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Siskiyou County rescuers pulled three young men off Mount Shasta after they used Google's Gemini chatbot to plan their climb. The group started at 3am, missed the noon turnaround guideline, summited at 7pm, and had to be rescued after spending the night in Mud Creek Canyon.
A DuckDuckGo survey found that a third of AI users have confided secrets to chatbots they wouldn't tell trusted people in their lives. Washington Post reporting shows these conversations aren't as private as users assume, having surfaced in at least a dozen court cases over the past two years and potentially being accessible to employers, law enforcement, or exposed through company data breaches like Anthropic's Claude leak in July.
Anthropic released a Claude iPhone app update this week that adds CarPlay support, letting drivers resume recent chats or start new voice conversations from their car's display. This makes Claude the fifth major AI chatbot to support CarPlay, following ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and Meta AI, which added the feature just days earlier.
On Thursday, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and xAI's Grok all experienced outages within the same window, though the scope varied by provider. OpenAI attributed its disruption to a routing error around 7:43 am PT that was resolved by 8:17 am PT, while Anthropic said only its Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 models were hit and xAI reported broader failures. No common infrastructure failure has been confirmed, with Cloudflare denying any service disruption on its end.
A tech guide highlights ways students can use AI tools like ChatGPT to create customized quizzes, flashcards and video summaries from dense course materials, tailoring study methods to different learning styles. It also points to project-management apps such as Taskade, which cost between $10 and $50 monthly, as a way to ease coordination headaches in group assignments.
More than 200 employees at the Wikimedia Foundation voted 158-14 to join the Communications Workers of America, with results tallied by the National Labor Relations Board. The unionizing group spans software engineering, finance and communications roles across the roughly 700-person, largely remote nonprofit behind Wikipedia.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly attempted to influence California Governor Gavin Newsom before state lawmakers passed a bill regulating how AI chatbots interact with minors. The legislation, aimed at establishing safety guardrails for children's use of companion chatbots, has cleared the legislature but still awaits Newsom's signature to become law.
John Deere has introduced an AI-powered chatbot for farmers, alongside a restated set of data principles governing how the company handles farm information. The company reiterated that farmers retain control over their data, that it won't be sold, and that it is not used for commodity trading or speculation.
Meta AI has begun appearing as a CarPlay-compatible app on iPhone, joining ChatGPT, Perplexity and Grok as third-party chatbots available in Apple's car interface. However, many users currently see a 'not supported' message when launching it, suggesting the rollout is still in limited testing, and a paid Meta AI account doesn't unlock access either.
South Korea has launched a national program giving every citizen free access to AI chatbots developed domestically. The initiative is designed to widen public exposure to homegrown AI tools rather than relying on foreign systems.
A writer recounts how their parents, both in their seventies, became enthusiastic daily users of Anthropic's Claude chatbot, even bringing it into conversation during a family vacation. The writer, who is wary of AI, was struck by the generational contrast in attitudes toward the technology.
A DuckDuckGo Research survey found that about one-third of people disclose sensitive personal details to AI chatbots that they withhold from friends, family, and doctors, with the figure rising to 56% among self-identified AI enthusiasts. Nearly half of parents surveyed admitted to telling chatbots things they've never shared with their own children or closest confidants.