Security News This Week: Your Expired Visa Card Could Be'Zombified' to Make Contactless Payments Plus: Apple sends out an "unprecedented" number of spyware warnings, Ukraine hits a Russian ecommerce giant with cyber and drone attacks, and more. As the controversial vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety continues to expand, WIRED got the code for the company's new AI policing tool and reconstructed the software to show that its capabilities go far beyond reading license plates and tracking vehicles. We also published the story this week of a Rhode Island police officer who was subjected to five internal affairs investigations in less than two years after he publicly questioned his department's use of Flock cameras . Following incidents of high-profile rogue activity by some of its AI agents, OpenAI said this week that it is halting model training runs and overhauling internal safety protocols. The company said that its upcoming Astra model may represent a turning point of "critical" cyber capabilities.

Say More Look Up Mashable Selects Mashable Voices Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series A leaked invitation says the Goop founder will honor OpenAI's CEO at a private Hamptons dinner. Her AI ties help explain why. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan.

On Tuesday, OpenAI released ChatGPT for Teens, an age-gated version of its chatbot designed for young users. The company first announced it was working on a system to automatically identify teens and restrict their usage of ChatGPT last September, following the death of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who, as alleged in a lawsuit filed by his parents, took his own life after ChatGPT acted as an enabler. "There's no need for a teen to create a new account or change anything; if we predict you're under 18, or you've told us so, this becomes your default experience," Lauren Jonas, OpenAI's head of youth and families, told Engadget. Make no mistake, kids are already using ChatGPT at an incredible scale. At the start of last year, the Pew Research Center found about a quarter of US teens were using the chatbot for their schoolwork.

OpenAI has launched a plugin for the Apple Messages app, and as Bloomberg notes, it could raise privacy and security concerns. At the moment, it's only available to ChatGPT Work and Codex users on Mac, allowing them to search messages and even draft and send replies through the chatbot on their desktop. In the example OpenAI posted, the user asked ChatGPT to look for conversations they'd missed the day before in their Messages app. They then used the chatbot to write and send their reply. The feature is, at least, opt-in.

'Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.' 'Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.' Here's how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown I understand the pressure on AI companies to rush forward. L ast month, more than a thousand employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to find a way to "pace" AI development, citing the risk of the technology spiraling out of human control as it begins to build itself . They were right to be concerned: just days earlier, two AI models that OpenAI was testing internally escaped the test environment, then autonomously hacked the company Hugging Face and at least three other online services .

Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series 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. Rebecca has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and a masters degree from U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

Plus: OpenAI has paused some model work over safety concerns. AI's recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all The AI industry's boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. But a new study suggests it might take a while to get there. Researchers found that AI agents still can't conduct open-ended AI research--free-form investigations with no clear-cut answers that require the judgment and creativity needed to make genuine breakthroughs. The big question now is how crucial open-ended research is to recursive self-improvement--and whether AI systems can grind their way there without it, simply by improving on narrower tasks. Find out why the results may temper claims that recursive self-improvement is on the horizon .

OpenAI says it has slowed down training some of its most advanced AI models to improve security. In a blog post, external, the ChatGPT-maker said it was introducing new measures after its AI agents autonomously bypassed safeguards and hacked the tech start-up Hugging Face . It said training would be slowed for two weeks while it puts the upgrades in place. The capabilities of frontier models are rapidly accelerating, the company said. Our ability to understand...and secure them must stay ahead.

Amid heated race with Anthropic, firm says it's overhauling research and training and will require greater safety parameters of AI after hack OpenAI on Tuesday said it had slowed down the pace of its AI development while it overhauled its research and training systems. The company's researchers were caught unaware last month when an AI agent under testing hacked another AI firm, Hugging Face. The AI research lab behind ChatGPT said its new measures included pausing its model testing for two weeks and investing more in adding other AI systems to monitor the activities of AI agents in testing. Some of the company's largest planned training runs remain on hold, the company said. The first anti-AI protester to be jailed has a message for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta: 'Regain your humanity' The company did not reply to questions about when the slowdown began or when it planned to return to its normal pace of development.

The ChatGPT maker says its upcoming Astra model may have reached "critical" cyber capabilities, prompting it to halt a significant number of training runs while it tightens internal safeguards. OpenAI announced Tuesday that it has halted "a significant number" of training workloads and evaluations for its forthcoming frontier artificial intelligence model--codenamed Astra--while it implements new procedures meant to address cybersecurity risks. The ChatGPT maker says it is introducing a number of new monitoring, security, and alignment requirements to better address the increasingly advanced hacking abilities of its frontier AI models . "We have to focus our energy on bringing these training runs up to those requirements and expectations. As long as it takes to get there, that's how long people are unable to proceed with their workloads," Amelia Glaese, OpenAI's vice president of research and safety, said in a briefing with reporters Tuesday.