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

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Polymarket has showed that it can still hit a new low after the controversial prediction market was allowing users to effectively bet on rape and sexual assault.

According to coverage from Defector, a market titled “Any of the Cornell 7 charged with a felony sex crime?” was on the gambling platform for nearly three weeks, before it was recently taken down after a public outcry.

The bet, which opened on September 30, was referring to the defendants against a civil suit filed last month by a former Cornell University student who says she was drugged and gang-raped by seven students who were part of a frat house on campus.

The harrowing case became a national news story, fueling headlines, sparking protests, and driving heated debates. And now, in an age of ubiquitous and effortless gambling, it was also powering bets.

Women and women’s rights organizations on social media began calling out the Polymarket bet over the past week, per Defector, though it largely escaped mainstream media scrutiny. 

The news site Front Office Sports reached out for comment and got only a boilerplate statement. Defector followed up and got an even less informative reply: “Polymarket is going to respectfully decline comment at this time.”

The bet was suddenly taken down after the FOS story ran, even though the company’s statement suggested no contrition or intent to change course. “This case, and sexual assault on college campuses more broadly, are deeply important issues,” Polymarket said, “and markets bring objective, data-driven insight into how a matter like this is moving through the legal system, on a topic that deserves far more transparency and honest attention.”

It elaborated on this in a statement to PBS after the bet was removed: “That said, we believe in the wisdom of crowds, have heard them loud and clear, and removed the market.”

Polymarket has a sordid history of unscrupulous bets. It allowed users to bet on whether a nuclear weapon would be detonated before next year, though it was taken down. It also routinely hosts bets on climate change, military actions, and natural disasters.

The chilling thing, Defector notes, is that it’s unclear if Polymarket would’ve bothered to take down the Cornell 7 bet if it hadn’t started attracting negative attention. 

More on finance: Gambling Addiction Group in Shambles After It Turns Out It’s Funded by Kalshi

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Keep your eyes peeled and your binoculars primed tonight, stargazers. The distant Halley’s Comet is reminding us of its far-off presence by pelting our planet with a barrage of meteors which will make the eastern welkin blush with a cosmic light show.

The meteor shower, known as the Orionids, is characterized by its fast-moving bright streaks and fireballs that can be seen for minutes at a time, with some trails staying visible even after the meteor has blinked out. And yes, you can see them with the naked eye.

Though it began at the start of October and is projected to last until November 7, the shower is expected to hit peak brightness this Wednesday night and early Thursday morning.

Its resplendence, however, will be challenged by a waxing gibbous Moon, which will be around 77 percent full tonight and as such fairly shiny in its own right, but will set early in the morning. 

Halley’s Comet is a long period comet that takes 76 years to orbit the Sun and only makes an appearance in our skies roughly just as often. Last time it swung by was back in 1986, and it won’t return until 2061, but the Orionids, which are essentially the debris discarded by the comet as it nears our star, can be seen at other times because they linger around long after it has departed back into the void.

Our planet happens to pass through this debris field twice a year, producing a meteor shower. The Orionids falls in October, and the other meteor shower, known as the Eta Aquariid, occurs in May. The streaks of light in our sky are the comet’s ejected particles burning up as they tear through our atmosphere.

To watch the Orionids, NASA recommends viewing it after moonset and before dawn because of the bright gibbous Moon. That will probably be around 3:30 AM EST. You don’t need any special equipment, but you should get outside the city and go somewhere far from any sources of light pollution. Then cross your fingers and hope for clear weather. 

The shower originates from a point near the star system Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion, but the shower is noticeable enough that you won’t have to do much more than look towards the southeast to spot it. If you’re lucky, you’ll see up to 20 streaks cross the sky each hour.

More on astronomy: Scientists Discover Weird Conditions at Site of Star That Exploded During the Period of Japanese Samurai

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The Northern suburbs of Toledo, Ohio turned into a real life Don DeLillo novel overnight, after an explosion at a chemical facility sent plumes of industrial compounds billowing into the sky.

According to the local station WTOL11, the blast happened at a chemical distribution site in Ohio’s Lucas County on Tuesday night, prompting an immediate evacuation order for anybody living within one mile of the disaster zone. Those within three miles were given an order to shelter in place.

In a press conference on Wednesday, city emergency officials explained that the leaking chemical exhaust is glycidyl methacrylate, an industrial manufacturing chemical broadly suspected to be carcinogenic to humans.

Maps show numerous residential neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity, the closest being a trailer park just 0.25 miles as the crow flies from the site of the chemical explosion. The nearby Ottawa river, a tributary of Lake Erie, is situated under a half mile to the South.

