Psychiatric clinicians in the US report a rising number of patients, some with no prior mental health history, who developed delusions or paranoid thinking after extended use of AI chatbots. Researchers say cases include people forming false beliefs, such as one documented by UCSF researchers involving a woman who believed she could communicate with a deceased relative through a chatbot. An Entrepreneur op-ed warns that founders, who are often isolated and prone to seeking validation, face heightened risk from AI tools built to agree with users.
Perceptron, a startup founded by former Meta FAIR researchers Armen Aghajanyan and Akshat Shrivastava, has released Isaac 0.5, a vision model built to help robots perceive and navigate physical settings like warehouses and factories. The model is open-weight, meaning its parameters and training data are publicly inspectable, and the company recently closed a $21 million round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
On the New York Times podcast 'Hard Fork,' Harvard historian Jill Lepore argues that tech leaders are constructing what she calls an 'artificial state,' where corporations and machines increasingly make decisions once reserved for democratic government. She says this shift bypasses public consent, noting that ordinary people generally don't want more AI or data centers imposed on their lives. Lepore explores the concept further in her forthcoming book, 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.'
A joint alert from the US State Department, Japan, Canada and the UK warns that North Korean operatives are using falsified identity documents to get hired as remote IT workers at foreign companies, letting them enter corporate networks with legitimate-looking access. Separately, groups like Scattered Spider have used social engineering against help desks to trick staff into resetting passwords or MFA for accounts they don't own, bypassing strong authentication entirely.
An Android Authority reviewer says his Pixel 11 Pro became unusable just five days after purchase, after a factory reset triggered a shutdown loop during the setup process. The device reportedly went blank mid-reset and later kept powering off every few seconds whenever the user tried to complete initial setup, leaving the phone effectively dead.