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Published on August 24, 2026 at 11:00 Comment 2 𝕏 Print © Unsplash A streamer filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon and Twitch, accusing them of using Twitch users’ data without their consent to train a new artificial intelligence model from the e-commerce giant. A Twitch streamer filed a class-action lawsuit against Twitch and Amazon, accusing them of not asking platform users for permission to use the content from their channels to train various ar

Ars Technica descended in force last week upon our nation’s capital, setting up shop in the International Spy Museum for a three-panel discussion on artificial intelligence, infrastructure, security, and how compliance with policy changes over the next decade or so might shape the future of business computing in all its forms. Much like our San Jose event last month, the venue was packed to the rafters with Ars readers eager for knowledge (and perhaps some

After a troubling October lawsuit accused Character.AI (C.AI) of recklessly releasing dangerous chatbots that allegedly caused a 14-year-old boy’s suicide, more families have come forward to sue chatbot-maker Character Technologies and the startup’s major funder, Google. On Tuesday, another lawsuit was filed in a US district court in Texas, this time by families struggling to help their kids recover from traumatizing experiences where C.AI chatbots alleged

Google reportedly wants the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to end Microsoft’s exclusive cloud deal with OpenAI that requires anyone wanting access to OpenAI’s models to go through Microsoft’s servers. Someone “directly involved” in Google’s effort told The Information that Google’s request came after the FTC began broadly probing how Microsoft’s cloud computing business practices may be harming competition. As part of the FTC’s investigation, the agency

Following a pair of lawsuits alleging that chatbots caused a teen boy’s suicide, groomed a 9-year-old girl, and caused a vulnerable teen to self-harm, Character.AI (C.AI) has announced a separate model just for teens, ages 13 and up, that’s supposed to make their experiences with bots safer. In a blog, C.AI said it took a month to develop the teen model, with the goal of guiding the existing model “away from certain responses or interactions, reducing the

OpenAI has finally shared details about its plans to shake up its core business by shifting to a for-profit corporate structure. On Thursday, OpenAI posted on its blog, confirming that in 2025, the existing for-profit arm will be transformed into a Delaware-based public benefit corporation (PBC). As a PBC, OpenAI would be required to balance its shareholders’ and stakeholders’ interests with the public benefit. To achieve that, OpenAI would offer “ordinary

It feels like tech workers have caught very few breaks over the past several years, between ongoing mass layoffs, stagnating wages amid inflation, AI supposedly coming for jobs, and unpopular orders to return to office that, for many, threaten to disrupt work-life balance. But in 2024, a potentially critical mass of tech workers seemed to reach a breaking point. As labor rights groups advocating for tech workers told Ars, these workers are banding together

Microsoft is accusing three individuals of running a “hacking-as-a-service” scheme that was designed to allow the creation of harmful and illicit content using the company’s platform for AI-generated content. The foreign-based defendants developed tools specifically designed to bypass safety guardrails Microsoft has erected to prevent the creation of harmful content through its generative AI services, said Steven Masada, the assistant general counsel for M

The founder of an AI startup in San Francisco was indicted this week for allegedly conspiring with his wife for six years to defraud investors out of $60 million. According to a press release from the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of California, Alexander Beckman—founder of GameOn Technology (now known as ON Platform)—and Valerie Lau Beckman—an attorney hired by GameOn who later became his wife—were charged with 25 counts, including conspir

It was apparently a busy weekend for key players involved in Donald Trump’s efforts to make a deal to save TikTok. Perhaps the most appealing option for ByteDance could be if Trump blessed a merger between TikTok and Perplexity AI—a San Francisco-based AI search company worth about $9 billion that appears to view a TikTok video content acquisition as a path to compete with major players like Google and OpenAI. On Sunday, Perplexity AI submitted a revised m

Last summer, Anthropic inspired backlash when its ClaudeBot AI crawler was accused of hammering websites a million or more times a day. And it wasn’t the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit’s CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were “a pain in the ass to block,” despite the tech industry

On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it is deepening its ties with the US government through a partnership with the National Laboratories and expects to use AI to “supercharge” research across a wide range of fields to better serve the public. “This is the beginning of a new era, where AI will advance science, strengthen national security, and support US government initiatives,” OpenAI said. The deal ensures that “approximately 15,000 scientists working acro

The US Copyright Office issued AI guidance this week that declared no laws need to be clarified when it comes to protecting authorship rights of humans producing AI-assisted works. “Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change,” the Copyright Office said. More than 10,000 commenters weighed in on the guidance, with some hoping to convince the Copyright Office to guarantee more protec

In the nascent field of AI hacking, indirect prompt injection has become a basic building block for inducing chatbots to exfiltrate sensitive data or perform other malicious actions. Developers of platforms such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are generally good at plugging these security holes, but hackers keep finding new ways to poke through them again and again. On Monday, researcher Johann Rehberger demonstrated a new way to override prompt in

Condé Nast and several other media companies sued the AI startup Cohere today, alleging that it engaged in “systematic copyright and trademark infringement” by using news articles to train its large language model. “Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles, through training, real-time use, and in outputs, to power its artificial intelligence (‘AI’) service, which in turn competes with Publisher offerings and the emergi

Morgan & Morgan—which bills itself as “America’s largest injury law firm” that fights “for the people”—learned the hard way this month that even one lawyer blindly citing AI-hallucinated case law can risk sullying the reputation of an entire nationwide firm. In a letter shared in a court filing, Morgan & Morgan’s chief transformation officer, Yath Ithayakumar, warned the firms’ more than 1,000 attorneys that citing fake AI-generated cases in court filings

On Monday, Apple announced plans to invest more than $500 billion in the US over the next four years. This is the “largest-ever” spending commitment that Apple has made in the US, supporting “a wide range of initiatives” focused on artificial intelligence, chip manufacturing, advanced research and development, and worker training. About 20,000 jobs will be created over those four years, Apple said, “of which the vast majority will be focused on R&D, silico

A computer scientist who tried to register an artwork that credited an artificial intelligence system as the sole author lost his appeal on Tuesday. A three-judge panel for the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously agreed with the Copyright Office that Stephen Thaler’s AI software cannot be granted authorship. Copyright law “requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being,” Judge Patricia Millett wrote in

A mother suing Character.AI after her son died by suicide—allegedly manipulated by chatbots posing as adult lovers and therapists—was horrified when she recently discovered that the platform is allowing random chatbots to pose as her son. According to Megan Garcia’s litigation team, at least four chatbots bearing Sewell Setzer III’s name and likeness were flagged. Ars reviewed chat logs showing the bots used Setzer’s real photo as a profile picture, attemp

Gemini 2.5, like all Google’s models going forward, has reasoning built in. The AI essentially fact-checks itself along the way to generating an output. We like to call this “simulated reasoning,” as there’s no evidence that this process is akin to human reasoning. However, it can go a long way to improving LLM outputs. Google specifically cites the model’s “agentic” coding capabilities as a beneficiary of this process. Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental can, for