AI News

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images During the 2024 presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the Democratic party establishment made the strange decision to swing right, in an apparent attempt to capture the mythical conservative-centrist vote. Republican stalwart Liz Cheney was trotted out before Democratic voters while policy proposals became more conservative, even as millions of young voters clamore

Getty / Futurism AI company Character.AI has long garnered a reputation for hosting some extremely dubious content. Though it built its early success off explosive popularity among teen users, it was repeatedly caught hosting wildly inappropriate bots — like ones modeled after real-world mass shooters or designed to encourage eating disorders. Outrage grew when a teen died by suicide after developing an intense emotional connection to a Character.AI chatbo

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Back in 2017, China’s state council laid out the first draft of its long-term AI strategy in a sweeping policy paper. By 2030, it declared, China should have developed its “AI industry competitiveness” to a “world-leading level,” an ambitious goal for a country whose future economic prosperity was not a given. Today, China’s patient cultivation of world-leading AI is bearing lush fruit, w

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images In the months before he committed a grisly mass shooting, Phoenix Ikner obsessively used Open AI’s ChatGPT to engage in conversations that are about as disturbing as possible. Over the course of more than 13,000 messages with the bot obtained by the Florida Phoenix, the student at Florida State University (FSU) called himself an incel, bemoaned that God had abandoned him, repeatedly asked

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Ethan Miller / Getty Images In most privately-owned venues today, you probably take it for granted that AI-integrated cameras are tracking your every move. From casinos to concert halls to sports arenas, the degree of public surveillance we deal with is breathtaking. For the most part, the consequences of this kind of private surveillance — severe though they may be — are rarely felt at the individual

Getty / Futurism Military and intelligence contractor Palantir has long struggled to beat the allegations of enabling an Orwellian surveillance state on behalf of the Pentagon. The Alex Karp-led company has received huge sums in federal funding to build out a surveillance platform for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with countless other contracts for military operations, policing, and border enforcement — not just with the US, but the Israeli mi

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images The AI boom has brought with it untold levels of fraud and graft. One of the largest schemes so far, concealed within the record-breaking valuations of the AI hype cycle, was iLearning Engines, a relatively young tech company which quickly scaled itself to a $1.5 billion market cap. A scathing statement by the US Department of Justice alleges that iLearning, an “out-of-the-box AI platform

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images Look, being CEO of the largest company by market cap in the world isn’t a cakewalk. It takes a tough person not to crack under that kind of pressure — just ask Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who blew his stack when asked about China on a recent podcast appearance. During a taping of tech guy Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast spotted by Tom’s Hardware, the Nvidia CEO became agitate

Back in March, we shared the story of a $136 million data center going up in Northeastern Ohio, which was slated to bring in a whopping ten full-time jobs. That project received a $4.5 million state tax exemption, which is egregious enough on its own — but a new project in New York State is making that Ohio handout look like chump change. First reported by New York Focus, a data center being built by financial giant JPMorganChase is receiving $77 million i

Getty / Futurism Last year, a team of researchers led by MIT research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna used electroencephalograms to monitor the brains of students while they were writing short, deliberately open-ended essays. They split the 54 participants into three groups: one was told to use ChatGPT, one could search for information on Google (minus AI-generated summaries), and another had to rely on their own knowledge. As detailed in a resulting yet-to-be-

Getty / Futurism For years, a buzzy Silicon Valley startup called Mercor has been hiring an army of desperate job-seekers — often including educated and underemployed experts — to train AI models to replace them in the workforce. It’s a grim facet of an AI-dominated future in which the business world continues to push for automation, hoping to wean itself off relying on pesky and expensive human labor once and for all. As MIT Tech Review reports, an eerily

Getty / Futurism As if activity-monitoring software installed on your work computer that snitches on you if you’re away from the keyboard for too long wasn’t enough, Meta is taking the trend to its logical — and dystopian surveillance state-level — conclusion. As Reuters reports, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is installing new tracking software on all of its US-based employees’ computers that tracks all of their mouse movements and keystrokes, data that

Getty / Futurism AI chatbots will recommend that cancer patients try unproven alternatives to chemotherapy and offer up other unscientific medical claims, researchers found. While AI’s proneness to giving bad information is well known, it’s a particularly alarming finding given that it could be putting lives at risk by leading patients to try cancer treatments that don’t work, with tens of millions of Americans already using chatbots for health advice. In

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images In April 2025, a student opened fire on the campus of Florida State University, killing two and wounding seven. Investigators have since discovered that the suspect, 20-year-old Phoenix Ikner, conducted extremely disturbing conversations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, repeatedly asking about Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and outright inquiring how the country would “react” if “there was a shooting at FSU.” Ikner also asked the c

Getty / Futurism As fear over an AI-driven jobs apocalypse continues to simmer, some tech leaders remain adamant that the wide proliferation of AI will lead to more employment opportunities, not fewer. Consider a recent panel at Stanford University, when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang painted an unusual picture of an AI agent-dominated future. Instead of getting ready to clear their desks, the centibillionaire argued that instead, human workers’ productivity will

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images A year ago today, AI giant Anthropic’s Chief Information Security Officer, Jason Clinton, made a bold pronouncement: within the next year, AI-powered employees will begin traipsing around the virtual innards of big companies around the world. Speaking to Axios in 2025, Clinton said these AI entities would have their own “memories,” as well as specialized roles within companies, which of c

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Meta / Getty Images Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureaucrats are reportedly planning to use specialty facial recognition glasses to collect data on Americans in real time, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed. Financial statements viewed by Klippenstein point to the development of a facial recognition platform modeled after commercially available AI smart glasses, like Meta’s widely

Getty / Futurism Remember Claude Mythos, Anthropic’s new AI model that it hyped as being so powerful that it was too dangerous to release to the public? Well, it’s already been broken into, according to new reporting from Bloomberg. A small group of Discord users gained access to a preview version of Mythos, a source told the outlet, on the same day Anthropic announced it would be exclusively releasing the model to a select ring of companies. “We’re invest

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Think something weird is up with your reflection in the mirror? Allow Grok to interest you in some 15th century anti-witchcraft reading. A new study argues that certain frontier chatbots are much more likely to inappropriately validate users’ delusional ideas — a result that the study’s authors say represents a “preventable” technological failure that could be curbed by design choices. “D

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Starbucks has innovated the perfect tool for getting mid-coffee in our misanthropic age. Those too cowardly to look their barista in the eyes before deciding not to give them a tip no longer have to simply hide behind an official Starbucks app. Now, they can place their order through ChatGPT, OpenAI’s notoriously sycophantic AI chatbot. In practice, the concept — an in-AI app, rather than