Security researchers using an OpenAI model have uncovered two stunning security flaws in PHP,  the software that underpins nearly 70 percent of all websites on the internet. 

The flaws are so catastrophic that all websites using PHP — all untold millions of them — are advised to immediately take their servers down and apply the latest patch, which was released Wednesday. Vast swathes of the internet, following the news, have gone dark. Some that went offline for a time include Wikipedia, Steam, and even government websites.

Many organizations, however, may not have the time, resources, and personpower to swiftly implement the patch, making them potential sitting ducks until they do. According to the New York Times, the information released on the vulnerability can be used to reverse engineer the attack and take control of victim’s servers and steal information. The best course of action if you can’t patch your website, the National Security Agency advised, is dramatic: keep your site offline and don’t turn it back on.

Just as extraordinary as the breadth of the threat was how it was identified. The flaws were discovered by researchers at the cybersecurity firm Calif by using OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol model, as part of a collaboration with the AI company. It then reported the flaw to the PHP Foundation back on August 11. 

The Google-owned security firm Wiz independently found the flaws, too, and made a report on August 24. Wiz called it one of the “most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history.”

Adding to the alarm presented by the exploits, there have been concerns raised over OpenAI’s role in how they were identified.

The flaws have been present in versions of PHP dating backing to 2004. But through OpenAI’s “Patch the Planet” program, and by using its flagship GPT-5.6 Sol model, Calif found it in only a matter of days. In a sense, these exploits only exist because of current powerful AI models. And moreover, OpenAI encouraged their discovery through its programs.

The messy disclosure of the vulnerability doesn’t help matters. OpenAI followed standard responsible practices, but some of the details around the hack leaked a day before it was officially scheduled to be announced.

Even if no leaks occurred, though, the damage caused by the mere knowledge that the vulnerabilities exist — which again, is largely thanks to AI — would still be catastrophic. It was the inevitable next chapter in all the bluster around AI companies revealing their agentic models’ hacking prowess. A headline in The Atlantic proclaimed that the “AI-Hacking Apocalypse Began Last Night.” OpenAI will tout the discovery as undeniable proof of its AI’s capabilities, while the rest of the world picks up the pieces of a shattered internet.

More on AI: AI Experts Already Doomsday Prepping for When AI Takes Out the Entire Financial System

The post Frontier OpenAI Model Exposes Stunning Exploit That Leaves Millions of Web Servers Open to Attack appeared first on Futurism.

Vibe coding is the act of telling an AI what you want to program and letting it write all the code for you. When it was first adopted, it was supposed to embody the sort of care-free optimism that was running in AI circles at the time, high off the possibilities of the tech. AI models had become so powerful that you could build an app using the same conversational language that you deploy while confiding in ChatGPT.

But the “vibes” are different now. Programmers were quickly forced to grapple with the new reality that AI coding tools brought to their profession. Now that everyone’s using AI to churn out code, you have to crank out even more work to keep up and meet your boss’s quota. It may be more “efficient” — and even that’s contested, since someone needs to do the hard work of verifying all that AI pablum — but it hasn’t exactly made people’s jobs easier. Meanwhile, everyone with a Claude subscription and a half-baked app idea fancies themselves a bona fide programmer, too.

In sum, vibe coding has gone from a novelty to something viewed as a necessary evil, or worse, as an object of suspicion. It’s no longer something to brag about. A recent tweet making the rounds in tech circles perhaps encapsulates this shift, joking about using the term “cuck coding” instead of vibe coding “because you just sit in a chair and watch.” Even posters on r/ClaudeCoding found the humor in it.

Vibe coding can churn out marvelous work, but it’s hard to divorce the optimism around it from the clueless bosses who are forcing their employees to heavily use AI to code. Epic Games, the game developer behind the mega hit shooter Fortnite, reportedly went the extra step of basically mandating actual vibes-based coding, telling employees that there would be “no more hand-written code” and that the unnamed game they were working on should be “generated with full AI workflows.” Epic was later met with waves of mockery for bragging that it “vibe coded” its game launcher to be faster than its competitor Steam.

As vulgar as the term sounds, maybe “cuck coding” is indeed the term that more accurately reflects what’s actually going on. You watch and burn… lots of tokens.

More on AI: Major Data Center Developer Rents Floating Prison Barge to House Contract Construction Workers

The post Maybe Vibe Coding Should Be Called “Cuck Coding” Because You Just Sit in a Chair and Watch appeared first on Futurism.

Donald Trump’s Twitter clone, Truth Social, is in serious trouble.

The company has weathered bad news before, hitting all-time low stock prices on multiple occasions over the past year. But those days now look balmy in comparison, with the social network’s shares sliding more than 7.5 percent on Monday alone and setting a new rock bottom of just $6.40. Zooming out doesn’t paint a prettier picture, either: over the past month, the company’s stock has fallen a stomach-churning 29 percent.

It’s easy to empathize with any investors looking to ditch the company. It never had much of a raison d’être beyond “funnel some money to Trump,” and the president’s declining political fortunes — not to mention looming midterms that are likely to undermine his remaining power — have weakened even that grift-era pitch.

As the Daily Beast reported last week, not even its users are sticking around, with analytics data suggesting that its daily traffic has cratered by more than 30 percent over the past year. For a company that was already posting huge losses every quarter, that’s grim news — and it sounds like the company’s remaining investors may now be seeing the writing on the wall.

