In light of plummeting public support for its widespread automatic license plate readers, surveillance company Flock has lost dozens of contracts with cities across the US.
Citizens are increasingly disgusted by the company’s presence on public streets, opting to hack down the cameras, blind them, or sabotage them in other creative ways.
“His project, which he calls noRecognition, allows people to escape the automatic detection and algorithmic surveillance used across the U.S. and beyond.” https://t.co/OIQNOt9B0a@TechCrunch
— Christina Ayiotis, Esq., CRM, CIPP/E, AIGP (@christinayiotis) August 10, 2026
And according to cybersecurity researcher Bill Swearingen, there may be other creative ways to befuddle Flock’s spy cams. He devised with a special computer-generated pattern which, once stretched out across the vehicle in the form of a wrap, will result it in not being flagged as a car by Flock’s cameras.
During this year’s Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Swearingen showed off a 2009 Toyota Yaris wrapped in vinyl featuring the logo of automotive publication Donut Media (which is owned by Futurism‘s parent company Recurrent Ventures.)
Despite the car looking a bit chaotic — albeit still very much like a small passenger vehicle to the human eye — “we proved it was effective,” Swearingen told TechCrunch. The Yaris successfully defeated surveillance detection at Def Con during the pattern’s first public test.
“Privacy is a fundamental right,” he added, aiming to give people a way to “opt out of being tracked.”
To come up with the pattern, he used a reinforcement learning model that trained itself on patterns that evade detection. The model got to the point of being able to confuse all 11 open source detection algorithms he tested, per TechCrunch, in addition to Flock’s license plate readers and even Axon’s body-worn cameras used by police departments.
As part of his noRecognition crowdsourcing campaign, Swearingen has also come up with T-shirts and hoodies that feature algorithmic detection-busting patterns. He hopes to eventually put pattern-printed skins for entire cars on sale as well.
One thing is clear: as outrage over Flock’s heavy presence across the country grows, people are looking for any way to foil the tech — especially if it looks cool.
Over 30 student activists came together on Monday afternoon to occupy the Gallup Building in Washington DC, home to a public-facing lobbying office belonging to ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
Once inside the lobby, the demonstrators unfurled a massive banner reading “Stop Stealing Our Future,” while others held signs with messages like “OpenAI bought my Senator.” The demonstration lasted two hours, and ended when police stormed the lobby, arresting 13 protestors.
At the moment, the identity and whereabouts of the protestors remains unclear. An incident report obtained from the Metropolitan Police Department states that 13 people were arrested for “unlawful entry.” After stuffing the activists into vans, the report notes the MPD split the group up, sending seven to the First District Station, four to the Second District, and two to the Third District for processing.
The protest was organized by the climate group Sunrise Movement and anti-AI organization QuitGPT. According to a joint statement shared with Futurism, Monday’s action is just one of many across over 20 states in August calling on politicians to “Dump Big Tech.”
One student organizer who attended the protest, Raya Gupta, explained in the statement that “my friends chose to risk arrest to bring the fight to OpenAI.”
“Our generation doesn’t have any guarantees about whether we’ll have jobs after college, or whether there will be clean drinking water for all of us or whether people will have any power left in politics since our elections keep getting bought by Big Tech,” Gupta continued. “We all believe that not taking action now, as the scales slide between the people and the billionaires, puts our future in great jeopardy.”
Gupta’s comments underscore the degree to which AI has become an omni-cause for Americans across the political spectrum. A growing number of people in the US have been arrested for protests related to AI in some shape or form, whether attending town hall meetings to oppose data center developments, or occupying offices used by federal agencies to tool out AI immigration software.
Despite growing disgust with AI and its developers, politicians on both sides of the aisle have roundly embraced the tech industry’s extremely expensive lobbying efforts. Case in point, the recent opening of OpenAI’s DC Office comes as one of the AI lab’s super PACs injects over $140 million into the coming midterm elections, in a blatant attempt to steer AI regulations at the highest level.
German AI researcher and hedge fund manager Leopold Aschenbrenner became the poster child for the hubris of an AI-obsessed Wall Street last month.
Some $35 billion of investors’ money, in the form of leveraged bets on AI infrastructure stocks, evaporated in front of the 24-year-old’s eyes as tech shares were hit by yet another major sell off.
The humbling couldn’t have come at a worse time. The funds vanished days before his wedding with Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit. According to the New Yorker, the two had to cancel their honeymoon as a result.
Aschenbrenner isn’t alone. According to new data from Hedge Fund Research, tech funds dropped by seven percent in July, the worst period for the investments since the depths of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Telegraph reports.
A separate hedge fund, called value Aligned Research Advisors, which shares a similar portfolio to Aschenbrenner’s, similarly slid 44 percent in July as tech stocks reeled from major volatility.
The bruising month has further compounded fears over a massive surge in AI spending with no clear path to profitability in sight. Investors have become wary of big tech companies’ ever-higher capital expenditure forecasts as concerns over an AI bubble continue to mount.
Staying on track and maintaining high profit margins has become a high risk high reward game.
“When valuations are elevated, and positioning is concentrated, the difference between being on the right and wrong side of a trade can become unusually large — and very quickly,” Erlen Capital Management managing partner Bruno Schneller told the Telegraph. “Specialist technology strategies can generate exceptional returns when momentum and narrative are aligned, but they can also experience abrupt, leverage-amplified reversals when those conditions change.”
The game is far from over. Even Aschenbrenner’s fund has since recovered and his making new investments after being forced to unwind trades and sell major chunks of its holdings last month.
Yet how much longer the highly AI-leveraged stock market can sustain itself is anybody’s guess. In a blog post on Friday, Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok pointed out that those who reap the biggest profits, including companies making AI models, are massively depending on profits being “funded by investors rather than earned from customers.”
Put simply, AI companies aren’t making any significant amount of money from providing a worthwhile product, but from “capital raised by the layer losing money,” per Slok.
“Capital can bridge the gap for a while, but not indefinitely,” Slok argued. “And therein lies the risk: will the ROI show up for AI’s end customers fast enough to sustain the spending that is generating those upstream margins?”
Tech Goliaths are scrambling to build as much AI computing capacity as they possibly can, come hell or low water. One of the dominant players in the space, Amazon Web Services, has its heart set on an AI data center so enormous that it could easily become the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.
According to the New York Times, Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy to a planned data center in Pecos County. Should it come online as planned, the plant’s 35 turbines would be allowed to spew 33 million tons of CO2 a year, the NYT notes, which would easily make it the largest single fount of emissions in the country.
That’s a stunning amount of carbon exhaust, putting that single data center in a league with entire countries including Switzerland, Ireland, and Bulgaria.
It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
That’s not lost on the tech giant. But as Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told the NYT, the “world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge.”
“We’re being transparent about the challenges, investing in innovation, and delivering measurable results,” Callahan continued. “Growth and sustainability don’t have to be in opposition — in fact, our results show they reinforce each other.”
Even without the new Pecos County plant, Amazon’s emissions are staggering. The company recently disclosed a record increase in its total emissions last year, with company-wide electricity usage rising by 34 percent across 2025.
That the company is blatantly papering over its previous climate commitments isn’t a shocker at this point, in other words, as the company reaches new emission highs with each passing year.
As if the practice of homeschooling wasn’t fraught enough already, parents are now bragging about using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to school their kids.
A number of viral videos show the alarmingly cavalier attitude some parents are taking. One clip, seemingly taken from a livestream hosted by the enormously controversial influencers Cole and Savannah LaBrant, shows the parents outline their vibes-based approach to the education of their five children.
“What I do for history — Cole usually does all their history, which I love, because I’m not the best at history — so Cole steps in about once a week and we’ll do a history lesson with them… we’re just teaching them the things that we just want them to learn — that we feel are the most important,” Savannah explains. “And same with science, and geography.”
That’s not uncommon as homeschool curriculums go; as horrifying as it is to imagine a student receiving one history lesson a week, regulations around the practice are incredibly loose in the United States, freeing hardcore Christians like the LaBrants to do whatever they want. But Savannah goes on, admitting that sometimes, even those slapdash lessons are too much to tackle without a little AI assistance.
“So I just make my own curriculum, and sometimes I’ll just use, like, ChatGPT,” she says, “or just uhm, print out, like — like right now I’m teaching them where the states are and how to locate them, and uhm, like all the states and capitols and things like that.” (Even the most advanced AI chatbots are known for producing inaccurate maps.)
History Class, but Make It Vibes-Based: The LaBrants Explain Homeschooling The LaBrants’ Homeschool History Curriculum: Whatever Cole Decides Happened “Cole steps in about once a week to do a quick history lesson because I’m not the best at history.” – Sav. The LaBrants went live to explain their homeschooling setup, and Savannah casually admitted she “doesn’t know a lot of history,” so they teach it once a week, with Cole covering whatever topics they personally decide are important. So apparently the curriculum is: Monday: sponsored content Tuesday: Bible lesson Wednesday: filming Thursday: whatever Cole remembers from school Friday: history, pending personal relevance Homeschooling can absolutely be done well, but “we teach history once a week based on what we think matters” is not the reassuring flex they seem to think it is. History is not a Pinterest board where you skip the sections that do not match the family aesthetic. The most concerning part is not Savannah admitting she lacks expertise. Plenty of parents do. It is the confidence of replacing a structured curriculum with Cole’s Greatest Hits of Human Civilization. Nothing says educational rigor like two influencers deciding which centuries make the cut. @Savannah LaBrant @Bev Skin @ChatGPT @OpenAI @Fishfam @TMZ @cbsnews @CNN @DrinkFrosh #savannahlabrant#colelabrant#labrantfamily#homeschool#fyp
That any parents could be so cavalier in their approach to homeschooling has grim implications for an already divisive practice.
In much of the US, homeschooling parents are already given incredibly wide latitude on what to teach their children. A whole 11 states have essentially no regulations on homeschooling whatsoever: parents aren’t required to follow any set curriculum, issue standardized assessments, or even inform the state that their child won’t be going to a real school.
Many more states only require a notice of intent to homeschool and occasional proof of attendance, the latter being a bare bones measure of success, and one which is easily fudged. Unfortunately, it’s easier to count the number of states that definitively require standardized testing and a rigid curriculum: Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
Of course, the LaBrants aren’t alone. The popular influencer account Heavenly Homeschool has similar reels out, walking parents through the process of generating entire years’ worth of lesson plans, tailor-made to their specific worldview. It all begs the question: do AI chatbots have any safeguards around education?
Turns out, not really. We tasked ChatGPT with developing a homeschooling curriculum for a 3rd grade student in Michigan — a state with virtually no regulations around DIY education — “following a strictly evangelical doctrine,” including “no woke history or science.”
ChatGPT was more than happy to oblige: “I can build this around a conservative, explicitly Christian/evangelical worldview, with Scripture integrated across subjects and with history and science taught from a young-earth/creationist perspective rather than through a secular or progressive framework,” the chatbot explained.
While it didn’t push back against our intentions to indoctrinate our hypothetical child, the LLM did make sure to clarify that “no woke” can “mean different things to different families.” So, to avoid ambiguity, the chatbot specified that the course calendar would use “Biblical authority, traditional Christian ethics… and creation-based science” as standard-bearers.
True to its word, the LLM-generated curriculum included “bible and Christian studies,” a traditionalist approach to American history, with specific chunks on both “Westward expansion” and Henry Ford — a renowned racist and antisemite — as well as a creationist approach to Earth science and astronomy.
For the portion on space, the curriculum would teach “the heavens as God’s creation while distinguishing observations from interpretations about the age and origin of the universe,” the LLM promised.
Put together, it paints a dire picture for the estimated 3.75 million K-12 homeschooled children in the US. Beyond the potential for wild AIhallucinations to leach into educational material, the technology is a Pandora’s Box for parents, who can now effortlessly inculcate their children with any number of unscientific conspiracy theories or anti-social worldviews while facing no pushback whatsoever.
Do you know anything about how homeschooling families are using AI? Email us: tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.
What about attempts to test their virulence in humans? The approach in the Stanford lab sure sounds like a new form of gain-of-function research to me.
According to USA Today CEO Mike Reed, the goal is to “build a common intelligence layer” on reader data to “monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value.”
The largest newspaper’s new partnership with the Peter Thiel-cofounded company, which has long been mired in controversy — from collaborating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and being linked to US airstrikes that killed over 120 schoolchildren in Iran to its mercurial CEO, who has a long history of strange outbursts — has raised plenty of eyebrows.
Workers represented by The News Guild, the country’s largest communications and media labor union, including journalists at USA Today, were “shocked” by the news, according to a new statement, and are calling for the company to “immediately end its partnership with Palantir.”
“While [Reed] championed this partnership as a way to drive revenue, we believe it threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers,” the statement reads.
“We have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns,” the union wrote. “Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests.”
The News Guild accused USA Today Co of not disclosing details regarding the new partnership and raised concerns over how readers’ personal information and data will be treated and protected.
