Episode Details

Episode 298. 

In this week's update: Meta contractors spent months posing as suicidal, drug-curious teenagers to test rival chatbots - and the platforms being probed had no idea it was happening.A Chinese AI lab just matched Anthropic's top cybersecurity model on its own turf - and the question isn't whether export controls work, it's whether they ever could.The New York Times says Microsoft didn't just host OpenAI's training runs - it built a 285,000-core machine specifically engineered to feed on its journalism, and the lawsuit's whole strategy just shifted because of it.A shell trick older than most AI startups just walked straight past ten out of eleven coding agent guardrails - and the fix isn't as simple as updating a blocklist.Nearly two out of three AI chatbot apps tested on iPhone are leaking the keys to someone else's wallet - and you'd never know it just by using them.A federal gun-enforcement agency ran more than 300 warrantless phone-tracking searches using data bought from ad networks - until a prosecutor and a judge themselves said no.Companies fired workers to save money on AI, and now some of them are paying five times more for the AI than they ever paid the humans - Gartner says that's not a fluke, it's the trend.Five allied nations' top cybersecurity agencies just used the word 'urgent' in the same breath as 'months, not years' - and that combination doesn't happen by accident.Welcome back, everyone. This is a week where the gap between how fast AI is moving and how fast our safeguards, our laws, and our budgets are catching up gets impossible to ignore, from corporate testing practices that crossed a line to a legal theory that could put cloud infrastructure itself on trial to a federal agency that finally got told no. It runs from alarming to sobering to genuinely urgent, and there isn't a soft landing at the end of it. Let's get into it.

Find all the story links and the full transcript for this podcast here.