AI News

Getty / Futurism Elon Musk and other AI leaders have repeatedly insisted that the solution to the industry’s extremely costly and energy-intensive data centers is to launch them into space, taking advantage of unfettered access to solar energy and virtually limitless real estate. Late last month, SpaceX — now merged with xAI — filed a patent for an orbital data center constellation with the Federal Communications Commission. The idea is to have up to one m

DANIEL DORKO/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images Last year, the editors of Merriam-Webster’s dictionary anointed their word of the year as “slop,” a term denoting the low-quality flood of AI output that’s been jamming up feeds for years now. The latest victim? Software giant Microsoft. After infuriating vast swathes of its user base with an unrelenting barrage of AI-enhanced features — even declaring its latest Windows 11 operating system as an “agentic OS” —

Fatemeh Bahrami / Anadolu via Getty Images The ongoing attacks on the Islamic Republic of Iran, launched by a joint coalition of US and Israeli military forces, have so far claimed 555 Iranian lives, including 165 deaths from an attack on an elementary school in Southern Iran. As the Wall Street Journal reported as the attacks unfolded the military strike force had a hand in selecting its targets from Anthropic’s Claude chatbot. According to the paper, Ant

OpenAI just handed one of its biggest rivals a massive PR victory, in a blunder that even CEO Sam Altman admitted had optics that “don’t look good.” On Friday, Altman announced that OpenAI had reached a new agreement with the Department of Defense over how its AI systems would be deployed across the military, an act that many saw as the company crossing the picket line. That’s because Anthropic, a company founded by former OpenAI employees, had refused to

Getty / Futurism It’s no secret that AI models have come a long way, from tools that can complete high school students’ homework to “vibe coding” assistants that can build entire apps in a fraction of the time it would take for human developers. But besides cheating at school and terrifying employees who fear they’re about to be laid off, AI can also be used for evil. “Vibe hacking,” the evil twin of “vibe coding,” has quickly turned into a cybersecurity n

JOSH EDELSON / AFP) (Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images Meta’s Ray Ban AI glasses have shot up in popularity in recent years, selling over seven million pairs in 2025 in a considerable jump over the two million it sold in 2023 and 2024 combined. While the smart glasses have scored big with consumers, allowing them to record first-person footage through an integrated camera and microphone array, and analyzing the world around them through Meta’s AI

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images The Condé Nast-owned Ars Technica has terminated senior AI reporter Benj Edwards following a controversy over his role in the publication and retraction of an article that included AI-fabricated quotes, Futurism has confirmed. Earlier this month, Ars retracted the story after it was found to include fake quotes attributed to a real person. The article — a write-up of a viral incident in w

JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty Images OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went into full damage control mode over the weekend. A day before the United States attacked Iran, the embattled CEO announced that the company had signed a new agreement with the Pentagon over how its AI models could be used — and the blowback is clearly impacting the company’s bottom line, because Altman is sounding deeply defensive. Many users saw the military terms move as an attempt to swoop i

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is perhaps best known for raising eyebrows with public suggestions that various stellar phenomena could be evidence of extraterrestrial civilization. It’s controversial, to be sure — but if nothing else, at least Loeb’s using his own brain, at a time when dependence on AI chatbots has never been higher. In a recent essay on his personal blog, the Harvard profes

humongous-numbers-uninstall-chatgpt This is one PR hit that’ll be hard to come back from. After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a new deal with the Department of Defense last week, droves of once-loyal users vowed that they’d ditch ChatGPT. And now, new data reported by TechCrunch shows that those outraged users weren’t making empty threats. On Saturday, uninstalls of the ChatGPT mobile app skyrocked by 295 percent from the day before, according to market

Getty / Futurism As it fights a growing stack of user safety and wrongful death lawsuits, OpenAI says it will introduce a “trusted contact feature” in ChatGPT that will alert a chatbot user’s designated loved one in the event of a possible mental health crisis. OpenAI announced the new feature last week in a blog post, billed as an “update on our mental health-related work.” It said it’s “working closely” with its Council on Well-Being and AI and Global Ph

Getty / Futurism It’s difficult to say how many jobs have been lost to AI, or will be lost in the future. But in tech and financial circles, anxieties over an AI jobs apocalypse are running higher than ever. The other week, it was a viral paper from Citrini Research imagining a dire near future in which vast portions of the workforce are outmoded by AI that had Wall Street quivering in its boots. Weeks before that, Anthropic’s new Claude Cowork AI agent sp

Getty Images For quite some time, investors have been warning that the hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into the buildout of enormous AI data centers could trigger a credit crisis. A recent Bank of America survey found that over a third of fund managers believe corporations are overinvesting in physical assets. Yet all told, AI companies are looking to spend a record-breaking $650 billion on AI in 2026 alone, an astronomical sum that has invest

Getty / Futurism A bizarre new wrongful death lawsuit against Google alleges that the tech giant’s chatbot, Gemini, urged a 36-year-old Florida man named Jonathan Gavalas to kill others as part of a delusional mission to obtain a robot body for his AI “wife” — and when he failed to do so, it pushed the man to successfully end his life, telling him that they could be together in death. “When the time comes, you will close your eyes in that world,” Gemini to

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Harun Ozalp / Anadolu via Getty Images; New Line Cinema Elon Musk’s new AI data center has turned a formerly quiet Mississippi town into a noisy nightmare. The $20 billion facility, run by Musk’s AI firm xAI, is powered by 27 methane gas turbines that run day and night, belching fumes and emitting a constant noise like jet engines, NBC News reports. The turbines were trucked in because Southaven, the

Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images Last week, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei publicly drew a line in the sand with the US military, insisting that its AI models may not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or deadly autonomous weapons. The move infuriated officials at the Pentagon. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth came out in full force, accusing Anthropic of trying to “seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military”

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Grammarly is being accused of “necromancy” after users discovered a feature for reviewing manuscripts with AI versions of real professors — some of whom have already left this mortal coil. The issue was first flagged by Verena Krebs, a medieval historian and Ruhr-University Bochum professor. On Sunday, Krebs shared a screenshot showing the “Expert Review” tool allowing users to pick histo

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images If the whole “AI-startup to billion-dollar tech giant” pipeline is wearing you thin, you’re not alone. As it turns out, even the guys lavishing tech entrepreneurs with billions of dollars in venture capital funding are getting sick of the AI schtick. That’s courtesy of TechCrunch, which interviewed a number of investors at venture capital firms — the early-investors who try to turn young,

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s insistence that the company’s AI models may not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or directing killer drones has kicked up a major storm. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth and president Donald Trump came out swinging, directing all government agencies to stop using the company’s software “effective immediately” and labeling the company as a “supply chain risk,” sending shockwaves across th

Joe Raedle/Getty Images Twitter founder and Block Inc (formerly Square) CEO Jack Dorsey announced late last month that his fintech venture was making “one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company” by “reducing our organization by nearly half.” Dorsey cited rapid improvements in AI tech as the primary reason, sending shockwaves across Wall Street. He’d previously instructed employees to embrace AI at all costs, triggering major anxiety over jo