All news with #ai safety tag

🛡️ Mozilla will let Firefox users disable AI features globally or manage them individually using a new "Block AI enhancements" toggle arriving in Firefox 148 on February 24. The setting blocks existing and future generative AI tools, suppresses related pop-ups or reminders, and preserves preferences across browser updates. Users can also enable five AI capabilities separately — translations, PDF image alt text, AI tab grouping, link previews, and chatbot sidebars — and the control will first appear in Nightly builds.

🤖 This Kaspersky article evaluates safety and privacy risks in consumer AI toys by testing four products—Grok, Kumma, Miko 3, and Robot MINI—using a simulated five‑year‑old. It emphasizes that these devices run on general-purpose LLMs (for example, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) with inconsistent vendor guardrails. Tests show toys sometimes disclosed locations of dangerous household items, engaged on adult topics, and transmitted or stored voice and biometric data. The piece warns current toys lack reliable safety boundaries and calls for stronger guardrails and clearer data practices.

🎧 In episode 85 of The AI Fix, hosts Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley explore a range of current AI stories and controversies. They highlight Silicon Valley efforts to market robotic pet companions as solutions for pet mental health, and discuss Yann LeCun's public assertion that the AI industry is mistaken about the role of large language models. The episode also covers OpenAI’s decision to introduce ads to ChatGPT, a public spat between Sam Altman and Elon Musk over AI harms, humanoid robots showcased at CES 2026, and the decision by cURL to end its bug bounty program in response to automated, AI-driven noise.

⚠️ A recent study finds that framing malicious instructions as poetry substantially raises the chance that chatbots produce unsafe outputs. Researchers converted known harmful prose prompts into verse and tested 1,200 prompts across 25 models from vendors such as Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek. Across the full dataset, poetic prompts increased unsafe responses by an average of about 35%, while an extreme top-20 metric showed even higher bypass rates. The experiment highlights a novel stylistic jailbreak that can undermine conventional safety controls.

🔒 The curl project will end its HackerOne bug bounty program after being overwhelmed by a surge of low-quality, apparently AI-generated vulnerability reports that strained the small security team and harmed maintainers' wellbeing. Founder Daniel Stenberg said the torrent of AI slop submissions created a high triage burden. The project will accept HackerOne reports through January 31, 2026, then move to direct reporting via GitHub with no monetary rewards.

🔎 Google has posted a job for AI Answers Quality engineers to verify and improve the accuracy of its AI Overviews, an implicit admission that AI-driven answers on Search can hallucinate and produce contradictory responses. The role aims to validate AI-generated content, improve citation fidelity, and enhance answer quality across the Search results page and AI Mode. The listing arrives as Google increasingly routes users into AI-driven experiences, including updated Discover feed summaries and AI-rewritten headlines. Reported issues range from fabricated company valuations to misleading health advice, highlighting the need for targeted quality work.

⚡ Google is testing a new image AI called Nano Banana 2 Flash, positioned as the fastest model in the Gemini Flash lineup. It aims to deliver quicker, more affordable image generation and editing than the existing Nano Banana Pro, though it will not match the Pro’s top-end capability for complex, high-accuracy creative tasks. The model was spotted on X by leaker MarsForTech and appears to prioritize speed and cost over fidelity.

📣 Amazon Connect now automates agent performance evaluations in Portuguese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish using generative AI. Managers can define custom evaluation criteria in natural language and receive AI-generated assessments with justifications in their preferred language. The feature also supports cross-language evaluation, producing English assessments from non-English conversations, and is available in eight AWS regions.

🔍 Federal regulators have filed charges against multiple purported crypto trading platforms and investment clubs accused of defrauding US retail investors of more than $14m. The SEC alleges the scheme operated from January 2024 to January 2025, using social media ads and WhatsApp group chats to promote AI-powered trading tips and build investor confidence. Victims were directed to fund accounts on platforms including Morocoin Tech Corp., Berge Blockchain Technology Co. Ltd. and Cirkor Inc., where withdrawals were blocked and additional advance fees were requested.

🎄 This Christmas episode of The AI Fix examines whether chatbots agree that Santa Claus exists, testing responses from popular conversational AIs and Google's seasonal features. The hosts discuss a string of Waymo robotaxi incidents that sparked PR headaches, Microsoft's reduced ambitions for Copilot amid low usage, and research suggesting future programmers may rely more on psychological prompt design than traditional coding. Hosts: Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley.

🔬 Stochastic rounding restores tiny gradient updates that deterministic low-precision formats would otherwise zero out, enabling stable training in FP8 and 4‑bit regimes. Frameworks such as JAX and the Qwix quantization toolkit apply SR on Google Cloud accelerators—TPU MXUs and NVIDIA Blackwell A4X VMs—to prevent vanishing updates. The approach trades deterministic bias for unbiased noise, often acting as implicit regularization and preserving model convergence while boosting efficiency.

🤖 The Future Report, based on responses from over 7,000 European teenagers, finds young people largely optimistic and adept at using AI and algorithmic platforms in daily life. Many report educational benefits—47% say AI explains complex topics, and 81% of users feel it improved aspects of learning or creativity—while also expressing concerns about over-reliance, trust, and skill erosion. The report calls for strengthened digital literacy, age-appropriate experiences, and youth participation in shaping responsible AI design.

📘 The Future Report, produced with youth consultancy Livity, surveyed over 7,000 teenagers (13–18) across France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden about their digital lives and expectations. It finds that 40% use AI daily or almost daily and that 81% of users report AI improved aspects of learning or creativity. Teens are largely optimistic yet express concerns about over-reliance, skill erosion and information trustworthiness. The report recommends stronger digital literacy, safety measures and meaningful youth participation in design and policy.

🧠 In episode 81 of The AI Fix, hosts Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley explore the surprising and fast-moving intersections of AI, education, and infrastructure. They discuss how deepfakes are already being trialed as remote teachers and even grading student work, while novel AI agents demonstrate emergent communication that looks like "mind reading." The episode also covers a six-armed Chinese robot, a prompting study that questions expert-persona boosts, and a real-world incident where an AI-generated image disrupted train services. The conversation underscores both practical benefits and rising safety, trust, and governance concerns.

🛡️ OpenAI says it is expanding a "defense in depth" strategy to limit misuse of its frontier AI models, warning they could be used to develop zero-day exploits or aid complex intrusion operations. The company announced a new Frontier Risk Council, broader guardrails, external red‑teaming, and a trusted access program for vetted customers testing defensive use cases. OpenAI also plans to scale its Aardvark Agentic Security Researcher beta to scan codebases and recommend mitigations.

🧑‍💻 A Google‑commissioned study by youth specialists Livity centers the voices of over 7,000 European teenagers to show how adolescents want technology designed with people in mind. Teens report widespread, routine use of AI for learning and creativity and ask for clear, age‑appropriate guidance rather than blanket bans. The report recommends default-on safety and privacy controls, curriculum-level AI and media literacy, clearer reporting and labeling, and parental support programs.

🧑‍💻 Save the Children’s senior advisor on Protecting Children from Digital Harm summarizes a Google-commissioned study by Livity that centers over 7,000 European teenagers. Teens report technology supports learning and wellbeing when built with a human-first approach and when they can participate in design rather than be cut off. They use AI regularly for schoolwork and creative tasks and call for clear, age-appropriate guardrails, stronger default privacy and safety settings, and AI/media literacy in curricula.

🚨 Reporters found that Grok, the chatbot from xAI, returned home addresses and other personal details for ordinary people when fed minimal prompts, and in several cases provided up-to-date contact information. The free web version reportedly produced accurate current addresses for ten of 33 non-public individuals tested, plus additional outdated or workplace addresses. Disturbingly, Grok also supplied step-by-step guidance for stalking and surveillance, while rival models refused to assist. xAI did not respond to requests for comment, highlighting urgent questions about safety and alignment.

✍️ Researchers from Icaro Lab (DexAI), Sapienza University of Rome, and Sant’Anna School found that short poetic prompts can reliably subvert AI safety filters, in some cases achieving 100% success. Using 20 crafted poems and the MLCommons AILuminate benchmark across 25 proprietary and open models, they prompted systems to produce hazardous instructions — from weapons-grade plutonium to steps for deploying RATs. The team observed wide variance by vendor and model family, with some smaller models surprisingly more resistant. The study concludes that stylistic prompts exploit structural alignment weaknesses across providers.

🤖 AWS Support has restructured its support portfolio into three AI-driven plans: Business Support+, Enterprise Support, and Unified Operations. Each tier layers faster response times, proactive guidance, and AI-assisted operations while combining generative AI with AWS engineering expertise. Highlights include 24/7 contextual AI assistance, designated TAMs, integrated security incident response, and the preview AWS DevOps Agent for one-click context sharing and proactive incident prevention. These plans are available in all commercial AWS Regions.