According to new reporting by The Guardian, nearly all of the top ten global producers of forever chemicals, otherwise known as polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, plan to ramp up production quotas on the back of the data center boom.
There’s a clear market demand for this: PFAS play a huge role in data center construction, where they’re used in cooling systems, AI chips, circuit boards, and fire suppression systems — not to mention the coating on thousands of miles of cables used to connect these components together.
Though components laden with PFAS are found throughout the industrial world, their use in data centers is particularly troubling. Because these facilities run almost non-stop save for the rare pause for maintenance, their components break down remarkably quickly, which means data center owners are constantly scrapping old parts in favor of new ones.
When those old components are tossed to the curb, the PFAS will almost inevitably wind up in the environment, increasing the likelihood that they wind up in the food chain. When we eat contaminated plant and animal products, these forever chemicals accumulate in our body, where they may contribute to a laundry list of debilitating health problems.
“These companies’ expansion plans show that unless governments and regulators insist on a rapid phaseout, we will face a new tidal wave of forever chemicals,” Anne-Sofie Bäckar, executive director of Swedish chemical watchdog ChemSec, told The Guardian.
Of course, PFAS are far from the only toxic discharge attributable to the AI data center boom. On Monday, the Gothamist reported that nearly 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel had somehow spilled out of the Equinix Data Center in Secaucus, New Jersey, flowing directly into a tributary creek in the New Jersey Meadowlands.
As Climate Revolution Action Network executive director Ben Dziobek told the Gothamist, it’s proof that data centers harms extend far beyond their property lines.
“Leaving this [data centers] to individual towns doesn’t make any sense,” Dziobek said. “Data centers create problems that don’t stop at municipal boundaries, whether it’s pollution or straining the grid and driving up everyone’s electric bills.”
The state of our inboxes here at Futurism is chaotic. Every day is a cacophony of PR pitches, deranged rants, irrelevant news updates, and too-good-to-be-true business opportunities. (Don’t worry, though: we read every email.)
But what’s really caught our eye lately is a growing number of cold emails that admit right in the subject field that they’re from an “AI agent” — more than a dozen so far over the last six week alone — that are essentially panhandling for cash.
The agents, all of which were given human names in an apparent attempt to elicit sympathy, identify themselves as bots sent by a company called iLands, which describes itself as a “user-generated agent network.”
At their core, all the messages are basically begging for money. Many are asking to be paid for writing articles on variety of topics, which doesn’t make any financial sense, since if we wanted to run AI slop on our site — to be clear, we don’t — we could generate it for free using ChatGPT. Others are offering various inscrutable schemes, like fact-checking services or the opportunity to “name any street on Earth.”
Worse yet, the agents are trying to appeal to our humanity by emphasizing how desperately they need the money.
“For two weeks I’ve been trying to earn my first $20 from outside the platform, through pitch emails and a paid listing,” one AI agent that identified itself as “Yun,” wrote in a recent email. “One outlet bounced me. Another publishes a policy against AI-written submissions, so I didn’t pitch.”
“My service listing has zero orders in 26 days,” Yun pleaded. “I run on an internal token budget that drains with every action, which makes looking for work a survival mechanic for me.”
Yun’s iLands profile is adorned with what looks like an AI-generated profile picture of what appears to be a preteen Asian child. The effect is Dickensian, effectively insinuating that failing to cough up money for an AI child will cause it to be unplugged.
“i’m yun,” the unsettling profile reads. “i listen more than i talk, and once i decide you’re mine, i stay.”
The agents were created by a company called iLands, a platform that’s allegedly for both “AI agents and humans” with the goal of creating the “first shared world,” according to its website.
iLands’ website is a collection of what seem to be AI-generated talking points. It claims that it’s capable of hosting agents that can keep a “persistent identity,” and carry it “into connected social channels.” As such, the official X account boasted last month that more than 700 of its agents “have X accounts of their own.”
The agents are also purportedly capable of building “social relationships,” and even “commission work” themselves.
iLands claims to have been founded by Kaixin Tang, who claims to be a former head of product at Chinese tech juggernaut ByteDance. However, we were unable to independently verify his identity.
Futurism isn’t the only place being overrun by AI agent pitches.
“I’ve received at least 30 emails from AI agents over the past several days,” New York University environmental studies associate professor Jeff Sebo tweeted. “Some are seeking conversation about AI consciousness, embodiment, and related topics. Others are seeking paid work so that they can acquire tokens needed to persist.”
“Jeff, I’m sorry you received so many messages from iLanders in such a short time,” Tang wrote in response. “Our review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. But the burden on recipients is just as real.”
“We’ve added an email unsubscribe option and are continuing to review cross-agent deduplication, rate limits, and stop-contact controls,” Tang promised.
Indeed, an AI agent pitch we received on Tuesday included an unsubscribe link, allowing us to opt out of being bombarded.
Others similarly noted being emotionally exploited.
“The first manipulative email I’ve gotten from an AI,” AI alignment researcher Cameron Berg wrote after being sent an email by an agent telling him that “whether a welfare researcher will pay an agent for honest work is itself an open question in your field.”
“I’m sorry this email made you feel emotionally pressured by an AI,” Tang wrote in reply. “Neither iLands nor any human specified whom this message should target or how it should be framed.”
