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Character.AI, the once-buzzy chatbot startup that faced high-profile lawsuits over the deaths of minors, has declared bankruptcy. Character.AI announced last night that it had entered a “voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy process” and is looking to sell the company in a court-supervised sale.“Over the past year, we’ve taken meaningful steps to sustain and improve our business amid significant legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds,” Character.AI said in a blog post. “After a comprehensive review of our available alternatives, our board determined that this court-supervised sale process provides us with the best opportunity to maximize value for all of our stakeholders.”Founded in November…

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on Monday that the country’s three strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex’s data centers last week had been a resounding success.Zelensky told reporters that social media platforms had seen a notable drop in Russian bot activity. Following the strikes, “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” he said.“A lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots,” he added. “And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.”The news once again highlights how data centers have become…

While the recreational use of marijuana is usually associated with a more peaceful mental state, scientists just a made a surprising discovery.As detailed in a meta analysis of cannabis-related studies published last month in the journal Psychological Medicine, a team of scientists in the UK discovered a significant link between cannabis use and an “increased risk of violence.” The headline finding was that they found cannabis users were statistically more likely to be the perpetrators of violent acts. They also found that the use of the drug — particularly among women and mixed-gender cohorts — was “significantly associated with an…

Beneath its pock-marked, craggy exterior, the Moon is thought to harbor a network of caves and tunnels from its volcanic past. Now, NASA has selected a mission to go investigate a promising window into our space rock’s subterranean secrets.Gaping up at outer space, as if mugging for the orbital satellite cameras, is the Marius Hill Pit, a hole on the lunar surface that’s thought to be up to 150 feet deep and up to 300 feet across. Scientists believe it’s an example of a skylight — the collapsed roof of an underground lava tube, which forms a circular aperture in the…

Open-weight AI models have skyrocketed in popularity. They allow users to host their own AI systems locally and evade safety guardrails enforced by commercial companies like OpenAI or Anthropic.Unfortunately, those qualities also make open-weight models popular among people who use AI to generate child sex abuse material (CSAM). As Bloomberg lays out in a shocking new feature, AI models that are partially or fully open-source have led to a major surge in disturbing CSAM material online.Tracking down perpetrators can be difficult since many of these AI models can be trained on existing CSAM and used to generate many new derivatives…

Ever wondered what it felt like to be a genius? It’s truly never been easier, thanks to the sycophantic power of ChatGPT. A viral post on X-formerly-Twitter encouraging people to “ask ChatGPT what percentile of intelligence it thinks you are compared to all its other users” is being flooded with wild screenshots, where the popular AI chatbot estimates that the vast majority of users rank among the smartest people in the population.Naturally, it’s next to impossible to verify how true any given reply on X is these days, so Futurism took it for a spin — and ChatGPT didn’t disappoint.On…

The United States runs on gas powered generators. As of 2022, the US had nearly 1,000 gas-fired plants, which was already more than the next nine countries combined. Under returning president Donald Trump, the country’s embrace of high-carbon power has only accelerated, as energy developers abandon environmentally-friendly projects like off-shore wind farms in favor of more noxious gas- and coal-powered facilities.As if our rapidly warming world wasn’t being choked by enough smog, the AI boom is now adding even more fuel to the proverbial fire. According to a new analysis by the Environment America Research and Policy Center, first flagged…

Spring and summer of 2026 have seen a sharp increase in the public’s awareness of pervasive police tech in the United States, primarily through the rising infamy of AI surveillance company Flock Safety. But as many Americans now revile automatic license plate readers, privacy advocates say we’ve only just scratched the surface of the web of police surveillance quickly enveloping the country.As Flock cameras come down, either at the hands of an outraged community or an angry guy with a Sawzall, they’re being replaced with an even more perfidious system: Axon’s Fusus platform.Like Flock’s FlockOS, Axon’s Fusus is designed to…

Amid Terrifying Readings, Experts Fear El Niño Is About to Wreak Havoc

As tech companies continue to claim their AI models are capable of cracking some of the toughest problems that have stumped mathematicians for decades, the crypto community is starting to become uneasy.As Business Insider reports, certain luminaries of the scene are concerned that AI could unlock blockchain wallets, whose public keys are currently protected by nearly ironclad mathematical computation.“Yesterday’s OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us,” Ethereum researcher Justin Drake tweeted this week. “They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen.”As a result,…