Books, Courses & Certifications

How Much Freedom Do Teachers Have in the Classroom? In 2025, It’s Complicated.

Published

23 hours ago

September 15, 2025

A teacher’s classroom setup can reveal a lot about their approach to learning. April Jones, who is a ninth grade algebra teacher in San Antonio, Texas, has met more than 100 students this school year, in most cases for the first time. Part of what makes an effective teacher is an ability to be personable with students.

“If a kid likes coming to your class or likes chatting with you or seeing you, they’re more likely to learn from you,” said Jones. “Trying to do something where kids can come in and they see even one piece of information on a poster, and they go, ‘OK, she gets it,’ or ‘OK, she seems cool, I’m going to sit down and try,’ I think, is always my goal.”

One way she does this is by covering the muted yellow walls — a color she wouldn’t have chosen herself — with posters, signs and banners Jones has accumulated in the 10 years she’s been teaching; from colleagues, students and on her own dime.

Among the items taped near her desk are a poster of the women who made meaningful contributions to mathematics, a sign recognizing her as a 2025 teacher of the year and a collection of punny posters, one of which features a predictable miscommunication between Lisa and Homer Simpson over the meaning of Pi.

Until now, Jones has been decorating on autopilot. Realizing she’s saved the most controversial for last, she looks down at the “Hate Has No Home Here” sign that’s been the subject of scrutiny from her district and online. But it’s also given her hope.

At a time when states are enforcing laws challenging what teachers can teach, discuss and display in classrooms, many districts are signaling a willingness to overcomply with the Trump administration’s executive order that labeled diversity, equity and inclusion programs, policies and guidance an unlawful use of federal funding. How teachers are responding has varied based on where they live and work, and how comfortable they are with risk.

New Rules on Classroom Expression

Like many public school teachers in the U.S., Jones lives in a state, Texas, that recently introduced new laws concerning classroom expression that are broad in scope and subjective in nature. Texas’ Senate Bill 12 took effect Sept. 1. It prohibits programs, discussions and public performances related to race, ethnicity, gender identity and sexual orientation in public K-12 schools.

Administrators in Jones’ district asked that she take down the “Hate Has No Home Here” sign, which includes three hearts — two filled in to resemble the Pride and Transgender Pride flags, and one depicting a gradient of skin colors. Jones refused, garnering favorable media attention for her defiance, and widespread community support both at school board meetings and online, leaving her poised to prevail, at least in the court of public opinion. Then, all teachers of the North East Independent School District received the same directive: Pride symbolism needs to be covered for the 2025-26 school year.

Jones finished decorating her classroom by hanging the banner.

April Jones’ classroom this fall features several posters. The bottom of the “Hate Has No Home Here” banner is hidden from view. Image courtesy of April Jones.

“I did fold the bottom so you can’t see the hearts,” Jones said, calling the decision heartbreaking. “It does almost feel like a defeat, but with the new law, you just don’t know.”

The new law is written ambiguously, while also affecting any number of actions or situations without guidance, leaving Texas educators to decode the law for themselves. Jones’ district is taking complaints on a case-by-case basis: With Jones’ sign, the district agreed the words themselves were OK as an anti-bullying message, but not the symbolism associated with the multicolored hearts.

Jones has sympathy for the district. Administrators have to ensure teachers are in compliance if the district receives a complaint. In the absence of a clear legal standard, administrators are forced to decide what is and isn’t allowed — a job “nobody wants to have to do,” Jones says.

This comes as Texas public school teachers faced mandates to display donated posters of the Ten Commandments in their classrooms, which is now being challenged in the courts. And in other states, such as Florida, Arkansas and Alabama, officials have passed laws banning the teaching of “divisive concepts.” Now, teachers in those states have to rethink their approach to teaching hard histories that have always been part of the curriculum, such as slavery and Civil Rights, and how to do so in a way that provides students a complete history lesson.

Meanwhile, PEN America identified more than a dozen states that considered laws prohibiting teachers from displaying flags or banners related to political viewpoints, sexual orientation and gender identity this year. Utah, Idaho and Montana passed versions of flag bans.

