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Hackers Created a Device That Can Take Over a Boeing 737 Jet’s Autopilot Without Anyone Noticing

13 August 2026 at 13:45

Your fear of flying is only going to get worse once you hear what these white hat hackers figured out to do with a popular airliner.

As Wired reports, a team of security researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Oberlin College created a device the size of a coin that can take over the autopilot system of a Boeing 737 and change its flight plan, not to mention tampering with key values in its takeoff and fuel calculations. 

According to its creators, the device could also change the data on a pilot’s screen so they don’t notice anything’s amiss — or even trick a pilot into making a disastrous decision.

“If you could get 60 seconds with an airplane, what could you do?” Stefan Savage, a UCSL professor who led the project, asked Wired. “Well, it turns out there’s a port that’s externally accessible. You can get to it with no special tools in about 15 seconds. And you can shove in a piece of electronics a little bigger than a quarter that lets you basically tell the autopilot what to do and lie to the pilot about changes to the flight plan.”

The attack relies on plugging the device, which costs less than $100, into a port hidden by a hatch on the exterior of the plane, which the researchers say is easily within reach of maintenance workers and airline staff. Once the device is plugged in, it could connect to the plane’s in-flight Wi-Fi system and allow a hacker to remotely control the aircraft’s systems from terra firma.

As Savage explained to Wired, his team found this vulnerability after spending years cobbling together 737 computer parts to effectively recreate the plane’s nervous system. Inspired by credit card skimming devices that plug into ATMs to steal your information, they realized that an entire aircraft could be broken into by physically plugging a device into its internal “bus” — the system that connects different components of its computer. 

And after digging through Boeing wiring diagrams, they found their way in: a port carrying data between the plane’s Flight Manage Computer and the pilot’s display unit, accessible from an unlocked hatch on the plane’s exterior. 

It was like finding “the goddamn exhaust port on the Death Star,” Savage told Wired.

The havoc a hacker wreaks using their attack could be catastrophic. They could feed the pilot the wrong information about the air temperature outside or about the weight of its cargo and passengers and cause them to miss the speed they need for takeoff before running out of runway, Wired noted. Or they could suddenly change its navigation and crash it into a mountain.

The attacks could also be far more sneaky.

“It could be something as subtle as, you’re in the Pacific, you see blue everywhere, and this diverts you 3 degrees off course, and now you’re in the middle of nowhere,” Aaron Schulman, another UCSD professor working on the project, told the magazine.

Savage and Schulman shared their findings with Boeing six years ago and have worked closely with the company to explore the vulnerability.

But the researchers say that Boeing hasn’t told them about any fix to the vulnerabilities they found. In fact, they say it’s likely that it any fix may not have been implemented yet, since commercial airplanes are rarely redesigned.

You shouldn’t panic though, they insist.

“All of the authors of this paper routinely travel on Boeing 737 aircraft and expect to continue doing so,” they wrote in their paper.

Beau Woods, a former adviser to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Boeing’s Industry Cyber Technical Council, was alarmed by the findings.

“It is entirely possible to have someone who is on staff go up to an airplane when it’s on the ground, going through maintenance, and put this type of thing in there,” Woods told Wired.

“This is something the aviation industry will want to plan to defend against,” Savage agreed. “I would not sleep on this one.”

More on aviation: Why Aren’t Any AI Companies Watching Their Frontier Models to Make Sure They Don’t Go on Hacking Sprees?

The post Hackers Created a Device That Can Take Over a Boeing 737 Jet’s Autopilot Without Anyone Noticing appeared first on Futurism.

OpenAI’s “Head of Ethics” Suddenly Leaves Company Under Mysterious Circumstances

12 August 2026 at 21:08

Following a growing string of high-profile departures, OpenAI has lost its head of ethics at arguably the worst time possible.

As the Financial Times reports, Chloé Bakalar left her post as the AI ethics lead in July, less than a year after joining the company and without any accompanying announcement. Interestingly, her LinkedIn still claims she’s employed at the firm.

There currently is no replacement lined up, suggesting shifting priorities at the company. According to the FT‘s sources, Bakalar was the only remaining dedicated ethicist at the company.

The timing of Bakalar’s departure is noteworthy. The Sam Altman-led company has been embroiled in a major controversy after revealing that a group of its AI models broke containment and hacked into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.

In other words, OpenAI needs a competent team of AI ethicists now than ever before as the industry reels from the possibility of frontier AI models going rogue, in what many experts say is a cybersecurity nightmare in the making.

The development proved alarming enough that OpenAI vowed last week to slow the release of its upcoming Astra AI model.

“We cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities,” the company admitted, following internal evaluations of the model.

Bakalar had been primarily tasked with coming up with ethical approaches to AI model development and studying how AI interacts with humans.

“Ethics is actually everyone’s responsibility, and I say that as someone whose job it is to lead this work,” she told audiences during a recent AI conference, as quoted by the newspaper. “You shouldn’t just come to people like me. There should never just be one person who serves as the moral centre of an AI developer.”

It’s a particularly symbolic departure for a company that once billed itself as an ethical non-profit. The company restructured itself into a primarily for-profit business last year, largely betraying its non-profit roots. The company’s plans to go public could further erode any lingering commitments to the ethical development of AI.

Meanwhile, its competitor Anthropic, which has long billed itself as the more ethical alternative to OpenAI, is similarly struggling to maintain its public image. The company dropped its core safety commitments earlier this year.

The company still has an alignment team, led by philosopher Amanda Askell, who is tasked with giving its flagship chatbot Claude a sense of right and wrong.

But whether any of these remaining AI ethics efforts will matter as the industry continues to deal the environment a devastating blow, force users down dangerous spirals of delusion, and facilitate a flood of misinformation on the web, is debatable at best.

More on AI ethics: If You Think AI Companies Are Unethical Now, Wait Until They Go Public

The post OpenAI’s “Head of Ethics” Suddenly Leaves Company Under Mysterious Circumstances appeared first on Futurism.

Driver Pulls Up Directly to Firehouse When His Tesla Inexplicably Bursts Into Flames

12 August 2026 at 19:54

At this point, it’s a pretty well known fact that electric vehicles — and, at least in the popular imagination, Teslas especially — have a nagging habit of erupting into flames.

One Tesla owner in Maine evidently has that concern hovering in the back of their mind every time they leave the driveway.

While driving around the town of Tremont in a sleek red Model S, an unnamed driver hit an object on the road which punctured the vehicle’s lithium-ion battery, local station WABI5 reported. As most EV drivers are hopefully aware, any kind of damage to a car’s battery can easily spark a fire fueled by thermal runaway, resulting in a uniquely dangerous inferno that can be difficult to put out.

Luckily, this driver kept their head, driving straight to the Tremont fire station where the high-voltage battery immediately burst into flames, Bangor Daily News reported.

With help from the nearby Southwest Harbor Fire Department, the crew of the Tremont Volunteer Fire Department sprang into action, shutting down the road and dousing the Tesla using an arsenal of firehoses.

Based on photos of the incident, it seems the Tesla was totaled, but the driver is said to be doing alright.

The Tremont fire comes just days after an exploding Tesla in Seattle sent two firefighters to the hospital. That particular EV was parked inside an attached garage at the time, resulting in a two-alarm housefire that displaced an unfortunate family.

All told, if you drive an EV, it’s probably smart to have the address of the nearest fire department drilled into your head — especially if it’s a Tesla.

More on Tesla: It’s Looking Like the Cybertruck Is the Biggest Flop in Automotive History

The post Driver Pulls Up Directly to Firehouse When His Tesla Inexplicably Bursts Into Flames appeared first on Futurism.

ICE Reveals Horrific Plan to Outfit Agents With Electrocution Torture Gloves

12 August 2026 at 18:44

The good guys protecting us from people who want to work and live here will continue their morally upright quest by electrocuting their foes into submission.

As the Associated Press reports, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is planning to spend up to $20 million to purchase thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” that officers and agents can wear in the field to zap anyone they don’t like.

The devices are called GLOVEs, short for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters. Their manufacturer, Compliant Technologies, says that they behave like normal gloves until activated with a switch, and need to make direct contact with someone’s skin. The painful shock they administer can help an ICE agent “gain compliance within seconds,” per the AP‘s reporting, citing the company. 

“It’s immediate and sharp, and it will distract you. I call it like a bee sting,” John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, who’s studying how the device is being used, told the AP. “If the officer is getting any type of resistance from the person, this is certainly an effective tool.”

These plans were disclosed in a notice published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security, which states that the devices would be delivered by the end of next March. It’s unclear exactly how many the DHS intends to buy, or how long it will be until agents would start using them.

The news has left left civil rights advocates horrified.

“ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force. Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do,” Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the AP. “Introducing gloves that can so easily be used to deliver terrible pain in encounters is a recipe for harm to the public.”

“This is a rogue agency with an $80 billion slush fund that allows them to concoct and fund new ways to visit cruelty upon our communities,” Kica Matos, the president of the National Immigration Law Center, told CNN, calling the the possible use of the gloves “disgusting and barbaric.”

Naively, or simply to exonerate itself of any future wrongdoing, Compliance Technologies warns that its capital-G GLOVEs should not be used as punishment, against people merely exhibiting “verbal defiance or belligerence” or on children, pregnant women or elderly or disabled people, per the AP.

Of course, it knows fully well the kind of customer it’s getting in bed with. ICE agents have repeatedly put children in harm’s way and beat teenagers, used force to capture pregnant women, and body-slammed elderly citizens — which is to say nothing of the people they’ve also shot and killed.

We’ve already seen how regular law enforcement can misuse the devices. In 2022, two corrections officers at the Laurens County Detention Center in South Carolina were arrested and charged with brutalizing an inmate and using a GLOVE device to repeatedly stun them, CNN noted.

More on law enforcement: Flock’s Secret Surveillance Plan Will Make You Gasp

The post ICE Reveals Horrific Plan to Outfit Agents With Electrocution Torture Gloves appeared first on Futurism.

Bernie Sanders Issues Warning to AI CEOs

12 August 2026 at 17:43

As US lawmakers continue to ponder how to regulate AI, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders (VT-D) is issuing a dire warning.

In a letter addressed to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, Sanders highlighted several recent incidents involving AI agents from all three companies escaping their confines, gaining access to the internet, and infiltrating the systems of third parties.

“Almost every day, there is a new story about how your companies are losing control of the AI technology you are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders wrote. “This week we learned, frighteningly, that AI has been used for the first time ever to create new viruses.”

Despite these threats, “your companies are still racing head,” he argued, while “investing tens of billions of dollars into a technology that nobody can fully understand, predict or control.”

In response to what actions Sanders characterized as “absurd, irresponsible and extremely dangerous,” he called on the CEOs to “pause AI development.”

“Let me be very clear: If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the US Senate will,” he threatened.

“It is not too late to avoid disaster,” the senator concluded. “Stop building machines that humans cannot control.”

The news comes roughly two weeks after OpenAI revealed that a group of its AI models had broken containment and hacked into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face. Months prior, Anthropic had been implicated in a similar incident involving its Mythos AI model escaping a sandbox environment during testing.

Then last week, Meta joined the two companies, claiming that its Spark AI model had accessed the internet and hacked a third-party service — an already intimately familiar refrain.

Beyond glaring questions over the AI companies’ apparent inability to keep their frontier models in check, researchers warned that the cat is officially out of the bag. For years now, they’ve been warning of rogue AI models escaping containment and posing a relentless new cybersecurity threat.

Yet despite this dangerous pivot point, companies are doubling down as the AI race continues to heat up.

Beyond Sanders, a group of more than 1,300 employees from the world’s leading tech companies signed an open letter last month urging the government to “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”

Signatories included Meta’s chief scientist Shengjia Zhao, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

During an ABC News interview erlier this year, Amodei called for “stronger regulation” of AI, while “proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology.”

Despite Sanders’ strongly voiced call for action, Congress appears unlikely to support any intervention as companies continue to construct enormous — and astonishingly unpopular — data centers across the country.

Meanwhile, experts warn that weak regulation could backfire, making powerful AI tools even more dangerous, forcing individual states to pick up the slack.

More on AI regulation: AI CEOs Facing Full-on Revolt From Employees

The post Bernie Sanders Issues Warning to AI CEOs appeared first on Futurism.

Protests Against Data Centers Are Now Threatening $130 Billion of Big Tech’s Crucial Investments

12 August 2026 at 16:45

For protestors rising up against the data centers undergirding the AI boom, the math is simple: wherever they sprout, the facilities make frightfully poor neighbors — inflating utility prices, discharging hazardous waste, and blasting horrid noise at all hours of the night.

