October 2026

It turns out the only thing more sycophantic than AI chatbots are the people in charge of building them. After president Donald Trump decreed that artificial intelligence should now be referred to as “Super Intelligence” (caps included), tech and AI CEOs — or should we say “SI” CEOs — have eagerly complied with this absurd […]

This week on “Uncanny Valley,” we discuss the contractor who plugged their AI agent into a Pentagon system, Anthropic’s IPO filing, and the volunteers gearing up to counter ICE at the midterms.

As AI tools and agents have continued their march across all aspects of digital life, many companies are trying to use LLMs to improve the experience of purchasing goods and services on the Internet. Thus far, though, a vanishingly small number of people seem to be taking advantage of those capabilities, at least when it

A significant number of patients in the US lie to their doctors to get antibiotics they likely don’t need, according to two new studies. While that may not be a startling revelation, the studies drills down on the phenomenon, finding that the lies patients tell are generally bad ones—and yet, they work almost all the

On August 9, 2026, Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell wrote a Washington Post op-ed called “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem.” This week, Schnell discovered the depths of the problem himself as he resigned from the university after an advisory committee found that he failed to disclose significant AI use in

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sympathizes with Gen Zers entering the job market. It’s just unfortunate that the AI tools he’s responsible for ushering into the world are completely upending the nature of work and finding a job. “It’s totally true that huge numbers of tasks that people do today will be done better, cheaper, and

Anthropic, the creator of Claude, filed to go public on the US stock market on 26 October. The company’s filing statement contains a 92-page risk factor document in which it acknowledges the dangers that AI poses to society and human beings, and factors that could negatively affect Anthropic’s business. Johana Bhuiyan, senior tech reporter for

Five MIT faculty members and two additional alumni were recently named to the 2026 cohort of AI2050 Fellows. The honor is announced annually by Schmidt Sciences, Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s philanthropic initiative that aims to accelerate scientific innovation.  Conceived and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, AI2050 is a philanthropic initiative aimed at helping to

Crater counts tell us that most of the Martian surface is more than 3 billion years old, but pieces of Mars we have on Earth tell a different story. The three main classes of Martian meteorites—shergottites, nakhlites, and chassignites—are all 2.4 billion years old or younger. Until now, only two genuinely ancient Martian meteorites were

In the wake of fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) announcing a weeks-long security incident outage, readers and writers are reflecting on why the site is important to the fanfiction community, and how they’re coping with the downtime.   On Thursday, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted that