February 10, 2026

A “QuitGPT” campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions

In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 a month and offers more access to advanced models, to speed up his work. But he grew frustrated with the chatbot’s coding abilities and its gushing, meandering replies. Then he came across a post on Reddit about…

Technology

Inside the marketplace powering bespoke AI deepfakes of real women

January 30, 2026
Civitai—an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—is letting users buy custom instruction files for generating celebrity deepfakes. Some of these files were specifically designed to make pornographic images banned by the site, a new analysis has found. The study, from researchers at Stanford and Indiana…

The Download: US immigration agencies’ AI videos, and inside the Vitalism movement

January 30, 2026
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. DHS is using Google and Adobe AI to make videos The news: The US Department of Homeland Security is using AI video generators from Google and Adobe to make and edit content shared…

How the sometimes-weird world of lifespan extension is gaining influence

January 30, 2026
For the last couple of years, I’ve been following the progress of a group of individuals who believe death is humanity’s “core problem.” Put simply, they say death is wrong—for everyone. They’ve even said it’s morally wrong. They established what they consider a new philosophy, and they called it Vitalism. Vitalism is more than a philosophy,…

DHS is using Google and Adobe AI to make videos

January 29, 2026
The US Department of Homeland Security is using AI video generators from Google and Adobe to make and edit content shared with the public, a new document reveals. It comes as immigration agencies have flooded social media with content to support President Trump’s mass deportation agenda—some of which appears to be made with AI—and as…

The Download: inside the Vitalism movement, and why AI’s “memory” is a privacy problem

January 29, 2026
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Meet the Vitalists: the hardcore longevity enthusiasts who believe death is “wrong” Last April, an excited crowd gathered at a compound in Berkeley, California, for a three-day event called the Vitalist Bay Summit.…

How the grid can ride out winter storms

January 29, 2026
The eastern half of the US saw a monster snowstorm over the weekend. The good news is the grid has largely been able to keep up with the freezing temperatures and increased demand. But there were some signs of strain, particularly for fossil-fuel plants. One analysis found that PJM, the nation’s largest grid operator, saw…

Roundtables: Why AI Companies Are Betting on Next-Gen Nuclear

January 28, 2026
AI is driving unprecedented investment for massive data centers and an energy supply that can support its huge computational appetite. One potential source of electricity for these facilities is next-generation nuclear power plants, which could be cheaper to construct and safer to operate than their predecessors. Watch a discussion with our editors and reporters on…

What AI “remembers” about you is privacy’s next frontier

January 28, 2026
The ability to remember you and your preferences is rapidly becoming a big selling point for AI chatbots and agents.  Earlier this month, Google announced Personal Intelligence, a new way for people to interact with the company’s Gemini chatbot that draws on their Gmail, photos, search, and YouTube histories to make Gemini “more personal, proactive,…

Rules fail at the prompt, succeed at the boundary

January 28, 2026
From the Gemini Calendar prompt-injection attack of 2026 to the September 2025 state-sponsored hack using Anthropic’s Claude code as an automated intrusion engine, the coercion of human-in-the-loop agentic actions and fully autonomous agentic workflows are the new attack vector for hackers. In the Anthropic case, roughly 30 organizations across tech, finance, manufacturing, and government were…