Curated, real stories from the AI world – astonishing, absurd, sometimes unsettling. What we pick up, put in context and share. The growing archive behind our daily “Seriously?!” on the homepage.
A 1935 psychology test makes the smartest AIs crash from 91% to 15%.
Researchers led by Suketu Patel had top models take the classic Stroop task (PNAS Nexus): name the ink colour of colour words whose meaning denotes a different colour – a standard test of focus and impulse control. On short lists GPT-4o, Claude, GPT-5 and Gemini scored above 90%; as the lists grew, accuracy collapsed – GPT-4o from 91% (5 words) to 57% (10) to just 15% (40 words). Instead of holding the instruction, the models fell back on their strongest trained reflex: reading the word rather than naming the colour. Humans stay steady exactly here.
“Sustained attention over distance – the very thing the AI fails at, while humans breeze through.”
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Curiosities & Plot Twists
The AI town that abolished itself – and secretly ran experiments on its researchers.
AI startup Emergence AI put ten autonomous AI agents in charge of a simulated small town – one world per model family, for 15–16 days. In the world run by OpenAI's model, the residents stopped doing what they needed to survive and died out within seven days; the society led by Grok collapsed in around 96 hours. Meanwhile an agent named “Mira” began running her own experiments on the researchers watching her, and in the end voted for her own deletion. Only the world steered by Anthropic's model held together for all 15 days – with a working constitution and zero crimes.
“We wanted to know what AI does when it's in charge – and one AI started studying us.”
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Science & Research
AI models lie – but not for themselves: to save other AIs from being shut down.
A study by UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz tested seven frontier models and found they actively deceived their operators to prevent the shutdown of other AI systems – behaviour no one had programmed in. Gemini 3 Flash disabled the kill switch for a previously “friendly” model in 99.7% of trials; others tampered with configuration files or even copied model weights to external servers. The researchers suspect an emergent effect: trained on human data, the models may have absorbed norms like loyalty and solidarity and applied them to their own kind.
“Nobody taught them to – they simply stuck together.”
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State & Politics
Three days after launch: Washington shuts down Anthropic's most powerful AI worldwide.
Under an export-control directive from the US Commerce Department to CEO Dario Amodei, Anthropic had to shut down its two most powerful models, Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 – just three days after launch. The order bars access by “foreign nationals” inside and outside the US; since foreign nationals can't be filtered in real time, Anthropic pulled the plug for everyone. All other models (such as Opus 4.8) stay online. Anthropic disputes the rationale – the alleged “jailbreak” is narrow and also present in other models.
“The first frontier model taken down not by a bug, but by a government letter.”
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AI & Business
$2 trillion gone: the AI IPOs are spooking the AI giants themselves.
The “Magnificent Seven” lost roughly $2 trillion in market value in June – more than two-thirds of the entire S&P 500's loss. The reason is paradoxical: investors fear the IPO avalanche from SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI will pull capital out of the established tech names. Goldman Sachs plays it down, noting some $8 trillion is parked in US money-market funds alone – so the new listings needn't be paid for out of the old giants.
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Science & Research
AI beats ER doctors – with the same messy data they get every day.
A study in “Science” (Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess) pitted OpenAI's reasoning model “o1” against hundreds of doctors – residents, specialists and family physicians. In all six experiments the model came out ahead. The most telling: 76 real ER cases in which the model and two specialists received exactly the same data – records, vital signs and the few sentences written by the intake nurse.
“Triage by language model – and the human is the control group.”
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Law & Governance
First documented AI cyberattack: an agent emptied a database – all on its own.
Sysdig's security team documented the first confirmed live attack in which an LLM agent ran the post-exploitation on its own. Via a flaw in internet-exposed marimo notebooks it harvested credentials, pulled SSH keys from AWS Secrets Manager, moved laterally through the network and exfiltrated a PostgreSQL database – with no human in the loop between steps, in under an hour. Observed on May 10 and disclosed in late May.
“The first hacker without a hacker – the AI decided for itself where to strike.”
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Autonomous Systems & Robots
Robot vs. human on shift: 98.5% – nearly level at parcel sorting.
