The Fight to Hold AI Companies Accountable for Children's Deaths After a series of suicides allegedly linked to AI chatbots, one lawyer is trying to hold companies like OpenAI accountable. Cedric Lacey relied on a camera to check on his kids while he was working as a commercial van driver going to and back from Alabama. Each morning, he would tune into the feed of his living room to make sure his teenage son, Amaurie, and his 14-year-old daughter were packing up their bags and getting ready to leave for school. But one morning last June, Lacey didn't see Amaurie up and about. Concerned, he called home, only to find out that his 17-year-old had hanged himself.

After OpenAI's Instant Checkout feature fell short, Walmart is instead embedding its Sparky chatbot directly into ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Since November, Walmart has let some ChatGPT users order a limited selection of products without ever leaving OpenAI's chatbot interface. Sales have been disappointing, a Walmart executive vice president exclusively tells WIRED. The results suggest that a future where chatbots and AI agents take over ecommerce is still a way off, if it ever materializes. Last year, OpenAI made a bet that it could boost revenue by charging a commission on purchases made through ChatGPT.

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.

Why can't language models write well? I n a certain, strange way, generative AI peaked with OpenAI's GPT-2 seven years ago. Little known to anyone outside of tech circles, GPT-2 excelled at producing unexpected answers. "You could be like, 'Continue this story:,' and GPT-2 would be like, ','" Katy Gero, a poet and computer scientist who has been experimenting with language models since 2017, told me. "The models won't do that anymore." AI leaders boast about their models' superhuman technical abilities.

Plus: China has approved the world's first commercial brain chip. Where OpenAI's technology could show up in Iran OpenAI has controversially agreed to give the Pentagon access to its AI. But where exactly could its tech show up, and which applications will its customers and employees tolerate? There's pressure to integrate it quickly with existing military tools. One defense official revealed it could even assist in selecting strike targets. OpenAI's partnership with Anduril, which makes drones and counter-drone technologies, adds another hint at what is to come.

AI firm Anthropic seeks weapons expert to stop users from'misuse' The US artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic is looking to hire a chemical weapons and high-yield explosives expert to try to prevent catastrophic misuse of its software. In other words, it fears that its AI tools might tell someone how to make chemical or radioactive weapons, and wants an expert to ensure its guardrails are sufficiently robust. In the LinkedIn recruitment post, the firm says applicants should have a minimum of five years experience in chemical weapons and/or explosives defence as well as knowledge of radiological dispersal devices - also known as dirty bombs. The firm told the BBC the role was similar to jobs in other sensitive areas that it has already created. Anthropic is not the only AI firm adopting this strategy.

Where OpenAI's technology could show up in Iran Three places to watch, from the margins of war to the center of combat. It's been just over two weeks since OpenAI reached a controversial agreement to allow the Pentagon to use its AI in classified environments. There are still pressing questions about what exactly OpenAI's agreement allows for; Sam Altman said the military can't use his company's technology to build autonomous weapons, but the agreement really just demands that the military follow its own (quite permissive) guidelines about such weapons. OpenAI's other main claim, that the agreement will prevent use of its technology for domestic surveillance, appears equally dubious . It's not the first tech giant to embrace military contracts it had once vowed never to enter into, but the speed of the pivot was notable. Perhaps it's just about money; OpenAI is spending lots on AI training and is on the hunt for more revenue (from sources including ads).

The encyclopedia company's lawsuit also said ChatGPT cannibalizes traffic to the Britannica and Merriam-Webster websites. OpenAI has been hit with another lawsuit. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT generates made-up content or ' hallucinations ' and falsely attributes them to Encyclopedia Britannica. The lawsuit doesn't specify an amount for monetary damages, but Britannica is also seeking an injunction to prevent OpenAI from repeating these accusations. When reached out for comment, a spokesperson for OpenAI told Engadget that, ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives.

OpenAI's adult mode reportedly won't generate pornographic audio, images or video The company's own council on wellbeing and AI appears to be against the feature. OpenAI's forthcoming adult mode will allow users to engage in lewd conversations with ChatGPT, but not use the chatbot to generate explicit images, audio or video. In response to reporting from an OpenAI spokesperson characterized the upcoming release as capable of producing smut rather than pornography. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman first floated the idea of allowing people to use ChatGPT for erotica, saying the company wanted to treat adult users like adults. OpenAI originally planned to release adult mode at the start of 2026.

The company launched its Sora 2 model in September 2025 alongside a dedicated Sora app. OpenAI plans to add its Sora video generation model directly into ChatGPT, reports . The standalone Sora app was seen as a smash hit when it launched alongside Sora 2 in September 2025, but interest in the video generation app has fallen in the time since as users ran into limits on the amount and kinds of videos they could create. Adding Sora to the ChatGPT could give the model a second life, and ideally grow the ChatGPT app's weekly active users from the 900 million OpenAI reported in February, to a billion or more. According to, the standalone Sora app will stick around after the model is integrated, even though the app has fallen out of the App Store's top 100 free apps and only a small number of users reportedly share their videos publicly in the app.