Many people suspect that these bots are part of an AI company’s effort to collect training data from web pages. In 2025, AI bots accounted for a significant portion of overall web traffic, which crawl the internet for text and other information to feed to data-hungry large language models. But there are some key differences … Read more
Cryptocurrency’s frictionless, transnational, Low-regulation transactions have long promised the ability to pay anyone in the world for anything. More than ever before, that anything includes human beings: victims of human trafficking forced into scam compounds and the sex trade on an industrial scale, bought and sold in crypto deals carried out with impunity, often in … Read more
I’m not above doing some gig work to make ends meet. In my life, I’ve worked snack food pop-ups in a grocery store, ran the cash register for random merch booths, and even hawked my own plasma at $35 per vial. So, when I saw RentAHuman, a new site where AI agents hire humans to … Read more
OpenClaw, a powerful new agentic assistant, has a thing for guacamole. This is one of several things I discovered while using the viral artificial intelligence bot as my personal assistant this past week. Previously known as both Clawdbot and Moltbot, OpenClaw recently became a Silicon Valley darling, charming AI enthusiasts and investors eager to either … Read more
United States Customs and Border Protection plans to spend $225,000 for a year of access to Clearview AI, a face recognition tool that compares photos against billions of images scraped from the internet. The deal extends access to Clearview tools to Border Patrol’s headquarters intelligence division (INTEL) and the National Targeting Center, units that collect … Read more
The largest western AI labs are taking a break from sniping at one another to partner on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models. Paris-based incubator Station F will run the program, named F/ai. On Tuesday, Station F announced it had partnered with Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI … Read more
A 30-second Super Bowl ad featuring boxing legend Mike Tyson and paid for by the nonprofit MAHA Center encourages viewers to avoid processed foods and visit realfood.gov. The government website, which Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is promotingprovides resources on the administration’s new dietary guidelinesreleased in January, and encourages people to … Read more
For half a century, the world’s nuclear powers relied on an intricate and complex series of treaties that slowly and steadily reduced the number of nuclear weapons on the planet. Those treaties are gone now, and it doesn’t appear that they’ll be coming back anytime soon. As a stopgap measure, researchers and scientists are suggesting … Read more
Over 160 companies in New York state have filed notices of mass layoffs since last March. None—in a group that includes Amazon, Goldman Sachs, and other employers that are adopting AI tools—attributed their workforce cuts in those filings to “technological innovation or automation.” That option was added 11 months ago to a required question on … Read more
An analysis by WIRED this week found that ICE and CBP’s face recognition app Mobile Fortify, which is being used to identify people across the United States, isn’t actually designed to verify who people are and was only approved for Department of Homeland Security use by relaxing some of the agency’s own privacy rules. WIRED … Read more