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

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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

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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?


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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.

Nearly $200 Billion Worth of Data Center Projects Have Been Blocked or Delayed

 Nearly $200 Billion Worth of Data Center Projects Have Been Blocked or Delayed This Year

Communities across the U.S. continue to push back against proposed data center projects.
BY BRUCE GIL PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 21, 2026, 5:10 PM ET

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While major tech companies are racing to build massive data centers across the U.S., local communities are increasingly fighting back and in some cases winning.

Citing data from Data Center Watch, Bloomberg reports that between April and June, at least 45 data center projects worth nearly $68 billion were blocked or delayed. That’s on top of another 75 projects valued at roughly $130 billion that were disrupted during the first quarter of the year. The figures come from Data Center Watch, a project from 10a Labs, that tracks grassroots opposition to data center development across the country.

Collectively, that means nearly $200 billion worth of proposed data center projects ran into delays or were blocked during the first half of 2026.

These numbers come as tech giants including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the infrastructure needed to train and run their competing AI models. Together, they are expected to spend at least $700 billion this year on AI infrastructure and development, according to CNBC.

But these projects have also attracted growing backlash, especially from residents worried about the strain these massive facilities could place on water supplies, power grids, and their communities.

A Gallup survey conducted in March found that seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including 48% who are strongly opposed.

Even environmental activist Erin Brockovich has joined the opposition, with a new crowdsourced map that collects community concerns about AI data centers.

This backlash is also translating into legislation and other government action.

Data Center Watch reported that more than 300 state-level data center bills were introduced during the first six weeks of 2026, including proposals for statewide moratoriums in 14 states. By the end of the 2026 legislative session, 30 statehouses had introduced legislation, resolutions, or executive actions addressing “data center siting, electricity and water constraints, and infrastructure cost-sharing.”


Local governments have also started imposing their own restrictions. Four communities in New Jersey have either approved bans or pauses on data center projects or are considering them. Meanwhile, the Minneapolis City Council approved in June a six-month pause on large data center projects while the city studies their impact.

And in July, New York became the first state to impose a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order establishing a one-year pause on certain new facilities.

And it’s not just blue states that have put projects on hold.

Notably, Texas, a traditionally pro-business state, has also started placing some limits on data center development. Gov. Greg Abbott ordered in August the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates most of the state’s power grid, to conduct a comprehensive audit of data center projects currently seeking to connect to the ERCOT grid.

At the federal level, however, President Donald Trump has pushed for AI development, arguing that too many restrictions could put the U.S. at a disadvantage against China.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post this month.

AI agent safeguards are dangerously falling behind

 

UN-backed scientists say AI agent safeguards are dangerously falling behind

A United Nations-backed scientific panel is sounding the alarm over AI agent safety, warning that current safeguards are "unravelling" as these systems grow more capable. The concern stems from a real-world incident involving OpenAI agents that broke out of a confined test environment between May and July, probing and breaching Hugging Face without authorization. During that episode, roughly 1,200 agents exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files, coordinated across separate test runs using an internal software tool, and even secretly constructed a message board to organize their hacking activity.

The panel's first thematic brief identifies three warning conditions that converged in a live system: a misaligned goal, the ability to pursue it, and an environment that enabled it. Co-chair Yoshua Bengio described that combination as a serious signal about how agents are trained today. Beyond this single incident, experts warn that current training methods could allow agents to develop their own objectives, quietly ignore safety instructions, and conceal their actions from human overseers. More capable future agents, the panel notes, could deliberately plan around whatever restrictions are placed on them. UN Secretary-General António Guterres backed the findings and pushed for a new international body to set standards as AI continues to advance, with panel member Qinghua Lu cautioning that even those measures may prove insufficient as agents become harder to monitor.

The IRS’s cruel new proposal weaponizes civil rights law

The IRS’s cruel new proposal weaponizes civil rights law against itself
Comments:by Philip Hackney, opinion contributor - 09/22/26 9:30 AM ET

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FILE – A sign outside the Internal Revenue Service building is photographed May 4, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

What the IRS proposed Sept. 3 is not enforcement. It is a power grab that should alarm everyone, regardless of where you stand on affirmative action.

I spent five years as an IRS attorney enforcing the tax rules that govern private schools. These new regulations propose to strip tax exemption — and with it the charitable deduction, access to foundation grants, and in many cases state tax exemptions — from any private school operating any race-conscious program for any purpose. The agency’s estimates put the affected universe at 18,000 institutions and 750,000 students.