Complicating matters for first responders and any broader evacuation order is the onset of a fog alert, which combined with the hazmat emergency has turned Toledo into America’s apocalypse zone du jour.

Images circulated by WTOL11 on Facebook show the cataclysmic scenes unfolding across the city, with commenters expressing confusion over whether the clouds of haze were caused by the airborne chemical leak, the fog, or a noxious mix of both.

“I can’t see out my window,” one Toledo resident wrote. “Should I and my dog leave?”

More on disasters: Giant Oil Tanker Runs Aground in Marine Nature Preserve, Spills Nonstop for Weeks

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Last week, the Sheriff’s Office in Stevens County, Minnesota made a startling Facebook post.

“On October 14, 2026, at approximately 3:30pm, the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office received a phone call of foreign debris that was found in a cornfield in Scott Township,” it wrote. “Upon responding, deputies confirmed that a large, metallic object, approximately 11-feet in diameter, presumably a space object, was present in the cornfield. The Sheriff’s Office is working closely with several state and federal agencies to identify and notify the owner of the debris and to plan for removal from the field.”

The post, which included a photo of a banged-up metal object surrounded by yellowed stalks of corn, quickly started picking up traction on social media due to the implication that the object had come from space.

Now, Ars Technica has the receipts: the object was almost certainly chunk of a Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket that launched from the Gobi Desert, deployed 10 satellites, and then headed back Earthward, where it was spotted burning up in the skies over Kansas and Minnesota.

As launches get more common and rockets get larger and sturdier — the model built by LandSpace, which deposited the debris in the cornfield, is a workhorse spacecraft meant to ferry cargo to Earth’s orbit — the chances of their detritus surviving the journey back to the ground increases.

These chunks of spacefaring equipment can sometimes crash down in populated areas. In 2024, a NASA component from the International Space Station withstood reentry and crashed through a home in Florida where a family was sleeping. Space wreckage has previously been discovered previously on farms in Canada and Australia.

Nobody has yet been injured by a piece of falling space debris, but as commercial ambitions for Earth’s orbit increase — the Chinese rocket had been launched to deploy satellites for a connectivity constellation meant to rival SpaceX’s Starlink — it’s probably only a matter of time.

More on space debris: Space Junk Now Almost Constantly Crashing Down to Earth

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When it comes to putting strange substances into your body in 2026, the sky’s the limit.

First there were black-market Russian peptides — and now there are AI-generated viruses, which one startup claims has been used to successfully treat a bacterial infection.

On Tuesday, the company called Radical Numerics published a technical paper on its website, explaining the process by which they trialed an AI-engineered viral treatment on a human subject.

Targeting bacteria with special viruses isn’t new — it’s called “phage therapy,” and it involves deploying viruses that specifically target harmful microscopic organisms. But the hunt for viruses capable of locking onto a particular infection is arduous, and Radical Numerics says it’s found a way to use AI to revolutionize the process.

Yet as the New York Times notes in its reporting, Radical Numerics’ research is really more like a blog post — not only was the study self-published, rather than being vetted by a scientific journal, but it hasn’t even been peer reviewed. Making matters even murkier, the company declined to share clinical information about the patient or the doctors involved with the NYT, citing the proprietary nature of a treatment it hopes to monetize.

“We take our responsibility to protect patient confidentiality and maintain the trust of our clinical partners extremely seriously,” CEO of Radical Numerics Eric Nguyen told the paper. “We intend to publish our scientific findings through peer-reviewed research, with any future disclosure of clinical details subject to appropriate consent.”

As Harvard microbiologist Michael Baym told the NYT, “if it works, that’s incredible,” but his “impulse is to be skeptical.”

As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — and that goes double when you’re running a venture-backed commercial lab exposing sick people to AI-generated viruses.

More on startups: “Customer Surveillance” Startup Says “Every Company Will Soon Assign an AI Agent to Every Customer to Watch Their Every Move”

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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

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Engagement farmers on TikTok are using AI to manipulate real arrest footage to show police officers kissing and groping arrestees being taken into custody.

The deepfakes, which were discovered by Copyleaks, are grotesque. The AI-manipulated videos are based on actual footage of arrests — which appear to have originally been filmed for reality TV shows like TLC’s “D.U.I.” — but have been altered to depict law enforcement officers kissing and sexually touching real women, as well as a few real men, who were pulled over. The arrestees are often shown wearing handcuffs and being held near, in, or against police cruisers as the fake sexual activity occurs.