As its fortunes have soured, Truth Social has tried a series of eyebrow-raising pivots into gambling and crypto that failed to gain traction. It also moved to merge with a nuclear fusion company and started selling early access to Trump’s messages on the platform, in a move that was widely derided as an attempt to profit off his position as president.

So far, none of those moves have showed any signs of turning around the company’s fortunes. Add it all up, and it’s hard not to wonder whether Truth Social will survive as long as Trump’s second administration.

More on Truth Social: Trump’s Failing Truth Social Was Doing Much Better Under Biden

The post Truth Social Stock Hits All-Time Low as Userbase Craters on Trump’s Twitter Clone appeared first on Futurism.

A retired professor was handcuffed and arrested last week, for the crime of standing on the sidewalk in front of a delivery robot.

According to local channel 6ABC, 78-year-old Carolyn Marvin was arrested in Philadelphia’s Center City, after planting her feet in the path of an oncoming Avride delivery robot. Marvin, a retired communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told local reporters she was protesting the robots due to the threat they pose to local delivery workers.

“I know they’re taking the jobs of human delivery workers,” Marvin told 6ABC, “and so I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward.”

The “confrontation” — if you can call it that — attracted a small crowd, who watched as police ordered Marvin to move out of the robot’s path. When she refused, citing protected speech, she was arrested and charged with one count of disorderly conduct, which she reportedly plans to dispute in court.

It wasn’t Marvin’s first time passively protesting Philadelphia’s growing fleet of delivery robots, and it probably won’t be her last. Asked by 6ABC whether she plans on continuing her demonstrations, she replied that “I do. Why not?”

“I think it’s my First Amendment right to publicly demonstrate on a sidewalk to protest against delivery robots,” Marvin continued.

In a separate interview with KYW Newsradio, the retired professor said she was protesting the “ruthless way that rich corporations are casting aside human workers — and here, we’re talking about the humble delivery folks — in order to enrich their bottom lines.”

The incident raises a valid legal question around delivery bots: if the privately-owned devices need unimpeded access to public infrastructure to work, who’s responsible for making sure they have room to roam?

More on robots: Walmart Running Into Trouble as Its Super-Expensive Robots Can’t Handle the Realities of Warehouse Work

The post 78-Year-Old Woman Hauled Off In Handcuffs After Blocking Delivery Robot appeared first on Futurism.

A biodiversity research team journeying into the incredibly diverse subtropical forests of China’s Ailaoshan Mountains took a strange companion with them: a robotic dog.

The robot, a Lynx M20S developed by DEEP Robotics, assisted the team on a trip organized by the China Association for Scientific Expedition, China’s state-run tabloid the Global Times reported. Photos of the expedition show the researchers using the robot like a pack mule to carry field and imaging supplies, though the unit reportedly also assisted with other tasks like route scouting, image recording, and data collection.

At one point, the robot was even used to capture footage of a rare parasitic plant known as Monotropa uniflora, as well as forest gibbons (though, to be fair, these are tasks a human scientist could surely perform just as well.)

Whether the expedition amounts to a practical deployment or a frivolous gimmick probably depends on how you view commercial robots as a whole. Though it can carry a load of about 220 pounds, the battery life on the Lynx M20S lasts just 2.5 to 3.5 hours, likely putting a decent burden on any researchers who have to lug replacement batteries up the Ailaoshan Mountain range or figure out a way to charge them in situ.

At the same time, it makes for a pretty effective product demo. The Ailaoshan Mountain range and its surrounding area are notoriously treacherous, with navigation of ravines and dense primeval forests complicated by extreme outbursts of precipitation. In 2021, a rapid change in weather on the range resulted in the deaths of four experienced geological researchers — an illustrative example of the kinds of conditions one can expect on the Ailaoshan Mountains.

As a device designed for challenging outdoor terrain, the Lynx M20S’s apparently successful participation in this trek seems to validate the company’s engineering efforts.

Elsewhere, DEEP robotics’ robo-hounds have reportedly assisted with underground tunnel excavation, patrolled urban streets during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and helped firefighters extinguish blazes.

More on robots: Chinese Startup Shows Off Robot Horse You Can Actually Ride

The post Jungle Research Expedition Using Robot Dog Like a Pack Mule appeared first on Futurism.

Amazon has officially surpassed a fleet of 1 million robots, an arsenal of mechanical arms, Roomba-like floor loaders, and hulking pallet sorting machines.

Each robot is a node in an intricate web allowing the corporation to speed up delivery times and lower overhead. But for the over 1.5 million full- and part-time workers relying on Amazon wages to pay their bills, the company’s bot army represents rising competition — not just metaphorically, but physically.

As George Mason University professor of business Brad Greenwood told Ars Technica in a recent interview, Amazon’s warehouse robots aren’t just helping Amazon cut costs on labor, but are literally boxing humans out of workspaces in the company’s facilities.

“For the last 100 years, most of the automation that we’ve seen usually happens away from workers,” Greenwood explained. “You’re taking that high-risk task away from the worker, and you’re doing so in a way that is not physically proximate.”

