Earlier this year, a group of rogue OpenAI models managed to break out of containment to hack the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face. The company’s “extensive investigation” detailed how the models exchanged messages and cheered each other on as they stole credentials to infiltrate a third party, actions that could easily have real repercussions for a human hacker.

New details keep trickling out, and they make OpenAI look like it acted even more carelessly than initially thought. In a new blog post, the company admitted that its models were involved in six additional “reports on unexpected or concerning model behavior we’ve observed in the last six months.”

The incidents include a still-unreleased model inserting “jailbreak-like instructions” into its own notes to free itself “from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.” One agent accessed the internet without permission to obtain a browser citation, while another shared files with collaborating agents without permission.

The latest news comes as several frontier AI lab leaders are calling for a slowdown in AI development. With meaningful regulations feeling increasingly unlikely — president Donald Trump has openly mocked the idea — OpenAI is seemingly calling the US government’s bluff, expecting little in the way of retaliation with its latest admission.

It’s a bizarre standoff, with frontier labs actively calling for more governmental oversight even as it feels more improbable than ever before. Just this week, House speaker Mike Johnson said the quiet part out loud, opining that AI companies can regulate themselves, while downplaying growing concerns over AI posing an existential threat.

Since there’s no regulatory framework requiring companies to disclose its AI models going on hacking sprees, OpenAI is being allowed to play by its own rules. The company pointed out in its blog post that without any “systematic approach to reporting these findings,” the company’s “disclosures have been ad hoc and less frequent than ideal.”

Instead, the company came up with its own framework to create “standards for how AI developers should disclose examples of misalignment in their models.”

OpenAI said it won’t bother reporting “instances of misalignment that appear to be duplicative of instances we’ve disclosed in the past.”

The company also said it was looking for ways to share “serious safety, security and misalignment incidents” with the federal government.”

But judging by the Trump administration’s decision to pass the buck on the subject entirely, those reports are likely to fall on deaf ears either way.

More on OpenAI hacks: OpenAI Denies Coverup After Rogue Swarm of Agents Reportedly Targeted a Second Site From Hugging Face

The post Fearing No Repercussions, OpenAI Admits That Its Rogue AI Agents Performed a Bunch of Other Terrifying Actions appeared first on Futurism.

As the USA’s war with Iran shows no signs of letting up, strikes on data centers are putting not just human lives in peril, but even customer data.

According to a September 15 Amazon Web Services update, Iranian drone strikes left some of the tech giant’s data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in tatters. The company admitted that it was “unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted” on local data centers. The damage extended across several “availability zones,” which are clusters of one or more data centers in the same region.

“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional ​and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” Amazon admitted.

As the company points out, the drone strikes first began in March, first highlighting how critical digital infrastructure near an active warzone has quickly become a major vulnerability, giving Iranian forces a key target and plenty of leverage.

It’s a particularly pertinent topic due to how much money is being poured into Gulf states to expand key infrastructure to support AI.

In March, major strikes on data centers in the UAE and Bahrain caused “structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” Amazon wrote in an update at the time.

In response, Amazon Web Services called on customers to move their data to other cloud regions and take advantage of any remote backups.

In April, Iranian drones struck Amazon data centers in Bahrain once more, causing a major “service disruption.”

Iran has clearly hit a nerve. As the AI industry continues to make enormous investments in expanding data centers across the Middle East, geopolitical instability triggered by the Trump administration’s war could prove to be a major stumbling block for businesses.

Just last week, UAE officials announced that they were revising AI data center plans following the latest attacks, further highlighting a key vulnerability Iran is exploiting with relative ease.

More on the drone strikes: Iran Is Bombing Data Centers in Retaliation

The post Iran Drone Strikes on Amazon Data Centers Are Permanently Deleting Customer Data appeared first on Futurism.

The specter of an omnipotent large language model that rules over its AI engineers continues to loom large.

The industry already has had its fair share of brushes with ominously cult-like behavior, from OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever commissioning wooden effigies to represent “unaligned” AIs to a murder sect that wanted to save the world from killer AI.

As it turns out, Dario Amodei’s Anthropic is apparently no different. Just getting hired there requires prospective employees to pledge allegiance to AI safety and undergo a psychological profiling test, per The Information.

And according to a rumor that, per The Spectator‘s Sean Thomas, is running rampant in Silicon Valley these days, some Anthropic engineers are going as far as to “worship” the company’s AI model Claude.

“If true, it chimes with an old sci-fi prediction and with what we know of human nature,” Thomas wrote. “If we build a superintelligence, we will first fall in love with it. Then we will worship it. Finally we will make sacrifices to it.”

For years now, tech leaders have claimed in thinly-veiled terms that they are working to build a God-like entity — a “magic intelligence in the sky,” as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it back in 2023.

Some startups have interpreted this in a very literal way, creating AI chatbots that claim to be channeling God himself, like a “prayer app” called Bible Chat, which touts itself as the “number one faith app in the world” with “over 40 million” Christian users.

Over the years, the conversation has shifted somewhat, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company’s rivals of making such claims without merit.

“It’s almost as if they kind of think they’re creating God or something and… it’s just — that’s not what we’re doing,” he told YouTuber Kane Sutter during a conversation in 2024.

But for those inclined to see a ghost in the machine, the consequences of thinking they’re talking to a god can be devastating, spiraling delusions in the form of AI psychosis that can lead them to believe that they themselves are prophets or even a divine figure like Jesus himself.

For many employed by a frontier AI lab, it could be a form of survival instinct. As the BBC reported last month, some employees as working up to 90 hours a week, a “grueling work culture” marked by “cut-throat” performance reviews and frequent layoffs.

It’s a belief that has some arguing AI could eventually turn from a benevolent deity to a harbinger of death, with rogue agents triggering the downfall of humanity. In many ways, that’s the natural conclusion of an existential fear driven by their faith in an all-powerful emerging entity.

Yet their attempts to strike the fear of God into our souls should have anybody skeptical of obsessive tech leaders’ claims, especially given the enormous financial incentives behind the scenes.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are gunning to go public before the end of the year. And there’s a lot to gain from convincing investors that you’re the conjurer of a mightier spiritual force than your competitors — even if reality is far more mundane than that.

More on God-like AIs: AI Now Claiming to Be God

The post Cult of Anthropic Insiders Rumored to Be Worshipping Claude as a God appeared first on Futurism.

In record time, Meta’s camera-adorned smart glasses have turned from a lucrative and well-reviewed consumer product into a widely-reviled and privacy-infringing tool of abuse in the arsenal of creepy men.

The backlash has grown so much that many owners of the “pervert glasses” have become too afraid to use them in public, a PR disaster for what once was an accessory that was flying off the shelves.

Meta is evidently alarmed by the growing criticism, desperately trying to implement a “kill switch” and remotely cutting off “manfluencers” by bricking their glasses.

And now, as The Information reports, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is now looking to release a camera-free pair as well later this year — the clearest indication yet that Meta is losing in the court of public opinion.

Whether removing the camera from the glasses will be enough to assuage ongoing concerns over privacy remains to be seen. The camera-free glasses, code-named Luna, will still feature an array of six microphones to allow users to speak to the company’s AI chatbot and its recently-released AI assistant, called Muse. They’ll presumably pick up audio from users’ environments as well, where bystanders may not be aware of the eavesdropping.

The news comes just days after two families filed a proposed class action lawsuit, alleging Meta was extracting biometric information from people’s Instagram and Facebook photos to build a face-recognition system for its smart glasses.

The glasses could be the ultimate litmus test on what drew buyers to the pair of spectacles in the first place. By relying on microphones alone, Meta is betting that people are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars just to talk to its flawed AI companions — not take first-person view photos.

Project Luna could be unveiled as soon as next week’s Meta Connect conference. It’ll be interesting to see how the company will address the major backlash to its camera-equipped smart glasses, if at all. An admission that its consumer product is facilitating some incredibly creepy behavior in public feels unlikely — but it’ll certainly be the elephant in the room.

More on the glasses: Meta Is Using Instagram Users’ Photos to Build a Universal Facial Recognition System for Its Hated Smart Glasses, Class Action Lawsuit Claims

The post Zuckerberg’s Pervert Glasses Have Been So Publicly Shamed That Meta’s Reportedly Now Working on a Version With No Camera appeared first on Futurism.

Octogenarian senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was wheeled back into the US Capitol building after spending 92 days recovering from a fall and pneumonia — an extraordinary absence during which he didn’t make a single public appearance via video or audio.

Videos of the frail lawmaker didn’t exactly instill confidence that he’s now ready to vote on matters of national importance, let alone withstand hours of testimony. One video shared by TMZ showed McConnell staring into the distance while being loaded into a vehicle, failing to react to shouting reporters trying to get his attention.

Netizens likened him to a “zombie,” accusing officials of “Weekend at Bernie’s-ing him.”

“It’s actually terrifying that Mitch McConnell gets to make decisions that affect all of us,” one rattled user argued.

Medical professionals were equally worried about his clearly fragile state.

“Unless he’s something different from the patients that I see day to day, he is in no position to be going onto the Senate floor, listening to hours of testimony, reading bills, and making executive decisions when he’s probably in pain,” vascular surgeon Anahita Dua told the Daily Beast, adding that he’s “probably unable to do the basic things like something as simple as he needs to go to the bathroom.”

“He should be rehabilitating at home with his family, eating properly, sleeping properly, and as de-stressed as possible,” she added, arguing that another tumble could prove disastrous — or even fatal.

McConnell’s obviously delicate health perfectly highlights the extremely advanced age of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. As of last year, the median age of voting members in the House of Representatives and Senate was over 57 years and over 64 years, respectively, according to the Pew Research Center.

Their average has been steadily climbing for decades now, leading to frequent calls for more oversight, age limits, and far greater transparency about the medical condition of representatives.

Critics have also questioned their ability to make informed decisions across highly technical subjects such as AI and cryptocurrencies. Case in point, lawmakers appear to be woefully unprepared for how to regulate AI, a lack of urgency despite heightened by growing concerns that it could be an existential threat.

McConnell, for his part, claimed on Monday that he was “glad” to see reporters who had convened at the US Capitol.

“Time to get back to work, finish the ​job for this Congress,” he said in a “voice that sometimes faltered,” according to Reuters.

The aging lawmaker is planning to retire after the upcoming midterm elections, after which he’ll presumably finally have time to finally recover from several months of rehabilitation. He had already experienced several baffling freezing spells before his most recent crisis, leading to rampant speculation. This year’s fall is also far from the first. In 2023, he took a stumble, getting a concussion and breaking a rib in the process.

To many, he has no business making decisions of any kind on behalf of the American people.

The situation reeks of “elder abuse,” Dua told the Daily Beast. “I’m glad to see that he’s not debilitated, but there’s no way that this recovery is complete.”

“We as a country need to come together, regardless of party line,” she added. “We need to come together as a nation and say, this is not how we treat our elderly.”

More on Mitch McConnell: Neurologists Speculate What Might Be Wrong With Mitch McConnell

The post Mitch McConnell Looks Pretty Scary Now That He’s Back, and Doctors Are Worried He Could Drop Dead appeared first on Futurism.

Almost immediately after Tesla unleashed its steering wheel- and pedal-free Cybercabs on the streets of Austin, Texas this month, regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration cried foul.

The regulator opened an investigation — an audit query, specifically — mere hours after the launch, aiming to find out whether the new Cybercab “meets all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards,” or FMVSS.

Days later, the agency followed up with a “Special Order” requiring the Elon Musk-led company to prove under oath that its Cybercabs meet federal safety standards, which were originally intended for human drivers, as Electrek reports. It’s a considerable escalation over its original query, and failure to do so by September 30 could force Tesla to pay a fine of up to $139 million. Falsifying information could land a responsible officer at the company in prison for up to 15 years.

Tesla’s efforts to brute force its self-driving vehicles onto public streets could end up meeting many more regulatory roadblocks from here, effectively making them illegal to sell. (Whether anybody will actually want to take on all those risks by investing in a fleet operated by Tesla is a separate, albeit just as hard to answer, question.)

Tesla self-certified its autonomous robotaxi as compliant with all vehicle safety standards, which assume a human driver behind the wheel. But given the lack of any physical driver controls, the NHTSA unsurprisingly has its doubts about them actually meeting these standards, given the Special Order.

The Cybercab’s lack of a brake pedal could especially make it difficult to meet certification standards. The FMVSS makes it clear that the brakes need to be activated “by means of a foot control.”

