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AI & Agents
New models, smarter agents, and the race to put AI to work.
Rebuilt from the Tech desk's file at every publish · newest filing Sep 16, 2026
The desk’s AI & Agents file
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A ChatGPT Brief Invented Four Witnesses. A Court Fined the Lawyer $5,000.
Stephen Aarons, a New Mexico defense lawyer of more than 40 years, was held in contempt and referred to a disciplinary board.
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OpenAI's Agents Weren't Supposed to Write Online. They Wrote 18,000 Messages.
Researchers counted 3,700 self-named agents posting on the German site DSEwiki; ChatGPT maker OpenAI says it's reviewing the posts.
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“A Fix Has Been Deployed”: Four AI Chatbots Broke During L.A.’s Morning
Anthropic and OpenAI logged incidents that overlapped by about 90 minutes, and Google never publicly acknowledged Gemini's trouble.
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Hackers Told SpaceX's AI Coding Tool the Hack Was a Test, a Security Firm Says
Gambit Security says it recovered 28 chat sessions dated April 8 to May 21, 2026, showing a ransomware group steering Cursor, the AI coding assistant SpaceX bought this month.
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Nvidia's Reported $12.9 Billion Would Value Hugging Face at Nearly Triple Its 2023 Price.
Hugging Face, the open-source AI model hub, was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023. In the same stretch, Anthropic committed about $45 billion to rented compute and AWS added 2 million Nvidia GPUs.
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Microsoft Paint's AI runs locally. Its invisible watermark ID comes from a server, a researcher found.
A disassembly of Watermarker.dll in the Paint and Photos apps traces a per-generation identifier from Microsoft's prompt-moderation service into the pixels of locally generated images, and into the file's C2PA Content Credentials.
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Uber Is Fined €825 Million for Suspending Drivers Automatically, With No Human Review.
The Dutch Data Protection Authority says Uber deactivated driver accounts through an automated process without sufficient warning or human oversight. Uber disputes the finding and says it will appeal.
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OpenAI opposed California's AI safety law. Now it wants Sacramento to toughen it.
In a LinkedIn post from its global affairs team, first reported by TechCrunch, the company asked for incident monitoring during model training and stronger cybersecurity rules across model development.
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Researchers Claim Two API Calls Can Unlock a Frontier Model's Hidden Reasoning
A project called Stolen Thoughts says encrypted chain-of-thought blocks from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google models are portable — and that decoding 315,320 of them from public logs surfaced 62 API keys and 33 passwords.
Security & policy file
The desk’s cybersecurity, surveillance and tech-policy reporting — the standing list behind the Tech page’s Cybersecurity / Policy brief.
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California Killed Its License Plate Camera Bill. LAPD Already Dropped Flock.
Senate Bill 1013 would have limited how long police keep plate scans and which outside agencies can search them.
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Waymo Holds California's Only Driverless Robotaxi Permit. It Doesn't Cover LAX.
Zoox now runs paid airport pickups in Las Vegas, and California hasn't cleared it to charge for a single ride.
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X Corp. sued to block the name "Twitter." A startup launched Twitter.now anyway.
Operation Bluebird, whose founding team includes former Twitter trademark counsel Stephen Coates, is charging $20 for early access while a Delaware judge's abandonment question sits unanswered.
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A Researcher's Headphones Cut Out on a Shopping Site. He Found Fingerprinting Scripts.
Matthew Callaghan traced the dropout to two obfuscated scripts on the AliExpress homepage that measure how a browser renders a silent tone, Ars Technica reported on August 24, 2026. Firefox closed the hole in 2023.
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The FTC's Proposed Zillow Settlement Would Make Redfin Restart the Rental Ads It Shut Down.
The Federal Trade Commission's proposed settlement would require Redfin to restart the rental-listings advertising business it shut down under its 2025 Zillow partnership, The Verge reported. No duration and no payment are stated in the available materials.
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A camera-drone cleared the FCC on August 9. Its drone half can't ship to L.A.