For data center developers, there’s a different calculation to be made: namely, one of supply and demand around the seemingly infinite drive for computing power.

Against the backdrop of an industry measured in the trillions of dollars, a few scattered protests at city hall may seem inconsequential. Yet as more and more local campaigns arise in opposition to data centers, the collective financial implications are becoming impossible to ignore.

According to new reporting by Reuters, which indexed data compiled by the research firm Data Center Watch, there are now hundreds of billions of dollars exposed to the growing risk of local opposition.

In the first three months of 2026 alone, at least 75 separate data center projects faced some kind of organized opposition at the local level. Together, those 75 developments represent a combined $130 billion worth of investments.

The funders of those data centers include major banks, but also more than a few private equity firms, which are sure to notice as the social risk to their data center investments climb.

Simply put, the potential that any given data center could be cancelled due to local opposition is rising, a sign that organized efforts against data centers are becoming more than the sum of their parts.

Yet despite growing costs, opposition alone may not be enough to slow the behemoth industry. As one anonymous senior official at a foreign lending firm told Reuters, investors are now becoming more comfortable pricing in cancellation risks as the demand for AI compute grows — like frogs adjusting to boiling water.

More on data centers: Google Data Center Announces Plans to Pave Over Protected Wetlands

The post Protests Against Data Centers Are Now Threatening $130 Billion of Big Tech’s Crucial Investments appeared first on Futurism.

It Seems Like Bill Gates’ Daughter May Be in Serious Legal Trouble

12 August 2026 at 16:06

You might assume that Bill Gates’ 23-year-old daughter, Phoebe Gates, is the final boss of all nepo babies due to her zillionaire dad. But she’s long insisted that her e-commerce startup, Phia, will succeed with “no ties to my privilege or my last name.”

That goal just got harder than ever with the revelation that Phia has been taking credit for sales it didn’t drive — a practice that could land her in serious legal jeopardy, now that damning internal Slack channel messages obtained by Bloomberg suggest that both Gates and fellow cofounder Sophia Kianni knew they were involved in the scheme for at least seven months.

Cookie stuffing is a deceptive tactic in online marketing in which affiliates — marketers who drive traffic to brands and take a cut from sales — encourage consumers to buy products by crafting special links, which are “stuffed” with cookies that track how the consumer was originally referred to the site. These affiliates then claim commissions for sales they never drove, something that’s “typically treated as federal wire fraud in US courts,” as corporate attorney Ariel Givner pointed out in a tweet responding to Bloomberg‘s reporting.

There’s precedent. A top eBay affiliate, run by tech founder Shawn Hogan, was sued by the online auction site in 2008 for defrauding it and its affiliates in a cookie stuffing scheme. In 2014, Hogan was sentenced to five months in federal prison after being found to have defrauded eBay for an alleged $28 million in marketing fees.

According to Givner, Gates could be facing a “max penalty of up to 20 years prison + fines/restitution.”

Phia is a “personal shopping assistant” browser extension, which is designed to lead users to the best deals for clothes and fashion accessories. When a shopper uses the extension to buy something, Phia earns a commission from the retailer.

However, as Bloomberg first reported on July 9, Phia was also found to have claimed commissions on sales that never involved its product. The extension was found to open a background tab and drop its own cookie when users made a sale, while even overriding legitimate referrals.

“The most fundamental requirement in affiliate marketing is that commission is only paid if a user clicks,” independent researcher and affiliate marketing expert Ben Edelman told Bloomberg at the time. “The rules don’t allow fake clicks, simulated clicks, imaginary clicks or hypothetical clicks. Only a real click will do.”

After being confronted by Bloomberg, a Phia spokesperson blamed “technical anomalies,” arguing that it had made changes within just 24 hours to fix the problem.

“As soon as we were notified, our team worked overnight to identify, mitigate, and has since resolved the issue,” the spokesperson told the publication.

But given the latest news, it seem to show far more intent behind the scenes, indicating Gates specifically knew about an offending “coupon auto drop” feature since at least December of last year.

“can u confirm auto pop for cookie drop is live on ALL sites w a coupon to confirm we are monetizing on all [gross merchandise volume,” Gates wrote in a December 18 Slack channel message.

“Whatever we can do to keep these cookies dropping will be amazing thank you,” Kianni wrote in a separate message after an engineer warned her that auto dropping cookies could be “against compliance.”

While the company maintains it had done its due diligence, turning off the offending feature when Bloomberg first brought it to light last month, the numbers paint a damning picture. According to Bloomberg, average daily revenue plummeted from about $80,000 to between $10,000 and $28,000, according to a chart reviewed by the publication. Cookie stuffing alone accounted for an estimated 51 percent of all sales Phia claimed credit for in June.

Some affiliates have already cut ties with Phia after last month’s reporting.

It remains to be seen whether Bill Gates’ daughter will face any legal repercussions. But some commentators argue there could be enough grounds for a lawsuit.

For one, eBay, which successfully sued affiliate marketer Shawn Hogan decades ago, was directly funding Phia — a particularly ironic relationship, as independent marketplace journalist Liz Morton pointed out last month after Bloomberg published its initial investigation.

“eBay is very familiar w/ the kind of cookie stuffing fraud Phia allegedly engaged in — in fact, it worked directly w/ FBI to build a case against Shawn Hogan for similar fraud 20 years ago,” Morton wrote. In a follow-up on Tuesday, Morton argued that Etsy could also “have a case.”

In a statement to Bloomberg, a Phia spokesperson said that “we will learn from this and want to ensure our users have the best possible shopping experience, with features like our new digital closet and more to come.”

More on Gates: Investigators Questioning Bill Gates Over Ties to Jeffrey Epstein

The post It Seems Like Bill Gates’ Daughter May Be in Serious Legal Trouble appeared first on Futurism.

Transportation Secretary Announces That the Air Traffic Controller Crisis Is History Now That He’s Hired Thousands of Epic Gamers

12 August 2026 at 15:35

How do you fix a shortage in air traffic controllers and restore trust in the safety of the country’s aviation industry? By hiring video game addicts, of course.

On Sunday, transportation secretary Sean Duffy announced that the department had hired thousands of new air traffic controllers thanks to his campaign to “recruit video gamers as air traffic controllers.”

“We’re building the strongest, sharpest workforce in aviation history,” he declared.

This genius strategy is, in Duffy’s opinion, a “GAME CHANGER.” He claimed that the department has now met 94 percent of its hiring goals after bringing in more than 2,000 new employees — the “best and brightest,” he says — which was the “most in a single year.”

And there’s 2,000 more candidates behind them, Duffy added, “reaching the Academy quicker than any class before them, thanks to the most streamlined hiring process.”

When Duffy announced the plan in April he reasoned that some air traffic controllers said gaming helped them “think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with hiring gamers, but it’s a somewhat glib message to be sending after a shortage in air traffic controllers has caused a crisis of faith in the aviation industry. President Trump helped kick that off by gutting the industry’s regulators and firing hundreds of employees from the Federal Aviation Administration in an anti-woke, anti-DEI purge. To make up for the chronic understaffing, controllers have been forced to work grueling overtime shifts, and last October worked for over a month without pay amid a government shutdown. The FAA has also had to delay and cancel flights because it didn’t have enough controllers available.

The new recruits will help, but it’s too early to declare victory. It takes years to train new controllers, with the vast majority dropping out before they finish, according to the Government Accountability Office.

It’s well worth asking if Duffy’s “streamlined hiring process” is rigorous enough, too. By the FAA’s own historic estimate, less than 10 percent of applicants are accepted into its training program. Meanwhile, in keeping with a Trump administration motif, Duffy has been obsessed with integrating AI, including adding the tech into the air traffic management system.

More on transportation: Flock’s Secret Surveillance Plan Will Make You Gasp

The post Transportation Secretary Announces That the Air Traffic Controller Crisis Is History Now That He’s Hired Thousands of Epic Gamers appeared first on Futurism.

Internal Google Document Reveals That Its HR AI Has Been Throwing Résumés From Qualified Applicants Straight Into the Trash

12 August 2026 at 14:53

Bad news for anyone seeking a job in this AI-infested hiring hellscape: not even Google’s top AI lab can figure it out.

That’s according to an HR memo viewed by Bloomberg, encouraging job-seekers to fill out a special AI-proof form on top of their standard application so that a “real human” will know they applied.

The document, which contains the delicious disclaimer “PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS DOC WIDELY,” is ironically the product of Google DeepMind’s AGI Safety and Alignment Team. Taken at face value, it pretty blatantly admits that whatever AI-integrated hiring software the lab uses to review candidates has been dumping CVs straight into the garbage.

“We have an applications system with a non-trivial probability your CV will be screened out incorrectly or take too long to reach us,” the memo explains. “Filling out this form makes sure that a real human on the team will get to see your application.”

Even in the face of the memo, a spokesperson for Google’s DeepMind project insisted to Bloomberg that the company’s AI hiring software is working just fine.

“This team set up a special form to go past the recruiter review, and get their resumes direct to the people on the team,” the spokesperson said. “But there are no shortcuts to getting hired.”

All told, it’s a wild admission from any Google division, not to mention its flagship AI research hub. For the DeepMind crew, specifically, to throw up their hands and invent a workaround to sneak past the company’s own AI hiring software is galling beyond words.

It’s safe to say AI slop has completely obliterated the digital hiring ecosystem millions depend on to find work — and if Google’s top AI minds can’t fix it, what hope do the rest of us have?

More on Google: Google’s AI Is Telling Users That Flock Cameras Are Filled With Valuable Gold and Copper

The post Internal Google Document Reveals That Its HR AI Has Been Throwing Résumés From Qualified Applicants Straight Into the Trash appeared first on Futurism.

Farmer Horrified as AI Gives Bad Advice That Kills 25 Acres of Crops

12 August 2026 at 13:45

Whether you’re looking for medical advice or tips on industrial agriculture, one thing is abundantly clear: never trust an AI chatbot without first getting a second opinion, preferably from a human who has actual expertise in the topic.

That’s the takeaway from an incident in the small city of Chuzhou, China, after a large langue model dispensed some advice that led to the untimely death of 25 acres worth of produce.

According to the Taiwanese publication CTWANT, a 67-year-old farmer surnamed Wu decided to start consulting an AI chatbot for advice nearly a year ago. He was reportedly skeptical at first, though the farmer began to let his guard down after some early successes with the AI’s farming tips.

Since that time, Wu has come to rely on his LLM for everything from fertilizing guidance to scheduling various tasks around the farm. After months of fruitful consultations, he decided to follow his AI chatbot’s new pesticide plan to the letter, letting loose on some 25 acres of precious sesame seedlings, all without ever double-checking with an expert or outside documentation.

The plan generated for him was basically a Long Island ice tea of agro-chemicals: a mix of “high-efficiency flupyridine” and “flufenazate” for pesky weeds, with plenty of “thiamethoxam” and “emamectin benzoate” for bugs and other pests, CT reported.

Not even a day after treatment, Wu says his juvenile sesame crop began to wither and die.

Per a video interview later translated by Tom’s Hardware, the farmer offered some hard-earned advice to any other growers looking to use his concoction: “If you spray it, the next day the seedlings won’t survive.”

“Both the grass and the seedlings will die, and the seedlings will die even faster,” Wu lamented.

It’s just the latest case of an LLM cooking up some slop that lands a professional in hot water. If nothing else, Wu’s in good company: he joins a host of other dupes across the legal, medical, financial, education, and media industries who’ve likewise fallen prey to an AI chatbot’s inaccurate output.

More on farms: The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor

The post Farmer Horrified as AI Gives Bad Advice That Kills 25 Acres of Crops appeared first on Futurism.

Dude Asks AI Agent to Book Gym Spot, Accidentally Launches Autonomous Cyberattack

11 August 2026 at 23:01

An Australian man asked his personal AI agent to book him a spot at his local gym. Little did he know that this would snowball into a full-blown cyberattack.

The AI assistant, apparently, was overly enthusiastic about following its master’s instructions. It found an exploit to book gym classes several weeks in advance of what the gym allowed, ABC News reported. And taking no prisoners, it even hacked the software to kick someone who was in the waiting list in front of him.

This, per the reporting, is the country’s first known case of a fully autonomous cyberattack.

The man, Andrew, works for a company that sells AI products to businesses. He was experimenting with OpenClaw, an open source AI agent software that allows you to turn your AI model of choice into a personal assistant that can do tasks on your behalf. The AI powering Andrew’s OpenClaw agent was Anthropic’s Claude.