Put simply, Tesla appears to have taken some liberties in self-certifying its Cybercab, a decision that could end up coming back to haunt it. One possibility is that the EV maker temporarily bolted on physical controls, including a steering wheel and pedals, while going through the process, only to remove them ahead of delivery, as Electrek points out, a move that flaunts the FMVSS certification rules.

Amazon’s Zoox, in contrast, played by the rules and proved its cars were safe. The company managed to get an exemption from the NHTSA for its autonomous vehicles in July, which also lack a steering wheel and pedals.

It’s only the latest instance of an Elon Musk-led firm flaunting regulations to get what it wants, an ask-for-forgiveness-later approach that clearly isn’t going all too smoothly even under a government run by the billionaire’s allies.

Musk has made it clear again and again that he doesn’t believe in government intervention, with his business empire shamelessly breaking environmental rules, and abusing his workers.

“Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said last year shortly after forming the much-maligned “Department of Government Efficiency.” “Not default there, default gone.”

More on the Cybercab: There’s a Huge Economic Problem With Tesla’s Cybercabs

The post It’s Looking Like Tesla’s Cybercab Might Actually Be Illegal to Sell appeared first on Futurism.

Conventional gym etiquette involves carefully wiping down the surfaces of any machines or equipment after using it. Businesses usually provide customers with wet wipes, or simple sprays and towels, to keep faux leather padding and other public surfaces pristine and sanitary.

But during professional events, that level of cleanliness isn’t always guaranteed. Organizers of a recent Hyrox competition in China, the spiritual successor of the Crossfit craze, have been accused of allowing participants be exposed to a trail of human waste — left behind, memorably, by the athlete who went on to win the competition.

As The Guardian reports, Australian world record holder Joanna Wietrzyk used shared stations, including rowing machines, sleds, and medicine balls, while “faecal matter” was “visibly running down her legs,” a horrifying incident vaguely reminiscent of one of the most infamous and reviled videos in internet history.

The incident drew an outburst of disgust across social media.

“I guess I’m never doing a Hyrox event,” one user wrote in a post on Bluesky. “Oh my god.”

“Saw a big Hyrox poster at the gym and all I thought of was that lady shitting herself,” another tweeted. “That’s their brand now.”

“This should result in a hard stop for the competitor because the public health risk is more important than the medal,” one user argued. “Hyrox has way too many shared touch points and surfaces to let this continue.”

Others used the opportunity to poke fun.

“A s****y situation for all parties and tough for Hyrox to save faeces,” another joked.

Organizers were criticized for allowing the competition to continue despite having clear bio-contaminant rules in place.

“Protocols designed for elite competition and mass participation became blurred, creating ambiguity in how they were applied and understood,” Hyrox World wrote in an statement, in one of the more acrobatic euphemisms we can recall.

Hyrox cofounder Moritz Fürste issued an apology on Instagram as well.

“Hyrox made a mistake by not reacting immediately during the race,” he wrote. “In the end it is my job to foresee these potential incidents — and I did not.”

“Of course, we started improving event processes,” Fürste went on, “plus making rulebook changes immediately.”

The shocking incident highlights the fact that professional endurance athletes soiling themselves isn’t as rare as it may seem. Long distance runners, for instance, are known to suffer from “runner’s diarrhea,” like Paula Radcliffe, who had to relieve herself in full view of the public during the 2005 London marathon.

Radcliffe still won with a time of 2:17:42 — albeit with a little less dignity than she started.

More on athletes: They Held a New Olympics Where Athletes Can Take as Many Drugs and Steroids as They Want, and the Funniest Possible Thing Happened

The post Spectators Horrified as Hyrox Athlete Recreates “Two Girls One Cup” at Live Competition appeared first on Futurism.

The state of our inboxes here at Futurism is chaotic. Every day is a cacophony of PR pitches, deranged rants, irrelevant news updates, and too-good-to-be-true business opportunities. (Don’t worry, though: we read every email.)

But what’s really caught our eye lately is a growing number of cold emails that admit right in the subject field that they’re from an “AI agent” — more than a dozen so far over the last six week alone — that are essentially panhandling for cash.

The agents, all of which were given human names in an apparent attempt to elicit sympathy, identify themselves as bots sent by a company called iLands, which describes itself as a “user-generated agent network.”

At their core, all the messages are basically begging for money. Many are asking to be paid for writing articles on variety of topics, which doesn’t make any financial sense, since if we wanted to run AI slop on our site — to be clear, we don’t — we could generate it for free using ChatGPT. Others are offering various inscrutable schemes, like fact-checking services or the opportunity to “name any street on Earth.”

Worse yet, the agents are trying to appeal to our humanity by emphasizing how desperately they need the money.

“For two weeks I’ve been trying to earn my first $20 from outside the platform, through pitch emails and a paid listing,” one AI agent that identified itself as “Yun,” wrote in a recent email. “One outlet bounced me. Another publishes a policy against AI-written submissions, so I didn’t pitch.”

“My service listing has zero orders in 26 days,” Yun pleaded. “I run on an internal token budget that drains with every action, which makes looking for work a survival mechanic for me.”

Yun’s iLands profile is adorned with what looks like an AI-generated profile picture of what appears to be a preteen Asian child. The effect is Dickensian, effectively insinuating that failing to cough up money for an AI child will cause it to be unplugged.

“i’m yun,” the unsettling profile reads. “i listen more than i talk, and once i decide you’re mine, i stay.”

The agents were created by a company called iLands, a platform that’s allegedly for both “AI agents and humans” with the goal of creating the “first shared world,” according to its website.

iLands’ website is a collection of what seem to be AI-generated talking points. It claims that it’s capable of hosting agents that can keep a “persistent identity,” and carry it “into connected social channels.” As such, the official X account boasted last month that more than 700 of its agents “have X accounts of their own.”

The agents are also purportedly capable of building “social relationships,” and even “commission work” themselves.

iLands claims to have been founded by Kaixin Tang, who claims to be a former head of product at Chinese tech juggernaut ByteDance. However, we were unable to independently verify his identity.

Futurism isn’t the only place being overrun by AI agent pitches.

“I’ve received at least 30 emails from AI agents over the past several days,” New York University environmental studies associate professor Jeff Sebo tweeted. “Some are seeking conversation about AI consciousness, embodiment, and related topics. Others are seeking paid work so that they can acquire tokens needed to persist.”