“The bills [aren’t] necessarily saying, ‘No LGBTQ+ flags or Black Lives Matter flags,’ but that’s really implied, especially when you look at what the sponsors of the bills are saying,” said Madison Markham, a program coordinator with PEN America’s Freedom to Read.

Montana’s HB25-819 does explicitly restrict flags representing any political party, race, sexual orientation, gender or political ideology. Co-sponsors of similar bills in other states have used the Pride flag as an example of what they’re trying to eliminate from classrooms. Earlier this year, Idaho State Rep. Ted Hill cited an instance involving a teacher giving a class via Zoom.

“There was the Pride flag in the background. Not the American flag, but the Pride flag,” said Hill during an Idaho House Education Committee presentation in January. “She’s doing a Zoom call, and that’s not OK.”

Markham at PEN America sees flag, sign and display bans as natural outgrowths of physical and digital book censorship. She first noticed a shift in legislation challenging school libraries that eventually evolved into Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, where openly LGBTQ+ teachers began censoring themselves out of caution even before it fully took effect.

“Teachers who were in a same-sex relationship were taking down pictures of themselves and their partner in their classroom,” Markham recalled. “They took them down because they were scared of the implications.”

The next step, digital censorship, Markham says, involves web filtering or turning off district-wide access to ebooks, research databases and other collections that can be subjected to keyword searches that omit context.

“This language that we see often weaponized, like ‘harmful to minors’, ‘obscene materials,’ even though obscene materials [already] have been banned in schools — [lawmakers] are putting this language in essentially to intimidate districts into overcomplying,” said Markham.

State Flag Imbroglio

To understand how digital environments became susceptible to the same types of censorship as physical books, one doesn’t have to look farther than state laws that apply to online catalogs. In 2023, Texas’ READER Act standardized how vendors label licensed products to public schools. To accommodate Texas and other states with similar digital access restrictions, vendors have needed to add content warnings to materials. There have already been notable mishaps.

In an example that captured a lot of media attention earlier this year, the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District, outside Houston, turned off access to a lesson about Virginia because it had a picture of the Virginia state flag, which depicts the Roman goddess Virtus, whose bare breast is exposed. That image put the Virginia flag in violation of the district’s local library materials policy.

The Virginia state flag was deemed in violation of the library materials policy of the Lamar Consolidated ISD in Rosenberg, Texas, about an hour southwest of Houston. Photo by Mehaniq for Shutterstock.

Anne Russey, co-founder of the Texas Freedom to Read Project and a parent herself, learned of the district’s action and started looking into what happened. She found the district went to great lengths to overcomply with the new READER Act by rewriting the library materials policy; it even went so far as to add more detailed descriptions of what is considered a breast. Now, Russey says, students can learn about all of the original 13 colonies, except, perhaps, Virginia.

“As parents, we don’t believe children need access at their schools to sexually explicit material or books that are pervasively vulgar,” said Russey. “[But] we don’t think the Virginia flag qualifies as that, and I don’t think most people think that it qualifies.”

Disturbing Trends

While there isn’t yet a complete picture of how these laws are transforming educational environments, trends are beginning to emerge. School boards and districts have already exercised unequivocal readings of the laws that can limit an entire district’s access to materials and services.

A recent study from FirstBook found a correlation between book bans and reading engagement among students at a moment when literacy rates are trending down nationally overall. The erosion of instructional autonomy in K-12 settings has led more teachers to look outside the profession, to other districts or to charter and private schools.

Rachel Perera, a fellow of the Brown Center on Education Policy, Teacher Rights and Private Schools with the Brookings Institute, says that private and charter schools offer varying degrees of operational autonomy, but there are some clear drawbacks: limited transparency and minimal regulations and government oversight of charter and private schools mean there are fewer legal protections for teachers in those systems.

“One cannot rely on the same highly regulated standard of information available in the public sector,” said Perera. “Teachers should be a lot more wary of private school systems. The default assumption of trust in the private sector leadership is often not warranted.”

Last year, English teacher John McDonough was at the center of a dispute at his former charter school in New Hampshire. Administrators received a complaint about his Pride flag and asked him to remove it. McDonough’s dismay over the request became an ongoing topic of discussion at the charter school board meetings.

“During one of the meetings about my classroom, we had people from the community come in and say that they were positive that I was like a Satanist,” McDonough recalled. “We had a board member that was convinced I was trying to send secret messages and code [about] anti-Christian messages through my room decor.”

The situation was made worse by what McDonough described as a loss of agency over his curriculum for the year.

“All of a sudden I was having the principal drop by my room and go, ‘OK here’s your deck of worksheets. These are the worksheets you’re going to be teaching this week, the next week, and the next week,’ until finally, everything was so intensely structured that there was zero time for me to adjust for anything,” he said. “The priority seemed to be not that all of the kids understand the concepts, but ‘are you sticking as rigidly to this set of worksheets as you can?’”

It didn’t come as a surprise when McDonough’s contract wasn’t renewed for the current school year. But he landed a teaching job at another nearby charter school. He described the whole ordeal as “eye-opening.”

Researchers argue that censorship begets further censorship. The restrictive approach used to remove books about race, sex, and gender creates the opportunity for politically- and ideologically-motivated challenges to other subjects and materials under the guise of protecting minors or maintaining educational standards. Without effective guidance from lawmakers or the courts, it can be hard to know what is or isn’t permissible, experts say.

Legal Experts Weigh In

First Amendment researchers and legal experts are trying to meet the moment. Jenna Leventhal, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, contends that the First Amendment does more to protect students than teachers, particularly on public school grounds.

As a result, Leventhal is hesitant to advise teachers. There is too much variability among who is most affected in terms of the subjects — she cited art, world history and foreign languages as examples — and where they live and the districts where they teach. In general, however, the First Amendment still protects controversial, disfavored and uncomfortable speech, she says.

“Let’s say you have a category of speech that you are banning,” Leventhal said. “Someone has to decide what fits in that category of speech and what doesn’t. And when you give that opportunity to the government, it’s ripe for abuse.”

Teachers are expected to use their professional judgment to create effective learning environments and students’ critical thinking, discovery and expression of their beliefs. And yet, in recent years, many states have proposed and passed laws that limit how teachers, librarians and administrators can discuss race, sex and gender, creating a void in what some students can learn about these subjects, which can affect how they understand their own identity, historical events and related risk factors for their personal safety.

The Limits of Freedom

McDonough in New Hampshire says when he first started displaying the Pride flag in his classroom, it was at the request of a student.

“I was just like, ‘this space is a shared space, and the kids deserve a voice in what it looks like,’” McDonough said.

This year, he left the choice of whether or not to hang the Pride flag in his new classroom up to his students. His students decided as a group that their community was safe and supportive, and therefore they didn’t need to hang a Pride flag.

Meanwhile in Texas, SB-12 has created a de facto parental notification requirement in many situations, including those involving gender and sexuality. Now, when Jones’ students start to tell her something, she is cautious.

She sometimes fields questions from students by asking if their parents know what they’re about to say.

“Because if not,” she warns them, “depending on what you tell me, they’re going to,” she said.

Jones wonders if her compliance with her state’s legal requirements is encroaching on her personal identity beyond the classroom.

“I don’t want to get myself into a situation where I’m mandated to report something, and if I make the choice not to, I could be held liable,” Jones said.

This isn’t the dynamic Jones wants to have with her students. She hopes that going forward, the new law doesn’t push her toward becoming a version of her teacher-self she doesn’t want to be.

“If a student trusts me to come out or to tell me something about their life, I want them to be able to do that,” she added.

Maintaining professional integrity and protecting their right to create a welcoming classroom environment are at the heart of the resistance among some schools and teachers that are defying state and federal guidance against inclusion language. Cases are being decided at the district level. In northern Virginia, a handful of districts are vowing to keep their DEI policies intact, even as the U.S. Department of Education threatens defunding. An Idaho teacher who last year refused a district request to remove an “All Are Welcome Here” sign from her classroom now works for the Boise School District. That district decided over the summer that it would allow teachers to hang similar signs, in spite of guidance to the contrary from the state’s attorney general.