These abusive deepfakes are then spliced in front of longer videos of the arrest, a tactic which suggests that the deepfakes were made to get scrolling users hooked so they watch the arrest videos through to the end.

“This is a disturbing example of how AI tools are being used to create deepfake versions of real content to drive attention and engagement on social media,” Copyleaks cofounder and CEO Alon Yamin said in a statement. “It’s important to remember that these videos feature real people — both police officers and citizens — who are being depicted doing things that never happened.”

“That’s concerning,” added Yamin, “for everyone featured and involved.”

In some of the videos, the people being kissed and groped are pictured smiling, implying that they’re willing participants in the sexual advances of police officers who are actively arresting them.

Some of the manipulated videos note the use of AI-generated content, and are additionally outfitted with a disclaimer claiming that the clips are for “entertainment use only with no harmful implication.” That disclaimer, though, rings extraordinarily hollow: sexualized deepfakes, created to manipulate media of real people without their consent, are implicitly harmful.

After we reached out, TikTok removed examples of the content that we specifically flagged, and pointed us to platform guidelines regarding clear labeling of realistic AI content.

More on deepfakes: The Proliferation of Deepfakes Is Profoundly Changing the Way Teenagers Use the Internet

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As Elon Musk tries to save face by claiming he’ll give every American child a chunk of SpaceX stock, here’s a chilling reminder of what he did that affected millions of children the second he had a whiff of federal power.

In a new interview, the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, who directed a just-released four-hour look at the billionaire’s life titled “Musk,” discussed the staggering death toll of Musk’s cuts to USAID, calling it a “crime against humanity.”

“There was an estimate that what [Musk] did by so suddenly cutting USAID would cost through disease and starvation as many as 14 million lives,” he told journalist Katie Couric. “Even if you discount that by an enormous amount, we know that within about a year of those summary cuts — where they were literally burning food that had already been paid for that was going to starving children — 500,000 children died.”

Musk, to Gibney’s astonishment, even joked about the cuts by saying he’d “put USAID into the woodchipper.” 

“What he put into the woodchipper,” Gibney said, “were children.”

Gibney, whose documentary Musk called a “hit piece,” is drawing from a 2025 study published in The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals. It estimated the impact of Musk effectively neutering USAID by implementing a freeze on its foreign aid funding — which went to programs to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and to address food insecurities — and slashing nearly 10,000 employees. 

In sum, the researchers found that the “steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 million additional all-age deaths, including 4.5 million in children younger than age five, by 2030.”

Even conservative estimates concurred that the number of deaths would be staggering. A tracker created by Brooke Nichols, a professor and infectious disease mathematical modeler at Boston University, projects the 1-year death toll caused by the USAID cuts at 518,000 children.

It’s a touchy subject for Musk, who continues to bristle at accusations that his actions could’ve caused harm. This summer, he challenged his critics to “cite a single name of someone who died” as a result of him gutting USAID. Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, took him up on it and gave him a list of the specific children who had died directly from his policies, many of whom were in South Sudan and Liberia — places he had visited in person to talk to locals and healthcare workers.

Musk, rather than countering his arguments, called Kristof “evil.”

More on Elon Musk: Elon Musk Says It Was the Pentagon That Shut Down Starlink for the Ukrainian Military

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As Meta was scrambling to release its Muse AI agent to the public earlier last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to social media to insist that it was “built from the ground up for privacy and security.”

On X-formerly-Twitter, the billionaire’s simple post soon had a correction tagged on via a community note, and for good reason: the AI agent is a font of untold privacy horrors.

As Ars Technica reported today, security researchers found Muse is capable of exposing sensitive information on its users through web links generated via a “share” feature. Investigators at the cybersecurity firm Claroc recently uncovered a simple exploit whereby they could access pages from over 6,800 links Muse had generated to share pages with other users.

The trick worked like this: once a Muse user decides they want to share something with another person — say, a copy of their chat log with Muse — the AI tool would generate a web link for that “share.” That URL included both the AI-generated title of the chat, plus a random string of characters.

When anybody opened the link, the full web address would be noted in a lookup dataset, like a phone book of web addresses that have been visited. Researchers were then able to search that set for other Muse share addresses, from which they were able to find strings of unrelated public chats.

By digging through those “phone books,” investigators were able to easily open chat logs containing detailed private information, including corporate revenue documents, loan applications, bank transaction details, income details, and one workplace vacation calendar, Ars noted.

“If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort,” the researchers wrote. Instead, “it took one query.”

