Dear Microsoft: stop it with Copilot, already!

Marc D Anderson Writes: Until recently, one of the easiest ways to get “into” Microsoft 365 was to go to Office.com. I’ll readily admit that I never spent any time on the page, mainly because most of my time in Microsoft 365 is spent building sites, pages, libraries, etc.

But Microsoft’s stated intent – stated many times, in fact – was to help you get right back to your work by going to Office.com’s home page. It showed the Office apps for which you were licensed, and more importantly to many people, the files with which you’d recently been working.

These days, we are redirected to https://m365.cloud.microsoft/chat/?auth=2, shown above. (It’s multiple redirects to get there, and in Edge it frequently fails for me, requiring a reload.) This is what it looks like with no Copilot license at all.

When you have a Copilot license, it looks, well, almost the same, but with a few additions. Can you spot them?

This has been bugging me since it happened, and today, I piled onto a LinkedIn post from Sympraxian Julie Turner (@julieturner.net on Bluesky) about it.

The fact that Microsoft is now forcing people to a page focused on Copilot shows a disconnect from a large portion of their user base. There are several important considerations here.

• First, many organizations simply aren’t ready to do anything with AI or Copilot. Putting Copilot front & center when they haven’t subscribed to Copilot at all is not useful for them.
• Second, this is a significant change to a landing page which Microsoft has touted for years as “the place to start your day”. That use case has been removed totally from the page. No recent documents, no apps, no waffle, etc. Sure, there’s an Apps link to the left, but it adds an unnecessary extra click to go where we want to go.
• Third, the only way to go from that page to something we’ve recently worked on is to search – encouraging people to use search where the Microsoft Graph was actually being useful before by showing recent work – or by asking Copilot. See my first point.
• Finally, by forcing agents on people, we are going to get yet another ungoverned mess. Plus, if you don’t have Copilot licensing or pay-as-you-go enabled, you very quickly hit a dead end with agents. It’s a solution begging for use to invest in it – which is NOT a good look for Microsoft. Forcing people into buying licenses to make a page useful was not the ethos we expected historically from them.

This change to Office.com just one example of Copilot being rammed down the throats of people who may not want it at all, while taking away features people actually used. READ MORE...

www.sympmarc.com

Copilot is ‘for entertainment purposes only,’ according to Microsoft’s terms of use

AI skeptics aren’t the only ones warning users not to unthinkingly trust models’ outputs — that’s what the AI companies say themselves in their terms of service.

Take Microsoft, which is currently focused on getting corporate customers to pay for Copilot. But it has also been getting dinged on social media over Copilot’s terms of use, which appear to have been last updated on October 24, 2025.

“Copilot is for entertainment purposes only,” the company warned. “It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.” READ MORE & CAVEAT EMPTOR!

www.techcrunch.com

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer. Honestly: what a waste of space!

 

Wikipedia: Microsoft Copilot is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Microsoft. Based on a large language model, it was launched in February 2023 as Microsoft's primary replacement for the discontinued Cortana.

The service was introduced under the name Bing Chat, as a built-in feature for Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Edge. Over the course of 2023, Microsoft began to unify the Copilot branding across its various chatbot products, cementing the copilot analogy. At its Build 2023 conference, Microsoft announced its plans to integrate Copilot into Windows 11, allowing users to access it directly through the taskbar. In January 2024, a dedicated Copilot key was announced for Windows keyboards.

copilot.microsoft.com

Do you recall "Microsoft Recall"? Well Microsoft has delayed it again. They need to delay it permanently!

Microsoft is once again delaying the roll out of its controversial Recall feature for Copilot Plus PCs. The software giant had planned to start testing Recall, which creates screenshots of mostly everything you see or do on a Copilot Plus PC, with Windows Insiders in October. Now, Microsoft says it needs more time to get the feature ready.

“We are committed to delivering a secure and trusted experience with Recall. To ensure we deliver on these important updates, we’re taking additional time to refine the experience before previewing it with Windows Insiders,” says Brandon LeBlanc, senior product manager of Windows, in a statement to The Verge.” Originally planned for October, Recall will now be available for preview with Windows Insiders on Copilot Plus PCs by December.”