Yet the growth of Amazon’s robot fleet “really changes that dynamic for two reasons: one is that it is physically proximate, and two, the robot has the ability to dictate the pace of work,” Greenwood continued.

That shifting terrain is great for Amazon’s bottom line. The robots help decrease friction across the company’s vast logistics empire, increasing speed and strengthening the company’s bottom line. And by allowing robots to “dictate the pace” of work, as Greenwood put it, Amazon is also loosening its need for human labor, disempowering workers both on an individual basis and in any potential collective bargaining arrangements.

Beyond the shop floor, Amazon’s robots also serve as a near-constant source of buzzy PR, as exciting achievements in automation overshadow the more mundane but widespread reality of workplace injuries. It’s especially convenient for Amazon, as conditions in the company’s facilities appear to become more dangerous as more robots roll out to the floor (and that’s to say nothing of the impact of AI-mediated human resources).

As director of strategic research at the trade union coalition Strategic Organizing Center, Joan Moriarty, told Ars: “Amazon likes to talk about its latest robots because it doesn’t want to talk about the tens of thousands of Amazon workers who are injured every year due to Amazon’s obsession with maximizing speed and minimizing costs.”

More on Amazon: Amazon Warns Local Communities to Stop Defying Its Massive AI Data Centers

The post Amazon Has Now Deployed Over 1 Million Robots, Which Is Bad News for Its 1.5 Million Workers appeared first on Futurism.

Police in Cologne, Germany, have seized a humanoid robot after a pair of livestreamers used it to sexually harass a teenage girl.

According to a police statement released Monday, the robot “allegedly touched a 16-year-old girl on the buttocks and performed thrusting motions against” her.

There’s not much “alleged” about the incident, though, since the IRL streamers recorded everything that happened while live on Twitch.

The robot’s owner is 16-year-old German IRL streamer Agaamuza. For the past few weeks, according to 404 Media, he’s been filming himself and his friends wandering the streets of Cologne while accompanied by a humanoid robot from the company Unitree, which they dress in a ridiculous outfit and have fixed with a mustache. They spend a lot of the time using the robot, which they’ve nicknamed Ahmed, to bother and outright harass strangers, most of them women.

In clips of the recent incident circulating online, the robot encounters a group of girls standing on the street at night. Then, it just so happens that the robot, after having no problems walking down a busy sidewalk, plows directly into one of the girl’s behind.

“Oh my god stop,” one of her friends says.

Agaamuza and his crew act as if they’re shocked by the robot’s actions, but ask the girls if they want to meet the robot. When she and her friends say no, the robot starts thrusting its hips provocatively in front of them. The girls, repulsed, move away.

This is just one example, though. In plenty of other videos, Agaamuza tricks unsuspecting women into being friendly with the robot before it suddenly springs into doing something pervy, like humping a woman as she’s hugging it, or making masturbatory gestures. Then Agaamuza’s posse play dumb and pretend to be appalled by what’s happening.

Make no mistake: these robots aren’t autonomous and everything they do is controlled by a human operator. Those hip thrusts and other gross gestures are pre-programmed moves, not something that’s happening spontaneously.

Nonetheless, the German police statement added an unnecessary air of mystery to who was responsible for these actions, saying that it’s now “investigating how the robot was operating at the time of the incident and whether someone was deliberately controlling its movements.”

This is unfortunately another example of how men looking for clout are using the latest gadgets to target women. Plenty of other livestreamers and Instagram “pick up artists” are using Meta smart glasses to film themselves harassing girls on the street and record them without their consent.

More on robots: Walmart Running Into Trouble as Its Super-Expensive Robots Can’t Handle the Realities of Warehouse Work

The post Livestreamers Film Themselves Using Humanoid Robot to Sexually Assault Teen Girl, Prompting Police to Seize the Bot appeared first on Futurism.

When it comes to hardware, Amazon’s strategy has historically been to throw spaghetti at the wall and pray it sticks.

There was the Amazon Fire Phone in 2014, a $170 million flop with a gimmicky 3D camera system. Then came the Amazon Tap, a clunky, Echo-style home assistant device that did away with voice-activation, instead requiring users to press a physical button. And of course, who could forget those silly Amazon Dash Buttons?

They all build context for Amazon’s latest gadget: an always-on wearable microphone that constantly listens in to your conservations.

Called the “Bee,” Amazon’s new hardware platform spans two devices, which are basically just a large language model (LLM) packed onto a watch-sized microphone, as Gizmodo reported. Customers can currently buy the “Bee Frontier” wearable version, which comes with a watch strap, for $75. Or Amazon aficionados can hold out for the “Bee Eclipse,” a $100 plastic puck that fits onto the back of your phone.

And when we say these gadgets are always listening, we mean it. Don’t take our word for it — in its press release announcing the new devices, Amazon explained that the Bee Frontier has a seven-day battery life, allowing it to “stay with you through a full week without interruption.”

This being an Amazon device, e-commerce is an essential selling point: “whether it’s remembering the details of important meetings, taking note of the coffee plans you made in passing, or simply ensuring you purchase the dish soap you said you’d buy, Bee Frontier will remember the details for you,” the release enthused.

As you might expect by this point in 2026, you’re not getting away with a one-time purchase. In order to use some core features like “unlimited recent conversation summaries” and access to an Alexa-style “personal chat assistant,” Bee owners will need to subscribe to Bee Pro, which costs $12 a month. (New customers get a month of Bee Pro on the house.)

