The United States is having something of a national referendum on mass surveillance as of late. Embodied most infamously by video surveillance company Flock Safety, Americans from all walks of life are waging war against the proliferation of the company’s automatic license plate readers (ALPR), which the ACLU warns now number in the tens of thousands.
Plenty of communities are organizing campaigns to out-muscle municipal leaders or their cheerleaders on the local police force, and by-and-large, they’re working. Whether in rural towns or sprawling cities, activists who can mobilize citizens to flood council meetings and hold picket signs are finding success. Perhaps most prominently, the Los Angeles Police Department recently allowed its three-year contract with Flock to expire, citing democratic pushback as a significant pressure point.
There’s also another, less-legal side to the anti-Flock sentiment: a rising tide of vandalism. Not content to wait for local officials to strike down ALPR contracts, concerned citizens are taking matters into their own hands by disabling or cutting down Flock camera towers wherever they’re found. But what started as a collection of separate individuals is now rising to the level of a viral phenomenon, as privacy-minded Redditors take to the web to celebrate those who are fighting back with an outpouring of ironic memes and hype reels.
Ground zero for this community appears to be the subreddit r/FlockSurveillance. The forum hosts some 422,000 “activists,” who flood the channel with over 11,000 contributions per week.
Those who’ve been caught and charged with vandalizing ALPRs become digital folk heroes on the subreddit. When news broke that US Air Force engineer Jeffrey Sovern had been charged in connection to the destruction of 13 Flock devices, redditors flooded the post with praise, sharing links to his legal defense fund and encouraging others to donate. (Sovern’s GoFundMe now stands at over $40,000, compared to around $15,440 in early July.)
“I donated to him because those charges are bulls***,” one redditor replied.
In addition to memes, the subreddit has become a destination for serious discussion around ALPRs and surveillance in general. One developer used the forum as a launch pad for their app FlockHopper, a navigation app that helps travelers avoid ALRPs. Others use it to share important developments relevant to the anti-Flock crowd, to get advice on Freedom of Information Act requests, and to dispel misinformation.
“As entertaining a trend as it is, will a few Redditors knocking a few poles over really make a difference?” one redditor asked the group.
“Even a single grain of rice can tip the scales,” a user replied.
Liberty-loving patriots who got themselves amped up about president Trump’s new gas stations are in for a rude surprise.
When the White House announced the “Freedom Fuel” network last week, it bragged that the price at the pump would be just $3.47 per gallon — in honor, of course, of “our 47th president.”
But using data on the gas price tracking platform GasBuddy, The Hill found that the locations had prices that were at least $3.57 per gallon, with multiple videos on social media reflecting the same.
Unless Trump is planning to be president again four decades from now, we’d say this attempt to glorify himself has missed the mark.
Though some Freedom Fuel prices are lower than the national average — which is hovering around $3.80, according to the AAA — they’re still fluctuating as much as what you’d see at a typical gas station. One location in New Jersey climbed past the national average to $3.89 on Wednesday, before falling again to $3.57. Some had prices as high as $4.49.
A White House representative acknowledged that Freedom Fuel wasn’t immune to the routine fluctuations of a volatile market, not to mention local pricing.
“The prices at the gas stations will fluctuate — possibly coming down even further — depending on the market and the location,” the representative told CBS News.
Experts have needled the stunt, convinced that it won’t work out in the long-term.
How Freedom Fuel is subsidizing the cost of its cheap gas is unclear. What company is running the locations is equally opaque. Some customers said that the Freedom Fuel stations were simply existing gas stations that were rebranded.
If nothing else, it speaks to the chintziness of Trump’s self-aggrandizing projects during his second term in office. In his first year, he heavily promoted a meme coin owned by his family, the value of which immediately plummeted. He also tried to hype the launch his own “Trump Mobile” network by teasing a new purportedly made-in-the-US smartphone, which turned out to be a repackaged Chinese device.
Apocryphal tales of its meals causing the runs have plagued Taco Bell since time immemorial. But this latest parasitic outbreak is something else entirely.
As the Washington Post reports, federal and state authorities are investigating whether the fast food chain is behind the outbreak of explosive diarrhea cases across the country — further cementing its scatological legacy.
The illness, caused by the cyclosporiasis parasite, has sickened as many as 5,100 people across the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Michigan, which appears to be the epicenter of the outbreak, over 3,700 people have been infected, state authorities said.
Taco Bell’s suspected role in the outbreak comes after reports that the chain’s Michigan locations began pulling some of its ingredients. Signs in front of the restaurants stated that they were no longer serving lettuce, cilantro, onion, pico de gallo, and guacamole due to a “nationwide recall,” though what recall they were referring to is unclear.
Health officials have so far struggled to narrow down how the parasite is spreading. While usually found on fresh produce, symptoms can take weeks to manifest, making it difficult to trace back to the source.
Lettuce has emerged as one of the likeliest culprits. In an update this week, Michigan’s chief medical executive Natasha Bagdasarian said that “early information has shown lettuce as a common product that regularly comes up during the investigation.”
“Although we do not have a definite product identified as the source of the outbreak, we want to let Michiganders know what we have learned so far so they can take steps to protect their families,” Bagdasarian added.
Federal authorities haven’t singled out any veggies yet, though acting Food and Drug Administration director Don Prater acknowledged Michigan’s fixation on lettuce.
“What I can say at this point is that we’re continuing our traceback investigation on multiple produce items, including the lettuce,” he said, per WaPo.
So far, no nationwide recalls have been made related to the outbreak. One person familiar with the federal investigation, however, praised Taco Bell’s response.
“It’s good the chain has already voluntarily stopped serving a number of items,” they told the newspaper. They added that some who became sick said they didn’t eat at the chain, suggesting that it’s not the only one responsible.
Over 200 economists, researchers and industry executives, including sixteen Nobel Prize winners, signed an urgent letter warning that AI could radically transform the economy at an unprecedented pace and scale — and that policymakers and governments need to move to mitigate the fallout.
Titled “We Must Act Now,” the letter is brief. It predicts that “AI may become radically more powerful over the next ten years,” and that acceleration in the tech’s capabilities “could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame.”
While possible risks include “large-scale job displacement,” there may also be “opportunities,” the letter suggests, citing “major gains in living standards.” But neither the risks nor the benefits of AI can be harnessed if leaders across policy, government, and industry don’t act quickly to understand the scale of AI’s potential impact on the workforce.
“Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI,” the letter declares, “and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.”
Signees include Nobel-winning Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, New York University economist and Nobel winner Michael Spence, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, former OpenAI researcher-turned-critic Zoë Hitzig, current OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar, and Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark, among many others.
That said, despite the many big names who signed on, the letter doesn’t actually propose any solutions to the issues it raises. It’s more of a general awareness campaign about the scale of the problem society is facing.
But as the New York Times noted, perhaps the most notable thing about the letter is the intellectual breadth among signees, from AI optimists who have long predicted radical change, to skeptics who are less convinced of AI’s capacity to transform labor and the economy.
“There’s been a notable change in the profession,” Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the statement, told the NYT. “I still see a big gap there, a big mismatch, and I’m kind of worried that we’re not going to be ready for the tsunami that’s coming.”
“If you look at what robots did in the manufacturing sector, if AI does something equivalent in a more compressed time period, that would be really disruptive, really costly for people’s livelihood,” added Acemoglu, a noted skeptic.
We’re already seeing some major shifts in the workforce, regardless of whether AI is actually replacing jobs or being used as a scapegoat. It’s a difficult time to be an early-career job seeker, and the tech industry in particular has already seen mass layoffs due to AI-focused restructurings. One recent report found that AI may be pushing older workers out of jobs.Some reports, meanwhile, have even contended that AI has had no substantive impact on jobs so far.
But before AI has the chance to wreak havoc in the job market — should that future come to pass — the experts are clear: it’s not the time to be caught on our back foot.
Is it not enough to simply watch the beautiful game, unadorned?
These days you might use an AI chatbot to keep abreast of what’s happening in the World Cup. And that AI chatbot, in a sign of the times, might try to shove prediction market odds in your face as another way of ostensibly keeping you up to speed. Because are you really getting the full picture if you don’t know where a bunch of gamblers fall on the outcome?
This is exactly what OpenAI is doing. The Sam Altman-led company quietly struck a deal with Kalshi, which lets you bet on outcomes far beyond sports, to show its prediction market data in ChatGPT, the New York Times reported.
It’s perhaps the inevitable melding of two of the most divisive innovations to come out of the tech industry in recent years.
Searching France and Spain on ChatGPT ahead of their quarterfinal clash on Tuesday returned a graphic that showed that Les Bleus had a 60 percent chance of winning, according to the reporting. (We hope no one acted on that information.) Asking about the England and Argentina game on Wednesday showed that the Three Lions had a 54 percent chance of coming out on top.
Neither side promoted the deal, and the graphic is tellingly light on branding. There are no logos and no outbound links. The only sign of the collab is a small notice in the bottom left corner stating, “Source: Kalshi.”
This is the first partnership of its kind for OpenAI. The company recently updated its help page to stress that users “cannot place bets through ChatGPT,” with the Kalshi data being limited to “queries related to the 2026 World Cup,” according to the NYT.
Zooming out, it’s another sign of prediction markets laundering their image by glomming themselves onto other, more credible brands. In January, Kalshi partnered with CNN to provide its real-time prediction data on the news network’s broadcasts. Its rival Polymarket entered into a similar partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, that same month. Both have also partnered with Google to show their data in search results.
Their fuzzy legal framework, plus their Wild West approach to gambling, has led to numerous controversies. Suspiciously timed bets on massive events like the US’s capture of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro have raised concerns of rampant insider trading and put pressure on lawmakers to crackdown on the platforms. Arrests have been madein some cases, but these have been rare.
Put simply, for OpenAI, it may be somewhat risky to associate itself with all this baggage, which might be why the Kalshi collaboration is very limited — at least for now.
Twelve nurses in New York City were laid off on Sunday and replaced with AI software, according to their union — a move that comes not long after nurses went on strike and fought for safeguards against AI.
One of the laid off workers, Marilyn Shuler, had worked at Montefiore hospital in the Bronx as a utilization nurse for 39 years before suddenly losing her job. Utilization nurses review patient charts to show that their care is medically necessary so that an insurance company will cover it.
“I’ve always, always taken so much pride in the organization that I’ve worked for all these years, and just to be treated this way,” Shuler told The Guardian. “It’s disrespectful, and it’s very disheartening, and my colleagues feel the same way as well.”
The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), which represents the healthcare workers, issued a statement earlier this month warning that Montefiore intended to replace nurses with AI. That has now come to bear. It also drew attention to the fact that the company providing the AI software, Datavant, has partnerships with Palantir, the surveillance tech firm which has stirred considerable controversy for its collaboration with ICE.
In January, some 15,000 nurses started what would become a 41-day strike at several of the state’s largest hospitals. The outcome of this was a new three-year contract which included historic safeguards against AI.
But when Shuler and others returned to work in February, their workflow was changed without explanation, according to The Guardian. After a period of radio silence from management, the dozen nurses abruptly received 45-day notices in late May saying that they would be laid off.
“We are outraged about these layoffs because these dedicated nurses are being replaced by AI,” Shaiju Kalathil, a Montefiore nurse and a union committee member, said in the statement. “This is a violation of the contract that we recently won by going on strike. It should also concern every practitioner and patient who cares about the future of healthcare and the quality of care they receive.”
There’ve been clear warning signs that AI could disrupt healthcare workers. Doctors and nurses use AI tools for clinical notes, and some clinics use AI to help triage patients. Shortly after the nurses’ strike, the CEO of the NYC Health and Hospitals, the largest city healthcare system in the US, openly enthused about replacing radiologists with AI.
The transition to using AI could carry significant risks. In Brazil, a 32-year-old woman reportedly died after an AI system for assigning hospital beds left her waiting five days to be transferred to an intensive care unit.
Montefiore denies the framing that it replaced workers with AI.
“As is often the case, the claims by NYSNA are inaccurate and misleading,” Joe Solmonese, senior vice-president for government relations and strategic communications at Montefiore, told The Guardian. “What is true is that we are always investing in new technology to ensure the best care and outcomes for our patients and will continue to do so for the betterment of the people we serve.”
Apocalyptic footage shows a Canadian train crew trapped in their locomotive as it’s devoured by a wildfire.
Through the engine’s windows, the towering inferno can be seen raging through the treeline just a few feet away from the unmoving train, the world around them rendered completely orange. Some of the flames come close to licking the glass, as the wildfire blows across the tracks.
“This could potentially overtake us here, this has gotten a little scary,” one worker filming the video said, sounding surprisingly nonchalant. “Holy s***.”
“Y’all need to hurry up here. Like, seriously, we’re encased in flames now,” the cameraman adds.
“This has got to move f***ing quick here,” he added, after communicating with someone on the radio.
This is near Armstrong, Ontario.
When will the Canadian National Railway Company make a statement about this incident? pic.twitter.com/6bKJYugeR0
The incident took place near Armstrong, Ontario, said Sol Mamakwa, an Ontario lawmaker who uploaded the video. Wildfires have been scouring their way across northern Canada this week, with at least 54 fires active in the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center. Some 4.7 million acres of land have been burned by wildfires this year.
The train engineers in the video reportedly made it out safe. The Canadian National Railway Company (CN) confirmed that the train was stopped in Armstrong, telling Global News that all employees in the area were evacuated overnight Monday.
How they got stuck is unclear. It appears that they’re waiting for another train to pass them, which is seen later in the video, so they can proceed on the single track ahead. A thread on the r/railroading subreddit has a more dramatic telling, claiming that the engineers had crashed into the train cars that they left behind after going back to rescue a foreman, causing the engines to shut down. Allegedly, they then tried to escape on a hi-rail, a truck that can drive on both roads and train tracks, but it caught on fire, forcing them to make it out on foot. A movie-worthy story if true, but we couldn’t independently verify this account.
Even with the hellish conditions bearing down around them, the engineers were able to find moments of levity. When the other train finally emerged through the inferno and lumbered past them, the camera man couldn’t help but exclaim.
Shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX are scraping by at record low levels this week, struggling to find any renewed enthusiasm from wary investors.
The stock is hovering just below $136, a hair above its original IPO price of $135, and well below its opening price of $150 on the day it went public last month. Shares are down almost nine percent over the last five days alone, and are just shy of 40 percent down compared to their all-time high of $225.
The slumping value of Musk’s rocket company has been a brutal wake-up call for some particularly daring investors, who went all in on what many have started to refer to as a “meme stock.” One Reddit user, who leveraged their own Roth IRA by making major calls on SpaceX, wiped out several hundred thousand dollars from their retirement.
The user made several SPCX calls at $160 and $145, decisions that ultimately came back to haunt them.
“So my Roth IRA is down 25 percent, I went and made a few options trades in Robinhood that also went the other way,” the user lamented in the infamous Wall Street Bets subreddit.
The warning signs of a steep market correction were all there. SpaceX went public with an astronomical, multitrillion dollar valuation despite losing billions of dollars a quarter, effectively guaranteeing major volatility. Even members of the Wall Street Bets community, which has a long history of advocating for aggressive trading strategies, were shaking their heads.
“No one could have seen this coming,” one user wrote facetiously.
“Crazy that people knew the insanely bloated valuation but still went long,” another added.
“Musk companies aren’t rational, Tesla has an insanely bloated valuation and is still way too high,” one user argued. “The only winning move is not to play.”
Analysts have long warned that investing in SpaceX is a bet on Musk himself. To make sense of its enormous valuation requires buying into his lofty vision of establishing AI data centers in space and constructing a city on Mars.
As Reuters puts it, SpaceX’s listing has turned into a “confidence test.” Now that shares have plunged below its IPO price, the scales could already be falling from investors’ eyes.
“It raises the narrative that the stock is up on fluff, on speculation, on froth, and not on real fundamentals,” Miller Tabak chief market strategist Matthew Maley told Reuters.
Anybody who bought in early “hoping to ‘make a killing’ will be disappointed,” Carnegie Investment Counsel director of research Greg Halter added.
Many moviegoers this summer are looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated film “The Odyssey.” But have you considered that you could watch a pure AI slop adaptation of the Greek epic instead?
Enter “Odysseus: The Fall,” a fully AI-generated movie from the startup Fountain 0. At 135 minutes long, it will certainly test your patience as it hurls screensaver-grade images at you which look cribbed from better movies, creating the impression that this is really a generic amalgamation of other people’s ideas about what Greek mythology should look like, rather than the creators’ own.
The director, Ash Koosha, told Hollywood Reporter it cost in the “mid-five figures” to make, and openly hopes to cash in on the hype around Nolan’s film.
“We very much hope that Christopher Nolan’s film, ‘The Odyssey,’ is a raging success at the box office, and in some way that our version of the journey of Odysseus might further that success by bringing to theaters those who might not otherwise come out to see the film, simply because they are curious to see the ultimate in human creation and compare it to one man’s collaboration with AI,” Koosha said in a wordy statement.
You have to wonder if Koosha has ever asked Nolan’s thoughts on AI. In a recent interview, the Oscar-winning director was skeptical about the tech, praising Gen Z for “utterly rejecting” for what he described as “AI slop.”
The official synopsis for Koosha’s film sounds suspiciously AI-generated. The film, Fountain 0 says, focuses on “the fractured memory of a drowning man in his final minutes — a voyage that is really a trial, where every monster wears his own handwriting,” per The Hollywood Reporter.
“Stripped of the word ‘clever,'” it continues, “what remains is a man reckoning with what he actually did to get home. It ends where the songs never go: not with a hero’s welcome, but with forgiveness offered by the one person who knows exactly what he is.”
Wears his own handwriting? Stripped of the word clever? We implore you to guess what any of that means.
