Dead internet theory could soon become a reality in the literal sense. Two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language powering an estimated 70% of websites, have triggered an emergency security response. OpenAI says its GPT-5.6 Sol model helped uncover one of the flaws, highlighting how advanced models can expose weaknesses across the internet before attackers exploit them.

Both vulnerabilities received severity scores of 9.2 out of 10. PHP released emergency patches on Wednesday, October 21, following weeks of coordinated work among researchers and software maintainers. The immediate concern is whether website administrators can secure vulnerable servers before hackers turn the newly disclosed flaws into widespread attacks.

How OpenAI found the flaws

OpenAI detailed the discovery in a Wednesday blog post about its Patch the Planet initiative. The effort brought together software maintainers, security researchers and infrastructure providers to prepare fixes before public disclosure.

A self-described hacker team called Calif used GPT-5.6 Sol to identify one of the vulnerabilities. Cybersecurity firm Wiz independently discovered and reported both flaws, according to OpenAI.

PHP’s development team led the patching effort, with OpenAI, Wiz and Cloudflare contributing research and technical support. The vulnerabilities required extensive coordination because their impact could extend across countless independently operated websites and servers.

OpenAI said frontier models identified the flaws before attackers did, giving defenders time to prepare. That window matters because publishing technical details can help other researchers understand a vulnerability, but it can also give hackers a starting point.

Hackers could seize server control

The vulnerabilities can enable remote code execution, allowing an attacker to run malicious commands on an affected server. Depending on the server’s configuration and permissions, a successful attack could expose sensitive information or compromise the system.

PHP’s official security advisory urges users to update immediately. The release includes fixes for supported branches, with emergency updates also available for certain older versions. Administrators should check PHP’s official guidance to identify the correct package for their installations.

Security experts are already concerned about attempts to weaponize the flaws. WatchTowr reproduced one of the exploits, while its head of threat intelligence, Jake Knott, warned that attacks could escalate quickly.

“As expected, watchTowr Intel is already observing in-the-wild exploitation of the latest PHP vulnerabilities,” Knott said in an email Wednesday morning, as reported by CNET. He added that nobody had succeeded at that point, but warned, “we don’t expect that will last long.”

Cloudflare Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht said Wednesday that the company had deployed a fix to its firewall. The US National Security Agency also urged organizations to prepare for immediate updates. It advised taking affected systems offline if administrators could not patch them promptly.

Finding bugs is only half

OpenAI’s disclosure points to a growing tension in cybersecurity. More capable models can help researchers uncover deeply embedded flaws, but attackers may also use similar tools to develop exploits faster.

If you are wondering whether your website is affected, we have packaged a Codex skill to help check.

Point your Codex at this repo to guide you through it: https://t.co/XUEbOwXuQC https://t.co/BDaIIaJ4yK

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) October 21, 2026

The company acknowledged that risk directly, warning that the same capabilities can help malicious actors build offensive tools. It expects discoveries of similarly consequential vulnerabilities to increase sharply in the coming months.

Finding a flaw, however, does not automatically secure the internet. Software maintainers must develop reliable patches, hosting providers need to deploy protections, and website operators must update systems they control. Older installations can complicate that process, particularly when administrators cannot upgrade immediately.

The PHP incident also shows why coordinated disclosure matters. Researchers spent weeks working with maintainers and security providers before releasing details that could help defenders and attackers alike.

That preparation has now given website operators a path to remediation. The remaining uncertainty is how quickly they can act before attackers turn public knowledge of the flaws into widespread compromises.

It's important for a robot not just to learn a task optimally, but to complete it without going off the rails of reasonable expectations. Until now, roboticists could have one or the other. Aerospace engineering researchers in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, combined reinforcement learning with control theory to guarantee robot stability and improve tracking performance by up to 15% compared with existing methods.

Tuesday Labs, a New York City robotics lab and design studio, has opened reservations for Voxel, a bipedal home robot meant to learn and take over routine household tasks. A $200 reservation holds a spot, while full pricing is expected to be around $20,000 when Voxel ships sometime in 2028, The Verge reported.

The company calls it a “droid butler.” The Series-1 model joins other household robots, such as Weave Robotics’ Isaac 1, that aim to handle chores beyond mopping or vacuuming floors.

Arms, eyes and backward knees

Voxel’s main tools are two highly articulated arms with seven degrees of freedom. Each ends in a simple gripper, not the dexterous fingered hand found on machines such as Boston Dynamics’ Atlas. The arms extend from the top of a torso that also serves as the head, which has a small mouth.

Pixelated, animated eyes sit near the robot’s waist, well below a hidden pair of stereo RGB cameras. A separate wide-field camera lets Voxel monitor an entire room.

It walks on a pair of Z-shaped legs with knees that bend opposite to human knees. The design is intentional, allowing the robot to bend its knees for balance and to raise or lower its height while standing close to kitchen cabinets, tables and shelves.

In all, Voxel is mostly humanoid, with a few liberties. It trades finger dexterity for simpler grippers and puts its face lower on its body than a human would.

What it is meant to do

Tuesday Labs’ website details the hardware at length but says less about capabilities and household benefits. Voxel is meant to handle basic autonomous tasks, including decluttering and putting things back where they belong. It is also meant to handle routine chores such as watering plants, fetch items like books and help locate lost objects. For example, a user could ask where Voxel last saw the TV remote.

At launch, Voxel will not cook dinner or change diapers. The Verge noted that if it can reliably remember where you left your keys, people with bad short-term memories might find a reason to justify its steep price.

What to know before reserving

The $200 reservation is separate from the roughly $20,000 full price. Voxel is expected to ship “sometime in 2028,” the report said, so buyers would wait at least a year or more for a unit.

Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google Gemini are increasingly being used to help robots perform tasks, but what if LLMs could be exploited to turn helpful robots into harmful robots?

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.

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

The post China Builds Actual Giant Mecha appeared first on Futurism.

No organization in the world operates more robots than Amazon. The company already has more than 1 million robots working in warehouses around the clock to make tens of millions of same-day and one-day package deliveries happen on a daily basis—and Amazon is poised to significantly grow that robotic fleet in the coming years as it establishes new factories to churn out increasingly more capable robot workers.

Despite deploying so many robots, Amazon is also the second-largest corporate employer in the world, with more than 1.5 million full-time and part-time human workers, according to its 2025 annual report. Amazon executives say that the growing robot fleet has eased the burden on its human workforce by taking on the toughest fulfillment center tasks that carry the greatest risks of physical fatigue and injury. But labor advocacy groups and independent researchers point to evidence suggesting that warehouse automation driven by AI is not all upside for the humans who work alongside robots.

“For the last 100 years, most of the automation that we've seen usually happens away from workers—you're taking that high-risk task away from the worker, and you're doing so in a way that is not physically proximate,” Brad Greenwood, professor of business at George Mason University, told Ars. “The rise of collaborative robots 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.”

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