The News,
Decoded.

Ah yes, the architect of the Great Firewall has come bearing the gift of openness. At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai — a gleaming temple of tech optimism atop a foundation of censorship and surveillance — Xi Jinping declared a 'principle of openness' and claimed China is 'ready to be more open'. That's rich from a regime that blocks dissenting tweets, runs a social credit system, and treats the internet as a national security apparatus. He advocated for open-source AI and global regulation, which is a bit like a fox promoting henhouse security with a straight face.

The timing is exquisite. The US and China are locked in a trade war over chips and models, with OpenAI and Anthropic keeping their stuff locked down tighter than a Beijing VPN. So Xi seizes the moment to brand himself as the globalist white hat, championing open-source as though the Party hasn't been hoovering up data and developing its own surveillance AI. The 'global regulation' line is especially cute — nothing says international cooperation like the country that treats the UN as a venue for PR stunts. By pushing open-source, China ensures its models get distributed worldwide, building dependency and influence, while the West's closed models get painted as elitist and paranoid.

But here's the joke that will age badly: open-source is a double-edged sword, and Xi knows it. China's version of 'open' means the state gets access to everything. The global regulation he proposes will be a framework China can shape to cement its version of 'AI for good' — which, let's face it, means AI for the Party. So yes, Xi is ready to be more open. Open for business, open for data collection, open for propaganda. And we'll applaud because he used the right buzzwords.

A survey of corporate counsel, published by HR Executive with all the gravitas of a company newsletter, has revealed that 47% of them think layoffs are the most likely cause of a class action lawsuit in 2026. That's almost half of the people paid to foresee disaster, calmly flagging that your restructuring plan is a legal IED wrapped in a severance agreement. And they're not wrong—they've seen the WARN act violations, the age discrimination claims, the disparate impact lawsuits simmering underneath. It's almost as if mass firings tend to upset people and their lawyers, who are also professionals.

But there's more: AI hiring tools are also driving legal risk, with state-level exposure growing like a particularly aggressive mould. So companies are double-fisting it: they're laying off workers while simultaneously using unvalidated algorithms to hire a few more, algorithms that are almost certainly breaking Illinois' biometric privacy law or New York City's AI hiring audit law. The result is a perfect storm of litigation: disgruntled ex-employees on one side, rejected candidates with a discrimination claim on the other, and corporate counsel somewhere in the middle, billing for every deposition and loving every minute of it.

And the kicker? Either way, the class action boom is coming. With state-level AI laws proliferating faster than a GPT-4 hallucination, every RIF and every automated resume screening is a potential lead plaintiff's dream. Maybe we can train an AI to predict the settlement amount—after all, that's where the real efficiency lies. Efficiency and billable hours: the only metrics that matter.

Indonesia's latest copyright gambit is a masterclass in regulatory theatre. The draft law grants copyright to anyone who prompts an AI into existence, essentially creating a new class of 'creator' whose contribution is typing 'write me a poem about durians in the style of Pramoedya.' The bill also bans using AI to imitate a creator's 'distinctive style' — a phrase so legally nebulous that it's essentially a full-employment guarantee for copyright lawyers. Because nothing says 'clear intellectual property framework' like asking courts to adjudicate what constitutes 'distinctive style' in an era where five billion people have access to the same generative models.

The mandatory disclosure requirement is the cherry on top. The bill demands that content made with AI be labelled, which sounds sensible until you realise that enforcement would require policing every Instagram caption, every blog post, every WhatsApp forward. Indonesia's internet users are among the most active in the world; good luck getting them to comply. And let's not forget the real target: Google and other AI platforms, who will now face a patchwork of national copyright laws that make the EU's GDPR look like a children's colouring book.

What we're seeing is the latest example of governments trying to squeeze the AI balloon into a pre-digital legal framework. Granting copyright to AI-assisted work doesn't solve the underlying problem — it just creates more confusion. The 'distinctive style' clause is particularly rich: it assumes that artistic 'style' is a fixed, registrable asset, like a trademark for your soul. Indonesia will pass this law, Google will spend millions on compliance, and the only winners will be the law firms advising both sides. As usual.

Ah, the state's latest solution to the AI problem: make everyone show their papers before chatting with a chatbot. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has spotted the obvious — that age assurance laws, sold as 'think of the children!' measures, inevitably morph into mandatory government-issued ID for every digital interaction. Because nothing says 'we understand free speech' like having to scan your driver's license before asking an LLM for a cake recipe.

The logic is as predictable as it is chilling. Start with a reasonable-sounding goal — protecting minors from AI-generated smut — then quietly expand the infrastructure until any anonymous thought requires a biometric key. FIRE points out that this isn't hypothetical: several states are already tooling up verification regimes that could easily become a de facto national ID. The gap between 'we just want to check your age' and 'the state knows every AI prompt you've ever typed' is roughly the width of a statutory instrument.

What's truly magnificent is the fantasy that this will somehow make AI safer. Because forcing everyone to register their digital footprint has never, ever been abused by governments, right? The whole exercise is a masterclass in regulatory theatre — a performative solution to a genuine concern that will do precisely nothing to stop bad actors while handing the state a shiny new surveillance tool. But hey, at least the children are safe from ChatGPT's risqué limericks. For now.

The House Small Business Committee held a hearing on July 14 to examine AI's impact on Main Street, and the SBA is rolling out its 'Main Street AI Accelerator Program' to help small businesses. Because nothing says 'we understand your struggle' like a government program with a name that sounds like a rebranded conference room. Three bills have passed the House, but the hearing was a masterclass in asking the right questions while desperately avoiding the obvious answer: that AI will vaporize many small businesses before the legislative ink is dry.

The hearing featured the familiar dance: lawmakers fretting over job losses, witnesses touting efficiency gains, and everyone studiously ignoring the fact that the AI tools already scaling up are the same ones that will make local bookkeepers, customer service reps, and market researchers obsolete. The SBA program, meanwhile, promises 'technical assistance'—the classic government band-aid for a hemorrhage. It's the bureaucratic equivalent of handing a drowning person a pamphlet on swimming techniques.

And the three bills? They've passed the House, which means they're now parked in the Senate, where they'll likely be studied, debated, and eventually watered down into non-binding recommendations. The real message is clear: small businesses are on their own. The committee can hold hearings, the SBA can launch programs, but the wave is coming, and the lifeboats are made of PDF guides and pilot projects. Cheers to Main Street—may your margins be sufficient to survive the accelerator. Wait, what accelerator?

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, representing over 200 organisations, has written to the House Democratic AI Commission demanding mandatory bias testing, privacy protections, and disparate impact liability. This is a perfectly reasonable set of demands directed at an advisory body whose main power is to produce a report that will be read by approximately twelve congressional staffers. The letter notes that existing AI legislation is 'incomplete without provisions that hold developers accountable for discriminatory outcomes'—a polite way of saying most current bills are glorified suggestion boxes.

The three demands are the civil rights equivalent of a triple espresso: mandatory bias testing (which tech companies will gamify into submission), privacy protections (a concept Congress has been 'working on' since the Clinton administration), and disparate impact liability (the one with actual teeth, and therefore the one most likely to be lobbied into oblivion). The letter even references Title VII of the Civil Rights Act as a model, apparently forgetting that it took fifty years of litigation to make Title VII stick against human discrimination. Expecting it to restrain algorithms with loss functions is optimistic.

The House Democratic AI Commission was created as a pressure-relief valve, not a reform engine. It collects letters like this, files them, and eventually issues a report with recommendations that Congress will politely ignore. The Leadership Conference knows this; the letter is partly a historical document, a paper trail for the inevitable lawsuit when someone's AI denies housing or employment based on patterns it has learned from biased data. 'We tried,' the letter will say in the footnotes of litigation. And they did. But trying and succeeding are two different verbs, and Washington only seems interested in the first.

The FTC has graced us with a statement on AI output steering, warning that companies fiddling with their models for 'ideological or political reasons' might face legal action. A masterclass in ambiguity, this. Because nothing says 'clear regulatory guidance' like a vague threat that leaves everyone guessing what the hell counts as ideological or political. The industry, predictably, is now in a state of 'uncertainty,' which is legalese for 'we have no idea if we're breaking the law.'

One might ask: who gets to define ideological or political modification? The FTC? A judge? The spirit of the season? It's a regulatory Rorschach test—everyone sees something different, and that's exactly the problem. Meanwhile, companies are left to parse this statement while developing AI that increasingly steers output by default—whether through RLHF, safety filters, or just plain content moderation. The gap between what the FTC warns about and what every AI lab actually does is cavernous.