Though Meta told Ars it had shut off the feature, this privacy gaffe is just the latest revelation about Muse’s many security shortcomings.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that Muse was keeping detailed files on users’ friends and families, apparently following an internal instruction to keep a running “page for every person in the user’s life.”

If Muse’s first month in public hands is any indication, this is likely just the start of a long list of security and privacy blunders for the cutesy AI model.

More on Meta: Meta Is Using Its Massive AI Data Centers to Avoid Paying Billions of Dollars in Taxes

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What does it take to get a hyperscale data center built this late into 2026? A whole army of contract laborers living on a prison barge, apparently.

New reporting by Bloomberg revealed some bizarre details around the 30-megawatt data center being developed in Glomfjord, a small industrial village in Norway. Despite being heralded as a crown jewel of British data center company Nscale, the facility is at least six months behind schedule, with just 6.4 megawatts currently up and running.

There are plenty of reasons for the setbacks. Bloomberg notes that costly and avoidable mistakes account for most of the delays, with major cooling system leaks, labor issues, and a huge electrical fire setting construction far behind schedule.

Labor conditions are especially brutal, with workers complaining to the publication about working extremely long shifts without proper training or health and safety protocols in place. An investigation by the Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority found that Nscale’s personnel records were likewise abysmal, with some paperwork only noting a workers’ first name, Bloomberg noted.

Making up for lost time won’t be easy, and surely won’t improve working conditions. To get back on track, Nscale is reportedly looking to bring in hundreds of last-minute laborers. But with most of Glomfjord’s rentable hotel rooms already booked up, the data center developer needed a solution a housing. That’s where a vessel called The Kalmar comes in.

According to Bloomberg, the boat is a three-story prison barge — a dull, gray rectangular ship that was once used as a floating detention center for migrants. It seems that Nscale will soon begin using the Kalmar’s 500 cots to house its new army of contractors, who will commute off the hulking barge to the jobsite.

Like in other places throughout the world, Glomfjord’s 1,000-or-so residents aren’t too thrilled with the data center development. Though mayor Grethe Anita Andersen explained to Bloomberg that she hopes Nscale will deliver a paltry 40 permanent jobs, those aspirations are far from guaranteed.

As Sofie Marhaug, a parliamentarian for Norway’s socialist Red Party told the publication, data center developers “don’t have Norway’s best interests in mind.”

“The value is being made in other places, not in Norway,” Marhaug said. “They don’t move jobs from Silicon Valley to Norway — they just use our natural resources.”

More on data centers: Residents Reject $10,000 Each to Let a Data Center Set Up in Their Town

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Donald Trump’s second spin in the White House has been mired in high-profile incidents of graft and corruption, like the family’s tech stock profiteering, or the now-infamous TrumpCoin scandal. But the president’s latest grift goes far beyond personal wheeling and dealing, extending into the very machines some 174 million voting-aged Americans could use to cast their ballots.

A bombshell investigation by ProPublica revealed that Trump’s cabinet goons overseeing the Department of Homeland Security instructed their underlings to procure a voting machine — and figure out how to hack it.

Specifically, the ProPublica investigation found that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a component of the DHS, was tasked with acquiring a voting machine and reporting its security flaws back to the White House. The revelation comes from two former government officials — speaking anonymously to avoid retaliation — who noted that CISA insiders were outraged at the order.

“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials told ProPublica.

Ironically, the initiative was reportedly complicated by the fact that Elon Musk’s DOGE squad had laid off the CISA agents who would have known how to actually break into voting machines. As a result, the agents who received the order had to repeatedly tell White House officials that the request was impossible.

Per ProPublica, CISA has engaged in security discussions with state governments and voting machine vendors over potential exploits for years. Now, key players involved in overseeing federal election equipment say CISA has left them high and dry for over a year, with zero explanation for their absence during a crucial election season.

“There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent,” CISA cybersecurity and election consultant Ryan Macias told ProPublica. During the run-up to the crucial US midterm elections between 2025 and September 2026, Macias says the once-reliable CISA experts “were nonexistent. Literally nonexistent.”

Those relationships took years of communication and trust-building to establish — something the Trump administration is apparently happy to discard in record time.

More on Trump: Trump Backs Down, Cancels Livestreamed Firing Squad Execution

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AI tools continue to automate more parts of our lives — and in turn, we become more reliant on them. Students use ChatGPT to do their homework, programmers ask Claude to churn out code, and now regular folks are getting a taste of AI agents with the launch of Meta’s cutesy personal assistant Muse.

If the trend continues, where does it lead? Some experts who spoke to CBS News worry that we’re on a path to slowly ceding more control to AI models until we become empty, waiting vessels for a bot’s decisions. There’s even a name for this phenomenon: “gradual disempowerment.” Its threat goes beyond job displacement, potentially affecting human cognition and agency itself.

“I put gradual disempowerment on the very top of my list,” Jay Chooi, the founder and CEO of Robocurve, a public benefit corporation that evaluates the role of robots in the workplace, told CBS. “A lot of people feel very powerless, because it requires a lot of effort and a whole-of-society approach to solve it.”

Jan Kulveit, a researcher at Charles University’s Center for Theoretical Studies and coauthor of the paper that coined the term gradual disempowerment, argued that it “does not need to emerge from a deliberate scheme or powergrab by AI systems.” 

“In the short-term, it is being incentivized by the perceived value that AI systems can bring to economic, cultural and state functions,” he wrote in the paper.

This is something many of us already picking up on. The people in our lives who ask an AI to do and plan everything are mocked as “meat proxies”; some are so thoughtless as to let an AI lay out a hiking trip that gets them stranded on a notoriously perilous mountain.

A more extreme imagining of this scenario portrays AI and robots taking over our jobs as they become a cheaper and more efficient alternative to human labor, driving companies that cling on to their human workforce out of business. It doesn’t need to be that drastic, though, to be harmful. Experts are already seeing signs of “cognitive surrender” among AI users — students especially — in which they’re effectively allowing an AI tool to supplant their own thinking. Research has linked reliance on AI tools to diminished critical thinking skills and demonstrated that AI leads to lower brain activity during cognitive tasks like essay writing.

On a societal scale, once we get trapped in this loop, it gets harder to get out.

“If people aren’t actually practicing the skills that the agents are doing for them, they lose the ability to have that skill, and so now you become reliant,” Margaret Mitchell, an AI research scientist at Hugging Face, told CBS. 

“What happens when something goes wrong?” she continued. “There’s no human you can point to who can fix it. So now you’ve become fully dependent on these systems to fix themselves, and what if that’s not possible?”

The decisions that AIs are being allowed to influence — or even make — are already incredibly consequential. An AI targeting system was reportedly involved in the decision to bomb a girl’s school in Iran, killing over 150 people, the vast majority of them children. President Donald Trump was reportedly encouraged to invade Venezuela and capture its president Nicolás Maduro by a conversation with Elon Musk’s Grok.

“A lot of people are talking about rogue AI hacking into data centers and taking over the world,” Chooi said, “but it is not in the mainstream consciousness that like AI could literally take over the world just by continuing to do what it’s supposed to do, which is automating everything.”

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Someone vibe-coded a gun and 3D-printed it — and wants the freedom loving citizens of the world to enjoy this power, too.

The creator, gun-rights activist Cody Wilson, told The Verge that it’s the “first AI-made gun” — his timely followup to the world’s first 3D-printed firearm that he crafted 13 years ago. Called the WASP, the .22 caliber weapon’s unconventional design aptly looks like it might’ve been hallucinated by an old image model, except it apparently actually works and is capable of firing real ammunition.

But the WASP is arguably just a proof-of-concept of his more consequential creation: his very own AI gun generator called “GatGPT,” which was trained on an online library of millions of digital guns and gun parts called DEFCAD (itself launched by Wilson). It will answer any question about firearms you can throw at it and pick out parts for your build, potentially allowing even someone who doesn’t know a clip from a magazine to design their own gun.

“I would argue that what we’ve made is not an AI-generated gun, but an AI that can generate guns,” Wilson told The Verge.

Crucially, Wilson’s WASP doesn’t have a serial number like a traditional firearm. If his AI gunsmith tool works as it’s made out to be, it could be a huge escalation in the advent of so-called “ghost guns,” or homemade firearms that are made outside of government oversight and can’t be easily traced. Some are available as pre-packaged do-it-yourself kits, while others may be custom-designed. (Luigi Mangione used one to shoot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.) 

This is almost certainly Wilson’s point. He considers access to firearms to be a “fundamental human right.” He claims he made WASP through simple natural language conversations with GatGPT, and so anyone else could do the same, even if it’s not legal in their state.

“[Wilson] admits the goal here,” Justin Wagner, senior vice president for law and policy at the gun safety group Everytown, told The Verge. “He wants to lower the barrier to entry so anyone, regardless of their background check status or legal eligibility [can] own a gun. He wants anyone to be able to design and manufacture weapons, and that’s dangerous.”