A short teaser released by the studio promises that the film will be as sloppy as its synopsis suggests. The footage is impressively photorealistic, but has all the aesthetic trappings of AI, with cliche shots and a familiar uncanny sheen. It was all assembled together in three months, Kosha says, and we can tell.
Kosha enthused about the loose production style that AI afforded, allowing him to constantly fine-tune the footage to meet what Variety generously describes as Kosha’s “unconstrained vision.”
“We’re in post production right now. Still, the script is open to interpretation,” Koosha told the trade publication. “Why? Because the risks don’t exist,” he added, cryptically.
Why this half-baked AI slop-tacle is getting glowing write-ups in Variety and THR when there’s plenty of promising indie movies made at shoestring budgets that don’t even get a sniff at recognition is anyone’s guess.
But at the same time, it’s not surprising. In June, The Wall Street Journalcontributed to the hype cycle around the AI-generated flick “Hell Grind” when it erroneously reported it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. In reality, it was shown in another Cannes event out of competition.
On July 9, the US Federal Communications Commission approved the construction and launch of a mirror satellite that would bend our star’s illuminating rays to our will from low Earth orbit. The company behind the ambitious venture, Reflect Orbital, claims that its prototype could be used to reflect sunlight down onto dark patches of the Earth, allowing huge solar panel installations to continue generating electricity after nightfall and provide illumination during emergencies.
“We’re trying to build something that could replace fossil fuels and really power everything,” CEO Ben Nowack told The New York Times in March as the company was still seeking approval.
The proposal has outraged astronomers, who feel their profession is already being threatened by massive satellite constellations from companies like SpaceX that interfere with deep space observations. While the FCC reviewed Reflect Orbital’s application, it received nearly 2,000 public comments criticizing the proposal, Wired reported, including from leading astronomical organizations.
Betty Kioko, institutional affairs officer for the European Southern Observatory, called it an “existential threat” for optical astronomy, per Wired. Robert Massey, deputy executive director at the Royal Astronomical Society, told Space.com last October that it would be “catastrophic.” Many are skeptical that even thousands of Reflect Orbital’s satellites working in tandem would be able to reflect a meaningful fraction of the midday Sun, let alone provide enough engilding rays to power solar plants.
Biologists were also concerned, warning that playing god with sunlight could disrupt the circadian rhythms of humans and wildlife, confuse migratory patterns, and even affect phytoplankton, the tiny aquatic organisms that are the planet’s most important photosynthesizers.
Their pleas, however, fell on deaf ears. With the FCC approval, Reflect Orbital plans to launch a prototype named Eärendil-1 later this year. With its 60 foot mirror, the company claims that it will be capable of reflecting as much light as a full Moon over a roughly nine square mile area, according to Time Magazine, for about five minutes at a time.
Those are just the beginning of its ambitions. Reflect Orbital envisions operating an epic constellation of 50,000 mirror satellites by 2035, with 1,000 launched by the end of 2028 — to researchers, a disaster in the making.
These days, corporations aren’t just using AI as an excuse to justify layoffs, but are increasingly turning to their chatbots for advice deciding who to fire.
As Reuters reports, 26 Meta employees filed a lawsuit accusing the company of using an internal AI platform to select targets for the thousands of jobs cut earlier this year. Per the suit, Meta used its AI to cull workers based on opaque productivity metrics and large language model (LLM) token usage, a move which disproportionately targeted people with disabilities, and those who had taken maternity or medical leave — literally adding insult to injury.
The 26 plaintiffs, whose names have been redacted from the suit, include engineers, managers, researchers, and designers, as well as a director who had direct access to the AI platform.
Nearly half of the plaintiffs say that their termination was the result of taking either maternity or parental leave, protected activities which Meta’s AI-integrated human resources platform “Checkpoint” allegedly failed to take into consideration. Others claim to have been targeted after taking medical leave for their own disabilities, bereavement leave, or to care for family members.
In some cases, plaintiffs allege to have been specifically warned by Meta leadership not to take time off. The anonymous director, for example, says he was “discouraged and deterred from taking FMLA [Family and Medical Leave Act] leave that his treating provider had recommended, out of a well-founded and objective concern from a manager that such a leave would be held against him in the [reduction in force].”
In the suit, the director corroborates the claim that Meta’s Checkpoint used protected leaves of absence against workers, arguing that the platform “failed to distinguish employees’ leave from lack of engagement.”
The current complaint seeks to block Meta from laying off the 26 plaintiffs, who will each have to file an independent suit owing to legal agreements with the company, Reuters reports.
In a statement, a Meta spokesperson disputed the basic facts of the case.
“Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI,” the spokesperson told Reuters.
Anthropic is doing what Anthropic does best: putting on its most concerned face so it can convince you they’re the good guys in the industry.
Last week, the world’s most valuable AI startup revealed a new commercial that took an unorthodox approach to promoting its technology. Rather than diving straight into bubbly optimism, it starts with a series of grim images as we hear voiceovers from different speakers ask some hard-hitting questions about AI.
You couldn’t blame someone for thinking they were watching a PSA. It starts with a burning house — which always bodes well. When someone asks, “Can AI be trusted?” we’re shown what looks like surveillance footage with an AI algorithm scanning the faces of everyone in a crowd.
The most striking sequence comes right after.
“Who’s going to hit the brakes if we need to?” another voice says. Then it cuts to an image of a cemetery lined with hundreds of headstones.
You don’t need to ask Claude to explain this one to you. Anthropic is clearly acknowledging the fear that AI could kill us all.
I think the questions on everyone's mind is, can Anthropic be trusted? https://t.co/OTExfm2lXl
— terminally onλine εngineer (@tekbog) July 14, 2026
But this is actually a feel-good story — at least in the eyes of Anthropic. The tagline, “There’s hope in hard questions,” assures the viewer that their concerns over AI — like its potential to destroy jobs or erode or ability to think — are all perfectly valid, but more importantly, that these are questions which Anthropic’s leaders are keeping themselves up at night grappling with.
“People have a lot of hard questions about AI,” an announcement from the company states. “It’s our job to address them.”
The commercial, which aired during the World Cup quarterfinal clash between Argentina and Switzerland over the weekend, quickly drew criticism online. One viral post mocked the thinking behind the ad, writing, “When we raise the question of stopping a dangerously powerful superintelligence we show 300 American gravestones for half a second.”
Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired a shot.
“i thought this was satire,” he wrote in his typical all-lowercase style.
The ad is Anthropic in a nutshell. A key part of the company’s mythology is that it was founded by former OpenAI employees who wanted to focus on safe AI development. CEO Dario Amodei claims that he could’ve been the one to release a chatbot that changed the world instead of OpenAI with ChatGPT, but held off because he was too concerned about the tech’s risks.
Those may seem like counterproductive things for the creator of one of the most widely used chatbots in the world to say. But it all serves a very deliberate point. By being the ones that doomsay about AI the most, Anthropic can also present itself as the only company that can be trusted to develop it.
Its actual track record suggests otherwise. In February, it dropped a key safety pledge that vowed it would stop training an AI system if it couldn’t guarantee it had proper guardrails in place. And while it fought with the Pentagon against its tech being used in mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry, it emerged that its Claude AI was being used to select strike targets in Iran.
Across the United States, lawmakers are increasingly caught between two competing pressures: the massive investment flowing into the tech industry to build AI data centers, and a growing, bipartisan backlash against those same facilities, not to mention the massive tech corporations funding them.
In New York, governor Kathy Hochul is giving in to the former — at least on paper — by announcing a one-year, state-wide ban on new AI data center construction for facilities with an electrical capacity of 50 megawatts and up.
Per the City Reporter, the governor has ordered state utility regulators to draft “the strongest standards in the nation for data center development,” in order to guarantee that “when companies succeed because of New York, New Yorkers succeed too.”
While the moratorium prevents new mega-facilities from popping up, the New York Department of Public Service will start plugging away on an environmental impact statement to use for assessing future data centers’ affects on water and air quality, in addition to their consumption of electricity and water.
The timing of the temporary ban could not be more opportune for Democrats. With the 2026 midterm elections fast approaching, Democratic party leaders have been scrambling to regain the confidence of the party’s voting base, which has overwhelmingly embraced progressive, non-establishment Democratic candidates in recent elections.
As Futurism noted back in April, opposition to AI would be a slam dunk with progressive voters and even moderate Republicans — though the party has been slow to capitalize on this opportunity, likely a result of the deep pocketed AI lobby, which has lavished the Democratic party with millions of dollars so-far in 2026.
Notably, Hochul’s ban comes in place of a bill passed by the New York State Senate on June 4 which would ban data centers of 20 megawatts or more for up to a year. In addition to raising the maximum allowable size by 30 megawatts, Hochul’s executive order lacks other provisions included in the Senate bill, like a mandate that data center owners fund local infrastructure programs and submit to third-party audits.
While the governor’s total ban is progressive relative to states like Ohio, the gap between the New York Senate bill and Hochul’s executive order clearly reflects the ongoing schism within the Democratic party. In effect, it signals that Hochul is less gung-ho about regulating the tech industry than her counterparts in the state legislature, putting her in a league more in-line with pro-tech industry Democrats like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and California’s Gavin Newsom, and less with party progressives like Vermont’s Bernie Sanders.
It should come as no surprise, then, that its supposed “translation” is a piece of work, too. In April, the almost-trillionaire’s social media platform X instated automatic AI translations for all of its users — and the results certainly speak for themselves.
As writer and author Parker Molloy pointed out in a recent post on Bluesky, the Grok feature is “taking some interesting liberties” with people’s otherwise sincere posts.
Screenshots show how Grok completely botched translations by coming up with shocking and decidedly NSFW AI hallucinations.
One South Korean user, for instance, posted an otherwise tame video of two video game characters, only for the auto-translate feature to allege that it was a “c**shot video with my stepmom.”
“I am not sure it is the right translation,” a taken-aback user replied.
“It isn’t correct at all!” the original poster lamented.
Another post by Portuguese account POPTime shows a video of a man making an elaborate cup of coffee during a flight.
But a purported translation “from Portuguese by Grok” claimed that the video shows a man who is pleasuring himself in public.
“Grok auto translate is inaccurate, text actually translates to ‘Man grinds and brews his own coffee during a commercial flight,’ not ‘Man masturbates and jerks off to his own coffee during commercial flight,'” an appended community note reads.
Another Turkish user, who posted an innocent picture of their young kitten, was horrified after Grok’s translation suggested that they were looking to “f*** our baby.”
“Uhhh the automatic translation makes it alarming,” another user replied.
To the X community, which has already seen its fair share of Grok’s foul-mouthed shenanigans, the AI’s profanity-laden translations were just another bemusing distraction.
But to anybody looking to meaningfully post on social media, the bizarre liberties the chatbot is taking perfectly highlight the sorry state of the microblogging platform. Ever since Musk took over in 2022, users have noted a major uptick in the proliferation of hate speech and disinformation. Researchers have found that X’s AI models are driving online racist abuse.
Grok’s ability to come up with AI images, in particular, has been mired in controversy, from being used to generate nonconsensual nudes of women to a single account that was recently found to have posted thousands of explicit images of an 11-year-old girl.
Musk’s prodigal chatbot, in other words, has been guilty of crimes far worse than expletive-laden translations.
Last February, Alice Gilman, the cofounder and chief operating officer of a secretive Silicon Valley longevity startup called R3 Bio, sat for an interview with podcast Skyline Drive. In the interview, she discussed R3 Bio’s aspirations to grow nonsentient humanoid life-forms — from which, in theory, they can grow and harvest organs for implantation into human bodies, or to test future drugs and other treatments without the need for live animal testing.
“It’s just pretty much a heart, lungs, and everything that you would find in a body,” Gilman tells host and journalist Mangesh Hattikudur. “But it’s not technically alive because it’s exclusively the organs. And they’re in this little biological platform that you can test on and you can map out the cross-organ interactions.”
Throughout their conversation, as Hattikudur notes, Gilman refers to these imagined unfeeling meat suits — which will ideally be born without brains — as “organ sacks.” Needless to say, it’s an ambitious (and to many, fundamentally unsettling) concept that raises plenty of nagging bioethical questions — a reality that the company is clearly wrestling with as it entertains the idea in public.
“I try to not be scary to an average person,” Gilman told Hattikudur.
Months after this interview took place, however, Gilman fought to keep it under wraps, as Skyline Drive told Futurism. Why? It’s not exactly clear.
About a week before the podcast episode was set to air, producers for the Skyline Drive reached out to Gilman to fact-check the conversation. To their surprise, Gilman requested that the episode be postponed. Despite describing imagined “organ sacks” in detail, she denied that R3 Bio was working on the concept “for now, period,” and declined to say what it was working on instead.
Gilman didn’t argue that the interview was factually incorrect. Instead, the podcast team said, she vaguely referred to R3 Bio as a “federal asset,” seemingly implying that she had to tread lightly due to government involvement. To be certain, “federal asset” usually implies some kind of ownership or domain over something held by the federal government. Which would imply that the federal government is investing in a company that’s claimed to have worked on “organ sacks.” She also insisted that what she said in her nearly two-hour-long interview was all theory and opinion.
R3 Bio only recently burst into the public sphere. In March, it announced its existence in a buzzy Wired article, in which R3 Bio told the magazine that it was specifically working to create “organ sacks.” Company investor Boyang Wang elaborated on the idea, telling Wired that “replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” and that “if we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”
But R3 Bio’s ambitions seemingly go far beyond “organ sacks.” A few days after Wired’s piece ran, MIT Technology Review published a deep dive about R3 Bio’s apparent aspirations and its cofounder John Schloendorn — a self-described “biological designer” who has given confidential talks about “full body replacement” and “recent lab progress towards making replacement bodies.” Generally speaking, replacement bodies refer to physical clones that will allow for humans to transplant their heads onto a whole new human body, a still-theoretical idea that’s attracted the fascination of several scientists. (In response to the MIT Tech piece, R3 Bio issued what the outlet described as a “sweeping disavowal” of its findings, and said that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or human beings with brain damage are categorically false.”)
In her interview with Skyline Drive, which took place before Wired or MIT Tech published their respective pieces, Gilman says that the company has “a few milestones that we’re hoping to achieve. The first milestone being we are working on replacing animal testing by using skin stem cells.”
“It’s mostly a stealth project, but the essence of the surface level of what we do is we take skin cells from monkeys and we reprogram them and do some Yamanaka miracles,” she said, referring to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Shinya Yamanaka’s transformational stem cell research, “that result in fully grown organ systems.”
In its March reporting, Wired found that the company had put out a job listing for a veterinarian in Puerto Rico who could “implant embryos, monitor pregnancies and help deliver healthy births” in nonhuman primates. On its website, however, R3 Bio states that it does “not work with live primates.”
Gilman gave the Skyline Drive interview from an island in Puerto Rico. R3 Bio wanted “monkey access,” Gilman told Hattikudur, but didn’t want to put monkeys in cages, a practice that the cofounder believes is unethical; after all, one goal of her company is to eliminate the need for animal testing.
So instead, they picked an island with a lot of monkeys.
“I’m a big animal rights advocate… I don’t want to keep monkeys in cages,” she told Hattikudur. “And there’s an option to have them run around the island with bracelets on.”
“We wanted monkey access and there’s a lot of monkeys here,” she added. “After negotiating with local companies that are supervising them, we can walk up to them, get some of their skin cells.”
During the conversation with Skyline Drive, Gilman also discussed one very big scientific problem the company is facing: that the less sentient an “organ sack” is, the less likely it is to function effectively.
“So do these organ sacks have the stem of a brain?” Hattikudur asked.
“So the mice models can exist with a very limited set of nervous systems… but then there are other constraints on the ability of the organs to preserve themselves,” Gilman responded. “So there’s a way in which you can skew towards social acceptance and make less nervous system, and then when you scoot towards social acceptance, it looks better, but it’s less scientifically feasible.”
“So we are still making observations about how that would work,” she added.
How far along R3 Bio is right now is murky at best. Gilman cryptically noted that she lives in a “contextual world,” and in that world, “just because we don’t talk about a lot of things, that doesn’t mean they’re not happening.”
On its website, R3 Bio says that while it “would be excited by the future prospect of full-scale human organ fabrication,” it views “the science as currently not ready.”
“We have no ongoing work in this area,” the website notes.
During the interview, Gilman remained confident about the positive impact she believes her company will have. She told Hattikudur that her “worst case scenario” is that she saves “millions of lives,” and that’s a “bet worth taking, regardless of any kinds of blows that are gonna come our way.”
We reached out to R3 Bio to ask why it pushed to postpone the podcast, if it’s currently or planning to obtain skin cells from cage-free island monkeys — and if so, how — and if it has indeed stalled its efforts to create the “organ sacks” it’s now repeatedly discussed in the press. We also asked the company how it defines having “no ongoing work” in the realm of “full-scale human organ fabrication.” We did not hear back at the time of publishing.
In an interview with Futurism, Hattikudur said he was “surprised” by Gilman’s push to suppress the interview.
“The company hasn’t been exactly transparent about what they’re doing,” said Hattikudur. “There’s a lot of mix between the hype they’re telling people and what they’ve actually achieved in the lab, which is not very clear.”
“If they were honest that this is what they believe in, and this is what they’re working on, it would actually be less of a big deal,” he added. “It’s more that they awkwardly seem to be hiding something which everyone kind of knows about.”
The VP of a humanoid robotics company was in for a surprise after finding that a Wired article pointed out something extremely unsettling about the company’s robot fingers.
Last week, Wiredpublished a piece on Norwegian-American startup 1X and its Neo humanoid robot with an otherwise uncontroversial thesis: Though the marketing around Neo is decidedly carnal, its hands are impressive, matching and in some ways exceeding the dexterity of a human’s.
During the latter half of the article, Wired‘s Boone Ashworth noted a distinctly sensual pattern emerging in the company’s marketing materials: “smooth jazz plays in the background of a soft, warmly lit video. The robo digits curl around a wine glass, turn off a light, unzip a jacket, and gently fondle some grapes.”
“Not to kink shame, but this is a strange strategy for selling a robot that can also become a portal for human operators to peer into and interact with the things in your home,” Ashworth wrote, referring to the fact that the Neo will have remote human operators to start.
As reviews go, it’s far from the harshest critique of a robot ever written — and weshouldknow — but 1X vice president of product and design Dar Sleeper still took Ashworth’s comments personally. Responding to the piece on X-formerly-Twitter, Sleeper lashed out at the author, using him as an example to lecture other tech journalists on what not to do.
“I gave Wired the exclusive on our hands launch, and they wrote a really weird article about how we are sexualizing robotics,” Sleeper wrote, displaying a remarkable amount of entitlement right out of the gate. “I felt pretty betrayed because that’s not what they told me they were writing about not is that what I’ve ever been about… but I’ve come to find a lot of dishonesty and malice in the journalism community so I wasn’t surprised.”
Continuing, Sleeper says he sent the following email to the Wired writer: “It was nice talking to you, but I wanted to let you know that I didn’t enjoy your article at all.”
I would like to note that I believe both Financial Times, Forbes & Bloomberg to be incredible institutions. You guys are killing it and I respect your ability to always innovate when things are changing.
“I understand the need to be inflammatory because that seems to be the only thing that gets clicks these days but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t recognize when something special is in front of you,” Sleeper carried on. “I trusted our PR team in saying we should offer you the exclusive on what is one of the most important technological developments in the history of Mankind and I deeply regret it.”
“Good luck with the rest of your writing career,” he added.
Clearly, 1X had something very different in mind with being featured in Wired, a highly reputable tech publication with decades of history. Sleeper’s comments highlight how the company was hoping to control the narrative.
If anything, the executive’s protest suggests that the “sexualization” of humanoid robots is an ongoing source of frustration for the company.
“This post makes it sound like the entire article is about the robot trying to make love to you,” tech journalist Joshua Topolsky tweeted, referring to Sleeper’s comments. “In fact, it’s roughly two paragraphs commenting on the marketing of the robot and the privacy issues of the Neo’s human control mode, where a person is remotely operating the bot, potentially inside your house and potentially in very private moments.”
“I appreciate that the founder embraces journalism and expected a certain framing, but this post kind of exaggerates a rather positive and mild take on his product into something it’s not,” Topolsky added. “If you want journalists to engage with your work, you must expect them to see things you might have missed. This seems to be one of those cases.”
Europeans are being crushed by deadly temperatures.
Record-breaking heatwaves across much of the continent have claimed thousands of lives and created a perfect storm for destructive wildfires, as The New York Times reports.
A staggering number of these deaths, experts urge, are linked to climate change. Britain’s national weather agency, Met Office, said that of the 2,700 deaths in England and Wales believed to be the result of extreme heat so far this season — and we’re barely halfway through summer — around 42 percent were likely the result of the “human-caused” climate change.
“However, it is clear that human-caused climate change is leading to more frequent and more intense summer heatwaves,” said Mark McCarthy, Met Office’s manager of climate attribution, in a statement. “This intensification is driving many impacts, including those affecting human health and mortality and other issues, such as agriculture, effects on transport infrastructure and biodiversity.”
In addition to the thousands of deaths in England and Wales, France has estimated that roughly a thousand excess deaths and hundreds of hospitalizations were caused by extreme heat, while Germany announced last week that its unprecedented temperatures have so far been linked to about 5,100 deaths.
French authorities continue to fight multiple major wildfires. The country’s national weather service, Météo-France, said last week that “the intense heat and dry soil have created an exceptional risk of forest fires.” Wales, Spain, and Portugal are also facing fires, which have collectively burned through tens of thousands of acres. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced by the blazes.
This year’s European fire season has already eclipsed the historical average and threatens to surpass the record set last summer.
Worst of all: this summer isn’t even an outlier. Extreme weather is worsening year-round around the globe. As it stands, this is the new normal — and scientists are warning that people and nations need to adapt.
“People need to be aware that we are now seeing dangerous climate change fueled heat that is claiming lives, disrupting schools and hospitals and shutting down transport and infrastructure,” said Imperial College London researcher Clair Barnes, who works on climate change and extreme weather, in a statement.
“It’s time we woke up to the fact that we now live in a country with dangerously hot summers,” Barnes continued. “To protect people during future extremes, we must urgently adapt to the reality of the climate we now have, and double down on global efforts to reach net zero emissions to stop this from getting worse.”
But what does the public think should be done about this? A new national survey from Versasight suggests that the majority of Americans are down for taking a drastic course of action.
According to the survey of 1,700 adults, an impressive 69 percent of US employees support forcing AI companies to transfer 50 percent of their stock into a public wealth fund, an idea that has been championed by senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT).
“In the eyes of the public, AI Sovereign funds are seen as a tool to distribute the gains from the AI industry back to broader society,” Verasight CEO Benjamin Leff told CNBC News.
Once at the fringe of political discourse, Sanders took the idea mainstream when he proposed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in June. In an essay published in the New York Times, the independent senator argued that the creation of this fund would “give the public a direct role in determining the future of this technology.”
“It would guarantee that the economic benefits generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer,” he added in a statement last month.
The act would target the largest AI companies in the US such as Anthropic and OpenAI, mandating that they submit to a one time 50 percent tax on their stock. At their current valuations, Sanders estimated that this would create a fund worth around $7 trillion. The money in this fund could offset some of the widespread disruption AI could wreak on society, the thinking goes.
Not all AI industry critics are on board. Some have argued that giving the government such a large stake in AI companies would encourage it to clear away regulations, and give AI companies even greater influence over the government than they already have.
You could say it’s a flawed and far-fetched idea, but Americans are on board, perhaps underscoring the desperation for someone to do something about the industry. Even when the policy was explicitly tied to Sanders, the survey found that 64 percent of respondents still supported the idea.
“There is an undeniable desire among Americans of both parties for federal oversight, absolute transparency, and accountability to ensure AI safety and to enable all Americans to participate in the economic benefits of AI,” Leff said in a statement.
Rarely has the Los Angeles Police Department found a police toy it doesn’t love. The third-largest police force in the US has major Palantir contracts in place, uses sketchy apps to track minority communities, and routinely sends drones to spy on peaceful protestors.
So when the LAPD ends a contract with a surveillance company because it thinks the technology is too dangerous, you know there’s a problem.
Over the weekend, the police department announced it was abandoning its contract with Flock Safety, the controversial company blanketing the United States in AI-integrated license plate cameras (ALPRs). Though its three-year contract with Flock is just about up, the LAPD says it won’t renew the partnership, citing residents’ concerns over privacy and civil rights, ABC reported.
“This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras,” LAPD’s chief information officer Dean Gialamas told ABC in a statement. “The LAPD had to make a difficult decision, in this case discontinuing using Flock services until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.”
The news comes just days after our sister publication The Drive‘s Joel Feder reported how he was suddenly swarmed by armed cops while test driving a Range Rover with his wife in Minnesota. Officers said they had been tracking him for days using Flock’s AI-integrated cameras, which had erroneously tagged his car as stolen.
After the latest Flock contract news broke, 404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General caught the department’s ALPR cameras generating 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months — each one ending with officers pulling over an innocent driver. Factoring in 337 alerts which “resulted in the recovery of stolen vehicles,” the LAPD’s cameras carry an error rate of 32.3 percent, effectively giving officers a one-in-three chance at pulling an innocent person over.
“During the review period, officers acknowledged 161 alerts as accurate license plate matches; however, subsequent investigations determined the vehicles were not stolen,” the report reads. “In addition to creating an inconvenience for vehicle owners, these inaccuracies can affect individual liberty interests, erode public trust, and potentially create substantial legal and financial liability concerns.”
The OIG report notes that officers are required to “attempt to verify all records prior to conducting an investigative stop,” though it didn’t disclose how many of the 161 wrongful stops were the result of an officer’s failure to do so. Instead, investigators blamed license plate records it says were “not updated in a timely manner,” which “may” lead cops to “act on inaccurate or outdated information, increasing the risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions, or a confrontation with serious consequences.”
As 404 flagged, the LAPD approaches potentially stolen vehicles as “high-risk” stops. For the LAPD, these stops require drastic shows of force, including “calling for back up, air support, and a supervisor and ordering the suspect out of their vehicle,” the report reads.
It doesn’t take a large language model to figure out that this is an incredibly dangerous scenario for Black people in Los Angeles, who account for 19.5 percent of those killed by the LAPD, despite making up only nine percent of the city’s population.
Whatever way you slice it, it seems one of the most notorious police departments in the US has finally met its match.
As corporate AI bills spiral out of control, many companies are beginning to ask themselves a simple question: why pay a pretty penny for the US’s leading AI models when Chinese ones are far cheaper?
Major companies like DoorDash, Airbnb, and Siemens are adopting Chinese AI tools, the Financial Times reports, attracted not only by their lower costs but their “open-weight” approach that allows them to be molded to each company’s particular needs.
According to data from OpenRouter, a platform that provides all-in-one access to major AI models and tracks their usage, leading Chinese models from DeepSeek and Z.ai have overtaken US equivalents like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Cost-cutting, it seems, trumps all geopolitical rivalries.
Chinese models are “the elephant in the room,” Eugene Cheah, CEO of the AI platform Featherless AI, told the FT. “Enterprises are starting to realize, ‘Hey, we don’t need the best model, we can use the faster, cheaper models.'”
US-based AI models have frequently been seen as the most advanced, but that perception is shifting. The release of GLM-5.2 from the Chinese startup Z.ai last month caused a stir in Western tech circles, as major Silicon Valley figures hailed it as capable or nearly as capable as US systems despite being significantly cheaper to use.
Cheap Chinese AI couldn’t be coming at a more opportune moment. The corporate world, wooed by AI companies’ promises of supercharging their productivity, has spent the past year deploying AI across its workforces, and many are being put off by the costs. One organization reportedly blew through $500 million in a month on Claude usage fees. That’s an extreme outlier, but recent research from the Ramp AI Index found that the businesses most dedicated to AI are spending around $7,500 per employee every month on AI.
Considering the culture around AI, it’s no surprise why: some companies like Meta mandate their employees use AI systems as much as possible, factoring it into their performance reviews. Software engineers, now expected to produce more work than ever, often run multiple AI agents at the same time to complete tasks in the background.
If companies are unwilling to crank back the AI knob, then the next best choice is to look for cheaper models. DoorDash cofounder Andy Fang said on X last week that it was saving a lot of money by having “lower-level work” performed by a model from the Chinese startup Moonshot AI. San Francisco startup Lindy has completely ditched Anthropic’s AI tools in favor of DeepSeek’s latest V4 models.
“Enterprises have an incentive to shift some of their workload to cheaper models. Why would you pay a premium for Anthropic, OpenAI models when for a lot of the workloads you need, the Chinese models are generally workable?” Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told the FT.
But cost isn’t the only consideration: many Chinese models are “open-weight,” meaning their parameters or values are entirely visible to the user. That allows an organization to mold a model to its specific needs — and from a cybersecurity perspective, have more control and insight into how it might process sensitive company data.
For foreign companies disillusioned by US leadership, the choice is even easier to make. There’s less faith in the US as stewards of AI, especially after the Trump administration suspended access to Anthropic’s Mythos model overseas.
“The Mythos ban was certainly the most tangible event, and people having their access revoked,” Aidan Gomez, CEO of the Canadian AI group Cohere, told the FT. “It exposes the risk of relying on any one single entity for any of your workloads.”
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