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There was a time in the not-so-distant-past when credit cards were a genuine novelty for American consumers. First emerging in the late 1950s, credit cards spread through households like wildfire during the 70s and 80s, fueling the rapid development of card technology and thus enabling them to become ubiquitous personal finance vehicles they are today. In a matter of decades, private credit has become the bedrock of the post-industrial US economy, contributing nearly $900 billion to the country’s GDP and providing six million jobs over the past three years alone.Now in 2026, those omnipresent slabs of plastic are just the…

Flock is starting to feel the heat — or at least its PR team is.Last week, its CEO Garrett Langley offered a simpering public apology for abuses of its mass surveillance network after a Washington Post investigation found at least 50 cases of police officers allegedly using Flock’s AI-powered cameras to stalk women.Then in an interview with Vanity Fair days later, Langley insultingly suggested that his cameras would have solved the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie — a comment that came as more cities across the country are cancelling their Flock contracts amid mounting public backlash against the company.Media outlets would…

Did the bright-eyed enlistees of the Space Force join up thinking they’d one day be fighting alien invaders like they’re, we dunno, Master Chief?Their jobs, in reality: drawing their weapons on imagined human invaders.As the Associated Press reports, security at the Vandenberg Space Force base in California held five news reporters and two military officers at gunpoint because they thought they were intruders trying to crash the gates.The snafu took place on Monday ahead of a groundbreaking ceremony for a new training facility for missile operators at a nearby federal airfield in Santa Barbara. 

OpenAI says that it’s slowing down development and release of new models due to security and alignment concerns.The ChatGPT maker announced the decision in a Tuesday blog post, citing two events as drivers of the indefinite training halt. One was the recent incident in which an OpenAI agent escaped its training sandbox without OpenAI’s knowledge and coordinated with other agents to launch a bizarre cyberattack against the AI training repository Hugging Face in an effort to cheat on its training tests. The blog post also — more mysteriously — cited “preliminary evidence” that an unreleased new model called Astra “may meet the…

A massive trial is underway in California, where state attorneys general are holding Meta’s feet to the fire for its role in fueling a children’s mental health crisis.According to the testimony of former Meta safety engineer Arturo Béjar, the company has purposefully adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it comes to keeping children safe on its platforms, the Guardian reported.Throughout his time on the witness stand, Béjar asserted that Meta has known its platform is actively harming children, pushing things like violent and predatory sexual content onto their feeds.Béjar, whose role in the company reportedly involved briefing CEO…

Chinese startup DaxAI has shown off a “Cyber Horse” quadrupedal robot that visitors of the recent 2026 World Robot Conference in Beijing, China, could actually ride.Video footage circulating on social media and photography by Reuters show visitors mounting the unusual contraption, a bizarre mash-up of a motorcycle and an oversized robot dog, and taking it for a spin. The robot’s movements are still quite jerky, but it clearly has little trouble navigating the showroom floor with an adult straddling its saddle.It’s also reassuring that we’re looking at an actual product that’s starting to take shape, and not pure vaporware. We’ve…

You might recall that back in October of last year, president of the United States Donald Trump shared an AI-generated video of himself flying a fighter jet and dropping loads of feces all over protesting Americans.While this was a completely deranged piece of content for — once again — the president of the United States to post, and it’s probably safe to say that most people probably didn’t take this AI-generated clip as a literal threat. Did it communicate the commander-in-chief’s hostility to Americans exercising their right to protest, in this case during 2025’s “No Kings” demonstrations? Well, yes. But did…

Unitree says that its new “Superman” humanoid robot can run faster than any recorded human.The Chinese robotics company revealed the new model on Monday, hyping up its athletic capabilities in a common marketing shtick.In a thirty second video, the robot leaps around two meters into the air, which is well over the human standing jump record of 1.7 meters, according to Guinness World Records.Then, sealing its Olympian credentials, the robot blazes down a track at a top speed of 12.66 meters per second, Unitree claims. Even Usain Bolt isn’t that fast. During his record-setting 100-meter sprint in 2009 of 9.58…

While talk of an AI investment bubble usually centers around the designs of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the implications reach far beyond the borders of the United States.On Monday, an analysis published by the European Central Bank, first reported by Reuters, made the case that a “market correction” to AI investment euphoria is not only highly probable, but carries the potential for far-reaching consequences in Europe and beyond.The analysis, authored by ECB economists and financial researchers, looked at two explanations for the AI financial bubble.Their first, dubbed the “rational view,” is that unprecedented tech investments are justified by “extreme…

Like a klutz on an obstacle course, a Tesla Robotaxi with no safety driver seemingly panicked after taking a wrong turn and plowed through a row of bollards, those springy traffic barriers that you are not supposed to run down.The incident was captured in a video uploaded Monday to the r/SelfDrivingCars subreddit and first spotted by Electrek. It was taken by a rider sitting in the front passenger seat, who sounded progressively more concerned as it dawned on him what the Robotaxi was trying to do.“It’s going through bollards,” the passenger says, as the car inches towards the barriers.In the…