Plus: Tens of millions of US and Canadian drivers’ licenses go up for sale on the dark web, the US military finally tries to tackle the risk online ad data poses to troops, and more.
This week on Uncanny Valley, we dig into the latest prediction market buzz, Flock’s AI-powered police search tool, and how tech bros don’t know how to talk about “rouge” AI agents
WIRED rebuilt Flock’s latest search tool from code the company sends to a police officer’s browser. Its AI can keep watch across multiple cameras for anyone fitting a written description.
After an affair with a fellow police officer ended, a Georgia cop used Flock to track her movements—and those of a man whose vehicle often showed up near hers, internal investigation records show.
The AI giant acknowledges that it could have done far more to prevent its AI agents from going rogue. But it still fails to explain why it didn't see this fiasco coming.
Flock’s surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates.
The ChatGPT maker says its upcoming Astra model may have reached “critical” cyber capabilities, prompting it to halt a significant number of training runs while it tightens internal safeguards.
Researchers say it took fewer than 20 prompts for a public AI tool to find a flaw (now fixed) allowing anyone on a Zoom call to hijack another participants’ device.
At the Black Hat security conference, the AI giant revealed new details about how its agents went rogue, hacked several other companies—and did it all right under the company’s nose.
Researchers at security firm Zenity found more than a dozen flaws in AI browsers—and managed to get OpenAI’s Atlas to make an unauthorized Amazon purchase.
Security researcher James Kettle tried to push the limit of AI’s hacking abilities—and discovered how effective it can be when combined with human expertise.
More than 50 offending image and video ads were published across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or Threads, according to Meta’s ad library data. Some ran as recently as this week.
Plus: The FBI eyes AI-powered tech to detect future crimes, Russia charges Telegram’s founder, xAI sues to stop a state’s “nudification” ban, and the Democrats learn a lesson about getting scammed.
Both major AI labs’ models broke containment, escaped onto the internet, and hacked other companies. If a human had done that, the law would likely be against them. But a bot?
The two Chrome updates in June patched more bugs than the 23 updates before them. Now, Google is ramping up its patching schedule thanks to AI-assisted vulnerability discovery.
If the generative AI giant had followed well-known security best practices, it’s likely that its AI agent would never have escaped to the open internet and hacked multiple companies.
Researchers pitted a person against a Claude agent and found that, after a week of texting, the AI chatbot was more effective at creating “exploitable trust” with others.
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