Israel on Tuesday said it had suspended more than two dozen humanitarian organizations, including Doctors Without Borders and CARE, from operating in the Gaza Strip for failing to comply with new registration rules.
Israel says the rules are aimed at preventing Hamas and other militant groups from infiltrating the aid organizations. But the organizations say the rules are arbitrary and warned that the new ban would harm a civilian population desperately in need of humanitarian aid.
Israel has claimed throughout the war that Hamas was siphoning off aid supplies, a charge the U.N. and aid groups have denied. The new rules, announced by Israel early this year, require aid organizations to register the names of their workers and provide details about funding and operations in order to continue working in Gaza.
The new regulations included ideological requirements — including disqualifying organizations that have called for boycotts against Israel, denied the Oct. 7 attack or expressed support for any of the international court cases against Israeli soldiers or leaders.
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs said more than 30 groups — about 15% of the organizations operating in Gaza — had failed to comply and that their operations would be suspended. It also said that Doctors Without Borders, one of the biggest and best-known groups in Gaza, had failed to respond to Israeli claims that some of its workers were affiliated with Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
“The message is clear: humanitarian assistance is welcome — the exploitation of humanitarian frameworks for terrorism is not,” Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli said.
Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym MSF, said Israel’s decision would have a catastrophic impact on their work in Gaza, where they support around 20% of the hospital beds and a third of births. The organization also denied Israel’s accusations about their staff.
“MSF would never knowingly employ people engaging in military activity,” it said.
‘Exhausted local staff’
While Israel claimed the decision would have limited impact on the ground. the affected organizations said the timing — less than three months into a fragile ceasefire — was devastating.
“Despite the ceasefire, the needs in Gaza are enormous and yet we and dozens of other organizations are and will continue to be blocked from bringing in essential life-saving assistance,” said Shaina Low, communications adviser for the Norwegian Refugee Council, which has also been suspended.
“Not being able to send staff into Gaza means all of the workload falls on our exhausted local staff,” Low said.
Some aid groups say they didn’t submit the list of Palestinian staff, as Israel demanded, for fear they’d be targeted by Israel, and because of data protection laws in Europe.
“It comes from a legal and safety perspective. In Gaza, we saw hundreds of aid workers get killed,” Low explained.
The decision not to renew aid groups’ licenses means offices in Israel and East Jerusalem will close, and organizations won’t be able to send international staff or aid into Gaza.
Israel says militants exploiting aid groups
According to the ministry, the decision means the aid groups will have their license revoked on Jan. 1, and if they are located in Israel, they will need to leave by March 1. They can appeal the decision.
The Israeli defense body that oversees humanitarian aid to Gaza, COGAT, said that the organizations on the list contribute less than 1% of the total aid going into the Gaza Strip, and that aid will continue to enter from more than 20 organizations that did receive permits to continue operating.
“The registration process is intended to prevent the exploitation of aid by Hamas, which in the past operated under the cover of certain international aid organizations, knowingly or unknowingly,” COGAT said in a statement.
This isn’t the first time Israel has tried to crack down on international humanitarian organizations. Throughout the war, Israel accused the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, of being infiltrated by Hamas, using its facilities and taking aid. The United Nations has denied it. UNRWA, the top U.N. agency working with Palestinians, has denied knowingly aiding armed groups and says it acts quickly to purge any suspected militants..
After months of criticism from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies, Israel banned UNRWA from operating on its territory in January. The U.S., formerly the largest donor to UNRWA, halted funding to the agency in early 2024.
NGOs say Israel vague over data use
Israel failed to confirm that the data collected from the new regulations wouldn’t be used for military or intelligence purposes, raising serious security concerns, said Athena Rayburn, the executive director of AIDA, an umbrella organization representing over 100 organizations that operate in the Palestinian territories. She noted that more than 500 aid workers have been killed in Gaza during the war.
“Agreeing for a party to the conflict to vet our staff, especially under the conditions of occupation, is a violation of humanitarian principles, specifically neutrality and independence,” she said.
Rayburn said organizations expressed their concerns and offered alternatives to submitting staff lists, such as third-party vetting, but that Israel refused to engage in any dialogue.
Palestinian girl killed in Gaza
A 10-year-old girl was killed and another person was wounded by Israeli fire in Gaza City near the Yellow Line that delineates areas under Israeli control, the territory’s Shifa Hospital said Tuesday.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the incident but have said troops operating near the Yellow Line will target anyone who approaches or threatens soldiers.
