

The NYC Angle

This isn't generic advice — it's the City of New York recognizing that AI scams have become sophisticated enough to warrant official consumer protection guidance.

For NYC business owners and operators, this matters on multiple levels:

• Your customers may be targeted. If you run a business that handles payments or personal information, your clients could receive AI-generated calls impersonating you or your staff
• Your employees are vulnerable. Voice cloning scams targeting workplace hierarchies — "the CEO needs this wire transfer now" — are increasingly common
• Your online presence is fuel for scammers. The more publicly available audio/video of you and your team exists, the more material scammers have to work with

What Businesses Should Do Now

Beyond the City's consumer advice, operators should consider:

Internal verification protocols. Establish a simple rule: any urgent payment request must be confirmed through a second channel (in-person, video call with the actual person, or a pre-arranged code word).

Limit public audio/video exposure. Consider whether public-facing content (podcasts, video interviews, social media clips) is worth the scam risk. If you must publish, be aware it can be cloned.
[7/29/2026 10:44 PM] Luffy: Educate your team. Share the City's warning with employees. Make sure they know the red flags and the verification protocol.

Monitor for impersonation. Periodically search your business name + "scam" or "fraud" to catch impersonation attempts early.

The Bottom Line
[7/29/2026 10:44 PM] Luffy: AI scams have evolved from crude email phishing to convincing voice and video impersonations. NYC's official warning is a signal: this threat is real, it's here, and it's targeting ordinary people — not just corporations.

The City's advice is simple but effective: ask questions, hang up and call back, stop and think. For operators, the same principles apply — but at organizational scale.

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The brAIef Signal maps how New York works with AI — for operators who need to know what's real and what matters.

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Source: NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP)
URL: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/consumers/artificial-intelligence-scam-tips.page

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT Health to all logged-in US users over 18, making it one of the most aggressive moves by a major AI company into the healthcare space.

The numbers are staggering: Users were already asking 300 million health-related questions per week — up from 230 million in January. That's not a niche feature. That's a behavior shift.

What it does:

• Integrates with Apple Health, Function, MyFitnessPal, Epic, Oracle Health, and One Medical
• Lets users pull health data into regular ChatGPT conversations (not just a dedicated hub)
• OpenAI says 70% of health queries were already happening outside the health hub during testing

The catch: OpenAI maintains its services are "not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of any health condition." This comes a day after a Florida pastor sued the company for allegedly giving near-fatal medical advice.

Why it matters for NYC operators: Healthcare is one of the biggest cost centers for small businesses. If ChatGPT Health can actually help owners navigate insurance, understand symptoms, or prep for doctor visits, that's real time and money saved. But the liability question looms large.

Source: TechCrunch, July 23, 2026 — OpenAI makes ChatGPT Health available to all US users

A multimillion-dollar partnership between Cornell's Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (CIS) and LinkedIn has concluded after five years, funding 40 researchers and producing breakthroughs in generative AI, large language models, and algorithmic fairness.

Why It Matters for NYC Operators

LinkedIn maintains a major presence in New York City. The talent and research flowing out of this partnership don't stay in Ithaca — they feed directly into the city's tech ecosystem. For local business owners, this means:

• Better hiring tools — LinkedIn's AI-powered job matching and candidate screening keeps improving
• Safer AI systems — Research into controllable AI and algorithmic fairness directly impacts the tools businesses rely on
• Talent pipeline — 20 doctoral students trained on cutting-edge AI are entering the workforce, many into NYC companies

What They Built

The partnership supported 20 faculty members and 20 doctoral students from 2022 to 2026. Research focused on four critical areas:

1. Generative AI & LLMs

Advancing how large language models understand context, generate relevant content, and maintain accuracy across domains.

2. Agentic AI

Building AI systems that can act autonomously — making decisions, completing tasks, and interacting with other systems without constant human oversight.

3. Algorithmic Fairness

Ensuring AI systems don't replicate or amplify bias in hiring, content recommendation, and professional networking.

4. Safer Clinical Trials

One concrete breakthrough: applying AI to make clinical trials safer and more efficient — relevant for NYC's massive healthcare and pharma sector.