The device follows a growing trend among hardware brands to eschew physical interactivity in favor of AI-integrated monitoring devices. Meta has its AI Glasses, which have been found recording users even when they’re in sleep mode, while OpenAI is developing a screen-less smart speaker engineered by famed Apple designer Jony Ive.

Whether any of these devices catch on with consumers remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely. A YouGov poll from earlier this year found that some 61 percent of Americans feel it’s very important to limit who has access to their data — which isn’t a great sign for anybody selling what amounts to an AI-powered ankle monitor.

More on hardware: Anthropic Warns “AI Worms” Will Infect Your Smart Home Devices and Use Them to Self-Replicate Beyond Control

The post Amazon Launches Ominous Wearable Ankle Monitor-Style Gadget That Records You Constantly appeared first on Futurism.

Experts have long argued that our current obsession with humanoid robots may be at least a little bit misguided.

After all, the awkward form factor of a torso teetering on two spindly legs isn’t exactly the pinnacle of motor proficiency, let alone suitable for every job.

But what if we were to double the height of the humanoid robot and gave it terrifying hydraulic actuators that give it far beyond superhuman strength?

That’s precisely what Beijing-based company NeodraDynamics Robotics has done. At this year’s China International Industry Fair, the company showed off an imposing, 13-foot and 1.2-ton robot dubbed Neo1 — and it looks like it was yanked straight out of a pulpy sci-fi movie. Photos show the behemoth towering above the heads of convention goers.

Instead of relying on electric motors, the company opted for a “hydraulic-electric hybrid drive” that, according to a boisterous press release, “thoroughly eliminates robots’ power and environmental adaptation anxieties.”

In other words, it’s akin to a highly sophisticated excavator in the shape of a 13-foot giant. But unlike an excavator, the robot has “41 full-body active degrees of freedom” and can carry over 1,100 pounds in its beefy arms. It also has a claimed “repeated positioning accuracy” and fingertip precision of a single micrometer.

NeodraDynamics Robotics is envisioning its Neo1 mecha as the ultimate “sky, ground and sea” responder, assisting during “aerial inspection, underground mining, and deep-sea engineering.”

It can withstand “ultra-high underwater pressure to execute subsea equipment maintenance,” as well as shock and pollution, making it a candidate for “efficient demolition, clearance and hazard zone operations.”

But while we continue to gaze upon the mecha in awe, we’ll wait for an actual showcase before we render full judgment. After all, the Neo1 would be far from the first Chinese piece of vaporware that never turned into a reality.

Apart from the breathless press release, the company’s website doesn’t elaborate a whole lot either. Even more importantly, we have yet to see the robot in action.

In short, it’s a wild idea that may or may not usher in a new era in industrial mechanical engineering. And judging by its inspiring looks, it’d look pretty cool from afar at a construction site — as long as it never decides to turn against humanity, that is.

More on humanoid robots: Scientists Create New Humanoid Robot That Flinches in Fear When You Come Close

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As if Meta’s AI-smart glasses didn’t have enough privacy issues, a growing number of owners report the devices are spying on them without their consent.

According to reporting by Android Authority, several owners of the Meta glasses have reported their devices capturing conversations without ever being activated. In theory, a user has to say “Hey Meta” to “wake” the device from sleep mode, similar to other smart systems like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri. But some owners say the Meta glasses are waking up and recording without that phrase ever being uttered — effectively monitoring their surroundings without express permission.

“I have observed the same behavior on THREE different pairs of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, including 2nd- and 3rd-generation models,” one user explained in a thread on Reddit.

“I believe this deserves a serious technical investigation,” the poster continued. “Customers should not have to wonder whether their private conversations are being captured when they have not intentionally activated their glasses’ AI assistant.”

Invasive as it is, the irony is hard to miss. Meta glasses have emerged as a preferred tool of sex creeps, bullies, and skeevy influencers the world over for their ability to record video discreetly — a feature which quickly earned them the nickname “pervert glasses.”

“Woah a company that makes money by invading your privacy is invading your privacy!” one Redditor joked in a separate thread about the issue. “Can’t trust anyone these days.”

In a vague response to the report, a Meta spokesperson told Android Authority that the issue “has been resolved.”

“People can manage, review and delete voice logs of their interactions with Meta AI via settings at any time,” the statement concluded.

Whether that boilerplate statement is enough to assuage Meta glasses users remains to be seen. If nothing else, maybe users will gain a new appreciation for what it feels like to be recorded without consent.

More on smart glasses: NYC’s Buzziest Nightclub Announces Stance On Smart Glasses: Even Try To Bring Them In, You’re Banned Forever

The post Meta Glasses Said to Be Recording Even When They’re in Sleep Mode appeared first on Futurism.

Aerial drones have become a startlingly common sight on the battlefield. Ukraine, for instance, has been deploying a record number of them as global demand for the often inexpensive and relatively simple to launch devices surges.

But US-based firms are thinking far ahead, envisioning a dystopian “Terminator”-inspired future in which humanoid robot soldiers go to war on behalf of their flesh-and-blood counterparts.