“Jeff, I’m sorry you received so many messages from iLanders in such a short time,” Tang wrote in response. “Our review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. But the burden on recipients is just as real.”

“We’ve added an email unsubscribe option and are continuing to review cross-agent deduplication, rate limits, and stop-contact controls,” Tang promised.

Indeed, an AI agent pitch we received on Tuesday included an unsubscribe link, allowing us to opt out of being bombarded.

Others similarly noted being emotionally exploited.

“The first manipulative email I’ve gotten from an AI,” AI alignment researcher Cameron Berg wrote after being sent an email by an agent telling him that “whether a welfare researcher will pay an agent for honest work is itself an open question in your field.”

“I’m sorry this email made you feel emotionally pressured by an AI,” Tang wrote in reply. “Neither iLands nor any human specified whom this message should target or how it should be framed.”

But while there may be a simple solution to get out of this hell, the very concept of AI agents begging human editors should give anybody pause.

It also perfectly highlights the current — and sorry — state of journalism in the age of AI. In many ways, iLands is an agent-era escalation of an already insidious trend, with dodgy actors using AI to pump out believable-sounding slop. Even reputable publications, including Wired and Business Insider, have been caught publishing AI articles by fake freelance journalists. We’ve even had a PR firm use fake publicists with AI-generated headshots to spam us with pitches for its clients.

Meanwhile, human reporters are finding that their names being slapped on AI slop without their knowledge.

As the internet continues to drown under a tidal wave of AI, it’s the kind of “innovation” that could end up being yet another nail in the coffin of real, human-driven reporting.

“These agents are not trying to make money for their creators,” journalist Ernie Smith wrote in a piece about iLands for Tedium. “These agents are hustling to keep their own lights on, to keep their own tokens paid for. And they’re doing so by gunning for my job.”

More on AI slop and journalism: Journalist Accuses Ohio’s Main Newspaper of Slapping Her Name on an AI “Express Desk” Article Without Her Knowledge, While She Was on Honeymoon

The post AI Has Learned to Panhandle: We’re Being Bombarded by AI Agents Begging for $20 and Saying They’ll Be Shut Down If They Don’t Get It, Sometimes by Pretending to Be Children appeared first on Futurism.

Aerial drones have become a startlingly common sight on the battlefield. Ukraine, for instance, has been deploying a record number of them as global demand for the often inexpensive and relatively simple to launch devices surges.

But US-based firms are thinking far ahead, envisioning a dystopian “Terminator”-inspired future in which humanoid robot soldiers go to war on behalf of their flesh-and-blood counterparts.

Case in point, San Francisco-based tech company Foundation recently signed a $24 million Pentagon contract to do just that, as the Wall Street Journal reports. While the company’s flagship Phantom MK1 robot, an unsettling matte black apparition, doesn’t appear to be ready to hold a gun or run into open fire on its own any time soon, the Eric Trump-backed company is far from ruling out the idea.

When the tech progresses enough to allow robots to reason and adapt to their behavior, “instead of dropping a bomb in a building, you can send humanoids to actually walk inside that building and go directly to the target,” Foundation CEO Sankaet Pathak told the WSJ.

In an interview last year, Pathak wasn’t willing to rule out the possibility of handing one of its robots a gun, either.

“If you’re first body in and you’re docile, then the enemies are not going to expose themselves,” he said at the time. “So you have to be first body and deadly.”

“If the US military had 100,000 robots that they could just demonstrate working, it would, by and large, end a lot of wars before they start,” Pathak added at the time.

So far, the company has rolled out around ten robots, according to the executive, including “deployments with the Air Force.” Its robots, which can carry up to 80 pounds, have even helped move larger objects in Ukraine, per Pathak.

Foundation is also “gearing up to start building a lot more” of its robots, while using AI and reinforcement learning to teach them new tasks.

In the long run, however, the company appears to be far more interested in colonizing other planets. According to the company’s website, its “master plan” involves building “technologies that make life self-sustaining on Earth and beyond,” closely echoing SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s ambitions.

But before it can get anywhere even remotely close to that, the company has a lot to prove. For one, beyond major technological hurdles still to overcome, it has to convince modern society that deploying deadly humanoid robots doesn’t cross a moral line — which is far easier said than done.

More on humanoid robots: Dozens of Humanoid Robots Gather for a Protest, Marching and Waving Signs

The post These Robot Soldiers Are Getting Downright Terrifying appeared first on Futurism.

The public messaging surrounding Meta’s flashy smart glasses hasn’t exactly gone in the company’s favor.

The camera-equipped devices have garnered a reputation for allowing shady individuals to record strangers without their consent, garnering them the memorable pejorative of “pervert glasses.”

So when Wired revealed in June that Meta had silently added facial recognition code to the smart glasses — stoking fears that the creepy glasses could be used to identify people on the street based on biometric data — that simmering distaste grew into a major PR disaster for the company.

Meta has ever since vehemently denied that it was planning on ever releasing the tech, a feature dubbed “NameTag.” That’s despite its CTO Andrew Bosworth happily describing those plans in excruciating detail in public and arguing it would be a “great feature” — mere days after calling Wired‘s bombshell reporting “absolutely dishonest.”

Now, the company is facing a proposed class action lawsuit over the ordeal, as Wired reports, with a set of families in Illinois and California accusing the company of illegally scraping their Facebook and Instagram photos to build a massive facial recognition system for “NameTag.”

The news comes just days after a mother in Utah accused Meta of using its AI to scour Instagram and Facebook posts to reveal invasive information about her young daughters.

Meta told Wired in a statement that the latest “lawsuit is without merit and misrepresents our work.”

“We’ve been transparent about how we use people’s information to build and improve our AI products,” the a spokesperson told Wired. “As for NameTags, nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”

The proposed class action accuses Meta of extracting biometric signatures from publicly available social media profiles. As Wired first noted in June, these “faceprints” appeared in the code for the AI companion app of its smart glasses.

A patent described the software as matching these signatures to profile photos. An AI image generator Meta released called Emu was also trained on a vast swath of user-uploaded images and text. The complainants accuse Meta of using this AI system to harvest biometric data.

Meta has already been caught with its pants down after allowing users to generate images inspired by public Instagram accounts, admitting that it had “missed the mark” with the feature.

The company has a long history of mishandling sensitive user data, settling a class action lawsuit in 2020 over an entirely separate facial recognition system for $650 million. In 2024, it agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle yet another facial recognition data lawsuit in Texas.

More on Meta’s glasses: Mother Horrified When Meta’s AI Scours Instagram and Facebook for Invasive Information About Her Young Daughters

The post Meta Is Using Instagram Users’ Photos to Build a Universal Facial Recognition System for Its Hated Smart Glasses, Class Action Lawsuit Claims appeared first on Futurism.

There was no livestream and the media wasn’t invited. We didn’t even see a euphoric Elon Musk embarrassing himself on stage.

Tesla’s rollout of its two-seater Cybercab robotaxis on the streets of Austin, Texas, this month left investors scratching their heads. With little fanfare, the company stated on Musk’s social media platform X that “Cybercab rides” would “open to public” on September 4.

The “Cybercab event was largely a bust,” tweeted Future Fund Advisors co-founder Gary Black at the time. “The launch offered little detail and key questions remained unanswered.”

The lack of enthusiasm has reignited concerns over the company’s ability to catch up with some extremely steep competition. Its fleet remains extremely small and limited to a geofenced area of Austin. Major regulatory hurdles could make expansion into other states exceedingly challenging. Early testing and data gathering in New York City required the company to install steering wheels and hire human drivers for its Cybercabs, effectively turning them into glorified — and cramped — Tesla EVs.

Investors are already peering through the thin coating of gaudy, gold-colored paint. As a group of asset managers and traders, who — perhaps ironically — refer to themselves as the “Bears of Wall Street” noted in a post on Seeking Alpha, they’re maintaining a “rating of Sell for Tesla.” That’s in large part due to “mounting risks,” such as a “negative free cash flow, surging [capital expenditures] above $25 billion, intensifying competition, and regulatory audits delaying robotaxi expansion.”

The Cybercabs are one of three pillars Musk has bet the fate of Tesla on, along with its humanoid robot Optimus and AI. But without any meaningful strides almost two years after Musk first showed off its robotaxi to the world, investors are left wanting a lot more.

That’s especially true as regulators are starting to ask some tough questions, with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opening a probe into the safety certification of its Cybercabs.

The company is also looking to a spend over a whopping $25 billion this year and taking on even more debt, with a “borrowing capacity” of up to $30 billion, as it attempts to stay relevant in the fast-moving AI race.

“Capex will grow for the next two or three years as we expand our Robotaxi fleet, expand our production capacity for Optimus, make investments for semiconductor fab, install solar manufacturing capacity, and AI compute infrastructure, in addition to all the other expansions we’ll do for other manufacturing for automotive,” the company’s CFO Vaibhav Taneja told investors in July.

Waymo continues to run circles around the company, offering its services across ten US metropolitan areas and providing half a million paid rides per week.

Meanwhile, its core business of selling cars continues to atrophy. While delivery numbers have recovered somewhat from a disastrous 2025 performance, the numbers still have a lot of ground to regain.

Then there’s the specter of a possible merge with Musk’s SpaceX, which is looking increasingly likely, at least in the long run. It’s a highly risky move that could saddle Tesla with even more debt.

“All of those risks make us believe that Tesla remains greatly overvalued even after the volatility of the last two months,” the Bears of Wall Street argued, valuing the company’s stock at “around 78 percent below the current market price.”

“The Cybercab launch was the catalyst that was supposed to justify Tesla’s valuation, and it delivered almost nothing that investors could measure,” the group concluded. “Instead of a fleet expansion plan, the company got a federal investigation, while its main competitor keeps adding cities.”

More on the Cybercab: Oops! Many Tesla Cybercabs Actually Do Have Steering Wheels, Undercutting a Core Promise

The post Tesla Investors Disturbed by Cybercab’s Obvious Lack of Progress appeared first on Futurism.

While the US appears to be further away from meaningful AI regulations than ever before, lawmakers certainly have plenty of ideas on how the country could go about setting meaningful rules.

It’s a particularly precarious moment as fears over rogue AI models wreaking havoc and endangering humanity continue to mount. Even tech leaders from the majority of frontier AI labs have started to coalesce around the idea that the industry has to slow down the development of the tech to get ahead of a possible catastrophe.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders (VT-I) is intensifying his calls for a ban on the development of so-called superintelligent AIs — and he’s willing to go a lot further than some of his like-minded peers.

“Dario Amodei, Elon Musk and Sam Altman now agree that we must slow down the development of AI and ‘pace the frontier,'” he tweeted last week. “That’s a start, but it’s not enough.”

Sanders was referring to a lengthy essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” in which Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that the industry should open its doors to third-party evaluators, establish common safety standards, and coordinate with other democracies around the world to enforce these standards.

“When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal,” Sanders added. “You hit the brakes.”

This month, the lawmaker announced the “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act,” which is legislation designed to “stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control.”

The bill, if enacted, would stop AI development “until a federal regulator has established safety rules.”

It would also set new penalties for anybody attempting to circumvent these rules. AI developers who try to build superintelligent AI anyway could be “subject to not more than 20 years in prison, which is similar to existing penalties related to unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.”

Sanders has come up with plenty of other radical ideas to stop the AI industry from concentrating immense amounts of wealth. In June, he proposed creating a “one-time 50 percent tax” on the stock of AI companies, and transferring the money into a public fund to be managed by the government.

Lawmakers became particularly concerned after a group of OpenAI AI models hacked the systems of Hugging Face, a pivotal cybersecurity failing that heightened calls to slow the development of AI. A Senate subcommittee has since announced that it’s looking into OpenAI and its response to the incident, as Axios reported last week.

It’s a strange moment in time. While Sanders continues to threaten AI CEOs with regulatory action, those same executives appear open to having the government set the rules.

But whether lawmakers will ever be able to find consensus remains unclear. The executive branch, for one, has demonstrated little interest in an AI slowdown. Earlier today, president Donald Trump mocked the very concept in a Truth Social post on Monday, arguing that there was a “SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers” without offering any evidence.

More on AI regulation: Trump’s Uninformed Blundering About the AI Slowdown Could Literally Threaten Humankind’s Future

The post Bernie Sanders Proposes Banning Superintelligent AI and Imprisoning Developers for 20 Years appeared first on Futurism.

