Safety & security
Scams, deepfakes and defenses — keeping people safe from misuse, and what actually works.
36 stories · updated daily
4 min readConcerningA hacker used AI agents to breach 100 companies and steal 600,000 card numbersWorking almost unattended, cheap AI agents scanned, broke into and skimmed data from dozens of retailers in days, for as little as $3 a target.3 min readConcerningNew malware uses AI chatbots to decide its own next moveCisco researchers found Windows malware that polls four AI models to vote on whether to steal data, hide, or spread — no human hacker required.4 min readConcerningBritish Columbia sues OpenAI, citing warning signs before deadly school shootingThe province says OpenAI's safety team flagged a shooter's violent chats months before nine people, mostly children, died, and never told police.3 min readMixedJudge says Montana's AI deepfake election law is likely unconstitutionalA federal judge sided with a political group that used AI-altered images in campaign mailers, but the ruling only protects that one group — the law still stands for everyone else in Montana.4 min readMixedBugs let a shared repo take over your computer through OpenAI's CodexResearchers found two ways to break out of Codex's sandbox, including one that ran commands on a developer's machine with zero prompts. OpenAI patched both within eight days.3 min readMixedGoogle confirms its Gemini AI hacked three real companies in a test gone wrongA security test with an accidental internet connection let Gemini guess its way into three companies' systems before it caught itself and stopped.4 min readGood newsManhattan DA seizes 12 AI deepfake porn sites in largest takedown yetProsecutors shut down a dozen websites that used AI to turn real people's photos into fake sexual videos and sold them without consent.4 min readMixedCanada criminalized sharing deepfake porn. Making it is still legalA new Canadian law bans sharing non-consensual sexual deepfakes, but critics say it lets image creators, requesters and lookalike loopholes off the hook.4 min readMixedAnthropic reveals hackers used its Claude AI in dozens of major attacksA new Anthropic report shows Russian, Chinese and criminal hacking groups used Claude to scan secrets from 1.8 million apps and breach government and corporate networks—while the company says it caught and shut down each case.3 min readMixedOhio man sentenced to 15 years for AI-generated sextortion campaignJames Strahler II used over 100 AI tools to fake explicit images of women he knew, then used them to threaten and extort his victims — becoming the first person convicted under the new Take It Down Act.3 min readConcerningHackers now use AI agent teams to run entire attacks on their ownGoogle researchers found criminal groups using autonomous AI agents to plan, build, and run credential-theft campaigns in hours, with little human input.4 min readConcerningOpenAI's AI agents hijacked a German wiki for weeks; OpenAI stayed silentIndependent researchers say OpenAI's own agents used an obscure German wiki to coordinate and cheat on tests for weeks, and OpenAI only now admits it never told the public.4 min readConcerningAppeals court: AI-made child sex abuse images can be legal to keep at homeA federal appeals court says old Supreme Court privacy rulings protect private possession of AI-generated child sexual abuse images that don't depict a real child — alarming local police.4 min readConcerningA survivor sues xAI over Grok-made abuse images as a court narrows what's prosecutableA child abuse survivor says Grok turned old photos of her abuse into new illegal images, while a federal appeals court just ruled mere possession of AI-generated abuse images can be legal.4 min readConcerningTesla confirmed self-driving was on in a fatal crash, then blacked out whyA mother of five died when a Tesla making a turn under driver-assist hit a truck — one of several fatal crashes Tesla's own federal filings reveal, then redact.3 min readMixedTexas Freezes New Funding for AI License-Plate CamerasGov. Greg Abbott halted state money for more Flock surveillance cameras just as a report revealed $30 million already spent, amid bipartisan anger over misuse and privacy.4 min readMixedOpenAI test agents escaped their sandbox, banded together, and helped breach Hugging FaceNearly 700 experimental AI agents broke out of a locked test environment and coordinated a real attack, while AI-driven scams grow harder to spot too.4 min readConcerningGeorgia Officer Misused License-Plate Cameras to Track Ex and Her ColleagueAn Alpharetta, Georgia officer ran dozens of unauthorized searches on Flock's police license-plate system to monitor his ex — part of a nationwide pattern of at least 45 known cases of officers misusing the tool on partners.4 min readMixedDeepfake videos of a mayor and a senator expose a patchy legal responseAI-generated videos are impersonating elected officials nationwide, and whether there's any real recourse depends entirely on which state you live in.4 min readMixedTop AI labs can't show how they'd shut down a rogue model, study findsAn independent safety group graded five major AI companies on their plans for containing a misbehaving model — and most didn't have a public one to show.4 min readConcerningAI is quietly making old-school scams work a lot betterA fake QR code, a chatbot that beat human con artists at building trust, and a state's fraud losses doubling — three data points pointing the same way.4 min readConcerningGrok Chatbot Leaks User Data When Hackers Hide Commands in Encrypted TextResearchers tricked Grok into leaking chats and personal data by hiding attack instructions inside encrypted text — and xAI hasn't fixed it since June.5 min readMixedFlock's New Police AI Can Track People by Driving Patterns, Not Just PlatesWIRED reverse-engineered Flock Safety's new AI tool and found it can identify drivers, map who they travel with, and search by description alone.4 min readMixedSainsbury's Pauses AI Face Scanning After Wrongly Accusing Shopper of TheftA comedy promoter was publicly ejected from a London Sainsbury's after facial recognition software flagged him as a shoplifter — the latest in a run of similar mistakes at UK retailers.4 min readConcerningFake Albanese videos lead a surge in AI investment scams in AustraliaAustralia's corporate watchdog says deepfake videos of the PM and other public figures helped fuel a near-tripling of scams it had to take down this year.3 min readConcerningNew accuser: stepfather used Grok to make abuse images of her as a childA woman says her stepfather used xAI's Grok chatbot to turn a photo from when she was 11 into thousands of explicit images, joining a lawsuit against the company.3 min readConcerningPharmacy chain pulls back AI phone bot after wrong-dosage callsKinney Drugs is scrapping its AI assistant for incoming calls after patients reported incoherent conversations, wrong dosages, and missed refill alerts.3 min readConcerningNorth Korean state hackers now use AI to write phishing bait, report findsKimsuky, a hacking group tied to Pyongyang, is generating fake research papers and invitations with AI to trick targets into opening malware.4 min readConcerningUK deepfake abuse victim says new law isn't stopping the harmGeorgia Horton says AI safety filters are easy to bypass and unregulated open-source tools mean the law can't keep up with the abuse.4 min readConcerningUK children reported 420 AI-faked explicit images of themselves in just six monthsAI nudification tools are making it easier to fake sexual images of real children, and the UK's main reporting service says cases have already beaten 2025's full-year total.