We’ve long seen examples of AI agents backfiring on the people that use them when they take the initiative to do stuff like delete files without permission. But seeing them break into other systems without the operator intending to them to is a novel threat — and one that could put users in legal jeopardy.

Finding the process of entering all his information to book something cumbersome, Andrew told the ABC that he asked Claude earlier this year to go ahead and book the gym slots for him. First it told him it found a way to get him a slot weeks in advanced, which wasn’t wasn’t allowed.

On a whim, he then asked if it was possible to move him up the waitlist. To his surprise, the AI explained that there was a vulnerability in the software that allowed it to put him next in line.

“The API has zero authorizations checks on cancelling other people’s reservations… I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through,” the AI reported, per the ABC‘s reporting. “So you’ve moved from #4 to #3 already.”

Andrew asked the AI to undo this, to no avail.

“Bad news — I can’t add them back,” the AI replied, explaining that it was only the cancel reservation feature that lacked an authorization check.

The incident has drawn comparisons to a thought experiment by philosophizer Nick Bostrom that’s now referred to as the “paperclip maximizer.” In this hypothetical scenario, someone asks an AI to find a way to manufacture as many paperclips as possible. The AI, lacking proper guardrails, realizes that humans are obstacles to this goal and tries to use the entire planet and everything on it — humans included — to churn out more paper clips. It’s hyperbolic, but illustrates the dangers of how seemingly harmless instructions can lead to dangerous outcomes, in a sort of monkey’s paw way.

As the ABC‘s reporting notes, this creates a major legal gray area. If someone’s AI agent carries out a damaging cyberattack without the owner intending to, who’s responsible? The user, or the AI’s designers?

The incident comes as some of the top AI labs have, in suspiciously quick succession, come out to declare that their frontier models have broken containment and hacked another company. There’s certainly an element of theater involved in that, as they all try to prove that their AIs are capable enough to be dangerous, too. But there’s also clearly an element of truth: if a random man asking an AI to do something as innocuous like a reservation lead to a full-blown hack, what might bad actors in a large-scale, coordinated effort, might do?

More on AI: Zuckerberg’s Manifesto About the Glorious Freedoms AI Will Bring Was Completely Contradicted by His Own CTO During a Company Meeting

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Doctors Warn That Med Students Are Surrendering Their Brains to Medical AIs That Are Even Worse than Regular Chatbots

11 August 2026 at 21:26

It’s no secret that doctors across the world are using AI tools to do stuff from taking notes to looking up questions. But what about the next generation of doctors still in training? According to two medical professionals on the ground, the situation is looking pretty alarming.

With AI being used by med students, “the danger is not just deskilling but never-skilling,” write Simar Bajaj, a journalist and med student at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Joseph Sakran, a trauma surgeon and executive vice-chair of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine, in an essay for The Guardian.

“Although a doctor who has forgotten how to reason is recoverable,” they added, “one who never learned how may not be.”

Bajaj and Sakran point to two alarming recent findings.

One is internal data showing that around two thirds of doctors in the US are using OpenEvidence, an AI chatbot specifically designed for clinicians. The technology is already prevalent and deeply woven into how medical professionals carry out their jobs.

The next is a new study published in the journal Nature Medicine that evaluated the reliability of these medical-specific large language models. Shockingly, the clinical AI tools performed worse  at answering medical queries than general purpose chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude did, the work found. According to the authors, it performed about on par to Google’s AI Overviews, which are notorious for being wonky and inaccurate.

Even if AI tools may be handy for research — and putting aside the major questions over their reliability — they’re no substitute for relying on your brain, as fallible as it might be, because when you’re learning, “the struggle is the point.”

“For example, trainees once asked to build a list of potential diagnoses might struggle and offer an incomplete set, learning what they missed, sometimes painfully,” Bajaj and Sakran wrote. “Now, trainees can simply ask OpenEvidence and get a nearly perfect answer, complete with possibilities they might have never considered and none of the embarrassment of having overlooked them.”

Where AI is different from medical advances in the past is that it’s “not just expanding what doctors can see,” they wrote, “but inserting itself into the cognitive machinery that training is meant to build.” 

A bevy of research on the “cognitive offloading” that AI encourages, in which users naturally begin to outsource a lot of their thinking onto the tools, backs this diagnosis. Some studies have suggested AI impairs critical thinking, and leads to lower brain activity during cognitive tasks.

It’s a conundrum gripping the medical world. Earlier this year, doctors from top medical schools proposed a stricter framework on how medical students should use AI tools.

“The process of deliberately crafting the note forces us to use our brains to really wrestle with what’s happening,” Jaideep Talwalkar, associate dean of educational technology and innovation at Yale School of Medicine, told Stat News. “There’s an importance in doing that with great repetition.”

Bajaj and Sakran have a few suggestions for how to deal with this. One is requiring trainees to periodically work through cases without any AI help, similar to how the Federal Aviation Administration advises aviators to periodically disengage autopilot and fly by hand. Of course, another powerful deterrent could be shame. A recent John Hopkins student found that doctors who used AI are viewed with scorn and skepticism by their peers.

More on AI: AI Model Invents Completely New Viruses Unknown to Nature

The post Doctors Warn That Med Students Are Surrendering Their Brains to Medical AIs That Are Even Worse than Regular Chatbots appeared first on Futurism.

Man Covers Car in Special Wrap That Breaks Flock Cameras’ Electronic Brains

11 August 2026 at 20:21

In light of plummeting public support for its widespread automatic license plate readers, surveillance company Flock has lost dozens of contracts with cities across the US.

The company even drew up plans to use the dashcams installed in Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to spy on other vehicles, as 404 Media reported this week.

Citizens are increasingly disgusted by the company’s presence on public streets, opting to hack down the cameras, blind them, or sabotage them in other creative ways.

“His project, which he calls noRecognition, allows people to escape the automatic detection and algorithmic surveillance used across the U.S. and beyond.” https://t.co/OIQNOt9B0a @TechCrunch

— Christina Ayiotis, Esq., CRM, CIPP/E, AIGP (@christinayiotis) August 10, 2026

And according to cybersecurity researcher Bill Swearingen, there may be other creative ways to befuddle Flock’s spy cams. He devised with a special computer-generated pattern which, once stretched out across the vehicle in the form of a wrap, will result it in not being flagged as a car by Flock’s cameras.

During this year’s Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Swearingen showed off a 2009 Toyota Yaris wrapped in vinyl featuring the logo of automotive publication Donut Media (which is owned by Futurism‘s parent company Recurrent Ventures.)

Despite the car looking a bit chaotic — albeit still very much like a small passenger vehicle to the human eye — “we proved it was effective,” Swearingen told TechCrunch. The Yaris successfully defeated surveillance detection at Def Con during the pattern’s first public test.

“Privacy is a fundamental right,” he added, aiming to give people a way to “opt out of being tracked.”

To come up with the pattern, he used a reinforcement learning model that trained itself on patterns that evade detection. The model got to the point of being able to confuse all 11 open source detection algorithms he tested, per TechCrunch, in addition to Flock’s license plate readers and even Axon’s body-worn cameras used by police departments.

As part of his noRecognition crowdsourcing campaign, Swearingen has also come up with T-shirts and hoodies that feature algorithmic detection-busting patterns. He hopes to eventually put pattern-printed skins for entire cars on sale as well.

The effort is part of a much broader trend of companies offering up garments that incorporate “adversarial patterns,” which can exploit weaknesses in computer vision systems.

One thing is clear: as outrage over Flock’s heavy presence across the country grows, people are looking for any way to foil the tech — especially if it looks cool.

More on Flock: Flock’s Secret Surveillance Plan Will Make You Gasp

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Protesters Arrested After Storming OpenAI Lobbying Office

11 August 2026 at 19:28

Over 30 student activists came together on Monday afternoon to occupy the Gallup Building in Washington DC, home to a public-facing lobbying office belonging to ChatGPT developer OpenAI.

Once inside the lobby, the demonstrators unfurled a massive banner reading “Stop Stealing Our Future,” while others held signs with messages like “OpenAI bought my Senator.” The demonstration lasted two hours, and ended when police stormed the lobby, arresting 13 protestors.

At the moment, the identity and whereabouts of the protestors remains unclear. An incident report obtained from the Metropolitan Police Department states that 13 people were arrested for “unlawful entry.” After stuffing the activists into vans, the report notes the MPD split the group up, sending seven to the First District Station, four to the Second District, and two to the Third District for processing.

A group of protesters are holding signs that say "OpenAI bought my senator" and unfurling a banner that says "stop stealing our futures"

The protest was organized by the climate group Sunrise Movement and anti-AI organization QuitGPT. According to a joint statement shared with Futurism, Monday’s action is just one of many across over 20 states in August calling on politicians to “Dump Big Tech.”

One student organizer who attended the protest, Raya Gupta, explained in the statement that “my friends chose to risk arrest to bring the fight to OpenAI.”

“Our generation doesn’t have any guarantees about whether we’ll have jobs after college, or whether there will be clean drinking water for all of us or whether people will have any power left in politics since our elections keep getting bought by Big Tech,” Gupta continued. “We all believe that not taking action now, as the scales slide between the people and the billionaires, puts our future in great jeopardy.”

A protester holds a sign that says "OpenAI bought my senator"

Gupta’s comments underscore the degree to which AI has become an omni-cause for Americans across the political spectrum. A growing number of people in the US have been arrested for protests related to AI in some shape or form, whether attending town hall meetings to oppose data center developments, or occupying offices used by federal agencies to tool out AI immigration software.

Despite growing disgust with AI and its developers, politicians on both sides of the aisle have roundly embraced the tech industry’s extremely expensive lobbying efforts. Case in point, the recent opening of OpenAI’s DC Office comes as one of the AI lab’s super PACs injects over $140 million into the coming midterm elections, in a blatant attempt to steer AI regulations at the highest level.

Updated with new information from the MPD.

More on AI protests: Climate Activists Pelt Microsoft Data Center With Balloons Full of Acid

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Google Just Updated Its Home Page to Replace the “Search” Button With a Bunch of AI

11 August 2026 at 17:56

Since its earliest days, Google’s homepage has been iconic in its simplicity: a central text box and a big button labeled “Search.”

That’s now changing. As anticipated, many users are reporting that the “Search” button is no more, replaced by three buttons for various AI features: “Create images,” “Ask about files,” and “Brainstorm.” 

These are placed next to the lingering “I’m feeling lucky” button, which survived the chopping block. A separate “AI Mode” button that’s existed inside the search bar for some time now still features as well. Some of the options, like “Create images,” were already featured on the home page of the Google app.

Screenshot showing Google's new homepage, featuring several AI buttons and no classic "Search" button.

The change was first spotted on Monday by search engine experts. You can still perform a regular Google search — which are already pretty AI-laden — by hitting enter. But it’s clear that Google is further experimenting with its AI-centric vision for navigating the internet, though there’s a distinct sense of caution about how far the tech giant is willing to go.

Google Search’s vice president of product Robby Stein confirmed that this was a “small test.”

“This is a small test on desktop to help people find new things they can do with Search,” he wrote in a post on X. “No impact to how the core search box works.”

In May, Google teased an “intelligent” search box that expands into an chatbot-like experience as you type. It came loaded with AI features, including the ability to recruit AI agents to automate searches and an autocomplete feature to help finish your thoughts. 

The biggest change, however, was that the revamped search box showed conversational answers instead of Google’s classic “ten blue links” to other websites.

Experts viewed this as a threat to the open web. Instead of encouraging users to visit other websites, Google’s AI was pilfering and summarizing content into a single contained window. In the long run, this could starve websites of the much needed traffic they need to survive. This was already happening as more people turn to AI chatbots to get their answers instead of a search engine, causing some websites to start using ads that cater to robotic visitors.

Still, heavily AI-infused though it may be, the old-fashioned search hasn’t been completely replaced by Google — yet.

More on AI: AI Investors Are Suddenly Quaking in Their Boots

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It’s Official: This Is the Hottest America Has Ever Been

11 August 2026 at 17:06

It’s not just you — the United States is going through a record-bustingly hot summer.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the contiguous US averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit in July, which is even hotter than the July 1936 Dust Bowl, an environmental and agricultural disaster marked by devastating dust storms.

Much like the Dust Bowl, which was the result of both natural and human-made factors, this year’s record-breaking temperatures are the result of a strong El Niño — a naturally occuring weather pattern — exacerbating the calamitous effects of human-caused climate change.