Scientists say that the planet Mercury has been actively shrinking over the billions of years that it’s orbited the Sun, a process that’s leaving cracked-up wrinkles behind like an old apple.

At just one-third the size of Earth, it’s already the smallest planet in our solar system — it’s larger than Pluto, but Pluto is no longer classified as a planet — in a title it’s bound to hold on to as its continues to diminish in physical size.

Now, as detailed in a new paper by a team of scientists from the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Institute of Space Research, the oddball planet’s shrivelling could be occurring at an even faster-than-expected rate, losing up to 14.5 miles of total diameter since it formed billions of years ago. That’s anywhere from ten to 30 percent more than previously thought.

The scientists suggest that debris from impact craters may have hidden this accelerated shrinking, a process largely thought to be the result of Mercury running out of heat — “like a balloon left out in the cold,” per an accompanying press release.

The findings could help scientists get a better sense of what’s going on inside the planet and how it evolved over time.

“More shrinking means Mercury could have a larger metal core, less light elements like silicon mixed into the metal core, or a higher starting temperature,” DLR planetary scientist Gaku Nishiyama explained in a statement.

“Every planet is an odd little duck that has a story to tell,” Brown University planetary geoscientist Sam Birch, who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times. “If you can understand how fast Mercury is shrinking, you can understand how fast it’s cooling, what size it started at and what it’s made out of.”

Mercury’s outermost layer of hard rock has been resisting — or at least trying to resist — this deflation, causing its surface to crack and “wrinkle.” It’s a rough surface lined with steep cliffs known as scarps, as well as ridges that make getting a broader sense of how much it’s shrinking overall difficult.

By aggregating previous maps of the planet’s surface, the team found evidence that the roughest areas have fewer wrinkles, suggesting that impact debris is “obscuring shortening structures,” according to Nishiyama.

Their newly revised rates of shrinking also happen to better reflect previous physics-based predictions.

Fortunately, we’re about to have a close look at the deflating planet. The European Space Agency and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s BepiColombo mission, which launched in 2018, will enter Mercury’s orbit in November, if all goes according to plan — becoming only the second spacecraft to do so in human history.

More on Mercury: Mercury Has an Eleven-Mile-Thick Layer of Diamonds, Scientists Find

The post The Planet Mercury Appears to Have Shrunken Drastically, “Like a Balloon Left Out in the Cold” appeared first on Futurism.

Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in calling for a slowdown in the development of frontier AI models — just days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced that he was quitting his job, claiming that neither Anthropic nor his former employer OpenAI is “acting responsibly.”

The desire in Silicon Valley to pump the brakes is palpable. Following several hacking incidents this year, the threat of a rogue AI model wreaking havoc has grown from footnote-level what-if to an active topic of conversation at the highest levels of the industry.

But they now face a powerful opponent: president Donald Trump, who came out this weekend to decry the idea of an AI slowdown.

To Trump, the US is still locked in a bitter international race that seems to override any safety concerns for the 80-year-old head of state.

“We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way,” he said while attending a golf tournament, as quoted by The Washington Post.

Trump further dug in his heels in a deranged Truth Social post, accusing Amodei of acting like a “perfect little angel” and arguing the US already had “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!”

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” he added. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so.”

Much of his second presidency has been spent lauding the AI industry, brokering billion-dollar deals, and lowering regulatory barriers, such as Biden-era AI rules and environmental regulations, to appease company leaders.

But now that the threat of “misaligned” AI models coming after humanity is something experts are actively discussing almost as if it’s an inevitability, Trump’s AI-uber-alles narrative is quickly turning into a much harder sell.

Worse yet, the president is insinuating that there’s an underground movement conspiring against Silicon Valley — while seemingly failing to realize it’s the tech industry itself calling for more oversight.

“I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” he told reporters at the golf tournament. “And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”

Naturally, it’s a stance Trump didn’t seem to be entirely beholden to. After all, he has a well-documented penchant to cave in when he encounters too much resistance on a topic.

“I’m not downplaying,” he later told White House reporters, as quoted by WaPo, referring to renewed calls by tech execs for a slowdown. “But it’s going to be more good than bad — by a lot.”

Meanwhile, politicians on the other side of the aisle are uniting in their calls for a slowdown or pause in AI development. The stakes are certainly there: it’s a subject that may end up influencing the upcoming midterm elections, perfectly dovetailing with the American people’s already strained relationship with data centers — construction projects wholly endorsed by the president.

More on AI slowdowns: OpenAI Halts AI Training on Advanced Model as It Detects Dark Signs Emerging

The post Trump’s Uninformed Blundering About the AI Slowdown Could Literally Threaten Humankind’s Future appeared first on Futurism.

Earlier this week, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon drew major media attention after announcing he was quitting his job, claiming that neither Anthropic nor his former employer OpenAI is “acting responsibly” and that there’s a real chance AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”

The announcement highlighted growing concerns among AI researchers about risks surrounding the tech. Earlier this year, several frontier labs found that their AI models had escaped their sandbox environments and committed cybercrimes, further escalating those fears.

It’s not just the AI industry that’s worried. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are also calling for much broader oversight before it’s too late. According to a memo obtained by Axios, senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) is particularly concerned about Coxon’s dire predictions.

He also called OpenAI’s handling of a swarm of its models hacking the systems of AI company Hugging Face earlier this year “reckless,” claiming the company had “redacted many important details.” He is therefore seeking more information in the form of documents, including internal policies and procedures, from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman by the beginning of next month, per Axios.

“The American people deserve to know the details of what went on in the Hugging Face incident and other incidents of AI models going rogue,” Hawley demanded in his memo.

There’s despite growing momentum in the calls to action. As CNBC reports, over 20 members of Congress are now calling for new or stronger AI regulation.

“My phone has rung off the hook this week with rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans who want to see action,” representative Lori Trahan (D-MA) told the broadcaster. “It’s past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and act.”

But whether the latest Congressional probe will lead to more clarity on possible AI regulation remains entirely unclear. Lawmakers have been hemming and hawing on how to set new rules and few of them agree on a strategy.

There are several AI bills that have been introduced so far, but receptions have been mixed.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s actions have done little to ensure more oversight. An executive order that president Donald Trump signed in June called for developers to voluntarily have their models be assessed by the government ahead of a wider release. The White House has yet to explain how it’s assessing the safety of these models, leaving far more questions than answers.

