AI News

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Police technology is a major business in the US. Altogether, the law enforcement equipment market was valued at nearly $11.7 billion in 2025, and as dystopian toys like self-driving squad cars and crime fighting drone hives make it to market, that number is set to skyrocket. A growing favorite among police departments throughout the country is the “camera on wheels” platform, known as COW

Getty / Futurism The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma just became the first Indigenous nation to officially ban data center construction from lands under its jurisdiction. After a tech startup approached Seminole leaders asking to allow a data center on their lands, the Tribal Council voted 24 to 0 to enact a “moratorium on the advancement of generative artificial intelligence technology and hyperscale data center development within the Seminole Nation and with

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Many executives lately have been using AI as a convenient excuse to lay off staff as the economy crumbles. Paradoxically, a growing number of CEOs are also turning the tech on themselves — using AI as an excuse to get out while the gettin’s good. New reporting by CNBC detailed the retirement of CEOs James Quincey and Doug McMillon of Coca-Cola and Walmart, respectively. In interviews with

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images In January 2025, just one day after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, AI tech leaders convened in the Oval Office as part of the announcement of a flashy $500 billion AI infrastructure deal, dubbed “Stargate.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gushed over his newfound adoration for Trump, telling him during the event that “for AGI to get built here, we wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President.” The company said it was commi

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales once described his creation as a “temple of the mind.” Now, a decade on, it’s taken on another role: a refuge against AI slop. Late this month, the English version of the online encyclopedia officially banned the use of AI to generate or rewrite articles, after years of piecemeal experimentation and heated internal debate among its volunteer editors, 404 Medi

Jerome Gilles/NurPhoto via Getty Images Hundreds of protestors descended on Palantir’s unmarked office building in downtown Manhattan over the weekend. Organized by the grassroots AIDS group ACT UP New York, they rallied at the New York AIDS memorial before marching on the surveillance company’s offices. According to photos published by the Advocate, protestors came dressed in flashy outfits and brandishing signs with hardline slogans. “Palantir: ICE and w

DON MACKINNON/AFP via Getty Images In its early days, Twitter alternative Bluesky tried to paint itself as a safe haven from the onslaught of AI, promising in November 2024 that it had “no intention” of scraping user-generated posts to train AI models. It was a shot across the bow, clearly aimed at its rival X-formerly-Twitter, which had recently changed its terms of service to allow just that. And since then, backlash to AI slop and relentless AI integrat

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Your AI chatbot isn’t neutral. Trust its advice at your own risk. A striking new study, conducted by researchers at Stanford University and published last week in the journal Science, confirmed that human-like chatbots are prone to obsequiously affirm and flatter users leaning on the tech for advice and insight — and that this behavior, known as AI sycophancy, is a “prevalent and harmful”

Xu et al. / Futurism Smart glasses aren’t just being used by juvenile pranksters and pickup artists to terrorize strangers, traumatize Meta’s data labeling subcontractors in Kenya, and covertly receive advice while being cross-examined in court. As Rest of World reports, students in China are also using them to cheat during exams. One university student, identified as Vivian, told the publication that she uses her Rokid AI glasses to scan questions and dis

Getty / Futurism The data centers at the heart of the AI boom are producing so much heat that they’re spiking land temperatures for miles around them by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, new research suggests. The effect is so pronounced that the researchers say they’re creating entire “heat islands.” The findings, detailed in a study that’s yet-to-be-peer-reviewed, add to an already grim picture of the environmental impact of these sprawling facilities, the la

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images (edited) Amid mounting scrutiny into AI usage creeping into the newspaper of record, the New York Times has cut ties with a freelance writer after discovering he turned to an AI model to help write a book review, The Guardian reports. A thudding prose style wasn’t the giveaway this time, but accidentally-cribbed work. The NYT was alerted to the issue by a reader who

Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images Earlier this year, the head of Anthropic’s blockbuster Claude Code AI agent Boris Cherny boasted that “pretty much 100 percent” of the entire company’s code is AI-generated. “For me personally, it has been 100 percent for two plus months now, I don’t even make small edits by hand,” he tweeted at the time. But the glaring cybersecurity implications of giving an AI agent full access over a computer to carry out complex

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Forget gas prices and fertilizer. One of the biggest casualties of the US war on Iran could be your favorite AI chatbot. As the hare-brained conflict enters its fifth week, the tech industry is raising alarm about a growing shortage of helium, the odorless gas that makes birthday balloons lighter than air — and which, it turns out, is silently undergirding the AI boom. Per the Wall Street

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Chesnot / Getty Images After Anthropic accidentally leaked the source code to its blockbuster Claude chatbot, netizens swiftly pounced to start plowing through its more than 512,000 lines of code — and have uncovered numerous curiosities sprinkled throughout. In an extensive thread in the r/ClaudeAI subreddit, one user said they found a “Tamagotchi”-like feature buried in the code, referring to the ha

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images It’s plain to see that Elon Musk’s ambition of putting data centers in space is a daring and risky undertaking. Further underscoring the challenges, experts tell Reuters that a previous failed attempt at taking data centers off solid ground has alarming parallels that could spell doom for Musk’s plan for SpaceX. In 2015, Microsoft deployed “Project Natick,” a cutting edge underwater data

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: David Dee Delgado / Getty Images for The New York Times The AI industry largely acts as if it’s above lowly copyright laws — unless, of course, those laws happen to be protecting its own interests. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Anthropic is scrambling to contain a leak of its Claude Code AI model’s source code by issuing a copyright takedown request for more than 8,000 copies of it — a gallingly

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Errich Petersen / Getty Images for SXSW; Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has finally dished on Disney’s reaction to his decision to kill the company’s AI video generator app, Sora — scuttling a billion dollar deal the two giants had planned. Given the amount of money Disney was prepared to invest, and the suddenness of the decision, speculation abounded on the drama behind the sce

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images OpenClaw fever is still going strong in tech circles. The open source AI agent, much hyped for “actually doing things,” has been embraced by many programmers to automate parts of their workflow. But could they be automating themselves out of a job? That’s not a possibility that seems to bother the co-founders of the Silicon Valley startup JustPaid, who brag they’ve used OpenClaw to create

Sven Hoppe/picture alliance via Getty Images OpenAI made headlines this year after announcing it was giving up on what one exec categorized as distracting “side quests,” including its Sora text-to-video app, to double down on enterprise and coding, which are lucrative revenue drivers that could stop the company from hemorrhaging billions of dollars a quarter. Many saw the moves as an effort to catch up with competitor Anthropic, whose Claude Code and Claud

Facebook The advent of powerful generative AI tools has supercharged the proliferation of disinformation, with viral and fictional stories making the lives of public figures a living hell. Facebook, in particular, has been overrun with misleading news stories, often featuring AI-generated images, that attract huge engagement. Now William Shatner, the 95-year-old actor of “Star Trek” fame, has become the latest victim of the trend. “My daughter came over to