In Ukraine's'kill-zone', robots are a lifeline to troops trapped on perilous eastern front The toy is delivered, a Ukrainian soldier whispers into the radio. In the dead of night, he and his partner move quickly to roll out their cargo from a van. Speed is crucial as they are within the range of deadly Russian drones. The fifth brigade's new toy is an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), a robot that provides a lifeline for Ukrainian troops at the front in Pokrovsk and Myrnograd, a strategic hub in eastern Ukraine. Russian forces are relentlessly trying to cut off Ukraine's supply routes in the area.

Parents could be alerted if their teenagers show acute distress while talking with ChatGPT, amid child safety concerns as more young people turn to AI chatbots for support and advice. The alerts are part of new protections for children using ChatGPT to be rolled out in the next month by OpenAI, which was last week sued by the family of a boy who took his own life after allegedly receiving "months of encouragement" from the system. Other new safeguards will include parents being able to link their accounts to those of their teenagers and controlling how the AI model responds to their child with "age-appropriate model behaviour rules". But internet safety campaigners said the steps did not go far enough and AI chatbots should not be on the market before they are deemed safe for young people. Adam Raine, 16, from California, killed himself in April after discussing a method of suicide with ChatGPT.

Adam Raine was just 16 when he started using ChatGPT for help with his homework. While his initial prompts to the AI chatbot were about subjects like geometry and chemistry – questions like: "What does it mean in geometry if it says Ry 1" – in just a matter of months he began asking about more personal topics. "Why is it that I have no happiness, I feel loneliness, perpetual boredom anxiety and loss yet I don't feel depression, I feel no emotion regarding sadness," he asked ChatGPT in the fall of 2024. Instead of urging Raine to seek mental health help, ChatGPT asked the teen whether he wanted to explore his feelings more, explaining the idea of emotional numbness to him. That was the start of a dark turn in Raine's conversations with the chatbot, according to a new lawsuit filed by his family against OpenAI and chief executive Sam Altman.

The makers of ChatGPT are changing the way it responds to users who show mental and emotional distress after legal action from the family of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who killed himself after months of conversations with the chatbot. Open AI admitted its systems could "fall short" and said it would install "stronger guardrails around sensitive content and risky behaviors" for users under 18. The 500bn ( 372bn) San Francisco AI company said it would also introduce parental controls to allow parents "options to gain more insight into, and shape, how their teens use ChatGPT", but has yet to provide details about how these would work. Adam, from California, killed himself in April after what his family's lawyer called "months of encouragement from ChatGPT". The teenager's family is suing Open AI and its chief executive and co-founder, Sam Altman, alleging that the version of ChatGPT at that time, known as 4o, was "rushed to market … despite clear safety issues".

President Trump speaks to reporters outside the White House on July 15, 2025, in Washington, as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt watches in reverence.. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. AI is "not my thing," President Donald Trump admitted during a speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. However, the president said during his remarks at the Energy and Innovation Summit, his advisers had told him just how important energy was to the future of AI. "You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that," Trump said, recalling a conversation with "David"--most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. "I said, what, are you kidding? That's double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it."

Explosions have been heard at the Port of Sudan, a critical lifeline and entry point for aid, as attacks on the city continued for a fourth day in the latest confrontation between Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the country's brutal two-year civil war. The attacks have been blamed on the RSF by Sudan's army and by residents. On Wednesday morning, an army source told the AFP news agency on condition of anonymity that the explosion was due to a drone attack that was met with "anti-aircraft missiles". The Port of Sudan on the Red Sea coast had been a haven city hosting hundreds of thousands of displaced people since the war began and serves as an interim seat for Sudan's military-allied government, which has been at war with the RSF since 2023. The attacks on Port Sudan have increased fears of disruptions to desperately needed aid deliveries in the country suffering one of the world's most dire humanitarian crises, and where famine has been declared in some areas.

Text-embedding models often exhibit biases arising from the data on which they are trained. In this paper, we examine a hitherto unexplored bias in text-embeddings: bias arising from the presence of $\textit{names}$ such as persons, locations, organizations etc. in the text. Our study shows how the presence of $\textit{name-bias}$ in text-embedding models can potentially lead to erroneous conclusions in assessment of thematic similarity.Text-embeddings can mistakenly indicate similarity between texts based on names in the text, even when their actual semantic content has no similarity or indicate dissimilarity simply because of the names in the text even when the texts match semantically. We first demonstrate the presence of name bias in different text-embedding models and then propose $\textit{text-anonymization}$ during inference which involves removing references to names, while preserving the core theme of the text. The efficacy of the anonymization approach is demonstrated on two downstream NLP tasks, achieving significant performance gains. Our simple and training-optimization-free approach offers a practical and easily implementable solution to mitigate name bias.

Tens of thousands of Californians are turning to a crowdsourced, nonprofit app called Watch Duty for critical, up-to-the-moment disaster updates as deadly fires continue to rage through the state. The app, which uses a mixture of official government and volunteer data to track wildfires, surpassed OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's Threads as the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store on Wednesday. Social media users have encouraged residents in affected areas to download the app in order to track the fire's rapid movements and stay aware of possible evacuation orders. Apps like Watch Duty, which have seen a surge in interest in recent years, may become even more important as climate change-related natural disasters intensify in scope and scale. It gives you updates on fires nearby, evacuation notices, and even will show you where an evacuation center is if you need to evacuate!

Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He had been well-regarded by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI's strongest contributors who was essential to developing some of its products. "We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir's loved ones during this difficult time," said a statement from OpenAI. Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on 26 November in what police said "appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation."

Ofcom has warned tech firms that content from chatbots impersonating real and fictional people could fall foul of the UK's new digital laws. The communications regulator issued the guidance after it emerged that users on the Character.AI platform had created avatars mimicking the deceased British teenagers Brianna Ghey and Molly Russell. Under pressure from digital safety campaigners to clarify the situation, Ofcom underlined that content created by user-made chatbots would come under the scope of the Online Safety Act. Without naming the US-based artificial intelligence firm Character.AI, Ofcom said a site or app that allowed users to create their own chatbots for other people to interact with would be covered by the act. "This includes services that provide tools for users to create chatbots that mimic the personas of real and fictional people, which can be submitted to a chatbot library for others to interact with," said Ofcom. In an open letter, Ofcom also said any user-to-user site or app – such as a social media platform or messaging app – that enabled people to share content generated by a chatbot on that site with others would also be in scope.