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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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