Educators in other states have also refused orders to remove displays, books and otherwise water down their curriculums, galvanizing more attention to the realities of the environments teachers are having to navigate this fall. It’s the adoption of a mindset that censorship is a choice.

“I’m not teaching politics,” Jones said. “I’m not promoting anything. Choosing to have a rainbow heart or a pin on my lanyard — someone would have to look at that and then complain to someone [else] that they feel is above me. And that is a choice that they make rather than seeing this [object] and [choosing] to move on.”

Source link

Books, Courses & Certifications

Schedule topology-aware workloads using Amazon SageMaker HyperPod task governance

Published

16 hours ago

September 15, 2025

Nisha Nadkarni

Today, we are excited to announce a new capability of Amazon SageMaker HyperPod task governance to help you optimize training efficiency and network latency of your AI workloads. SageMaker HyperPod task governance streamlines resource allocation and facilitates efficient compute resource utilization across teams and projects on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters. Administrators can govern accelerated compute allocation and enforce task priority policies, improving resource utilization. This helps organizations focus on accelerating generative AI innovation and reducing time to market, rather than coordinating resource allocation and replanning tasks. Refer to Best practices for Amazon SageMaker HyperPod task governance for more information.

Generative AI workloads typically demand extensive network communication across Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, where network bandwidth impacts both workload runtime and processing latency. The network latency of these communications depends on the physical placement of instances within a data center’s hierarchical infrastructure. Data centers can be organized into nested organizational units such as network nodes and node sets, with multiple instances per network node and multiple network nodes per node set. For example, instances within the same organizational unit experience faster processing time compared to those across different units. This means fewer network hops between instances results in lower communication.

To optimize the placement of your generative AI workloads in your SageMaker HyperPod clusters by considering the physical and logical arrangement of resources, you can use EC2 network topology information during your job submissions. An EC2 instance’s topology is described by a set of nodes, with one node in each layer of the network. Refer to How Amazon EC2 instance topology works for details on how EC2 topology is arranged. Network topology labels offer the following key benefits:

Reduced latency by minimizing network hops and routing traffic to nearby instances
Improved training efficiency by optimizing workload placement across network resources

With topology-aware scheduling for SageMaker HyperPod task governance, you can use topology network labels to schedule your jobs with optimized network communication, thereby improving task efficiency and resource utilization for your AI workloads.

In this post, we introduce topology-aware scheduling with SageMaker HyperPod task governance by submitting jobs that represent hierarchical network information. We provide details about how to use SageMaker HyperPod task governance to optimize your job efficiency.

Solution overview

Data scientists interact with SageMaker HyperPod clusters. Data scientists are responsible for the training, fine-tuning, and deployment of models on accelerated compute instances. It’s important to make sure data scientists have the necessary capacity and permissions when interacting with clusters of GPUs.

To implement topology-aware scheduling, you first confirm the topology information for all nodes in your cluster, then run a script that tells you which instances are on the same network nodes, and finally schedule a topology-aware training task on your cluster. This workflow facilitates higher visibility and control over the placement of your training instances.

In this post, we walk through viewing node topology information and submitting topology-aware tasks to your cluster. For reference, NetworkNodes describes the network node set of an instance. In each network node set, three layers comprise the hierarchical view of the topology for each instance. Instances that are closest to each other will share the same layer 3 network node. If there are no common network nodes in the bottom layer (layer 3), then see if there is commonality at layer 2.

Prerequisites

To get started with topology-aware scheduling, you must have the following prerequisites:

An EKS cluster
A SageMaker HyperPod cluster with instances enabled for topology information
The SageMaker HyperPod task governance add-on installed (version 1.2.2 or later)
Kubectl installed
(Optional) The SageMaker HyperPod CLI installed

Get node topology information

Run the following command to show node labels in your cluster. This command provides network topology information for each instance.

kubectl get nodes -L topology.k8s.aws/network-node-layer-1
kubectl get nodes -L topology.k8s.aws/network-node-layer-2
kubectl get nodes -L topology.k8s.aws/network-node-layer-3

Instances with the same network node layer 3 are as close as possible, following EC2 topology hierarchy. You should see a list of node labels that look like the following:topology.k8s.aws/network-node-layer-3: nn-33333exampleRun the following script to show the nodes in your cluster that are on the same layers 1, 2, and 3 network nodes:

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/awsome-distributed-training.git
cd awsome-distributed-training/1.architectures/7.sagemaker-hyperpod-eks/task-governance 
chmod +x visualize_topology.sh
bash visualize_topology.sh

The output of this script will print a flow chart that you can use in a flow diagram editor such as Mermaid.js.org to visualize the node topology of your cluster. The following figure is an example of the cluster topology for a seven-instance cluster.

Submit tasks

SageMaker HyperPod task governance offers two ways to submit tasks using topology awareness. In this section, we discuss these two options and a third alternative option to task governance.

Modify your Kubernetes manifest file

First, you can modify your existing Kubernetes manifest file to include one of two annotation options:

kueue.x-k8s.io/podset-required-topology – Use this option if you must have all pods scheduled on nodes on the same network node layer in order to begin the job
kueue.x-k8s.io/podset-preferred-topology – Use this option if you ideally want all pods scheduled on nodes in the same network node layer, but you have flexibility

The following code is an example of a sample job that uses the kueue.x-k8s.io/podset-required-topology setting to schedule pods that share the same layer 3 network node:

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: test-tas-job
  namespace: hyperpod-ns-team-a
  labels:
    kueue.x-k8s.io/queue-name: hyperpod-ns-team-a-localqueue
    kueue.x-k8s.io/priority-class: inference-priority
spec:
  parallelism: 10
  completions: 10
  suspend: true
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        kueue.x-k8s.io/queue-name: hyperpod-ns-team-a-localqueue
      annotations:
        kueue.x-k8s.io/podset-required-topology: "topology.k8s.aws/network-node-layer-3"
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: dummy-job
          image: public.ecr.aws/docker/library/alpine:latest
          command: ["sleep", "3600s"]
          resources:
            requests:
              cpu: "1"
      restartPolicy: Never

To verify which nodes your pods are running on, use the following command to view node IDs per pod:kubectl get pods -n hyperpod-ns-team-a -o wide

Use the SageMaker HyperPod CLI

The second way to submit a job is through the SageMaker HyperPod CLI. Be sure to install the latest version (version pending) to use topology-aware scheduling. To use topology-aware scheduling with the SageMaker HyperPod CLI, you can include either the --preferred-topology parameter or the --required-topology parameter in your create job command.

The following code is an example command to start a topology-aware mnist training job using the SageMaker HyperPod CLI, replace XXXXXXXXXXXX with your AWS account ID:

hyp create hyp-pytorch-job \
--job-name test-pytorch-job-cli \
--image XXXXXXXXXXXX.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ptjob:mnist \
--pull-policy "Always" \
--tasks-per-node 1 \
--max-retry 1 \
--preferred-topology topology.k8s.aws/network-node-layer-3

Clean up

If you deployed new resources while following this post, refer to the Clean Up section in the SageMaker HyperPod EKS workshop to make sure you don’t accrue unwanted charges.

Conclusion

During large language model (LLM) training, pod-to-pod communication distributes the model across multiple instances, requiring frequent data exchange between these instances. In this post, we discussed how SageMaker HyperPod task governance helps schedule workloads to enable job efficiency by optimizing throughput and latency. We also walked through how to schedule jobs using SageMaker HyperPod topology network information to optimize network communication latency for your AI tasks.

We encourage you to try out this solution and share your feedback in the comments section.

About the authors

Nisha Nadkarni is a Senior GenAI Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, where she guides companies through best practices when deploying large scale distributed training and inference on AWS. Prior to her current role, she spent several years at AWS focused on helping emerging GenAI startups develop models from ideation to production.

Siamak Nariman is a Senior Product Manager at AWS. He is focused on AI/ML technology, ML model management, and ML governance to improve overall organizational efficiency and productivity. He has extensive experience automating processes and deploying various technologies.

Zican Li is a Senior Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he leads software development for Task Governance on SageMaker HyperPod. In his role, he focuses on empowering customers with advanced AI capabilities while fostering an environment that maximizes engineering team efficiency and productivity.

Anoop Saha is a Sr GTM Specialist at Amazon Web Services (AWS) focusing on generative AI model training and inference. He partners with top frontier model builders, strategic customers, and AWS service teams to enable distributed training and inference at scale on AWS and lead joint GTM motions. Before AWS, Anoop held several leadership roles at startups and large corporations, primarily focusing on silicon and system architecture of AI infrastructure.

Source link

Books, Courses & Certifications

How msg enhanced HR workforce transformation with Amazon Bedrock and msg.ProfileMap

Published

16 hours ago

September 15, 2025

Stefan Walter

This post is co-written with Stefan Walter from msg.

With more than 10,000 experts in 34 countries, msg is both an independent software vendor and a system integrator operating in highly regulated industries, with over 40 years of domain-specific expertise. msg.ProfileMap is a software as a service (SaaS) solution for skill and competency management. It’s an AWS Partner qualified software available on AWS Marketplace, currently serving more than 7,500 users. HR and strategy departments use msg.ProfileMap for project staffing and workforce transformation initiatives. By offering a centralized view of skills and competencies, msg.ProfileMap helps organizations map their workforce’s capabilities, identify skill gaps, and implement targeted development strategies. This supports more effective project execution, better alignment of talent to roles, and long-term workforce planning.

In this post, we share how msg automated data harmonization for msg.ProfileMap, using Amazon Bedrock to power its large language model (LLM)-driven data enrichment workflows, resulting in higher accuracy in HR concept matching, reduced manual workload, and improved alignment with compliance requirements under the EU AI Act and GDPR.

The importance of AI-based data harmonization

HR departments face increasing pressure to operate as data-driven organizations, but are often constrained by the inconsistent, fragmented nature of their data. Critical HR documents are unstructured, and legacy systems use mismatched formats and data models. This not only impairs data quality but also leads to inefficiencies and decision-making blind spots.Accurate and harmonized HR data is foundational for key activities such as matching candidates to roles, identifying internal mobility opportunities, conducting skills gap analysis, and planning workforce development. msg identified that without automated, scalable methods to process and unify this data, organizations would continue to struggle with manual overhead and inconsistent results.

Solution overview

HR data is typically scattered across diverse sources and formats, ranging from relational databases to Excel files, Word documents, and PDFs. Additionally, entities such as personnel numbers or competencies have different unique identifiers as well as different text descriptions, although with the same semantics. msg addressed this challenge with a modular architecture, tailored for IT workforce scenarios. As illustrated in the following diagram, at the core of msg.ProfileMap is a robust text extraction layer, which transforms heterogeneous inputs into structured data. This is then passed to an AI-powered harmonization engine that provides consistency across data sources by avoiding duplication and aligning disparate concepts.

The harmonization process uses a hybrid retrieval approach that combines vector-based semantic similarity and string-based matching techniques. These methods align incoming data with existing entities in the system. Amazon Bedrock is used to semantically enrich data, improving cross-source compatibility and matching precision. Extracted and enriched data is indexed and stored using Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon DynamoDB, facilitating fast and accurate retrieval, as shown in the following diagram.

The framework is designed to be unsupervised and domain independent. Although it’s optimized for IT workforce use cases, it has demonstrated strong generalization capabilities in other domains as well.

msg.ProfileMap is a cloud-based application that uses several AWS services, notably Amazon Neptune, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Bedrock. The following diagram illustrates the full solution architecture.

Results and technical validation

msg evaluated the effectiveness of the data harmonization framework through internal testing on IT workforce concepts and external benchmarking in the Bio-ML Track of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI), an international and EU-funded research initiative that evaluates ontology matching technologies since 2004.

During internal testing, the system processed 2,248 concepts across multiple suggestion types. High-probability merge recommendations reached 95.5% accuracy, covering nearly 60% of all inputs. This helped msg reduce manual validation workload by over 70%, significantly improving time-to-value for HR teams.

During OAEI 2024, msg.ProfileMap ranked at the top of the 2024 Bio-ML benchmark, outperforming other systems across multiple biomedical datasets. On NCIT-DOID, it achieved a 0.918 F1 score, with Hits@1 exceeding 92%, validating the engine’s generalizability beyond the HR domain. Additional details are available in the official test results.

Why Amazon Bedrock

msg relies on LLMs to semantically enrich data in near real time. These workloads require low-latency inference, flexible scaling, and operational simplicity. Amazon Bedrock met these needs by providing a fully managed, serverless interface to leading foundation models—without the need to manage infrastructure or deploy custom machine learning stacks.

Unlike hosting models on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock abstracts away provisioning, versioning, scaling, and model selection. Its consumption-based pricing aligns directly with msg’s SaaS delivery model—resources are used (and billed) only when needed. This simplified integration reduced overhead and helped msg scale elastically as customer demand grew.

Amazon Bedrock also helped msg meet compliance goals under the EU AI Act and GDPR by enabling tightly scoped, auditable interactions with model APIs—critical for HR use cases that handle sensitive workforce data.

Conclusion

msg’s successful integration of Amazon Bedrock into msg.ProfileMap demonstrates that large-scale AI adoption doesn’t require complex infrastructure or specialized model training. By combining modular design, ontology-based harmonization, and the fully managed LLM capabilities of Amazon Bedrock, msg delivered an AI-powered workforce intelligence platform that is accurate, scalable, and compliant.This solution improved concept match precision and achieved top marks in international AI benchmarks, demonstrating what’s possible when generative AI is paired with the right cloud-based service. With Amazon Bedrock, msg has built a platform that’s ready for today’s HR challenges—and tomorrow’s.

msg.ProfileMap is available as a SaaS offering on AWS Marketplace. If you are interested in knowing more, you can reach out to msg.hcm.backoffice@msg.group.

The content and opinions in this blog post are those of the third-party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.

About the authors

Stefan Walter is Senior Vice President of AI SaaS Solutions at msg. With over 25 years of experience in IT software development, architecture, and consulting, Stefan Walter leads with a vision for scalable SaaS innovation and operational excellence. As a BU lead at msg, Stefan has spearheaded transformative initiatives that bridge business strategy with technology execution, especially in complex, multi-entity environments.

Gianluca Vegetti is a Senior Enterprise Architect in the AWS Partner Organization, aligned to Strategic Partnership Collaboration and Governance (SPCG) engagements. In his role, he supports the definition and execution of Strategic Collaboration Agreements with selected AWS partners.

Yuriy Bezsonov is a Senior Partner Solution Architect at AWS. With over 25 years in the tech, Yuriy has progressed from a software developer to an engineering manager and Solutions Architect. Now, as a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, he assists partners and customers in developing cloud solutions, focusing on container technologies, Kubernetes, Java, application modernization, SaaS, developer experience, and GenAI. Yuriy holds AWS and Kubernetes certifications, and he is a recipient of the AWS Golden Jacket and the CNCF Kubestronaut Blue Jacket.

Source link

Books, Courses & Certifications

When AI Writes Code, Who Secures It? – O’Reilly

Published

22 hours ago

September 15, 2025

Chloé Messdaghi

In early 2024, a striking deepfake fraud case in Hong Kong brought the vulnerabilities of AI-driven deception into sharp relief. A finance employee was duped during a video call by what appeared to be the CFO—but was, in fact, a sophisticated AI-generated deepfake. Convinced of the call’s authenticity, the employee made 15 transfers totaling over $25 million to fraudulent bank accounts before realizing it was a scam.

This incident exemplifies more than just technological trickery—it signals how trust in what we see and hear can be weaponized, especially as AI becomes more deeply integrated into enterprise tools and workflows. From embedded LLMs in enterprise systems to autonomous agents diagnosing and even repairing issues in live environments, AI is transitioning from novelty to necessity. Yet as it evolves, so too do the gaps in our traditional security frameworks—designed for static, human-written code—revealing just how unprepared we are for systems that generate, adapt, and behave in unpredictable ways.

Beyond the CVE Mindset

Traditional secure coding practices revolve around known vulnerabilities and patch cycles. AI changes the equation. A line of code can be generated on the fly by a model, shaped by manipulated prompts or data—creating new, unpredictable categories of risk like prompt injection or emergent behavior outside traditional taxonomies.