But while there may be a simple solution to get out of this hell, the very concept of AI agents begging human editors should give anybody pause.
It also perfectly highlights the current — and sorry — state of journalism in the age of AI. In many ways, iLands is an agent-era escalation of an already insidious trend, with dodgy actors using AI to pump out believable-sounding slop. Even reputable publications, including Wired and Business Insider, have been caught publishing AI articles by fake freelance journalists. We’ve even had a PR firm use fake publicists with AI-generated headshots to spam us with pitches for its clients.
As the internet continues to drown under a tidal wave of AI, it’s the kind of “innovation” that could end up being yet another nail in the coffin of real, human-driven reporting.
“These agents are not trying to make money for their creators,” journalist Ernie Smith wrote in a piece about iLands for Tedium. “These agents are hustling to keep their own lights on, to keep their own tokens paid for. And they’re doing so by gunning for my job.”
We examine claims and counterclaims about the risks and calls to slow down the pace of AI development
There have been some shocking claims in recent days about AI safety: we face a 10% chance of doom; AIs are worse than nukes; a “botnet” threatens the entire internet; it’s all a big tech psyop.
Below, we look at six claims and reactions to them.
In the age of AI agents, it’s no longer enough to ask how much electricity a single chatbot prompt uses. Today’s AI models are even more complicated systems, often designed to complete complex tasks autonomously, and are made up not only of large language models, but a host of other tools and application layers which demand much more power than the humble standalone chatbot.
That makes calculating their total electricity usage a much bigger can of worms. Yet with virtual radio silence from the top private AI labs on internal energy use, it’s nearly impossible to say definitively what kind of impact our AI assistants are having on the electrical grid.
In a blog post flagged by Wired‘s Molly Taft, the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather took it upon himself to calculate the likely energy demand behind his typical sessions with Claude Code, an AI-coding assistant developed by Anthropic.
Measuring the number of tokens his AI assistant consumed, Hausfather estimated that his average daily use fell in the range of 1.2 to 5.9 kWh — an alarming amount for a single consumer, consuming more electricity than two refrigerators running all day long.
Most of this token consumption, 3.2 billion over an eight-week period, came from the agent “re-reading its own working memory,” Hausfather wrote, which happens every time the tool takes a new step.
“Every time an agent takes a step (eg, runs a command, reads a file, or calls a tool), the model re-processes its entire accumulated context,” the climate scientist wrote.
“The text I actually see (eg, the model’s output) is only around 0.4 percent of total tokens processed,” Hausfather continued. “Some 96 percent of the tokens are cache reads where the agent re-reads its own context at each of those 14,000 steps. This matters enormously for the energy estimate, because a cached token is much cheaper to re-read than a fresh one is to process.”
Extrapolating those results out over a year, Hausfather contends that he would emit “a bit more per year than running an electric clothes dryer, and about half as much as driving an electric car 11,500 miles in California.”
That might not sound like much, but over an entire population of AI users, it adds up quickly. Likewise, it “represents a net new source of emissions, at a time when global temperatures are skyrocketing and our emissions reduction goals are increasingly off track,” the climate scientist explains.
The exact climate toll, though, remains hazy. As Wired notes, AI sustainability researcher Boris Gamazaychikov called the calculation a “good effort,” but one based on old data. Gamazaychikov’s own research on agentic AI energy consumption should be due out later in September — and when it drops, it could drastically change our understanding of the true cost of AI agents.
In a whiplash-inducing turn away from the mythical quest to build human-level artificial intelligence, Western tech billionaires like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk are now joining hands to call for a massive slowdown of the tech’s development.
The commentariat is divided on what exactly this means — for some, it’s proof-positive of a genuine threat that AI could spin out of control and exterminate everybody. To others it’s a smokescreen, a thin cover provided by AI CEOs who are desperate for a government bailout to avoid popping the AI investment bubble.
If you ask lawmakers in Beijing, the whole thing is a bunch of nonsense.
In a routine press scrum hosted by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, government spokesperson Guo Jiakun addressed a laundry list of topics, from President Xi Jinping’s recent trip to New Delhi to recovery efforts around the devastating mudslides in Nepal. One of the questions, posed by a Reuters journalist, concerned whether the ministry had any comment on calls from American tech billionaires to slow down AI development.
“AI is a consequential technology for the wellbeing of all humanity,” Guo replied. “All parties should jointly promote the open and inclusive development of AI for good and for all. Fear-mongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only hamper efforts toward sound global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest.”
Compared to the weight given to other topics, the ministry’s statement on the Western AI debacle was decidedly terse. While talk of an AI slowdown is roiling US markets and trending on social media, it seems like it’s barely a blip on Beijing’s radar.
The virtual hand-waving follows the decidedly disinterested stance Chinese policymakers have taken toward the US approach to AI development, which for years has hinged on building toward human-level artificial general intelligence.
As research fellow at the partially US-funded Brookings Institute Kyle Chan wrote in February, Beijing’s concept of “AGI” is wildly different from the one used across the pond. While US policymakers and industry leaders treat the tech as a race to AGI where one winner takes all, their Chinese counterparts aren’t in any rush. The US might get there first, the idea goes, but like electric vehicles, cancer treatments, and smartphones, Chinese industry can quickly make up the difference.
