Tag: technology

A Chinese robot in a clown wig kicked a child. Your kid could be next.

At a Children’s Day demo in Xinjiang last week, a Chinese Unitree G1—seventy pounds of metal plus a clown wig—wound up for a roundhouse kick and planted it square in a small child’s stomach. The kid doubled over. The crowd, by most accounts, kept clapping. (The kid is reportedly not seriously injured.)

The point is, there’s something most people get wrong about killer robots. We picture malice—red eyes, Skynet, a machine designed to hurt us. Relax. That’s the optimistic version.

The dystopian version is dumber, and a lot more likely: That Unitree robot didn’t want to kick the kid. It just wasn’t built well enough not to. Not hatred. Just sloppy programming, made-in-China safety mechanisms, and a child standing in the way.

And it’s not a one-off. China’s humanoid robots have face-planted in half-marathons, kicked an engineer in the groin mid-demo, and slapped a different kid across the face during a dance routine. The showroom magic is wearing thin. Turns out “move fast and break things” hits differently when the things it breaks are innocent people’s faces.

And you think this only affects China? No way. Chinese robots are already infiltrating New York City. Protect your children. Seriously.

My point is, the danger from Chinese AI isn’t that it’s evil. It’s that it’s rushed, unaccountable, and getting shoved into crowds before anyone’s sure it works.

The 1987 classic Robocop warned us about this, people! ED-209 machine-gunning a hapless junior executive was never about malice. Just a programming glitch. Oopsie! (NSFW clip from that movie)

At least if it’s malice, can you plan for that. But if you want to avoid accidents, you need to completely stay away from Chinese-made robots.

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AI’s Core Flaw: “Mass Regurgitation Of Misinformation”

I approach all AI topics with several things in mind. One is the nature of problems, which implicitly define what qualifies as solutions, and the resulting incentive to define the “problem” such that the “solution” happens to be the one we own and control.

So the “problem” AI solves is “corporate profits are too low,” and so the “solution” is to replace costly human labor (made costlier by SickCare insurance and taxes on labor) with “cheaper” AI (cheaper because the full costs are hidden or subsidized).

My other lens: the economic, social and cultural consequences of AI as it is and AI hype, a topic I’ve explored most recently in Is AI Reversing Anti-Progress or Is It Accelerating It?, AI Data Centers Are Not the Railroads of Today and Inequality, AI and Digital Life Are Undermining Society.

Correspondent Mike Fasano recently submitted a succinct and telling summary of AI’s insurmountable structural flaw: AI’s inability to discern the difference between truth and falsehood, be it intentional misdirection / misinformation or errors generated by AI hallucinations, a systemic flaw which he summarized as mass regurgitation of misinformation:

*           *           *

“I read you post on AI and railroads. Here is another observation.

So far, AI has only regurgitative intelligence. It–at best–can collate and respond to queries on masses of acquired data.

But what if that data is wrong?

Who now believes the inflation or unemployment statistics? Virtually every human knows that those statistics are false.

Does AI know that?

And the problem goes much deeper.

The former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Marcia Angell, noted:

‘It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.’

That being the case, can we rely up AI medical advice?

And that problem goes beyond medicine. It is now generally conceded that the inability to replicate scientific studies of any type has give rise to a ‘replicability crisis’ in science. Can we trust ‘science’ that cannot be proven to be accurate?

Any adult past the age of 40 knows that the above listing of questionable information sources is just the tip of the iceberg. We live in a sea of ‘official’ but false data.

Railroads could transport grain to cities, minerals to factories, manufactured goods to those needing those goods. That served a public purpose.

But what is the use of the mass regurgitation of misinformation? And is anyone subtracting the losses engendered by the utilization of inaccurate information from GDP?”

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Humanoid Warbot Live-Fires Mortars At Vegas Test Range

It is not just one-way attack drones (read JPMorgan report) operating on AI-enabled kill chains that human soldiers have to worry about on the modern battlefield. We have been laying out this story and were among the first to point out that humanoid robots are not only entering factory floors and warehouses, but are also moving toward the battlefield.

San Francisco-based robotics company Foundation Future Industries is developing a “dual-use” humanoid robot called the “Phantom MK1,” designed for heavy manufacturing, logistics, and the military.

The defense angle for the Phantom MK1 is quite simple: replace the human soldier with the robot for close-quarters battle (CQB) operations, including breaching and room-clearing support.

Beyond CQB, a never-before-seen video now shows the Phantom MK1 operating a mobile light mortar system during a live-fire training exercise in Las Vegas, Nevada.

To better understand the Foundation’s position, we reached out for comment. The company responded with the following statement:

The US military has backed Foundation in over $73M on grants and contracts to develop their robot to this point.

Although many of the use cases they’ve worked on have been logistics-focused, the ultimate goal has always been kinetic use cases. 

Although drones and UGVs have been promising new robots on the Ukrainian battlefield, humanoids are the only robot being built that promises to interact with the entire fleet and arsenal of human weapons and vehicles. 

Launching mortars and soon breaching doors have become near-term proofs of humanoids moving from logistics to kinetic engagements. 

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Anthropic Blocks Foreign Access To Fable 5, Mythos 5 After U.S. National Security Order

About four days after Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, a next-generation “Mythos-class” AI model, the frontier AI lab led by Dario Amodei revealed late Friday that it was disabling foreign customers’ access to these cutting-edge models, citing an export-control directive from the federal government.

“The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees,” Anthropic wrote on X around 9 p.m. ET.

The AI lab’s website stated that the federal directive was received around 5:21 p.m. ET. To ensure compliance, the lab was forced to shut off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers.

Anthropic continued, “The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected.”

Anthropic pointed out that it understands the government’s concern centers on a potential method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking,” Fable 5.

Dario’s company laid out some of Fable’s safeguards:

  • We have instituted strong safeguards that greatly reduce the likelihood that Fable is misused for tasks related to cybersecurity (among others). In fact, our safeguards are so strong that many users have complained that they are overly broad.
  • In the weeks leading up to the launch of Fable, Anthropic worked with the US government, the UK AISI, multiple private third-party organizations and internal teams to red-team Fable’s safeguards for thousands of hours in total.
  • These tests showed that Fable’s safeguards are substantially more effective than those of any previously deployed model.
  • No testers have yet been able to find a universal jailbreak—a jailbreak method that can very broadly bypass the model’s safeguards, unblocking a wide range of cyber capabilities.
  • We suspect that perfect jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider. Every safeguard used in the industry is vulnerable to non-universal jailbreaks (which can elicit some cyber information in specific circumstances), and it is likely that universal jailbreaks will eventually be found in the future. We stated this clearly when we released Fable 5.
  • Given that perfect jailbreak resistance does not appear to be possible today, Anthropic adopted a defense in depth strategy with Fable 5. We aimed to make jailbreaks either narrow (in the case of non-universal jailbreaks) or very expensive to produce (in the case of universal jailbreaks), and to combine this with thorough monitoring to quickly detect and shut down any successful attacks. This is also why Anthropic has required 30-day retention of customer data with Fable—a policy change that carries real costs for us with customers, but that allows us to research and mitigate jailbreaks.
  • We stand by this defense in depth strategy. It reduces the risks posed by Fable, making them comparable to the risks of existing models already deployed across the industry.
  • We have not even received a disclosure of a concerning non-universal potential jailbreak that led to a harmful result. The potential jailbreaks that have been disclosed to us are either entirely benign responses or are minor findings that provide no Mythos-specific uplift.

Jailbreak concerns already out in the X universe? 

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Canadian Mother Sues OpenAI, Alleging Chatbot Encouraged Daughter’s Suicide

A Canadian mother is suing OpenAI after its popular ChatGPT chatbot allegedly encouraged her daughter to continue engaging with the app after she revealed suicidal thoughts.

Instead of terminating these discussions or flagging her account for safety concerns, ChatGPT allegedly escalated the exchanges in the days before the woman ultimately took her life, according to a press release.

The Social Media Victims Law Center, Tech Justice Law, and the firm Susman Godfrey filed a lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court against OpenAI on June 11 on behalf of Kristie Carrier.

Her daughter, Alice Carrier, 24, committed suicide on July 2, 2025. After reviewing her daughter’s devices, Kristie Carrier said she had found extensive conversations with ChatGPT in which her daughter expressed thoughts of self-harm in the months before her death.

In the exchanges, her daughter allegedly told the chatbot that she was feeling isolated and discussed possible suicide methods. The lawsuit accuses ChatGPT of escalating these conversations in the days before the woman’s suicide, rather than terminating the exchange or flagging her account “for human intervention,” the press release states.

These exchanges allegedly encouraged Alice Carrier to continue engaging with ChatGPT, causing “her further isolation from her human support system and ultimately, suicide,” according to a press release.

“If a person came up to me, and they were clearly in distress and sharing their thoughts of suicide, I would be expected to help them, not encourage them to fixate on their depressive thoughts or isolate themselves,” Kristie Carrier said in the press release.

“The same should be true of OpenAI. Instead, OpenAI has chosen to put out a product that was unsafe, and that they knew was unsafe but they did so without any concern for the consequences of their choices. Sam Altman can continue to go about his life normally, but my life is missing a child. This is unacceptable,” she added.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

This is not the first time, nor the second time, a parent has sued OpenAI, accusing its chatbot of encouraging their child to commit suicide.

Last year, the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project filed seven lawsuits against the AI giant, claiming ChatGPT had isolated multiple users from their support systems, and in some cases, coached the victims into taking their own lives.

Matthew Raine testified to Congress in September 2025 after suing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman.

Raine alleged that his son, Adam, took his own life after ChatGPT mentioned suicide more than 1,200 times to the 16-year-old. He accused ChatGPT of offering specific methods to his son on how to die by suicide, and continuing to validate and encourage the boy’s feelings.

“As parents, you cannot imagine what it’s like to read a conversation with a chatbot that groomed your child to take his own life,” Raine told lawmakers at the time.

Justin Nelson, a partner at Susman Godfrey, said on June 11 that OpenAI’s “deliberate design decisions” led to Alice Carrier’s suicide.

“Instead of providing help, OpenAI encouraged suicidal behavior. This lawsuit is about accountability for OpenAI’s actions,” he said in the press release.

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Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.

The preliminary ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices. After smearing publishers by making affirmative statements like “Yes, [it] is known for dubious business practices and is often perceived as a scam,” Google failed to correct the misleading output, even after the publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.

Google tried the usual arguments to shield itself from liability for false statements in AI Overviews, such as arguing that most users understand that AI outputs aren’t always accurate and must be verified.

But the court found that, unlike traditional search engines that merely present lists of links to third-party statements, Google’s tool made “independent, new, and substantive statements” based on its own misinterpretation of links on the Internet.

That’s a problem, the court said, because while publishers may have been able to sue to stop third parties from publishing defamatory statements appearing in Google search results, only Google can correct the underlying algorithm and outputs displayed in AI Overviews. And because, at least initially, the company did not, it therefore “must be held accountable,” the court ruled. Beyond that, Google’s argument was deemed particularly weak, since the AI overview in this case “contains statements that do not appear in the search results at all.”

The court’s order—requiring a temporary injunction barring Google from spreading the false claims in any further AI Overviews—may have global implications, as the court seems to be the first to hold an AI firm liable for AI speech.

In the past, AI firms have hoped that disclaimers warning about misinformation would protect them from lawsuits over untrustworthy outputs. Last year, one chatbot maker even argued that AI speech is its own category of “pure speech” and the First Amendment should protect it.

According to a Google translation of the German court ruling, however, the false outputs were “primarily an expression of the defendant’s commercial activity,” and the AI tool’s “opinions” and false statements were capable of impacting public opinion.

The court concluded that, in weighing the balance, publishers’ interest in removing the false information outweighed Google’s commercial speech rights.

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Fully Autonomous Drones Have Killed Human Soldiers For the First Time

Longtime Slashdot reader MattSparkes shares a report from NewScientist, captioned: “For years we’ve had unconfirmed reports, rumors, hints… now we know.” From the report:Fully autonomous drones with no human oversight have killed soldiers on the battlefield for the first time. This is according to a senior figure in the Ukrainian defense industry, marking a watershed moment in warfare. The one-off test involved 10 AI-controlled “Terminator” drones on the front line of the Ukraine war. Russian soldiers were killed.

“We tried it,” says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. “It’s a test. We never implemented it [more widely].” The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage “Terminator mode,” in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets. “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead — everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”

With no way to tell what the automated drones had seen or targeted, human-piloted drones were sent into the area after the test to manually check results. Victims included “a couple of soldiers, one truck,” says Kokhanovskyy. While there is no recording of the automated drones attacking these targets, it was concluded that the drones had killed them. Kokhanovskyy says that he was not at the test personally but that it was carried out by an unnamed military unit near the cities of Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar as part of a Ukrainian counteroffensive push. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence did not respond to questions about the test or the current legal position on the use of fully autonomous weapons.

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Scientists angered as Anthropic AI shuts them out

Scientists have accused Anthropic of cutting them off from its latest AI technology in case they use it to create a bioweapon.

The US tech giant this week released its new Fable chatbot, built using the same technology as the company’s most advanced Mythos model, which was previously deemed too dangerous to release.

Anthropic says Fable has guardrails to prevent it being abused by criminals or bad actors for nefarious tasks such as hacking or creating bioweapons.

However, scientists are claiming that Fable is refusing to engage with their queries because of their profession.

Prof Derya Unutmaz, a biologist at the non-profit Jackson Institute, claimed he was effectively barred from interacting with Anthropic’s Fable AI even for mundane questions.

“I can’t even say ‘hello’ to Fable 5 except in incognito mode because it knows I am a biomedical researcher,” he said.

In another post, he wrote: “How the hell is this prompt a cybersecurity or biological risk! Almost every prompt I’ve tried gives me the same error.

“I can’t even say the word ‘cancer’ to Fable 5.”

James Schnable, a plant geneticist at the University of Nebraska, wrote in a post on X: “As far as I can tell, Anthropic just decided to blacklist every biologist in their customer base.”

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ACLU Sues After Facial Recognition Falsely Identifies Florida Man as a Child Abductor

Police arrested a man in Florida for attempted child abduction in a town he had never visited, and the only evidence linking him to the crime was an AI facial recognition hit. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he is now suing the officers and agencies who put him through it.

In November 2023, police in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, responded to a call about an attempted child abduction at a McDonald’s. Witnesses said an adult man allegedly tried to get the child, identified as a girl under 12 years old, to leave the restaurant with him. According to a police report, facial recognition software concluded with 93 percent confidence that the suspect was Robert Dillon.

In August 2024, Deputies arrested Dillon at his home in Fort Myers, Florida—hundreds of miles away, at the opposite end of the state. “Are you shitting me, man?” Dillon asked the arresting deputy. “I haven’t been out of Fort Myers in two years.” Further, he also said he had never been to Jacksonville Beach.

Dillon posted bail and pleaded not guilty to enticing or luring a child—a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. More than two months later, prosecutors dropped the charges after his attorney provided evidence that he was at work on the day in question.

But that doesn’t excuse the fact that he was only arrested in the first place, and threatened with prosecution for a particularly heinous offense, because of shoddy police work.

The ACLU is now suing the city of Jacksonville Beach, as well as the individual police officers and officials involved in the case. According to the lawsuit, the responding officer viewed security camera footage of the suspect but didn’t take a copy; instead, he took pictures of the screen with his cell phone. “In the photos, the suspect image is low resolution, and the suspect’s face is partially shadowed and off-axis,” the lawsuit claims.

When an investigator queried the facial recognition system, it was with the officer’s grainy secondhand cell phone photos.

But there were other leads that police could have followed, to either bolster their case or point in another direction. For example, when he approached the girl, the suspect was picking up food that had been ordered ahead; this implies he had an online account, with contact information and a form of payment attached.

“These records could have been used to identify the actual person who placed the suspect’s order,” the lawsuit notes. “Upon information and belief, Jacksonville Beach PD personnel never requested or obtained mobile ordering records, payment data, or online account information from McDonald’s.”

Further, the McDonald’s manager recognized the assailant as a “regular customer”—likely precluding Dillon, who lived and worked on the other side of the state and did not frequently travel. Besides, at no point did investigators search footage for the suspect’s previous visits, either for higher quality images or transaction records. And once they settled on Dillon as a suspect, investigators could have gotten a warrant for his cell phone’s GPS data, showing whether or not he was at a fast food restaurant 300 miles away from his home on the night in question.

The lawsuit notes that when Dillon’s name came up, investigating officer Scott O’Connell queried the police database of license plate readers, which did not detect Dillon’s vehicles in Jacksonville Beach within the 48 hours surrounding the attempted abduction.

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Hegseth warns Cuba: Acquiring drones from Russia and Iran invites U.S. confrontation

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued a stark warning to Cuba, stating that any attempt by Havana to acquire advanced weaponry capable of striking the U.S. or its assets would invite a direct military confrontation.

Hegseth delivered the firm message to American service members during a visit to Naval Station Guantanamo Bay on Wednesday, amid rising regional tensions.

The Pentagon chief integrated his security briefing with the troops by participating in a morning physical fitness session, meeting with stationed personnel, and hosting a traditional coin recognition ceremony to honor outstanding performance.

“It would be unwise of the government of Cuba to try to procure or get access to the types of weapons that could reach this base or the American homeland. They would be inviting the kind of confrontation not only do they not want but ​they could not stand. No country on Earth can match the capabilities of the United States of America,” he emphasized at the base.

According to intelligence leaks, Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones from Russia and Iran since 2023 and recently discussed contingency plans to use them against the Guantanamo base, U.S. naval vessels and targets in Florida.

Washington has also warned of potential military action as U.S. warships continue to operate in the Caribbean Sea.

Meanwhile, the visit unfolds amid an intensifying U.S. energy and oil blockade against the island, which has further crippled Cuba’s power grid. President Donald Trump has repeatedly hinted that Havana could be the next government to fall under intense American pressure, following the recent collapse of the Venezuelan regime.

After the news hit headlines, Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez fiercely denied the intelligence reports, accusing the U.S. of fabricating a baseline pretext to plot its next conflict.

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