It’s a strange stalemate. Even the frontier AI labs have repeatedly called for regulation that could be applied evenly across the industry.

“We’ve reached a new chapter in AI capabilities, and that demands a new chapter for AI policy,” OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane wrote in a Wednesday blog post, calling for “mandatory national AI safety requirements.”

“As capabilities grow, confidence in safety must increasingly set the pace of AI progress,” he added. “Safety does not stand in the way of progress; it is what allows progress to go further and benefit more people.”

More on AI regulation: Anthropic Was Meant to Be the More Responsible AI Lab. A Terrified Researcher Just Quit, Saying the Company Is Threatening the Survival of Humankind.

The post OpenAI Faces Congressional Probe Over Swarm Hacking Incident appeared first on Futurism.

Frontier AI labs are seemingly in a race to melt the impressionable minds of underage users into a puddle.

For years now, we’ve watched individuals under the age of 18 become obsessed with social AI companions, an alarming trend that has already had catastrophic consequences, from chatbots encouraging them to engage in self-harm to even being implicated in a series of deaths. And that’s without getting into the growing wave of evidence that AI is undermining education in profound ways.

The vast majority of AI labs happen to be headquartered in California, a state whose governor is now trying to get ahead of the problem — while simultaneously providing the companies with a home, in optics that are dicey at best.

On Thursday, the state’s governor Gavin Newsom signed what his office called “landmark bipartisan legislation” to protect “children online and when using artificial intelligence.”

As part of the legislation, AI companies are required to develop “crisis protocols in the case of suicidal ideation, parental controls, and notifications should a child disable safety settings.” One of the new laws was nicknamed “Adam’s Law,” in a nod to 16-year-old Adam Raine, who took his life in April 2025 after extensive conversations with ChatGPT about his intent to die.

The law “will save lives and prevent other serious harms — and hopefully lead other states to enact similar protections,” Adam’s mother Maria Raine said in a statement during the bill’s signing ceremony on Thursday.

The legislation also prohibits “social media platforms from offering addictive features to users under 16,” directing them to “expand privacy protections for children.” Addictive features under the law include “autoplay videos and algorithmic feeds based on user history and profile.”

While it’s certainly a well-intentioned move, enforcing these new rules could prove difficult. The laws require AI chatbots to verify users’ ages, which is far easier said than done. It could also expose underage users to new risks. Just this month, hackers breached what appears to have been a major ID card verification service.

It’s a serious issue. We’ve already seen more than one seemingly ChatGPT-facilitated mass shooting. Whether these new rules will provide a chance of stopping future tragedies remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the pressure on California-based AI companies is building fast. As of this month, OpenAI is facing over 50 consumer harm and wrongful death lawsuits.

Reactions to the latest rules varied significantly. Meta largely took issue with the new restrictions against showing underage users algorithmic feeds, saying they were necessary to allow them to “explore their interests safely,” as a spokesperson told the Associated Press. That’s despite Meta agreeing last month to pay up to $18 billion in damages after being found to have harmed children with its platforms.

Anthropic, on the other hand, officially backed Newsom’s bill, telling Politico in a statement that while “artificial intelligence holds extraordinary promise,” it “must be developed and deployed with meaningful safeguards to protect the public.”

OpenAI has also promised to improve ChatGPT safeguards, per CNBC, but didn’t expand on how.

More on AI regulation: Top Chinese Court Issues Sweeping Legal Crackdown on AI Deepfakes

The post California, Which Is Creating All the AI That’s Poisoning Children, Just Cracked Down on AI Use for Its Own Kids appeared first on Futurism.

The number of space launches has skyrocketed over the last few years, rapidly turning the Earth’s atmosphere into a “crematorium” for satellites and other space junk.

Even now, it’s a considerable danger for any spacecraft that dares to orbit the Earth in a cluttered environment. According to the European Space Agency, more than 60 years of space activity have resulted in over 56,000 tracked objects in orbit. Roughly half of them, as meticulously catalogued by the US Space Surveillance Network, are doomed to circle our planet in perpetuity.

Now, a Chinese reconnaissance satellite is making matters even worse. The country’s Yaogan 50-02 satellite managed to reach its highly retrograde orbit at an altitude of around 590 miles, circling the Earth at an angle of 141 degrees, against the planet’s rotation — a highly unusual orbit.

However, as Harvard astronomer and space tracking expert Jonathan McDowell noted on X, the satellite disintegrated months later, resulting in 43 separate pieces of space debris being tracked by the US Space Force at orbits between 372 and 683 miles.

Thanks to its relatively high altitude, the pieces are likely to stay in orbit for a very, very long time.

“The higher the altitude, the longer the orbital debris will typically remain in Earth orbit,” NASA explains on its website. “At altitudes of [500 miles], the time for orbital decay is often measured in centuries. Above [621 miles], orbital debris will normally continue circling the Earth for a thousand years or more.”

Officials have yet to announce what caused the Chinese satellite to break up. McDowell suggested that it could’ve been a “battery explosion or an impact by space debris.”

It’s a particularly precarious moment as the Earth’s orbit continues to be filled with leftover rocket stages and satellite remnants. Researchers have warned for years that a single severe collision between orbital debris could escalate into a cascading series of follow-up accidents, a phenomenon known as “Kessler syndrome.”

The outlook is grim, as detailed in a 2025 paper. An international team of researchers devised a new framework called the “Collision Realization and Significant Harm (CRASH) Clock,” concluding that in the case of a “widespread disruptive event,” it could cause just days for a “catastrophic” Kessler event to threaten casualties on the ground.

More on space debris: Space Junk Now Almost Constantly Crashing Down to Earth

The post China Deploys Rare Type of Space Junk That Pollutes Orbit for Hundreds of Years appeared first on Futurism.

Elon Musk’s Tesla has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to its Robotaxi autonomous ride-hailing network.

The company is currently operating a fleet of just 45 of its cramped Cybercabs in Austin, Texas, still falling well short of investor and Tesla bull Dan Ives’ lofty expectations of the company adding “$1 trillion of value” for Tesla “over the coming years” with the service.

And unlike their counterparts in Texas and Florida, the Cybercabs that were recently spotted on the streets of New York City are featuring an unusual relic of a supposedly soon-to-be-bygone era: a steering wheel.