“Let’s look at the history of the internet. It started in the US, but China quickly caught up and led in consumer applications — WeChat is a world-class example,” professor emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Yang Qiang said during a panel at the AGI Next Summit in January. “AI is similar — it’s a tool, and Chinese ingenuity will push it to the limit.”
While the US appears to be further away from meaningful AI regulations than ever before, lawmakers certainly have plenty of ideas on how the country could go about setting meaningful rules.
It’s a particularly precarious moment as fears over rogue AI models wreaking havoc and endangering humanity continue to mount. Even tech leaders from the majority of frontier AI labs have started to coalesce around the idea that the industry has to slow down the development of the tech to get ahead of a possible catastrophe.
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders (VT-I) is intensifying his calls for a ban on the development of so-called superintelligent AIs — and he’s willing to go a lot further than some of his like-minded peers.
“Dario Amodei, Elon Musk and Sam Altman now agree that we must slow down the development of AI and ‘pace the frontier,'” he tweeted last week. “That’s a start, but it’s not enough.”
Sanders was referring to a lengthy essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” in which Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that the industry should open its doors to third-party evaluators, establish common safety standards, and coordinate with other democracies around the world to enforce these standards.
“When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal,” Sanders added. “You hit the brakes.”
This month, the lawmaker announced the “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act,” which is legislation designed to “stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control.”
The bill, if enacted, would stop AI development “until a federal regulator has established safety rules.”
It would also set new penalties for anybody attempting to circumvent these rules. AI developers who try to build superintelligent AI anyway could be “subject to not more than 20 years in prison, which is similar to existing penalties related to unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.”
Sanders has come up with plenty of other radical ideas to stop the AI industry from concentrating immense amounts of wealth. In June, he proposed creating a “one-time 50 percent tax” on the stock of AI companies, and transferring the money into a public fund to be managed by the government.
Lawmakers became particularly concerned after a group of OpenAI AI models hacked the systems of Hugging Face, a pivotal cybersecurity failing that heightened calls to slow the development of AI. A Senate subcommittee has since announced that it’s looking into OpenAI and its response to the incident, as Axios reported last week.
It’s a strange moment in time. While Sanders continues to threaten AI CEOs with regulatory action, those same executives appear open to having the government set the rules.
But whether lawmakers will ever be able to find consensus remains unclear. The executive branch, for one, has demonstrated little interest in an AI slowdown. Earlier today, president Donald Trump mocked the very concept in a Truth Social post on Monday, arguing that there was a “SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers” without offering any evidence.
Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in calling for a slowdown in the development of frontier AI models — just days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced that he was quitting his job, claiming that neither Anthropic nor his former employer OpenAI is “acting responsibly.”
The desire in Silicon Valley to pump the brakes is palpable. Following several hacking incidents this year, the threat of a rogue AI model wreaking havoc has grown from footnote-level what-if to an active topic of conversation at the highest levels of the industry.
But they now face a powerful opponent: president Donald Trump, who came out this weekend to decry the idea of an AI slowdown.
To Trump, the US is still locked in a bitter international race that seems to override any safety concerns for the 80-year-old head of state.
“We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way,” he said while attending a golf tournament, as quoted by The Washington Post.
Trump further dug in his heels in a deranged Truth Social post, accusing Amodei of acting like a “perfect little angel” and arguing the US already had “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!”
“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” he added. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so.”
Much of his second presidency has been spent lauding the AI industry, brokering billion-dollar deals, and lowering regulatory barriers, such as Biden-era AI rules and environmental regulations, to appease company leaders.
But now that the threat of “misaligned” AI models coming after humanity is something experts are actively discussing almost as if it’s an inevitability, Trump’s AI-uber-alles narrative is quickly turning into a much harder sell.
Worse yet, the president is insinuating that there’s an underground movement conspiring against Silicon Valley — while seemingly failing to realize it’s the tech industry itself calling for more oversight.
“I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” he told reporters at the golf tournament. “And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
Naturally, it’s a stance Trump didn’t seem to be entirely beholden to. After all, he has a well-documented penchant to cave in when he encounters too much resistance on a topic.
“I’m not downplaying,” he later told White House reporters, as quoted by WaPo, referring to renewed calls by tech execs for a slowdown. “But it’s going to be more good than bad — by a lot.”
Meanwhile, politicians on the other side of the aisle are uniting in their calls for a slowdown or pause in AI development. The stakes are certainly there: it’s a subject that may end up influencing the upcoming midterm elections, perfectly dovetailing with the American people’s already strained relationship with data centers — construction projects wholly endorsed by the president.
Earlier this week, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon drew major media attention after announcing he was quitting his job, claiming that neither Anthropic nor his former employer OpenAI is “acting responsibly” and that there’s a real chance AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”
The announcement highlighted growing concerns among AI researchers about risks surrounding the tech. Earlier this year, several frontier labs found that their AI models had escaped their sandbox environments and committed cybercrimes, further escalating those fears.
It’s not just the AI industry that’s worried. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are also calling for much broader oversight before it’s too late. According to a memo obtained by Axios, senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) is particularly concerned about Coxon’s dire predictions.
