The Fox News AI Newsletter highlights 10 CES 2026 showstopping gadgets, breakthrough health tech and new AI tools designed to improve safety and everyday life.

A day of national mourning is being held in Switzerland on Friday, following a fire which killed 40 young people, mostly teenagers, in a bar in the Crans-Montana ski resort on New Year's Eve. Church bells rang across the country for five minutes, and people stood for a minute's silence in their memory. Firefighters in the resort were applauded as they joined an audience watching the tribute ceremony, which was live-streamed to Crans-Montana from the Swiss city of Martigny. The ceremony saw the leaders of neighbouring countries, including France's Emmanuel Macron, join an audience while speakers, including the Valais canton's president, paid tribute to those who died. The annual food fight festival ''Els Enfarinats'' has left the Spanish town of Ibi covered in flour and egg shells.

In March 2025, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), published a report on the Future of AI Research . The report, which was led by outgoing AAAI President Francesca Rossi covers 17 different AI topics and aims to clearly identify the trajectory of AI research in a structured way. As part of this project, members of the report team, and other selected AI practitioners, are taking part in a series of video panel discussions covering selected chapters from the report. In the third panel, the AI experts tackle the topic of AI reasoning. They consider the definition of reasoning, what reasoning is and what it should be in our AI models, planning techniques, model training, making smart (and not to smart choices) about which AI products to use, guarantees, why we shouldn't imitate human reasoning in AI models, thinking about the future, and more.

X is only allowing "verified" users to create images with Grok. Experts say it represents the "monetization of abuse"--and anyone can still generate images on Grok's app and website. After creating thousands of "undressing" pictures of women and sexualized imagery of apparent minors, Elon Musk's X has apparently limited who can generate images with Grok. However, despite the changes, the chatbot is still being used to create "undressing" sexualized images on the platform. On Friday morning, the Grok account on X started responding to some users' requests with a message saying that image generation and editing are "currently limited to paying subscribers."

Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok has limited image generation on the social media platform X amid growing backlash over its use to create sexualised deepfakes of women and children. Grok told X users on Friday that image generation and editing features were now available only to paying subscribers. The move comes after Musk was threatened with fines and several countries pushed back publicly against the tool that allowed users to alter online images to remove the subjects' clothes. The European Commission said on Monday that such images circulating on X were unlawful and appalling. The United Kingdom's data regulator also said it had asked the platform to explain how it was complying with data protection laws following concerns that Grok was generating sexually abusive images of women.

A Sharpa North robot uses a camera at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. A Sharpa North robot uses a camera at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. ESTLast modified on Fri 9 Jan 2026 10.00 EST This year will be filled with robots that can fold your laundry, pick up objects and climb stairs, fridges that you can command to open by voice, laptops with screens that can follow you around the room on motorised hinges and the reimagining of the BlackBerry phone. Those are the predictions from the annual CES tech show in Las Vegas that took place this week. The sprawling event aims to showcase cutting-edge technology developed by startups and big brands. Many of these fancy developments will be available to actually buy, moving from outlandish concepts to production devices, although some are still limited to costly prototypes.

That time Oregon blew up a whale with dynamite. And why we should never do it again. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When a whale dies in the ocean, an ecosystem grows around its sunken carcass. It's an epic burial at sea, something researchers call a whale fall .

If I were to locate the moment AI slop broke through into popular consciousness, I'd pick the video of rabbits bouncing on a trampoline that went viral last summer. For many savvy internet users, myself included, it was the first time we were fooled by an AI video, and it ended up spawning a wave of almost identical generated clips. My first reaction was that, broadly speaking, all of this sucked. That's become a familiar refrain, in think pieces and at dinner parties. Everything online is slop now--the internet "enshittified," with AI taking much of the blame. But then friends started sharing AI clips in group chats that were compellingly weird, or funny.

'The incident is a lesson in the dangers of rapid and unregulated technology: it is not a coincidence that among many users, the first thing they thought to do with AI was to harass and degrade women.' 'The incident is a lesson in the dangers of rapid and unregulated technology: it is not a coincidence that among many users, the first thing they thought to do with AI was to harass and degrade women.' Grok is undressing women and children. Don't expect the US to take action Elon Musk's reckless and degrading AI could be built differently. Fri 9 Jan 2026 08.00 ESTLast modified on Fri 9 Jan 2026 12.48 EST Over the past year, Elon Musk has made a series of protocol changes to Grok, the proprietary AI chatbot of his company xAI, which runs prominently on his social media site X, formerly Twitter. Many of these changes have been geared to make the bot more amenable to producing pornography.

Welcome back to In the Loop, new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? In the past few weeks, many tech leaders have made bold predictions about what AI will achieve in 2026, from mastering the field of biology to surpassing human intelligence outright . But in 2026's first week, the most visible use of AI has been X users employing Grok to digitally disrobe women. Elon Musk's platform X has been flooded with nonconsensual AI-created images, requested by users, of unclothed or scantily-clad women, men and children, sometimes in sexual positions.