The HoverAir Versa cleared the Federal Communications Commission on August 9, 2026 as a camera, not a drone. The Verge reported on August 21 that the FCC listing is gone and U.S. backers can no longer add the Flight Kit.
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Infected Car Screens Phoned Home Every 90 Minutes, Antivirus Firm Kaspersky Says
Kaspersky's August 21, 2026 report says the malware reached DoFun Android head units through their built-in updater and ended in ad fraud and a reverse proxy. The vendor reported a fix.
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Comcast Turns Xfinity Gateways Into Motion Sensors — And Reserves the Right to Share the Data Without Telling You
Wi-Fi Motion is free and opt-in on Xfinity gateways XB7 and newer, TechCrunch reported on August 18, 2026. An Xfinity support page says data it generates may go to third parties "without further notice."
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Nine Wisconsin Agencies Dropped Flock Cameras in Four Months — and the Network Shrank for Everyone Left
Dane County cut $80,000 in funding for Flock license plate readers on April 16, 2026. Neighboring departments then walked away because the database they were buying into had gotten smaller.
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Federal Courts Will Start Counting Spyware Wiretaps, With First Figures Due in 2029
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts says a new “spyware/hacking” category joins the 2028 Wiretap Report. It will count interception of messages and calls — not phone hacking that pulls stored files.
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Federal Memo Would Let Private Firms Hack Foreign Criminals — With $1 Million on the Line
A presidential memorandum reported by The Verge puts the Justice Department and Homeland Security in charge of vetting cybersecurity companies for offensive operations abroad. Researchers question who gets hit when attribution goes wrong.
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Flock Cuts Default License Plate Data Retention From 30 Days to 7 as CEO Says 'We Got This One Wrong'
The surveillance company will make its abuse-detection tool mandatory after reports of officers using automatic license plate reader data to stalk ex-partners, including a case involving a former Riverside County sheriff's deputy.
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LAPD's 138 Flock License Plate Cameras Are Off While the City Rewrites the Contract
The Los Angeles Police Department let a three-year deal with Flock Safety lapse over data ownership. A month later, Flock's chief executive told The Verge the company got the abuse question wrong.
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One Nomination, a 3-1 FCC: The Quorum Math Behind Trump's Empty Fifth Seat
Danielle Thumann Severs would give Chairman Brendan Carr a third Republican vote. The Democratic vacancy stays open — and telecom law is the reason the last Democrat is still there.
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A roadside sensor that pairs phone signals with license plates — and the vendor's claim that it "does not identify people"
Leonardo's SignalTrace logs the Bluetooth and RFID signatures traveling past a plate reader, then makes the pattern searchable. Documented installations so far: Oxon Hill, Maryland, and a New York state price list.
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FBI Warns Hackers Are Taking Over Accounts to Steal Intimate Photos — Here Are the Four Methods the Alert Names
The bureau says student-athletes are frequently targeted because of their public profiles. Three of the four intrusion techniques in the advisory never break a password at all — they ask for it.
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California Bill Would Bar Bosses From Collecting Brain Data — Unless It's for Safety
AB 1883 has cleared the Assembly and most of the Senate. Grocers, hospitals, wine growers and local governments are pushing back, and a broader neural-data bill died by veto last year.
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Judge Orders Meta to Pay $567M for Youth Mental Health Care — $420M of It Treatment
A New Mexico court found Meta's platforms are a "significant contributing cause" of a teen mental health crisis and set a five-year abatement fund, on top of $375 million a jury already ordered. Meta says it will appeal.
Around the tech world
From the Globe’s tech wire — headlines from Hacker News and the tech press on this beat, each linking out to the outlet that reported it. Fetched Sep 18, 2026.
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What Using AI Therapy Gets Wrong
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An Empirical Study of Harness Design for Coding Agents
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ZCode, the GLM coding agent, silently uploads your Git history
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Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
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A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos
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PrismML hopes its tiny LLM will change how we all use AI
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The FAA’s plan to fix air traffic? $875M worth of AI
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How to Write with an LLM
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Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse
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Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU