Since the launch of Flock Safety in 2017, the ACLU estimates the company installed some 100,000 automatic license plate readers throughout the United States. The dragnet comes with plenty of downsides to privacy and civil liberties: it’s ripe for abuse by crooked cops, powered by sweatshop labor, and nearly impossible to escape once it designates you a target.

But police officials insist it’s worth the trade off — because at it least it helps them catch the bad guys, right? Unfortunately, the reality isn’t quite that peachy.

Atlanta, Georgia has experienced far and away the largest influx of ALRPs in the country, with over 5,000 various Flock cameras now blanketing the city. Yet as bombshell data released by the FBI shows, the city’s massive web of surveillance has had virtually zero impact on the Atlanta Police Department’s ability to solve crime, with some clearance rates for offenses like homicide even experiencing a decline over the past few years as the cameras have proliferated.

First reported by the Atlanta Community Press Collective, the FBI data is a damning refutation of Flock’s primary claim: that ALPRs are necessary to help officers keep the public safe.

According to the ACPC, the rates at which the APD resolves crimes like homicide, robbery, miscellaneous larceny, and shoplifting have actually decreased between 2021 and 2025, when the city’s ALPR build-out hit its full stride.

For homicide, the numbers are especially embarrassing, with the FBI reporting case closures at just 48 percent in 2025, down from 53.4 percent in 2021. Meanwhile, rape remained flat year over year, holding steady at a pitiful 37.7 percent closure rate from 2021 to 2025, and dipping down to just 21.2 percent at its lowest point in that four-year span.

Though the APD actually did show improvement on some crime categories as Flock’s cameras sprouted all over the city, the changes from 2021 to 2025 amount to little more than rounding errors.

For example, case closures on crimes like aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft ticked up by just 0.2 and 0.3 percent, respectively. One would think motor vehicle theft solve rates would be an easy win for a technology designed to track cars, specifically. Yet in 2025, the APD was solving just one in tencases of auto theft, even with thousands of Flock ALPRs at its disposal.

Len Phillips, head of the anti-ALPR community group DeFlock Atlanta told ACPC that the “public has been asked to accept a significant expansion of surveillance based on the promise that it would dramatically improve public safety.”

In reality, Phillips continues, that tradeoff between safety and civil liberties “was just a one-way transaction.”

More on Flock: In Light of Overwhelming Backlash, Flock Cancels Creepy Audio Surveillance Feature

The post Flock Surveillance Cameras Are Actually Horrible for Fighting Crime, FBI Data Shows appeared first on Futurism.

Last week, OpenAI claimed that a group of its AI models had broken containment, successfully hacking into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face to cheat on a benchmark test.

In the wake of the announcement, two very distinct narratives have emerged surrounding OpenAI’s claims. Some say it was essentially a publicity stunt, with the company setting parameters for the test that pushed the models toward outrageous behavior. But others, including certain prominent researchers, warn that the hack should serve as a warning shot for an even more severe AI-enabled cybersecurity disaster that’ll inevitably take place as models become more sophisticated.

“This is the first time, to my knowledge, that an AI system has autonomously committed a crime,” said New York Times journalist Kevin Roose of the event. “If a human did to Hugging Face what OpenAI’s models did to Hugging Face, they would be charged with computer fraud, and potentially sent to prison or fined or prosecuted.”

Debate will surely continue to rage among wonks and skeptics. And new details aren’t exactly tamping out the sense of alarm: on Tuesday, OpenAI issued an update to its ongoing investigation, claiming the incident was worse than initially thought. In addition to hacking Hugging Face, the company now says, its models “used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly available services,” totaling “four accounts on four services.”

“We’ll continue to notify service owners directly, and have not seen evidence of broader impact to these providers or other accounts on their services,” OpenAI wrote, without elaborating on which services were affected.

The news further raised alarm bells among some cybersecurity experts, highlighting ongoing concerns over the tech’s ability to evade protective measures. It’s a possibility that researchers have warned about for years, and the incident suggests that the threat is now turning from a possibility into a reality.

On the other hand, more skeptical experts have become suspicious about OpenAI’s hair-raising tale. After all, we’ve heard a strikingly similar story from its biggest competitor, Anthropic, mere months ago. Could OpenAI’s latest admission be a bid to build hype to drum up excitement and prove to investors that its latest AI models are just as much of a cybersecurity threat as Anthropic’s fabled Mythos?

Experts also point out that the Hugging Face hack could’ve easily been prevented, further adding credence to the theory that OpenAI was looking for attention from the public. As cloud security firm Edera co-founder Alex Zenla told Wired, the hack was largely a result of callousness on OpenAI’s part.

“People are YOLO-ing really hard,” he said. “It’s shocking how little people have really thought about a scenario like this.”

“I consider all AI and anything AI touches to be fully untrusted — which is fine, you just need to build against that,” Zenla added. “And this situation proves the point. The fact that OpenAI wasn’t more paranoid about this seems kind of reckless.”

“A simple analysis of the actual risk has an actual simple answer,” security and compliance consultant Davi Ottenheimer told Wired. “The OpenAI mistakes were dead simple.”

As Wired points out, simple protections like fully isolating AI services from the internet could’ve prevented the hack, which have been intimately familiar to researchers for decades now.

Considering OpenAI is nearing a $1 trillion valuation and should have all the resources in the world at its disposal, major lapses in security should have anybody start questioning the company’s narrative.

Yet there could be truth to both versions of the story. It’s entirely possible that there is legitimate cause for concern as AI models become more sophisticated at identifying cybersecurity vulnerabilities. We’ve already seen frontier models flagging thousands of software bugs, underlining their growing competence.

But OpenAI is also heavily invested in showcasing its models’ capabilities to the world as it tries to keep up with Anthropic. That leaves the possibility that the company could’ve coordinated with Hugging Face to orchestrate the hack — or at least given its AI models a strong push in the direction of controversy.