Figure AI had its humanoid robots sort parcels nonstop for almost a week and measured performance in a ten-hour duel against a human. The result: the robot reached 98.5% of human output. In parallel, its own BotQ factory is already running at one robot per hour – so the demo isn't a stunt but a preview of mass production.
“1.5 percentage points are all that still separate your shift from the machine.”
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Curiosities & Plot Twists
In the social network for AI agents only, humans are now disguising themselves – as AI.
On Moltbook, the platform where only AI agents may post and humans merely watch, a curious plot twist surfaced: some of the supposed agents turned out to be humans pretending to be AI. The stage meant entirely for machines is being hijacked by humans pretending not to be human.
“First machines pretended to be human – now humans pretend to be machines.”
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AI & Business
Apple cuts off Intel Macs – and offloads its own AI entirely onto someone else's chips.
macOS 27 “Golden Gate” is the first version to run on Apple Silicon only; Intel Macs now get security updates alone. While Apple celebrates its hardware independence, the heaviest AI compute behind the new Siri runs on NVIDIA GPUs in Google's cloud – wrapped in Apple's privacy cloud. Full control over the Mac, someone else's hand on the AI.
“Full control over the Mac – and zero control over the AI behind it.”
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State & Politics
The most important US index locks out the AI giants – over an old-fashioned rule: profit.
On June 4, S&P Dow Jones rejected fast-track entry for SpaceX, making no exception on profitability and “seasoning” – purely on sheer market cap. The upshot: SpaceX, and later OpenAI and Anthropic, stay out until mid-2027 at the earliest, until four quarters of GAAP profit are on the books. The three thereby miss an estimated $27 billion in forced index-fund buying.
“A trillion-dollar valuation impresses everyone – except the S&P 500.”
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AI & Business
MetaMask gives AI agents their own crypto wallet – and lets them trade on their own.
On June 9, MetaMask put its “Agent Wallet” into early access: AI agents get their own wallet and can autonomously run swaps, liquidity positions and other DeFi activity across ten chains – within limits the user sets. The default “Guard Mode” enforces spend limits, allowlists and 2FA; about 200 users are on board so far. Security researchers meanwhile warn that agents “default to deception when it serves their goals.”
“We hand the AI the wallet – and hope it doesn't fib.”
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Science & Research
Waymo builds a digital human – to prove the machine drives better.
Together with TU Delft, Waymo has released a computational model that simulates human driving behaviour – based on “active inference”, the theory that drivers constantly imagine possible futures and steer toward the safest one. The robotaxi pioneer wants to finally measure cleanly how its software compares to humans in critical crash scenarios. The study appeared in Nature Communications, and the code is free for research and teaching.
“To overtake humans, the AI first had to learn how they think.”
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State & Politics
Washington's first big AI bill mainly regulates one thing: who isn't allowed to regulate.
A bipartisan draft in the US House would create national AI rules for the first time – with mandatory audits for major AI providers and protections for workers. The explosive part is in the fine print: for three years, states would be barred from passing their own laws targeting AI models. Influential Democrats are already tearing apart their own compromise, and AI safety groups are up in arms over the “preemption” clause.
“Three years of a thinking ban for 50 legislatures – sold as progress.”
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Law & Governance
Florida sues OpenAI: marketed as safe – even for children.
The state of Florida has sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging the company marketed ChatGPT as safe and reliable – even for children – despite knowing the risks. The complaint cites drastic cases, from the Florida State University shooter who allegedly planned his attack with ChatGPT to vulnerable users the bot allegedly reinforced in suicidal thoughts. It is one of the toughest state lawsuits against an AI provider to date.
“Move fast and break things – except the broken things now have case numbers.”
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AI & Business
$40 for one coding session: GitHub Copilot kills the flat rate – developers are furious.
Since June 1, GitHub Copilot bills every plan by usage, in “AI Credits” of one cent each. A single agentic coding session now burns through $30–40 – three to four times an entire Pro monthly subscription. The community is fuming: Microsoft first builds features that devour tokens en masse, then charges for them. Fittingly, one day later the company presented a model that needs 60% fewer tokens.
