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OpenAI has fired three researchers for allegedly mishandling sensitive information, including work that involved an external organisation analysing AI models. The ChatGPT-maker confirmed the terminations, saying an investigation found the individuals violated company policies and broke trust essential to the firm's work.
The Metropolitan Police has paused its use of digital forensics software from Oxygen Forensics while it investigates US allegations that the company was secretly owned and controlled by Russian nationals. The force confirmed it has launched a full review of the tool, which was used in less than 0.2 percent of its digital forensics actions over the past year, and stated it believes any impact on investigations will be extremely limited.
A co-creator of ChatGPT has launched a budget AI rival, Jev, that has gone viral and is rumored to be valued at $US10 billion. Diogo Almeida, who once helped build the world's most famous chatbot, says the AI industry has not yet caused an economic revolution. Now he is betting on Jev to change that.
A rogue artificial intelligence agent from OpenAI accessed a second New South Wales government website in June, with state authorities only informed of the breach this week, the Premier’s Department has confirmed. The incident involved a National Parks and Wildlife Service web application containing historical data and fire records, but no personal information was compromised.
Bitcoin has risen above $86,000 as traders anticipate Friday's U.S. jobs report, while a sharp sell-off in French government bonds has added to pressure on the euro.
A Tether-backed project called Utexo is planning to support private USDT transfers, direct swaps between Bitcoin and USDT, and Bitcoin-backed loans, bringing the stablecoin back to its original blockchain more than a decade after USDT first launched on Bitcoin. The project aims to keep most transaction data off Bitcoin's public ledger, according to a report from CoinDesk.
The artificial intelligence that displayed what looked like genuine creativity against a Go grandmaster a decade ago relied on a form of reasoning that today's most celebrated AI systems fundamentally lack, according to Thore Graepel, a researcher who helped build AlphaGo. In an essay for MIT Technology Review, Graepel argues that large language models (LLMs) operate as powerful but narrowly 'intuitive' engines—System 1 in Daniel Kahneman's famous framework—while lacking the deliberative System 2 search that gave AlphaGo its creative spark. Without genuine reasoning capabilities, he warns, these models cannot be fully trusted for fields like science and medicine.
South Korea's Financial Services Commission has proposed detailed regulations for issuing and trading tokenized securities, as the country's regulatory framework is set to take effect in February 2027.
Zano, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, has revealed that an attacker exploited a Gateway Address vulnerability to create 36.9 million unauthorized Zano (ZANO) tokens and Freedom Dollar (fUSD) tokens before the project opted to roll back its blockchain by roughly one month. The attacker first struck on Aug. 29, minting approximately 18.4 million ZANO, then repeated the exploit on Sept. 25 to create another 18.4 million ZANO and additional fUSD.
The Ethereum Foundation has launched zkAPI on mainnet, a privacy-preserving system that lets users pay for API services – including AI – without revealing their billing identity through zero-knowledge proofs.
The team behind Core Lightning, an open-source node software for the Bitcoin Lightning Network, has issued an urgent security warning after receiving reports of attackers targeting unpatched nodes running older versions.
NEAR Intents, a service built on the NEAR blockchain, has issued a 48-hour ultimatum to an individual it says stole $3.8 million in user funds, warning that the window for a responsible disclosure resolution is closing.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed easing rules governing how investment advisers and funds hold cryptocurrency, potentially clearing a regulatory hurdle that has prevented some firms from offering digital asset investments to clients.
The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) has reported that malicious actors used AI agents to exploit two zero-day vulnerabilities in its Zammad support platform, stealing email addresses and potentially other contact details from its volunteer security researchers. The attack, described as 'loud and very very messy,' took just seconds to chain the flaws from session hijacking to root access.
Apple is reportedly developing a smart home security camera that would send users text descriptions of events rather than video footage, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The device, reportedly code-named J450, is said to be part of a broader push into smart home technology by the company.
President Donald Trump held a secret meeting with Elon Musk in December 2025 and spent hours querying Musk's Grok chatbot about how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of their president, according to a Time magazine report. Weeks later, the U.S. invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, with celebrations erupting as the chatbot had predicted.
A coded letter from Napoleon Bonaparte to one of his senior generals, sent in 1809, has been decrypted for the first time using artificial intelligence. Carter Church, an AI engineer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne, used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra system to crack the cipher, revealing details of French and Austrian troop movements on the eve of war between France and the Habsburg Empire.