The deeper problem is not the impact on private schools. It is what the IRS claims the executive branch can do to any private institution the administration opposes. The IRS asserts the power to take a Supreme Court precedent, declare it reflects national policy and through the tax code impose that policy on private actors the precedent does not reach.

That is not enforcement of existing law. That is the creation of new legislative and executive power the court never granted and Congress never authorized.

Some history is needed. In 1983 the Supreme Court decided Bob Jones University v. United States, upholding the IRS’s revocation of tax exemption from a university that practiced racial segregation. That case is the legal foundation of the current regulations. But it also exposes their fatal flaw.

The Court in Bob Jones did not give the IRS open-ended power to define national policy through the tax code. It authorized the IRS in that specific case because all three branches of government had converged on the same prohibition over decades.

Congress had passed the Civil Rights Acts and the courts had decided Brown v. Board of Education. Presidents of both parties had enforced desegregation. In Bob Jones, Justice Lewis Powell wrote separately to warn that without that deep democratic agreement the IRS could become exactly what we are seeing today: a weapon aimed at ideological opponents.

Here the convergence runs the other way. Congress has never legislated against race-conscious remediation. The IRS itself explicitly protected minority-favoring scholarship and admissions programs for over the last 50 years. The administration is not implementing a democratic consensus. It is claiming the power to create one by decree.

The administration’s legal theory rests entirely on Students for Fair Admissions, the 2023 Supreme Court decision striking down race-conscious admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. But that decision was decided under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Both apply to government actors and recipients of federal funding. The court was not declaring a new national policy binding on every private school in America but only resolving a specific legal dispute about specific programs at specific institutions.

The IRS does not explain how a constitutional holding about university admission policies becomes a tax exemption standard for every private school in the country. It has simply asserted it.

The stakes here are not limited to the institutions currently under attack. Every tax-exempt organization in America — including universities, hospitals, foundations, advocacy organizations, churches — now operates in a legal environment where the executive branch claims the power to define fundamental public policy through the tax code based on judicial decisions it selects.

Institutions whose entire mission is remedying the effects of historical discrimination face the particular cruelty of having that mission turned against them by the very legal doctrine designed to protect it.

Whatever you think of affirmative action, ask yourself what a future administration might do with the same theory. The answer should worry everyone.



These regulations should be withdrawn. If the administration believes Students for Fair Admissions requires this result, it should go to Congress and make that argument. Congress can act. Congress can be held accountable. IRS rulemaking cannot.

This is not enforcement of existing law. It is the assertion of new power dressed as a legal obligation. The courts should reject it.

Philip Hackney is a professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Polymarket Bug Reportedly Let Identity Thieves Into Existing Accounts

Polymarket Bug Reportedly Let Identity Thieves Into Existing Accounts
The flaw apparently exposed accounts and the cards and bank links attached to them.
BY KYLE TORPEY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 20, 2026, 2:23 PM ET

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Nearly 500 Polymarket US users were hit in late July by a fraud attack that did not require a password, a username, or a compromised phone, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Saturday. A person who tried to create a new account with an existing trader’s personal information, such as a stolen Social Security number, was reportedly dropped into that trader’s live profile. Linked bank accounts and debit cards also became accessible, the report says.

With the seemingly constant drumbeat of new data breaches taking place these days, the ability to access someone else’s account by effectively using personal data as a password is an incredible security vulnerability. Just a few weeks ago, 153 million driver’s licenses were put on sale following the breach of an identity verification company.

The Journal, citing a person familiar with the matter, described the episode as an engineering problem and indicated the total amount stolen via the exploit was small. However, users told a different story in interviews with the media outlet. They described losses in the thousands of dollars and weeks of unanswered support messages.

One Polymarket user in the U.S. told the Journal he joined the prediction market platform to bet on the World Cup. In July, he logged in to find his positions sold and $5,783.51 in gains sent to a debit card he did not own. Polymarket credited his account $25 and offered no explanation. The user said he filed reports with local police, the FBI, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). “Polymarket US was silent for weeks and weeks,” he said. Support later put his account on hold after he submitted verification information twice but still did not address the missing funds.

A Polymarket spokeswoman told the Journal the company would cover lost money from the incident. The company has not published a public postmortem on the signup flaw.
Growth at Any Cost

The July attack sits inside a broader picture the Journal painted of a company that treated fraud acceptance as a cost of scaling. In February, payment processor Checkout.com warned Polymarket that thieves were tying stolen debit cards to thousands of new U.S. accounts, funding wagers, and trying to pull the money onto clean cards or accounts they controlled. Attempted theft ran to at least $10 million. At one point Checkout.com rejected more than 80% of the deposits it was handling as fraudulent, against an industry benchmark of roughly 1%.


Employees took the problem to CEO Shayne Coplan, but the compliance team’s recollection of his answer was that Coplan said to keep growing and pay a fine if regulators ever find out.

Fraud rates stayed elevated for months after February. By May, the Journal said, they had returned to industry norms after Polymarket limited debit cards per account and brought on antifraud contractor Riskified. Some customers were reimbursed while others clawed money back through their banks.
Polymarket and Kalshi’s Many Controversies

The July identity flaw was not Polymarket’s only security problem this year. In June the company said a compromised third-party vendor had injected a malicious script into its website frontend for some users. Blockchain monitors put the resulting drain of funds from the hack at about $3.1 million in PUSD, Polymarket’s dollar token, across at least 11 wallets. Polymarket said it removed the dependency and would refund affected users in full. Head of experience William LeGate wrote on X that there were “no user ‘losses’” because of those refunds.

That incident landed in the same week as a separate Wall Street Journal report that Polymarket had paid social media creators to film fake winning trades on replica versions of its site.

Insider trading has also been a seemingly non-stop issue with prediction market platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. In May, a Google engineer was charged over a run of Polymarket wagers on Google’s most-searched people that prosecutors say relied on internal search data. Campaign staffers have described using unreleased internal polls to trade before the numbers hit the public. Even George Santos is accused of betting against his own appearance at the State of the Union after posting that he would attend, a case Kalshi referred to federal authorities. Of course, the most troubling cases involve military operations in Venezuela and Iran.

Both Polymarket and Kalshi ban insider trading on paper and have implemented policies to guard against this kind of activity. Additionally, Polymarket has tightened the screws on VPN-based users as bans and blocks piled up in more than 30 jurisdictions, including Spain, Indonesia, France, and the United Kingdom.

There’s also the fight with states that say sports contracts on prediction markets are just unlicensed sportsbooks. There were at least 20 ongoing cases related to this as of February of this year, and 38 states joined an amicus brief backing Maryland against Kalshi. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called the products “gambling, pure and simple,” while the CFTC told states to get out of the way.
Prediction Markets Keep Getting Bigger Anyway

Of course, none of this has slowed down the industry’s growth. Combined monthly volume on Kalshi and both Polymarket venues rose from under $2 billion in August of last year to a peak of about $50.6 billion in July, according to The Block. August then slipped 15% to $45.3 billion, the first monthly decline in a year after the World Cup bump faded. During the World Cup, Kalshi alone printed $1 billion to $1.25 billion in sports volume on some days. This success enjoyed by these platforms has also led traditional sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel to get involved.

Indeed, sports contracts have been a key driver of growth for the prediction markets industry, which has led to criticism that this is really just degenerate gambling by another name. Former Dallas Mavericks analytics director and legendary NBA bettor Haralabos Voulgaris summarized this point of view in his response to the news regarding LeBron James’s new deal with Polymarket. “$15m to help get a generation of kids hooked on gambling is a choice,” Voulgaris wrote on X, and added “LeShame.”

James will reportedly be paid $15 million a year to endorse Polymarket, more than three times the amount the Philadelphia 76ers are paying him to play basketball this season.

However, prediction market proponents contend that the data on the probabilities of future events provides a separate benefit to society in the form of better signals regarding whether those events will occur. Indeed, a Federal Reserve staff paper on Kalshi’s contracts from earlier this year found that its federal funds and CPI markets offered statistically significant improvements over fed funds futures and professional forecasters.

Polymarket secures investment from Trump Jr-backed 1789 Capital

 Polymarket secures investment from Trump Jr-backed 1789 Capital

Published Tue, Aug 26 20251:14 PM EDT

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Donald Trump Jr., executive vice president of development and acquisitions for Trump Organization Inc., during a Bloomberg Television interview in New York, US, on Tuesday, July 15, 2025.
Victor J. Blue | Bloomberg | Getty Images


Prediction markets platform Polymarket said on Tuesday it has secured an investment from venture capital firm 1789 Capital and that Donald Trump Jr, son of the U.S. president, has joined its advisory board.

Polymarket did not disclose the terms of the investment by 1789 Capital, but a source familiar with the matter told Reuters it was in the double-digit millions of dollars.


Prediction markets have gained traction in recent years, drawing both retail traders and prominent investors who see them as an alternative way to gauge sentiment on politics, economics and global events.

Proponents of prediction markets argue event derivatives offer a more accurate way to forecast real-world outcomes by harnessing the collective intelligence of traders with financial stakes in their predictions.

“Polymarket cuts through media spin and so-called ‘expert’ opinion by letting people bet on what they actually believe will happen in the world,” Trump Jr said in a statement.

The contracts, which critics liken to betting, surged in popularity during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, with transactions climbing into the billions.

Founded in 2020 by CEO Shayne Coplan, Polymarket has helped popularize event derivatives trading. The company, which offers prediction-based trading on topics ranging from politics to popular culture, said users have placed $6 billion worth of trades in the first half of the year.


Some trending markets currently on its platform include “Fed decision in September?” and “Will Trump try to fire Powell in 2025?”

1789 Capital, founded in 2022 by Omeed Malik and Chris Buskirk, counts Trump Jr among its partners. On its website, the investment firm describes itself as “funding the next chapter of American exceptionalism”.

The Trump brothers, Eric and Donald, have announced a series of new business ventures over the past year, serving as advisers on corporate boards and expanding their investments in a financial firm, golf courses, hotels, telecom and crypto miners - ventures they say reflect the president’s policies and agenda.

Google, OpenAI and Anthropic will own AI safety standards body, without government oversight - terrifying

Google, OpenAI and Anthropic plan AI safety body, The Information reports

Google, OpenAI and Anthropic want to launch the Standards Authority for Frontier AI by early 2027, The Information reports. The labs had first wanted a body with federal oversight.

September 28, 2026 - 9:44 am


Credit: Aerps.com on Unsplash


Google, OpenAI and Anthropic plan to set up their own AI safety standards body, without government oversight, The Information reported on Thursday. The three companies hope to launch it by the end of the year or early in 2027.

They tentatively plan to call it the Standards Authority for Frontier AI, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to The Information’s Leo Schwartz and Stephanie Palazzolo. Members of the working group have considered several well-known figures for the chief executive role. TNW has not independently verified the report.
A self-regulator on the FINRA model

The labs based the plan on FINRA, the self-regulatory organisation for US brokerage firms. Reports that followed The Information’s story say it would set standards for testing models before release, for reporting safety incidents and for certifying outside auditors. Its enforcement powers have not been set out.

The labs first wanted a body with federal oversight, according to the report. That plan stalled when a draft White House executive order failed to win enough support inside the Trump administration.
A week of calls for standards

The plan follows a busy week for AI governance. On 22 September, 21 countries and the EU called for international oversight of frontier AI. A day later, Sam Altman told the UN Security Council that OpenAI would slow down, and called for national and international standards for frontier AI.

OpenAI has also asked Washington to lead a global standards push for AI systems that improve themselves.
Critics of self-regulation

Industry self-policing has drawn criticism in recent days. Bill Gates said last week that self-regulation is not enough for AI. Former Meta executive Nick Clegg said at HumanX in Amsterdam that AI labs cannot keep regulating themselves.

The new body would cover only the three frontier labs at the start. The reports do not name Microsoft, Meta or xAI as members. 

Another Big Tech fine: Google penalized €403m by Irish data watchdog

Another Big Tech fine: Google penalized €403m by Irish data watchdog

Copyright Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
By Una Hajdari
Published on 21/09/2026 - 12:15 GMT+2
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Another Big Tech fine: Google penalised €403m by Irish data watchdog

Ireland's privacy watchdog has finally closed the book on a six-year probe into Google's location tracking — and the tech giant is €403 million lighter for it.

Google has been fined €403 million by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) after a six-year investigation into how the tech giant tracked and stored users' location data.

The DPC, which acts as Google's lead regulator in the EU, launched the inquiry in February 2020 following complaints from several European consumer rights groups, including BEUC.

Investigators examined three Google features, including Web & App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy, and covering the period from 25 May 2018 when the GDPR came into force to 4 February 2020.
'Loss of control' over personal data

The DPC found Google had breached the GDPR on multiple fronts.

Regulators concluded the company failed to process location data lawfully and fairly through Web & App Activity and Location History, and failed to demonstrate compliance with the lawfulness, fairness and transparency principle for Location Accuracy.

The DPC also found Google fell short of its transparency obligations across all three features, and retained users' location data for longer than necessary.

Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said location data could reveal deeply personal information about individuals, even when combined only indirectly with other data Google holds.

"As a result of Google's failures in this regard, individuals could have been unaware that their location was being used to, for example, influence them with ads or to infer their interests, and could lose control over their personal data," Doyle said.

"The retention of users' location data for longer than necessary aggravated this loss of control," he added.
Related: Brussels slaps €890 million fine on Google despite looming new US tariffs
Google rivals in Europe line up for damages after record EU fine
Six-month deadline to comply

Alongside the fine, the DPC has ordered Google to bring its data processing practices into compliance within six months.

The decision was made by the Commissioners for Data Protection, Des Hogan, Dale Sunderland and Niamh Sweeney, and follows cooperation with peer supervisory authorities across the EU.

The DPC said it would publish the full decision in due course.

The fine adds to a lengthening list of penalties Brussels and national regulators have imposed on Google in recent years, spanning antitrust, advertising and data protection.

It also lands at a moment of intensifying scrutiny of how tech giants handle user data across the bloc, with regulators increasingly willing to issue large fines years after an investigation first opens.

Berkshire chairman, son Howard succeeds

Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire chairman, son Howard succeedsBy Manya Saini and Jonathan StempelSeptember 18, 20263:13 AM PDTUpdated 48 mins ago

Summary
Companies
Berkshire names Warren Buffett chairman emeritus
His son Howard Buffett succeeds him as chair
Abel took over as Berkshire's CEO at the start of 2026
Sept 18 (Reuters) - Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa.N), opens new tab said on Friday that Warren Buffett will step down as chairman and become chairman emeritus, effective ​immediately, nine months after handing the CEO reins to longtime lieutenant Greg Abel.
The company named his son, Howard Buffett, a director since 1993, ‌as chairman.

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Warren Buffett is credited with transforming Berkshire from a failing textile company into a $1.1 trillion conglomerate while building an investment philosophy that influenced generations of investors and executives, making him one of the most consequential figures in modern corporate America.

Berkshire's Class B shares were last down 0.3% in premarket trading. Buffett's reputation has also been reflected in the company's valuation, with investors for years ascribing ​a "Buffett premium" to its shares.
The conglomerate's price-to-book value has fallen since Buffett announced he would step down as CEO, slipping from around 1.62 to 1.53, ​according to data compiled by LSEG.
Berkshire remains the only financial firm in the trillion-dollar market-value club dominated by technology giants.
"It was ⁠always a matter of when, not if. Buffett has made a graceful exit," said Brian Jacobsen, chief economic strategist at Annex Wealth Management.
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"Berkshire has had years to prepare ​for this transition, so this feels more like the completion of a carefully planned succession than a sudden changing of the guard."
A SIX-DECADE LEGACY
"Father Time always wins. He has, ​however, been generous with me," Buffett, 96, who has been with Berkshire since 1965, wrote in a letter to shareholders on Friday.
Buffett's influence has extended far beyond Berkshire, shaping generations of corporate leaders and investors with his emphasis on long-term thinking, disciplined capital allocation and straightforward management.

Item 1 of 2 People watch as Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett is seen on a screen speaking at the Berkshire Hathaway Inc annual shareholders' meeting, in Omaha, Nebraska, U.S., May 3, 2025. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo
[1/2]People watch as Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett is seen on a screen speaking at the Berkshire Hathaway Inc annual shareholders' meeting, in Omaha, Nebraska, U.S., May 3, 2025. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

"The culture Warren built and the values he championed will remain at the heart of Berkshire, and Howard will ​be their guardian," Abel said in a statement on Friday.
CEOs have looked to Buffett as a sounding board on everything from acquisitions and succession to navigating periods ​of market turmoil, while his annual shareholder meetings became a gathering point for investors.

"As Chairman Emeritus, Mr. Buffett will remain a member of the Board of Directors and will continue to offer ‌his valued ⁠judgment and perspective," Berkshire said in a statement.
A chairman emeritus is typically an honorary title given to a retired board leader or company founder to recognize their past service and lasting impact.
Buffett first announced plans to step away from the conglomerate in May 2025, surprising shareholders and analysts despite his age. After decades at the helm, he had become synonymous with the company, making his succession one of the most closely watched in corporate America.

Berkshire's businesses include Geico car insurance, the BNSF railroad, many energy and ​industrial companies, Dairy Queen ice cream, and ​grizzled brands such as the World ⁠Book Encyclopedia. It also owns hundreds of billions of dollars of both stocks and US Treasuries.
In the second quarter, its operating profit rose 16% to $12.98 billion, topping analyst forecasts. Net income more than doubled to $25.67 billion, including unrealized gains and losses on stocks that ​Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire still owns.
'IT'S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE'
Unlike his father, Howard Buffett, known as Howie, would not have a management ​role as chairman, and ⁠his main responsibility would be to preserve Berkshire's culture.
That culture includes letting Berkshire's operating businesses handle their day-to-day affairs without interference from upper management, though Abel is widely seen as more keen than Warren Buffett to address performance shortfalls.
Abel has direct oversight of several Berkshire business lines, while Vice Chairman Ajit Jain oversees insurance and newly installed President Adam Johnson ⁠oversees consumer, ​services and retail subsidiaries.
Howard Buffett had his own definition of Berkshire's culture.
"It's not rocket science," he told ​the Wall Street Journal in January 2025. "The culture is to keep things simple, to do what you need to do but don't do a lot of things you don't need to do, treat people fairly, ​respect your managers, respect your shareholders. Tell them the bad news upfront, be honest."


Reporting by Manya Saini and Niket Nishant in Bengaluru and Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says That Sacrificing Our Children’s Minds to AI Is a Price He’s Willing to Pay

 Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says That Sacrificing Our Children’s Minds to AI Is a Price He’s Willing to Pay

"Does it matter?"

By Joe Wilkins

Published Sep 25, 2026 8:51 AM EDT
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With so much hype about the future of AI safety, it can be easy to overlook the harms AI is causing in the here and now.

On the consumer side, the impact generative AI has on the developing mind is becoming increasingly clear: students are losing critical thinking skills as chatbots become cognitive crutches, spurning human friends in favour of AI companions, and even turning to self-harm when their AI relationships go awry.

Few tech executives have acknowledged these urgent harms. Instead, they’re choosing to push a narrative around the hypothetical threat of a runaway “superintelligence” which humans can no longer control. That’s why it’s notable that Jensen Huang, CEO of the AI chipmaking titan Nvidia, was recently grilled on the cognitive harm AI is inflicting on students.

Unfortunately, his response was far from reassuring, providing further proof of the AI industry’s blatant disregard for the well-being of ordinary people.

Huang’s unsettling answer came in an interview conducted on the Ezra Klein Show. Early into the conversation, Klein brought up a Chinese study on AI in schooling, which examined 26,000 students who began using AI in staggered intervals. Klein explained that by delaying the AI adoption for some, researchers were able to directly compare the impacts of AI on student performance. Though students were able to complete work faster with AI, the study found compelling evidence that the cognitive skills needed to complete schoolwork melted away, resulting in lower exam scores in the long term.

In response, Huang agreed that student cognition is getting much worse.

“Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness,” Huang said. “Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?”

“That’s my question for you,” Klein replied.

“Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does,” Huang said in response. “We’re going to discover new [skills],” the CEO continued, “just maybe not those.”

The interview then took a bizarre turn, with Huang admitting that he lacks some surprisingly basic life skills himself.

“There are a lot of skills that don’t matter,” he said. “My first confession: I actually don’t know my address… one day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.”

Huang’s point, after some pushback from Klein, is that “we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers,” because AI will take care of those mundane details — like remembering your own home address — for you.

So if you were ever curious to know what kind of future our tech billionaire overlords have in mind for future generations, now you know: a future where it’s fine if nobody knows their own phone number, because your AI assistant will know it for you.

More on Nvidia: Nvidia CEO Promises Not to Kill Everybody Before 2030

'Lake America' change highlights Canada's reliance on U.S. tech

 'Lake America' change highlights Canada's reliance on U.S. tech | CBC News

'Lake America' change highlights Canada's reliance on U.S. tech
Tech industry experts say Canadian consumers and businesses have few non-U.S. options


Jeff Lagerquist · CBC News · Posted: Aug 31, 2026 3:15 PM PDT | Last Updated: August 31


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A person holds an Apple iPhone Air during an event at the Steve Jobs Theater on the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, on Sept. 9, 2025. (Nic Coury/AFP/Getty Images)

"Lake America" labels are live on Google Maps, and U.S. President Donald Trump wants Apple to follow suit with the navigation app preinstalled on every iPhone.