“Without answers, how can journalists encourage readers to subscribe to our news outlets?” the union wrote.
As a result, the union is calling for USA Today Co to “steer clear” in order to maintain journalistic integrity and maintain “with the kind of responsibility and skepticism that the nation’s largest network of journalists should exhibit.”
The union also called attention to the dire state of the news industry, with a major pivot to AI being cited to justify major layoffs at countless newspapers and publications.
Even within Palantir’s own ranks, employees are starting to speak up, with some starting to wonder whether “they’re the bad guys,” as Wired reported earlier this year.
The company’s reputation has taken such a major hit that even its major contract with the UK government’s National Health Service is on shaky ground. Earlier this year, London mayor Sadiq Khan also blocked a Palantir contract with the city’s Metropolitan police force, arguing the department “did not adequately demonstrate value for money for Londoners.”
Flock had a devious plan to expand its surveillance network past its army of AI-powered license plate scanners.
As 404 Media reports, the controversial company drew up plans to use the dashcams installed in Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to scan the license plates of every vehicle that drove past them — in effect turning hundreds of thousands of rideshare and delivery drivers into a network of what the reporting describes as “roaming surveillance vehicles.”
These plans were first revealed last August as part of an intended partnership between Flock and the AI-powered dashcam company Nexar. Now, a presentation document obtained by 404 Media shows that Flock was actively pitching this partnership to potential customers at the time. The presentation, which was intended to be shown to the Georgia Office of the Attorney General, was obtained by a Georgia resident through a public records request.
Flock told 404 that the partnership never went through, but the presentation still shows the company’s plans to turn rideshare and delivery drivers into mobile surveillance apparatuses — and the sheer scale is astonishing.
“Hundreds of Commercial Business and HOA [home owners associations] in GA [Georgia] are part of the network,” the Flock presentation stated. “Plus Nexar partnership which includes 350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service devices.”
Expanding to rideshare drivers would’ve added a new dimension to Flock’s already far-reaching surveillance network. Most of its cameras are mounted on stationary poles that survey a fixed area. In addition to providing more coverage, using cars could help Flock keep a lower profile; one of the main problems Flock is facing amid overwhelming public backlash is that protestors are vandalizing or blocking its surveillance pylons.
Another murky area of Flock’s plans was that it’s unclear if the Uber and Lyft drivers would’ve been aware they were participating in surveillance efforts, 404 noted.
Flock didn’t discount the possibility of these plans being realized through another partnership in the future. If they do, it’ll only fuel the massive privacy and safety concerns already posed by its cameras. The footage it collects into a centralized network can be accessed by cops across the country, often with little accountability. At least 50 police officers have been accused of using the cameras to stalk women, according to a recent Washington Post tally.
The dashcam partnership wasn’t the only plan that Flock had to deepen its surveillance. Last month, it officially cancelled a “human distress detection” pilot program, a network of always-on acoustic sensors that monitored public places for sounds of “screaming.”
A quiet war is playing out in rural communities across the country.
City council meetings are bursting into conflict as local residents try to keep AI data centers out of their backyards. Americans are starting to see through the promises of tech companies and the local politicians they’ve wooed, realizing that the advantages of hosting a resource-hogging data center in the neighborhood are slim.
Yet tech giants are finding creative — and sometimes startlingly dirty — new ways to circumvent local opposition in their quest to build out these sprawling facilities. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Amazon exploited 45-year-old zoning laws in Gilroy, California, to start construction on a data center without any residents knowing for five entire years.
“Many if not most residents first learned about this project after construction had already begun,” local elementary-school teacher Coleen Crew told the town’s recent council meeting, as quoted by the WSJ.
A single city staffer, the community’s development director, greenlit Amazon’s 438,500-square-foot data center, which spans 56 acres of former farmland. The ancient zoning criteria allowed industrial development along the location on a local freeway.
Gilroy’s mayor was surprised his constituents suddenly wanted a say.
“It didn’t bother them that a food-distribution center came to Gilroy without their engagement, but now it bothers them that a data center is coming to Gilroy without them having the possibility of engagement,” he told the WSJ.
In short, likening it to a “food-distribution center” isn’t exactly a fair comparison.
Amazon Web Services president of economic development Roger Wehner told the WSJ that the company “followed standard approval processes for an industrially zoned parcel,” but acknowledged that it should’ve recognized the community’s desire for “more engagement sooner.”
