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OpenAI has introduced a parental controls system that lets parents link their ChatGPT account to their teen's via an email or phone invitation sent through the Settings menu. Once accepted, parents can view and adjust safety settings for their child's account from a dedicated Family members section.
Campaign finance filings reviewed by the Washington Post show 39 congressional candidates paid for OpenAI subscriptions, with some acknowledging use for advertising and message drafting despite OpenAI's rules barring political ad generation. Roughly 30 PACs and parties also reported OpenAI payments, led by the Republican National Committee at about $9,700.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to criticism about AI's environmental footprint by claiming roughly 38,000 ChatGPT queries use about as much water as growing a single almond. The comparison quickly went viral, with users mocking him online and dubbing him 'Sam Almond' as they debated the accuracy and intent behind the figure.
A Brooklyn father of two used AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude to research and compare back-to-school products instead of manually checking retailer sites and online reviews. The AI consolidated his shopping list across multiple stores and even advised him on optimal timing to buy items at the lowest prices. Retail surveys indicate this behavior is becoming widespread among shoppers this school season.
OpenAI has been hit with 30 new lawsuits from survivors and families connected to the Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia school shooting, alleging the company enabled the attacker through ChatGPT interactions and failed to warn police despite internally debating whether to do so. These join seven earlier lawsuits filed in April, bringing OpenAI's total legal exposure to more than 50 cases claiming psychological, physical, or fatal harm linked to ChatGPT use.
OpenAI has unveiled GPT-6 Astra, a new flagship model succeeding last year's GPT-5, bringing major gains in computer use, browsing, software engineering, and scientific reasoning. The company reports near-perfect scores on benchmarks like FrontierMath Tier 4, ARC-AGI-3, and ExploitBench, and says Astra is its best model yet for coding tasks. Astra also introduces a new memory system for Codex that lets it retain notes across long coding sessions instead of relying solely on context summarization.
Users across web, mobile and desktop platforms reported widespread disruptions to ChatGPT, Claude and Grok around the same time. xAI confirmed Grok was experiencing a service issue, while OpenAI and Anthropic had not yet detailed the cause of their outages.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pushed back on claims that ChatGPT usage consumes excessive water, comparing it to a viral claim that a single query uses as much water as running a shower for six hours. Speaking on the Sources Podcast, he said 38,000 queries equate to the water needed to grow one almond in California, and argued modern data centers no longer rely on evaporative cooling, instead using water similar to an office building.
OpenAI's ChatGPT and Codex services went down starting around 10:58 AM ET on Thursday, with users unable to access conversations, login, search, file uploads, voice mode, image generation and more. OpenAI confirmed on its status page that it is investigating elevated errors affecting at least 15 components, including ChatGPT Work, Deep Research, Agent, Atlas, and Connectors/Apps.
The Trump administration filed a statement of interest in New York federal court supporting OpenAI's argument that training AI models on copyrighted news content qualifies as fair use. The filing addresses lawsuits brought by The New York Times and Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, which accuse OpenAI of infringing their copyrighted material to build ChatGPT.
The Trump administration filed a 20-page brief supporting OpenAI in its copyright dispute with The New York Times, arguing that training large language models on copyrighted material qualifies as fair use. The filing cites an executive order calling for the US to maintain global leadership in artificial intelligence, and warns that restricting AI training practices could harm American innovation and economic competitiveness.
Students, teachers, and the school's principal have filed 30 lawsuits in a California federal court alleging OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman gave 'substantial assistance' to Jesse Van Rootselaar, the suspect in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting. The suits claim OpenAI's safety team flagged the suspect's violent conversations with ChatGPT and recommended alerting Canadian authorities, but executives chose silence to protect the company's reputation and finances, then merely deactivated the account rather than banning the user outright.