Plus: Anthropic has called for a global slowdown in AI development. The Meta hack shows there's more to AI security than Mythos On Monday, reports emerged that attackers had used Meta's AI customer support agent to steal Instagram accounts. Their approach was simple: they asked the agent to link the accounts to email addresses they controlled, and it complied. Since Anthropic announced that its Mythos model was too good at hacking for a general release, cybersecurity concerns have focused on the risk of superpowered AI systems overwhelming computer infrastructure. But the Instagram hack shows that far simpler exploits can still cause damage. As companies offload more work to AI, these comparatively unsophisticated attacks are becoming harder to ignore.

On June 5, reported that attackers had been using Meta's AI customer support agent to steal Instagram accounts. Their approach was simple: They asked the agent to link the accounts to email addresses that they controlled, and the agent complied. One attacker broke into the dormant Obama White House account and made pro-Iran posts; others took over accounts with valuable, single-word handles, possibly in order to sell them. AI cybersecurity concerns are nothing new. Since Anthropic announced in April that its Mythos model was too good at hacking to be released to the general public, commentators, researchers, and federal officials alike have fixated on the idea that superpowered AI systems could lay waste to our computer infrastructure. That's not quite what this Instagram hack was: There, AI was the target rather than the attacker, and the method was far simpler than anything Mythos would cook up. But as companies offload more work to AI, these comparatively unsophisticated attacks could wreak their own havoc. "As AI becomes more and more widely used--especially when AI is more and more widely used to automate our work flows, like account recovery--I think attackers are going to be more and more motivated to attack AI itself," says Neil Gong, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University.

This week I've been at SXSW London . There's been music, film, and a lot--and I mean --of talk about AI. I also had the opportunity to sit down with Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent the last 30 years studying how people interact with digital technologies. Early in her career, the biggest concerns were the potential impacts of internet and email use on our brains. We may laugh those concerns off today, but it's true that as the technologies became more ubiquitous and ingrained in our daily lives, our attention spans began to shrink.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. O.C. immigration attorneys suspended for filing briefs filled with AI-hallucinated errors The attorneys were fined $2,500 each and suspended from practicing in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for six months. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . A pair of Orange County immigration attorneys received temporary suspensions after the court discovered they used generative AI to write briefs that included "multiple nonexistent cases, misattributed quotations, and gross misrepresentations."

Plus: The EU has proposed new legislation to end its Big Tech dependence. Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. The number of these filings has more than doubled compared to before 2023. She puts that jump down to AI. But while AI appears to be expanding access to justice, it doesn't seem to be improving people's chances of winning. Judges are starting to question what rights and duties chatbots should have as they stand in for lawyers.

Silicon Valley is turning to ethicists to shape the future of AI. Philosophy has long suffered an unfortunate reputation as pedantic and abstruse. In one of the most prominent debates of the 20th century, philosophers spent a great deal of energy arguing over what means. Paul Graham, the legendary tech investor, studied philosophy as a college student, which seemed "an impressively impractical thing to do," as he later wrote. But over time, Graham became disillusioned: "I kept taking philosophy courses and they kept being boring," he explained .

ChatGPT now processes around 2.5 billion queries every day UN researchers are urging people to be less polite to artificial intelligences after a report found that cutting words from prompts could reduce ChatGPT's energy consumption by up to 25 per cent. Removing "please", "thank you" and other unnecessary words from AI prompts could save 87 to 98 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, the report from the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) found. That is the equivalent of the annual residential electricity use of up to 760,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa. 'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day To reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint, people should write concise prompts, avoid getting sucked into conversation loops and refrain from starting relationships with AI, the researchers said. "We are not saying be rude to your AI. But don't fall into the interaction trap and don't go falling in love with it either," says Kaveh Madani at UNU-INWEH.

Some of the optical components used in Atom Computing's quantum computer The race to build the first truly useful quantum computer just got more exciting. A quantum computer made from extremely cold atoms has now passed some of the most important milestones towards usefulness, joining a small group of equally able and promising machines. Though there is wide agreement that sufficiently powerful quantum computers would transform our ability to discover new materials and drugs, and break the encryption that underpins the internet, there are many competing ideas about how best to build them. Industry mainstays such as Google and IBM have spent a decade building quantum computers from tiny superconducting circuits, and this approach is currently the front-runner. But an alternate approach that uses electrically neutral ultracold atoms has recently been gaining traction.

OpenAI has failed to execute several strategies to monetise ChatGPT, including advertisements, which Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, had said would be a'last resort'. OpenAI has failed to execute several strategies to monetise ChatGPT, including advertisements, which Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, had said would be a'last resort'. As the tech mega-IPO race heats up, has OpenAI missed its moment? With rivals racing to market to raise'eye-popping sums', the spotlight is now on the AI sector's one-time'poster child' A year is a long time in AI. Just 12 months ago, Sam Altman was predicting his company OpenAI would build a super intelligence and fundamentally remake society.

Donald Trump's new AI order is a lot of nothing. For months now, the White House has hinted that it may try to rein in the AI industry. Just two weeks ago, the nation's top tech executives--including Sam Altman and Dario Amodei--were invited to attend a ceremony for the signing of a long-anticipated executive order on AI. But just hours before the ceremony, Donald Trump scrapped it. America is leading the world in the AI race, the president told reporters at the time, "and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead."