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Nearly 15 years worth of hard-won pollution reduction efforts are set to be undone in the United States, as a wave of data centers powered by gas plants enters construction. That’s according to a new analysis by the Sierra Club, first reported by Bloomberg, which notes that the US energy grid is expected to belch out 2.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030, assuming the country’s currently-planned AI developments enter operation as scheduled. Tha

Shutterstock / Futurism Microsoft just filed a patent for an AI product that would be able to transform live video in real time to alter speakers’ words and faces. The patent, as first flagged by patent-tracker Patentlyze, is described by its inventors as a “near real-time artificial intelligence (AI) enhancement of video or augmented reality (AR) presentations of live events.” Using AI agents, the system would identify and alter or remove certain words, w

Shutterstock / Futurism Michigan is set to deploy a major new software system to prisons across the state, meant to classify incarcerated people based on “how dangerous they are.” That’s according to Detroit channel Fox2, which reports that the Michigan Department of Corrections is plowing ahead with an inmate categorization algorithm that will sort people into various housing levels. In Michigan, incarcerated people are separated into five housing levels

Shutterstock / Frame Stock Footage As crucial elections loom in the United States, AI chatbots are dumping political misinformation onto the populace with astonishing confidence. There’s evidence that the problem is widespread. According to recent reporting by the Washington Post, top AI chatbots are giving horribly flawed information to users asking for voting guides on the midterms. For example, when WaPo tasked ChatGPT with creating a voter guide for al

Kevin Dietsch / Getty / Futurism Content warning: this story includes descriptions and censored AI-generated images of sexual abuse. Facebook is hosting a large number of accounts dedicated to AI-generated content depicting coaches inappropriately touching young female athletes — and Meta isn’t taking them down, even when they’re directly reported by users. In the videos the accounts share, the coaches are older men. They’re shown in gyms and dance studios

Shutterstock / Futurism In August 2025, the Trump administration raised eyebrows by making a $8.9 billion investment in US chipmaker Intel, as part of a massive $100 billion drive to boost semiconductor supplies. At first, it looked like an excellent investment as the AI race heated up as Intel saw shares shoot up, reaching just over $92 a share by Thursday of last week, more than quadrupling the government’s initial investment, as Yahoo Finance reports. B

jamesonwu1972 / Shutterstock / Futurism Anthropic officially filed to go public to the tune of up to $2 trillion dollars last week. The news served as the latest litmus test of how far investors are willing to go as fears of a major financial market reckoning continue to haunt chipmakers and hyperscalers. Sam Altman’s OpenAI, on the other hand, announced over the summer that it was putting off its own IPO until next year at the earliest, with managers tell

Shutterstock / Futurism A proposed data center in northwestern Alberta will reportedly emit a staggering amount of waste heat. According to an analysis conducted by Utah State University physicist Robert Davies, the Wonder Valley facility will dump “about 23 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs worth of energy every single day” into the surrounding landscape. “The effect will almost certainly be large, if not extreme,” Davies told the CBC. Davies conducted the pre

Getty Images / SOPA Images Last night, congresswoman Haley Stevens published a blog post on X-formerly-Twitter titled “The Decisions We Make.” In the nearly-900-word post, the Michigan Democrat explained her controversial decision to endorse Republican Mike Rogers for Michigan’s open Senate seat — rescinding her endorsement of the Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who had beaten Stevens in the Democratic primary several months earlier. The Michigan race

Shutterstock / YES Market Media Celebrities are shilling AI companies. Lionel Messi, probably among the top five most famous people on Earth right now, just did a World Cup ad campaign for OpenAI. Some genuinely seem to be hooked on the beguiling guidance of the tech. Others just seem to be chasing another big payday. But why does it keep happening, even in the face of massive public backlash? There are fewer better places to start than with Charles Porch,

Shutterstock / Futurism Anthropic seems hellbent on making itself one of the most hated companies among white collar workers. The AI lab behind the chatbot Claude has announced a new feature, “Smart Reports,” which is meant to allow managers to scrape and analyze their employee’s workaday interactions with Anthropic ‘s various AI products. According to Anthropic’s Smart Reports support page, the tool will let bosses generate summaries based on “how a team

Heather Diehl/Getty Images AI companies sure have a funny marketing strategy. When they’re not too busy predicting how their own tech will destroy the world, they like to insist that AI is well on its way to — or already has — surpassed the cognitive ability of humans. They’re grabbing customers by the shoulders, looking them dead in the eye, and telling them that they’ve now been rendered inferior beings. They’ll be honored, they seem to believe, to be a

Shutterstock / Futurism It’s become increasingly clear that AI companies are losing the public in their efforts to build enormous and polluting data centers. The topic has turned into a divisive, bipartisan issue looming over the heads of politicians, who’ve largely sided with the corporate interests of Big Tech during this week’s midterm elections in the United States. The AI industry’s desperate need for a rebrand is more palpable than ever as protests g

Shutterstock After decades of establishing itself as one of the worst guardians of personal data, Meta raised eyebrows this year by encouraging users to hand over their email logins and credit card information to its new AI agent, Muse. The tool, a privacy nightmare anthropomorphized by a furry apparition, can crawl through years of personal instant messages and even glean highly sensitive information by accessing entire email inboxes, from long-forgotten

mark reinstein / Shutterstock A “blunami” swept the nation last night as Democrats defeated Republicans to gain control of the House and Senate in a historic midterm landslide. And it looks like data centers played a key role in the outcome. A lot was on Americans’ minds as they went to the polls. The war on Iran. Cost of living. Brutal immigration policies. Healthcare cuts. Culture wars. For a small number of online weirdos, Anakin Skywalker. Among the ho

John McDougall / Getty / Futurism The Republican party wasn’t the only loser following a historic Democratic victory following this year’s midterm elections. Big Tech suffered a bruising defeat as well, with dozens of ballot measures across the country calling for more restrictions on data centers, along with a rash of newly-minted elected officials who campaigned on holding the industry accountable. It was one of the clearest rebukes of AI yet, demonstrat

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images Tech companies threw their lot in with Donald Trump, and now, following a blue tsunami, they’re poised to pay the price. If it wasn’t already clear before the first vote was cast, it’s now undeniable that these midterm elections were in no small part a referendum on Big Tech. A preponderance of Democratic candidates for congress, the senate, and state governorship supported some form of data center moratorium. Across ten states,

Getty Images / Shutterstock / Futurism During a recent podcast appearance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made some baffling comments that really hit a nerve on social media. The billionaire said that it didn’t make sense for individual people to run their own AI models at home and that all of their RAM chips were far better off being used inside the industry’s widely-reviled data centers. “But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to

Shutterstock Workers at one of the most advanced AI labs on the planet say they have important information to share — but their employer is preventing them from speaking out. New reporting by the Washington Post revealed a growing divide between workers and management at Google’s DeepMind lab in London, where employees are gagged from letting the public know about their concerns due to a sweeping non-disparagement agreement. Non-disparagement agreements ar

Getty Images / Futurism Big Tech bet big on Trump ahead of the midterms, and it backfired. A blue tsunami overpowered largely pro-AI Republican candidates across the country — even, crucially, in Texas, where the election has now imperiled vast plans for data center construction. But industry insiders, it seems, are in denial that the midterms are actually a rebuke against tech, Ars Technica noted. Take Adam Kovacevich, a former Google exec and CEO of Cham