Axios

Microsoft has made key improvements to an identity verification tool that Chinese hackers exploited last summer to hack government email accounts.

Why it matters: The changes will help keep malicious hackers from replicating last summer's hack, which exposed emails tied to officials at the State Department and even Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

OpenAI said Monday it has paid to translate and publish a key AI benchmark into 14 languages in hopes of spurring more investment in non-English AI systems.

Why it matters: Much of the internet text used to train AI systems is in English and a handful of other languages.

• Driving the news: OpenAI said that the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark will be available in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili and Yoruba.
• The ChatGPT maker is also launching OpenAI Academy, providing grants, technical advice and other incentives to developers and organizations that are working to address local challenges, an effort that will kick off in a range of low and middle income countries.

Between the lines: OpenAI is making these announcements as CEO Sam Altman attends his first UN General Assembly week in New York and meets with various international officials.

• I'll be interviewing Altman later today on stage, alongside Amandeep Gill, the United Nations Secretary-General's envoy on technology.

Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, defended her agency's aggressive antitrust record in an interview on "60 Minutes" Sunday, and said she'd be honored to work in a Harris administration.

Driving the news: Khan, the youngest-ever chair of the FTC, has had an historically aggressive run that could be soon coming to an end if former President Trump wins the presidency or if Vice President Kamala Harris decides to appoint another Democrat to head the agency.

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan suggested in an interview broadcast Sunday that the largest-ever proposed grocery merger could increase shopping costs if the deal goes through.

Why it matters: The trial of the planned merger of Kroger and Albertsons wrapped up last week and if the court sides with the FTC and grants an injunction, it would effectively kill the deal.

Qualcomm has informally approached Intel about a takeover, in what would be the largest tech merger of all time, according to multiple reports.

Why its matters: This could reshape the U.S. tech industry, and become the next president's first major antitrust case.

A new app that gives each user a private, Twitter-like social network populated exclusively by chatbots has stoked a wider debate about the purpose and value of online communication.

The big picture: At first blush, SocialAI, the all-bot platform, might sound like "pure artifice" or an "AI void" — but its 28-year old creator pitches it as an antidote to the toxicity of today's "real" social media.