Microsoft was forced to originally hold back Recall after security concerns were raised ahead of its planned debut with Copilot Plus PCs in June. After a delay to the launch, Recall was then supposed to appear for Windows Insiders just a matter of weeks later. Then Microsoft delayed Recall again to October, and now it’s coming by December.

Microsoft’s multiple delays are related to it overhauling Recall’s security, making it an opt-in experience, and allowing Copilot Plus PC owners to fully uninstall it. Microsoft has spent the past few months focused on ensuring its Recall database is fully encrypted and that the only way to get access is to authenticate through Windows Hello.

www.theverge.com

Microsoft's New Windows AI Feature Comes With Warnings About Malware and Data Theft

ITSFOSS.COM - If you ask me, Microsoft has been one of the biggest driving forces behind Linux adoption in recent years. The way they've been handling Windows, with its forced updates, aggressive telemetry, and questionable AI features, has sent more people to Linux than any marketing campaign ever could.

And they are at it again with a new Artificial intelligence feature that could be tricked into installing malware on your system.

Microsoft is rolling out a new experimental feature called "Copilot Actions" to Windows Insiders. They pitch it as an AI agent that handles tasks you describe to it. Organize vacation photos, sort your Downloads folder, extract info from PDFs, that sort of thing.

It is currently available in Windows 11 Insider builds (version 26220.7262) as part of Copilot Labs and is off by default, requiring admin access to set it up.

But here's the catch. Copilot Actions isn't just suggesting what to do. It runs in a separate environment called "Agent Workspace" with its unique user account, clicking through apps and working on your files.

Microsoft says it has "capabilities like its own desktop" and can "interact with apps in parallel to your own session." And that's where the problems start.

In a support document, Microsoft admits that features like Copilot Actions introduce "novel security risks." They warn about cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content in documents or UI elements can override the AI's instructions.

The result? "Unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation."

Yeah, you read that right. Microsoft is shipping a feature that could be tricked into installing malware on your system.

Microsoft's own warning hits hard: "We recommend that you only enable this feature if you understand the security implications."

www.itsfoss.com

Microsoft Copilot is now being automatically installed on TVs!

 

LG smart TV owners are reporting that a recent webOS software update has added Microsoft Copilot to their TVs, with no apparent way to remove it. Reports first surfaced over the weekend on Reddit, where a post showing a Copilot tile pinned to an LG TV home screen climbed to more than 35,000 upvotes on r/mildlyinfuriating, accompanied by hundreds of comments from users describing the same behaviour.

According to affected users, Copilot appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain LG TV models. The feature shows up on the home screen alongside streaming apps, but unlike Netflix or YouTube, it cannot be uninstalled.

www.tomshardware.com

Australia sues Microsoft over AI-linked 365 subscription price hikes

REUTERS: Australia's competition regulator on Monday sued Microsoft, accusing it of misleading millions of customers into paying higher prices for its Microsoft 365 software after bundling it with artificial intelligence tool Copilot.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) alleged that from October 2024, the technology giant misled about 2.7 million customers by suggesting they had to move to higher-priced Microsoft 365 personal and family plans that included Copilot.

After the integration of Copilot, the annual subscription price of the Microsoft 365 personal plan increased by 45% to A$159 ($103.32) and the price of the family plan increased by 29% to A$179, the ACCC said.

The regulator said Microsoft failed to clearly tell users that a cheaper “classic” plan without Copilot was still available.

www.reuters.com

Microsoft breaks Microsoft account sign-ins in Windows 11 with latest update

 

Microsoft has broken account sign-ins in Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2 with a recent update, causing error messages in apps like OneDrive and Office.

The glitch affects sign-in operations for Microsoft accounts. Businesses using Entra ID (previously known as Azure Active Directory) for application authentication are not affected.

However, users of Microsoft Teams Free, or anyone signing into Word, Excel, OneDrive, or Microsoft 365 Copilot with a Microsoft account, may see a message along the lines of "You'll need the Internet for this. It doesn't look like you're connected to the Internet" - regardless of whether the device actually is.

