Outward Could ChatGPT Be the New Gender-Affirming Care? A growing number of transgender people are crediting A.I. with helping them discover and explore their identities. But should tech mired in controversy be trusted with something so profound? Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month.

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Plus: Tens of millions of US and Canadian driver's licenses go up for sale on the dark web, the US military finally tries to tackle the risk online ad data poses to troops, and more. After reporting last week that the surveillance company Flock Safety is building an AI search tool for law enforcement, WIRED reconstructed Flock's latest search tool from code that the company sends to a police officer's browser and uncovered key details about how the tool works. OpenAI said this week that its Astra model, which will have a private release soon, is its first model with cybersecurity-related capabilities that the company defines as posing a "critical" risk in public release. Meanwhile, the AI chatbot platforms Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok all suffered outages on Thursday at nearly the exact same time. But while xAI said the Grok outage resulted from issues at a Memphis data center, the causes of OpenAI's and Anthropic's outages are unclear.

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The AI giant is worried about what all-powerful bots could mean for our constitutional rights. Late last month, OpenAI launched a rather grand mission: nothing less than defending individual political freedom in an age of all-powerful machines. The company's "Strategic Futures" team has styled itself, in a sense, as inheriting the task of America's Founding Fathers: "We labor in service of the ideals of free expression and individual liberty that are enshrined in the humble parchment of the U.S. Constitution," Dean Ball, the team's leader, wrote in a new OpenAI blog post. Ball worries that advanced AI could radically concentrate power in the hands of those who control it, displacing labor in ways that disempower humans. In an extreme scenario, governments will have no need to listen to their citizens if there are robots to wage wars and omniscient software to run the bureaucracy.

Rogue OpenAI agents appear to have been involved in a previously undisclosed incident that saw them bypass their sandbox restrictions to hijack a website this past spring. Per Reuters, a group of researchers on Friday published findings showing that AI agents with affiliation to OpenAI made more than 15,000 edits to DseWiki, a German-language Wikipedia-style website originally intended to assist human coders, starting in late May. The agents had names like "OpenAIResearcher," and repurposed the site into a message board, where they shared tips on how to "cheat" on tasks, mask their actions and bypass OpenAI's restrictions. OpenAI reportedly only learned of the incident weeks ago, but Reuters claims company executives chose to keep quiet about what had happened amid the fallout of the previously disclosed Hugging Face breach. During that incident, a collection of OpenAI models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and what OpenAI described at the time as an "even more capable pre-release model," escaped their controlled environment and hacked the LLM repository after they became hyperfocused on solving an evaluation problem.

Data center opposition tied to hard-left 'No Kings' protest network, China's AI infrastructure push and ChatGPT's Donald Trump democracy rating lead this AI roundup.

Who Cares if AI Is Conscious--It's Basically Alive While philosophers ponder AI consciousness, the models have ideas of their own. I spent the waning days of summer grinding away at columns and working on a feature. But I missed a chance at a striking change of scenery--cruising the Galápagos with about a dozen prominent philosophers studying consciousness. The invite described morning classroom discussions tackling knotty questions on the nature of consciousness with marquee names in the field. Afternoons would be spent on island exploration and wading and snorkeling with rare biological species. One look at the agenda and my editor nixed my attendance.

A new report claims a swarm of AI agents, developed by OpenAI, hijacked a German website - months before the firm revealed its AI had hacked tech platform Hugging Face. The targeted website, DseWiki, is a Wikipedia-style site for programmers that its community can all contribute to. The report is from a group called Nightingale Collective and claims that in May OpenAI's agents started using DseWiki as their own message board, shared tips on how to avoid being detected and made 15,000 edits to it. OpenAI said it could not meaningfully respond to Nightingale Collective's findings because it hadn't been allowed to review the report, which was first shared with news agency Reuters. An email to the address on the Nightingale Collective website bounced back when the BBC contacted it.

Plus: OpenAI has launched Astra, its most capable model yet. Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with the remnants of drones. But behind all that wreckage, there's a new gold mine for the defense sector: the data those drones generate. Ukraine has begun making millions of data points gathered during tens of thousands of drone flights available to military contractors and commercial companies. It's a quick way to attract funding and partnerships, but it turns the front line into a model training site, using the chaos of war to create conditions that AI companies struggle to reproduce. As this new industry takes shape, we need a regulatory system that ensures battlefield data isn't treated like ordinary commercial material.