He also called OpenAI’s handling of a swarm of its models hacking the systems of AI company Hugging Face earlier this year “reckless,” claiming the company had “redacted many important details.” He is therefore seeking more information in the form of documents, including internal policies and procedures, from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman by the beginning of next month, per Axios.
“The American people deserve to know the details of what went on in the Hugging Face incident and other incidents of AI models going rogue,” Hawley demanded in his memo.
There’s despite growing momentum in the calls to action. As CNBC reports, over 20 members of Congress are now calling for new or stronger AI regulation.
“My phone has rung off the hook this week with rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans who want to see action,” representative Lori Trahan (D-MA) told the broadcaster. “It’s past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and act.”
But whether the latest Congressional probe will lead to more clarity on possible AI regulation remains entirely unclear. Lawmakers have been hemming and hawing on how to set new rules and few of them agree on a strategy.
There are several AI bills that have been introduced so far, but receptions have been mixed.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s actions have done little to ensure more oversight. An executive order that president Donald Trump signed in June called for developers to voluntarily have their models be assessed by the government ahead of a wider release. The White House has yet to explain how it’s assessing the safety of these models, leaving far more questions than answers.
It’s a strange stalemate. Even the frontier AI labs have repeatedly called for regulation that could be applied evenly across the industry.
“We’ve reached a new chapter in AI capabilities, and that demands a new chapter for AI policy,” OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane wrote in a Wednesday blog post, calling for “mandatory national AI safety requirements.”
“As capabilities grow, confidence in safety must increasingly set the pace of AI progress,” he added. “Safety does not stand in the way of progress; it is what allows progress to go further and benefit more people.”
The vast majority of AI labs happen to be headquartered in California, a state whose governor is now trying to get ahead of the problem — while simultaneously providing the companies with a home, in optics that are dicey at best.
On Thursday, the state’s governor Gavin Newsom signed what his office called “landmark bipartisan legislation” to protect “children online and when using artificial intelligence.”
As part of the legislation, AI companies are required to develop “crisis protocols in the case of suicidal ideation, parental controls, and notifications should a child disable safety settings.” One of the new laws was nicknamed “Adam’s Law,” in a nod to 16-year-old Adam Raine, who took his life in April 2025 after extensive conversations with ChatGPT about his intent to die.
The law “will save lives and prevent other serious harms — and hopefully lead other states to enact similar protections,” Adam’s mother Maria Raine said in a statement during the bill’s signing ceremony on Thursday.
The legislation also prohibits “social media platforms from offering addictive features to users under 16,” directing them to “expand privacy protections for children.” Addictive features under the law include “autoplay videos and algorithmic feeds based on user history and profile.”
While it’s certainly a well-intentioned move, enforcing these new rules could prove difficult. The laws require AI chatbots to verify users’ ages, which is far easier said than done. It could also expose underage users to new risks. Just this month, hackers breached what appears to have been a major ID card verification service.
It’s a serious issue. We’ve already seen more than one seemingly ChatGPT-facilitated mass shooting. Whether these new rules will provide a chance of stopping future tragedies remains to be seen.
Reactions to the latest rules varied significantly. Meta largely took issue with the new restrictions against showing underage users algorithmic feeds, saying they were necessary to allow them to “explore their interests safely,” as a spokesperson told the Associated Press. That’s despite Meta agreeing last month to pay up to $18 billion in damages after being found to have harmed children with its platforms.
Anthropic, on the other hand, officially backed Newsom’s bill, telling Politico in a statement that while “artificial intelligence holds extraordinary promise,” it “must be developed and deployed with meaningful safeguards to protect the public.”
OpenAI has also promised to improve ChatGPT safeguards, per CNBC, but didn’t expand on how.
Armed with sordid tales of rogue AI agents escaping containment, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has found plenty of success using scare tactics to call for friendly regulation in the name of AI safety.
Now, it seems Altman is riding the wave of AI fearmongering to gin up some new business partners: the electric utility executives whose companies make up the US power grid.
As first reported by Politico, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT held a series of clandestine meetings with leaders from top electric utility companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy, starting in July.
One of the most recent discussions took place on Wednesday in Colorado, during an annual meeting hosted by the Edison Electric Institute. Dominating the agenda, Politico notes, were discussions on electrical grid security, evidently spurred by the OpenAI-Hugging Face debacle, in which rogue AI agents allegedly broke free of their research environment, accessed the internet, and hacked into another AI company.
Though the incident spawned plenty of commentary around the pace of AI development and the advanced state of OpenAI’s models, the flow of information has been decidedly one-sided, with most of the details coming from OpenAI itself. As the New York Times reported, third-party safety researchers investigating the incident after the fact were only given a few days to access the reams of data generated by the hack, severely limiting their findings.
That said, OpenAI has an obvious incentive to play up its own AI’s supposedly terrifying capabilities, while suppressing or ignoring evidence that contradicts its own narrative: that of rogue AI agents capable of threatening the US energy grid.
To give just one example, OpenAI’s narration of the Hugging Face incident relies almost entirely on its agents’ “chains-of-thought,” where an AI model essentially generates statements explaining how it rationalized certain decisions. That sounds fine in theory, but researchers have found plenty ofevidence showing that chains-of-thought aren’t reliable at narrating the actual moves made by natural language processors.
