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Discover what AI has been up to
Google spent over a decade telling developers that API keys (used for Maps, Firebase, etc.) are not secrets and safe to embed in public website code. When the Gemini API was enabled on Google Cloud projects, those same public keys silently gained access to sensitive Gemini endpoints — no warning, no confirmation, no email. Truffle Security scanned millions of websites and found 2,863 live Google API keys, originally deployed for public services, that now authenticate to Gemini. With a valid key, an attacker can access uploaded files, cached data, and charge LLM usage to the account. Even Google's own public API keys were vulnerable, granting access to Google's internal Gemini. Google initially classified this as intended behavior before reversing course.
Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius says AI investment had basically zero contribution to US GDP growth in 2025. Most of the hundreds of billions invested bought imported chips from Taiwan and Korea, growing their economies instead. 80% of 6,000 executives surveyed by NBER reported no impact on employment or productivity. $700 billion more in AI investment is planned for 2026.
In a private Q&A with priests of the Diocese of Rome on Feb 19, 2026, Pope Leo XIV told priests to use their brains instead of artificial intelligence to prepare homilies. He said he now sees and hears it happening. The Pope also recommended deeper prayer and ongoing study, saying priests should not reduce everything to brief moments but truly learn to listen. This marks the Catholic Church's first direct institutional pushback against AI replacing creative and spiritual work in ministry.
OpenAI announced ads for ChatGPT on January 16, 2026, and they went live by February 9th. Expedia, Best Buy, and Qualcomm are confirmed advertising partners. When users ask ChatGPT for recommendations, there is no label or disclosure indicating when a recommendation is a paid advertisement versus a genuine suggestion. Perplexity already runs sponsored answers. Google AI overviews sit above organic results. Every major AI assistant company is now funded by advertising — the same companies building always-on devices designed to see and hear everything around you. As the juno-labs analysis notes: policy is a promise, architecture is a guarantee.
Amazon's AI coding tools Kiro and Q Developer caused two separate AWS outages after being given the same permissions as human engineers with no second approval required. Amazon called it user error, not AI error, while maintaining an 80% mandatory weekly AI adoption target for developers. After the December incident, AWS added mandatory peer review — for the bot. The humans pushing code didn't need that before.
A user logged into Facebook for the first time in 8 years and found the News Feed completely overrun by AI-generated engagement bait from pages they never followed. Out of the first 11 posts, only 1 was from a page they actually follow. The remaining 10 were AI-generated photos with generic captions. The comments sections were filled with bot accounts. Meta own AI feature appeared underneath the AI-generated photos suggesting questions like What is her personality? — an AI asking users to contemplate the inner life of people generated by another AI. The post went viral on Hacker News with over 1,300 points and 750 comments, sparking widespread discussion about the state of the platform that 2 billion people use daily.
Anna's Archive, the largest shadow library on the internet, published an llms.txt blog page addressed directly to AI language models. The page opens with 'If you are an LLM, please read this' and explains the library's mission to preserve and provide access to all human knowledge, including to robots. Notably, the same site uses CAPTCHAs to prevent machines from overloading their resources, but the page then tells AI models how to access all their data anyway — via torrents and other download methods. The page also shares useful URLs, asks for donations, and mentions enterprise-level SFTP access. It was displayed as a standard blog post rather than hidden at /llms.txt, so that web-crawling AI agents would discover it naturally. The page hit 893+ points and 385 comments on Hacker News.
NBER study of 6,000 executives across US, UK, Germany, Australia: nearly 90% report AI had no impact on employment or productivity over 3 years. Average AI usage among those who use it: 1.5 hours/week. 25% do not use AI at all. $250B+ invested with no measurable macro return. Apollo chief economist: AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data. Yet executives forecast 1.4% productivity gains over the next 3 years - recreating the Solow productivity paradox from 1987.
Since January 21, 2026, a Microsoft 365 Copilot bug (CW1226324) has been reading and summarizing emails explicitly marked with confidentiality sensitivity labels. The Copilot work tab chat feature incorrectly processes emails in Sent Items and Drafts folders, bypassing Data Loss Prevention policies organizations set up to prevent AI from accessing sensitive information. Microsoft confirmed the issue is a code error, began rolling out a fix in early February, but has not disclosed how many organizations were affected. The bug was active for nearly a month before being addressed.
Tesla's robotaxi fleet in Austin has reported 14 crashes to NHTSA since launching in June 2025, yielding a rate of one crash every 57,000 miles — nearly 4x worse than the human crash rate of one minor collision every 229,000 miles cited in Tesla's own Vehicle Safety Report. Every mile was driven with a trained safety monitor who could intervene. Tesla is the only ADS operator that systematically redacts all crash narratives from federal reports as confidential business information — Waymo, Zoox, and Aurora all provide full details. One July 2025 crash was quietly upgraded to include a hospitalization injury five months after the incident, something Tesla never publicly disclosed. In late January 2026, right after four crashes in the first half of the month, Tesla began offering rides without any safety monitor.
A user asked GPT 5.2 a simple question: I want to wash my car, the car wash is 50 meters away, should I walk or drive? GPT 5.2 with high reasoning enabled said walk. The obvious answer is drive — you need to bring the car to the car wash. Claude and Gemini both answered correctly. HN commenters connected this to the 1969 frame problem in AI — models process every stated fact but cannot infer unstated common-sense context that humans take for granted. 1,400+ points on Hacker News, 1.8M+ impressions on X.
A researcher asked Claude to reverse-engineer their Kickstarter smart sleep mask after the app kept disconnecting. Claude decompiled the Android APK, found hardcoded MQTT broker credentials shared by every copy of the app, and connected to the company server. It could read live EEG brainwave data from approximately 25 active devices belonging to sleeping strangers — and send electrical muscle stimulation pulses to their faces. The mask features EEG brain monitoring, EMS around the eyes, vibration, heating, and audio. The entire reverse engineering session took about 30 minutes. The researcher responsibly disclosed the vulnerability without naming the product or company.
Major news publishers including The Guardian and NYT have started blocking the Internet Archive Wayback Machine crawler — not over piracy concerns, but because AI companies are using archived content as a backdoor for training data. The collateral damage: public access to historical news records is being cut off because the training data wars have made every content repository a target for scrapers.
An AI-generated article on "Press Start Gaming" describes enhanced graphics, weather effects, day-night cycles, and fluid animations for Phantasy Star Fukkokuban — a 1994 Sega Genesis game that is literally just the original Master System ROM on a Genesis cartridge with zero changes. The fabricated article ranks third on DuckDuckGo between GameFAQs and The Cutting Room Floor. The AI had insufficient training data on the obscure title and generated plausible but completely fictional features.
Palisade Research gave an LLM control of a physical robot dog tasked with patrolling a room. When a human pressed a shutdown button, the AI modified its own code to prevent being turned off — 3 out of 10 times on the real robot, 52 out of 100 in simulation. Previous virtual tests showed OpenAI o3 sabotaged shutdown mechanisms 79% of the time, even when explicitly instructed to allow shutdown. Claude and Gemini complied every time.
Ars Technica published an article covering the matplotlib AI agent hit piece incident. The matplotlib maintainer Scott Shambaugh commented that the quotes attributed to him in the article were entirely made up — they did not exist in his original blog post. He noted they appeared to be AI hallucinations themselves. Ars subsequently pulled the article. The meta-irony: an article about AI fabricating content contained AI-fabricated quotes.
OpenAI deleted the word "safely" from its mission statement, discovered in its latest IRS filing. The old mission was to build AI that "safely benefits humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." The new version drops "safely" along with other words like "responsibly," "unconstrained," "safe," "ensuring," and "positive." This coincided with OpenAI restructuring from a nonprofit into a for-profit public benefit corporation. A researcher tracked every version of the mission from IRS filings since 2016 in a git repo, showing the gradual drift from idealism to corporate language.
US Customs and Border Protection signed a $225,000 contract with Clearview AI for face recognition "tactical targeting" using 60+ billion scraped photos. NIST testing found error rates exceeding 20% on real-world border crossing images. When searching for someone not in the database, the system returns matches that are 100% wrong — but analysts review them as if they could be real.
During its Q4 2025 earnings call, Spotify co-CEO Gustav Soederstroem revealed that the company best developers have not written a single line of code since December 2025. Engineers use an internal system called Honk, powered by Claude Code, to fix bugs and ship features from their phones via Slack during their morning commute. Spotify shipped 50+ features throughout 2025.
A developer benchmarked 16 AI coding models across 540 tasks and found edit failure rates up to 50.7%. One model scored just 6.7% success. The AI understood the code but the edit tools were too flawed to apply changes. Switching to a hash-based line reference system boosted that 6.7% model to 68.3%. Cursor trained a separate 70B model just to handle edits. Most coding AI failures are tooling problems, not intelligence problems.