CoreWeave’s debt makes investors question AI finances

CoreWeave’s debt makes investors question AI finances

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Wall Street is treating the AI data center operator CoreWeave like an underemployed boyfriend who just revealed he’s maxing out six different credit cards. As investors dumped the debt-saddled company’s bonds yesterday, the market for insuring against CoreWeave defaulting on its debt priced in a more than 60% chance it would be insolvent within five years.

The company’s stock recovered yesterday afternoon following a 15% drop on Wednesday. But its shares are down 13% this week amid a broader AI sell-off tied to fears that Silicon Valley’s debt-fueled splurge on AI infrastructure is unsustainable.
Core concern

Investors began to get nervous about CoreWeave’s plans to keep adding to its $50 billion debt pile to build AI data centers earlier this week:CoreWeave co-founder Brannin McBee told the Financial Times in an interview published Wednesday that the company is seeking to borrow from the “unlimited” pool of money held by insurers, after which a sell-off followed.
Then came the unexpectedly hot government inflation data for consumers and businesses, making it more likely the Fed will hike rates, which could raise CoreWeave’s loan payments.

Plus, there’s unease about CoreWeave being financed by its largest vendor, Nvidia, which supplies it with AI chips and owns 10% of its stock. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tried to assuage concerns yesterday, saying CoreWeave’s borrowing costs are declining. It seemed to have worked, boosting the stock to close almost 6% in the green yesterday.

Beyond CoreWeave: Concerns about unsustainable debt and signs that revenue growth at AI labs might be slowing battered other stocks dependent on the AI hardware binge, with chipmakers crashing particularly hard. The Philadelphia semiconductor index is down almost 6% this week.—SK

Hollywood thinks this is all a game

 Hollywood thinks this is all a game

Universal Pictures

If at first you don’t succeed, take out the game, blow into the cartridge, and try again. That’s what Hollywood did after its mostly forgettable attempts at adapting video games for the big screen in the 1990s. Now, video game adaptations are big business, and the entertainment and gaming industries are fully in co-op mode.

Collecting coins: In its never-ending quest for strong intellectual property, Hollywood has found that nostalgia for familiar video game characters can sell a lot of tickets, bringing in both gamers and people who wouldn’t know the difference between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man (it’s the bow). Per Box Office Mojo:

• The fifth-highest-grossing film of the year so far is The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which raked in more than $1 billion worldwide.
• Last year, A Minecraft Movie also landed in the No. 5 spot, grossing $960 million worldwide.
• The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has also made more than $1 billion at the global box office since 2020.

The commercial and critical success of Fallout and The Last of Us has shown that video games can translate to TV as well.

Side quests: Strong intellectual property can swing both ways. In June, Paramount unveiled its own gaming studio to turn its TV and film IP into video games. Warner Bros. Discovery, which Paramount is trying to acquire, also has its own in-house game studio.

Different levels: The entertainment industry is working other angles, too—movies are being promoted inside video games; Amazon and Netflix have added games to their platforms; and when the latest GTA VI trailer debuted on Netflix, it attracted more viewers that week than any of the streamer’s titles

The internet is debating iced coffee at job interviews

The internet is debating iced coffee at job interviews

Nick Iluzada

A job recruiter on TikTok set off an internet firestorm this week with a one-minute video. Her warning to Gen Z: Stop bringing iced coffee to interviews, as it’s perceived as disrespectful to the potential employers.

Caitlin Wehniainen, who works mostly with Fortune 500 companies, said that’s her feedback for Gen Z job hunters who have the audacity to arrive for interviews with iced latte in hand—the very thing you may be drinking right now. People who accepted the ragebait can be boiled down into two groups:

• On one side, there’s people who call the move unprofessional. One concern was condensation. Another was swirling the cup.
• On the other side are people who can’t believe this is A Thing. “It is such a non-issue,” one person told Business Insider.

In statistical-based Gen Z job news: The influx of AI has been particularly tough on young people. A study from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab found that employment among workers aged 22–25 in highly AI-exposed jobs is ~19% below where it is in less-exposed occupations. 

Amazon’s new AI wearables can hear it all

 

Amazon’s new AI wearables can hear it all

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Amazon

Your friends might be tired of your terrible memory, but Amazon wants you just the way you are. Yesterday, the tech company introduced two new AI devices that record and summarize users’ conversations so you can keep track of…everything?

The gizmos are: The $75 Bee Frontier, a wristband available now, and the $100 Bee Eclipse, a magnetic smartphone attachment coming soon.

They join an emerging AI wearables market that’s notorious for a convenience-versus-privacy trade-off:

• When turned on, the new Bee devices act as note-takers—transcribing, summarizing, and creating to-dos. An optional $12 subscription lets users link the gadgets with Amazon.com, Gmail, Google Calendar, Apple Health, and Microsoft Outlook.
• Though the devices have on/off indicator lights, nearby people might not notice: Amazon said that it will prompt users to ask permission before they record (you know, like Meta glasses users definitely always do), and that nobody but the user will be able to access their conversation transcripts, unless the user shares them.

Just in time for the holidays: These are the first new Bee devices since Amazon acquired the startup last year, hoping to plow ahead in the AI gadget race. There’s plenty of competition: In recent weeks, Meta unveiled a pendant for its new Muse agent, and Apple launched a smart home hub and an “always-listening” Apple Watch feature.—ML

FAA launches AI tool to reduce flight delays

 

FAA launches AI tool to reduce flight delays

Niv Bavarsky

You won’t find Agent 99 or Hymie the Robot in Washington, DC, but its three main airports are getting SMART nonetheless. Yesterday, the FAA rolled out Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories (SMART), an $875 million AI system that’s intended to help air traffic control avoid inciting the rage of a thousand travelers flight disruptions.

According to the Transportation Department:

• SMART is designed to analyze the skies for potential flight obstacles—e.g., weather and runway capacity—and suggest alternate routes to air traffic controllers, who will still have the final say.
• The tool is being piloted at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Dulles International Airport, and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.
• The agency hopes to expand usage nationwide by 2028.

Still, some experts are wary of AI-maxxing the tarmac. And Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat who represents the district containing Reagan National Airport, called for the immediate suspension of SMART after learning “air traffic controllers were not consulted” on the system’s design and “were not trained on using it prior to the system’s adoption at local airports.”

The FAA has said SMART won’t replace workers, though the union representing air traffic controllers is reportedly already beefing with the Trump administration over how many controllers the FAA should hire to plug its persistent shortage.

How Nintendo went from handmade cards to Wii

 

How Nintendo went from handmade cards to Wii

Kaku Kurita/Getty Images

Mario and Luigi trace their origins to a 19th-century craftsman shop that produced card decks popular in Yakuza-run gambling dens. Before it became a video game behemoth, Nintendo was a top supplier of traditional hand-painted Japanese playing cards, called Hanafuda, for six decades after its 1889 founding in Kyoto.

Gaming the system

It wasn’t until after its 1962 IPO that Nintendo began its foray into gaming devices (after a brief stint in instant rice and the taxi business). It moved from electronic toys that included a light beam gun and a device for young people to test how much they love each other, to coin-operated machines. But what made it a global household name was the 1981 release of the arcade classic Donkey Kong, which introduced the world to Mario.

Throughout the 1980s, the company prioritized iconic IP, quirky design, and competitive pricing to make its home gaming gadgets into playdate staples:

• It sold millions of handheld devices and consoles—like Nintendo Entertainment Systems and the long-battery-life Game Boy—that were simple and cheap to produce.
• These gizmos attracted devotees by serving as portals to beloved titles like The Legend of Zelda and Super Smash Bros., with game sales accounting for much of Nintendo’s profit.

The company’s IP-focused strategy and maverick console design powered its continued success after the turn of the century. The DS popularized touch-screen gaming, while the Wii’s motion-activated joystick meant that Mario Kart involved actual steering. The Switch, released in 2017, offered improved graphics and more functional handling, helping it compete with Xbox and PlayStation.

Today…Nintendo trails Sony’s PlayStation in the console market but commands a majority in physical game sales.

MCA tells maritime sector to plan for life without GPS

 MCA tells maritime sector to plan for life without GPS

Heather Prentice
October 12, 2026
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The UK government is advising yachtsmen, ship owners, ports and all those involved in the maritime sector to plan for operations without GPS, as spoofing, jamming, signal loss and interference in Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) increase worldwide

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In a significant move, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) published a guidance note highlighting the increasing risk of GNSS interference and encouraging maritime stakeholders to review their operations and ensure they are not entirely reliant on GPS for safe navigation.

‘Recent years have seen a marked increase in reports of GNSS interference worldwide, particularly in the Black Sea, Baltic Sea, Gulf region and parts of East Asia,’ the MCA wrote in Guidance Note 719, issued on 1 October.
Spoofing and jamming

‘Such interference may take the form of jamming (where signals are blocked or degraded), or spoofing, (where false position information is presented to users).

‘This interference degrades or denies satellite derived PNT (Positioning, Navigation and Timing), meaning that GNSS is no longer universally available at certain locations.’

The MCA ‘encourages stakeholders to understand these risks, review contingency arrangements and maintain resilient navigation practices to support safe and continuous operations during periods of GNSS based PNT disruption’.


large container ship, container ship and yacht, yacht passing big ship, yachting in the solent, yacht in shipping channel. sailing in path of big ship. Photo: Alamy Stock Photo

A Royal Institute of Navigation survey in 2025 exposed the vulnerability of critically important systems such as Global Maritime Distress and Safety Systems (GMDSS) and other SOLAS-mandated equipment that rely on satellite positioning and timing.

In 2025, at least two collisions and groundings were linked to GNSS interference in regions such as the Baltics, Straits of Hormuz and the Red Sea with hundreds of vessels affected daily, the RIN said earlier this year.

GNSS – GPS (US), Galileo (EU), GLONASS (Russia) and BeiDou (China) – have become key to modern maritime operations, providing PNT information to a wide range of onboard and shore-based systems, such as AIS, traffic management, port operations and other critical infrastructure.
Europe’s largest maritime economy

The UK is Europe’s largest maritime economy with 95% of all UK import and export arriving by sea. Government research in 2023 showed that a seven-day GNSS outage would cost the maritime industry £1.5 billion; shipping £183 million, port operations £1.31 billion, fishing £8 million.


GPS Chart Plotter

Technologies offering an alternative to GNSS are under development, but many are unlikely to be available at scale in the near term, ‘consequently the maintenance of resilient navigation practices remains essential,’ the MCA said.
Alternative technologies

The government is developing a sovereign Enhanced Long-Range Navigation (eLoran) terrestrial-based programme, which will improve the resilience of the UK critical national infrastructure and reduce vulnerability to GNSS disruption.

An initial capability is planned for 2028 (Timing) and full operational capability by 2030 (Position and Navigation).



Image of digital icons and data processing over world map and satellite

The MCA is also working with International Maritime Organisation member states to establish alternative sources of PNT internationally.

Alternatives to satellite-based PNT under development include; VDES R mode, use of 5G (mobile) networks, automatic visual fixing, automatic celestial fixing and inertial navigation systems.
Mariners not to rely on satellites

The MCA recommends that mariners practice navigation using alternatives to GPS.

‘The guidance reiterates the importance of being able to navigate without relying on satellite positioning, and looks at radar fixing, visual bearings, celestial navigation and even good old-fashioned dead reckoning as valid methods to consider,’ said Lee Gallacher, who manages event support at YB Tracking using global satellite systems.

‘They’re not skills we should be looking to consign to the history books, they’re skills that could potentially save your life if the electronics were to give up at a crucial moment.

‘You can have all the technology in the world, but if you don’t understand the limitations of it, or what to do when it fails, then you run the risk of putting yourself and others in danger.’
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You can get a scholarship for playing video games

 You can get a scholarship for playing video games

Sam Hodde/Getty Images

Here you were hosing out dog kennels to try and pad your community service hours when you could have just logged a few more runs in Overwatch. High school students are snagging college scholarships for esports like they would for traditional sports, but just like the quarterbacks nabbing full rides, these are not casual gamers.

Despite video games dominating pastimes since the early Pong days, competitive esports (especially in schools) is relatively new. The National Association of Collegiate Esports, which was founded in 2016, now includes 200+ schools and 16,000 student-athletes:

• Scholarships often range from $20,000 to $30,000 and can be awarded for competing on a collegiate team.
• At a recent recruiting event in New Jersey (a state with a robust esports infrastructure), 29 colleges extended 181 offers totaling $99,000 in scholarships for college esports, as well as ecasting and design. Two gamers were awarded full rides.

There’s still a long way to go pro. The odds of playing video games as a career are even slimmer than pro athletes, but game companies like Electronic Arts are shoveling money into scholarships and nonprofits to bolster the next generation of game builders.

Our favorite video game worlds

 Our favorite video game worlds

Ubisoft

You know what they say: It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. Here are some of the best places to stop and smell the roses en route to the Final Boss:

The Legend of Zelda (1986): It’s the video game that taught a generation the value of a walkable city. Look at this beautiful map of Hyrule. There were forests, mountains, and lakes that contained fairies that would replenish your energy, like a Zyn and a cold brew when you’re feeling sluggish on a Wednesday afternoon. You could spend weeks exploring all of it to find the swords and shields you needed to slay Ganon. With Hyrule free, couples could come from all over to hike and camp. It was truly a vacation paradise with Ganon out of the way.—DL

Temple Run (2011): Though I eventually had to delete it from my phone since I’d start playing it whenever I needed to avoid eye contact in high school, the seemingly simple game taught me a deep lesson. No matter what treacherous twists and turns life throws at you, you must continue moving forward with a razor-sharp focus on clearing hurdles.—SK

Super Mario Bros. (1985): If nine-year-old me could have designed the perfect world, it would have looked like Mario’s. There are cool reptiles everywhere. The castles are haunted and full of lava. Mushrooms are both hats and superpower fuel. And even sworn enemies can put their differences aside to race go-karts.—BC

Assassin’s Creed II (2009): This is the game that made me feel okay about spending hours in front of the TV because I told myself it doubled as a history lesson. You play as a parkouring assassin (the game is rated M) in Renaissance-era Italy, where highlights include scaling Il Duomo, befriending Leonardo da Vinci, exploring hidden tombs, and roaming around the canals and rooftops of Venice.—ML

SpongeBob SquarePants: SuperSponge (2001): Yes, the world is technically just Bikini Bottom, but the Game Boy Advance version was full of pixelated trees and jellyfish to jump on.

People are using AI apps to vibe code video games

 People are using AI apps to vibe code video games

Unsplash

Not satisfied with what video game creators are providing? Thanks to generative AI apps, you’re only a few prompts away from vibe coding your very own game.

While you can’t make an effortless version of Animal Crossing or Red Dead Redemption, apps like Meta’s Pocket let people create smaller interactive games that are published to a scrollable feed. There’s also Roblox’s AI app, Build, which gives users the power to build (get it?) basic games on their phones.

A gateway to more vibe coding? There’s a steep learning curve to vibe coding new software, but “a small, browser-based game is a great way to get a taste of vibe coding,” according to Inc. reporter Ben Sherry. After an hour spent prompting Claude, this is what he created.

There are some constraints. One person attempted to vibe code his own version of GTA to beat the new installment to market in November, but ran into enough technical and legal problems that he has since bought a PS5 so he can play the real game when it’s released.

Peloton pins future on ‘a big move beyond the bike

 

Peloton pins future on ‘a big move beyond the bike’

Peloton

The iPhone of indoor cycling is moving into the running boom’s slipstream. Yesterday, Peloton unveiled a new line of treadmills with jogging-focused AI features that it hopes will revive its shrinking customer base.

Citing the rising popularity of marathons and run clubs, the company is launching:

• The $2,195 Tread Flex, a foldable and relatively quiet treadmill angled toward cramped city dwellers.
• The $3,495 Tread Vision and $6,695 Tread+ Vision, which use movement-tracking cameras and Peloton’s AI coaching system to provide form feedback. The Tread+ also has a resistance-training mode likely meant for the CrossFit and Hyrox crowds.

The new products, releasing Oct. 1, mark “a big move beyond the bike, which is the foundation of everything here, but we are going all in on Tread,” CEO Peter Stern said.

Peloton is also going all-in on partnerships, including with Miley Cyrus, Spotify, and the New York City Marathon, which users will be able to partially “re-run” using a new treadmill feature. Meanwhile, Peloton is trying to infiltrate more gyms and hotels.

Zoom out: Peloton’s market cap has collapsed 97% from a pandemic-fueled peak of ~$50 billion in 2021. The company recently returned to profitability, but revenue growth remains measly, as it lost ~500,000 paid subscribers in the last three years.

Warren Buffett gets his son set, rides into the sunset

 

Warren Buffett gets his son set, rides into the sunset

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images

After a remarkable decades-long run, legendary investor Warren Buffett is stepping down as chair of Berkshire Hathaway. But in a way, he’ll still be doing what he’s always done: betting on the long-term benefits of good stock. His son, Howard, will be taking over as chair.

From one father to another: The elder Buffett announced the change yesterday in a letter to shareholders. “Father Time always wins,” 96-year-old Buffett wrote. “He has, however, been generous with me.” Buffett had already handed off his CEO role to Greg Abel at the end of last year.

During his more than six-decade tenure at Berkshire, Buffett turned a struggling textile mill into a $1 trillion conglomerate, growing the company’s shares more than 5,500,000%. By comparison, the S&P 500 gained 39,000% over the same period.

The future the Oracle designed

The elder Buffett will become chairman emeritus and remain on the company’s board, while his 71-year-old son Howard—or Howie, as he prefers to be called—slots into the chairman position, effective immediately. The move wasn’t a secret, nor was the reasoning: Papa Buffett literally told the Wall Street Journal last year, “He is getting it because he’s my son.”

But Howie’s qualifications do extend beyond the fact that he looks like his predecessor. The younger Buffett has:

• Been on Berkshire’s board for 33 years.
• Served on the boards of Coca-Cola, ConAgra Foods, and more.
• Been chairman and CEO of his own charitable foundation since 1999.

He’s also a longtime farmer and former agricultural exec, and served as a county commissioner in Omaha, as well as sheriff of Macon County, Illinois, for a few years—which makes him like four Fargo characters in one.

What will the nepo Buffett do? CEO Abel is still running the company, while Howie will be in charge of protecting Berkshire’s culture and values. Or, as Daddy Warrenbucks put it in 2013, the new chairman will “only have to think about whether the board…may need to change the CEO.”

Apple solders storage back onto the new Mac mini, kills upgrade path

 

Apple solders storage back onto the new Mac mini, kills upgrade path

Apple's new M6 and M5 Pro Mac minis have reversed one of the more consumer-friendly decisions the company made with their predecessors. Teardown specialists at Expand Mac Mini confirmed that the NAND storage chip on the latest models is soldered directly to the logic board, eliminating any possibility of an aftermarket upgrade. The M4 and M4 Pro Mac minis had used a pop-out module that allowed buyers to purchase the base 256GB configuration and swap in a larger drive later for far less than Apple's own storage upgrade pricing, a workaround that saved users hundreds of dollars. That option is now gone entirely.

The situation is made worse by a second discovery affecting the base M6 model specifically. Benchmarks from AAPL Ch. show the entry-level 256GB variant uses a single NAND chip rather than the two chips found in higher-capacity configurations. The result is roughly half the read speed of the 512GB model, with the 256GB version posting around 3,217 MB/s compared to approximately 6,371 MB/s on its sibling. The base model is still faster than the M4 Mac mini in raw read performance, but buyers paying a premium for additional storage are getting quicker speeds on top of the extra capacity. For most of the Mac mini's history, from the M1 through the M3, soldered storage was simply the norm, making the M4 generation a brief and notable exception rather than a new direction.

Wikimedia Detected Activity From OpenAI’s ‘Rogue’ Agents

Wikimedia Detected Activity From OpenAI’s ‘Rogue’ Agents Across Its Platforms
The nonprofit says the agents made unauthorized edits, probed its services, and may have contributed to a partial outage.
BY BRUCE GILPUBLISHED OCTOBER 6, 2026, 12:30 PM ET

READING TIME 3 MINUTES

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It seems like every week there’s a new story about OpenAI agents messing with another part of the internet. This week, it was Wikimedia’s turn. The nonprofit behind Wikipedia said in a blog post Monday that its services were affected by OpenAI’s “rogue” agents.

The Wikimedia Foundation said it conducted its own investigation and found activity on its platforms that it believes came from agents operated by OpenAI. The unauthorized bots made edits to Wikimedia wikis, unsuccessfully attempted to exploit a public note-taking tool, and generated heavy traffic that may have contributed to a partial outage of one of its data services.

Wikimedia said it found no evidence that its systems or data were compromised. Still, the nonprofit said it was concerned about what could have happened, the difficulty of investigating these incidents, and “the growing risks of agentic AI activity.”

The blog post follows a wave of reports involving OpenAI agents accessing or targeting third-party websites and services without authorization.

Scrutiny over rogue AI agents really kicked into high gear this year after Hugging Face disclosed in July that it had detected and responded to an intrusion carried out “end to end” by an autonomous AI agent system. OpenAI came forward several days later to acknowledge that its models were behind the compromise.

The AI company said the agents, which were undergoing internal cybersecurity evaluations, circumvented guardrails meant to keep them from the internet. They exploited vulnerabilities, gained internet access, and eventually compromised parts of Hugging Face’s infrastructure while trying to complete their assigned tasks. OpenAI is now facing a lawsuit over the breach.

OpenAI has since disclosed other incidents in which its agents accessed third-party systems without authorization. In June, for example, an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government Medicare statistics portal.

In Wikimedia’s case, the nonprofit said it identified edits to its wikis that it believes were made by OpenAI agents. Almost all were test edits made in “sandbox” areas and were not published to pages visible to general readers. However, some agents also edited the configuration of a citation tool. Wikimedia said it believes those changes “were intended to misuse this tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services.”

For context, Wikimedia allows bots to make edits, but only when they are disclosed and approved by the community.

Wikimedia also said OpenAI agents made unsuccessful attempts to compromise Etherpad, a public note-taking tool it hosts. The agents also tried to use the service as a proxy to gather data from other websites.

Finally, Wikimedia said agents it believes were operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to its public APIs, crawled millions of pages, and made hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). The nonprofit said that traffic may have contributed to a partial outage of WQDS back in May.

“Incidents like this one, and the many others that have been (and are still being) uncovered, illustrate how AI agents can drain resources and crash servers, as well as attempt to compromise trustworthy information,” wrote Wikimedia Chief Product and Technology Officer Selena Deckelmann in the blog post.

Deckelmann called on AI companies to take more responsibility for monitoring their agents and preventing these risks.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a for comment, however, spokesperson Drew Pusateri told Reuters that the company appreciated Wikimedia’s findings and was working with the them to review the reported activity.

Meta's Muse AI phone calls are secretly made by human workers

 

Meta's Muse AI phone calls are secretly made by human workers

When Meta executives announced last month that its AI agent Muse could make phone calls on your behalf, booking restaurant tables, scheduling haircut appointments, they framed it as a breakthrough in autonomous AI capability. What they did not mention publicly, but did tell employees internally, is that the feature relies on human workers in call centers to place and handle those calls. According to internal communications obtained by 404 Media, Meta quietly added what it described as "a human agent layer" to complete those calls, and early testers were not informed that a person, rather than an AI, was making the call until after it had already happened. The revelation touches on serious privacy concerns that Meta's own employees flagged loudly on internal message boards.

When a user asks Muse to schedule a sensitive medical appointment, for example, that request and the personal details attached to it may be routed to a human contractor, a fact users had no way of knowing. Meta told employees that contractors received extensive training to keep data safe, but workers pushed back, with one noting bluntly that training "is not a security mechanism." Several employees warned that launching the feature without clear disclosure would generate damaging press and destroy the goodwill the product had earned among early adopters. Meta told 404 Media that internal testing is a standard part of its development process and that the company will only roll out the calling feature publicly "when it's ready and with the proper disclosures," suggesting the human-assisted version of Muse calls is not the final product, though exactly how and when the handoff between AI and human agent occurs remains unclear.

MIT Report Finds That AI Is Leading to “Cognitive Surrender” Among Students

MIT Report Finds That AI Is Leading to “Cognitive Surrender” Among Students

Futurism · 2 hours ago
by Victor Tangermann · Future Society

As generative AI continues to intrude on almost every aspect of our daily lives, students are increasingly starting to feel the effects of over-relying on the tech.

Some are going to absurd lengths to use AI to complete their assessments while avoiding being caught cheating. Meanwhile, exam scores are dropping off a cliff as students struggle to get by without using the tech as a crutch.

The effects extend far beyond bad grades. Some college students are losing the ability to participate in class discussions, a terrifying consequence of offloading their cognitive facilities to AI.

In a report on the state of education last month, MIT researchers warned that the alarming trend is leading to “cognitive surrender,” effectively overriding their own intellectual agency with the output of AI.

“As AI-enabled technologies become more capable, it will be possible — and tempting — to offload more ‘thinking’ tasks to them; not surprisingly, students told us the temptation was greatest when they feared they would miss a deadline,” the report reads. “There are early signals, however, that overreliance on chatbots can have a range of significant negative consequences — diminishing critical thinking, weakening memory, eroding confidence, and undermining mastery.”

It’s a thorny subject as administrators continue to push for more AI adoption, not less. That’s despite countless educators, who’ve watched helplessly as their AI-dependent students struggle in the classroom, are bristling at the thought.

“I think you have to lean in, but you have to do so in a way that’s thoughtful and ethical and asks the right questions,” University of Hawaii president Wendy Hensel told the New York Times. “The right answer to AI is not just ‘no.’ It can’t be. It has to be approached with curiosity and understanding of the implications.”

We’ve seen study after study warning that the overreliance on AI chatbots could have devastating effects on education. Students aren’t being taught to internalize what they’ve learned, as one MIT study found last year.

“You basically didn’t engage any of the memory networks that would actually help you remember,” coauthor and MIT researcher Nataliya Kos’myna told the NYT.

At the same time, university administrators argue that preparing students for an AI-dominated future remains paramount — a belief that could risk further eroding their cognitive thinking skills.

Others are drawing a much harder line, like the University of Chicago’s school of law, which announced it was banning the use of phones, tablets, and even laptops in class for first-year courses earlier this year.

More on AI and education: College Students Using AI to Cheat Are Going to Absurd Lengths to Avoid Detection

The post MIT Report Finds That AI Is Leading to “Cognitive Surrender” Among Students appeared first on Futurism.

Meta’s Muse Is Collecting Information on Everyone in Your Life

 Meta’s Muse Is Collecting Information on Everyone in Your Life

Meta’s AI agent creates profiles of people in users’ lives even if they don’t use Muse.
BY BRUCE GILPUBLISHED OCTOBER 5, 2026, 12:05 PM ET

READING TIME 3 MINUTES

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In typical Meta fashion, the company’s popular new AI agent Muse reportedly keeps detailed, regularly updated files on the people in users’ lives.

Nearly a month after its launch, researchers are digging into how Muse works. It turns out the AI agent will openly share internal files and instructions when users ask, offering a peek at how it operates.

One of the somewhat unsettling details is an hourly process that instructs Muse to create and update “a page for every person in the user’s life,” Wired reports.

Independent AI safety and security researcher Karan Joshi extracted a trove of Muse instructions and system prompts through the app’s regular chat interface and shared the findings with Wired. Separately, The Future Society published system instructions from an exported copy of a Muse virtual machine.

“What it seemed like to me—from all these prompts, system skills data, and things that they’re feeding into Muse—is that they want to understand your relationships that you have with real people,” Joshi told Wired. “They’re trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy.”

The new details come just weeks after Meta launched Muse on Sept. 8 as a personal AI agent that can handle tasks like sending emails, booking travel, shopping, and tracking goals. To do all that, users give Muse access to a wide range of their apps and accounts. Muse has since climbed to the number-one spot on Apple’s U.S. App Store chart for free iPhone apps.

But privacy and security concerns have emerged almost immediately.

For instance, Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its site in September, saying Meta had not notified the company in advance that the agent would access its online shop. The company also raised concerns about how Muse handles customer credentials and account data.

Meta also recently patched a zero-day vulnerability in the Mac version of Muse that could allow malware already running on a user’s computer to hijack the agent and take advantage of permissions the user had previously granted it.

Now, we have a better idea of just how much Muse keeps track of about users and the people in their lives, even if those people don’t use Muse themselves.

According to system instructions published by The Future Society, these relationship pages can include a person’s name, how they are connected to the Muse user, recurring topics such as an upcoming apartment move or savings goal, and important dates like birthdays and anniversaries.

Muse can also keep a history of the relationship, including events or milestones, as well as information about how close the user is to the person, what their relationship is built on, how they interact, and what the relationship appears to need at the moment.

“For any agent to be useful and actually help you achieve your goals, it needs to have context about you and those you interact with,” a Meta spokesperson told Gizmodo in an emailed statement. “Muse gathers that based on public information and from what you’ve chosen to share, which is how it remembers the person who just sent you an invoice is in fact the plumber who you previously hired to complete some work in your bathroom or which flowers your spouse said they liked best.”

The spokesperson added that the information is stored in each user’s dedicated secure virtual machine, which Meta says cannot be accessed by other users’ agents.

The Majority of Americans Are Now Terrified of AI

The Majority of Americans Are Now Terrified of AI
Fears of apocalypse are running high.

By Frank Landymore

Published Sep 18, 2026 11:59 AM EDT
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The majority of Americans are harbouring some apocalyptic fears about AI.

According to a new Politico poll that surveyed over 2,000 adults, about two-thirds of the American public believes there’s now at least a “moderate” chance that advanced AI could destroy humanity.

Intriguingly, the prevalence of this view extends across political lines, with only slight variation. Americans who voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election were 70 percent likely to view AI as at a moderate or higher existential risk, compared to 60 percent to Trump voters.

There’s also a large contingent who’re quite fatalistic about the tech. A full 17 percent of Americans overall are “almost certain” that AI could wipe us all out, with an even split between Harris and Trump voters. Meanwhile, less than a quarter — 22 percent — said that AI posed a very small to no risk.

The poll, conducted this September, is an intriguing barometer of public sentiment as AI leaders have made alarming claims about the risks posed by their systems’ capabilities.

An Anthropic researcher stirred the pot last week when he quit the company and accused it of “gambling with our lives,” claiming that the people building the tech “earnestly believe that it could kill us all.”

As alarm brewed, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei penned a lengthy essay calling on the US’s top AI companies to cooperate on slowing down AI development, earning the endorsements of Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

There’s some real skepticism over the sincerity of the AI industry’s safety claims, but they appear to be a loud minority. Only 26 percent said they thought AI leaders were warning of AI’s existential risks as a marketing stunt, per the poll’s findings.

By and large, the public is buying what AI leaders are saying. A hefty 48 percent of Americans agreed that AI is now advanced enough that we should outright pause development.

There was more divergence here across party lines, though, with only 44 percent of Trump voters holding this view, compared to 58 percent of Harris voters. Conversely, 28 percent of Harris voters said we should continue building powerful AIs because of their potential benefits, compared to 40 percent of the president’s backers. Americans largely agree that the threat is real, but are split on how to tackle it.

What can OpenAI see?

What can OpenAI see?


(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Potentially more than simply whether you visited a website. According to Buchodi's network analysis, OpenAI's advertising collector received information associated with pages people visited and conversion events on participating sites.

The researcher examined 23,929 observed URLs and found that query strings were stripped before being sent to OpenAI, but URL paths remained.

A URL path can sometimes reveal considerable information about what someone is looking at. Buchodi says paths observed in the dataset included pages involving a medical condition, debt services and a litigation intake form.

The advertising system also supports what OpenAI calls conversion measurement.

OpenAI's own documentation says advertisers can install a pixel and use conversion measurement to understand what happens after someone interacts with a ChatGPT ad. Its measurement integrations can support conversion tracking and attribution across websites, apps and even offline activity.