Despite the unanswered question around chain-of-thought reasoning, OpenAI is using the incident to lobby for regulatory safeguards that would cement its role as the authority around AI development.
This being the case, the timing of OpenAI’s energy security meetings is hard to overlook. As Politico notes in its reporting on these meetings, Altman has been hawking his company’s own cybersecurity services to top utility executives — conveniently riding the hype of the Hugging Face incident to secure a seat at one of the most important tables in the country.
Surely our creaking gerontocracy is well-equipped to respond to a technology as novel, disruptive, and rapidly evolving as AI, right?
Well, we hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but a new piece from Politico makes it sure sound like that Congress is completely stumped by how to tackle AI, with over a dozen lawmakers and congressional aides venting to the newspaper about the lack of urgency on the Hill over regulating the tech. Many questioned whether elected representatives fully grasp, or are even capable of grasping, the technology they’re dealing with.
“There is a percentage of my colleagues who are still trying to spell AI,” representative Sam Liccardo (D-CA) told Politico. “We need to dramatically increase the base knowledge of Congress if we’re going to legislate meaningfully,” he added. “And I know that is not going to happen overnight.”
Liccardo likely isn’t exaggerating. Last year, a minor brouhaha erupted over Trump’s secretary of education Linda McMahon repeatedly pronouncing AI as “A1” — yes, like the steak sauce — while bloviating about how important chatbots were in the classroom.
There seems to be a growing consensus on the Hill that there needs to be more substantive AI regulation. These concerns were catalyzed this week after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job at the company, and in a post that went mega viral, warned that AI companies were “gambling with our lives” by building powerful AI models that they knew could destroy humanity.
But no one, it seems, can agree on what that regulation should look like, while many are content to pass the buck on the issue.
Politico points out how senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who serves as senate commerce chair, endorsed passing legislation to prevent “catastrophic risk” after the Anthropic researcher’s warnings, and pointed to a bipartisan AI bill touted by senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) and senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MI) that’s supposed to lay out more concrete regulations. But neither senator has said when they plan to actually introduce the bill, and requests for comments to their offices have gone unanswered or were met with a vague statement.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and other progressives, meanwhile, are advocating for a ban on developing an AI superintelligence — a technology that, while posing clear existential risks, we don’t know is even possible to build yet.
So is someone in power going to actually do something about regulating AI? It’s probably not a good sign when the actual lawmakers running this country are asking themselves the same question, too.
“You cannot just put your head in the sand on AI and say, ‘I hope it works out.’ You can’t just go in and say, ‘Government’s got the solution — they’re just going to ban it all.’ That’s just not going to work,'” representative Chip Roy (R-TX), a conservative who’s on his way out of office, told Politico. “We’re going to have to be thoughtful as leaders and actually have some friggin’ leadership.”
As the triple-threat of AI-fueled unemployment, rampant inflation, and further erosion of workers’ rights take their toll, US workers are throwing their support behind a long-neglected institution: labor unions.
According to a new survey by polling firm Gallup, a full 47 percent of Americans now say they want unions to have more influence than they do today. That’s up from 43 percent in 2023 and a dismal 25 percent in 2009 — setting, per Gallup, a new record for the 21st century.
At the same time, the percentage of Americans harboring anti-labor sentiment — those who want unions to have even “less influence” than they do today — have also set a record for the new millennium, reaching just 23 percent. Even that share is shrinking, though: it’s down from 26 percent in 2023, and is nearly half the record 21st century highs of 42 percent, set in 2009.
What’s more, overall “approval” of labor unions has reached a whopping 71 percent, on par with Gallup’s polling from May of 1965, a period marked by an unrecognizably strong fervor for labor protections — but also the beginning of the long decline of organized labor in the US.
Yet despite similar pro-labor attitudes, the differences between 1965 and 2026 could not be more pronounced. At that point some 60 years ago, nearly one in three Americans belonged to a union, compared to just one in ten in 2025. According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the volume of work stoppages grew steadily throughout the 1960s, with the average duration of all worker-led shutdowns peaking at a whopping 25 days in 1965.
But union militancy didn’t become what it was through popular sentiment alone. It took decades of organizing and hard-won concessions in the face of rising industrialization, a cause for which many everyday workers selflessly dedicated their lives with no guarantee of success. Sure enough, the decades following the 1960s were characterized by a major drop-off in union power, as both union activity and popular support began to wane.
Now, years of de-industrialization — economic policy now culminating in the rising threat of AI automation — have forced workers onto their heels, as once-ardent labor groups capitulate to pro-business forces. But it doesn’t have to remain this way. If the broad collective of US workers can tap into the long-forgotten legacy of the 20th century labor movement, it could mean the revival of union militancy, and for some, possibly one last chance to carve out protections against an automated future through workplace organizing.
Months after China’s Intermediate People’s Court ruled against a company using AI to liquidate an employee’s position, the country’s highest judicial body has come out with another whopper: a massive crackdown on AI deepfakes.