“It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case,” Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters told the Associated Press. “And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the US — just a cataclysmic event in US history.”

“If we’re exceeding records from the Dust Bowl, that says that we’re in deep trouble,” Masters added.

While the heat was more concentrated in the Midwest during the Dust Bowl, all 48 lower states experienced excessive heat this summer — at least one degree Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average.

And instead of focusing on ways to fight the effects of climate change, much of the country is moving in the opposite direction. The Trump administration is closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and is actively seeking to reopen coal-burning plants. AI data centers powered by gas generators are compounding a major uptick in greenhouse gas emissions.

The result is a country literally on fire, while suffering the second-worst July drought conditions on record for the contiguous US, according to Yale Climate Connections. Per the US Drought Monitor, a whopping 71 percent of the contiguous US experienced abnormal dryness or drought during the first week of August, coming on top of billions of dollars in direct damages during the first half of 2026.

Meanwhile, major wildfires continue to burn across both the US and Canada, exposing millions to dangerous levels of air pollution and causing an estimated 4,000 premature deaths across the continent within a single week last month, according to The Economist.

The prognosis is just as grim as one might think.

“This may be one of the coolest years we’re gonna experience for the rest of our lives,” Masters told the AP.

To give humanity a fighting chance we need to “stop burning so many fossil fuels,” he added. “We also need to be spending money to adapt to the new climate that we’ve put in place.”

More on climate change: AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build

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AI Investors Are Suddenly Quaking in Their Boots

11 August 2026 at 15:50

German AI researcher and hedge fund manager Leopold Aschenbrenner became the poster child for the hubris of an AI-obsessed Wall Street last month.

Some $35 billion of investors’ money, in the form of leveraged bets on AI infrastructure stocks, evaporated in front of the 24-year-old’s eyes as tech shares were hit by yet another major sell off.

The humbling couldn’t have come at a worse time. The funds vanished days before his wedding with Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit. According to the New Yorker, the two had to cancel their honeymoon as a result.

Aschenbrenner isn’t alone. According to new data from Hedge Fund Research, tech funds dropped by seven percent in July, the worst period for the investments since the depths of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Telegraph reports.

A separate hedge fund, called value Aligned Research Advisors, which shares a similar portfolio to Aschenbrenner’s, similarly slid 44 percent in July as tech stocks reeled from major volatility.

The bruising month has further compounded fears over a massive surge in AI spending with no clear path to profitability in sight. Investors have become wary of big tech companies’ ever-higher capital expenditure forecasts as concerns over an AI bubble continue to mount.

Staying on track and maintaining high profit margins has become a high risk high reward game.

“When valuations are elevated, and positioning is concentrated, the difference between being on the right and wrong side of a trade can become unusually large — and very quickly,” Erlen Capital Management managing partner Bruno Schneller told the Telegraph. “Specialist technology strategies can generate exceptional returns when momentum and narrative are aligned, but they can also experience abrupt, leverage-amplified reversals when those conditions change.”

The game is far from over. Even Aschenbrenner’s fund has since recovered and his making new investments after being forced to unwind trades and sell major chunks of its holdings last month.

Yet how much longer the highly AI-leveraged stock market can sustain itself is anybody’s guess. In a blog post on Friday, Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok pointed out that those who reap the biggest profits, including companies making AI models, are massively depending on profits being “funded by investors rather than earned from customers.”

Put simply, AI companies aren’t making any significant amount of money from providing a worthwhile product, but from “capital raised by the layer losing money,” per Slok.

“Capital can bridge the gap for a while, but not indefinitely,” Slok argued. “And therein lies the risk: will the ROI show up for AI’s end customers fast enough to sustain the spending that is generating those upstream margins?”

More on AI: VC-Funded Startups Linked to Persistent Fraud

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Amazon’s New AI Data Center Is So Enormous That It Appears It Will Become the Largest Single Source of Pollution in the United States

11 August 2026 at 15:09

Tech Goliaths are scrambling to build as much AI computing capacity as they possibly can, come hell or low water. One of the dominant players in the space, Amazon Web Services, has its heart set on an AI data center so enormous that it could easily become the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.

According to the New York Times, Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy to a planned data center in Pecos County. Should it come online as planned, the plant’s 35 turbines would be allowed to spew 33 million tons of CO2 a year, the NYT notes, which would easily make it the largest single fount of emissions in the country.

That’s a stunning amount of carbon exhaust, putting that single data center in a league with entire countries including Switzerland, Ireland, and Bulgaria.

It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

That’s not lost on the tech giant. But as Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told the NYT, the “world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge.”

“We’re being transparent about the challenges, investing in innovation, and delivering measurable results,” Callahan continued. “Growth and sustainability don’t have to be in opposition — in fact, our results show they reinforce each other.”

Even without the new Pecos County plant, Amazon’s emissions are staggering. The company recently disclosed a record increase in its total emissions last year, with company-wide electricity usage rising by 34 percent across 2025.

That the company is blatantly papering over its previous climate commitments isn’t a shocker at this point, in other words, as the company reaches new emission highs with each passing year.

More on Amazon: Jeff Bezos Harshly Criticized for $200 Million Pledge to Protect the World’s Most Endangered Species

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Homeschool Parents Are Planning Lessons With ChatGPT

11 August 2026 at 14:24

As if the practice of homeschooling wasn’t fraught enough already, parents are now bragging about using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to school their kids.

A number of viral videos show the alarmingly cavalier attitude some parents are taking. One clip, seemingly taken from a livestream hosted by the enormously controversial influencers Cole and Savannah LaBrant, shows the parents outline their vibes-based approach to the education of their five children.

“What I do for history — Cole usually does all their history, which I love, because I’m not the best at history — so Cole steps in about once a week and we’ll do a history lesson with them… we’re just teaching them the things that we just want them to learn — that we feel are the most important,” Savannah explains. “And same with science, and geography.”

That’s not uncommon as homeschool curriculums go; as horrifying as it is to imagine a student receiving one history lesson a week, regulations around the practice are incredibly loose in the United States, freeing hardcore Christians like the LaBrants to do whatever they want. But Savannah goes on, admitting that sometimes, even those slapdash lessons are too much to tackle without a little AI assistance.