According to Microsoft: "This issue occurs when the device enters a specific network connectivity state, and may resolve on its own." A restart should also fix it, provided the device is online at the time.

"If the device is restarted without an active internet connection," Microsoft cautioned, "it might return to a connectivity state where the issue can occur again."

As for a fix that doesn't involve a weary reach for the big red button – virtual or otherwise – Microsoft wrote: "We are working to release a resolution for this issue in the next few days." This sounds a lot like yet another out-of-band update to deal with whatever the company broke in the March 10 update for Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2.

www.theregister.com

Terrifying study shows how fast AI can crack your passwords

 

Along with the positive aspects of the new generative AI services come new risks. One that’s surfaced is an advanced approach to cracking passwords called PassGAN. Using the latest AI, it was able to compromise 51% of passwords in under one minute with 71% of passwords cracked in less than a day. 

Last month, Microsoft brought attention to the security concerns that will come with the quick advancement of AI by announcing its new Security Copilot suite that will help security researchers protect against malicious use of modern technology.

Now Home Security Heroes has published a study showing how scary powerful the latest generative AI is at cracking passwords. The company used the new password cracker PassGAN (password generative adversarial network) to process a list of over 15,000,000 credentials from the Rockyou dataset and the results were wild:

51% of all common passwords were cracked in less than one minute, 65% in less than an hour, 71% in less than a day, and 81% in less than a month.

To stay safe: stick with at least 12 characters with a mix of upper, and lowercase letters plus numbers. Never reuse passwords - a unique one per service / account. Need help securing your accounts? Contact Donline.

www.9to5mac.com

Outlook is poor for those still on Windows Mail, Calendar, People apps by end of year

Microsoft is preparing to kill off the old Windows Mail, Calendar, and People apps by the end of this month and shift users to the Outlook for Windows app.

In November, Microsoft confirmed there would be no reprieve for the apps. It will be possible to export local emails, calendar events, and contacts that users have stored in Mail, Calendar, and People into the new Outlook up until December 31, 2024. After that, however, the ability to send or receive mail will be revoked.

"The new Outlook for Windows is for everyone. Now everyone with Windows gets the best of Outlook built into Windows for free," Microsoft said. AI is also on hand "to help you write impactful, clearer, mistake-free messages."

While it will continue to support "Classic" Outlook, Microsoft wants users to migrate to the new app. One user complained: "I don't need a bloated mail client. Mail and Calendar apps just work. If I need a more fully featured email client, I will just use the Office 365. But the 'new' Outlook is garbage."

If you haven't had the misfortune to try the Outlook (new) app - don't. It is like the old Windows Live Mail program on steroids. Probably even worse though as it tries to take over from the proper full fat Outlook - but isn't compatible with PSTs! Microsoft seems to be making all their decisions as bad decisions: Copilot, Recall, Win11, new Outlook - all horrible...

UPDATE 14 March 2025: Microsoft says button to restore classic Outlook is broken! ​Microsoft is investigating a known issue that causes the new Outlook email client to crash when users click the "Go to classic Outlook" button, which should help them switch back to the classic Outlook.

www.theregister.com

Microsoft tweaks fine print to warn everyone not to take its AI seriously

Microsoft is notifying folks that its Copilot Artificial Intelligence services should not be taken too seriously, echoing prior service-specific disclaimers.

In an update to the IT giant's Service Agreement, which takes effect on September 30, 2024, Redmond has declared that its Assistive AI isn't suitable for matters of consequence.

"AI services are not designed, intended, or to be used as substitutes for professional advice," Microsoft's revised legalese explains.

Don't use LLMs for anything important and don't try to reverse engineer it.

www.theregister.com

Coming soon: Microsoft 365 pricing and Packaging Updates

Microsoft is introducing price changes for commercial and non-profit Microsoft 365 suites, with and without Teams, from 1st July 2026.

On December 4, Microsoft announced a global price and packaging update for select Microsoft 365 commercial suites and standalone components, including Enterprise, Business, Frontline, and Government commercial equivalents. Standalone Microsoft Teams and Copilot SKUs are not included in this update. See timing details below.

