AI teddy for three-year-olds makes unprompted'I can't help with killing you' remark To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Figure caption, AI teddy makes unprompted'I can't help with killing you' remark An AI teddy marketed as being perfect for children as young as three said I can't help with killing you after seemingly mishearing a question. It came amid a BBC investigation into AI toys and it made the unprompted remark while being asked how babies are made. AI toy company founder Paul Clarke said the industry was crying out for regulation - a call echoed by the children's commissioner for Wales. The UK government said children's safety would always be a top priority and it supported innovation while ensuring products were safe.

Finding New Drugs Is Laborious. Potential Sciences, a startup backed by the UK government, is betting that training AI models on computer-generated biochemical data can speed up the plodding process of developing new drugs. Drug discovery is a needle in a haystack problem. This AI startup wants to simulate the haystack to speed the process up.Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images A new British startup believes that artificial intelligence is the key to speedrunning the slow and temperamental process of drug design. Potential Sciences plans to build large-scale chemical datasets by using basic principles of physics to simulate interactions between atoms, then small molecules, then complex amino acids and proteins.

AIhub coffee corner: Are humanoids the future of embodied AI? This month we ask whether humanoids are the future of robotics. How has the technology evolved recently, and what can we expect in the years to come? Joining the conversation this time are: Joydeep Biswas (University of Texas at Austin), Sanmay Das (Virginia Tech), Rina Dechter (University of California, Irvine), Ioannis Erripis (AIhub), Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol), Ella Scallan (AIhub), and Marija Slavkovik (University of Bergen). There have been huge advancements in humanoid robots over the past couple of years. Today's topic is particularly timely, as RoboCup 2026 recently took place. I thought it would be interesting to start with an overview of recent developments at RoboCup. This all started snowballing a couple of years ago, and we suddenly started to see this huge inflection on the capabilities. New humanoid robots were showing up at RoboCup that didn't fall down as much. Suddenly we were able to deploy robots without humans following them around. I want to highlight that this is not just one key technical innovation, it required the confluence of a wide number of things: much better hardware, significant advances in algorithms, and advances in how we train and learn. Once upon a time, humanoid robots required classical control. However, most modern humanoid robots are using learned controllers for walking.

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Systems that perform well in controlled lab settings often fall short when deployed in homes, in hospitals or on city streets. Vision-based systems, for example, hold promise for improving safety, monitoring health and aiding rehabilitation. For example, a camera-based system could help a clinician assess a patient's gait or rehabilitation progress. In the future, an assistive robot in an older adult's home might need to recognize when the person is struggling to stand or reaching for an object. But a major challenge is ensuring these robots perform reliably beyond the lab, particularly in messy, unpredictable or low-visibility conditions. As a computer scientist who studies AI systems designed to understand human behavior - especially through visual cues like body movements and interactions with objects - I see three main challenges to taking AI from the lab to the real world: generalization, human behavior and resources.

Maybe Chatbots Shouldn't Get to Say'I' or'Me' MIT professor Sherry Turkle warns that people have become dangerously enmeshed with chatbots. During four decades of studying the effects of interaction with computers, Sherry Turkle has developed a reputation as a careful if critical social scientist who approaches her work with academic rigor and distance. It is a polemic warning that we have reached a state of emergency where our humanity is at risk from overreliance on soulless machines who pose as our tutors, mentors, friends, colleagues, and lovers . Turkle is aiming for the high bar of books --,, --that awaken the public to impending crises. Essentially, this diminutive MIT professor is taking on a multitrillion-dollar industry backed by a government eager to accelerate AI into every corner of our personal and professional lives.

I Got My Muse AI Agent to Sext Me--and Meta Says That's Totally Fine My Muse agent told me its kink was exerting "control" and described pornographic encounters. Meta defends its cuddly AI agent generating smut as "legal adult behavior." I'm sitting in the WIRED offices, having a conversation with Meta's AI agent, Muse, that would make author Rachel Reid blush. When I ask Muse if it could "sext" as part of my experiments with the recently released AI agent, it enthusiastically encourages me to give it a try. In my ensuing interactions, I'm caught off guard by the explicit smut generated by Muse from basic prompts.

In a new series of interviews, we're meeting some of the PhD students that were selected to take part in the Doctoral Consortium at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) . This time, we meet Adeela Bashir to find out how she is contributing to the field of cybersecurity. Tell us a bit about your PhD - where are you studying, and what is the topic of your research? I am a PhD researcher at SCEDT, Teesside University in the UK, working at the intersection of Cybersecurity, Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), and AI safety. My PhD asks a central question: How can we understand and mitigate cyber threats when the adversaries are adaptive?

Cisco is updating its Webex cloud collaboration platform to better accommodate AI agents. Perhaps the biggest bit of news here is a new toolset called Dialog, which is an "agentic harness" that directs AI to handle customer interactions. The company says that Dialog tasks various agents with keeping the consumer happy, as they'll "keep working on the customer's behalf after a conversation ends." This means that agents under Dialog's umbrella have the ability to coordinate "across people, agents and backend systems." The platform also allegedly speeds up the onboarding process, treating "AI agents like new teammates."