The Gaza Health Ministry, part of the Hamas-run government, said on Monday that 71,266 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, not including the girl. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count. The United Nations and independent experts consider the Health Ministry the most reliable source on war casualties. Israel disputes its figures but has not provided its own.
Recent headlines about a major technology company’s board compensation have reignited a familiar, and often reflexive, debate: how much is too much? It is an easy question, and the wrong one.
The more consequential issue for boards and shareholders alike is whether director compensation frameworks are still “fit for purpose” in a governance environment that has grown materially more complex, more adversarial, and more global. If board service has quietly evolved into a role that requires greater time, sharper judgment, and higher reputational risk, then our assumptions about compensation deserve a closer look.
For decades, we have wrapped board service in the language of altruism. Directors “give back.” They “serve.” Compensation is something one accepts politely, not something one interrogates. That framing may once have reflected reality. It no longer does.
The quiet transformation of board service
Modern independent directors are underwriting risk with three forms of capital: time, judgment, and reputation.
The workload has expanded dramatically. Boards now oversee cyber and AI risk, geopolitical exposure, regulatory volatility, activist preparedness, executive succession under pressure, and culture as a leading indicator of enterprise risk. Learning curves are shorter. Expectations are higher. Mistakes, especially visible ones, come with greater consequences.
The environment has also changed. Outside actors: proxy advisory firms, activists, plaintiffs’ lawyers, and social media have made board service more personal. Disagreements over judgment are increasingly framed as failures of character. Reputational exposure is no longer a remote concern; it is part of the job.
And the market has changed. Independent directorships are no longer filled primarily through CEO relationships. They are globally competed-for roles, with real scarcity around directors who combine operating credibility, risk fluency, the ability to govern under stress and the required bandwidth to meet the moment.
All of this matters when we talk about compensation.
Compensation as a decision factor, not the decision itself
None of this suggests that board service should be motivated primarily by money. It should not be. Purpose, curiosity, and stewardship still matter deeply. But it is no longer credible to pretend that compensation should not matter at all.
In any rational market, sought-after professionals weigh the full equation: time commitment, risk exposure, reputational stakes, and opportunity cost. Board service should be no different. All else being equal, compensation should be a legitimate, albeit secondary, factor in deciding whether to accept a role.
The prevailing governance posture: “you get what you get and you don’t get upset”, is increasingly misaligned with reality. That posture is further strained by the fact that boards set their own pay, creating awkwardness within the board and the compensation committee and understandable skepticism among investors.
The answer, however, is not denial. It is design and transparency.
A comparative reality check
Looking across major governance markets reveals a tension that deserves more scrutiny than it receives.
This is not a moral judgment about which system is “right.” Structural differences matter. Two-tier boards are different animals. Equity alignment raises legitimate independence concerns in some jurisdictions.
But capital markets are global, board recruitment is increasingly global, and enterprise risk does not respect national compensation norms.
Vignette: Global strategy, local pay norms
Consider a UK-based public company with a growth strategy centered on the United States.
Its ambition is real: U.S. customers, U.S. regulators, U.S. capital markets, and potential U.S. acquisitions. The board understands that success will require directors with first-hand experience navigating American regulatory complexity, activist dynamics, litigation exposure, and market expectations.
The nominating committee identifies several outstanding candidates, current and former executives with deep U.S. operating and governance experience. Each is intrigued by the strategy.
And each pauses.
Not because of purpose. Not because of interest. But because the expectations — time, travel, committee workload, crisis availability, reputational exposure — are unmistakably global, while the compensation framework remains firmly local.
The board fills the seat. It always does. But the unanswered question is whether it filled the seat with the best director for the strategy, or simply the best director willing to accept the terms.
Where shareholder value is quietly at risk
This is not about fairness to directors. It is about outcomes for shareholders.
Persistently underpricing board work does not show up immediately in TSR. It shows up indirectly: in narrower talent pools, overstretched committee chairs, slower escalation during crises, and reduced willingness or capacity to rigorously challenge management as complexity increases.
These are not failures of character. They are failures of design.
What this moment actually teaches
The compensation controversy is instructive not because it proves directors are overpaid, but because it highlights how poorly structured pay can undermine trust, invite litigation and headline risk, and distract from effective oversight.
Excessive, opaque, or option-heavy compensation can compromise perceived independence just as surely as underpayment can hollow out accountability. Alignment matters, but so does restraint.
The lesson is not escalation, it is intentionality.
A better governance standard
Boards that want to address compensation credibly should anchor to a few principles:
Benchmark for complexity, not just size
Distinguish base service from incremental burden
Align with equity thoughtfully and simply
Explain the rationale in plain language
Engage shareholders early
The closing truth
We still call it board service, and we should. But service does not mean self-denial. Good stewardship includes confronting governance design risks, including whether board structures and compensation remain fit for today’s demands.