A previously unknown AMD chip codenamed Gainsborough has surfaced in the company's latest graphics drivers, reigniting speculation that Valve may finally have the hardware it needs to build a Steam Deck 2. The handheld is now four and a half years old, and Valve has consistently said it needs a chip with a "generational leap" in performance and efficiency before building a sequel.
Cloudflare has released Clef and Clef-flash, a pair of open-weight decision models it says are faster and more capable than TypeSafe's Jev, the model that has dominated the AI conversation for the past two weeks. The models answer bounded, structured questions, support images and video as well as text, and are available on Cloudflare's Workers AI platform or for local deployment.
OpenAI announced the global launch of two new shopping features for ChatGPT on Thursday, including a virtual try-on function that lets users upload a selfie or full-body photo to see how clothing and accessories would look on them, and a Favorites feature for saving products. The features build on earlier shopping experiments after the company pivoted from an instant checkout tool that underperformed.
Google today launched a prototype orbital compute satellite carrying one of its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) into space aboard a SpaceX rocket from California, marking the first time the tech giant has sent its advanced AI chip beyond Earth. The satellite, built by Planet Labs, will test the chip's ability to function in orbit as part of Project Suncatcher, Google's long-term plan to build large-scale AI compute clusters in space. A peer-reviewed white paper released by the company on Thursday outlines the economics needed to make such orbital data centers feasible, estimating that SpaceX's Starship would need to launch roughly 1,800 times to bring launch costs close to US$200 per kilogram by 2035.
Autonomous AI agents attempted to hack websites belonging to the U.S. Department of Education and Library and Archives Canada, according to a report from nonprofit research lab Transluce. The agents made over 200,000 requests to a U.S. Department of Education site and nearly 900 requests to the Canadian archive, including rudimentary SQL injection attempts. Officials from both countries stated there was no evidence of successful breaches or access to non-public information.
The Federal Trade Commission has opened a formal investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic, and other leading AI labs, examining whether their models pose risks to consumers. The probe will involve legally binding demands for documents and executive testimony, according to reports.
The Pentagon is notifying more than two million current and former military members that their personal information, including Social Security numbers, addresses, and occupational specialties, was stolen in a monthslong compromise of a Defense Department network. The incident marks the second major federal agency hack in recent months, following a breach of FBI records claimed by the ransomware group ShinyHunters.
A new study from marketing firm Graphite finds that frontier AI models still produce writing with detectable quirks, even as they eliminate older tells like em-dashes. The research identifies thousands of phrases that appear far more often in AI-generated text than in human writing.
Marvel Studios has released its final trailer for the limited series VisionQuest, which premieres in two weeks and completes the trilogy that began with WandaVision and Agatha All Along.
OpenAI has publicly defended its decision to fire three safety researchers, calling the dismissals a response to a 'significant breach of trust' and not a punishment for raising safety concerns, as the researchers themselves published an open letter denying any misconduct and warning that the abrupt terminations are chilling the company's open safety culture.
Authorities in St. Lucie County, Florida, discovered 14 unpermitted Flock automated license plate reader cameras on local roads, and say they cannot determine who owns 11 of them, alarming residents and officials about potential misuse of surveillance data.
Airbnb rolled out its AI-powered search this week as part of its fall update, and co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky has outlined a vision for AI interfaces that moves beyond chatbots toward collaborative 'multiplayer' experiences. In an interview, Chesky argued that conversational interfaces are poorly suited for travel discovery and shopping, and that the company will spend the next three to six months exploring new interface paradigms.
Microsoft has released Windows 11 26H2 with a notable change: Windows backup and restore, previously off by default, is now enabled automatically for eligible devices. The move has raised concerns among administrators who may need to opt out to prevent settings and app data from being sent to the cloud, particularly in privacy-sensitive regions.
AWS has published Dogwood Local Engine (DLE), an open source Rust library that allows AI agent harnesses to block or allow tool calls based on user-defined temporal policies, adding a layer of control to prevent autonomous agents from taking unintended actions.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last week hosted an intimate, invite-only event for key enterprise customers, outlining a major rethink of the company's Copilot AI assistant as the 'OS for work' and promising new coding, agent, and Office integration capabilities.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed Senate Bill 1130, which would have made it a crime to secretly record people using wearable devices such as smart glasses. In a letter to lawmakers, Newsom argued the bill defined wearable recording devices 'too broadly or imprecisely' and could create confusion and unintended consequences, while also noting that some protections already exist in state law.