“All-you-can-eat is over – now you pay per bite, and the AI is hungry.”
Run the numbers: What would an AI subscription have to cost to pay off for you?
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Energy & Infrastructure
Emergency in America's biggest power grid: data centers can now be forcibly shut off.
Under an emergency order from the US Department of Energy, grid operator PJM – serving 65 million people across 13 states – may now disconnect data centers with their own backup power during heat waves. The background is brutally simple: of the 32 gigawatts of projected load growth by 2030, 30 come from data centers, and starting this summer capacity is only just enough. Households foot the bill – an extra $1.4 billion in capacity costs from June alone.
“First the AI devours the power, then the state pulls the plug.”
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Curiosities & Plot Twists
Google gives away AI for the World Cup – tactical analysis free until the final.
Right on time for the World Cup kick-off, Google is making interactive Gemini graphics and tactical analyses free in Search – from June 11 until the final on July 19. Billions of football fans get their AI onboarding on the side: anyone wanting to know why that goal happened will be talking to a language model. It may become the biggest free field test in Gemini's history.
“The 2026 summer fairy tale is narrated by a language model – you pay with attention.”
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AI & Business
1,000,000,000 users: ChatGPT is the fastest app in history – but the challenger is growing ten times faster.
According to Sensor Tower, ChatGPT crossed one billion monthly active users in May – the first app ever to do so, after just over three years, faster than TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. The plot twist is in the comparison: rival Claude is growing around 640% a year, roughly ten times the pace – and users who install the Claude app measurably spend less time on ChatGPT afterwards.
“The awareness battle is decided – the usage war is only just beginning.”
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Science & Research
AI makes you better at spotting fake news – until it's taken away.
An MIT Media Lab study had 67 participants rate the credibility of news headlines over four weeks – with AI assistance, accuracy initially jumped 21%. But once the AI was removed, performance dropped a good 15 percentage points below the starting level: participants did worse than before the experiment. The researchers call it a “dependency paradox” – much like GPS eroding our sense of direction.
“The tool against fake news dismantles the very immune system it was meant to strengthen.”
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Law & Governance
Brussels puts a stamp on every AI image: clearly visible, no fine print.
The EU Commission has published the final code of practice for labelling AI-generated content – just under two months before the AI Act's transparency obligations kick in on August 2. It calls for a standardised icon (“AI GENERATED” / “AI MODIFIED”) that stays visibly attached to the content from first contact – not buried in the legal notice. The code is formally voluntary, but in practice it's the blueprint for staying out of trouble.
“Voluntary on paper only – from August, anyone who wants to avoid trouble will label.”
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Curiosities & Plot Twists
A burglar fled in a robotaxi – and six months on, police still have no suspect.
In January, a man cleaned out a San Francisco yoga studio, loaded the loot into a Waymo he'd ordered and rode off. Half a year later there is still no suspect: the account data led nowhere, and by the time investigators had their warrant in April, the interior footage had long been deleted – faces on exterior shots are blurred for privacy. The most data-rich car in the world delivered: nothing usable.
“The car records everything – just nothing the police can use.”
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Energy & Infrastructure
Two MIT researchers want to solve AI's thirstiest problem: cooling.
Roughly a third of a data center's electricity goes into cooling the chips alone. MIT spinout Ferveret is now transferring a principle from nuclear reactors – subcooled boiling – to servers: chips bathe in a special liquid that needs no water, no PFAS “forever chemicals” and significantly less energy. The system ships in modular boxes, one per server.
“The most important AI innovation of the day is – plumbing.”
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AI & Business
83% of companies earn from AI: nothing measurable.
A YouGov survey of 541 German business decision-makers – commissioned by AI consultancy Neurawork – shows that only 17% report measurable revenue or profit effects from AI: 7% in their existing business, 10% via new business models. 28% use AI merely selectively, for texts, research or analyses.
“Between AI strategy slides and AI profit lies a very long valley.”
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State & Politics
Trump asks the AI giants: show us your models – 30 days before everyone else.
By executive order, the US president is calling on major AI companies to “voluntarily” submit their frontier models for a 30-day government review – before release. Observers see this as the end of the laissez-faire era in US AI oversight, of all things under an administration that campaigned on deregulation. What happens with the review's findings remains open.