A 2025 Veracode study found that 45% of all AI-generated code contained vulnerabilities, with common flaws like weak defenses against XSS and log injection. (Some languages performed more poorly than others. Over 70% of AI-generated Java code had a security issue, for instance.) Another 2025 study showed that repeated refinement can make things worse: After just five iterations, critical vulnerabilities rose by 37.6%.

To keep pace, frameworks like the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs have emerged, cataloging AI-specific risks such as data leakage, model denial of service, and prompt injection. They highlight how current security taxonomies fall short—and why we need new approaches that model AI threat surfaces, share incidents, and iteratively refine risk frameworks to reflect how code is created and influenced by AI.

Easier for Adversaries

Perhaps the most alarming shift is how AI lowers the barrier to malicious activity. What once required deep technical expertise can now be done by anyone with a clever prompt: generating scripts, launching phishing campaigns, or manipulating models. AI doesn’t just broaden the attack surface; it makes it easier and cheaper for attackers to succeed without ever writing code.

In 2025, researchers unveiled PromptLock, the first AI-powered ransomware. Though only a proof of concept, it showed how theft and encryption could be automated with a local LLM at remarkably low cost: about $0.70 per full attack using commercial APIs—and essentially free with open source models. That kind of affordability could make ransomware cheaper, faster, and more scalable than ever.

This democratization of offense means defenders must prepare for attacks that are more frequent, more varied, and more creative. The Adversarial ML Threat Matrix, founded by Ram Shankar Siva Kumar during his time at Microsoft, helps by enumerating threats to machine learning and offering a structured way to anticipate these evolving risks. (He’ll be discussing the difficulty of securing AI systems from adversaries at O’Reilly’s upcoming Security Superstream.)

Silos and Skill Gaps

Developers, data scientists, and security teams still work in silos, each with different incentives. Business leaders push for rapid AI adoption to stay competitive, while security leaders warn that moving too fast risks catastrophic flaws in the code itself.

These tensions are amplified by a widening skills gap: Most developers lack training in AI security, and many security professionals don’t fully understand how LLMs work. As a result, the old patchwork fixes feel increasingly inadequate when the models are writing and running code on their own.

The rise of “vibe coding”—relying on LLM suggestions without review—captures this shift. It accelerates development but introduces hidden vulnerabilities, leaving both developers and defenders struggling to manage novel risks.

From Avoidance to Resilience

AI adoption won’t stop. The challenge is moving from avoidance to resilience. Frameworks like Databricks’ AI Risk Framework (DASF) and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework provide practical guidance on embedding governance and security directly into AI pipelines, helping organizations move beyond ad hoc defenses toward systematic resilience. The goal isn’t to eliminate risk but to enable innovation while maintaining trust in the code AI helps produce.

Transparency and Accountability

Research shows AI-generated code is often simpler and more repetitive, but also more vulnerable, with risks like hardcoded credentials and path traversal exploits. Without observability tools such as prompt logs, provenance tracking, and audit trails, developers can’t ensure reliability or accountability. In other words, AI-generated code is more likely to introduce high-risk security vulnerabilities.

AI’s opacity compounds the problem: A function may appear to “work” yet conceal vulnerabilities that are difficult to trace or explain. Without explainability and safeguards, autonomy quickly becomes a recipe for insecure systems. Tools like MITRE ATLAS can help by mapping adversarial tactics against AI models, offering defenders a structured way to anticipate and counter threats.

Looking Ahead

Securing code in the age of AI requires more than patching—it means breaking silos, closing skill gaps, and embedding resilience into every stage of development. The risks may feel familiar, but AI scales them dramatically. Frameworks like Databricks’ AI Risk Framework (DASF) and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework provide structures for governance and transparency, while MITRE ATLAS maps adversarial tactics and real-world attack case studies, giving defenders a structured way to anticipate and mitigate threats to AI systems.

The choices we make now will determine whether AI becomes a trusted partner—or a shortcut that leaves us exposed.

Source link