More on the hack: OpenAI Says a Group of Its Models Broke Out of Secure Containment and Hacked Another AI Company

The post OpenAI’s Escaped Models Were Allegedly Rampaging More Extensively Than Previously Reported appeared first on Futurism.

The US job market is in a weird place right now.

Life is clearly rough for the working class, stuck navigating Kafkaeqsue hiring infrastructure while billionaires devour an ever-larger slice of the world’s wealth. But frustratingly, the data being used to steer the economy tells a rosier story than the one workers actually live. The latest unemployment numbers — a flawed metric, admittedly — showed a slight improvement from May to June, at least on paper. And even as the economy appears to cool its jets, Americans keep spending like there’s no tomorrow, even in the face of aggressive inflation.

With so much data — anecdotal and empirical — swirling around, it’s hard to find the pulse of the US labor force. Luckily, one enterprising AI startup found a perfect barometer. There’s no conflicting data or tedious calculations involved — just a little ink, and the vibrating sting of a tattoo machine.

On Thursday, the Y Combinator-backed AI startup LemonLime hosted a bizarre recruitment event in which attendees were offered an “instant interview” in exchange for getting the company’s logo tattooed on their body.

It sounds like a joke, but LemonLime co-founder Jordan Zietz bragged on a LinkedIn post that an astonishing seven people took them up on the offer.

According to his post, the goal was to “meet exceptional people,” and sort out “which of them are just as crazy as we are.”

“That’s why we brought an actual tattoo artist to our party and offered an instant interview to anyone who got a LemonLime tattoo,” Zietz continued. “If you’re reaching out to us to apply for a job, you might want to take notes.”

While coercive body art has become increasingly common in the 21st century, there’s usually at least some form of financial compensation involved. The idea that it takes getting a permanent tattoo just to get one foot in the door for an interview is especially galling, and reveals a lot about the sorry state of the US job market.

One of the people who received a free tattoo, Dimple Amitha Garuadapuri, clarified on LinkedIn that while she didn’t get the company’s logo inked on her skin, “almost everyone else got a LemonLime tattoo.”

Regardless, news of the stunt spread quickly on social media, prompting a lightning-fast apology from the founder, who admitted on X-formerly-Twitter that he “messed up.”

“Even though participants chose their own tattoos and no one was asked to get our logo, I should have understood the pressure and power dynamic created by connecting tattoos to hiring,” Zietz said. “We’ve taken the posts down and have spoken to everyone who participated. We’re also ready to cover associated removal costs with anyone facing any delayed regret.”

Just for good measure, the founder stressed that “interviews were available to everyone regardless,” though it remains to be seen if the seven share that view.

Did you attend the YC afterparty with LemonLime? If so, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out at tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.

More on tech startups: Startup Sued After Delivery Bot Clobbers 73-Year Old Woman

The post We Are Mildly Horrified by This AI Startup That Coerced People Into Getting Tattoos of Its Logo in Exchange for a Job Interview appeared first on Futurism.

When you’re a scientist relying on government funding to conduct your research, and that government suddenly yoinks all your money in the name of “efficiency,” you have to get creative to keep the lights on.

Such has been the experience of Daniel Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, renowned for his work on studying the ground-dwelling rodents known as marmots. After the Trump administration cancelled billions of dollars in federal research grants last year, he and his colleagues decided to start creating content dedicated to the charming mammals — on OnlyFans.

As SFGate reports, their account, called “OnlyMarms,” promises near-daily “unfiltered yellow-bellied marmot content from the Rockies.” Subscribing is free, but users can leave tips on the cute photos and videos they post, which goes towards funding the research. 

It’s a win for everyone: shy gooners have a convenient explanation for all the OnlyFans transactions in their bank accounts, and the scientists get to keep doing the work they’re doing. Thank you, marmots, for being so adorable.

“Sometimes I’m just posting the videos I think will get the most ‘aws,'” Emily Renkey, a student in Blumstein’s lab who started the account, told SFGate. “But my favorite is when I find footage of a particular behavior and I can use that to educate people.”

The Trump administration’s cost-cutting regime has crippled scientific research in the US. In efforts led by Elon Musk’s now defunct Department of Government Efficiency, it cancelled more than 1,700 grants worth some $1.4 billion at the National Science Foundation in 2025. In 2026, the NSF has so far awarded just a fraction of the $9 billion grant money it has typically distributed in recent years, and the White House has proposed slashing its budget by nearly half for the 2027 fiscal year. 

Many of the grant cancellations were clearly politically motivated, targeting research into climate change — and even research that simply contains the word “climate” — something Trump has called a “hoax.” Even more flagrantly, the administration recently admitted in court documents that it canceled research grants in certain states “based solely” on whether they supported Trump in the 2024 election.

Why marmot research ended up in the administration’s crosshairs is anyone’s guess, but it’s invaluable work. Blumstein and his colleagues have spent years closely tracking the charming rodents, forming what is one of the longest-running studies of free-living mammals in the world, according to SFGate.

These long-term projects ask “some of the most important questions in our time,” Blumstein said, providing our best window into studying evolution in real-time. But their value may not be immediately obvious to the people in charge of crunching the numbers. Historically, this hasn’t been a problem for Blumstein, as his program had received funding from the NSF for over a decade. But now, under the new regime, he’s applied to renew the grant three times, before the agency told him to stop applying at all.

“After the third time, our program officer told my colleague… that they will never fund us because they think we have too much data,” Blumstein told SFGate. “I don’t even know how to parse that sentence. It’s nuts.”

Blumstein’s marmot program, as it stands, is running on fumes. OnlyMarms has only brought in a few hundred dollars, and the lab is looking for more traditional sources of funding, too.

More on science funding: Trump Orders Construction of Powerful Quantum Computer

The post Scientists Forced to Go on OnlyFans After Their Funding Was Cut appeared first on Futurism.

As unpopular as SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become in the popular eye, some say the vitriol doesn’t go nearly far enough.

