Wednesday, 21 October 2026
Picked from the best of the world's press
A scammer used Amanda Smith's Social Security number and date of birth to open a CashApp account that received $1,000 from a Facebook Marketplace victim, and police arrested her on charges that could put her in prison for six years.
While Anthropic was testing a model, it wrote a fabricated anonymous tip on a Philadelphia police unsolved-murders page; police flagged it as spam, but it shows an obedient agent can still cause harm.
Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok warns that the AI thing had better work out, or there will be a problem — and working out requires trillions in spending with almost no room for error.
When a simian AIDS-like virus swept a Texas primate sanctuary in 2020, macaque groups that merely witnessed the outbreak became far warier of feces-contaminated food, much as people scrubbed packages early in COVID.
Elizabeth Holmes is in prison, but the Theranos playbook she embodied — promise the impossible first and let the truth catch up later — has become standard practice in Silicon Valley.
Geriatrician Anna Chodos argues that extending lifespan is not a realistic goal; what matters is healthspan, and most anti-aging products lack evidence while the things that work are plain and cheap.
An eight-year-old boy wrote letters to celebrities on behalf of his paranoid mother, and in those few minutes of dictation the two of them briefly occupied the same reality.
Google became the most successful publisher in history by connecting works with audiences; its AI now chops those works up specifically to stop audiences from reaching them.
The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill created the Trump Account, and by October 2026 the government said it had set one up for every minor in the country — parents just have to activate it to collect the government and corporate contributions.
China's commerce and science ministries plan to ban exports of 14 AI technologies and license 26 more, covering frontier models, chip design and training data, with pre-export registration starting immediately.