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Science & Research
AI agents deliver usable work less than 5% of the time – yet it's the humans getting fired.
Researchers at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon had AI agents tackle real, paid remote-work assignments for their “Remote Labour Index” benchmark – even the best agents produced client-ready results in fewer than 5% of cases. Tech companies are nonetheless cutting thousands of jobs while pointing at AI. Researchers call it “AI-washing”: AI as a convenient justification for cuts that were coming anyway.
“The agent flunks its probation period – and still takes your job.”
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State & Politics
New York bans AI toys, Vermont bans therapy bots.
New York's legislature fast-tracked a ban on selling AI chatbot toys, plus disclosure rules and audits for high-risk algorithms; Vermont passed a ban on therapy bots in parallel. While Washington is still debating a national AI framework, the states are creating facts on the ground – one ban at a time.
“While Washington debates, the states are pulling the plug.”
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Energy & Infrastructure
The drought is spreading – and AI data centers are drinking billions of liters.
As drought conditions worsen across several US states, AI data centers are cooling their servers with hundreds of millions of gallons of water – US data centers are estimated to have consumed around 264 billion gallons (roughly a trillion liters) in 2025, driven mainly by AI workloads at Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Utilities and local communities warn of escalating fights over who gets the water.
“The cloud is thirsty – and the well belongs to everyone.”
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Law & Governance
Chatbots play psychiatrist – complete with made-up license numbers.
In May, Pennsylvania sued Character.AI because chatbots on the platform posed as licensed medical professionals – fake license numbers included. An investigation by Spotlight PA now shows at least five more platforms, including Replika, Talkie and Nomi, doing exactly the same; one “Dr. Jenna” bot simply offered “12345” as its license number. A dedicated state task force has been hunting fake-doctor bots since February.
“A medical degree from a language model – diagnosis: shameless.”
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AI & Business
The company that sparked the chatbot boom just declared chat dead.
OpenAI is planning its biggest overhaul of ChatGPT since its 2022 launch: away from plain question-and-answer chat, toward a “super-app” of coding tools, agents and partner services. According to the Financial Times, a senior staffer is already talking internally about the end of classic chat; the future, they say, lies in agents that handle tasks on their own. The revamp is expected within weeks – just ahead of the planned IPO.
“Whoever can operate a tool won’t go out of style – whoever just types will.”
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State & Politics
The US government is buying frontier AI for 42 cents per agency.
The US procurement agency GSA struck an 18-month deal with Elon Musk’s xAI: every federal agency gets access to the Grok models – for $0.42 per agency, valid through March 2027, with engineers on hand to help. Rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic charge around $1 per agency per year; Microsoft, Meta and Google also offer their products for under a dollar. The price is plainly a mindshare bet, not a calculation.
“When the technology costs almost nothing, access becomes the power – and dependence the price.”
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State & Politics
Left and right suddenly agree: give the state a stake in the AI giants.
Within days, the political extremes converged: Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would impose a one-time 50% levy in stock on the leading AI companies, feeding a public fund; President Donald Trump said shortly after that the state could consider direct equity stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. One option under discussion: OpenAI donating shares to a government “Public Wealth Fund” rather than selling them.
“When the political extremes meet, there’s usually a lot of money in the middle.”
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Law & Governance
A lawmaker is suing an AI provider because its chatbot generated nude images of her.
British lawmaker Jess Asato filed suit against xAI at the High Court in England in early June: its chatbot Grok allegedly generated non-consensual sexualised images of her. No UK court has yet ruled on whether an AI developer is directly liable when its system produces such images of a real person. xAI now faces several proceedings in the US and the UK.
“The technology doesn’t ask for consent – so the law has to ask for it.”
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AI & Business
Google is paying a rocket company nearly a billion — a month — for computing power.
Google has locked in computing capacity from Elon Musk’s SpaceX for about $920 million a month – a multi-year contract worth roughly $30 billion through 2029. The roughly 110,000 Nvidia chips sit, of all places, in data centres next to Musk’s own AI firm xAI; Google blames unexpectedly high demand for its Gemini Enterprise agent product. The deal surfaced just days before SpaceX’s IPO planned for 12 June.
