AI News

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images In a recent interview on Sean Hannity’s YouTube podcast, FBI head Kash Patel lauded AI for helping stop multiple violent attacks on innocent people. “AI was never used at the FBI till we got there, literally crazy,” Patel said in his characteristically hopped up affect. “I’m using it everywhere.” Specifically, Patel — who’s been accused of severe issues related to alcoho

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Don Arnold / Getty Images Whatever you may think of the man, Richard Dawkins is clearly suffering a tragic case of having your mind melted in real time by a bewitching AI model. Over the weekend, the famed evolutionary biologist drew a deluge of mockery after admitting he found a genuine “friend” in “Claudia,” a female persona he invented for Anthropic’s Claude AI. He was so moved by his conversations

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Trade unions have a centuries-long history of squaring up against the might of industrial capitalists to fight for rights that workers now often take for granted, from the eight-hour work day to the federal minimum wage to workplace safety laws. If you were to imagine how unions are responding to the tech industry’s massive push to build AI data centers across the country — an issue that’

Getty / Futurism In an age of AI, our hardworking CEOs are being tortured with a tough decision, according to new Wall Street Journal reporting: they can embrace AI and lay off scores of employees — or keep their employees, but use AI to make them work even harder. If those options sound like a false dichotomy to you, you’re probably not wrong. But it’s emblematic of the logic that business leaders, gripped by AI fomo, are operating with. No one wants to b

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Benjamin Fanjoy / Getty Images The bizarre and messy court battle between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former OpenAI investor Elon Musk trudges on. And this week, as revealed in court, OpenAI’s former Chief Technology Office had some extremely interesting — and at points, alarming — things to say about her time working under Altman. Appearing in a video deposition on Wednesday, former OpenAI CTO and curr

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images The AI sloppification of the internet comes for us all, even the petty scammers and fraudsters doing business in the darker corners of the web. As a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study found, old-world internet scammers are getting frustrated as their favorite cybercrime forums turn to generative AI, much the same way Amazon or Reddit have degraded their own sites with the tech — which, you hav

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Hey kids! Want to tell your mom you love her, but without expending a single iota of emotional effort? If so, you’re in luck: a new service called Cards for Agents fulfils that exact grim service, presaging a dystopian future in which you can express love to your family members without ever having to actually interact with them. “Your AI can finally send your mom a real card,” the site en

Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images / Futurism It’s hard to even imagine now, but immediately after it launched in 2004, there was nothing on the internet cooler than Facebook. It was initially available only to Harvard students, then gradually expanded to students at other elite colleges, giving it an aura of exclusivity that founder Mark Zuckerberg clearly coveted. By the time it opened up to public accounts in 2006, the hype was palpable,

Nathan Howard / Getty Images On Thursday, Amazon Web Services said that one of its major data centers in north Virginia was overheating so much that it had to be shut down. According to The Next Web, AWS engineers were forced to throttle their services and then reroute customer traffic to other facilities, affecting customers like the crypto platform Coinbase, which experienced an “extended outage of core trading services.” Things hadn’t improved by Friday

Gett Images / Eoneren You probably already know that AI is a deeply bizarre technology. Nobody really understands how it works on a deep level, even the people creating it, leading to ongoing behavioral issues that can’t be explained. OpenAI was recently caught giving ChatGPT instructions to stop talking about “goblins” so much. Despite Anthropic’s best efforts, Claude can easily be coaxed to help users carry out a bioterror attack. The list goes on. Needl

Getty / Futurism As of 2026, Google maintains an iron grip on the web browser market, boasting well over three billion Chrome users worldwide. That means even small changes or interruptions can have a significant impact. As security researcher Alexander “The Privacy Guy” Hanff noted in a blog post earlier this week, Google’s web browser has been “silently” installing an AI model on users’ devices without asking for consent. Hanff discovered a four-gigabyte

Getty / Futurism In November, Amazon leaders sent an internal memo to employees, pushing them to use its in-house code generating tool, Kiro, over third-party alternatives from competitors. “While we continue to support existing tools in use today, we do not plan to support additional third party, AI development tools,” the memo read, as quoted by Reuters at the time. “As part of our builder community, you all play a critical role shaping these products an

Getty / Futurism The jury’s still out on AI’s effectiveness as a learning tool, but research so far paints a grim picture. Using AI chatbots can impair critical thinking, result in lower brain activity during cognitive tasks, and has been linked to memory loss. There was one prominent study, however, that provided a glimmer of hope for AI advocates. Published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, it purported to show that using AI l

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Artificial intelligence has torn through many industries since the debut of ChatGPT in 2022, but there’s probably no single area where it’s had a clearer material impact than software development. Programmers running the gamut from experienced to novice have embraced the tech, using chatbots and specialty tools to quickly generate code from natural language prompts. “Vibe coding,” as it’s

Getty Images / Yaroslav Kushta A new report from Palisade Research has found that AI models can self-replicate by copying themselves onto other machines, without any help from human co-conspirators. “We’re rapidly approaching the point where no one would be able to shut down a rogue AI, because it would be able to self-exfiltrate its weights and copy itself to thousands of computers around the world,” Jeffrey Ladish, the director Berkeley-based AI safety g

Karl Mondon / AFP via Getty Images If you thought English-language ChatGPT-prose was annoying, just wait until you get a load of its conversational habits in Chinese. A fascinating piece of reporting by Wired took a look at how ChatGPT handles Chinese, the global language with the highest number of native speakers, according to the Language School at Middlebury College. One of its go-to tics, the publication reports, is to answer questions with “我会稳稳地接住你,”

Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Across the United States, the fight over data center construction has largely pitted stamp-happy municipal governments against their own residents. As these battles multiply, local officials are increasingly pressured to approve projects their constituents oppose, while more and more voters take their struggles to the ballot box. Residents in Saline Township, Michigan, however, thought they had avoided t

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Jamie McCarthy / WireImage The surviving widow of a mass shooting victim is suing OpenAI for ChatGPT’s alleged role in stoking the killer’s deadly rampage — the latest in a string of lawsuits against the Silicon Valley AI firm claiming that its tech has enabled stalking, murder, and mass casualty events. The lawsuit was filed in Florida on Sunday by Vandana Joshi, whose spouse, Tiru Chabba, was shot a

Getty / Futurism A proposed “hyperscale” data center in Box Elder County, Utah, will create an enormous heat island that could devastate the area’s ecology, according to an expert’s analysis. Dubbed the Stratos Project and backed by the celebrity venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, the sprawling facility will devour up to nine gigawatts of energy, its developers say, which is more than double the electricity used by the entire state. That epic energy bill co

@Kennethudut via TikTok This year’s commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida was visibly floored after she extolled AI as the future of industry — to the ire of the school’s graduating students, who ferociously booed and jeered. The speaker was Florida-based businesswoman Gloria Caulfield, the Vice President of Strategic Alliances for Tavistock Development Company, a real estate firm. In her speech, she triumphantly announced that “we are