Plus: The US disrupts the internet's biggest black market, a Conti ransomware hacker gets prison time, Meta fails to stop AI-generated videos of child abuse. Meta failed to catch roughly 350 AI child abuse ads, according to new research this week, including some that included images of real kids. In one case, a child depicted in an ad was a member of a European royal family. Lawmakers have said they intend to investigate, and the San Francisco City Attorney's Office ordered the company this week to stop "allowing" AI child abuse ads. In other Meta news, the company announced a new personal AI agent this week that can book your plane tickets or sell your car, but it emphasized heavy investment in security and privacy features, seemingly anticipating mistrust from consumers.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as a giant image of Ray-Ban smart glasses appears on screen, in Menlo Park, California, on 27 September 2023. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as a giant image of Ray-Ban smart glasses appears on screen, in Menlo Park, California, on 27 September 2023. Exclusive: Documents show officers from Maine to California worry Meta's camera-equipped glasses will be used either to secretly record them or aid acts of terrorism In January, the New York Police Department's counterterrorism unit sent out a memo warning police officers about a new potential "security and counterintelligence" threat: Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The memo directed officers to "conduct thorough inspections of all eyewear permitted within inmate cells" and cautioned that people who have been arrested could use these glasses, equipped with small cameras and microphones, to record inside police facilities. The memo cited two examples of such videos posted on social media.

OpenAI is facing another wave of lawsuits in the wake of the February mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge in Canada's province of British Columbia, which left eight people dead. On Wednesday, 30 new complaints were reportedly filed in a United States federal court in California, including teachers and students who were witnesses and survivors at the school where most of the shooting took place, joining seven initial lawsuits filed in April. The suits, brought by lawyer Jay Edelson, allege that the company knew about the intentions of the 18-year-old shooter who, in her interactions with OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT, had described scenarios involving gun violence, but that the leadership did not report their concerns to law enforcement, echoing earlier lawsuits on the matter. In April, Altman penned a letter to the community apologising that the company did not alert law enforcement about the shooter, Jesse Van Rootselaar. "While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered," Altman wrote in the letter.

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Child welfare referred Black parents to law enforcement 14,000 times in 7 years, despite no findings of abuse or neglect. After Robinson had a false positive test for cocaine that year, the hospital barred her from breastfeeding her daughter, and child welfare officials placed her under spousal supervision. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. The mothers of Black newborns are more likely than those of White newborns to be referred to law enforcement over allegations of substance use during pregnancy, according to The Marshall Project's new analysis of child welfare data from eight states. The referrals are often the result of unreliable hospital drug tests performed at childbirth that are easily misinterpreted and produce false positive results as much as half of the time, which can prompt incorrect reporting to child welfare and law enforcement authorities.

The Canadian province of British Columbia is preparing to sue OpenAI, alleging the US company failed to alert police after its staff internally flagged violent ChatGPT conversations linked to the person responsible for February's Tumbler Ridge mass shooting . Attorney General Niki Sharma announced Tuesday that the province has hired legal teams in British Columbia and California to "explore all legal avenues to hold OpenAI and its decision-makers accountable for its documented failure to notify law enforcement regarding explicit, flagged threats made by the perpetrator on the company's ChatGPT platform." The move stems from the February 10 attack in the remote mountain community of Tumbler Ridge, where authorities say 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed their mother and half-brother before going to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and opening fire. Five children between the ages of 11 and 13 and one educator were killed at the school. Twenty-seven other people were wounded before Van Rootselaar died from what police described as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Nine major suspected cargo thefts happened at Tesla's Nevada battery factory in January alone, according to sheriff's records obtained by WIRED. Trailers containing millions of dollars worth of Tesla car and home batteries have allegedly been stolen straight from loading docks at the company's Nevada facilities at least 11 times since last December, according to sheriff's records obtained by WIRED. "It's an epidemic right now," says Storey County Sheriff's Detective Sam Hatley, who has been investigating the Tesla cases. Three men suspected of carrying out one of the heists were arrested in January and charged with felony possession of stolen property. But the broader spate of cargo thefts plaguing Elon Musk's car company are still under investigation and have not been previously reported.

A joint congressional report describes a spam operation that turned tens of thousands of fake podcasts into search-engine bait for illegal pharmacy and scam sites. For the past year, Spotify has been quietly purging tens of thousands of podcasts that advertised illegal online pharmacies. A report released Thursday by Senator Maggie Hassan, ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, faults the company for acting only after news outlets exposed the content and her office spent nearly a year pressing for answers. None of what it removed was sent to law enforcement, the report says. Spotify reportedly removed more than 57,000 podcast episodes and 3,000 shows, and took enforcement action against 3,500 accounts, all pushing links to illegal online pharmacies advertising opioids, benzodiazepines, and stimulants for sale without a prescription.

The families of victims of a school shooting in a remote Canadian Rockies town are suing artificial intelligence company OpenAI in a United States federal court, alleging that the ChatGPT maker failed to alert police to the shooter's alarming interactions with the chatbot. A lawsuit filed on Wednesday on behalf of 12-year-old Maya Gebala, who was critically injured in the February shooting, is among the first of more than two dozen cases from families in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, in what their lawyers say represents "an entire community stepping forward to hold OpenAI accountable". The cases represent the families of the five slain children targeted in the school shooting. Those include Zoey Benoit, Abel Mwansa Jr, Ticaria "Tiki" Lampert, Kylie Smith, all 12, and Ezekiel Schofield, 13, as well as education assistant Shannda Aviugana-Durand. Jesse Van Rootselaar, whose interactions with ChatGPT are at the centre of the lawsuits, shot her mother and stepbrother at home before killing an educational assistant and five students aged 12 to 13 at her former school on February 10, according to police.

OpenAI's Sam Altman apologises over failure to report Canadian mass shooter OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has apologised over his company's failure to warn authorities about the concerning online activities of a teen who went on to commit one of Canada's worst mass shooting s. Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, went on a shooting spree in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, on February 10, killing eight people. Rootselaar, who was born male but identified as female, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. OpenAI said after the attacks that Rootselaar's ChatGPT account had been flagged internally the previous June for misuse "in furtherance of violent activities", resulting in its suspension. The San Francisco-based AI company said at the time that it had not informed authorities, as Rootselaar's usage of the chatbot had not met the threshold of posing a credible or imminent threat of harm to others.