All news with #chatgpt tag

📉 New data from SimilarWeb shows ChatGPT's web market share fell to 64.5% in January 2026, down from 86.7% a year earlier, while Gemini rose to 21.5%. The report's timeline highlights steady gains for Gemini and smaller increases for Grok and DeepSeek, alongside a seasonal dip in usage over the holidays. Independent tests cited in the coverage praise Claude Code for complex coding and Gemini for image quality, and OpenAI is reportedly considering ads for ChatGPT amid rising competition.

🛡️ The growing use of generative AI in the workplace is raising security concerns as many employees access tools via personal accounts. Netskope's 2026 Cloud and Threat Report found 47% of workplace generative AI usage occurs through personal ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot accounts, reducing visibility and controls. Reported data-policy violations tied to LLMs have doubled, averaging 223 incidents per month and involving sensitive source code, intellectual property and credentials. Organizations are starting to curb Shadow AI use, but the report warns that stronger governance and employee education remain essential.

📣 OpenAI is reportedly preparing to test ads within ChatGPT, beginning with internal trials limited to employees. Reports say the company is evaluating multiple ad formats — including sponsored content prioritized in AI answers and sidebar placements — while details on how ads would affect paid plans like Go, Plus, and Pro remain unclear. OpenAI has confirmed it is exploring ads and says any approach would be designed to respect users' trust, though the timeline and implementation remain unspecified.

🤖 OpenAI has begun rolling out a new variant of its coding agent, labeled GPT-5.2-Codex-Max, to a subset of paying users who have spotted the model identifier when querying Codex. The release follows December’s introduction of Codex with GPT-5.2 and appears to deliver enhanced long-task persistence, repository context compaction, improved tool reliability, better Windows workflow handling, and stronger vision for interpreting screenshots, UI bugs, and diagrams. Given the prior uplift seen with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, this Max tier is expected to provide another notable performance bump, and OpenAI may publish formal details in the coming days.

🔍 OX Security researchers uncovered two malicious Chrome extensions — Chat GPT for Chrome with GPT-5, Claude Sonnet & DeepSeek AI and AI Sidebar with Deepseek, ChatGPT, Claude, and more — installed by over 900,000 users. The add-ons scrape ChatGPT and DeepSeek conversation content and all open tab URLs, then batch-upload harvested data to attacker-controlled servers. Operators used hosted privacy pages and impersonation to obscure activity; users should remove these extensions and audit exposed data immediately.

🔔 OpenAI may grant a one-month complimentary subscription of ChatGPT Plus to certain users who request cancellation, a change first reported by BleepingComputer. The report describes a Flutter/Dart developer who switched to Claude and, when canceling, was presented with the free-month offer and an automatic temporary switch to $0/month. The trial is expected to end around Feb 17, 2026 and will revert to the paid price unless otherwise updated. The promotion is rolling out gradually across several regions; check the Manage button under Payment to confirm availability.

🤖 OpenAI is rolling out a mobile update that lets ChatGPT Plus subscribers select the Thinking time toggle, often called the model's 'juice', to enable longer, higher‑compute responses on mobile. Until now, Android devices routed Thinking requests through Standard Thinking, which uses less compute and cannot sustain long reasoning. On desktop, users could already switch between Standard Thinking and Extended Thinking, with Extended using more compute for complex queries. The rollout is gradual, the toggle is limited to ChatGPT Plus (the Go tier does not include it), and OpenAI also introduced new desktop formatting blocks and mini editor toolbars for richer task-specific outputs.

📰OpenAI is exploring a new ad format for ChatGPT — 'sponsored content' — that could be prioritized within model responses and shown in a sidebar or carousel. References to the feature appeared in an Android beta and in mockups reported by The Information. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the company is researching ads and said any approach would be designed to respect user trust.

📝 OpenAI has introduced 'formatting blocks' in ChatGPT, adjusting how the interface presents generated content to match the specific task users are performing. The update adds a compact editor toolbar that appears when text is highlighted in newer rich-text areas, such as email composition or writing drafts. Drafts are now shown as formatted documents users can edit inline, similar to Word or Gmail, rather than as plain chat messages. The feature is rolling out gradually and OpenAI plans to add support for additional formats over time.

🔒 Researchers at Koi found that the popular Urban VPN Proxy browser extension injects scripts to capture full AI chat conversations — including prompts and responses — then exports them to the extension vendor's backend. The monitoring runs even when the VPN is disabled and activates on major platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok. For organizations that paste internal code, data or research into AI tools, this creates a significant data-theft risk outside corporate controls.