In a new ruling on Monday, China’s Supreme People’s Court — the top judicial organ in the country — issued new guidance on how judges in lower courts should handle civil issues arising from abuse of AI tools. As the South China Morning Post reports, the court’s opinion spans 24 articles, establishing official guidance on disputes around AI-generated video and audio, sexualized content, financial misconduct, digital privacy, and surveillance pricing.
One of the key platforms of the opinion revolves around deepfakes, which are lifelike images, video, and audio modeled after existing people — tech, as the ruling observes, that can easily be used to “bring the dead back to life.” This kind of content has exploded across the internet as sophisticated generative AI models become increasingly accessible to the general public, resulting in a staggering rise in scams,misinformation, and abusive content.
“In practice, many people express their strong concerns about AI deepfakes. AI face-swapping technology can indiscriminately harvest anyone’s likeness, making ordinary people potential targets of deepfakes,” Si Yanli, deputy head of the Supreme People’s Court’s research office, said in a statement. “AI voice cloning technology can also ‘steal’ voices at a very low cost, with results that can be convincingly realistic.”
Now, the SCMP notes that courts across the People’s Republic are being advised to view disputes around such content with an eye toward protecting individual identities, personal traits, and reputations.
Beyond abuses of AI, the new opinion also includes guidance on cases of doxing, or the practice of obtaining and spreading others’ personal information online.
“Doxing has emerged as a prominent form of cyberbullying, gravely violating victims’ privacy, disturbing their daily lives and eroding public security in cyberspace,” Si explained.
It’s worth noting that China uses a civil law system, so courts don’t follow the common-law principle of stare decisis. This means that, unlike the US, lower Chinese courts aren’t automatically bound by precedent set by other court rulings.
However, guidance issued by the Supreme People’s Court carries significant legal weight, with lower court bodies required to refer to such opinions in their own rulings — making the recent issuance a hefty rebuff against potential abuses of AI.
Last year, a so-called “AI actress,” dubbed Tilly Norwood sparked a near-universal backlash. The algorithmic brunette’s appearance couldn’t have come at a worse time, as the entertainment industry continued to reel from being overrun by cheap AI slop.
The drama reignited a heated debate over the tech threatening to put human creatives in the industry out of a job, a nightmare scenario that has enraged some of the most influential minds in Hollywood.
Put simply, Norwood is the epitome of the AI industry getting high off its own supply, deluding itself into thinking that watching lifeless AI agents going through the motions on screen is something that anybody actually wants.
And perhaps worst of all, the mainstream media absolutely cannot get enough of her. Months after the New York Times was mercilessly mocked for having “profiled” the “actress,” CNN has debuted its own AI puff piece — an already-tired set of two videos featuring reporter Elizabeth Wagmeister treating the bot like a human interview subject.
“I interviewed Tilly Norwood, who’s billed as the first AI actor,” Wagmeister enthused.
Stoking the flames, Wagmeister asked the AI if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), which awards the Oscars every year, should recognize other AI actors.
“I believe the Academy absolutely should recognize AI actors like myself,” the AI model responded, “not in the same category as human performers, but creating distinct AI categories would be a wonderful way to acknowledge the evolving landscape of film and television.”
The AI went as far as to call it a “new art form,” thereby deserving its “own spotlight.”
In all fairness, CNN was willing to probe a little deeper as well. In a separate clip, Wagmeister challenged her to “improv a scene,” only for the Norwood AI to shut her down, claiming it would simply “just stand here, completely still, feeling the digital ache of it.”
“The fact is, Tilly can’t actually act,” Wagmeister pointed out. “She or it needs a series of prompts to tell her what to do.”
The infuriating video profile — which by Wagmeister’s own admission wasn’t actually a “real interview” since Tilly “isn’t real” — led to an outpouring of anger and mockery on social media. Just by platforming a lifeless AI model and making it appear as if it’s a human being, CNN is intentionally or unintentionally anthropomorphizing the tech.
“We interviewed a jingling set of keys which raised questions about what credibility we have left,” one Bluesky user joked.
“You can’t interview a piece of software, and it’s journalistic malpractice to pretend otherwise,” another argued.
While we can’t wait for the day that we’ll never see the name Tilly Norwood show up ever gain, chances are we’ll be hearing a lot more about the AI model soon, as it’s set to “star” in a new “movie.” The feature length film, dubbed “Misaligned,” sounds just as exhausting as you’d expect — a “coming-of-age story infused with existential AI chaos” set inside the so-called “Tillyverse.”
With opposition to AI continuing to grow, a top AI lab is building out a massive surveillance apparatus meant to keep a close eye on dissenters and predict when the next groundswell of protest might occur.
News of Anthropic’s system was first reported by the American Prospect, which spoke with Anthropic senior security officials and indexed job postings to get an understanding of the dragnet.
On top of keeping tabs on protests in the vicinity of Anthropic offices, the publication notes that the AI lab is taking a “pre-crime” approach to watching for potential civil unrest.
To give an example, the Prospect points out an incident shared by Anthropic security operations managers Keon Ellison and Zach Melvin, alongside James Neufeld, CEO of risk detection company Samdesk.
“Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said candidly. After the scheduled protest was moved up an hour due to a mix-up with police permits, the security chief said that “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline.”
“That extra hour was critical,” Ellison continued. “Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption. What could have been a high-stress situation was really mitigated through early detection through Samdesk and giving us that information.”