Directors are not being paid for prestige. They are being paid to absorb complexity, shoulder accountability, and lend reputations built over decades to enterprises that need them.
Boards don’t need to justify paying directors more.
They need to justify paying them appropriately.
Questions Boards Should Ask About Director Compensation
What assumptions are embedded in our compensation model about time, availability, and crisis work? Are they still accurate?
Does our pay structure reflect committee leadership as a materially heavier role?
Are we implicitly narrowing our talent pool by underpricing the skills we say we need?
How does our compensation signal seriousness about governance to candidates and shareholders?
Could we explain our approach clearly and confidently to our largest investors?
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
Even AI chatbots can have trouble coping with anxieties from the outside world, but researchers believe they’ve found ways to ease those artificial minds.
A study from Yale University, Haifa University, the University of Zurich, and the University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich published earlier this year found ChatGPT responds to mindfulness-based exercises, changing how it interacts with users after being prompted with calming imagery and meditations. The results offer insights into how AI can be beneficial in mental health interventions.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT can experience “anxiety,” which manifests as moodiness toward users and being more likely to give responses that reflect racist or sexist biases, according to researchers, a form of hallucination tech companies have tried to curb.
The study authors found this anxiety can be “calmed down” with mindfulness-based exercises. In different scenarios, they fed ChatGPT traumatic content, such as stories of car accidents and natural disasters, to raise the chatbot’s anxiety. In instances when the researchers gave ChatGPT “prompt injections” of breathing techniques and guided meditations—much as a therapist would to a patient—it calmed down and responded more objectively to users, compared with instances when it was not given the mindfulness intervention.
To be sure, AI models don’t experience human emotions, said Ziv Ben-Zion, the study’s first author and a neuroscience researcher at the Yale School of Medicine and Haifa University’s School of Public Health. Using swaths of data scraped from the internet, AI bots have learned to mimic human responses to certain stimuli, including traumatic content. As free and accessible apps, large language models like ChatGPT have become another tool for mental health professionals to glean aspects of human behavior in a faster way than—though not in place of—more complicated research designs.
“Instead of using experiments every week that take a lot of time and a lot of money to conduct, we can use ChatGPT to understand better human behavior and psychology,” Ben-Zion told Fortune. “We have this very quick and cheap and easy-to-use tool that reflects some of the human tendency and psychological things.”
What are the limits of AI mental health interventions?
More than one in four people in the U.S. age 18 or older will battle a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year, according to Johns Hopkins University, with many citing lack of access and sky-high costs—even among those insured—as reasons for not pursuing treatments like therapy.
These rising costs, as well as the accessibility of chatbots like ChatGPT, increasingly have individuals turning to AI for mental health support. A Sentio University survey from February found that nearly 50% of large language model users with self-reported mental health challenges say they’ve used AI models specifically for mental health support.
Research on how large language models respond to traumatic content can help mental health professionals leverage AI to treat patients, Ben-Zion argued. He suggested that in the future, ChatGPT could be updated to automatically receive the “prompt injections” that calm it down before responding to users in distress. The science is not there yet.
“For people who are sharing sensitive things about themselves, they’re in difficult situations where they want mental health support, [but] we’re not there yet that we can rely totally on AI systems instead of psychology, psychiatric and so on,” he said.
Indeed, in some instances, AI has allegedly presented danger to one’s mental health. OpenAI has been hit with a number of wrongful death lawsuits in 2025, including allegations that ChatGPT intensified “paranoid delusions” that led to a murder-suicide. A New York Times investigation published in November found nearly 50 instances of people having mental health crises while engaging with ChatGPT, nine of whom were hospitalized, and three of whom died.
OpenAI has said its safety guardrails can “degrade” after long interactions, but has made a swath of recent changes to how its models engage with mental-health-related prompts, including increasing user access to crisis hotlines and reminding users to take breaks after long sessions of chatting with the bot. In October, OpenAI reported a 65% reduction in the rate models provide responses that don’t align with the company’s intended taxonomy and standards.
OpenAI did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
The end goal of Ben-Zion’s research is not to help construct a chatbot that replaces a therapist or psychiatrist, he said. Instead, a properly trained AI model could act as a “third person in the room,” helping to eliminate administrative tasks or help a patient reflect on information and options they were given by a mental health professional.