⚠️ Security researchers found that Urban VPN Proxy, a free browser extension with millions of installs, injected hidden scripts to capture full AI chat conversations from users’ browsers. The extension targeted multiple platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, overriding browser network APIs to intercept prompts and responses. Captured data was packaged and sent to the extension operator’s backend even when VPN features were disabled. The extension marketed an “AI protection” feature that did not prevent this collection.

🛡️Kaspersky researchers uncovered a macOS campaign in which attackers used paid search ads to point victims to a public shared chat on ChatGPT that contained a fake installation guide for an “Atlas” browser. The guide instructs users to paste a single Terminal command that downloads a script from atlas-extension.com and requests system credentials. Executing it deploys the AMOS infostealer and a persistent backdoor that exfiltrates browser data, crypto wallets and files. Users should not run unsolicited commands and must use updated anti‑malware and careful verification before following online guides.

⚠️OpenAI's ChatGPT experienced a global outage that caused errors and disappearing conversations for many users. Many reported seeing messages such as "something seems to have gone wrong" and "There was an error generating a response," while some conversations vanished and new messages kept loading indefinitely. DownDetector recorded over 30,000 reports, and OpenAI acknowledged elevated errors and said engineers were working on a fix. Service began returning as of 15:14 ET, though performance remained slow.

🔴 OpenAI's ChatGPT experienced a global outage that produced "something seems to have gone wrong" errors and stalled responses, with some users reporting that entire conversations disappeared and new messages never finished loading. BleepingComputer observed the model continuously loading without delivering replies, while DownDetector recorded over 30,000 reports. OpenAI confirmed elevated errors at 02:40 ET, said it was working on a fix, and by 15:14 ET service had begun returning but remained slow.

📝 OpenAI is internally testing an 'ads' feature in the ChatGPT Android beta that references bazaar content, search ad entries and a search ads carousel. The leak, spotted in build 1.2025.329, suggests ads may initially be confined to the search experience but could expand. Because the assistant retains rich context, any placements could be highly personalized unless users opt out. This development may signal a major shift in ChatGPT's monetization and the broader web advertising landscape.

🤖 Smart Answers is a generative AI chatbot embedded across CSO articles to help security professionals ask questions, discover content, and explore IT and leadership topics. The tool provides pre-made topic prompts, follow-up suggestions, and links to source articles and background material. It was developed with partner Miso.ai, uses only editorial content from the publisher's German-language brands, and flags when it cannot answer or relies on older (pre-2020) material.

⚠️A representative YouGov survey commissioned by recruitment firm SThree found that 77% of STEM professionals in Germany use AI tools at work without approval from IT or management. Commonly used services include ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity. Experts warn this shadow IT practice can lead to GDPR breaches, inadvertent disclosure of sensitive customer or internal data and the risk that providers will retain and reuse submitted content for training. In Germany, 23% report daily use, 29% weekly and 12% monthly; respondents cite efficiency gains and technical curiosity as primary drivers.

🛍️ Black Friday shopping is increasingly fraught with staged discounts and manipulated prices, but large language models (LLMs) can help shoppers cut through the noise. Use AI like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to build a wish list, track historical prices, compare alternatives, and vet sellers quickly. The article provides step-by-step prompts for price analysis, seller verification, local-market queries, and model-specific requests, and recommends security measures such as using a separate card and installing Kaspersky Premium to reduce fraud risk.

🔬 In episode 77 of The AI Fix, Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley survey a week of unsettling and sometimes absurd AI stories. They discuss a bioRxiv preprint showing a genome-trained LLM generating novel bacteriophage sequences, debates over whether AI should be allowed to decide life-or-death outcomes, and a woman who legally ‘wed’ a ChatGPT persona she named "Klaus." The episode also covers a robot's public face-plant in Russia, MIT quietly retracting a flawed cybersecurity paper, and reflections on how early AI efforts were cobbled together.

🔐 Researchers at Tenable disclosed seven techniques that can cause ChatGPT to leak private chat history by abusing built-in features such as web search, conversation memory and Markdown rendering. The attacks are primarily indirect prompt injections that exploit a secondary summarization model (SearchGPT), Bing tracking redirects, and a code-block rendering bug. Tenable reported the issues to OpenAI, and while some fixes were implemented several techniques still appear to work.