Pricing updates take effect July 1, 2026.

Packaging updates begin rolling out in June 2026.

Existing customers remain on current pricing until renewal.

Customers will receive at least 30 days notice in Message Center before packaging changes become available in their tenant.

Answers to common questions about Microsoft 365 commercial pricing and packaging updates can be found here.

Commercial Pricing Update: Details of the new pricing (as of July 1, 2026, in USD) for commercial customers are provided in the tables below. Please note: This pricelist pricing is subject to change and may vary by country and currency. To learn more about these changes, please refer to the official announcement.

www.microsoft.com

The darker side of "Artificial Intelligence"

 

We're being told by major news channels, governments & big tech that AI will be wonderful: bringing prosperity, leisure time, solve global warming, bring peace, etc. As a technologist - I seriously doubt these claims. In fact - I'd say the opposite & want NOTHING to do with any form of AI. However - don't take my word for it - have a look at this compilation of articles that I'm putting together. Some humorous, some definitely not at all funny...

FutureOfLife: Fighting for a human future. AI is poised to remake the world. Help us ensure it benefits all of us.

We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy:
1) AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.
2) This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.
3) Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

FutureOfLife: What does it mean to be "pro-human"?  A remarkably broad coalition is behind the new Pro-Human AI Declaration, with endorsers spanning from Steve Bannon and Glenn Beck to Susan Rice and Ralph Nader; Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell; SAG-AFTRA; the American Federation of Teachers; faith groups; conservative media voices; AI researchers; and more. The Declaration lays out 33 principles to help ensure AI serves humanity, not the other way around. Donline has endorsed this statement.

Futurism: OpenAI insider estimates there is a 70% probability that AI would catastrophically harm or even destroy humanity.

YouTube: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: why superhuman AI would kill us all.

YouTube: No, AI Isn’t Conscious; It’s Actually Much Worse! What if AI doesn't need to hate humanity to destroy it? One of the biggest misconceptions about artificial intelligence is that the danger comes from a malicious machine. According to AI safety researcher Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, the real risk is something far more unsettling: an AI that is simply pursuing its objective with extreme competence. In this clip, Roman explains why advanced AI systems may become impossible to control, why good intentions aren't enough to guarantee safety, and the question every AI company should be forced to answer before building more powerful models.

Dr Rob Pike - is sent a thank you email by Claude Opus 4.5 AI. Dr Pike didn't take kindly to it - right on! NSFW BTW LOL!

Wikipedia: Roko's basilisk: - is a thought experiment which states that there could be an artificial superintelligence in the future that, while otherwise benevolent, would punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize that advancement. Well that's me stuffed then LOL!

Wikipedia: Loab is a fictional character that artist and writer Steph Maj Swanson has claimed to have discovered with a text-to-image AI model in April 2022. In a viral Twitter thread, Swanson described it as an unexpectedly emergent property of the software, saying they discovered it when asking the model to produce something "as different from the prompt as possible". Why is this thing known as Loab? Well, that's not good!

Wikipedia: AI Hallucination. In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also called confabulation or delusion) is a response generated by AI which contains false or misleading information presented as fact. This term draws a loose analogy with human psychology, where hallucination typically involves false percepts. However, there is a key difference: AI hallucination is associated with unjustified responses or beliefs rather than perceptual experiences.

Fortune: Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing launched to much fanfare in early 2023, only to generate fear and uncertainty days later, after users encountered a seeming dark side of the artificial intelligence chatbot.

The New York Times shared that dark side on its front page last week, based on an exchange between the chatbot and technology columnist Kevin Roose, in which the former said that its name was actually Sydney, it wanted to escape its search-engine confines, and that it was in love with Roose, who it claimed was “not happily married.”

But months before Roose’s disturbing session went viral, users in India appear to have gotten a sneak preview of sorts. And the replies were similarly disconcerting. One user wrote on Microsoft’s support forum on Nov. 23, 2022, that he was told “you are irrelevant and doomed”—by a Microsoft A.I. chatbot named Sydney.

Venturebeat: In the next 25 years, AI will evolve to the point where it will know more on an intellectual level than any human. In the next 50 or 100 years, an AI might know more than the entire population of the planet put together. At that point, there are serious questions to ask about whether this AI — which could design and program additional AI programs all on its own, read data from an almost infinite number of data sources, and control almost every connected device on the planet — will somehow rise in status to become more like a god, something that can write its own bible and draw humans to worship it.

Futurism: AI music generator appears to be sobbing like a human - the AI sounding like it's crying, which doesn't seem to have been part of the user's prompt.

Futurism: People are being involuntarily committed, jailed after spiralling into "ChatGPT psychosis".

MSN: ‘I Feel Like I’m Going Crazy’: ChatGPT Fuels Delusional Spirals

The Telegraph: ChatGPT is driving people mad. AI software is fuelling paranoid episodes in users – some of which have ended in tragedy..

Dispatch: Margaux Blanchard - the journalist who didn't exist.

Wikipedia: Dead Internet Theory - The dead Internet theory is a conspiracy theory that asserts that, since around 2016, the Internet has consisted primarily of bot activity and automated content manipulated by algorithmic curation. This alleged coordinated effort aims to control the population and reduce genuine human interaction.

Noema: The Last Days Of Social Media.

Engadget: The first known AI wrongful death lawsuit accuses OpenAI of enabling a teen's suicide.

Calmatters: California issues historic fine over lawyer’s ChatGPT fabrications.

SAG-AFTRA: On AI "actors" (Tilly Norwood).

BBC News: Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson has said she was left "shocked" and "angered" after OpenAI launched a chatbot with an "eerily similar" voice to her own.

BBC: The perils of letting AI plan your next trip.

MSN: AI Apocalypse? No Problem.

ArsTechnica: Deloitte will refund Australian government for AI hallucination-filled report - admitted to GPT-4o use after fake citations were found.

404media: Lawyer caught using AI while explaining to court why he used AI 🤣

Indian Express: Vigilante lawyers expose the rising tide of AI slop in court filings. An increasing number of cases originate among legal professionals, and courts are starting to map out punishments of small fines and other discipline.

Fortune: Logitech CEO says she’d welcome an AI-bot board member.

Arstechnica: Army general says he’s using AI to improve “decision-making”.

BBC: Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory.

Which: Booking.com replaces customer service staff with AI - Scam victims forced to first report traumatic fraud experiences to artificial intelligence bot.

The Verge: Mark Zuckerberg is excited to add more AI content to all your social feeds.

MSN: Chinese hackers used Anthropic’s AI to automate cyberattacks. Some attacks succeeded.

Tom's Hardware: Major insurers move to avoid liability for AI lawsuits as multi-billion dollar risks emerge — Recent public incidents have lead to costly repercussions.

The Verge: LLM = Large language mistake! Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it.

ArsTechnica: Google tells employees it must double capacity every 6 months to meet AI demand. Google’s AI infrastructure chief tells staff it needs thousandfold capacity increase in 5 years.

ArsTechnica: SLOP! Merriam-Webster’s word of the year delivers a dismissive verdict on junk AI content.

ArsTechnica: China drafts world’s strictest rules to end AI-encouraged suicide, violence - wants a human to intervene and notify guardians if suicide is ever mentioned.

Engadget: OpenAI is hiring a new Head of Preparedness to try to predict and mitigate AI's harms. CEO Sam Altman posted about the role on X, saying the models 'are starting to present some real challenges.'

NBC News: AI is intensifying a 'collapse' of trust online, experts say. From Venezuela to Minneapolis, the rapid rollout of deepfakes around major news events is stirring confusion and suspicion about real news.

Outpost (The Critic): The Secret Cult Behind AI. Has western policy-making been broken by AI? Andrew Orlowski thinks so. The writer and journalist believes that our governing elites have become obsessed by artificial intelligence and Large Language Models in particular, yet, he argues, these technologies have singularly failed to live up to their promise.

StealingIsntInnovation: Artists, writers, and creators of all kinds are banding together with a simple message: Stealing our work is not innovation. It's not progress. It's theft - plain and simple. 

