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The FBI confirms it's buying Americans' location data

Engadget

The FBI confirms it's buying Americans' location data During a Senate hearing, FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed that his agency has bought information that could be used to track individuals' movement and location. We do purchase commercially available information that's consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us, he said. Law enforcement is required to obtain a warrant in order to get location data from cell service providers following the Carpenter v United States ruling from 2018. But why bother with all that hassle when they can just buy the information from the open market? Doing that without a warrant is an outrageous end run around the Fourth Amendment, it's particularly dangerous given the use of artificial intelligence to comb through massive amounts of private information, Sen. Ron Wyden, (D-Ore.) said during the Intelligence Committee hearing.


A Meta agentic AI sparked a security incident by acting without permission

Engadget

Maybe think twice before letting an AI take over all your tech? According to the publication, an employee used an in-house agentic AI to analyze a query from a second employee on an internal forum. The AI agent posted a response to the second employee with advice even though the first person did not direct it to do so. The second employee took the agent's recommended action, sparking a domino effect that led to some engineers having access to Meta systems that they shouldn't have permission to see. A representative from the company confirmed the incident to and said that no user data was mishandled.


Senator Blackburn introduces the first draft of a federal AI bill

Engadget

It will likely go through several more iterations before completion. The White House has been promising a set of national rules to guide artificial intelligence since late last year, and today Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) The senator shared a discussion draft for codifying the executive order signed by President Donald Trump in December calling for an AI bill. Her stated goal is a policy that protects children, creators, conservatives and communities from harm. Blackburn has called for tougher policies for AI safety, and one of the core messages in this discussion draft is that it places a duty of care on AI developers in the design, development and operation of AI platforms to prevent and mitigate foreseeable harm to users.


Google is testing Search Live in more markets

Engadget

The company had originally planned to announce global availability. A few hours after this story was published, Google reached out to retract the news. Given that the company says it is testing in more markets, it seems entirely possible that the global Search Live release will happen sooner than later. After rolling out Search Live to all US Google app users last September, Google is now bringing the feature to every place where it offers its AI Mode chatbot. Search Live, if you need a reminder, allows you to point your phone's camera at an object or scene and ask questions about what you see in front of you.


UK reverses course on AI copyright position after backlash

Engadget

Sir Paul McCartney was among the artists who spoke out on the issue. After significant backlash, the UK backed off from that position. We have listened, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said on Wednesday. However, the government's new stance is, well, not a stance at all. It currently no longer has a preferred option about how to handle the issue.


Google expands Search Live globally

Engadget

The tool is now available in every place where the company offers its AI Mode chatbot. After debuting in the US, Search Live is now available globally. After rolling out Search Live to all US Google app users last September, Google is now bringing the feature to every place where it offers its AI Mode chatbot. Search Live, if you need a reminder, allows you to point your phone's camera at an object or scene and ask questions about what you see in front of you. Google debuted the tool at I/O 2025 before it began rolling it out to users.


The Defense Department reportedly plans to train AI models on classified military data

Engadget

The models will be separate versions of models specifically for military use. The Pentagon is making plans to have AI companies train versions of their models specifically for military use on classified information, according to the . If true, it wouldn't come as a surprise, seeing as the US is aiming to become an "AI-first warfighting force, based on the statement [PDF] released by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth earlier this year. The department is already using AI models in the military: For instance, the US reportedly used Anthropic's Claude to help with the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and with its attack on Iran, even after President Trump ordered federal agencies to ban its technology. But models trained on actual classified data could give more accurate and detailed responses, say, for situations similar to what happened in the past that aren't public information.


GPT-5.4 mini brings some of the smarts of OpenAI's latest model to ChatGPT Free and Go users

Engadget

GPT-5.4 mini brings some of the smarts of OpenAI's latest model to ChatGPT Free and Go users The new model offers performance improvements in reasoning, multimodal understanding and more. The ChatGPT icon, as seen on iPhone 12 running iOS. When OpenAI released GPT-5.4 at the start of March, the company said the new model was designed primarily for professional work like programming and data analysis. Now OpenAI is launching GPT-5.4 mini and nano, and while it is once again highlighting the usefulness of these new systems for tasks like coding, one of the new models is available to Free and Go users . What's more, that model, GPT-5.4 mini, even offers performance that approaches GPT-5.4 in a handful of areas.


Google makes Gemini personalization available to free users

Engadget

After AI Pro and Ultra subscribers first got to first try the feature, now anyone in the US can enable it. Gemini's Personal Intelligence feature is now rolling out to more users in the US. At the start of the year, Google introduced Personal Intelligence, a Gemini feature that allows the chatbot to pull information from the user's other Google apps and services to generate personalized responses. After making the feature first available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, the company is expanding availability to more users in the US. Google is kicking off the expansion with AI Mode.


Gamers are right to be disgusted by NVIDIA's DLSS 5

Engadget

Maybe not everything needs to be AI yassified? You can sum up the gamer response to NVIDIA's DLSS 5 announcement with the ever-relevant meme: Everyone disliked that. Across social media and Reddit last night, I couldn't find anyone who's genuinely positive about the potential for DLSS 5, which uses AI to add photorealistic lighting and materials to in-game models and environments. It's not unusual to see gamers being reflexively angry about new technology on the internet, especially when it's being pitched by NVIDIA as the "biggest breakthrough in computer graphics" since its RTX 20-series GPUs arrived in 2018 with real-time ray tracing. There was plenty of suspicion around DLSS's original AI upscaling model, as well as the fake frames generated by later iterations.