Welcome back to, TIME's 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? What to Know: Musk v. Altman Two artificial intelligence heavyweights will face off in court this spring, in a case that could have far-reaching outcomes for the future of AI. A judge ruled on Thursday that Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman, Microsoft, and other OpenAI co-founders can proceed to a jury trial, dismissing OpenAI's attempts to get the case thrown out. The lawsuit relates to the early days of OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit that was funded by around $38 million in donations from Musk.

Booth is a reporter at TIME. Booth is a reporter at TIME. With the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence around the world over the past year, the technology's potential to cause harm has become clearer. Reports of AI-related incidents rose 50% year-over-year from 2022 to 2024, and in the 10 months to October 2025, incidents had already surpassed the 2024 total, according to the AI Incident Database, a crowd-sourced repository of media reports on AI mishaps. Incidents arising from use of the technology, such as deepfake-enabled scams and chatbot-induced delusions have been rising steadily, according to the latest data.

Signal's Founder Built a Chatbot That Can't Spy on You Welcome back to, TIME's 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? What to Know: Signal's founder is working on encrypted chatbots Moxie Marlinspike, the cryptographic prodigy who wrote the code that underpins Signal and WhatsApp, has a new project--and it could be one of the most important things happening in AI right now. The tool, named Confer, is an end-to-end encrypted AI assistant. It uses smart math to ensure that even though the compute-intensive process of running the AI still happens on a server in the cloud, the only person who can access the unscrambled details of that computation is you, the user.

AI Is Moving Beyond Chatbots. The DNA file had been gathering dust in Pietro Schirano's computer for years. Then, earlier this month, he gave it to Claude Code--an "agentic coding tool" developed by Anthropic--for analysis. "I'm attaching my raw DNA file from Ancestry DNA," he told the tool. The AI spawned copies of itself on Schirano's computer, each one simulating an expert in a different part of the genome--one expert on cardiovascular disease, another on aging, a third on autoimmune disease.

Why the World's Best AI Systems Are Still So Bad at Pokémon Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. Right now, live on Twitch, you can watch three of the world's smartest AI systems-- GPT 5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro --doing their best to beat classic Pokémon games. At least by human standards, they are not very good. The systems are slow, overconfident, and often confused.

In this photo illustration, a screen displays examples of AI prompt-created videos, made with Xai's Grok app, on January 12, 2026 in London, England. In this photo illustration, a screen displays examples of AI prompt-created videos, made with Xai's Grok app, on January 12, 2026 in London, England. The United Kingdom plans to bring into force a law that criminalizes the creation of non-consensual sexualized images, including through Grok, the chatbot within Elon Musk's X application, following the app's deepfake scandal of the last few weeks. "This means individuals are committing a criminal offence if they create--or seek to create--such content--including on X--and anyone who does this should expect to face the full extent of the law," Technology Secretary Liz Kendal announced in the House of Commons Monday, adding that the government would work to also make it illegal for companies to supply the tools designed to create these nonconsensual images. The move came just hours after the Office of Communications (Ofcom)--the country's independent regulator for the communications industry--announced that it will be investigating X and the thousands of pornographic images generated by Grok that flooded the app, including sexualized images of what appear to be minors.

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.

Welcome back to, TIME's 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? Late last year, an AI researcher opened his laptop and showed me something jaw-dropping. Lucas Hansen, co-founder of nonprofit CivAI, was showing me an app he built that coaxed popular AI models into giving what appeared to be detailed step-by-step instructions for creating poliovirus and anthrax. Any safeguards that these models had were stripped away.

Children and parked cars are color-coded on a monitor inside a Mercedes-Benz S-Class during an autonomous driving and AI demonstration in Immendingen, Germany on July 17, 2018. Children and parked cars are color-coded on a monitor inside a Mercedes-Benz S-Class during an autonomous driving and AI demonstration in Immendingen, Germany on July 17, 2018. In 2025, misconceptions about AI flourished as people struggled to make sense of the rapid development and adoption of the technology. Here are three popular ones to leave behind in the New Year. When GPT-5 was released in May, people wondered (not for the first time) if AI was hitting a wall.

Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. Albania's new AI-generated minister Diella speaks during the parliamentary session for the voting of the new government of Albania, in Tirana on Sept. 18, 2025. Albania's new AI-generated minister Diella speaks during the parliamentary session for the voting of the new government of Albania, in Tirana on Sept. 18, 2025. Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. It's been three years since the launch of ChatGPT gave hundreds of millions of people access to a kind of digital genie in their pocket--and things have been getting stranger by the month. Besides billions of AI-generated emails and the technology's widespread disruption of education and cognitive work, in 2025, some people began to fall in love with their AIs.