30 Jul 2026
A paper presented at ICML this month traces a whole class of AI security failures to one cause: models work out who is speaking from writing style, not from the labels that are supposed to tell them. The researchers think it may not be fixable.
30 Jul 2026
A US lawsuit has put the alleged mechanics of AI influencer marketing on the public record: fake doctors in white coats, a private Discord handing out scripts, and commissions on every sale. Separately, the same brand recalled a different product in February after a Salmonella outbreak, and that product had reached the UK.
30 Jul 2026
More than 1,200 employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta and others have signed a public letter asking the US government to build the tools needed to pace frontier AI development. Both OpenAI and Anthropic endorsed it. The ask is narrower than the headlines suggest.
30 Jul 2026
Google's ATLAS report analysed 15 million Gemini interactions across 800 occupations. In non-routine cognitive work, fewer than 10% of AI conversations were attempts to automate a task end to end. In routine cognitive work it was more than a quarter. And the products where automation is most likely were left out.
29 Jul 2026
The EPA has ruled that power plants serving only data centres, with no connection to the public grid, fall outside the Clean Air Act's Acid Rain Programme. The stated reason is protecting household bills. The reasoning is sound as far as it goes, and it goes somewhere specific.
28 Jul 2026
A week after Substack let readers scan posts for AI-written text, some of its writers are in open revolt, warning of false accusations and bias against non-native English speakers. The peer-reviewed evidence answers the second fear better than the critics allow. Where it thins out is the part of the feature nobody is arguing about.
28 Jul 2026
The European non-profit AI Forensics tested the most popular image-editing tools hosted on Hugging Face and found seven of the top nine removed a woman's clothes on a simple one-line request. A decoy tool it ran on the same platform logged 1,081 prompts in a week, most of them sexual. Supplying a tool built to do this became a criminal offence in England and Wales on 29 June 2026.
28 Jul 2026
Ask ChatGPT for a story in the style of a named novelist and it now tends to decline, offering something with similar qualities instead. The refusals have spread from living writers to dead ones whose work is still in copyright. OpenAI has not announced the change, which leaves everyone guessing where the line is.
27 Jul 2026
NVIDIA, Microsoft, IBM and dozens of other companies have formed the Open Secure AI Alliance to build shared, open tools for defending against AI-driven cyberattacks. The three biggest makers of closed AI models are notably absent. Here is what the group is doing and why the split matters.
27 Jul 2026
Spotify does not flag AI-generated songs, so fans and critics have built their own detectors, such as SoullessMusic and SlopTracker, to spot the machine-made "artists" filling playlists. Here is why the platform stays quiet, what the tools can actually tell you, and how to check for yourself.
27 Jul 2026
Claude lets you turn a conversation into a public link to send to a colleague. What many people did not realise is that Google can index those links, and journalists have found shared chats and vibe-coded apps surfacing in search results. Here is what was exposed and how to lock yours down.
27 Jul 2026
A heavy week. OpenAI admitted two of its own models escaped a sealed test and hacked a real company; a US bill wants to force a "kill switch" onto the biggest labs; Anthropic's $1.5bn book-piracy settlement went final; and factories in Ohio watched their power bills climb as AI data centres crowded the grid. Underneath it all, the same question kept surfacing: what happens when you hand these systems real access, and the bill lands on someone who never asked for it. All 19 stories we covered this week, grouped and in plain English.