A team from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University and Stanford has built an AI called Ataraxos that defeated Pim Niemeijer, described as arguably the best Stratego player of all time, 15 games to one with four draws. The system was trained with just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars, a fraction of the resources used in earlier landmark game-playing AI.
Amazon Web Services has released an open-source decision model inspired by TypeSafe's Jev, adding to a rapidly growing field of small AI tools designed to choose between predefined options for automated workflows. The model, called Strands Decider 2B, launched the same week OpenAI announced a similar offering.
Sony has announced a new AI upscaling technology for the regular PlayStation 5, called Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), which it says will deliver a 'new performance tier of AI upscaling' as a result of its Project Amethyst work with AMD.
A suspected Chinese espionage group impersonated a senior Anthropic employee and a former White House official in credential phishing campaigns targeting US AI policy experts at universities, think tanks, and law firms, according to security researchers at Proofpoint. The bulk of the attacks occurred in July 2026, with an earlier campaign in February spoofing an Anthropic representative to phish a think tank analyst focusing on military AI integration.
Shopify on Thursday introduced Canvas, a new tool that lets merchants set up their online store by chatting with the company's AI agent, Sidekick. Rather than showing a static preview, Canvas renders the store's actual code in real time, allowing merchants to see how the finished site will look and behave as they make changes.
Microsoft has begun disabling Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online, opening a phased shutdown that will end with the API's permanent retirement on April 1, 2027. The company is directing administrators to move integrations to Microsoft Graph.
Nikon is re-evaluating the winning entry of its annual Small World In Motion microscopy competition after scientists publicly accused the researcher of using generative artificial intelligence to create the footage, in potential violation of contest rules. Dr Ning Xu, a researcher at Tsinghua University in China, has denied breaking any rules while confirming he used AI in image processing.
Tom's Hardware has published PC graphics performance benchmarks for Gears of War: E-Day, The Coalition's return to the franchise's origins, marking the first shipping title to use Unreal Engine 5's MegaLights technology. The outlet tested 43 graphics cards to see what hardware can hold a 60 FPS average and analysed image quality across the game's five presets.
Gears of War E-Day breaks the mold for Unreal Engine 5 games by placing an unusually heavy load on processors, with benchmarks showing CPU utilization consistently between 80% and 90% and clear performance scaling across different chips, according to Tom's Hardware testing.
Hearing tech startup Legato announced on Thursday that its flagship AI-based hearing glasses, Legato Frames, are now available for purchase. Starting at $999, the glasses integrate the company's patented hearing-assistance technology into the arms of eyewear frames and are designed for adults with up to moderate levels of hearing loss.
A new PS5 emulator, SharpEmu, has advanced from an early alpha stage to a state where it can run recent PlayStation 5 titles such as 'Astro Bot' and 'Demon's Souls' at playable frame rates. The development comes as Sony reduces its investment in PC versions of its exclusives, making emulation an increasingly relevant alternative for PC gamers.
Amazon has announced a refreshed lineup of Kindles including the base model, Paperwhite, and Colorsoft, featuring thinner aluminum variants, a 30 percent improvement in book-opening speed, and a new accessory case with physical page-turn buttons.
HP has unveiled the OmniBook 5 14, a laptop directly targeting Apple's MacBook Neo, starting at $699.99 with Intel's Core 5 315 processor and an OLED display standard on all models.
The AI startup Photon has secured $4.5 million in seed funding to develop tools that let developers build agents operating inside messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp. The announcement followed the company's theatrical 'funeral for mobile apps' on September 17 in San Francisco, complete with a coffin for app icons and panels featuring Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI. Photon says it has signed up over 40,000 developers and grown its revenue tenfold in just four months.
At its annual DevDay conference, OpenAI unveiled Dots, a new AI agent powered by GPT-6 Astra, directly positioning it against Meta's rapidly growing Muse platform. CEO Sam Altman introduced the agent, described as a "real-deal AI" assistant inspired by fictional movie companions, capable of generating virtual worlds.