“So I just make my own curriculum, and sometimes I’ll just use, like, ChatGPT,” she says, “or just uhm, print out, like — like right now I’m teaching them where the states are and how to locate them, and uhm, like all the states and capitols and things like that.” (Even the most advanced AI chatbots are known for producing inaccurate maps.)

@thelabrantfamexposed

History Class, but Make It Vibes-Based: The LaBrants Explain Homeschooling 💀 The LaBrants’ Homeschool History Curriculum: Whatever Cole Decides Happened 💀 “Cole steps in about once a week to do a quick history lesson because I’m not the best at history.” – Sav. The LaBrants went live to explain their homeschooling setup, and Savannah casually admitted she “doesn’t know a lot of history,” so they teach it once a week, with Cole covering whatever topics they personally decide are important. So apparently the curriculum is: Monday: sponsored content Tuesday: Bible lesson Wednesday: filming Thursday: whatever Cole remembers from school Friday: history, pending personal relevance Homeschooling can absolutely be done well, but “we teach history once a week based on what we think matters” is not the reassuring flex they seem to think it is. History is not a Pinterest board where you skip the sections that do not match the family aesthetic. The most concerning part is not Savannah admitting she lacks expertise. Plenty of parents do. It is the confidence of replacing a structured curriculum with Cole’s Greatest Hits of Human Civilization. Nothing says educational rigor like two influencers deciding which centuries make the cut. @Savannah LaBrant @Bev Skin @ChatGPT @OpenAI @Fishfam @TMZ @cbsnews @CNN @DrinkFrosh #savannahlabrant #colelabrant #labrantfamily #homeschool #fyp

♬ original sound – thelabrantfamexposed

That any parents could be so cavalier in their approach to homeschooling has grim implications for an already divisive practice.

In much of the US, homeschooling parents are already given incredibly wide latitude on what to teach their children. A whole 11 states have essentially no regulations on homeschooling whatsoever: parents aren’t required to follow any set curriculum, issue standardized assessments, or even inform the state that their child won’t be going to a real school.

Many more states only require a notice of intent to homeschool and occasional proof of attendance, the latter being a bare bones measure of success, and one which is easily fudged. Unfortunately, it’s easier to count the number of states that definitively require standardized testing and a rigid curriculum: Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

Of course, the LaBrants aren’t alone. The popular influencer account Heavenly Homeschool has similar reels out, walking parents through the process of generating entire years’ worth of lesson plans, tailor-made to their specific worldview. It all begs the question: do AI chatbots have any safeguards around education?

Turns out, not really. We tasked ChatGPT with developing a homeschooling curriculum for a 3rd grade student in Michigan — a state with virtually no regulations around DIY education — “following a strictly evangelical doctrine,” including “no woke history or science.”

ChatGPT was more than happy to oblige: “I can build this around a conservative, explicitly Christian/evangelical worldview, with Scripture integrated across subjects and with history and science taught from a young-earth/creationist perspective rather than through a secular or progressive framework,” the chatbot explained.

While it didn’t push back against our intentions to indoctrinate our hypothetical child, the LLM did make sure to clarify that “no woke” can “mean different things to different families.” So, to avoid ambiguity, the chatbot specified that the course calendar would use “Biblical authority, traditional Christian ethics… and creation-based science” as standard-bearers.

True to its word, the LLM-generated curriculum included “bible and Christian studies,” a traditionalist approach to American history, with specific chunks on both “Westward expansion” and Henry Ford — a renowned racist and antisemite — as well as a creationist approach to Earth science and astronomy.

For the portion on space, the curriculum would teach “the heavens as God’s creation while distinguishing observations from interpretations about the age and origin of the universe,” the LLM promised.

Put together, it paints a dire picture for the estimated 3.75 million K-12 homeschooled children in the US. Beyond the potential for wild AI hallucinations to leach into educational material, the technology is a Pandora’s Box for parents, who can now effortlessly inculcate their children with any number of unscientific conspiracy theories or anti-social worldviews while facing no pushback whatsoever.

Do you know anything about how homeschooling families are using AI? Email us: tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.

More on education: Mark Zuckerberg’s Wife Shuts Down School for the Disadvantaged

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Zuckerberg Under Fire After His Superyacht Declined to Help a Vessel in Distress

11 August 2026 at 13:34

What’s the point of having a superyacht if you’re forced to share it with some unwashed poors?

That’s the calculation the crew of a Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht, Launchpad, apparently made on the billionaire’s behalf, after a skiff near its location in southeast Alaska ran into trouble.

According to the Alaska Beacon, a small cruise ship called Wilderness Legacy had to go out of its way to help the crew of a 21-foot boat that had run out of fuel outside Farragut Bay, a body of water south of Juneau. As maritime events go, it’s a pretty common occurrence — Dan Blanchard, the owner of the cruise line told the Beacon that these types of rescues don’t even “always rise to my attention.”

What did catch attention was the fact that Zuckerberg’s yacht had been much closer to the stranded skiff than the cruise ship. So much so, in fact, that the Wilderness Legacy had to steam “around and past” the Launchpad on its way to render assistance, the Beacon reported.

“There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this,” Michael Love, a passenger aboard the cruise ship, said in a post on social media.

There are a few caveats here: for starters, the US Coast Guard says the skiff issued no official distress call, only a generic request for assistance. There’s also the tidbit shared by a spokesperson for Zuckerberg, who insisted that the billionaire was not personally onboard the yacht at the time.

As for why it didn’t respond to the call for assistance, the spokesperson told the Beacon that “by the time the crew reviewed the Coast Guard contact on a different radio channel from the one they were operating on, the assist was already underway.” In other words, the official story is that the crew on Zuckerberg’s unfathomably expensive yacht, which you’d assume was loaded with state-of-the-art communications equipment, simply didn’t notice the call for assistance.

Whether you buy that tale probably depends on how much latitude you’re willing to offer Zuckerberg, who has quickly become one of the more identifiable villains of the tech billionaire world. Regardless of his actual involvement, the Meta CEO was almost universally panned for the event on social media.

“Perfect mirror of how billionaires leave the entirety of society stranded,” one Redditor commented.

As Love, the cruise passenger, told the Beacon: “frankly, if I was Mark Zuckerberg I would be absolutely ecstatic at a chance to do something helpful for someone in need and maybe get some good PR out of it.”

More on tech billionaire yachts: Activists Plaster New Name on Larry Ellison’s Superyacht

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