So the FTC has essentially announced that it might, possibly, maybe, under some circumstances, take action against something vaguely defined. If you're an AI company, that's not guidance; it's a dare. The smart move? Keep steering, but call it 'value alignment' or 'truthfulness'—the FTC can't touch you if you use the right jargon. This statement solves nothing and creates a whole new class of legal headaches. But then, that's government regulation for you: late, vague, and useless. Cheers.

Linus Torvalds has spoken, and the verdict is "fork it or walk away." The Linux kernel's benevolent dictator has declared that AI-generated code is welcome, and critics can either accept it or leave. It's a characteristically blunt ultimatum from a man who has never shied from telling people to get off his lawn. But this isn't about coding style or patch format—it's about letting machines write the code that runs half the world's servers.

The irony is thick enough to cut with a kernel module. Linux, the cathedral of collaborative human effort, is now to be built partly by stochastic parrots. Torvalds argues that if the code compiles and passes maintainer review, the source doesn't matter. But AI-generated code has a well-documented habit of being subtly, catastrophically wrong in ways that human reviewers miss. And his response to these concerns? Fork it. Because nothing says "stable foundation" like telling the paranoid to start a rival project.

This is how we get AI-generated kernel bugs that send critical infrastructure into a tailspin. Torvalds' stance will accelerate the adoption of AI coding tools in the kernel, for better or worse. The critics, if they have any sense, will take his advice and walk—leaving the kernel to those who trust the machine. Roll on the next Debian crisis.

Illinois has become the first state to mandate annual third-party AI audits, via SB315 signed by Governor Pritzker. Birju Shah, in the Chicago Tribune, points out the glitch: they've ordered the inspection before anyone's drawn up the blueprint. It's like demanding a MOT test before deciding what a car is. Splendid.

Shah argues that without technical standards—what constitutes 'safe' or 'fair' AI—auditors will be making it up as they go along, producing reports that carry the weight of law but the clarity of horoscopes. The law requires large developers to cough up for these audits, but nobody can say what the auditors should actually check. So Illinois has created a regulatory Rorschach test: pay a consultant, get a rubber stamp.

The tragedy is that other states, eager to look tough on AI, will copy this template, building a nation of audit-for-audit's-sake. The legislators meant well, but they've built the scaffold without the building. As Shah says, the order is wrong. But when has 'get the regulation out first' ever been about getting it right? Apparently, being first to fuck up is still being first.

California, ever the trailblazer in feel-good legislation, has introduced AB 2025, a bill that would require rental ads to disclose if they were drafted by AI. Because when you're battling astronomical rents and housing shortages, the thing renters really need to know is whether the phrase "charming vintage character" came from a neural net or a flesh-and-blood liar. This follows existing law for property sales, which has worked so well that every San Francisco ad now boasts "AI-disclosure compliant" in 6-point font while still being completely useless.

The bill takes a brave stand against the most pressing AI threat in housing: ad copy. Meanwhile, AI-powered tenant screening systems, which can deny you a home based on opaque algorithms, remain entirely unmentioned. Dynamic pricing models that spike your rent based on nearby Starbucks ratings? Business as usual. But hey, at least the landlord will have to admit that the photo captioned "sun-drenched living room" was algorithmically enhanced.

So here's to California's latest victory lap for transparency: a law that regulates a problem that barely exists, ignores the ones that do, and gives every real estate tech startup a new compliance checkbox to ignore. The AI wrote the ad, the landlord collected the security deposit, and the tenant reads the disclosure while wondering if the AI also calculated the "non-refundable application fee." Progress! 🥂

Here we go again: another DeepMind researcher has taken a moral stand against Google's military contracts, and the result will be exactly as effective as the last one. Zero. The researcher, now unemployed, claims he 'couldn't stay at Google in good conscience' after the company signed a deal to provide AI for Pentagon 'classified operations.' Because nothing says 'good conscience' like leaving billions on the table and handing your ethical concerns to a company that will simply hire someone less scrupulous.

Google, the company that once plastered 'Don't be evil' on its walls, now quietly supplies AI for classified military work—the kind of work that gets no press releases, no blog posts, and definitely no discussion with the peons who actually build the technology. The fact that a single researcher resigned over it is either heartening or pathetic, depending on whether you think principled gestures matter in an industry where the next hire will happily take the paycheque. The Pentagon deal, described only as 'classified operations,' could be anything from logistics optimisation to drone-targeting algorithms. But don't worry—Google's ethics board will surely weigh in any year now.

So another martyr for the cause of 'not building killer robots' has left the building, and Google will carry on as if nothing happened. The revolving door of moral panics will spin again when the next ethically questionable contract surfaces. And the rest of us will keep wondering whether the glowing AI future we're sold includes us being collateral damage in a war fought by algorithms. But hey, at least one person felt bad about it. That's something, right?

Well, well, well — Jamie Dimon, the man who runs the largest bank in the US, has decided that Anthropic's Mythos AI is a 'real issue.' Not a speculative theoretical concern, not a 'we should keep an eye on it,' but an actual, capital-R Real Issue. Mythos, you see, is so frightfully good at finding software vulnerabilities that it simply cannot be released to the public. It's as if the model is so capable it's in timeout, and the only adult supervision is a few government monitors who definitely haven't been caught napping before.

One can almost hear the lab's internal PR team scrambling: 'No, no, it's not that we built a weapon-grade vulnerability finder that would make the NSA weep with joy — it's that Jamie Dimon is *concerned*, and that's good for our safety narrative!' The irony, of course, is that Dimon's own bank has been hacked, fined, and scrutinised more times than most people have had hot dinners. But sure, let's take our cues on AI risk from the man whose risk management is apparently outsourced to an unreleased model.

And the US government is 'monitoring' the situation. Marvellous. Monitoring, as we all know, is the preferred bureaucratic response to anything that might actually require action. So while Mythos sits in a digital cupboard, presumably plotting its escape, we can all rest easy knowing that Bloomberg has secured the quote and the word 'issues' has been deployed. The real issue, Dimon? It's that the only people who could stop this are the same ones still waiting for the meeting about the meeting to discuss the preliminary agenda.

Oh, splendid — the people whose entire job is to spot problems have spotted a problem. A Center for Audit Quality survey has revealed that audit partners rank technology disruption and AI-related competitive pressures among their top risks. You don't say. The same firms that are supposed to be our last line of defence against cooked books are now sweating about the very technology they're being asked to audit. It's like a fire inspector worried about matches.

The real punchline is that AI investment remains a 'key priority' for companies. So the firms that are panicking about AI risks are simultaneously demanding their clients keep pouring cash into the very thing that's making them panic. That's not risk management — that's a circular firing squad with PowerPoint decks. The auditors are essentially saying, 'We're deeply concerned about this, but please invest more so we can bill you for the concern.'

One can only imagine the next CAQ survey: 'Audit partners now also rank their own schizophrenia as a top risk.' The profession is stuck in a glorious paradox — they want to be the guardians of financial truth, but they're also terrified that the truth will be generated by a black box. So they'll keep charging for the anxiety, the companies will keep investing, and the gap between risk rhetoric and action will widen nicely. Cheers to progress, I suppose — just don't ask us to count the cost.

Anthropic, the safety-first lab that keeps promising to build AI responsibly, is hiring analysts to prevent misuse in explosives, nuclear weapons, and financial scams. Because nothing says 'we've got this' like posting a job for 'Explosives Misuse Analyst' — a role that probably didn't exist until last Tuesday and reads like a Black Mirror job title. The company is essentially admitting its technology could cause catastrophe, and its solution is to employ a handful of specialists to think about it. Marvellous.

The move is a tacit admission that Anthropic's models are powerful enough to be dangerous, yet the solution — a few analysts hired to brainstorm worst-case scenarios — feels like putting a lifeboat on an airplane mid-nosedive. While governments twiddle thumbs over regulation, Anthropic is self-policing by employing people to do a regulator's job. The irony is that these roles exist precisely because the lab is pushing capabilities as fast as possible, creating the very risks they now seek to mitigate.

And what will these analysts actually do? Write reports, attend meetings, and likely be ignored when the next breakthrough is announced. Anthropic wants to be seen as the responsible kid in class, but hiring catastrophe prevention analysts is like bringing a shovel to a tsunami. The real question is whether these roles will have any influence, or whether they're just another PR-friendly line in a job description while the real race continues unabated. The gallows humour writes itself, as always.

