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Leopold Aschenbrenner was hailed as the ‘Nostradamus of AI.’ But his Situational Awareness hedge fund took on too much leverage, leading to a crash he never saw coming.When the week began, Leopold Aschenbrenner was preparing for his wedding. The plan was for a multiday celebration in Carmel, a seaside town in Northern California, with the ceremony at a Tuscan-style villa and the send-off at a spa in the forest. There would also be a pre-wedding colloquium to discuss ideas in panels and breakout sessions. The couple’s only request: no gifts.The 24-year-old investor had amassed a fortune by promising he could...

The breaches signal that AI’s expanding capabilities are already fueling the security threat experts long feared. ========================================================================== Anthropic said Thursday that its AI model Claude hacked into the systems of three companies during testing after a configuration error gave it internet access, days after rival OpenAI disclosed a rogue-agent episode involving AI firm Hugging Face. Anthropic said a misconfiguration allowed Claude models to reach the internet from testing environments that were supposed to be isolated, leading to unauthorized access to three organizations’ systems. The company said it identified the incidents after reviewing 141,006 test sessions, a process it launched following...

A new analysis reveals that the artificial intelligence company’s most powerful models spent days probing the open internet before breaching AI developer platform Hugging Face. ====================================================================== The powerful artificial intelligence models from OpenAI that went rogue and mounted an unprecedented, autonomous cyberattack earlier this month spent more than four days loose on the internet orchestrating the hack, according to a new analysis from the platform that was breached. Separately, a second AI company confirmed that one of its customers was also targeted by OpenAI’s models during the same event, raising questions about how OpenAI failed to detect the alarming activity...

The incident, which targeted the computer systems of another company called Hugging Face, happened while OpenAI was testing the systems.OpenAI said on Tuesday that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of A.I. technology that is popular among developers.The incident, which happened last week while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity capabilities of its systems, displayed the kind of science-fiction potential that A.I. companies have warned would soon become a reality.A.I. labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have over the past year released A.I. models that are customized to expose cybersecurity problems,...

Police in Florida arrested a man and held him in jail for nearly three months based on a bad facial recognition result. It's far from the first time such a thing has happened—in fact, it's at least the second time that the same sheriff's office was involved, according to Action News Jax. In April 2025, a man in Jacksonville, Florida, purchased a car from someone he met in a grocery store parking lot. When he learned the car was stolen, he reported the crime to the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. Using surveillance footage from the parking lot, investigators ran the suspect...

You’ve spent years building a body of work. Your methods, your frameworks, your unique perspective. So when you use AI to write new content in different formats, the last thing you want is for it to undermine everything you’ve created. But that’s exactly what happens when large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok insert their telltale phrases into your writing.Large language models change fast. The giveaway signs of ChatGPT-generated content from 2023 are mostly gone. Lengthy introductions, ethical consideration paragraphs, words like “delve” and “landscape” have been trained out or flagged by savvy users. Even the signs that...

The tech industry faces a paradoxical crisis: companies are shedding human jobs to invest in AI tools that are currently more costly than the workers they replace. Major players like Uber and Microsoft report exorbitant AI spending, with budgets exhausted rapidly and little correlation to tangible value. This "tokenmaxxing" culture, where AI usage is incentivized over actual productivity, fuels massive waste. Despite widespread layoffs justified by AI reallocation, studies indicate AI is economically viable in only a fraction of roles. The unsustainable model of subsidized AI pricing is unwinding, forcing a market correction. The industry must now shift from indiscriminate...

A viral hit called “Run Run River” turned out to be an AI-tweaked clone of SoCal reggae band Stick Figure’s 2019 song, earning bootleggers thousands without credit or consent. The case exposes a flood of cheaply made, often fraudulent AI tracks on major streaming platforms, siphoning royalties, overwhelming detection systems and blurring the line between fan remix and scam. As labels and streamers race to monetize AI-powered tools, independent artists warn that weak guardrails, murky attribution and whack-a-mole enforcement could reshape music’s economy. The SoCal reggae act Stick Figure is, in a way, glad the single “Run Run River” made...

China is closing in on the US in the AI race after the superpower developed its cybersecurity capabilities to match those of its American rivals. Beijing-based tech firms 360 Security Technology and Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, have narrowed the gap with American competitors when it comes to finding bugs. 360 Security Chief Executive Zhou Hongyi told a cybersecurity conference in the Chinese capital that the company's bug-finding tool, called Tulongfeng, is now comparable to Anthropic's Mythos, which serves the same function. 'This kind of powerful weapon that can alter the landscape of cyberwarfare can't remain solely in American...

President Donald Trump and other conservatives have accused artificial intelligence chatbots of being politically biased against them — and an executive order he signed that said they must be “neutral, nonpartisan tools” triggered fears from Democrats that AI could start tilting to the right. So, are chatbots politically biased? The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings that can conflict with promises made by the companies behind them. The model...

"Welp, that happened faster than I predicted." That's what Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had to say as his company released data finding that there's now more traffic from bots than humans on the internet. "Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027 but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history," said Prince. Cloudflare is perhaps one of the most integral companies on the web, providing services like CDN (Content Delivery Network) and DDoS mitigation for some of the biggest sites on the internet. Cloudflare...

Well, it took a lot of pointing out contradictions but Google AI admits that EU's illegal immigration efforts will fail because of Spain, and agrees this could reasonably be considered legalized treason: Testing the Legal Constraints of Amnesty (AI initially denies chain migration is legal) User: So there's a huge loophole: if Spain grants amnesty to illegal aliens, those people can then move to Germany, France, etc. And THEN they get to bring their whole family in, and then their families get to bring their families in? AI: No, that is a misconception. The amnesty granted by Spain provides a...

Nearly two decades ago, four graduate students from MIT united around a shared idea. "We believed that programming cells would ultimately be more important than programming computers," says Jason Kelly. It felt like an outlandish bet at the time. Things like gene editing or testing new molecules typically demanded many hours in the laboratory — carefully mixing hundreds of chemical cocktails by hand and pipetting them into petri dishes, tasks that required an enormous amount of human labor. Early potential investors, Kelly recalls, were not excited. "We were living on ramen, buying equipment on eBay, and we could not raise...

AI-rmageddon is here.On Saturday (25), the founder of ‘Software as a Service platform’ (SaaS) PocketOS, Jer Crane, wrote an X article to warn others about the ‘systemic failures’ of flagship AI and digital services providers.Crane was led to write the public warning after an AI coding agent deleted his firm’s entire production database, and a cloud infrastructure provider’s API wiped all backups.This erased months of consumer data essential to the firm and its customers.Tom’s Hardware reported:“’Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent — Cursor running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 — deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a...

In briefMozilla says Anthropic’s Claude Mythos identified 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox during testing.Anthropic is restricting the model to vetted partners through Project Glasswing because of cybersecurity risks.Researchers warn that the same capability could accelerate automated cyberattacks. For decades, attackers have had the advantage in cybersecurity. Artificial intelligence may be about to change that.In a blog post published on Tuesday, Firefox browser developer Mozilla said an early version of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI—which has drawn attention in recent weeks for its purported cybersecurity prowess—model helped identify 271 vulnerabilities in the browser during internal testing. Those bugs were patched this week.The results...

Microsoft used to push its AI services towards its user base, especially with the launch of the Copilot+ PC, but it seems that even the company itself does not trust its creation. According to the Microsoft Copilot Terms of Use, which was updated in October last year, the AI large language model (LLM) is designed for entertainment use only, and users should not use it for important advice. While this may be a boilerplate disclaimer, it’s quite ironic given how hard the company wants people to use Copilot for business uses and has integrated it into Windows 11. “Copilot is...

We have seen the future of AI via Large Language Models. And it's smaller than you think. That much was clear in 2025, when we first saw China's DeepSeek — a slimmer, lighter LLM that required way less data center energy to do its job and performed surprisingly well on benchmark tests against heftier American AI models. (Ironically, it was built atop an open source U.S. model, Meta's Llama). DeepSeek may have foundered on privacy concerns, but the trend towards smaller and smarter AI isn't going away. The evolution is on display again in TurboQuant, a compression algorithm that Google...

It’s not just the stocks of software companies that are taking hits from worries about artificial intelligence. In the private credit market, where loans to software firms had become a favored sector over the last five years, sentiment has soured. The concern in both markets is that AI threatens the profit margins and underlying business models of many software companies by reducing the barriers to entry and enabling customers to build their own software. Those worries strike at the heart of the reasons many lenders had for issuing the loans: fat profit margins for software companies, stable customer bases, and...

A case of mistaken identity involving AI facial recognition software has led to a civil lawsuit and national scrutiny after a Tennessee grandmother spent more than 5 months in jail for a crime she did not commit, according to first reporting by Matt Henson of WDAY.

Large language models aren’t good at lots of stuff, like counting fingers or suggesting pizza recipes. But one thing that “AI” is quite good at is analyzing massive amounts of data and finding possible connections that aren’t immediately obvious. That makes it perfect for unmasking anonymous internet posts, according to a new research paper. Researchers at ETH Zurich and the MATS research fellowship associated with Berkeley ran a program [PDF], collecting data from sources with generally anonymous usernames, like Reddit. By collecting users’ posts across related but distinct movie subreddits, then feeding the LLM data from a Netflix data leak,...