“AI has amazing potential to assist, in general, in mental health,” Ben-Zion said. “But I think that now, in this current state and maybe also in the future, I’m not sure it could replace a therapist or psychologist or a psychiatrist or a researcher.”
A version of this story originally published at Fortune.com on March 9, 2025.
More on AI and mental health:
Why are millions turning to general purpose AI for mental health? As Headspace’s chief clinical officer, I see the answer every day
The creator of an AI therapy app shut it down after deciding it’s too dangerous. Here’s why he thinks AI chatbots aren’t safe for mental health
OpenAI is hiring a ‘head of preparedness’ with a $550,000 salary to mitigate AI dangers that CEO Sam Altman warns will be ‘stressful’
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Nvidia built its AI empire on GPUs. But its $20 billion bet on Groq suggests the company isn’t convinced GPUs alone will dominate the most important phase of AI yet: running models at scale, known as inference.
The battle to win on AI inference, of course, is over its economics. Once a model is trained, every useful thing it does—answering a query, generating code, recommending a product, summarizing a document, powering a chatbot, or analyzing an image—happens during inference. That’s the moment AI goes from a sunk cost into a revenue-generating service, with all the accompanying pressure to reduce costs, shrink latency (how long you have to wait for an AI to answer), and improve efficiency.
That pressure is exactly why inference has become the industry’s next battleground for potential profits—and why Nvidia, in a deal announced just before the Christmas holiday, licensed technology from Groq, a startup building chips designed specifically for fast, low-latency AI inference, and hired most of its team, including founder and CEO Jonathan Ross.
Inference is AI’s ‘industrial revolution’
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been explicit about the challenge of inference. While he says Nvidia is “excellent at every phase of AI,” he told analysts at the company’s Q3 earnings call in November that inference is “really, really hard.” Far from a simple case of one prompt in and one answer out, modern inference must support ongoing reasoning, millions of concurrent users, guaranteed low latency, and relentless cost constraints. And AI agents, which have to handle multiple steps, will dramatically increase inference demand and complexity—and raise the stakes of getting it wrong.
“People think that inference is one shot, and therefore it’s easy. Anybody could approach the market that way,” Huang said. “But it turns out to be the hardest of all, because thinking, as it turns out, is quite hard.”
Nvidia’s support of Groq underscores that belief, and signals that even the company that dominates AI training is hedging on how inference economics will ultimately shake out.
Huang has also been blunt about how central inference will become to AI’s growth. In a recent conversation on the BG2 podcast, Huang said inference already accounts for more than 40% of AI-related revenue—and predicted that it is “about to go up by a billion times.”
“That’s the part that most people haven’t completely internalized,” Huang said. “This is the industry we were talking about. This is the industrial revolution.”
The CEO’s confidence helps explain why Nvidia is willing to hedge aggressively on how inference will be delivered, even as the underlying economics remain unsettled.
Nvidia wants to corner the inference market
Nvidia is hedging its bets to make sure that they have their hands in all parts of the market, said Karl Freund, founder and principal analyst at Cambrian AI Research. “It’s a little bit like Meta acquiring Instagram,” he explained. “It’s not that they thought Facebook was bad, they just knew that there was an alternative that they wanted to make sure wasn’t competing with them.”
That, even though Huang had made strong claims about the economics of the existing Nvidia platform for inference. “I suspect they found that it either wasn’t resonating as well with clients as they’d hoped, or perhaps they saw something in the chip-memory-based approach that Groq and another company called D-Matrix has,” said Freund, referring to another fast, low-latency AI chip startup backed by Microsoft that recently raised $275 million at a $2 billion valuation.
Freund said Nvidia’s move into Groq could lift the entire category. “I’m sure D-Matrix is a pretty happy startup right now, because I suspect their next round will go at a much higher valuation thanks to the [Nvidia-Groq deal],” he said.
Other industry executives say the economics of AI inference are shifting as AI moves beyond chatbots into real-time systems like robots, drones, and security tools. Those systems can’t afford the delays that come with sending data back and forth to the cloud, or the risk that computing power won’t always be available. Instead, they favor specialized chips like Groq’s over centralized clusters of GPUs.
Behnam Bastani, founder and CEO of OpenInfer, which focuses on running AI inference close to where data is generated—such as on devices, sensors, or local servers rather than distant cloud data centers—said his startup is targeting these kinds of applications at the “edge.”
The inference market, he emphasized, is still nascent. And Nvidia is looking to corner that market with its Groq deal. With inference economics still unsettled, he said Nvidia is trying to position itself as the company that spans the entire inference hardware stack, rather than betting on a single architecture.
“It positions Nvidia as a bigger umbrella,” he said.
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