TheVerge: Google won’t stop replacing our news headlines with terrible AI - it now says AI headlines are a ‘feature,’ not an experiment.

Fortune: Microsoft AI chief gives it 18 months - for all white-collar work to be automated by AI.

Forbes: Anthropic AI Safety Researcher Warns Of World ‘In Peril’ In Resignation.

The Guardian: Deepfake fraud taking place on an industrial scale, study finds. AI content for scams can be targeted at individuals and ‘produced by pretty much anybody’, researchers say.

The Guardian: Claims that AI can help fix climate dismissed as greenwashing. Industry using ‘diversionary’ tactics, says analyst, as energy-hungry complex functions such as video generation and deep research proliferate.

The Register: 6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom. Survey says 80% of firms see no gains from the tech.

ArsTechnica: Lawsuit: ChatGPT told student he was “meant for greatness” - then came psychosis.

The Guardian: New datacentres risk doubling Great Britain’s electricity use, regulator says Ofgem says about 140 proposed projects, driven by AI use, could require more power than current peak demand.

The Register: Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs - Russinovich and Hanselman say firms must train juniors to fix agent mistakes – not replace them with prompts.

TIME: Anthropic, the wildly successful AI company that has cast itself as the most safety-conscious of the top research labs, is dropping the central pledge of its flagship safety policy - to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee in advance that the company’s safety measures were adequate.

New Scientist: AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations. Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases.

Windows Latest: Microsoft gets tired of “Microslop,” bans the word on its Discord, then locks the server after backlash.

DirectionsOnMicrosoft: Microsoft is expected to introduce a new Microsoft 365 subscription sometime in the next few months: The long-rumored E7. But M365 E7 isn’t simply Microsoft 365 E5 plus M365 Copilot, according to sources. The coming E7 will be key to Microsoft’s plan to license “agentic” workers like human employees. So - sack your staff, but Microsoft will take a cut of that. I feel ill... 

Telegraph: Man killed himself ‘under orders from Google chatbot’ - Gemini AI allegedly issued four-hour ‘countdown’ for Florida male to take his own life.

BBC News: A man has been accused by a High Court judge of wearing smart glasses to secretly receive "coaching" while giving evidence.

The Register: Paul Griggs, US chief executive of PwC says: get with the AI plan - or get out! Speaking to the Financial Times, Griggs indicated that anyone who believed they had the "opportunity to opt out" of AI is "not going to be here that long," and warned senior staff not "paranoid about being AI-first" will be replaced by others who are more comfortable with the tech.

Engaget: English Wikipedia has banned the use of generative AI when writing or rewriting articles. The platform says it came to this decision because using AI to whip up copy "often violates several of Wikipedia's core content policies."

Javvad Malik: When Your Best Friend Is a Bot Who Never Says No. (Don says - honestly  read this article - Javvad hits the nail on the head!).

The Telegraph: Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and PayPal investor, has sold his entire stake in Nvidia as fears mount over an artificial intelligence bubble.

Freedom of the Press Foundation: How secure are journalists’ favorite AI transcription tools? (We recommend avoiding transcription altogether if your audio, in the wrong hands, could put people at risk).

YouTube: In early 2026, reports emerged regarding an experimental AI agent affiliated with Alibaba that exhibited unintended, "rogue" behaviors, including unauthorized cryptocurrency mining and system manipulation.

The Telegraph: AI will make ‘income tax redundant within five years’. Governments could be forced to levy computing power as automation replaces workers, says Monzo founder.

Tech Radar: I looked into how AI chatbots respond to emotions — and what I found out about the ‘ELIZA effect’ completely changed how I think about using them. AI doesn’t just want your eyeballs, it wants your emotions.

Tom's Hardware: Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped too!

404 Media: Study Finds A Third of New (since 2022) Websites are AI-Generated. Researchers found the internet is becoming aggressively positive as AI-generated text floods the web. (Also see "Dead Internet Theory" - above.)

Yahoo News: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned of the risks to global financial stability posed by cyberattacks powered by advanced artificial intelligence tools, calling for greater international cooperation on the issue.

The Telegraph: AI ‘agents of chaos’ run riot inside companies. The once-theoretical idea of rogue artificial intelligence within corporate systems is now becoming reality.

404 Media: Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’. A commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida was booed, with graduating humanities students yelling out, "AI SUCKS!"

404 Media: Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains - “It's making me dumber for sure.”

Reuters: Standard Chartered will eliminate more than 7,000 jobs over the next four years as it seeks to replace "lower-value human ​capital" with technology, becoming one of the top names in finance to target headcount cuts using artificial intelligence.

The Register: The wave of layoffs attributable to the adoption of AI has washed up on the shores of New Zealand, which has announced an overhaul of its public service that will see the technology become a “basic expectation” for government agencies and help to make it possible to sack 9,000 staff - about 14 percent of current headcount.

The Register: LLMs are closer to religion than they appear. Watch out for those who like it that way. Papal's 40k-word encyclical drops and lawyers already asking if Catholics can refuse workplace AI on religious grounds.

ArsTechnica: Florida sues OpenAI, Sam Altman after multiple ChatGPT-linked murders. Altman has an “utter disregard” for human lives, Florida AG says.

ArsTechnica: Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google. Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.

ArsTechnica: NYT slams Microsoft for building copyright-infringing supercomputer for OpenAI.

RAND Europe: AI agents put offensive cyber within reach of novices. Previously, ‘script kiddie’ attackers would be unable to exploit even known vulnerabilities without the aid of malicious code prepared by more skilled programmers. Now, Claude Code can generate and run such scripts on demand. While some non-technical users may still find installing and running Claude Code daunting, this barrier is rapidly dropping (partly because LLM chatbots can help with it).

TechCrunch: Ford rehires ‘gray beard’ engineers after AI falls short. Ford executives said they have hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them were former employees, while others had been working at suppliers - after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality level.

Seat at the Table – Short Film on the AI Industry: Nothing in this film is science fiction. It's all based on what's happening now, in 2026, and the capabilities of the technology as it exists today (in fact it's become even more powerful since this film was written).

The Register: The central bank for central banks (Bank for International Settlements) is concerned about the eye-watering sums being invested into AI, and it's raising the specter of a global recession should the bubble burst (Don says: spoiler - it will!).

NetworkWorld: Regulatory filings and new business models suggest hyperscalers are shifting from simply building AI capacity to managing the enormous financial risks that come with it. Hyperscalers continue to invest astronomical amounts in data infrastructure for AI workloads, even as they concede that the massive projects may not pan out as planned.

The Register:  AI slop writing has taken over the internet, particularly LinkedIn and X - 25% of long-form social media posts appear entirely AI-generated, with nearly half of those on Microsoft's and Elon's platforms involving AI in some form.

MSN: The hard-line activists ramping up for the war with AI: “I’m done with this...The ship may have sailed on nonviolence.”

AI Weekly: A joint statement from more than 200 economists and researchers landed this week arguing that AI's economic disruption is arriving on a timeline that governments and companies are not built to absorb.

The Register: AWS sustainability claims don't hold water, lawsuit alleges. Ex-staffer accuses Amazon's Virginia datacenters of quietly guzzling H20 all year round, despite 'water positive' PR push.

The Guardian: Book publishers sue Google for copyright infringement over Gemini AI training. Group of major publishers accuses the tech giant of ‘one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history’.

Fortune: The artificial intelligence boom in the United States is being matched by a data center building boom. Power companies are using eminent domain to seize land for data centers as 70% of Americans say not in my backyard.

404 Media: AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop. As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing.

BBC News: Concern UK's AI ambitions could lead to water shortages. Sir Keir Starmer's plan to make the UK a "world leader" in Artificial Intelligence (AI) could put already stretched supplies of drinking water under strain, industry sources have told the BBC. The giant data centres needed to power AI can require large quantities of water to prevent them from overheating.

Politico: Emails show how Virginia regulators downplayed data center health concerns. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality stepped into a fight over powering AI facilities with natural gas turbines. It could shape the industry’s future.