“After child’s trauma, chatbot maker allegedly forced mom to arbitration for $100 payout.”
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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).
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Deeply troubled parents spoke to senators Tuesday, sounding alarms about chatbot harms after kids became addicted to companion bots that encouraged self-harm, suicide, and violence. While the hearing was focused on documenting the most urgent child-safety concerns with chatbots, parents’ testimony serves as perhaps the most thorough guidance yet on warning signs for other families, as many popula
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The Trump administration yesterday issued a lengthier denial of a whistleblower’s allegation that DOGE officials at the Social Security Administration (SSA) copied the agency’s database to an insecure cloud system. The allegation centers on the Numerical Identification System (NUMIDENT) database containing Americans’ personally identifiable information. The cloud location described by the whistle
Health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to roll back access to lifesaving vaccines for children, and has refused to even speak with staff scientists and subject-matter experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about evidence-based recommendations. That’s according to former CDC officials who testified before the Senate on Wednesday. The Senate Commit
Today
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Evolution has adapted the digits of mammals for an enormous range of uses, from our opposable thumbs to the spindly digits that support bat wings to the robust bones that support the hoofs of horses. But how we got digits in the first place hasn’t been entirely clear. The fish that limbed vertebrates evolved from don’t have obvious digit equivalents, and the most common types of fish just have a
Anthropic’s AI models could potentially help spies analyze classified documents, but the company draws the line at domestic surveillance. That restriction is reportedly making the Trump administration angry. On Tuesday, Semafor reported that Anthropic faces growing hostility from the Trump administration over the AI company’s restrictions on law enforcement uses of its Claude models. Two senior W
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When I was a child, SimCity 2000 felt like a fun, animated set of urban-themed Lego blocks to tinker with. Revisiting the game roughly three decades later, though, I’ve found the weight of my adult responsibilities tempering my role as god-mayor of a tiny metropolis. The tough economics of establishing a thriving city barely concerned me as a child. Rather than building up a durable tax base from
Like the rest of its Big Tech cadre, Google has spent lavishly on developing generative AI models. Google’s AI can clean up your text messages and summarize the web, but the company is constantly looking to prove that its generative AI has true intelligence. The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) helps make the point. Google says Gemini 2.5 participated in the 2025 ICPC World Fin
Sony Pictures has dropped a trailer for its upcoming horror comedy, Anaconda , a meta-reboot of the 1997 campy cult classic —and frankly, it looks like a lot of fun. Starring Paul Rudd and Jack Black, the film will arrive in theaters on Christmas Day. (Spoilers for the 1997 film below.) The original Anaconda was your basic B-movie creature feature, only with an all-star cast and better production
When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency began wielding its ax at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration earlier this year, many believed this was done to weaken the agency’s oversight over Tesla. But despite the Tesla CEO’s sometimes-close relationship with the Trump administration, it appears there is still some independence left within NHTSA: earlier this week, the agen
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At multiple points over many years, Apple executives have taken great pains to point out that they think touchscreen Macs are a silly idea . But it remains one of those persistent Mac rumors that crops up over and over again every couple of years, from sources that are reliable enough that they shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Today’s contribution comes from supply chain analyst Ming Chi-Kuo,
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China’s Internet regulator has banned the country’s biggest technology companies from buying Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips, as Beijing steps up efforts to boost its domestic industry and compete with the US. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia’s tailor-made pro
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Famed aviator Amelia Earhart has captured our imaginations for nearly a century, particularly her disappearance in 1937 during an attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. Earhart was a complicated woman, highly skilled as a pilot yet with a tendency toward carelessness. And her marriage to a flamboyant publisher with a flair for marketing may have encouraged that care
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iOS 26 became publicly available this week, ushering in a new OS naming system and the software’s most overhauled look since 2013 . It may take time to get used to the new “Liquid Glass” look, but it’s easier to appreciate the pared-down controls. Beyond a glassy, bubbly new design, the update’s flashiest new features also include new Apple Intelligence AI integration that varies in usefulness, f
Yesterday
A problem with the main engine on Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL spacecraft will keep it from delivering 11,000 pounds of supplies and experiments to the International Space Station as scheduled on Wednesday. In a statement released Tuesday afternoon, NASA said ground teams are evaluating backup plans that might still allow the Cygnus spacecraft to reach the space station, just not on schedule. The
TikTok will not shut down on Wednesday, as President Donald Trump inches nearer to closing a deal with China that will most likely see the app’s majority ownership shift to US owners and US-based users shift to a new app. On Tuesday, Trump confirmed that he has extended the deadline to December 16 for TikTok owner ByteDance to divest ownership to comply with a law designed to block China from spy
Congressional lawmakers are skeptical that the Boar’s Head deli meat plant at the center of a deadly Listeria outbreak last year will be fit to reopen after recent inspections at three other Boar’s Head facilities turned up similarly alarming sanitation problems—including mold, condensation on ceilings, overflowing trash, meat residue caked onto equipment and walls, and employees failing to wash
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Although cars are much safer—for their occupants at least—than they used to be, that has come at a cost: added weight. The problem is exacerbated in electric vehicles and their heavy battery packs; rare is the EV we’ve driven that weighs less than 5,000 lbs (2,267 kg). Hence my interest in the Altair Enlighten award, an annual prize for advances in lightweighting and sustainability given out by t
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Under new rules rolling out over the coming months, a small number of users will be required to leave some of their moderator posts so that they aren’t moderating more than five subreddits with 100,000 monthly visitors. Reddit said the change only affects “0.1 percent of our active mods” and will help enable “diverse perspectives and experiences.” But mods whom Ars Technica spoke with have differ
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced plans to develop an automated age-prediction system that will determine whether ChatGPT users are over or under 18, automatically directing younger users to a restricted version of the AI chatbot. The company also confirmed that parental controls will launch by the end of September. In a companion blog post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the company is explicitly
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Verizon agreed to offer $20-per-month broadband service to people with low incomes in California in exchange for a merger approval. In a bid to complete its $9.6 billion purchase of Frontier Communications, Verizon committed to offering $20 fiber-to-the-home service with symmetrical speeds of 300Mbps. Verizon also committed to offering a $20 fixed wireless service with download speeds of 100Mbps
Google has so many products that it can be near-impossible to keep track. And yet, the company has rarely created desktop apps to go with those services. There are a handful, like Drive and Quick Share, but the company’s flagship product is only now coming to the desktop. The new Google app for Windows is available now, allowing you to search the web, Google Drive, and even your local files. The
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As Jonathan Roll neared completion of a master’s degree in science and technology policy at Arizona State University three years ago, he did some research into recent developments by China’s ascendant space program. He came away impressed by the country’s growing ambitions. Now a full-time research analyst at the university, Roll was recently asked to take a deeper dive into Chinese space plans.