The NYC Angle

This isn't just an academic exercise. LinkedIn's NYC office is a major hub for product development and AI research. The algorithms that power LinkedIn's feed, job recommendations, and recruiter tools are built and refined here.

When Cornell researchers improve how LLMs handle professional data or make recommendation algorithms fairer, those improvements flow into products used by millions of NYC professionals daily.

What to Watch

With the grant concluded, the question is what comes next:

• Will LinkedIn renew or expand the partnership? The success of this program makes a strong case for continued investment
• Where do the 20 PhDs land? Their placement will signal which NYC companies are betting big on AI research
• Which breakthroughs ship first? Academic research takes time to reach products — watch LinkedIn's feature announcements over the next 12-18 months

The Bottom Line

Five years. Millions of dollars. 40 researchers. The output isn't just papers — it's safer, fairer, more capable AI systems that NYC businesses and professionals use every day.

For operators watching the AI talent war, this partnership is a reminder that the research happening upstate doesn't stay upstate. It shapes the tools you use to hire, market, and compete.

Source: Cornell Chronicle, July 2026
URL: https://news.cornell.edu/index.php/stories/2026/07/2026-linkedin-grant-recipients-drive-innovation-genai-llms

Source: Cornell Chronicle
Author: Lo

uis DiPietro
Published: July 24, 2026
Read time: 3 minutes

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The Lead

A team at Cornell University has built an AI model that measures soil carbon 50 times faster than existing methods — and it could change how New York thinks about climate policy, agriculture, and carbon offsets.

The model, called BINN (Biogeochemistry-Informed Neural Network), is one of the first AI tools designed specifically to advance scientific discovery rather than just repurpose existing data.

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Why Soil Carbon Matters

Here's the number that should get your attention: Earth's soils hold roughly three-quarters of all terrestrial carbon — more than the atmosphere and all the world's plants combined.

If we understood soil carbon processes better, we could:

• Predict climate change more accurately
• Develop practical carbon capture solutions
• Potentially offset human-caused emissions through soil management

In 2015, French scientists proposed the "4 per 1,000" initiative — the idea that increasing soil organic carbon in agricultural lands by just 0.4% annually could offset all human-caused carbon emissions. The theory is sound. The measurement tools? Not so much.

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What BINN Does Differently

Most AI tools (think ChatGPT) repurpose existing information. Some extract patterns from data. BINN goes further: it predicts biological processes that aren't yet well understood and suggests what factors control them.

Previous models had a spatial bias problem — when predicting across the contiguous U.S., they'd favor data from certain regions over others. BINN shows less spatial bias while maintaining similar accuracy.

"BINN is very easy to use and can be democratized among the scientific community in various disciplines," said Yiqi Luo, Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor at Cornell CALS and senior author of the study.

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The NYC Angle

This isn't just an Ithaca story. Here's why NYC operators should care:

1. New York's Climate Goals
NYC has aggressive decarbonization targets. Better soil carbon measurement means more accurate carbon accounting — and more credible offset programs.

2. State Funding
The research was partially funded by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Your tax dollars are already backing this.

3. Talent Pipeline
The collaboration between Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and Cornell Bowers Computing shows how NY's universities are bridging agriculture and AI — a combination that will matter for the state's $5B+ agricultural sector.

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The Team

The research was a collaboration between:

• Yiqi Luo's lab (Cornell CALS, Soil and Crop Sciences)
• Carla Gomes' lab (Cornell Bowers Computing and Information Science, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business)
• Haodi Xu, doctoral student and co-first author
• Joshua Fan (now at Google) and Feng Tao (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Funding came from USDA, NSF, the Schmidt Sciences programs, U.S. Department of Energy, and NY State DEC.

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BINN won't make headlines like ChatGPT or Claude. But it's exactly the kind of applied AI that solves real problems — climate measurement, agricultural efficiency, and scientific discovery.

For NYC operators watching the AI landscape: not every breakthrough comes from San Francisco. Some of the most important ones are happening in New York soil.

Source: Cornell Chronicle
Author: Louis DiPietro

Published: July 24, 2026