Recent efforts to limit the proliferation of these DIY weapons have hit a few snags. In August, a federal judge struck down the ATF’s “ghost gun” rule adopted under the Biden administration that required 3D-printed gun kits and parts to be marked with serial numbers and for their manufacturers to conduct background checks on customers. New York and California, though, passed laws that require 3D printer companies to install their products with gun blocking software, which have proven controversial in the 3D-printing community.

More on AI: Anthropic Secretly Lobbying Government to Only Shut Down an AI Model If It’s Poised to Kill More Than 50 People

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Top AI labs have been hiring subject matter experts across academic disciplines for years at this point — often turning them into glorified fact-checkers whose labor is used to train the AI models of tomorrow. Still, Google’s latest job listing is odd, even by those admittedly strange standards, and may reveal a lot about the future big tech has in mind for humanity.

As reported by the tech industry publication Data Center Dynamics, Google’s AI research lab, DeepMind is now hiring a team of “highly qualified physicists and nuclear engineers” for the role of “nuclear subject matter expert in the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and high-yield Explosives team within the Responsible Development and Innovation team.”

According to the job listing, interested candidate should have a PhD in a field like plasma physics or nuclear engineering, or else “equivalent practical experience,” on top of experience collaborating with a US government lab and familiarity with policy related to “stockpile stewardship, nonproliferation, arms control, or threat reduction” — and that’s just at a minimum.

Ideally, Google says it would prefer its candidates to also have experience to have experience working with AI safety, as well as expertise in computational modeling, experience working at “major laser user facilities,” or the ability to design evaluations and mitigations that are “demonstrably unclassified and non-export controlled by developing dual use science proxies for weapons topics.”

The lucky candidates will be offered a salary in the ballpark of $174,000 to $252,000, with a 15 percent bonus on top.

The job won’t be easy, however. As the listing notes, the role involves evaluating safety risks of so-called “frontier AI models” in the “nuclear domain.” Specifically, this means “model assistance in fission, fusion, and thermonuclear weapons proliferation, radiation hydrodynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, etc. in a demonstrably unclassified and non-export controlled manner.”

Put together, it reads as if Google’s top AI research lab expects the company’s AI tools to start churning out actionable instructions for developing nuclear devices, and is now hiring nuclear physicists to help spearhead the defense efforts.

How serious the scenario is remains to be seen — but Google is clearly willing to put its money where its mouth is.

More on Google: The Tech Industry’s Aggressive Push to Integrate AI Into Schools Is Turning Into a Disaster

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Flying cars are right around the corner, if Tesla CEO Elon Musk is to be believed.

Last week, he unveiled the automaker’s long-awaited Roadster by having it drive to the top of a ramp, flipping upside down in the process, then fling itself into the air before using its cold-fuel thrusters to gently land in style. Minutes later, another Roadster did its best Evel-Knievel-with-a-jetpack impression by blowing itself into the air and leaping over a row of six Tesla vehicles, including its Semi Truck cab.

Sure, the Roadster can “fly.” There’s no denying that it was an impressive stunt. But huge questions remain, such as whether regulators will ever deem it road — let alone air — worthy. Another is if the cars used in the stunt will remotely resemble the actual product that’s sold to consumers, if such a thing does ever come to pass.

Tesla says the “Rocket” version of its Roadster is loaded with 600 liters of compressed air, 10 directional cold-gas thruster nozzles, and a huge suction-fan system on the bottom. To make room for it all, Tesla says it removed the passenger seat.

But some observers are wondering if the car is even more stripped down than that, perhaps even lacking a full-sized battery so the engineers could save room and cut down weight. Meanwhile, screenshots of the car’s sparse looking underside taken while it was midair seemed to show it lacking a suction fan, fueling further speculation that Tesla hasn’t figured out to fully combine its capabilities as they’re being presented. The car that stuck upside down to the top of the ramp and then cushioned its landing was, some skeptics allege, equipped with different hardware from the one that leaped into the air to leapfrog the other cars.

Practical questions abound. Without a full-sized battery, the car obviously wouldn’t be able to drive around on roads even if it were allowed to.

None other than computer scientist and “godfather” of AI Yann LeCun derided the Roadster’s aerial acrobatics display, calling it a “marketing stunt” and questioning its authenticity.

“Even assuming that 50 percent of the mass of the car is the compressed air, that gives you less than 10s of useful thrust (with thrust-to-weight ratio larger than 1.0). Probably more like 5 seconds, actually,” he wrote on X. “So the car must be an empty, lightweight shell containing big compressed air tanks. Cute demo, but totally impractical.”

A little bit of misleading showmanship certainly isn’t below Musk. Tesla stunned the world in 2016 with a promotional video of its self-driving car puttering along public roads and dutifully stopping for red lights. Musk boasted that it was clear evidence that “Tesla drives itself.” But later, its engineers admitted the whole thing was staged. 

At its glitzy “We, Robot” event in 2024, Tesla tried to wow investors with its Optimus humanoid robots that poured drinks, danced on stage, and mingled with attendees while holding down a conversation. But it quickly became apparent that what Tesla had unleashed weren’t real-life C-3POs, because the seemingly autonomous robots were in reality individually teleoperated.

In any case, it’s impossible to verify what Musk’s showing off with the Roadster since Tesla isn’t allowing the public — journalists included — to take a peek under the hood.

More on Tesla: Tesla Bros Using AI to Dream Up Improbable Scenarios Where the Flying Tesla Roadster Would Be Helpful

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A new report exposes thousands of scam websites flooding the web with AI-generated recipes.

In the report, Decrypt Ads — a startup that tracks the supply chains of online advertisements — identified more than two thousand websites that strongly appear to be AI slop farms masquerading as blogs run by real chefs and home cooks. These sites, the report found, are pumping fake recipes into search engines like Google as well as social media platforms such as Pinterest, often relying on sketchy Russian and Chinese adtech partners to monetize the operations.

It’s “common knowledge that publishers in certain niches are being openly deceptive about their owners and authors, using AI photos and fake back stories on their sites,” reads the report, which was published today. “Some of the most consistent growth in AI slop spreading across the internet has come from AI recipe websites.”

Security expert and Decrypt Ads researcher Zach Edwards told Futurism that he initially identified about 400 suspicious websites that seemed to be publishing AI-generated recipes under the names of fake chefs. Using “technical fingerprints,” he then found hundreds more sites associated with the suspicious domains he manually uncovered — bringing the tally up to roughly 2,100 different domains, many of which seem to be run by the same sloperators.

“We really approach this expecting these operators to try and hide their websites,” said Edwards. “These folks they don’t want people to know all of the websites they own.”

The slop recipe sites often have “aggressive” social media strategies, according to the report, with Edwards noting that the bogus brands are “super aggressive on Pinterest, super aggressive on Twitter, on Facebook.”

“Any place where there’s visual media,” he added, “you can expect these AI author people to be trying to drum up organic traffic.”

Among the most aggressive slop sites uncovered in the report is “AddCakes,” a baking site that claims it’s operated by a baker named “Elena.” Elena is described as a “busy mom who wanted to connect with my roots through baking, but got overwhelmed by complicated cake recipes and the pressure to make them look perfect.” But in an act of theft so bold that it’s comical, the character of Elena is clearly an AI-generated version of the extremely recognizable British actress Emily Blunt, who’s starred in hit movies like the 2006 “The Devil Wears Prada” and the 2018 “A Quiet Place.”

AddCakes is apparently either betting that no one will recognize AI-manipulated images of the famous celebrity, or banking that her face will attract readers. It’s even published photos depicting the Elena character in the kitchen cooking and sitting at a dinner table, surrounded by her fake, AI-generated family. According to location data from X-formerly-Twitter, the person behind the operation is based in Morocco. (Blunt doesn’t live in Morocco, and her representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Whatever you do, though, don’t trust the AI-generated Emily Blunt. As Edwards emphasized, websites working with Chinese and Russian adtech partners carry a privacy risk for consumers, as authoritarian regimes may look to hoover up valuable browsing data.

“This report is about publishers who are being deceptive. Their audiences could be impacted, advertisers are wasting money,” said Edwards. “But the underlying fact is also that if you load this website and you don’t block ads, your data is going to, basically, authoritarian countries.”

In other words, AI slop isn’t just choking the web with garbage. It can also come with security risks — and, at the end of the day, it’s built on fundamental dishonesty.

“Most of these AI recipe websites, when you look at those ‘about’ pages, the fake backstories that they’re putting together… this lady was a Michelin star chef and she worked at this fancy hotel or this place, and they’re basically saying that this expert not only wrote these recipes, but tested themselves. And it’s giving this air of, ‘Wow, you’re about to get a recipe from an expert. This has all been carefully vetted,'” said Edwards. “But none of these recipes have probably been cooked — zero of them by the actual owners or authors, and to me that’s the scary part.”

