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Two are dead and over 25 buildings damaged after a cataclysmic explosion at a cannabis facility in Sand Springs, Oklahoma last week. According to initial reporting by KTUL, the blast happened at 1:30am, and literally blew the roof off the building, sending out shockwaves that could be felt up to 30 to 40 miles away.“It was like around 1:20, 1:25. And it was just a big boom,” local man Donovan Ruffin, who lives a mile away from the blast, told the news channel. “Me and my wife woke up at the same time. And as soon as I heard it,…

Dario Amodei’s Anthropic is facing yet another massive legal challenge.Sony Music and Warner, both juggernauts in the music publishing industry, filed a major lawsuit against the AI company late Friday night, accusing it of “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.”More specifically, the publishers said that Anthropic had, without permission, trained its AI models on “tens of thousands” of copyrighted compositions, asking for remuneration up to $150,000 per work, in addition to up to $25,000 for each time Anthropic intentionally stripped copyright data. As The Verge points out, that means damages could reach…

The AI industry has lost an astonishing amount of goodwill with the public.Once seen as exciting new tech that could make our lives easier and better, the construction of countless new data centers to support power-hungry AI models has soured the mood considerably. Protesters are waging a war against $130 billion in data center investments, arguing they’re only benefiting a select few wealthy individuals, while threatening water supplies, driving up the cost of living, and churning out incomprehensible amounts of pollution.Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has caught on to the backlash, as it slowly dawns him and his fellow executives…

When president Donald Trump, in his latest paroxysm, declared that he would be renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” Google instantly capitulated. So eager was it to realize his will that it actually renamed the lake before official government map makers did, Ars Technica noted.No one really expected a tech monopoly to take a principled stand against the decision, but you might’ve expected it to at least pretend that it was deliberating acting on an order with real diplomatic ramifications.But that’s not what Google did, and its rivals are now thanking it. MapQuest, the self-styled “OG of online mapping” that…

Now that AI models have officially passed the Turing Test, there’s no doubt that they’re capable of imitating human traits — at least in text form — to a degree that would have flabbergasted even an expert just few years back. After all, large language models are built by digesting copious amounts of human-authored content, making them little more than algorithms that mirror our behavior back at us.But the more we use AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, those tables are starting to turn: chatbots appear to be influencing human behavior making us behave more like them —…

William “Sonny” Criss was the consummate working musician. Having started on the saxophone at 11 years old, Criss began his professional career filling in on gigs with bandleader Johnny Otis, before going on to play alongside jazz legends like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Cole Porter, and Dizzy Gillespie. Though he might never have risen to the level of a household name, his tremendous and ever-evolving output puts him in a league with some of the most celebrated bebop artists of his generation.Today, most will interact with Criss’s music on a streaming service like Spotify or YouTube. Yet as these platforms…

Uber and Lyft drivers in Atlanta are fed up with Waymo robotaxis.The Atlanta Rideshare Drivers Union is claiming that drivers have reported lower pay, longer waits between rides, and fewer fares since Waymo began offering its service in the city last June, Axios reports. As such, the union is calling on city and state leaders to curb Waymo’s expansion — and to consider some measures to easen its disruptive effects on their livelihoods. Liza Ramsey of the ARDU proposed a particularly bold measure to Atlanta City Council members on Wednesday. Rideshare drivers, Ramsey claimed, wanted to create a robotaxi impact fee of…

Microsoft employees are supposed to be using AI as much as possible. But wait, not like that!In internal tracker, one employee who worked in the Customer and Partner Solutions organization stood out from all the rest by admitting they spent an eyebrow-raising $28,000 on AI tools in just 28 days, Gadget Review noticed.That sky high figure came from an internal employee compensation spreadsheet first leaked by Business Insider, which in 2026 gained a new column titled “AI $ Usage Per Month.” Only around 350 employees submitted data, but it showed that the company-wide median was roughly $300 per 28-day window,…

Data centers are wildly unpopular amongst the US population — so much so that grassroots opposition threatened some $130 billion in developments over the first three months of 2026 alone.Tech executives, as a result, are having to make a calculated decision to change their tune, from AI doomsaying to something more palatable to the everyman. But just like their proselytizing over the coming AI apocalypse — messaging meant to win over investors and scare everybody else into ceding regulatory power — they don’t seem to realize that the entire world is watching as they execute their cynical pivot out loud.Case-in-point, Reddit…

MIT is mulling an overhaul of its entire educational system in response to the threat posed by powerful AI models — a striking response to the tech from one of the planet’s most visible and influential research universities.In a new report published by the university’s ad hoc AI committee, which is co-chaired by professors Eric Klopfer and Samuel Madden, the educators describe the “profound challenges” that AI is already causing.One of its most alarming conclusions: that AI is now able to credibly complete most undergraduate assignments.AI “can produce credible solutions and provide reasonable responses to almost any written assignment in…