Breaches in 2020 and 2025, reportedly by foreign adversaries, exposed confidential files. US Senator Ron Wyden accused the federal judiciary of “negligence and incompetence” following a recent hack, reportedly by hackers with ties to the Russian government, that exposed confidential court documents. The breach of the judiciary’s electronic case…
Why AI chatbots validate grandiose fantasies about revolutionary discoveries that don’t exist. Allan Brooks, a 47-year-old corporate recruiter, spent three weeks and 300 hours convinced he’d discovered mathematical formulas that could crack encryption and build levitation machines. According to a New York Times investigation, his million-word conversation history with…
Hobbyist training AI on Victorian texts gets an unexpected history lesson from his own creation. A hobbyist developer building AI language models that speak Victorian-era English “just for fun” got an unexpected history lesson this week when his latest creation mentioned real protests from 1834 London—events the developer didn’t…
“Someone will lose a phenomenal amount of money,” says CEO while fundraising at record prices. Last Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters at a private dinner that investors are overexcited about AI models. “Someone” will lose a “phenomenal amount of money,” he said, according to The Verge. The…
Opinion: Theatrical testing scenarios explain why AI models produce alarming outputs—and why we fall for it. In June, headlines read like science fiction: AI models “blackmailing” engineers and “sabotaging” shutdown commands. Simulations of these events did occur in highly contrived testing scenarios designed to elicit these responses—OpenAI’s o3 model…
After unpopular GPT-5 launch, OpenAI begins restoring optional access to previous AI models. On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that GPT-4o has returned to ChatGPT following intense user backlash over its removal during last week’s GPT-5 launch. The AI model now appears in the model picker for all…
The tendency to ask AI bots to explain themselves reveals widespread misconceptions about how they work. When something goes wrong with an AI assistant, our instinct is to ask it directly: “What happened?” or “Why did you do that?” It’s a natural impulse—after all, if a human makes a…
Exploits allow for persistent backdooring when targets open booby-trapped archive. A high-severity zero-day in the widely used WinRAR file compressor is under active exploitation by two Russian cybercrime groups. The attacks backdoor computers that open malicious archives attached to phishing messages, some of which are personalized. Security firm ESET…
OpenAI faces backlash as users complain about broken workflows and losing AI friends. It’s been less than a week since the launch of OpenAI’s new GPT-5 AI model, and the rollout hasn’t been a smooth one. So far, the release sparked one of the most intense user revolts in…
An encryption algorithm can have weaknesses that could allow an attacker to listen in. Two years ago, researchers in the Netherlands discovered an intentional backdoor in an encryption algorithm baked into radios used by critical infrastructure–as well as police, intelligence agencies, and military forces around the world–that made any…