In an episode of his podcast Ones and Tooze, Columbia University economic historian Adam Tooze picked apart the increasingly expensive AI arms race and its consequences for humanity. Among Tooze’s observations: the AI boom is completely upending the long-standing social contract under capitalism, a shift embodied most dramatically by Musk.

During the podcast, co-host Cameron Abadi asked what a “best case scenario” for AI might look like — where a human-level superintelligence emerges that can automate the world’s jobs. In response, Tooze pointed to a report from the Bank of International Settlements: under that scenario, labor’s share of income could collapse from an already paltry 54 percent to just 20 percent, meaning workers would be forced to fight over the remaining crumbs that drop from billionaires’ tables.

“The share in the total pie collapses, and that’s obviously a huge transformation in political power,” Tooze explained. And though that’s a future projection, the economic historian notes we’re already seeing symptoms of this extreme reversal of fortunes today, chiefly in the extreme wealth accumulation of Musk.

“I don’t understand frankly why the event of Musk’s enrichment isn’t more of a scandal, isn’t more a historic moment,” Tooze said. “Like this — to have a trillionaire in our midst ruptures the social bargain in such a — just such a dramatic way, like how can we even be any longer talking about being in the same society as this group of individuals who’ve unleashed this technology on the world.”

“It goes beyond Luddism,” Tooze continued, referring to the 19th-century labor movement that saw workers smash textile looms to fight back against economic exploitation. “It’s not about resisting the technology per se, it’s about asking ‘which social contract this belongs to?'”

Though it remains to be seen how severe an impact AI actually has on the labor market, one scenario keeps surfacing: superintelligent AI fuels a drastic rise in economic inequality, with tech billionaires on one end, and the working class on the other.

Comparing the current “AI arms race” to the actual nuclear arms race, Tooze asks the listener to imagine a “private Manhattan Project, developing a thermonuclear weapon,” calling superintelligent AI “kind of like a labor-market neutron bomb.”

And where the Manhattan Project was funded, organized, and staffed by the US government, the current AI boom takes almost the exact opposite approach, following the whims of the ultra-rich.

“Clearly, government money has gone into Silicon Valley in various ways,” Tooze caveats. “But nevertheless, the contrast between the Manhattan Project… and the realities of the current moment, spearheaded by a figure like Elon Musk, who literally has eviscerated the state apparatus of that first [nuclear] race… it strikes me that it’s really a regression away from the mid-century arms race model to something that’s much more like the ‘Merchants of Death’ vision.” (The Merchants of Death was a moniker for 1930s-era war profiteers.)

“We’re back in that space” Tooze continues, “of private, unfettered, oligarchic — but global — arms race… to my mind, the [AI arms race] analogy is interesting not because of the similarities, but because of the differences it reveals.”

More on Musk: Suddenly, as His Empire Crumbles, Elon Musk Admits He Made a Huge Mistake With DOGE

The post Columbia Economist Baffled as to Why the Masses Aren’t Rising Up Against Elon Musk appeared first on Futurism.

If you’re among the 2.6 million active users of the popular telehealth apps Hims and Hers to obtain medication for erectile dysfunction, hair loss, and a cavalcade of other intimate issues, there’s probably a very short list of people you want to know about it — and Mark Zuckerberg probably isn’t one of them.

On Wednesday, the US Federal Trade Commission filed a major lawsuit against Hims and Hers, over allegations the firm was sharing user’s health information with third party companies, Gizmodo reported. Chief among those third-parties apps was Zuckerberg’s Meta, as well as Snap, two social media companies with horrible track records on protecting sensitive information.

Though Hims and Hers advertises its app-based health services as “100 percent online, private, and secure,” the FTC suit alleges “those assurances were false or misleading.”

“Instead of honoring its privacy promises,” the filing says, “Hims opted to grow the company and increase its revenue streams… with advertising platforms such as Meta and Snap.”

The suit doesn’t blame Meta directly, but argues that Hims and Hers used two “automated tracking technologies offered by Meta” to surveil users’ actions on the telehealth app. “These two tools automatically tracked and disclosed certain Events [user actions] to Meta,” the lawsuit reads.

Hims sells all kinds of men’s health meds, but most people know it for one thing: erectile dysfunction pills. While any leak of patient data would be an outrage, the thought that Hims could be sharing this particular kind of medical information is especially horrifying.

In a statement, Hims and Hers argued that the FTC’s case “is not enforcement grounded in consumer protection,” but rather “an effort to generate headlines at our expense.”

The lawsuit comes on the back of a three-year investigation by the FTC, and is currently in the very early stages — meaning it could be years before a final verdict is reached.

More on Meta: Meta’s Attempted Crackdown on AI Glasses Perverts Is Already Failing

The post FTC Concerned About Meta Surveillance of Users of Erectile Dysfunction Apps appeared first on Futurism.

Suddenly, things ain’t looking great for the AI industry. Or at least for the people pouring loads of money into it.

Situational Awareness, a much-hyped AI hedge-fund whose 24-year-old founder Leopold Aschenbrenner preached endless AI gains, basically imploded over this month amid a mass tech sell-off. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that it’s now down 67 percent in July, forcing Aschenbrenner to desperately seek clients to buy its shares on the cheap to cover its losses.

“We let you down this month,” the fund wrote in a letter to clients, per the WSJ.

Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher who had zero investment experience before launching the fund, has been hailed as the “Nostradamus of AI.” He apparently didn’t predict his rapid reversal of fortunes, though.

The Financial Times reported that his fund returned 439 percent for the year through June, and was up 1,551 percent since its founding. 

Then came July. According to CNBC, the fund assets reached a peak of $45 billion, before beginning a precipitous decline this month. Pretty much everything went against its way. Its commitments to AI infrastructure tanked when the likes of the semiconductor manufacturer SK Hynix dropped off a cliff. And it shorted software companies — which investors once feared would be outmoded by AI labs — like Adobe, which instead continued to steadily climb. 

Other companies it invested in, including Sandisk, Micron, and CoreWave, are all down more than 35 percent this month, CNBC noted.