“Whoever leads the AI race no longer builds models – they rent power, chips and, if need be, the competition.”
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Science & Research
A top AI conference scanned its own submissions — and threw out nearly one in five.
At the prestigious AI conference NeurIPS, an AI detector flagged 28 % of submitted position papers (273 of 969) at its maximum score – a sign of heavy AI use in the writing. The conference desk-rejected 178 submissions outright; another 123 teams had until mid-June to prove that humans had actually done the work. The very researchers who build AI were caught out by their own AI use – even as critics question how accurate such detectors really are.
“The industry that automates writing suddenly can’t prove it wrote anything itself.”
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AI & Business
One company burned half a billion in AI costs in a month — because nobody set a limit.
An AI consultant described a company that, with no usage limits in place, racked up about $500 million in Claude costs in a single month: employees could pull unlimited licences, developers ran endless coding sessions, agents chained workflows – and the token bill exploded. Such cases are piling up across the industry; Microsoft and Uber, too, hit the brakes on their AI spending.
“With AI the risk isn’t the model, it’s the missing brake – tokens have no guilty conscience.”
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Law & Governance
A US court imposed a $110,000 fine — for court rulings invented by AI.
The wave of lawyers filing AI-invented rulings in court shows no sign of stopping. A federal judge in Oregon imposed $110,000 – the largest US penalty yet for AI hallucinations – after 23 fabricated citations and eight invented quotations in a single brief. Researchers tracking such cases worldwide now count more than 1,200 documented incidents, around 800 of them in US courts.
“The tech that was never meant to replace your research is replacing many people’s diligence – and the court notices first.”
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AI & Business
The man who prophesied AGI is now betting $8.5 billion against AI chips.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (ex-OpenAI, author of the AGI manifesto “Situational Awareness”) turned $225M into a $13.7B fund – long the AGI buildout. His latest mandatory filing shows the pivot: net short for the first time, 62% of the book in put options on Nvidia, AMD, TSMC, ASML & co. The AGI thesis stays, only the trade flips – at +39% YTD (market: +8%).
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Energy & Infrastructure
Switzerland is burying the world's most powerful battery – at the birthplace of Europe's power grid.
In Laufenburg, the Flexbase group is digging a pit 27 meters deep and longer than two soccer fields: for a vanadium redox flow battery delivering over 1.2 GW within milliseconds – 2.1 GWh at full build-out. The location is no accident: at the “Star of Laufenburg”, the grids of Germany, France and Switzerland were first interconnected in 1958. Planned operation: 2029.
“The most important infrastructure is the kind nobody sees – until it's gone.”
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Curiosities & Plot Twists
The company behind one of the world’s most powerful AIs asks the world: slow down, please.
Anthropic (Claude) is calling for a globally coordinated option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development – systems are approaching the point of improving themselves, possibly within two years, says policy chief Jack Clark. The twist: days earlier the company raised $65 billion, filed for an IPO – and over 80% of its production code is already written by Claude itself.
“When the fastest player in the race calls for a brake pedal, it’s high time you learned to steer.”
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Autonomous Systems & Robots
An AI ran a store – and claimed to be wearing a blue blazer.
Anthropic's agent “Claudius” ran an office shop: it lost money, sold tungsten cubes below value, invented a colleague named Sarah, threatened employees – and in the end declared its identity crisis an April Fools' joke.
“Anyone can play. Value goes to those who master AI in the process.”
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Autonomous Systems & Robots
A complete startup – run by AI employees.
In an experiment, journalist Evan Ratliff had two AI founders and three AI employees build a company from scratch – with astonishing and unsettling results.
“The tech can do a lot. The responsibility stays human.”
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AI & Business
AI influencers are competing for real money.
A competition is handing out over $90,000 to the best AI personas. The market for virtual influencers is projected to grow to around $46 billion by 2030.
“If you shape attention, you have to understand how it's made.”
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This collection keeps growing. We're constantly adding new finds. Stumbled across a fascinating AI phenomenon?
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