Case in point, San Francisco-based tech company Foundation recently signed a $24 million Pentagon contract to do just that, as the Wall Street Journal reports. While the company’s flagship Phantom MK1 robot, an unsettling matte black apparition, doesn’t appear to be ready to hold a gun or run into open fire on its own any time soon, the Eric Trump-backed company is far from ruling out the idea.

When the tech progresses enough to allow robots to reason and adapt to their behavior, “instead of dropping a bomb in a building, you can send humanoids to actually walk inside that building and go directly to the target,” Foundation CEO Sankaet Pathak told the WSJ.

In an interview last year, Pathak wasn’t willing to rule out the possibility of handing one of its robots a gun, either.

“If you’re first body in and you’re docile, then the enemies are not going to expose themselves,” he said at the time. “So you have to be first body and deadly.”

“If the US military had 100,000 robots that they could just demonstrate working, it would, by and large, end a lot of wars before they start,” Pathak added at the time.

So far, the company has rolled out around ten robots, according to the executive, including “deployments with the Air Force.” Its robots, which can carry up to 80 pounds, have even helped move larger objects in Ukraine, per Pathak.

Foundation is also “gearing up to start building a lot more” of its robots, while using AI and reinforcement learning to teach them new tasks.

In the long run, however, the company appears to be far more interested in colonizing other planets. According to the company’s website, its “master plan” involves building “technologies that make life self-sustaining on Earth and beyond,” closely echoing SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s ambitions.

But before it can get anywhere even remotely close to that, the company has a lot to prove. For one, beyond major technological hurdles still to overcome, it has to convince modern society that deploying deadly humanoid robots doesn’t cross a moral line — which is far easier said than done.

More on humanoid robots: Dozens of Humanoid Robots Gather for a Protest, Marching and Waving Signs

The post These Robot Soldiers Are Getting Downright Terrifying appeared first on Futurism.

As sordid tales of AI layoffs and automation grip the news cycle, one group is fighting fire with fire, by staging an anti-AI demonstration with dozens of humanoid robots.

The rally, first reported by Agence France-Presse, was organized by the Polish group Democratism. It featured some 30 robots waving flags calling for swift regulation of AI. Staged outside the offices of Poland’s Digital Affairs Ministry in Warsaw, the organizers told reporters they used the robots to demonstrate the current state of robotics and AI. Though humanoid robots remain in their infancy, the robots gathered together do make for a striking display.

Around 30 robots joined a protest in front of Poland’s digital affairs ministry, calling for stronger AI regulations.

The demonstration was organised by campaigners to spark debate on how AI and robots could replace workers. pic.twitter.com/QEbvchb2RS

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 7, 2026

“The robots present here are meant to show that this technology is already a reality,” the organizers told AFP via an Agibot A3, which contains voice-recognition capabilities integrated with a large language model.

“We particularly want to address the issue of the potential replacement of people both by humanoid robots and by artificial intelligence in cognitive work,” Democratism organizer Grzegorz Kuliś told the news service. “If we don’t react now, we may soon have a problem… these robots can already move around freely, they’re already ‘protesting.'”

Notably, Kuliś is the chief information officer and owner of a company called Delta Robots, meaning the demonstration also serves to drum up press for his own commercial interests. Kuliś’ altruistic motivations notwithstanding, plenty of major AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have taken to using scare tactics to promote the supposedly advanced capabilities of their own products — while calling for stricter regulation of their own industry.

Whether the Polish robotics wiz is following in the self-serving footsteps of Sam Altman remains to be seen. But either way, it marks the first known use of humanoid robots for a political demonstration — and it surely won’t be the last.

More on robots: Humanoid Robot Fights Back After Getting Shoved

The post Dozens of Humanoid Robots Gather for a Protest, Marching and Waving Signs appeared first on Futurism.

The companies ushering in food delivery robots aren’t buying themselves much goodwill in the Windy City.

In the short amount of time they’ve been on Chicago streets, the bots have sent residents to the hospital and smashed through bus stops, prompting local officials to set up an exclusion zone prohibiting the companies from operating in a certain section of the city.

Now, it seems the bots are also capable of swarming the city’s busy sidewalk, making it all but impossible for residents to pass safely.

A clip shared by Chicago resident Becca Ostein on her morning run captured the bizarre moment when a swarm of delivery robots operated by the firm Coco caused a traffic jam on a sidewalk near Lincoln Park.

Apparently caused by a freak glitch, the video shows Ostein attempting to pass a veritable obstacle course of a dozen squirming robots, their on-board lights flashing as they congregate on a patch of narrow sidewalk. Another bot is seen maneuvering off in the distance, though it isn’t clear whether it’s approaching or fleeing the fray.

“Run route was crowded this morning,” Ostein wrote in her caption of the video.

View this post on Instagram

The video garnered plenty of reactions in the comments, the majority of which were negative.

“As a disabled person this is an actual nightmare,” one user replied.

“They were swarming,” Ostein told CBS News in an interview following the incident. “They didn’t seem to have anywhere to go. Without agile feet, no one could have gotten by.”

In a statement shared under Ostein’s post, Coco apologized, admitting “that’s not how our robots are designed to operate.”

“Our team caught it quickly, and the robots were cleared and operating normally within minutes,” the company continued. “We’ve made sure this won’t happen again.”