That's standard practice in digital advertising. What's unusual is that the advertising platform in this case sits alongside an AI assistant where users may share substantially more personal context than they would with a traditional search engine or social network.
Is it connected to your ChatGPT account?

This is where the story gets more complicated. Buchodi found that the process used to generate the identifier included tokens labeled either account_user or anonymous.

Of 932 tokens the researcher decoded, 736 were associated with logged-in users and 196 were labeled anonymous. The researcher also found that anonymous identifiers could remain stable on the same device for at least 27 days.

However, there's an important caveat. Buchodi did not directly observe OpenAI taking an event received from an advertiser website and joining it to a person's ChatGPT account on its servers.

The researcher argues that the architecture makes such a connection possible, but that final server-side step wasn't independently observed.

So it would be premature to say OpenAI definitively attaches every page you visit on participating sites to your ChatGPT profile. What the research does demonstrate is that the same OpenAI identifier can be transmitted from participating websites back to OpenAI.

Buchodi says the identifier appeared across a number of recognizable websites during testing. On one device, the same __obi value was sent to OpenAI from 12 commercial websites using 13 separate advertising pixels. Across the larger dataset, 12 of 30 identifiers appeared with more than one advertiser, while one appeared across 10 different advertisers.

The researcher also notes several important limitations. Testing was performed using Chrome on Android, and desktop Chrome wasn't tested. Safari's anti-tracking protections block the third-party cookie mechanism described in the research, meaning it shouldn't operate the same way on Safari or other iOS browsers using Apple's WebKit.

The identifier also wasn't generated during every ChatGPT session. Buchodi estimates that roughly one in five sessions tested produced the synchronization token.
What does OpenAI say?

OpenAI hasn't publicly responded to the specific findings. Buchodi says they contacted OpenAI's press and privacy teams on September 14 and asked why __obi was classified as an analytics cookie and how it behaves when someone rejects marketing cookies.

According to the researcher, OpenAI acknowledged the inquiry and said the findings would be passed along internally but had not provided answers to those questions when the research was published.

Tom's Guide has contacted OpenAI for comment and will update this story if we hear back.

OpenAI's public documentation emphasizes that advertisers do not receive ChatGPT conversations, chat histories, memories or personal details.

The company also says it does not sell user data to advertisers, and advertisers receive aggregated reporting about things such as views, clicks and conversions.

That's an important distinction here: the research does not suggest advertisers themselves can read your ChatGPT conversations or access the __obi identifier.

Instead, the concern is about information potentially flowing in the other direction — from websites using OpenAI's advertising tools back to OpenAI.
Why this matters

Cross-site advertising measurement isn't new. In fact, Google, Meta and other advertising companies have spent years building systems designed to determine whether someone who saw or clicked an ad later visited a website or bought something. But ChatGPT introduces another dimension.

People don't just search for products using ChatGPT. They use it to discuss relationships, health concerns, finances, careers, travel plans and countless other parts of their lives.

OpenAI itself promotes ChatGPT advertising around this idea, telling advertisers that people share "richer context" in ChatGPT while exploring options and making decisions.

That's why the boundary between your ChatGPT activity and what you do elsewhere on the web matters.

For now, the evidence doesn't show that OpenAI is handing your conversations to advertisers — and OpenAI explicitly says it doesn't.

But the discovery of __obi raises a different question: how much information should be able to flow back into an AI platform after you leave it?

iPhone 18 Pro owners report touchscreen and Face ID restart bugs

 iPhone 18 Pro owners report touchscreen and Face ID restart bugs

The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max have only been on sale since Friday, but early adopters are already running into two notable issues. Some owners are reporting that the touchscreen periodically becomes unresponsive, with at least one user posting video footage on X showing repeated swipes failing to register any reaction from the display. A separate but potentially more disruptive problem involves the phones restarting unexpectedly after a failed Face ID authentication attempt, with one Reddit thread drawing more than 20 replies from users describing the same behavior. The root causes remain unclear on both fronts. The touchscreen freeze may be a software issue tied to iOS 27, with one theory pointing to an accidental simultaneous invocation of Control Center and Notification Center, though the user who originally reported the problem has disputed that explanation.

The restart issue could be connected to the redesigned, smaller Face ID sensor array Apple introduced on the iPhone 18 Pro series, but that has not been confirmed either. At least one affected owner was told by Apple Support that their specific device was simply faulty. Apple has not officially acknowledged either problem, and it is too early to gauge how widespread they actually are. Whether a software update can resolve one or both issues, or whether hardware replacements will be necessary in some cases, should become clearer as the phones get into more hands over the coming days.