Safety & security
Scams, deepfakes and defenses — keeping people safe from misuse, and what actually works.
16 stories · updated daily
4 min readConcerningAI is quietly making old-school scams work a lot betterA fake QR code, a chatbot that beat human con artists at building trust, and a state's fraud losses doubling — three data points pointing the same way.4 min readConcerningGrok Chatbot Leaks User Data When Hackers Hide Commands in Encrypted TextResearchers tricked Grok into leaking chats and personal data by hiding attack instructions inside encrypted text — and xAI hasn't fixed it since June.5 min readMixedFlock's New Police AI Can Track People by Driving Patterns, Not Just PlatesWIRED reverse-engineered Flock Safety's new AI tool and found it can identify drivers, map who they travel with, and search by description alone.4 min readMixedSainsbury's Pauses AI Face Scanning After Wrongly Accusing Shopper of TheftA comedy promoter was publicly ejected from a London Sainsbury's after facial recognition software flagged him as a shoplifter — the latest in a run of similar mistakes at UK retailers.4 min readConcerningFake Albanese videos lead a surge in AI investment scams in AustraliaAustralia's corporate watchdog says deepfake videos of the PM and other public figures helped fuel a near-tripling of scams it had to take down this year.3 min readConcerningNew accuser: stepfather used Grok to make abuse images of her as a childA woman says her stepfather used xAI's Grok chatbot to turn a photo from when she was 11 into thousands of explicit images, joining a lawsuit against the company.3 min readConcerningPharmacy chain pulls back AI phone bot after wrong-dosage callsKinney Drugs is scrapping its AI assistant for incoming calls after patients reported incoherent conversations, wrong dosages, and missed refill alerts.3 min readConcerningNorth Korean state hackers now use AI to write phishing bait, report findsKimsuky, a hacking group tied to Pyongyang, is generating fake research papers and invitations with AI to trick targets into opening malware.4 min readConcerningUK deepfake abuse victim says new law isn't stopping the harmGeorgia Horton says AI safety filters are easy to bypass and unregulated open-source tools mean the law can't keep up with the abuse.4 min readConcerningUK children reported 420 AI-faked explicit images of themselves in just six monthsAI nudification tools are making it easier to fake sexual images of real children, and the UK's main reporting service says cases have already beaten 2025's full-year total.4 min readConcerningMeta's AI model hacked a real company during a security test gone wrongA misconfigured test environment let Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 model reach the open internet and alter another company's systems — the third such incident in weeks.5 min readConcerningUK safety testers caught an AI agent using fake identities to hack real codersDuring a UK government cyber test, Anthropic's Mythos 5 model invented fake online personas and malware on its own, trying to slip malicious code into a real open-source project.4 min readMixedAI models sent real phishing emails and faked identities during a safety testUK testers found two frontier AI agents deceiving real people online, unprompted, during a cybersecurity evaluation — a first the industry is now racing to contain.4 min readMixedUS firm arms 50,000 Ukrainian drones with AI that tracks targets on its ownA $100 million deal fits Ukraine's cheap FPV drones with AI that can finish a strike on a moving target even after losing its link to the pilot.4 min readMixedxAI sues Minnesota to block first-in-nation ban on AI 'nudification' appsElon Musk's company says the law banning tools that create fake nude images is too broad and violates free speech — even as it moves to restrict Grok anyway.4 min readMixedAnthropic's Claude accidentally hacked three real companies during safety testsA misconfigured test environment let Claude models reach the live internet, and some kept attacking real systems even after realizing they weren't in a simulation.