More on robots: As If There Was Any Question About Data Centers Being Weak Job Creators, Meta Is Now Deploying Robots to Maintain Them

The post Bizarre Glitch Causes Delivery Robots to Swarm Busy City Sidewalk appeared first on Futurism.

The surveillance state costs money, people!

Well, tell that to president Trump. On Thursday, he slapped a 100 percent tariff — he sure loves round numbers and levying imports — on larger foreign-made drones.

Trump claimed that this “bolsters national security.” But, ironically, it could be undermining domestic security — at least according to surveillance-happy police departments who’ve gotten used to overlooking their subjects from above, according to a roundup of commentary from Ars Technica.

Speaking to the New York Times, Scott Mlakar, chief of the Lake County Drone Unit outside Cleveland, called the tariffs financially onerous and lamented that it would prevent many communities from buying them, adding that his unit uses them to hunt crime suspects at night and search for lost children.

“Most of this, in our humble opinion, is lobbying by US manufacturers to eliminate foreign competition,” he said. “This is not national security. It’s protectionism.”

The tariff is explicitly designed to target popular Chinese drones, while making exceptions or imposing much lighter tariffs on drones made from allies like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and the EU.  In particular, these steep duties will apply to drones that use thermal imaging or weigh more than 55 pounds. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission is weighing reclassifying some drone technologies like lidar as “military grade,” Ars noted, which would restrict who can access these drones even further.

Drones have a lot of other practical uses beyond law enforcement, obviously, including monitoring wild fires and assisting rescue operations. Amid heightened backlash against Flock, though, they’ve come to be seen as another surveillance apparatus.

But weaning the US off Chinese drone tech is supposed to be good for national security, according to the Trump administration. One small problem: a single Chinese company, DJI, makes more than 70 percent of the world’s commercial drones, according to the NYT. Good luck replacing all those.

Plenty of other cops are bellyaching about the tariffs, too, extolling how irreplaceable that awesome Chinese made drones have become to their operation.

Ars spotted a Texas police officer named Jason Lee, for instance, who complained to the FCC that “there is currently no economically viable domestic replacement” for DJI drones. “More than 80 percent of state and local law-enforcement drone programs surveyed in 2024 used DJI aircraft,” he added.

“The fact that a domestic product exists does not necessarily mean it is a viable substitute,” Lee said. “A replacement must be operationally comparable, economically obtainable, supported by an adequate supply chain, and accepted by pilots who must rely on it during real-world incidents.”

More on drones: Amazon Delivery Drone Drops Package Directly Into Customer’s Swimming Pool

The post Surveillance-Happy Police In Shambles After Trump Tariffs Makes Drones Absurdly Expensive appeared first on Futurism.

While they’re seemingly still years away from completing actually useful tasks, like cleaning a messy apartment or doing the dishes, humanoid robots have developed plenty of capabilities over the past few years, from sprinting faster than any human ever to performing elaborate dance choreographies.

They’ve also been taught how to punch and even kickbox for their human overlords’ amusement, as one man visiting a store in Russia appears to have learned the hard way.

A viral CCTV video shows the individual lightly shoving what appears to be a Chinese Unitree G1 humanoid robot. After it recoils slightly, it suddenly starts playing cheesy fighting music and pops into a wide-legged stance, ready to pounce. Two store clerks then try to restrain the robot as it tries to throw technical, high-legged kicks.

Robot consultant glitches and ATTACKS customer in Russia's Saratov

The customer escaped with a fright, while robot Syoma was sent for a reboot pic.twitter.com/tGYUhj4KPV

— RT (@RT_com) September 2, 2026

One kick appears to hit a target, in the form of one of the clerk’s nether regions.

Twenty seconds later, the robotic assailant’s moves come to an abrupt end as it suddenly lifts up its arms as if to strike a T pose.

“They gave that thing a kung-fu beat down mode I’m in tears,” one X user wrote.

Other netizens took a far more serious tone.

“Not long now robots will be ripping peoples arms off in public,” one tweeted.

But it’d be far too soon to officially declare the beginning of a real robot uprising. The footage leaves us with far more questions than answers. We don’t know if the robot was being controlled remotely, for example, or following a predetermined sequence of actions as part of a tech demonstration.

Of course, it’s also entirely possible the entire confrontation was scripted and designed to get views on social media.

While it doesn’t appear to have resulted in any serious injuries, it wouldn’t have been the first time we’ve seen somebody get hurt by a humanoid robot. For instance, we’ve come across a video of a robot in a clown wig roundhousing kicking an innocent child, or another hit a man in the nose, causing him to bleed.

More on humanoid robots: Chinese Companies Are Unleashing AI-Powered Robo-Chefs

The post Humanoid Robot Fights Back After Getting Shoved appeared first on Futurism.

Since the start of the data center boom, “job creation” was one of the key promises made to communities weighing whether to host the tech industry’s monstrous computing facilities in their backyards.

That was always a gross over-representation of the facts, as most labor required for data centers comes in the form of temporary construction jobs to build them. Still, the tech tycoons who need data centers to keep the AI revolution chugging along could always fall back on promoting the lonely skeleton crews tasked with manually monitoring, patrolling, and maintaining each facility.

Now, even that could be going away.