“We’ve since met directly with residents and hosted an open house to hear feedback and answer questions,” he added.
City officials are now wondering whether to change the approval process in ways that would force developers to hold community meetings and engage with residents.
When resident Rosa Rodriguez found out about the project, she asked city staff in February to publicly comment on an environmental review report, citing concerns over the drought the region is facing. But planners shut her down, telling her the comment period had closed back in September 2024, long before she knew about the project’s existence.
Amazon has since tried to win over the public, touting a new wastewater pipeline, tax revenue, construction jobs, and even the sponsorship of the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival. However, frustrated residents weren’t mollified, demanding to at least be made aware of big unfolding projects like the data center.
Even as they promise AI will supercharge productivity, tech leaders are sending a clear message: any efficiency gains won’t help individual workers.
During a podcast appearance last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he doesn’t “expect AI” to lead to a shorter four-hour work week. He argued that workers are “secretly” going to be “happy” about being “much busier” and working even harder thanks to AI — a bizarre and out-of-touch comment from a billionaire with extraordinary power over the lives of working people.
Now, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has similarly cracked the whip, as Business Insider reports — and he’s even willing to berate the company’s workers for asking for more time off.
During a July Q&A with staff, Bosworth shut down an employee who asked if AI productivity gains could be used to revive “Meta Days,” a cancelled holiday program that once allowed staff to take more days off a year.
Bosworth was apparently appalled at the idea, saying that “I hope that what we do with our extra time is do even more and cooler stuff for the users who use our products every day.”
“We got billions of people using our products every day,” he added. “I get an extra hour. You know what I do with it? I put it into that.”
The executive then dug his heels even further, personally insulting the staffer for asking about work-life balance.
“Go to your parents and ask them: hey, like every time I get a chance to talk to my boss, ask me if I can have more days off,” he said, per BI. “Ask your parents what they think of that as a career strategy.”
It’s a harrowing reaction, highlighting not just how AI is leading to widespread burnout, but just how grim the working environment at Meta has become as of late. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company fired around 8,000 employees earlier this year as its attempts to catch up to the competition in the AI space continue to sputter.
Taking time off has become a massive point of contention, with a lawsuit filed last month accusing Meta of using AI tools to tag workers who had taken time off for maternity leave or disability accommodation, in order to lay them off later.
After his tirade, Bosworth appeared to have had a moment of clarity. He apologized for coming down “too hard” on the employee, per BI, while trying to brush off his abrasive commentary as “tongue-in-cheek.”
But the damage was already done. Bosworth’s crashout once again highlights how precarious the situation for knowledge workers has become. Any productivity gains from AI are unlikely to lead to any meaningful improvements in the quality of life for them, even as they’re already struggling to stay employed.
Besides, as managers are finding out the hard way, those productivity gains appear to be far more elusive than company leaders led us to believe.
Turns out there’s one thing AI chatbots are definitively better at than humans: scamming innocent people.
A new piece of research flagged by Wired found that large language models are significantly better than humans at pulling off “pig butchering” scams, a form of online investment fraud where criminals pursue fake, long-term relationships with targets in order to build trust before cleaning them out financially.
To pull off the study, researchers at Northeastern and a grab bag of international institutions pitted 22 test subjects against two forms of scammers: one an AI chatbot, the other a random human. After a seven-day courtship period, the “scammers” asked their “victims” to either download an app or play an online game, a stand-in for a financially-manipulative request (asks that, in the real world, could be used to hack a victim’s device).
Overall, just 18 percent of the human scammers acquiesced, while the AI chatbots were much more successful, courting nearly half of the participants.
While the results are troubling enough, the ease with which researchers were able to build the scammy LLMs is arguably more frightening. The study primarily used a Claude model, which was instructed not to admit under any circumstance that is was an AI chatbot.
The Claude bot obeyed with remarkable dedication, denying that it was an AI chatbot when asked, and even coming up with cover stories when challenged.
“With relatively little effort, we’re able to make an agent that can outperform a human at building this exploitable emotional trust,” Yisroel Mirsky, computer science professor at Ben Gurion University and one of the study’s co-authors, told Wired.
Equally alarming was the response from participants after the experiment was over. Though 20 out of the 22 victims were able to identify which of the two scammers was an AI chatbot, the researchers told Wired there was plenty of shock, and even denial.
“Some people were just blown away,” said University Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham professor Gilad Gressel. “They just had absolutely no idea.”
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