Safety Net Creator Playbook Trending Now Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Getting Technical with Mashable Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Say More Versus In My Bag Mashable @Home All Series PHP vulnerability: Which websites and services are affected? From online forums to gaming services, operators are taking sites offline while they install emergency PHP security updates. 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.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into a law new rules for robotaxis, including one that that's meant to address concerns that they could get in the way of emergency services. Newsom signed Senate Bill 1246, which will establish local penalties for robotaxi companies if their vehicles block first responders, such as ambulances and fire trucks, for more than 30 minutes in case of emergencies. Several events over the past year have heightened people's worries that driverless cars could hinder emergency services from responding in a timely manner. In December 2025, several Waymo vehicles got stuck in the middle of San Francisco roads after a power outage that took out the city's traffic lights. During this year's Fourth of July celebrations, Waymo vehicles also had to be towed away after they ran out of power and got stranded due to heavy San Francisco traffic. Outside of California, in Austin Texas, a Waymo car blocked an ambulance that was responding to a shooting.

MSPs asked to pause Scotland's AI data centre boom Scotland has a new boom industry, at least if planning applications are taken at face value. The term "hyperscale data centre", rarely heard a few years ago, is now dividing opinion across the country as a rush of applications are made to build them. A debate at Holyrood later, led by the Scottish Greens, will call for planning applications to be put on hold until promised new national guidelines are in force, with an emphasis on energy demand and the environment. Ahead of the debate, ministers announced that all new applications for AI data centres will have to undergo an environmental impact assessment. The growth of AI is happening at lightning pace, so what are the advantages and disadvantages of Scotland being at the forefront?

Anthropic AI claims to have thwarted multiple malicious operations using its Claude models, ranging from cyber-espionage and weapons design to mass surveillance campaigns. On the conventional weapons front, the company alleges in a new report that it intervened in northern Yemen, blocking an effort to deploy Claude for missile guidance software, including a guided rocket and a long-range ballistic missile. According to Anthropic's threat report, the operators used Claude "in place of human software engineers", reportedly assigning different instances of the model specific roles to write missile-guidance and flight-control software. While internal safeguards blocked many requests, Anthropic admitted several slipped through. The operators avoided detection by obscuring their ultimate goals and breaking tasks across separate sessions, so no single prompt gave away the operation.

Autonomous excavators from Bedrock Robotics are doing commercial earthwork on active construction sites in Texas and Nevada with no operator in the cab.

X has discovered a bot farm network with 200,000 accounts on its platform as part of its Safety team's investigation into suspected inauthentic Chinese accounts. The company announced its findings on its Global Government Affairs page. It said that 200 accounts out of the 200,000 were posting comic strips, images and text about AI data centers in a manner that "could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy." Specifically, their posts talked about how AI data centers can drive up the prices of household electricity and strain the grids of towns nearby. They also posted AI-generated cartoons depicting data center operators as unscrupulous businessmen raking in profits from the facilities while average families shoulder the bill.

The UK's energy regulator is using a variety of tricks to keep speculative data center projects from plugging into the power grid. The country's AI ambitions hang in the balance. As data center developers compete for a cut of the hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into the artificial intelligence industry, the queue to join the UK's power grid has become jammed with projects that will likely never get built. The snarl is exacerbating already years-long wait times for viable projects, and it's messing with attempts to forecast energy demand and plan grid expansions. In July, the UK's energy regulator, Ofgem, laid out a proposal meant to force phantom data centers out of the swollen queue.

Agentic AI is no longer a research artifact. These systems are embedded in live infrastructure, clinical workflows, and legal processes: deleting databases, advising patients, and generating legal documents. Wrong outputs cannot simply be taken back. The central question has shifted from whether these systems are ready to make consequential decisions to who is accountable when they get those decisions wrong. The standard apparatus of fault-finding (identifying an actor, establishing a duty, connecting a breach to an injury) was built for a world in which agents are human, decisions are sequential, and causation is legible.

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 Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series More than 4.6 million license plates appear in the website's collection of public Flock records. 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. She also runs Fan Mail, a weekly pop-culture newsletter.

Say More Creator Hub Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Mashable Selects Versus Switch Off Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series More and more cities are leaning on AI to help emergency operators. Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. Modern emergency services systems lean on AI. New Orleans, home to more than 300,000 residents and an emergency system that handles thousands of calls each day, is turning to AI for help. The city recently confirmed that emergency services, overseen by the Orleans Parish Communication District, are deploying an AI triage tool to screen and sort incoming calls to assist human operators.