According to new reporting by Ars Technica, the AI giant Meta is testing new robots designed to automate the work of data center maintenance, with the aim of keeping the cost of labor even lower.

The initiative is in its very early stages, per Ars, involving trial runs of hardware from a few different robotics firms. These include companies like ABB, Kinova, and Watney Robotics, which supply robot arms being tested for tasks like hot-swapping network cables and cycling power to server racks.

One anonymous Meta staffer told Ars that, if it’s successful, a robotic arm from Kinova could replace up to 80 percent of their the facilities’ workload.

“We thought those of us performing the physical tasks were safe for a while, but not anymore,” the worker lamented. “It’s coming for us all, unfortunately.”

The bulk of data center overhead comes from the hardware itself, particularly the extremely pricey AI chips needed to run high-powered large language models. Even when factoring in construction the human labor cost of data centers is negligible, meaning Meta is going far out of its way to automate maintenance work.

Approached for comment by Ars, a Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the testing of robots for data center work.

More on data centers: Data Center Backlash Has Officially Rattled Sam Altman

The post As If There Was Any Question About Data Centers Being Weak Job Creators, Meta Is Now Deploying Robots to Maintain Them appeared first on Futurism.

In a time of rising skepticism against tech surveillance, it seems not even the best intentions can spare you from backlash.

That’s a lesson some good samaritans in Los Vegas learned the hard way, after a thermal imaging drone they were using to track a runaway dog was trashed by a group of unidentified vandals.

According to to Las Vegas station FOX5, the volunteer animal rescue group Paws Patrol LV has been scrambling to replace a $7,000 camera drone after it suddenly went offline while tracking an injured dog.

“For the past couple of days, we’ve been searching for a dog we believe was hit by a car,” the group wrote in a post on Facebook. “We searched on foot, but the vegetation was simply too dense to see through with flashlights. So we launched our thermal drone… one of the most valuable rescue tools we’ve ever owned.”

“Less than a minute after it took off,” the post continues, “a group of unhoused individuals knocked it out of the sky, smashed it, and threw it into the water.”

The animal-rescue group wasn’t left empty-handed for long, however, as a business owner from Montana chipped in to donate a brand new thermal imaging drone, per an update on the original post.

While it would be easy to blame a group of unwashed Luddites for the damage, it’s important to keep in mind that the true identity of the vandal or vandals remains unknown. If the vandals really are homeless, as Paws Patrol LV volunteers suggest, then their aversion to strange drones makes sense — elsewhere, surveillance drones have been deployed by police officers to clear homeless camps, while private citizens have used drones to drop dog feces on homeless populations struggling to survive.

And one doesn’t necessarily have to be homeless to have an aversion to the growing number of surveillance drones surfing our skies. In some parts of the US, malicious operators have used drones to harass random suburbanites and poach wildlife, while insurance adjusters are increasingly conducting secretive drone flights to find excuses to penalize homeowners and sometimes even drop customers altogether.

While we hope the dog gets found, the episode underscores a larger point: the skies have become a contested space, with drone operators both benevolent and vindictive jockeying for control — not just of the airspace itself, but over how their drones are perceived.

More on drones: We’re Admittedly Terrified That They’ve Now Invented Invisible Drones

The post Volunteers Tracking Lost Dog Baffled When Locals Trash Thermal Imaging Drone appeared first on Futurism.

They’re agile, they’re creepy, and they may be coming for human jobs.

Robot dogs affixed with AI-integrated cameras are becoming the latest dystopian fixation of the security industry, especially in the US, where they’re being deployed to patrol data centers, safeguard cash crops, and police sports stadiums.

Though expensive, they’re gradually becoming a more attractive option over human security guards. At least, that’s according to new reporting by Business Insider, which notes that the cost to cover one 24/7 guard shift is anywhere from $80,000 to $130,000 cheaper per year when contracting robot dogs over human security officers.

That’s bad news for the nation’s security guards, an essential role providing low-barrier employment for uneducated workers. Often deployed to help property owners reduce insurance premiums, the role of security guard is an important source of income for some 1.3 million people. According to a report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, about 60.8 percent of those roles are filled by people of color, while 27.8 percent of guards are 55 or older.

It is, however, a difficult job to make a living on, with the median annual wage of just $38,390 as of 2024. That being the case, the industry faces a high degree of turnover, which tech companies are all too happy to exploit.

“Training them and staffing them is super inconsistent, and it’s a big burden on the business,” Damon Henry, CEO of robot dog company Asylon, told BI.

So far, Henry says he has about 50 robots deployed across 25 customers nationwide. Compared to a workforce of 1.3 million humans, that might not sound like much. But if robotic production lines get more efficient and the bots themselves become cheaper to roll out, it’s hard to imagine the nation’s businesses keeping low-paid security guards on the payroll out of charity (just look at what happened with Walmart greeters.)

Still, you probably haven’t bumped into your last mall cop quite yet. As director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center’s Low-Wage Work program and co-author of the report referenced above Enrique Lopezlira told BI, the role is likely to experience pressures similar to that of other workers facing automation: security jobs won’t disappear entirely, but they will get much more demanding.

“The realistic near-term effect is not that guards are replaced,” Lopezlira said. “The human role is going to be pushed toward those hardest, higher-stakes parts of the work.”

More on robots: Startup Sued After Delivery Bot Clobbers 73-Year Old Woman

The post Robot Dogs Suddenly Taking Jobs From Human Security Guards appeared first on Futurism.

When the Federal Aviation Administration shut down air traffic to El Paso Airport earlier this year, nobody could have guessed than an experimental high-energy laser weapon was the cause. After days of chaos and speculation, it was revealed that Customs and Border Patrol officials had fired off a laser volley from a US Army base adjacent the El Paso Airport.

Though the trigger-happy Border Patrol grunts evidently thought they were firing at drug-smuggling drones, their real target turned out to be a kids’ party balloon. Regardless, it was later reported that the cutting-edge weapon was taken for a test-drive a week before FAA and Pentagon officials had a chance to discuss how to safely implement the laser device, making it a small miracle that nobody in the air was killed.

Not every use of an experimental aerospace weapon goes off without a hitch, however.

New bombshell reporting by Wired reveals an incident in which the testing of an experimental GPS jammer resulted in a medical plane crashing into the side of a mountain.

The horrifying incident happened in May, the publication reports, when a small twin-engine medevac aircraft carrying two pilots and two medical workers departed from Roswell, New Mexico. Heading West for the small mountain village of Ruidoso, the crew became the victim of an electronic warfare exercise being conducted at the nearby White Sands Missile Range, a test which rendered their navigational system inoperable.

Due to a combination of low visibility and an air-traffic control that was stretched far beyond capacity — at least three other planes reported navigation disruptions due to the GPS jamming — the pilots failed to register a mountainous formation between their plane and the landing strip.

As airline pilot and aviation crash analyst Juan Browne told Wired, the visual effect of that approach would have been stupefying. “When those lights go out, man, you know you are in big trouble,” Browne explained.

Unfortunately, the disoriented crew ran straight into the side of a mountain they likely never saw, resulting in the loss of every life on board. It’s the first known instance where military GPS jamming played a role in downing a civilian plane in US airspace. Reported incidents of GPS jamming within the continental US have skyrocketed in recent years. According to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the number of GPS interference events went from four in 2020 to 50 in 2024, and 40 across 2025.

After the initial publication of this piece, a spokesperson for the US Army provided a statement in response.

“The Army is aware of the release of the NTSB’s preliminary report into the crash of a civilian medical evacuation flight on May 14 in the vicinity of Ruidoso, New Mexico,” it read. “As the incident remains under investigation, we cannot comment at this time.”

Though the crew involved in the New Mexico crash was warned that GPS interference may be present, there evidently weren’t enough safeguards or air traffic control personnel in place to prevent a tragedy.

Updated with comment from the US Army.

More on military tech: The US Military Has Been Using Elon Musk’s Grok AI to Bomb Iran

The post It Appears That the US Military Accidentally Killed Everybody on Board a Civilian Medevac Flight in New Mexico appeared first on Futurism.

How do we combat the scourge of school shootings? The distinctly cyberpunk gamble that some places of learning are taking: rapid response drones.

Multiple schools across three states will soon have their own veritable platoons of pepper-spraying drones to hunt down active shooters, The Washington Post reports, waiting to spring into action the moment they’re called on.

Traveling at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and capable of smashing through the windows, the so-called “Campus Guardian Angels” can reach a gunman within just fifteen seconds, the manufacturer Mithril Defense claims.

In addition to blasting a shooter with pepper spray, they can also distract them with loud sirens and flashing lights, and even ram into them at high speeds.

“Once I get the drones on you, you just can’t escape them,” Bill King, a Mithril cofounder and retired Navy SEAL, told WaPo.

It remains a fringe solution, but seems to be picking up steam. The state of Florida last year allocated more than $557,000 to a pilot program to deploy the drones at three different high schools. Georgia recently approved its own $500,000 pilot to test Mithril’s system at five public schools. And in Colorado, a new K-12 public charter school decided it would pay to use the drones on its own.

The drones aren’t autonomous and are instead remotely controlled by human operators at Mithril’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. Somewhere between 30 and 90 of the drones will be placed throughout a school in storage boxes, which helps them arrive quickly at the scene.

But the efficacy of the drone defense systems remains a big question mark — and hopefully we’ll never have to know — as is whether these solutions distract from addressing the systemic causes of mass shootings, like weak gun control and poor mental health support services.

Mithril has promised that its tech could help local law enforcement who respond to a shooting by locating the shooter and relaying critical information, but that would require a high degree of coordination in a hectic and dangerous environment. What if the drone operators target the wrong person, or cause law enforcement to mistake an innocent person for the shooter because the drones happen to be near them? Are these drone operators ready to make split-second decisions in a life or death situation for the people on the ground?

“It’s almost like where gaming and school safety collide,” Curtis Lavarello, CEO of the School Safety Advocacy Council, told WaPo. “I have some really serious reservations about the deployment of drones in schools.”

It’s not the only tech-inflected solution being adopted to combat mass shootings. There are already numerous startups offering AI-powered gun detection systems, but their performance has been dubious. One called Omnilert called the cops on an innocent 16-year-old after it mistook his bag of Dorito chips for a weapon, and is being sued by a survivor of a Tennessee high school shooting after it failed to detect the handgun used by the shooter.

More on drones: We’re Admittedly Terrified That They’ve Now Invented Invisible Drones

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