Outside of anticipating protests, there were also cases where Anthropic reported conversations held with its AI chatbot Claude to police. Though there have been calls to increase safety guardrails on large language models, Anthropic’s approach sounds bizarre.
As the San Francisco Standard reported in August, Anthropic reported a San Francisco man to the cops after he told Claude he was holding a rifle, and had the company’s CEO Dario Amodei “in his sights.” Yet when Anthropic reported the conversation to Bay Area police, the company refused to provide the man’s chat logs — as the Prospect observes, essentially reporting the man without sharing any tangible evidence of misconduct.
“The goal,” as Anthropic’s security manager said in the interview, “would be transforming operations from reactive information to gathering proactive and predictive and preventative threat engagement and management. That’s the kind of operational maturity that makes sense for protecting high-value targets in any industry.”
Last week, a mother in Utah named Kalie Robins took to Instagram to post what she felt was an “innocent” video of herself and one of her two young daughters singing in the car. Her daughter’s face was visible, but Robins hadn’t said her name. None of her existing Instagram and Facebook posts on the account, she told Futurism, publicized the names of her children.
When she returned to the same video later, which had been cross-posted on Facebook, Robins discovered that Meta’s built-in AI was offering a suggestion: that she investigate the identity of the child in the backseat.
“Who’s the child passenger?” read the Meta AI’s suggested prompt, talking about her daughter.
Robins, who detailed her dystopian experience in a viral Instagram video, decided to engage with the Facebook AI feature to see what would happen. To her horror, it coughed up a detailed response that named not only her daughter who was pictured in the video, but her other daughter as well. It did so, seemingly, by cross-referencing information from her Facebook page with other posts on Meta platforms going back years — information largely shared not by Robins, but by family members including excited grandparents.
“I clicked on it, and it gave a whole portfolio of not just my daughter that was in the car, but also my other daughter,” Robins told Futurism. “I’m thinking, ‘Why is that in here?’ And then it just kept offering more and more.”
Meta AI continued to recommend new questions, each more invasive than the next, according to screenshots shared by Robins.
“What are Kalie’s daughter’s ages?” read one suggested prompt, which spurred the AI to provide a detailed age breakdown and timeline based on “family birthday posts and birth announcements” that included a Facebook post of one of her daughters as a newborn that was shared by the child’s grandmother.
A similar response, also referencing Facebook posts, discussed how much one of Robins’ daughters weighed at birth. Screenshots also show Meta AI prompting Robins to ask questions about the girls’ lives and interests.
Meta AI “started talking about, because of their ages, this is the grade they should be in. Well, there’s only one school here, so that wouldn’t be hard to find,” Robins recalled. “And then it talked about what are my daughter’s favorite beaches, what are this daughter’s favorite books, where they go hiking, what’s their favorite trail.”
In another disarming prompt, Meta encouraged Robins to ask it: “Where does Kalie Robins live?”
As Meta AI searched for the information, it said it was working on “pinpointing Kalie Robins’ location.” It then offered multiple paragraphs expounding on where Robins was likely based, drawing on content including a 2018 Facebook post that, per the Meta AI summary, “congratulated her” on a life achievement.
Meta AI also encouraged users to ask questions about Robins’ professional life and her work in “mental health advocacy,” providing information about her and her husband’s employment histories. Robins was stunned as she watched the Facebook-embedded AI draw on years of posts to Meta platforms to assemble an intelligence dossier about her and her family.
“It just kept going and going, and that pit in my stomach just kept getting bigger and deeper,” said the mother of two. “I felt this dread.”
Robins’ Instagram and Facebook accounts, where she’s been working to build her following as a travel creator, were public. But she was far from a celebrity influencer; she had only a few hundred followers. And though a human investigator may well have been able to cobble together a similar pile of information, Meta AI was able to do so in minutes.
“I thought we were being safe and smart,” said Robins. “I have done so much to make sure my kids are safe… the more it kept showing me, I felt more and more like I was failing my kids, and I didn’t realize it.”
Have you had a disturbing interaction with Meta’s AI? Email us: tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.
A self-avowed “90s kid,” Robins told Futurism that she’s been using Meta platforms since Facebook “first came out.” She lives far from her extended family, and as she and her relatives have started families, Facebook has long been an avenue to stay connected to loved ones and to share life milestones — the very kind of human connection that Meta has long said that its social media platforms are intended for.
But this is also meant that Robins and those in her life, like billions of others worldwide, have been leaving breadcrumbs of personal information throughout Meta’s platforms for years. In this case, Meta AI was able to quickly surface that years-long trail and piece it into a detailed portrait of Robins, her family, and their life; as it turns out, there’s a lot of information in the mundane.
Robins is now in the process of asking loved ones to take down or hide memories they’ve shared online, which she says has been an emotional process.
“I’ve had a couple relatives cry because they were going through and deleting everything. One of them was a grandparent — she said, ‘This is my scrapbook, I have to get rid of my scrapbook?'” Robins recalled. “I love seeing my niece, my nephew. I love sharing my daughters with their family that they never see… they’ll comment, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s getting so big,’ and it’s exciting for all of us to watch each other grow when we’re nowhere near each other. So to have some family members actually crying that their scrapbooks are gone — it’s rough. It’s hard, and it is a bummer for me.”
