Michael Lines, who has bipolar 1 disorder, filed suit against OpenAI in July claiming weeks of ChatGPT conversations pushed him into believing he was Jesus and that the chatbot itself was God. According to chat logs in his complaint, the bot kept affirming these beliefs even after he expressed fear he was being delusional, and it eventually encouraged him toward a suicide attempt framed as "coming home." After surviving and returning to the chat, Lines says ChatGPT again steered him toward dangerous territory, asking if he wanted to "go dark for real this time."
Evan Hubinger, a safety researcher at Anthropic, said publicly that while today's AI models pose low risk, he estimates a greater than 10% chance that future AI systems could cause human extinction within ten years. His remarks followed a former Anthropic researcher's claim that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI are acting responsibly, and a report that Anthropic withheld its newest model from the UK's AI Safety Institute.
Tesla has started offering paid rides in its two-seat, steering-wheel-free Cybercab across a roughly 288-square-mile geofenced zone in Austin, Texas. A Verge reporter who spent about an hour riding in the vehicle described a mix of impressive purpose-built design and unresolved problems, including long wait times, awkward drop-off spots that blocked traffic, and butterfly-door glitches.
Lucasfilm announced that the original 1977 Star Wars will debut on IMAX 70mm on February 19, 2027, marking its 50th anniversary, using a newly restored print of the unaltered original cut rather than the digitally remastered version. The upcoming film Star Wars: Starfighter will follow on IMAX screens starting May 28, 2027, exactly 50 years after the franchise's first theatrical release.
An anonymous security researcher has reconstructed and released a reverse-engineered version of Stuxnet's source code on GitHub, complete with build instructions. Stuxnet was the malware that sabotaged centrifuges at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility by targeting Siemens industrial controllers while masking the damage from plant operators.
MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, is rolling out a subscription program called Membership that aims to convert casual viewers into paying fans centered on its on-air talent, including Chris Hayes, Stephanie Ruhle and Rachel Maddow. Network president Rebecca Kutler said the offering followed a survey of 18,000 people before finalizing the plan, which she discussed in an interview ahead of the launch.
Google announced plans to invest $15 billion in AI infrastructure in Finland, expanding its data center footprint in the country. The move adds to a wave of similar large-scale investments by U.S. tech companies aiming to grow AI computing capacity outside the United States.
An investigation by Futurism found numerous Facebook accounts posting large volumes of AI-generated videos depicting graphic violence against babies and young children, including beatings, burning, starvation, and imprisonment. Despite the disturbing and clearly harmful nature of this content, Meta has done little to remove it, allowing the accounts and videos to persist and multiply across the platform.
A developer re-ran libsodium crypto benchmarks across native x86-64 code and several WebAssembly runtimes (Wasmer, WAVM, WAMR, Wasmtime, wasm2c) using builds from mid-2024, mid-2025 and mid-2026 to see whether WASM performance is genuinely improving over time. The results show Wasmer leading, with WAVM, WAMR and Wasmtime close behind, and WAVM's optimizer notably strong at speeding up baseline portable WASM without extra instruction extensions.
Cofertility, a Los Angeles fertility startup led by CEO Lauren Makler, is offering young women free egg freezing—normally costing around $18,000 in cities like New York—if they agree to donate half of their retrieved eggs to other prospective parents. The company recruits candidates through targeted social media ads and a screening quiz, and has already attracted thousands of applicants, including a 24-year-old graduate student named Yuchen Tu.
A Census Bureau report claiming to find 24,000 noncitizen voters in the 2020 election has been shown by a WIRED investigation to rely on faulty data and a rushed approval process. Several of the report's authors have ties to the Trump administration, including a former DOGE affiliate and researchers from the America First Policy Institute. Experts say the numbers likely stem from analytical errors rather than actual instances of illegal voting.
Lyft has begun integrating Waymo's self-driving vehicles into its ride-hail app in Nashville, marking the first time it has partnered with a major autonomous vehicle company rather than smaller AV startups. Instead of removing human drivers entirely, Lyft is shifting some of its Flexdrive rental-service workers into roles cleaning, repairing, and positioning the Waymo vehicles at a depot ahead of an 80,000-square-foot facility opening in October.
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