By Tami Luhby, CNN

(CNN) — Less than a year after remaking a key vaccine advisory committee, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has set his sights on overhauling an HHS panel of medical experts that determine what preventive care Americans can receive at no cost.

Kennedy is seeking to expand the US Preventive Services Task Force’s membership beyond primary care doctors to specialists, a move that raises concerns among some former panel members and other experts that specialists may not have the needed breadth of knowledge.

The task force recommends screenings for cancer, diabetes, heart diseases, sexually transmitted infections and other preventive care.

The task force’s work has a direct impact on millions of people’s wallets. Insurers must cover preventive services that get an A or B grade from the panel at no cost to patients, thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

In a notice published Thursday in the Federal Register, HHS is asking for nominations of new members, encouraging anesthesiologists, cardiologists, oncologists, radiologists, obstetricians and other specialists to apply. The agency anticipates that the new members will start serving in July.

It’s unclear whether Kennedy plans for these new members to fill the slots of the five members whose terms expired at the end of last year, or if he intends to replace the remaining 11 members or to expand the task force’s size.

The secretary has repeatedly blasted the panel, which was established in 1984, for poor performance.

“That task force has been lackadaisical. It’s not been doing its job,” he told a House committee this week.

Some of its advocates say Kennedy has already sidelined the task force. It has not met for more than a year and has been unable to advance recommendations that are under review or in development, including those related to autism spectrum disorder screening, breast cancer medication, chronic kidney disease screening and behavioral counseling for sexually transmitted infections.

Also, it did not submit last year its annual report to Congress outlining gaps in research and highlighting areas where more focus is needed. The report is used to help inform the National Institutes of Health’s grant decision-making.

Evaluating 92 topics

Some experts have raised concerns about Kennedy’s plan to broaden the panel’s membership to specialists.

The task force evaluates evidence across 92 topics, including cancer screening, behavioral counseling, chronic disease prevention and maternal health, said Dr. Aaron Carroll, a pediatrician and CEO of the nonprofit AcademyHealth, a national organization for health services and policy researchers.

“No single specialist has deep expertise across all of them, which is precisely why the task force has historically been composed of generalist pri

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By Lisa Eadicicco, CNN

(CNN) — Foreign entities primarily based in China have conducted “industrial-scale” campaigns to crib frontier AI models from US companies, Michael Kratsios, White House director of the office of science and technology policy, said in a memo on Thursday.

The effort entails using tens of thousands of surrogate accounts to go undetected and complex tools to expose proprietary information, Krastios wrote.

“These coordinated campaigns systemically extract capabilities from American AI models, exploiting American expertise and innovation,” he said.

The US and China have been locked in a race to build the most sophisticated and advanced AI technology. AI has become a flashpoint in trade tensions between the two global superpowers, with tech giants like Nvidia getting caught in the middle.

At the heart of the accusations is a process called “distillation,” a technique used to transfer knowledge from a large AI model to a smaller one that can run more cheaply. Distillation is widely used for training AI models, but companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have previously claimed the process has been used to unfairly mimic their models’ capabilities.

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that rattled Wall Street last year, has been at the center of such accusations. OpenAI in February warned lawmakers that DeepSeek has been attempting to replicate the performance of the ChatGPT maker’s models and those of other US frontier labs through distillation.

Anthropic also said in February that it has “identified industrial-scale campaigns” by DeepSeek along with two other AI labs to “illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models.”

DeepSeek did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Distilled AI models can also raise security concerns since they lack the safeguards of the models they were trained on, Anthropic wrote in a February blog post.

“These distillation campaigns also allow those actors to deliberately strip security protocols from the resulting models and undo mechanisms that ensure those AI models are ideologically neutral and truth-seeking,” Kratsios wrote in the memo.

CNN has reached out to the Chinese embassy in Washington for comment.

The Trump administration plans to take several actions in response to the campaign, including sharing information with US AI companies about attempts to “conduct unauthorized, industrial-scale distillation” and improving coordination between private companies.

It also plans to explore measures to “hold foreign actors accountable” for such campaigns and work with the private sector to develop best practices for finding and defending against “industrial-scale distillation activities.”

Cementing the US as a leader in the AI race has been a cornerstone of Trump’s second term. He’s pushed for federal AI regulation rather than state-level rules in an attempt to expedite innovation. But critics have warned that approach could make it easy for AI companies to evade accountability. He’s also exerted controls over sales of AI chips to China.

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SANTA BARBARA COUNTY, Calif. (KEYT) – Large plumes of smoke have been spotted coming from the seaside cliffs in Hope Ranch Thursday.

Santa Barbara County Fire Department confirmed that a fire engine and a battalion chief from the Santa Barbara City Fire Department are on the scene and monitoring the potential spread to nearby vegetation.

The area is known for the 'Hope Ranch Volcano', as locals sometimes refer to the natural phenomenon, which has emitted smoke and even sparked fires multiple times in the past and is known as a sulfaterra.

Local residents may see or smell smoke in the area and those with respiratory illness should take caution.

The post Return of the ‘Hope Ranch Volcano’: Smoke plumes spotted rising from seaside cliffs appeared first on News Channel 3-12.

SANTA BARBARA COUNTY, Calif. (KEYT) – Large plumes of smoke have been spotted coming from the seaside cliffs in the Hope Ranch area Thursday.

Santa Barbara County Fire Department confirmed that a fire engine and a battalion chief from the Santa Barbara City Fire Department are on the scene and monitoring the potential spread to nearby vegetation.

The area is known for the 'Hope Ranch Volcano', as locals sometimes refer to the natural phenomenon, which has emitted smoke and even sparked fires multiple times in the past and is known as a sulfaterra.

Sulfaterras, which is the name given to accumulated sulfur compounds on the surface of such geological phenomena, can often emit a mix of sulfur aerosols and water vapor.

Local residents may see or smell smoke in the area and those with respiratory illness should take caution.

The post Return of the ‘Hope Ranch Volcano’: Smoke plumes spotted rising from seaside cliffs appeared first on News Channel 3-12.