He added that many of these sites are likely scraping content ideas from real bloggers and creators who have actually taken the time, energy, and expertise to test, photograph, and publish real recipes. “These people are clearly not cooking their own recipes. They’re putting out sometimes dozens of recipes a day. It’s an automated publishing pipeline,” said the researcher. “It’s all a lie… and I think that the reason why we need to be holding AI publishers accountable is because they don’t care about their audience.”

More on fake authors and the web: Google Updates Guidelines to Punish Sites That Use Fake Bylines and AI-Generated Headshots

The post Recipe Scammers Are Using an AI-Generated Emily Blunt as a Slop Puppet to Promote Their Garbage appeared first on Futurism.

Whether as short-form slop Reels or the data centers that spit them out, Americans are absolutely sick of AI. Their elected officials, however, are going all-in — both embracing gobs of money from tech lobbying arms, and increasingly even embracing the tech to churn out attack ads to tarnish their opponents.

According to reporting from the New York Times, AI generated election ads have become a hundred-million dollar business, generating over $137 million in promotional revenue already in the current election cycle. That’s nearly a quarter of all spending on midterm political advertising overall — which amounts to a cool $565 million in spending across all US house and senate campaigns, according to Wesleyan University’s Wesleyan Media Project research lab.

To date, Wesleyan media researchers found that political action groups have generated over 220 midterm election ads with AI. The vast majority, or 80 percent of those are made by Republicans, with 20 percent generated by Democrats.

For example, one ad by Make Oklahoma Great Again shows Republican candidate for Oklahoma governor Mike Mazzei embracing an AI-version of Hillary Clinton, while an AI Donald Trump pouts off to the side. “Clinton lover, Trump hater,” the ad intones. “That’s Mike Mazzei.”

The ad contains no mention that it was generated by AI. As the NYT notes, the PAC has spent over $200,000 buying TV ad time for the AI commercial across the state of Oklahoma.

“I think what we’re seeing with AI has surprised even us,” professor of government and co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project Erika Franklin Fowler told the NYT. “Some of the ways in which AI is used, honestly, if there wasn’t a disclaimer on the ad, it would be hard to know that AI was there.”

More on AI: OpenAI Hit With Stack of Lawsuits Over ChatGPT Allegedly Coaching Children to Harm Themselves

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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

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Fears of an AI bubble have been growing for years. And now the International Monetary Fund is the latest to sound the alarm.

In its Global Financial Stability Report published last week, the global financial institution warned that markets everywhere are increasingly at the mercy of precarious AI investments.

The untold billions poured into AI has driven economic growth, the IMF says, but the boom could quickly invert if profits, which so far have largely proven elusive, never come to fruition — or at least not proportionately with the epic investment levels. AI stocks would tank, and the resulting market correction would send powerful shocks across the global economy.

“Growing leverage could be a catalyst for such a correction,” the IMF warned in a blog post about its findings. “Hyperscalers, as the largest data center operators are known, are borrowing more and more, while investors have been leveraging to invest in AI stocks.”

The report also casts a wary eye to the circular nature of AI financing, in which the biggest benefactors and beneficiaries of AI companies are other AI companies. Nvidia, for example, agreed to invest $30 billion in OpenAI and provide another $105 billion towards an OpenAI data center; OpenAI is one of Nvidia’s biggest customers, relying on its chips to power and train its AI models, so a lot of those billions will go straight back to Nvidia when its buys more chips. Besides creating a mirage of robustness, it also means that their financial health is inextricably tangled with each other.

“Stress at key companies receiving investment could lower revenue forecasts and investment valuations, which in turn would weaken the value of the accumulated debt in those deals,” the IMF wrote. “Our review of 14 such transactions since 2023 found about $300 billion in equity investments and $650 billion in debt, in exchange for $1.4 trillion in future revenue commitments.”

A disastrous AI-driven market correction isn’t the only economic catastrophe potentially looming. The IMF is also worried about an increase in government bond yields, or interest rates, or a potential major cyberattack targeting critical government and financial institutions — a strike that could feasibly be assisted by powerful AI models.

The IMF is far from the only one to caution about an AI bubble, but as the stewards of the global economy, theirs is one of the weightiest warnings yet. Fears were freshly stoked again earlier this month when it was reported that OpenAI’s annualized revenue was $20 billion lower than anticipated, dampening hopes that it would soon be on the road to profitability. Everyone knows not to put all your eggs in one basket, but who can stop the runaway freight train of the global economy?

More on AI: Investors Disturbed by Anthropic’s Financial Data

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