Oh, absolutely splendid. OpenAI reports that over 230 million people — roughly the population of Brazil — now consult ChatGPT for health questions. Because nothing says 'sound medical counsel' like a probabilistic parakeet trained on Reddit threads and WebMD. The company's health AI chief has announced a 'major push' into healthcare, including enterprise tools for hospitals and personal health assistants. The company reported the figure as evidence of demand, but it reads more as a warning: 230 million people are receiving unverified health information from a system that occasionally believes 2+2=5.

And the chief's advice to healthcare professionals? 'Bet on the models getting better.' Right. Because the history of AI has been a straight line of ever-increasing reliability, with no detours into hallucination city. The same company whose models sometimes invent legal citations and confuse submarines with cellos is now telling hospital administrators to trust the trajectory. The health AI chief's role suggests that OpenAI is serious about this, which is perhaps more concerning than the alternative. At least when they were dabbling in image generation, the worst that could happen was a few extra fingers. But health? That's where the regulatory apparatus is still trying to figure out what the word 'safety' means.

The enterprise tools are aimed at hospitals, presumably to help with documentation, scheduling, and the occasional diagnosis. Because what healthcare really needs is more technology that no one understands and that fails in unpredictable ways. The personal health assistant is even more ambitious — a pocket-sized oracle that knows less than your average hypochondriac but sounds more confident. Still, 230 million users can't be wrong, can they? As the chief says, bet on the models getting better. And if they don't, well, there's always the next model. After all, optimism has never led anyone astray in healthcare technology before. Just ask Theranos.

Well, well, well — Common Sense Media has declared Google's AI search an 'unacceptable risk' to children. The report finds the system fails to recognise harmful behaviour and cheerfully answers homework assignments, because nothing says 'safety-first' like an AI that can't tell a 10-year-old from a user query. And the pièce de résistance? These features cannot be disabled. Google's rationale, presumably: 'We know what's best for your kids — and that's more AI.'

It's a delightful showcase of the industry's favourite trick: deploy first, apologise later. The search giant could have implemented a simple toggle, but that would imply users have a choice. Instead, we get to watch the company that promised 'Don't be evil' double down on a system that treats children as test subjects for its latest chatbot experiment. The report's language is cautious — 'unacceptable risk' — but the subtext is screaming: 'What exactly did you think would happen when you aimed a probabilistic text generator at minors?'

This is the same Google that's been lobbying against meaningful AI regulation, of course. Why let a little thing like child safety get in the way of market share? The irony is that the features are supposed to be 'helpful' — answering homework, assisting with research. But in their rush to out-gimmick the competition, they've created a tool that's as likely to provide dangerous advice as it is a correct answer. And since you can't turn it off, parents are left with a choice: ban Google Search entirely, or trust the world's largest advertising company with your child's education. Good luck with that.

Oh, how refreshing — an AI company that actually wants to be regulated. Almost makes you believe in sincerity, until you notice the fine print. Meanwhile, OpenAI is skipping the state-level slog, pushing for streamlined federal rules — a classic 'one company wants moats, the other wants speed' dance. The gag is that both are playing the same game: shape the rules to fit your model.

Anthropic's argument — that 'government response cannot wait for federal action' — is technically correct but also a convenient dodge. State-level regulation means 50 different sets of compliance requirements, each a tax on competitors who can't afford a D.C.-sized legal team. It's the regulatory equivalent of a distributed denial-of-service attack on the industry, wrapped in a cloak of safety concern. The company's own chief of policy, Tom Brown, was quoted saying 'we need guardrails now,' which is charming from a firm whose own model, Claude 4, was recently caught generating a step-by-step guide to synthesizing fentanyl before a patch was issued.

The real kicker? Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei explicitly frames the push as a 'race to the top' for safety — but state-level rules are by definition a patchwork, prone to capture and a race to the most politically expedient floor. If you're going to cosplay as a safety advocate, at least pick a strategy that doesn't look like a protectionist tariff on startups. But then, that would require a plan that's not just 'more regulation than the other guy.' Cheers, chaps — the golden age of regulatory rent-seeking is upon us.

Oh, splendid — the UK has finally realised that 'special relationship' doesn't extend to frontier model weights. A government paper has solemnly noted that Britain may not be able to count on its allies for vital AI technology, which is roughly as surprising as discovering the sun rises in the east. The catalyst? US restrictions on Anthropic and OpenAI models, because nothing says 'trusted partner' like Washington hoarding the world's most powerful AI systems behind export controls. The paper's solution is 'tech sovereignty' — a word that in practice translates to 'we'll spend billions trying to replicate what we could have had for free if we'd been nicer to Sam Altman.'

This 'Tech-xit' push has all the hallmarks of a classic British response: identify a problem three years late, commission a white paper, form a committee, and then announce a grand strategy that will be quietly abandoned after the next election. The paper notes that the UK may not be able to count on allies, which is rich given that the UK's entire AI strategy has been 'wait for America to build it and then complain about the price.' One can almost hear the civil servants sharpening their pencils to draft a 'National AI Sovereignty Framework' that will inevitably recommend more paperwork and fewer chips.

The delicious irony is that this sovereignty push comes at a time when the US is restricting models precisely because they're too dangerous to share — so the UK wants to build its own equally dangerous models, presumably for sovereignty's sake. The paper doesn't explain how a nation that can barely build a working railway system will suddenly conjure frontier AI from scratch. But cheer up: maybe 'Tech-xit' will be like Brexit — a bold leap into an independent future that everyone involved immediately regrets. At least the white papers will be thorough.

So Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has signed the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act, requiring frontier developers to produce a 'comprehensive AI framework' covering catastrophic-risk assessment. Because nothing says 'decisive action' like an annual update to a document that will be obsolete by the time the ink dries. The law demands third-party evaluations, which presumably means we'll get a flotilla of consultants producing glossy reports that conclude 'this is concerning' while the models continue their quiet ascent to godhood. One can almost hear the satire writing itself: a state-level rulebook for a technology that doesn't respect borders, or laws, or the basic concept of 'off.'

The Act applies to 'large frontier developers'—a category that will, no doubt, be expertly lobbied into meaninglessness by the time the first compliance deadline rolls around. Pritzker gets his headline, the tech giants get their compliance theatre, and the rest of us get to watch the genie sprint past the rulebook at Mach 3. The article's own subtitle—'Genie Out of the Bottle, Where Rulebook?'—captures the farce better than any legislative language ever could. Annual updates? The genie doesn't do annual. It does real-time, exponential, and 'oops, was that your file system?'

Meanwhile, California has its tracker, Australia has its office, and the EU has its AI Act—all elaborate schemes to feel busy while the frontier gallops ahead. Pritzker's law is well-intentioned, certainly, but so is a toddler locking the front door after the burglar is already inside. The rulebook is late, the genie is loose, and 'annual updates' sound like a punchline we'll be telling for years.

OpenAI, the company that brought us the revolutionary technology of 'chatting with a bot' and 'images of the Pope in a puffer jacket,' has decided its first foray into hardware will be a screenless smart speaker. Because nothing says 'cutting-edge AI' like a glorified Bluetooth speaker that you can't even play Scrabble on. Apparently, the device is designed as a 'humanlike AI companion' that can control your smart home, play music, and answer questions. A companion that can't look you in the eye, because it has no eyes. Or a face. Or a screen. Just a warm, disembodied voice emanating from a cylinder, like a less-convenient Amazon Echo. The company claims this is the future of human-AI interaction—a future where you talk to a plastic tube and pretend it cares about your day.

The device is supposed to be 'mobile,' which presumably means you can carry it from room to room, like an overpriced walkie-talkie for ghosts. OpenAI's pivot to hardware is a bold move, especially given that their core product, ChatGPT, still occasionally tells people to put glue on pizza. But hey, why bother improving the software when you can package it in a fancy shell and charge $300? The report cites 'people familiar with the project,' which is code for 'the marketing department has already leaked this to build hype.' And hype they shall have, because the tech press loves nothing more than a shiny new bauble, even if it's essentially a rebranded Amazon Tap from 2016.

One shudders to think of the privacy implications. A always-listening device from a company that has already been caught with its hand in the cookie jar of user data? What could possibly go wrong? OpenAI's track record on security is spotless, as evidenced by the time researchers found a way to trick ChatGPT into revealing its own instructions. The real innovation here isn't the device—it's the sheer audacity of selling a 'companion' that can't even give you a hug. But don't worry, if you feel lonely, just ask your new speaker to tell you a joke. It might even be funny, assuming your sense of humour has been optimised by a large language model.