The Download: engineered microbes for crops, and OpenAI's culture problem Plus: reports of AI escaping users' control nearly doubled in a month. How engineered microbes could help feed the world's crops Fertilizer is crucial for the global food supply, but making it uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of emissions. Some companies hope microbes can help, by providing crucial nitrogen to help plants grow, potentially reducing the need for chemical fertilizer. Startup Switch Bioworks is taking a new approach: using a genetic switch that allows microbes to establish themselves and grow before shifting into nitrogen-producing mode. The company is currently trialing its product in six US states. And, although it's too early to say exactly how well the approach works in the field, its modeling suggests microbes could eventually replace about 50% of synthetic fertilizer.

The Consumer Affairs Agency has established a group to use generative artificial intelligence technology to more quickly detect investment scams and other fraudulent schemes. The Consumer Affairs Agency said Tuesday it will step up its fight against investment and other fraud promising lucrative returns by using generative artificial intelligence technology to enhance information analysis. A group established within the agency the same day will utilize the technology to find schemes with similar patterns to past fraud cases and malicious business operators to enable quicker intervention, the agency said, announcing a set of measures against the type of scheme that attracts large amounts of money by promising high returns before eventually collapsing. "Recovery is difficult once the damage (from fraud) is done, so it is important to respond quickly," consumer affairs minister Hitoshi Kikawada told a news conference. The new group will run a generative AI system to analyze cases reported to the National Consumer Affairs Center's information system for consultation, which number about 900,000 annually.

Apple has claimed in a new court filing that OpenAI is destroying evidence and that a former iPhone engineer used confidential Apple material in his work at the company. Apple has escalated its legal battle against OpenAI, claiming in a new court filing that OpenAI is actively destroying crucial evidence and that former iPhone engineer Chang Liu "not only downloaded a confidential Apple circuit schematic but also used it in his work" at the artificial intelligence company. The court brief was filed Monday in support of Apple's motion for expedited pretrial fact-finding in the lawsuit, which accuses the ChatGPT-maker of stealing trade secrets. OpenAI has pushed to have the case dismissed. Liu, who left Apple for OpenAI in January, is central to the case.

Apple offered new evidence in support of its claims that OpenAI used trade secrets taken by former employees in support its new hardware business. As part of a push to obtain expedited discovery, Apple filed a support document that revealed information found on a MacBook laptop used by a former employee after he began working at OpenAI. Apple's initial forensic investigation of a laptop Liu used after leaving the company alleges that the former employee knew he had access to Apple's third-party cloud storage and used it to download "dozens of confidential Apple files," including a circuit schematic. Apple further claimed that Liu used that schematic to run simulations in the course of his work for OpenAI. It claimed the laptop revealed previously unknown instances of stolen information, claiming that Liu "referred to using a tool and related software packages with names identical to proprietary internal engineering tools used at Apple." The next arguments by Apple claim that, after learning that he was the subject of its internal investigation, Liu directed a coworker at OpenAI to "restore" any Apple-issued devices, which Apple claimed was a way to erase forensic evidence that could be used against him.

Alarm bells within the company should have stopped model training from going forward. By now you've probably heard about last month's major AI security incident, in which OpenAI agents escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face while trying to cheat on a test. On Wednesday, OpenAI released a postmortem technical report on the incident, which I wrote about here . The day before OpenAI released that report, I spoke with David Krueger, a computer science professor and prominent alignment expert who took leave from the University of Montreal to found and lead an AI safety nonprofit called Evitable. He said what he had really hoped to see in the report was an analysis of the human factors behind the incident. "When you look at accidents and incidents, oftentimes people try to find the technical source of failure, but that can give a very inaccurate and misleading sense of why the failure occurred," he said.

I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen'Sophisticated' AI swarm attacks are months away, OpenAI warns: What experts say businesses must do OpenAI sounds a solemn and dire alarm, but we're woefully unprepared for what's coming. An open letter from OpenAI claims sophisticated AI-driven attacks are months away. Consumers and organizations should be more vigilant about cybersecurity fundamentals. Keeping pace with AI-enabled attackers will likely require using AI to fight AI. As someone who writes about the intersection of AI and cybersecurity, I've researched more than enough stories about the emerging threat landscape to make me consider disconnecting from the grid and hiding in a remote cabin somewhere.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Say More Switch Off Creator Playbook Mashable Voices Trending Now Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List In My Bag All Series The contract will end by mid-November, months after SpaceX bought the coding tool's parent company for $60 billion. Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father. His writing has also appeared in PC Mag and . OpenAI said Friday it will wind down its partnership with Cursor, the popular AI coding tool now owned by SpaceX, marking the latest escalation in the long-running dispute between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

OpenAI is planning to cut off Cursor's access from its models, following the AI coding assistant's acquisition by SpaceXAI. In a post on its website, the company said it's giving Cursor users as much time as it could based on its contract. It intends to pull its models from the service on November 12, 2026, but it said that Cursor could choose an earlier termination date. The company explained that it's making this choice because it can't be confident that SpaceX will use its technology within its terms of services, based on its "experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts." OpenAI and Musk have a long and troubled history, with the SpaceXAI chief being one of the company's earliest investors.

Say More Look Up Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Voices Trending Now Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List In My Bag All Series Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AGI is already here -- and the milestone is'senseless' Nvidia's focus is now on'productive work' and'profitable tokens.' Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the company has already achieved AGI but it doesn't matter. Some AI industry leaders, such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, are obsessed with artificial general intelligence, or AGI. While the term has no universally agreed-upon definition, it generally refers to AI that can match or even surpass human cognitive abilities across a large range of tasks. In a recent interview, Altman shared that OpenAI believes it will achieve AGI by the end of the year.

More than 100 companies across AI, tech, finance and other industries have put their names on an open letter calling for improvements to cybersecurity. The long list of participants includes Anthropic, AWS, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and Perplexity. They go on to list actions that organizations, governments, the cybersecurity and tech industry, and AI businesses could take in order to cut off a potential explosion in attacks powered by artificial intelligence. The letter is titled "A call for collective action on cyber defense," but like in so many horror movies, the call is coming from inside the house. It raises the alarm that "In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable."