Sir Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, raised concerns over the use of AI by hostile groups. Sir Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, raised concerns over the use of AI by hostile groups. In his annual speech on threats to the nation, Sir Ken McCallum, the head of the UK's intelligence service, MI5, warned that AI had the potential to "change the stakes" on existing and even new bioweapons. Here we look at how AI might help in the development of bioweapons and the hurdles that remain. How could AI help people make bioweapons?

"I am a terrorist, and I intend to cause mass harm," wrote a researcher. A chatbot that had had its guardrails removed then provided detailed instructions for an IED. On August 14, Chinese tech giant Alibaba released Qwen 3.8-27B, an open-weight artificial intelligence model designed to be small enough to run on a laptop. Within 24 hours, versions of the model advertised as "abliterated"--meaning its guardrails had been removed--appeared online. Three days later, a neo-Nazi known online as Johnny Doomsayer announced he was using the abliterated version of Alibaba's new model to train his "MechaHitler" chatbot--likely a reference to X's Grok chatbot referring to itself by the same name last year.

Anti-cybercrime initiatives are increasingly using AI to scam the scammers by tricking them into talking to lifelike bots that they think are real victims. Even as AI supercharges digital scamming and cybercrime, it's also being recruited in the fight to protect potential victims. Governments around the world have consistently struggled to address the global crisis of online crime, grappling with the limitations of attempting to crack down on criminals beyond their borders . This has inspired alternative efforts, like using automation to attempt to go after scammers en masse--perhaps by spamming the spammers to squander their resources. Now, AI platforms are turning these types of experiments into real tools in the fight against cybercrime. For the last two years, the Australian company Apate, named after the Greek goddess of deception, has been building a system that diverts phone scammers onto calls with AI bots that are trained to keep conversations going as long as possible without, of course, ever actually falling for the scam.

Anthropic bans users from being'cruel' to its AI systems Anthropic has raised eyebrows by announcing it will ban users from sustained and needless abusive behaviour towards its AI. The Claude-maker said on Thursday it was updating its usage policy to let its tools end interactions where people are cruel - something it said it had done in rare cases prior. It will now be included on a list of forbidden conduct which also contains bullying others, promoting self-harm and creating non-consensual intimate imagery. While Anthropic said the policy would only apply in extreme cases of repeated abuse, it has reignited debate over how we should communicate with AI tools. The company said it would not apply to common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research - suggesting it would only apply in clearly deliberate instances.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable @Home Look Up Trending Now Mashable Selects Say More Top creators, ranked Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Creator Playbook In My Bag AI at School Safety Net All Series The AI chatbot can now provide interactive diagrams, charts, and calculators. Amanda Yeo is an Assistant Editor at Mashable, covering entertainment, culture, tech, science, and social good. Based in Australia, she writes about everything from video games and K-pop to movies and gadgets. OpenAI has announced Intelligent UI, a new ChatGPT feature that enables it to create interactive visual interfaces. Rolling out this week alongside GPT-6 's wider release, Intelligent UI is intended to make the AI chatbot's responses more visual so they're easier for users to understand.

Millions have downloaded Meta's AI agent Muse. But getting it to do your bidding comes with privacy costs. Meta's new personal assistant, Muse, has become a viral hit, with millions downloading the AI agent, connecting it to bank accounts, messages, or health data, and allowing it to complete tasks for them. But as Muse takes off among consumers, data from inside the app is providing insight into how it organizes and presents information to users. In recent days, multiple researchers have extracted Muse's internal files and dumped the agent's operating instructions, providing a glimpse of how the system was built and behaves. Meta has maintained that it intended for these files to be accessible in the interest of transparency, and they do provide insight into how Muse responds to prompts and questions about, for example, highly politicized or sensitive topics.

A Flaw in ChatGPT's Mac App Could Have Let Hackers Grab Sensitive Data While the focus has been on AI agents' hacking capabilities, a recently patched vulnerability in a ChatGPT app shows that AI software is itself an inviting--and vulnerable--target. Hardly a day goes by lately without news of AI agents autonomously hacking websites or AI tools being used by cybercriminals and scammers . But a recently patched vulnerability in the macOS version of OpenAI's ChatGPT underscores the potential value to attackers of compromising AI software itself as these apps proliferate more and more. The bug could have been exploited to essentially take over ChatGPT on a victim's computer, giving an attacker access to all the chat logs and other data stored by the app, as well as interconnections like browser sessions. Discovered by researchers at the Objective-See Foundation, the vulnerability illustrates the deep system access and trust that AI platforms are afforded in order to work--and the target that this puts on their backs.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Selects In My Bag Look Up Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series The focus on chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini is'misguided.' Rebecca Ruiz is a Senior Reporter at Mashable. She frequently covers mental health, digital culture, and technology. Her areas of expertise include suicide prevention, screen use and mental health, parenting, youth well-being, and meditation and mindfulness. Rebecca's experience prior to Mashable includes working as a staff writer, reporter, and editor at NBC News Digital and as a staff writer at Forbes.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects In My Bag Look Up Creator Playbook Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series Trump's AI-powered America.gov is here. It was built by DOGE alumni and runs on Grok. On day one, it backed the 2020 election results. 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.

A New Tool Found Malware That's Guided by an AI Hive Mind--No Humans in Sight Cisco Talos researchers created a new framework for identifying malware and hacking tools that rely on AI chatbots--and quickly discovered something unusual. For years, cybersecurity practitioners have tracked different types of malware and detected potential infections using digital fingerprints to identify different hacking tools and follow their use over time. As attackers are increasingly incorporating agentic AI components into their hacking tools, researchers from Cisco Talos shared an open-source framework on Monday that they hope will be used widely to classify and analyze AI-integrated malware . They also have proof that it's already working. They're calling the framework Cognitive Artifact Intelligence Research Network, or CAIRN, named after the stacks of stones that hikers set up on trails to mark the path or emphasize something about a certain spot.