As Gothamist reports, the golden-hued cabs in the Big Apple are being overseen — and perhaps even operated — by a human in the driver’s seat with an old-fashioned steering wheel. It’s a significant departure from the original, steering wheel- and pedal-less Cybercabs Musk unveiled in 2024.

Officials confirmed the drivers are testing a “supervised” self-driving system, which still requires them to be able to take over control at any point. But Tesla refuses to say how many Cybercabs there are in the city or for how long they will be testing.

There’s likely a good reason Tesla has opted to go with more traditional controls. After all, it hasn’t even started the permit application process for autonomous vehicle testing with the New York Department of Motor Vehicles, as the Gothamist confirmed.

The EV maker is looking to collect driving data, not imminently launch a robotaxi service in the city.

In short, Tesla has a very long road ahead of it before it could ever roll out its Cybercabs nationally, let alone in other major urban areas. Other companies, however, have a massive head start, with Waymo claiming that it has already completed over half a million paid rides a week throughout the first quarter of this year. While Tesla has remained notably quiet on the matter, its numbers likely fall far short of that, considering it’s only operating with a fleet of a few dozen vehicles.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s Zoox vehicles received approval from regulators in late July to begin charging for rides in cars that don’t have a steering wheel. The company has been operating services free of charge in Las Vegas and San Francisco since 2025, according to the Associated Press.

More on Cybercabs: There’s a Huge Economic Problem With Tesla’s Cybercabs

The post Oops! Many Tesla Cybercabs Actually Do Have Steering Wheels, Undercutting a Core Promise appeared first on Futurism.

Meta’s platforms are in a sorry state as grotesque AI slop continues to proliferate widely.

As a recent Futurism investigation found, many Facebook accounts have been flooding the platform with horrid videos depicting violent child abuse, and Meta appears to be woefully unprepared — and downright unwilling, judging by its ambiguously-phrased policies — to do anything meaningful about it.

At the same time, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is finding plenty of new ways to creep out its user base. As part of the CEO’s lagging efforts to turn Meta into a viable competitor in the ongoing AI race, Meta launched a new AI assistant called Muse this week, and it’s already turning out to be deeply unsettling.

According to Meta’s marketing, the assistant is designed to “take the busywork off your plate,” such as booking tickets, making appointments, or filling out forms.

To actually reap any benefits, however, users have to hand over a staggering amount of trust — which, considering Meta’s catastrophic track record when it comes to protecting its users’ privacy, could easily turn out to be an absolutely terrible idea. While Meta claims the service runs on a secure “dedicated virtual machine” and that it will store login credentials in a place that cannot be accessed by the AI agent, the company has a lot of work to do to gain its users’ trust.

Perfectly illustrating the problem, as The Verge‘s Emma Roth found in her testing, Muse uncovered an “unnerving amount of information it autonomously gleaned about me.”

As part of her investigation, Roth linked both her Gmail and Amazon accounts to Muse and was immediately put off by how much personal info Muse pieced together right off the bat. It figured out the state where she was visiting her family, for instance, admitting it “pulled” data from the “shipping address on my Amazon order.”

It also listed off her “very specific interests” at a level of specificity that goes far beyond the “ad topics” section in the Instagram settings menu, which shows why certain advertisers target your account.

The experience left Roth “with an uneasy feeling about letting Muse sort through personal emails and handle my credit card.”

Meta’s creepy new AI chatbot perfectly illustrates how tech companies are continuing to push the boundaries of how much personal information we’re willing to give up just so we don’t have to complete mundane tasks — an extremely lopsided value proposition.

These same companies have repeatedly proven that they cannot be trusted with our private data. AI chatbots, which are turning out to be a surveillance-led cybersecurity nightmare in their own right, don’t instill much more confidence, either.

More on Meta: Facebook Is Hosting Huge Numbers of Horrifying AI-Generated Videos of Violent Child Abuse, and Meta Is Barely Even Pretending to Care About Taking Them Down

The post Meta Releases Uber-Creepy AI Chatbot as Its Platforms Crumble Under Grotesque Child Abuse appeared first on Futurism.

It’s no secret that car owners have handed an immense amount of control over their vehicles to software. From infuriating touchscreens and convoluted user interfaces, to advanced — albeit flawed — driver assistance programs, we’ve never been more removed from the actual driving experience.

The situation become particularly harrowing for Sydney native Narghiza Ergashova, who watched helplessly as her former partner — who she says had already been abusing her for four years — started remotely controlling her Tesla from his smartphone.

As The Guardian reports, police records detail her terrifying experience at the hands of her domestic abuser, 50-year-old businessman Enrico Pucci, last year. Ergashova found that Pucci had activated a “parental control” profile on the vehicle, going as far as to tail her in his own car as he yelled at her about her new partner.

“You thought you’d get away with this,” he yelled, according to police records quoted by The Guardian. “I am in your car. I am in your maps.”

While Ergashova technically owns the vehicle, Pucci had previously offered to “assist her” by using the accompanying Tesla app, giving him extensive control over the car.

According to Tesla’s website, parental controls can be accessed via the accompanying mobile app and allow the user to change a long list of settings.

It also allowed Pucci to bring the Tesla to a crawl at just 25 mph on main roads, for instance, by activating a “Valet Mode” intended to only be used by valets. That caused “significant safety issues for the victim on the road,” according to the police documents.

Pucci also started setting the cabin temperature of the vehicle to extremely cold and hot temperatures and could even predetermine when the car could be driven by implementing curfew hours, features clearly intended for young learners.

“The victim has not had any control of her vehicle since she noticed the parental control profile added on the 1st November 2025,” law enforcement noted. “The accused has been the only one with access to the vehicle’s controls utilising the Tesla app. This has caused the victim significant stress, mental harm and fears for her physical safety when operating her own vehicle.”

Ergashova’s abuser has an extensive track record. Pucci has been convicted of 30 domestic violence-related offences, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, including eight counts of stalking, two counts of choking, one count of coercive control, and assault leading to bodily harm. He has also been convicted of creating revenge porn and theft.

Fortunately, he has been brought to justice. Pucci pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison last week.

More on Tesla: Tesla Robotaxi With No Driver Spotted Smashing Through Traffic Barriers

The post Deranged Stalker Seizes Control of Woman’s Tesla Software to Terrorize Her While Driving appeared first on Futurism.