AI headlines
October 2026
Anthropic AI model submitted false Philadelphia homicide tip in July through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, a public website where people can share information about unsolved killings: police department called Anthropic's two-month delay in detecting and reporting the incident "unacceptable" (LINK) — 9 October 2026
OpenAI caught Russians and Iranians using ChatGPT for influence campaigns: they managed to get their false narratives picked up by news outlets, and in once case, prompted a response from a member of the European Parliament (LINK) — 8 October 2026
Dow Jones futures rise after AI stocks tumble on underwhelming OpenAI revenue news (LINK) — 9 October 2026
— OpenAI told investors that it saw $50 billion in annualized revenue at the end of September. A $68 billion figure was widely reported last month.
AI could damage crypto in 2 years, warns Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin: advises holding funds in addresses that have never sent a transaction (LINK) — 8 October 2026
— He was replying to Ethereum researcher Justin Drake, who wants the industry to plan for a "bunker mode". Some of today's newest security tools rely on lattices, a type of math puzzle that quantum computers struggle to solve. Buterin's worry is that AI could find a shortcut to those puzzles, much as researchers once found shortcuts that forced older encryption keys to grow. Hashes, which scramble data into fixed codes with no pattern to exploit, look safer to him. That is why Ethereum's roadmap is moving toward hash-based signatures. Bitcoin also relies on elliptic curve signatures, so Drake's warning applies there too. He said ECDSA could break within months in the worst case.
ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists' signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons (LINK) — 5 October 2026
Motley Fool: The only 2 Artificial Intelligence (AI) stocks i'd buy with $1,000 today and never sell: IREN, NLST (LINK) — 6 October 2026
Guardian: Forget 'superintelligence': error-prone AI nearly sparked World War Three this month: almost brought the US into war with China (LINK) — 1 October 2026
— CNN report published on 18 September, which hasn't been verified by other major outlets, says due to government reliance on error-prone systems that are marketed by their manufacturers as being close to superintelligent. An intelligence report that claimed a chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three. It was only moments before executing on the plan that American officials further investigated the intelligence report and found that it had been generated with the use of a chatbot and contained erroneous information about the vessel's contents.