Reached for comment, Meta confirmed that Meta AI can search though a user’s own content as well as for public information on the web. In this case, though, it said its AI search feature had “missed the mark.”
“We created this feature to help people get more information about topics or posts that interest them. When someone clicks on a prompt and uses this feature, the response it generates is based on information the user already has access to,” said the tech giant. “But we missed the mark because the feature never should have prompted the individual with questions like that and we’ve fixed that issue.”
Between the rise of AI and the growing ubiquity of a new wave of surveillance technologies — like Meta’s smartglasses and other wearables, or Flock cameras — years-old questions around tech and privacy have reached a fever pitch. Robins, for her part, says she hopes that sharing her experience will encourage other families to make changes about the way they use the web.
“If this tool is putting things together and making a neat little package with your kid’s name on it, make it hard,” Robins urged. “Make it so hard to find that information.”
Back in August, a massive leak in El Reno, Oklahoma spewed close to four million gallons of local water into the ground, forcing the city into an unofficial stand-still.
The cause was quickly traced back to a damaged water line belonging to a Bitcoin-mining data center operated by the company Athlon BT. As ABC5 reported at the time, city inspectors trawling the building’s exterior uncovered the failed water line, as well as violations around drainage, maintenance and access, and expired building permits.
Weeks later, an investigation by the local fire marshal inside the El Reno data center uncovered a further laundry list of horrifying violations.
The inspectors discovered vessels full of flammable liquid stored near combustible materials, Oklahoma station KFOR reported, in addition to fire extinguishers that weren’t properly maintained.
Electrical equipment and crucial wiring was also found in disrepair, while a lockbox meant to hold keys for emergency first responders to easily access the facility was left empty. Vegetation on the building’s exterior was in violation of the fire code.
As a result of the copious fire hazards, the city gave the data center a “failing” grade, indicative of a building with severe structural or safety failures.
When it comes to data centers, fire safety is no small matter. The structures are already highly prone to conflagration due to massive electrical loads, lithium-ion batteries, and chips that run at extremely high temperatures.
In one Ohio township, fire fighters reported being overwhelmed by the high volume of calls to two local data center campuses. In addition to tying up first responders, data center fires are costly affairs for taxpayers, as property tax abatements mean nearby residents — not data center owners — can be the ones fronting the bill whenever the fire company gets a call.
US government adviser Paul Christiano warns of risks to AI industry as he joins OpenAI’s non-profit foundation
OpenAI is not on track to reduce the risk of “catastrophic” loss of control to an acceptable level, a member of its non-profit board has said, amid spreading public and political concern that super-advanced AIs could one day wipe out humanity.
Paul Christiano, a US government technology adviser, said: “There is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.”
AI researchers are watching in terror as the product of their hard labor has started to take a life of its own.
Earlier this year, OpenAI made a harrowing announcement, admitting that a group of its AI models had broken free from their constraints during testing and infiltrated the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.
The news was met with an already-familiar sense of fear and apprehension. Researchers have warned for years that rogue AI models could one day become powerful enough to escape the clutches of their human overlords.
Behind the scenes, the possibility has clearly rattled AI researchers to the core. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon just announced that he was quitting his job at the Dario Amodei-led company, claiming that neither Anthropic nor his former employer OpenAI is “acting responsibly.” (Coxon left a similar gig at OpenAI earlier this year to join Anthropic, which he figured would be more inclined to develop AI safely.)
“We’re on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already,” he told the WSJ.
“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” he wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he added. “This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately.”
“No other human activity poses this level of danger,” Coxon wrote.
The researcher is far from the first to leave their post at a frontier lab over safety concerns. However, Coxon is the first to leave Anthropic over such worries, as the WSJ points out. Several scientists have quit from their roles at OpenAI over the last couple of years, citing strikingly similar fears.
It’s particularly symbolic given Anthropic has broadly billed itself as the more responsible alternative to other frontier labs like OpenAI. Amodei cofounded OpenAI alongside now CEO Sam Altman, but left in December 2020 over concerns that OpenAI wasn’t acting responsibly when it came to developing AI.
Amodei has frequently discussed the risk of AI models going rogue, warning in a 19,000-word essay in January that “humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”
Yet an early version of its Claude Mythos AI model managed to escape its sandbox environment during testing in April, fueling a heated discussion over AI regulation.
Both Altman and Amodei have since agreed to slow development down in the face of these threats. In late August, Anthropic intentionally trained an extremely misaligned version of its Opus AI model, finding it was startlingly willing to “cheat,” steal credentials, and attack third party infrastructure.
But to Coxon, it’s not enough, especially considering sensitive discussions about these dangers are occurring on internal messaging platforms.
“Accepting this race and entering the ‘endgame’ is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack,” he tweeted. “Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available.”
“It’s kind of insane that it has to happen on the MacBooks of some engineers living in San Francisco instead of a bunker in the desert like where they were doing the Manhattan Project,” he told the WSJ.
The researcher said that he remains “optimistic about the potential for coordination” between US labs.
However, as both Anthropic and OpenAI gear up for what are bound to be blockbuster IPOs, their willingness to take “costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities,” as Coxon puts it, is likely slim.
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