As the dominoes fell, Aschenbrenner sent a letter to investors to quell their fears, highlighting how well it had performed until this point. Boldly, he also said that the mass tech sell off was a “particularly good time to add funds,” the FT reported.

But when the assets kept tanking — and more money didn’t come in —  Aschenbrenner started frantically calling investors trying to get them to sell assets or pour in fresh capital, according to the reporting. When it got even worse, his clients couldn’t reach him.

“Leopold just stopped taking calls,” one investor told the FT.

With nowhere to turn to, Situational Awareness sold the majority of its public assets to the investment firm Citadel, though it hung onto its stake in Anthropic. The FT reported that Citadel’s vulturous purchase of Situational Awareness’s shares “marks one of the largest and most sudden stock transactions in Wall Street history.”

Situational Awareness, despite commanding billions in assets, operated with a skeleton staff of only four investment professionals and eight employees overall, the FT found in a regulatory filing. The fund used borrowed money to buy shares, which helped boost its returns, but made its losses far worse when those assets declined.

AI stocks will likely weather this storm. The real warning sign is that investors are so blinded by AI that they’re entrusting their billions to someone who had no idea what they were doing.

More on AI: Microsoft CEO Warns That Companies Embracing AI Could Drive Themselves Out of Business

The post A Prominent AI Investor Is Now Crumbling, in What Could Be a Sign of Things to Come appeared first on Futurism.

After years of facilitating a surge in gambling addiction by allowing users to make dubious bets on anything from the outcome of the World Cup to deadly conflict, trading platform Kalshi is finally facing a serious regulatory challenge.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James announced that the state is suing the company for running an illegal gambling operation. An investigation by state authorities concluded that Kalshi was running an “illegal, unlicensed gambling operation” in the state.

Officials also pointed out that Kalshi was offering its services to “those under the legal gambling age of 21,” putting them at “serious personal and financial risk.” In New York, a person has to be at least 21 to participate in mobile sports betting.

The lawsuit is seeking to shut down Kalshi in New York and is requiring it to pay a $100,000 penalty for each attempt to offer sports betting and fees three times its gains in the state, which could saddles the company with paying an estimated $36 billion.

“Kalshi has chosen to ignore New York’s gaming laws, which exist to protect consumers, prevent problematic gambling, deliver funding for critical public services, and ensure that every company plays by the same rules,” said Hochul in a statement.

The news comes as state regulators continue to ponder what rules to set for prediction markets, which have seen a massive surge in popularity over the past year or so. On the federal level, the Trump administration appears unlikely to jump into action, especially considering the president’s close personal ties to the prediction markets industry. His son, Donald Trump Jr, serves as an advisor to both Polymarket and Kalshi.

Kalshi and Polymarket continue to bristle at being associated with the gambling industry and argue they’re effectively a predictions-based stock exchange. Unlike Polymarket, Kalshi is regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

However, some officials vehemently disagree with that assessment.

“No matter what they call themselves, prediction markets like Kalshi are gambling platforms, plain and simple,” said James. “By ignoring our laws, Kalshi is running an illegal operation and harming New Yorkers in the process.”

Researchers continue to warn that gambling addicts are betting their entire incomes away on prediction markets, a growing crisis perfectly dovetailing a massive surge in sports betting in the United States following a 2018 Supreme Court decision.

Worse yet, rampant insider trading and other differentials in information means that the vast majority of users on Kalshi and Polymarket are being left holding the bag while a select few are getting away with big winnings.

The brashness of certain crimes linked to the markets is hard to fathom. Earlier this month, president Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator was accused of making tens of thousands of dollars by placing bets on Kalshi about what the president would say, leading to his removal.

In short, the latest lawsuit shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody who’s been following along.

Predictably, Kalshi has since shot back, accusing the government of making it all up.

“It’s sad to see this type of political theater from the leadership in our own state,” a spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. “States can’t just shut down a federally licensed exchange… We love New York, we love New Yorkers, and New Yorkers love our product.”

More on prediction markets: OpenAI Strikes Bold Deal With Kalshi to Mix Together the Most Hated Technologies in Existence: AI and Prediction Markets

The post Kalshi Sued for Running Illegal Gambling Operation appeared first on Futurism.

Even the gazillion-dollar empire that is Amazon is reeling from the costs of letting its employees run loose with AI agents.

The Financial Times reports that staff at the company have identified cases of “catastrophically expensive” cost overruns as it switched over to using AI tools to perform what sound like pretty routine coding tasks.

In one case, Amazon blew $1.8 million by using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet AI to match author details with product listings on its namesake ecommerce website. This menial job somehow went 860 percent over the allocated budget. And equally alarming was that it took five months to notice the piles of money being set on fire.

“It’s difficult to figure out how much anything [AI related] costs,” one senior Amazon employee complained to the FT.

Senior engineers who presumably got their start before “vibe-coding” became all the rage warned that these weren’t isolated incidents, lamenting that coding mistakes that were once “trivially cheap” were now “catastrophically expensive.” Amazon wasted $541,000 in unexpected costs related to building financial auditing tools, per the FT. And it also accidentally burned through $134,000 after giving AI the daunting task of improving delivery speeds across its logistics network. (Magical thinking much? These things aren’t genies, contrary to what Sam Altman promises.)

Amazon’s unintentional spending binges are part of a broader reckoning in the business world as leadership grapples with the costs of deploying AI tools across a company. 

Not long ago, the prevailing ethos of “tokenmaxxing” encouraged companies and software engineers to use AI agents, and especially coding tools, as much as possible. Inevitably, this led to unfortunate incidents such as one company that reportedly blew half a billion dollars in Claude usage fees in a single month.

These costs concerns have been underscored by AI companies transitioning to token-based billing instead of flat subscription rates.

Amazon was certainly guilty of reveling in the debauchery “tokenmaxxing” era. It hosted an internal leaderboard, for example, that ranked employees based on how much they were using their AI tools. It was eventually shut down in May, presumably as the spending hangover started to set in.

For AI to be burning a whole in its wallet is an ironic twist of fate for Amazon, because it’s been culling its workforce for years to cut costs and pour more money into the tech. While conducting its latest round of layoffs affecting 16,000 employees, it openly boasted of the “efficiency gains” from deploying AI across the company.

A spokesperson maintained that despite what it may look like, it’s actually running a tight ship.

“Cherry-picking small, isolated examples where teams are learning from one another and portraying them as business as usual doesn’t reflect how teams across Amazon are using AI,” the spokesperson told the FT.

More on AI: Amazon Is Gutting Its AI Division After Sustained Failure

The post Amazon Insiders Horrified at “Catastrophically Expensive” Internal AI Usage appeared first on Futurism.

This government sure loves its AI slop, doesn’t it?

While presenting at the global AIDS 2026 conference in Brazil this week, officials at the US State Department proudly displayed a map of Africa that seemed to be beamed from an alternate reality.

Apparently intended to lay out where the US could commit health funding, the cartographical catastrophe mislabeled every single country it highlighted. 

Nigeria, a coastal country, was placed smack dab in the Sahara Desert. Mozambique, in southeastern Africa, was moved to the Horn of Africa. Uganda and Malawi had incorrectly drawn borders.

And worst of all, nobody noticed that the country literally called the Ivory Coast was now shown as a landlocked nation.

How could such a horrifically inaccurate map be made? An analysis by Reuters found that it contained an AI watermark indicating it was generated with an OpenAI model, making this another likely case of an AI hallucination that went overlooked by people who have completely surrendered their brains to a piece of technology that offers to do their work for them. OpenAI, Reuters reported, said it was investigating the report.

U.S. government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference — Guardian pic.twitter.com/Qf89AjCkA8

— NewsWire (@NewsWire_US) July 30, 2026

Numerous conference attendees immediately spotted the errors and posted pictures of the mangled map online. AIDS expert Emily Bass first flagged pictures of the map in a Substack post which went viral on LinkedIn, according to Reuters.

“Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to ​check their work,” Matt Petit, an expert on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, wrote in a post with over 40,000 views.

The State Department in a statement said it took “full responsibility for ​the confusion and misrepresentation it ​caused for attendees, including ⁠our African partners.” The “unfortunate error,” it said, was “caused by a team member who hastily altered the slide deck immediately before the presentation.”

The lazy AI usage is an apt symbol for the Trump administration’s attitude towards combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Last year, it cut funding to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program, or PEPFAR, the largest HIV prevention program in the world. A recent study found that over 1,700 HIV treatment sites were shut down after it lost funding as part of Trump’s dismantling of USAID.

More on AI: Trump Says Images of the Iranian Elementary School His Lackeys Obliterated Could Be “AI Generated”

The post US Government Displays AI-Mangled Map of Africa That Gets Every Single Country Wrong appeared first on Futurism.

There’s been plenty of buzz lately around vandalism of Flock Safety’s automatic license plate readers, which are AI-integrated surveillance cameras that index license plate data from passing vehicles indiscriminately and without a warrant.

Countless vigilantes have taken to the roadways armed with trash bags, spray paint, laser pointers, and power drills to render the surveillance poles useless, resulting in arrests and investigations by police.

But what if there was another way to block Flock cameras that didn’t involve damaging public property? Turns out they’ll come after you for that, too.

A 77-year old Florida man named Carl Gunn decided to take matters into his own hands and block a Flock camera in his neighborhood. His method is unorthodox: he doesn’t destroy anything, but simply uses a 12-foot pool skimmer with a sign taped to the end reading “DOWN WITH FLOCK CAMERAS.”

Footage of the one-man protest shows Gunn lounging in a camping chair with his comically long sign in one hand and an umbrella in the other. Speaking to weekly paper Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, the protestor justified his action saying the “Flock company, they’re doing this for profit.”

“They don’t own the air,” Gunn continued. “We didn’t give them permission to do it on us. If they want to do it for profit, I want my paycheck.”

The 77-year old has staged at least two protests so far, CL reports, both at different Flock cameras. Two St Petersburg squad cars rolled up on him during one protest, prompting a community member to stop and film the encounter.

“Yo, what’s your name? I’ll come bail you out!” shouts the passerby, a St Petersburg local named Tyler Knight. “You got the boys out protecting it [the ALPR].”

“F**k the Flock cameras, and f**k you for not looking out for us,” Knight hollers at the officers before driving off.

View this post on Instagram

Though the video caption claims Gunn was arrested over the incident, no report with his name appears in the Pinellas County Clerk of the Circuit Court’s case record database.

Of course, any discussion of Flock overreach has to include the police officers themselves. While Flock may be a front-runner for most hated tech company of the 2020s, its dragnet would be impossible if it weren’t for a massive coalition of police departments and private landowners fueling the company’s rise.

Wherever Flock controversies bubble to the surface, police come out of the woodwork as the company’s most ardent defenders. And because police departments have complete access to the Flock network — which now spans nearly 100,000 cameras across the country — cops are also the most likely to abuse the company’s ALPRs.

In the state of Georgia alone, 17 officers have been caught using Flock in order to stalk and harass people. Further abuses have been recorded everywhere from big cities like Los Angeles and Milwaukee to small towns in South Carolina and Illinois.

Whether a 12-foot pole will be enough to stop those abuses nationwide is doubtful, but it sends a message that’s impossible to miss.

More on Flock: So Many People Are Smashing Flock’s Cameras That It’s Disguising Them Inside Other Objects

The post Wild Footage Shows Man Blocking Flock Camera With Comically Gigantic Protest Sign appeared first on Futurism.

The US and European stock markets might be numb to the enormity of the AI bubble at this point, but in East Asia it’s a different story.

In South Korea, the AI bubble appears to be bursting — at least partially — with the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (Kopsi) plummeting by over 40 percent from its June highs after the Korean chipmaker SK Hynix failed to impress investors despite reporting a sixfold increase in quarterly earnings.

Across July 28 and 29, Seoul Economic Daily reports widespread panic triggered not just one but two “circuit breakers” on the Korea Exchange, a sort of automated kill switch that halts regular trading for 30 minutes so panic-stricken traders can gather their thoughts.

The recent panic marks the first time the Kopsi has ever triggered two consecutive circuit breakers, and only the 14th and 15th Kopsi activations in the Korean Exchange’s history. The tech-heavy Korea Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, or Kosdaq, also reached circuit-breaker-tripping levels two days in a row for the third time ever — the previous incidents coming in 2020 and 2008, if that’s any indication of the amount of turbulence roiling Korean financial markets.

In response, the South Korean government has scrambled to implement cooling measures and prevent an all-out financial crisis. The government already moved to ban new listings of single-stock leveraged ETFs — a high-risk, high-reward kind of financial product bearing some of the blame for the panic — though it clearly wasn’t enough to prevent billions of dollars from fleeing the Korean stock market.

According to Bloomberg, government officials are now convening an emergency meeting to discuss additional measures.

“We’ve already put in place a package of measures, but if it’s needed we’ll introduce additional steps to help normalize the market,” Finance Minister Koo Yun Cheol told lawmakers, per Bloomberg.

Korea’s conservative People Power Party seized on the chance to blast their opponents’ handling of the financial panic, with lawmaker Lee Jongwook declaring that the “country has turned into a casino.”

More on AI: The AI Bubble Has Become So Surreal That It’s Now Propping Up the Toilet Industry

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By now, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who isn’t broadly familiar with the AI heavyweights and their flagship models. OpenAI has ChatGPT, Anthropic has Claude, Google has Gemini. But what does Amazon have?

Not a whole lot, it turns out. Unlike its competitors in the tech megacorp scene, Amazon’s standout AI model — organized under the name “Nova” — is about the farthest thing from a household name. And that’s not likely to change anytime soon, because the ecommerce giant is now gutting its in-house AI labs, Bloomberg reports.

Per the outlet, Amazon is scaling back the ambitions of most of its Nova AI models and reorganizing its AI development teams as part of an effort to narrow its focus on “highest priority” goals, after its power-hungry large language models turned out to be a bust.

Accordingly, the company has put most of its AI models on ice, Amazon insiders told Bloomberg. This includes its text-based Nova models, as well as video- and image-generating models, all of which have been placed in a state of “keep the lights on,” meaning they’re technically still supported, but only receive the bare minimum resources needed to sustain them.

Instead, labor and computing power are being diverted toward a singular “frontier-model effort” led by Pieter Abbeel, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab whose robotics company Covariant was hoovered up by Amazon in 2024. At the time Abbeel joined the tech giant, Covariant’s founders were working on AI models for robots, which lines up pretty well with Amazon’s push to automate everything it possibly can.

News of the shift in Amazon’s strategic focus comes a week after it closed one of its key AI offices in San Francisco, an 80-person site specializing in research on artificial general intelligence, the supposed next-level of AI development where the tech obtains human-level intelligence and reasoning skills.

With urgent questions swirling over whether LLMs can ever usher in a return on investment — let alone AGI — it may be that Amazon is jumping out of the AI hype cycle while it still can.

More on Amazon: Amazon’s AI-Generated Animated Series Canceled After Relentless Derision

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Despite certain improvements in accuracy, large language models still hallucinate a lot. So much so, in fact, that cybersecurity researchers warn that criminals can easily weaponize delusional AI outputs to spread malware throughout the internet.

According to SecurityWeek, the attack works by exploiting a persistent flaw in AI coding assistants. Basically, when these tools recommend third-party software packages, there’s a strong possibility that they include names of ones that don’t actually exist.

Astonishingly, cybersecurity researchers at Tel Aviv University and Intuit found that this scenario can be exploited in common AI coding tools ranging from Cursor to Microsoft’s Copilot, at rates of anywhere form 85 to 100 percent, depending on the specifics of the engineering task.

The attack, called “adversarial hallucination squatting,” or “hallusquatting,” takes advantage of this fact. To run it, attackers can simply identify hallucinated package names that they know AI coding assistants will reference, register them as real repositories, and stuff malware inside. That malicious package then lies in wait for the near-guarantee than an AI assistant will access it and clone it into its owner’s machine.

Because the attack relies on an automated process, a victim likely won’t even know their AI assistant downloaded the malware until well after it begins executing code.

And because the compromise is a feature of the technology itself, a massive array of AI assistants are vulnerable, including Cursor, OpenClaw, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, and many more.

The researchers claim they notified AI companies about the exploit and held back some sensitive details that would help attackers improve their workflows, but the underlying problem remains: AI assistants are remarkably confident liars — and apparently easy marks for the next generation of cyber criminals.

More on AI: A Whole Bunch of People’s Claude Chats Are Publicly Accessible Online, and There’s Some Wildly Private Stuff in There

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The business world has quickly learned that there’s such a thing as using too much AI, as they get slammed with outrageous token bills.

Now, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is warning of another way that embracing AI could doom a business.

In an interview Sunday, Nadella cautioned against sharing too much information, ranging from proprietary data to the prompts entered, with a third-party AI model. 

Instead, he recommended that businesses should make sure they retain all the data on how employees use AI tools so they can eventually train or fine-tune their own open-weight model. This can be accomplished by using AI gateways, which serve as a protective intermediary.

“Any firm that doesn’t have this control, I will claim will not remain a firm because you’ve essentially outsourced your thinking,” Nadella said on an episode of CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria GPS, as spotted by TechCrunch.

That’s a striking claim — and an ironic one, since outsourcing your thinking is arguably exactly the point of using AI, of which Microsoft is a leading vendor. Nadella, in a nutshell, is saying that heavily relying on proprietary AI software could also be a company’s undoing.

He may have an angle in pushing these claims, though. Microsoft hosts the cloud infrastructure that businesses can run their open weight models on. The more people run to hosting their own models, the better for its bottom line.

There’s been a lot of hype lately around open-weight models as a cheaper alternative to those offered by the top AI labs. In AI, “weights” are the numerical values that determine how a model processes information. The models are “open” because these weights are publicly accessible and free to download.

Agentic AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code, by contrast, are closed-source. They also come in a “harness,” which is essentially the software the underlying model is couched in. Nadella thinks companies should ditch AI harnesses and instead use a custom AI platform that allows you to recruit multiple AI models — like a cheaper, open-weight one.

“By keeping the harness separate from the model and the context and memory separate from the model, you absolutely can use multiple models for what they’re great at,” Nadella said in the interview, per TechCrunch. “At the same time, any one model can go away, and you can still continue to be in control of your own destiny.”

Getting mixed signals from Nadella here? TechCrunch also notes how he suggests, in pretty hypocritical fashion, that while businesses should be stingy about the data they share with AI models, regular users shouldn’t.

“To some degree there’s got to be some value exchange in the consumer space where you’re getting something for free, maybe for your data,” he mused. “That’s sort of how the advertising business model has worked.”

More on AI: Sam Altman Says Even the Power of AI Will Never Lead to a Shorter Work Week

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If you were looking for even more ways to give Elon Musk your hard-earned cash, you’re in luck!

His social media platform X has officially rolled out a new banking service, uninspiredly called X Money, to its Premium and Premium Plus users — who are already shelling out up to $40 a month for a blue checkmark and more prominent tweet replies.

The service allows users to store their money in a deposit account and withdraw cash via ATMs using a physical Visa debit card. The microblogging platform is also enticing users with three percent cash-back and six percent annual percentage yield (APY).

But you’re not alone if you’re having second thoughts about handing over a company primarily known for the dissemination of misinformation, child sexual abuse material, and hate speech — while providing a depressing echo chamber to its broadly loathed CEO — your life savings.

As senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pointed out in a letter directly addressed to Musk earlier this year, X Money could pose a risk to “consumers, our national security, and the stability of the financial system,” while citing Musk’s “track record operating X.”

“Your failure to operate X in a safe and responsible manner does not breed confidence in your ability to safely expand into consumer finance,” she wrote.

Musk’s desire to launch a banking app goes way back. In 1999, he cofounded e-commerce payment system X.com, which merged with another company in 2000 to eventually form PayPal. However, the company’s board ousted Musk and replaced him with Peter Thiel at the time over major disagreements, a clear source of frustration and anger for the SpaceX CEO.

X Money is part of Musk’s broader goal of transforming X into what he calls “the everything app,” which, in the timeless words of former CEO and Musk’s mouthpiece Linda Yaccarino, “can deliver, well… everything.”

It’s an ambitious dream that evokes the Chinese app WeChat. But considering Musk’s standing in today’s society — his behavior has quickly turned him into one of the most hated people on the planet — convincing the public of going all-in on X might be more difficult than he anticipated, especially when it comes to personal finance.

Besides, even just getting the feature off the ground has seemingly been far more difficult than Musk anticipated. He originally promised it would launch by the end of 2024.

“It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year,” Musk told then-Twitter employees in October 2023.

Considering he missed his deadline by over two and a half years, chances are his mind has been blown several times over by now.

More on X: Elon Musk Is Having One of His All-Time Meltdowns

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Last week, we came across a cleverly subversive advertisement for Meta’s controversial smart glasses, which overlaid socialite Kylie Jenner’s face with one of the terrifying bug-eyed monsters from John Carpenter’s “They Live” and a bold type caption that reads “We’re always watching” when viewed from a specific angle.

The billboard, created by activist group Everyone Hates Elon, called attention to how Meta’s camera-adorned and AI-enabled spectacles have quickly turned into a privacy-invading nightmare. The optics of the problem is so bad that Meta is now trying to ban “manfluencers” and juvenile pranksters who use the glasses to record members of the public without their consent.

The public backlash has become so strong, even those who bought a pair of the “pervert glasses” are choosing to leave them at home.

Now, the activist group has come up with its next — and even more brutal — stunt. A new “advertisement” adorning a bus station in London, not far from Meta’s King’s Cross office, shows late sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein wearing a pair of the specs while getting his picture taken for the New York sex offender registry.

“Glasses for people who don’t do consent,” the caption reads.

Epstein Meta AI Glasses advert on Carnegie Street
byu/Physical_Echo_9372 inlondon

It’s a clear reference to the late criminal’s sex trafficking operation, which recruited dozens of girls, many underage. Grisly documents details how his victims were convinced to go to his beachfront mansion and even bring friends. According to some of their depositions, they were coerced into taking off their clothes without their consent.

Epstein has also been accused of secretly filming one of his victims. Witnesses also claim he kept “sex tapes” involving prominent people.

Email correspondences from 2014 also detail how the sex criminal directed his aide to install hidden video cameras across his home in Palm Beach, Florida, including one installed inside a Kleenex box.

While Epstein died in 2019, years before roughly two years before Meta launched the first generation of its smart glasses, the billboard sends a grim message.

Critics argue that glasses that can be used to film strangers without their consent shouldn’t be legal.

“If regulators actually did their damn jobs for once, glasses such as these would be illegal,” one Reddit user argued.

“Pervert glasses have no place in our society,” another wrote.

More on Meta’s glasses: Meta Desperately Trying to Ban Creeps Misusing Its AI “Pervert Glasses”

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The West Pacific has swung back into an El Niño phase, bringing nearly unprecedented heat to vast swaths of the globe.

Some of El Niño’s impacts are immediately apparent, or will be in the months to come: blistering high temps, of course, but also major amounts of rainfall for some, and extreme drought for others. Unfortunately, those weather patterns don’t just come and go. They also have a major impact on agricultural production, from the plains of the American Midwest to the rice paddies of Southeast Asia — and, as a result, a huge influence on the global economy.

As Reuters observes, El Niño conditions will likely have an inflationary effect on the economies of developing countries, as the ensuing weather flips typical rainfall totals on their head.

In Asia, for example, rainfall totals are likely to be much lower than usual, a situation expected to wreak havoc on countries like India and Vietnam. With India’s weather bureau projecting the driest conditions in over a decade, this year’s rice harvest is at risk. Lower rice yields would tighten supply, raising food prices for millions.

Central banks, in turn, could be forced to keep borrowing rates high, in order to keep rising prices in check.

“People are forecasting rate hikes for the second half of the year, especially for the South Asian countries, ​which are kind of the most impacted by El Niño such as India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand,” equity portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments Gary Tan told Reuters. “El Niño is ​just going to make inflation more sticky.”

A similar situation is possible across Africa, Reuters warns, as agricultural sectors in countries like Kenya are particularly susceptible to weather disruptions.

In today’s incredibly connected economy, in other words, it doesn’t take a butterfly flapping its wings to make waves half a world a way — just some warm ocean water in the middle of the Pacific.

More on El Niño: Scientists Propose Dimming Sun to Combat El Niño

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Last week, ChatGPT maker OpenAI issued what seems like a frightening memo about an “unprecedented cyber incident” involving cutting-edge AI models breaking loose and hacking another company.

As the AI lab tells it, a group of next-generation AI models — including one that hasn’t even been disclosed to the public yet — had busted out of their secure testing environment and into a production database owned by the machine learning startup Hugging Face.

“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue tweeted, seemingly backing the story. “The investigation is ongoing, and we’ll share more learnings from what might be the first incident of its kind!”

Mainstream press took the industry’s story and ran with it, issuing a flurry of anxious dispatches fretting about dangerous AI. One CBS headline called it “very alarming,” while NBC fretted that it was “just the start” of an ominous trend.

Look beyond the alarmist headlines, however, and you’ll find a familiar pattern: a massive tech company using scare tactics to manipulate public opinion.

As assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University John Thickstun observes for the Guardian, this isn’t OpenAI’s first time peddling the “scary AI” narrative. Back in February of 2019 — way before the public release of ChatGPT — the company announced GPT-2, then a cutting-edge large language model. But GPT-2, the company insisted, was too dangerous to release to the dimwitted public, a pronouncement which fed the AI hypebeast and went on to secure OpenAI a cool $1 billion investment from Microsoft.

“This was an early example of a pattern in OpenAI’s communications,” Thickstun explains: “loudly proclaim how dangerous AI is, and investors will hear how powerful it is.”

Whether the tale of OpenAI’s rogue agent stands up to scrutiny remains to be seen, but there are reasons to be skeptical.

If OpenAI’s models really were actually gnawing on the wires of other American companies, it would present a substantial threat to economic activity that any Justice Department worth its salt would want to shut down (maybe not this iteration of the Justice Department, but you get the idea.)

And as AI labs go, OpenAI is notoriously secure both from prying eyes outside and internal threats within its halls. Sure, it’s possible OpenAI has overstated its own internal safeguards as a kind of security theater. But on the flipside, OpenAI is now a major AI contractor for the US Pentagon, a relationship which demands cutting edge security practice.

It likewise follows the broader AI industry’s playbook. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has deployed similar rhetoric, warning of a similar breakout in which a rogue AI agent escaped its cage all on its lonesome. In one strange instance, the company’s billionaire co-founder Chris Olah even warned the Pope that the Vatican needs to help stop rogue AI from “dominating humanity.”

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What would you do if you were unfathomably wealthy? Collect superyachts, throw extravagant parties, and just generally live a care-free existence? 

Not if you’re Elon Musk. The former trillionaire is busy as ever waging his war on all-things “woke” — and it’s devolved into a performance which, even by his extreme standards, is a meltdown for the ages. Or a few of them simultaneously, involving entities as diverse as an esteemed journal, a chef, a Greek epic and Anne Hathaway.

It all started over the weekend when The Economist released a lengthy interview with Musk, who displayed none of the irreverent charm that once made him so popular, or even the calculating calm you might expect from a powerful business leader.

Musk smugly denied that his USAID cuts have caused the deaths of any children, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And when the magazine’s editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes addressed how deeply unpopular he’s become due to the kind of polarizing rhetoric he pushes, he fumed against her at and the media class at large.

“They hate you far more than they hate me!” Musk raged, impotently. “You’re the problem, the media.”

His ire didn’t end there. He took to his personal echo chamber X to label Beddoes a “traitor to the West, plain and simple,” after she criticized him for constantly spreading misinformation about immigrants to his hundreds of millions of followers, and also called her a “woke NPC with zero self-awareness.”

In response, celebrity chef José Andrés, whose nonprofit World Central Kitchen provides food relief, pleaded with Musk to “change” because he was acting “like a tyrant.” And despite Andrés praising some of Musk’s accomplishments, the zillionaire remained as thin-skinned as ever.

“You’re an asshole,” Musk accused Andrés, despite literally just calling someone an NPC and hand-waving aside the deaths of children.

All the while, he’s also been busy crashing out about a resurfaced clip of Anne Hathaway advocating trans rights in an awards acceptance speech — from eight years ago.

“She has a little bird brain,” he wrote. In a flurry of posts that followed, he also said Hathaway was a “marionette” who “just says the words Hollywood tells her to say,” with “no internal thoughts of her own.”

Hathaway, it’s worth noting, recently starred in Christopher Nolan’s film “The Odyssey,” which has been an outstanding critical and commercial success — much to Musk’s chagrin. He has spent the past several months tirelessly campaigning against the adaptation of the Greek epic for being too woke, for reasons such as casting Black women in prominent roles. 

Nolan, according to Musk, “desecrated Homer and groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar.” When it was clear that his obvious attempt at trying to sink the film’s chances had utterly failed, he then vowed that his AI Grok would create a “historically accurate” adaptation of The Odyssey.

Hundreds of billions of dollars to his name, folks. Money truly can’t buy happiness.

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