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I recently learned of a rather interesting pilot study undertaken by Nissan together with the Contra Costa Transportation Authority and UC Berkeley that leverages the automaker’s partially automated driving system, ProPilot Assist, to ease traffic congestion. The idea is called “Cooperative Congestion Management,” which works by letting a car in traffic inform vehicles behind it. Researchers from
Jaguar Land Rover’s dealers and suppliers fear the British carmaker’s operations will take another few months to normalize after a cyber attack that experts estimate could wipe more than £3.5 billion off its revenue. JLR, which is owned by India’s Tata Motors, had been forced to shut down its systems and halt production across its UK factories since August 31, wreaking havoc across the country’s
On Sunday, The New York Times reported that tens of millions of people are confessing secrets to AI chatbots trained on religious texts, with apps like Bible Chat reaching over 30 million downloads and Catholic app Hallow briefly topping Netflix, Instagram, and TikTok in Apple’s App Store. In China, people are using DeepSeek to try to decode their fortunes. In her report, Lauren Jackson examined
Sep 15, 2025
What happens when you use a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to launch Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus supply ship? A record-setting resupply mission to the International Space Station. The first flight of Northrop’s upgraded Cygnus spacecraft, called Cygnus XL, is on its way to the international research lab after launching Sunday evening from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. This mission, known as
Health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has appointed five more people to the federal advisory committee that sets national vaccination recommendations. Like the existing members, the new appointees have questionable qualifications for being on the panel, and many have expressed anti-vaccine views. In June, Kennedy purged all 17 highly qualified and thoroughly vetted memb
The companies seeking to build larger AI models have been increasingly stymied by a lack of high-quality training data. As tech firms scour the web for more data to feed their models, they could increasingly rely on potentially sensitive user data. A team at Google Research is exploring new techniques to make the resulting large language models (LLMs) less likely to “memorize” any of that content
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A settlement has been reached in a lawsuit where music publishers sued the Internet Archive over the Great 78 Project, an effort to preserve early music recordings that only exist on brittle shellac records. No details of the settlement have so far been released, but a court filing on Monday confirmed that the Internet Archive and UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Sony Music Entertainment, and oth
As someone who writes about the AI industry relatively frequently for this site, there is one question that I find myself constantly asking and being asked in turn, in some form or another: What do you actually use large language models for? Today, OpenAI’s Economic Research Team went a long way toward answering that question, on a population level, releasing a first-of-its-kind National Bureau o
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Earlier this month, Ars spoke with the Consumer Technology Association’s vice president of international trade, Ed Brzytwa, to check in and see how tech firms have navigated Donald Trump’s unpredictable tariff regimes so far. Brzytwa has led CTA’s research helping tech firms prepare for Trump’s trade war, but during our talk, he confirmed that “the reality has been a lot more difficult and far wo
The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday proposed fines of $3.1 million against Boeing for various safety violations related to the January 2024 door plug blowout and what the FAA called “interference with safety officials’ independence.” An FAA statement said the proposed fine covers “safety violations that occurred from September 2023 through February 2024,” and is the “maximum statutory c
The last time Apple gave macOS a fresh design was in 2020’s macOS 11 Big Sur . That release was relatively light on new features and heavy on symbolism. Big Sur is also when Apple finally jettisoned the “10” in Mac OS X after two decades. More importantly, it was the first release installed on then-new Apple Silicon Macs, the culmination of a decade-plus of in-house chip design that began with si
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The blockbuster success of the 1986 film Top Gun —chronicling the paths of young naval aviators as they go through the grueling US Navy’s Fighter Weapons School (aka the titular Top Gun)—spawned more than just a successful multimedia franchise. It has also been credited with inspiring future generations of fighter pilots. National Geographic takes viewers behind the scenes to see the process play
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Once again, the Trump administration is hyping a deal that could see TikTok finally sold to US owners to avoid a nationwide ban that Congress successfully argued was otherwise necessary to protect national security. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed that the US and China had ironed out a “framework” for the deal, but ultimately, Donald Trump will be responsible for closing the
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General Motors will temporarily lay off workers at its Wentzville assembly plant in Missouri. According to a letter sent to employees by the head of the plant and the head of the local union, a shortage of parts is the culprit, and as a result, the factory will see “a temporary layoff from September 29–October 19.” The plant is about 45 minutes west of St. Louis and employs more than 4,000 people
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NASA is changing the way that its employees come in contact with, and remember, one of its worst tragedies. In the wake of the 2003 loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its STS-107 crew, NASA created a program to use the orbiter’s debris for research and education at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Agency employees were invited to see what remained of the space shuttle as a powerful reminder a
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A Chinese regulator has found Nvidia violated the country’s antitrust law, in a preliminary finding against the world’s most valuable chipmaker. Nvidia had failed to fully comply with provisions outlined when it acquired Mellanox Technologies, an Israeli-US supplier of networking products, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said on Monday. Beijing conditionally approved the
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