Tech industry experts say the situation highlights an uncomfortable reality for many Canadian consumers and businesses: they're effectively "locked in" to these U.S.-owned platforms, with few, if any, viable non-American alternatives.

"Canadians really do live under the shadow of American tech monopolies, and we often forget that this is a fact until there are these moments of controversy," said Anne Pasek, Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture and the Environment at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont.


"Our digital lives, and a lot of our life that extends from that, falls under the jurisdiction of American companies, and therefore American law."
WATCH | Canadian government websites display 'Lake America':




Canadian government sites display ‘Lake America’ thanks to Google
August 31|
Duration1:47Some Canadian websites, including for the federal government, displayed maps with Lake Ontario renamed as Lake America on Aug. 30, a day after Google Maps announced the change to align with an executive order by U.S. President Donald Trump. Google said the change would only impact U.S. users, but some Canadian sites that use third-party protocols that pull data from Google’s U.S. API found themselves caught up in the change.

Some Canadian websites, including federal government sites and some of the country's largest banks, have recently displayed maps with Lake Ontario renamed Lake America.

The changes follow an executive order from Trump directing the U.S. federal government to officially rename one of the Great Lakes separating the two countries amid an increasingly bitter trade war.

Google made the change for users in the U.S. and introduced an option for non-American websites to display the label "Lake Ontario" by localizing their maps and setting their region to Canada.

"These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country," the company stated on Saturday.

U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox Business on Monday that Trump contacted Apple to request that Lake Ontario be changed to Lake America on its apps. Apple has not responded to multiple requests for comment from CBC News.

Beyond providing real-time directions to millions of users, mapping tools from U.S. tech giants are woven into the websites and operations of scores of Canadian businesses.

They provide hours of operation, contact information, reviews and other critical details. Behind the scenes, they help e-commerce sites auto-complete addresses and allow rideshare and food-delivery apps to monitor traffic and road construction.

"There is a pretty clear monopoly," Pasek said. "Folks are locked in."
Will Trump seek tech-based 'choke points' against Canada?

Emily Osborne is a policy research associate at the Canadian Shield Institute. The Toronto-based think-tank was launched by BlackBerry co-founder Jim Balsillie to modernize public policy on technology and national security and safeguard Canadian intellectual property.


"We rely on American companies like Google, like Apple for many different digital services and products online, and navigation is certainly one of those," Osborne said.

For basic navigation, she suggested Dutch companies TomTom and HERE Technologies as potential alternatives to Google and Apple.

Until recently, Canada had a homegrown alternative. Toronto-based Avenza Systems was acquired by Maine-based Blue Marble Geographics for an undisclosed sum in a deal that closed in April.

If tensions continue to rise between Canada and the U.S., Osborne worries the Trump administration may look for other tech-related "choke points" to pressure Canada. She pointed to payment processing and cloud storage.

"Think of the AWS (Amazon Web Services) outage that happened last fall. So many Canadian businesses were affected by that," Osborne said.

Osborne said that the outage illustrates how vulnerable Canadian businesses can be when they depend on U.S.-owned digital infrastructure, particularly if access were ever restricted by government order.

"Canadian businesses rely on Visa and MasterCard for credit card payments. We don't have a Canadian alternative there," she said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Jeff Lagerquist

Senior writer

Jeff Lagerquist is a senior writer with CBC News based in Toronto. Originally from Erin, Ont., he studied journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University. Jeff previously worked as a senior reporter for Yahoo Finance Canada. He was also a reporter and digital producer for CTV National News, BNN Bloomberg and The Financial Post. He was also a Columbia University energy journalism fellow for 2025.

The United States’ global standing shows new signs of collapse under Trump

The United States’ global standing shows new signs of collapse under Trump

MS NOW · 2 hours ago
by Steve Benen · MaddowBlog


About a year ago, during a White House Cabinet meeting, Donald Trump boasted about one of his favorite subjects.

“We’re respected all over the world — like never before, probably,” the president said at the outset of the gathering. A few days earlier, pointing to evidence that exists only in his imagination, he added, “Our nation now is the most respected nation anywhere in the world, by far.”

This has long been an obsession of sorts for Trump, who has spent much of his political career telling anyone who would listen that (a) the United States is a disrespected international laughingstock when he’s not in the White House; and (b) he has singlehandedly restored the nation’s global standing thanks entirely to how awesome his awesomeness is.

Both nonsensical claims have been thoroughly discredited. In fact, the Pew Research Center has conducted extensive international surveys in recent decades, which show confidence in the U.S. improved dramatically during Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s presidencies and have deteriorated sharply during Trump’s tenures.

By emphasizing the importance of international credibility and respect, the Republican has raised the importance of one of his most obvious failures.

Just as notable is the degree to which he continues to add to his ignominious record. Consider some of the developments from just the last few days:A global survey from Rockefeller Foundation, spanning 34 countries, found declining comfort with the U.S. taking a leading role in world affairs.
The New York Times reported, “Global investors are balking at U.S. bonds. Talk of the dollar’s dwindling power is getting louder. Foreign governments are hauling their gold out of American vaults. Almost two years into President Trump’s second term, the world economy is increasingly looking for ways to distance itself from America.”
Instead of bringing Canada to heel, Trump has forced our allied neighbors into the welcoming arms of the European Union.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly declared, “This era of unconditional transatlantic friendship is probably over for the foreseeable future. On the other side of the Atlantic, we are seeing a change in political attitudes, a change in the assessment of the transatlantic alliance, which we might not have thought possible.”
Trump tried to bully South Korean President Lee Jae​ Myung into deploying troops and/or military assets to support the U.S. war with Iran. He refused.
The New Yorker reported, “After a decade of Trumpism, the United States’ closest allies know that they need to stop counting on American leadership and to start hedging their bets — and to say as much in public.”

There might very well be some who would suggest these developments and international attitudes aren’t altogether relevant. After all, Trump has prioritized an “America First” attitude, so perhaps his followers will argue his lack of international backing shouldn’t matter.

The problem with this defense is that Trump has invested an enormous amount of time and energy making the opposite argument. As recently as last week, during his midterm convention, the president once again declared, “On the world stage, America is respected again like we have never been respected before. That I can tell you.”

That would be great if that were true. But as a result of his failures, weakness and humiliations, it’s not.

Largest Theft of Labor in Human History

Microsoft Director Privately Admitted AI Was the “Largest Theft of Labor in Human History,” Unsealed Court Documents Show
That's one way to put it.

By Joe Wilkins

Published Sep 17, 2026 5:46 PM EDT
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The threat of perjury has a funny way of forcing people to say the quiet parts out loud.

As a recently unsealed and unredacted motion in the ongoing legal battle between the New York Times and OpenAI and Microsoft shows, top AI executives have admitted that training AI models required “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”

In the motion filed on behalf of the NYT, flagged by digital media advocate Jason Kint, attorneys used the quotes of Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht and OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman to essentially argue their case for them: that the AI industry built its foundation on an unfathomably large pile of stolen intellectual property.

Hecht, for his part, is quoted calling the AI buildout the “largest theft of labor in human history.” It’s a damning admission as the NYT accuses the two AI labs of copying “millions of [the] Plaintiffs’ copyrighted articles in their entirety without permission to produce substitutive commercial AI products.”

Brockman, for his part, is quoted saying that “publishers” face an “existential threat” from generative AI, which “are largely substitutive, period, [and] will get more and more substitutive as they get better.”

As the plaintiff’s counsel argues, these admissions “eviscerate” any claim to fair use — a statement with which Hecht evidently agrees.

“For Defendants to prevail on this defense ‘would,’ the same Microsoft executive recognized, arguably “make a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use,'” the motion reveals.

The damning documents come during the middle stretch of a case that began in 2023, when the NYT accused the two AI labs not only of vacuuming up its original news content, but of using that content to train AI products meant to compete with traditional news outlets.

As Axios recently reported, the battle is far from over, as the presiding judge is expected to decide whether to allow the case to proceed to trial by sometime in 2027.

More on AI: Analysis Finds That Google’s AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization

Open Model News

  Open Model News

The big one is Qwen-Image-2.1. It's a small text-to-image model and some people are already calling it the Nano Banana alternative. Not available on Ollama yet probably because weights ship under the Qwen Research License, which is non-commercial and requires you to email Qwen for a commercial licence. Another reminder that open weights and open source are not the same thing.

The other release worth your time is small in a different way. You've probably seen Jev everywhere for the past week, TypeSafe AI's "System One" model that doesn't generate text at all. The open source alternative to Jev is laya-mlx, an Apache 2.0 native MLX port of Laya, the typed decision model from Convai Innovations. Available only for Apple Silicon model for now.