A 13-Year-Old Asked AI About Suicide on Her School Laptop. It Didn't Get Flagged for Weeks The young girl's parents allege that she used Gemini via her school Chromebook to plan her suicide, but the school's monitoring systems didn't know until it was almost too late. A 13-year-old girl spent three months using her school-issued laptop to discuss depression, research suicide, and plan her funeral before self-harm-monitoring software finally prompted school officials to alert her parents, who intervened and stopped her, according to a lawsuit filed this month by her parents. The lawsuit alleges that Google and parent company Alphabet were negligent in their rollout of a Gemini model, claiming that the AI chatbot "coached" the North Carolina teenager to consider taking her own life. The case, which was previously reported by The New York Times, is one of several that allege harm from AI chatbot use, including claims of delusions and suicide .

So far, Department of Justice-led efforts to sow chaos, even as Americans are already voting, have fallen flat. Polls are looking pretty bleak for Republicans --and the Trump administration's various attempts to interfere with the elections haven't been too successful either. In recent weeks, the Department of Justice, helmed by Attorney General Todd Blanche, a proponent of conspiracy theories about widespread noncitizen voting in the 2020 election, has pulled out all the stops to sow doubt in voters' minds about the security and validity of the electoral process. To do this, the DOJ has spent the last year demanding unredacted voter rolls, issuing executive orders to wrest control of elections from states, raiding election offices, proposing new laws to disenfranchise millions of citizens, and claiming that noncitizens were voting en masse across the country. There have also been escalating threats by the DOJ against election officials. On Thursday, the DOJ sent letters to election officials in all 50 states warning them that they would pursue criminal action if they failed to preserve election records for 22 days.

Sources tell WIRED that an Accenture employee's personal Claude agent ran on a DOD network for two months before it was identified and the vulnerability could be patched. Earlier this year, sources tell WIRED, a contractor caused a security incident at the Department of Defense by connecting a secure centralized system used by multiple intelligence agencies to their personal account for Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent . It appears that the agent used by the contractor, who is employed by global consulting firm Accenture, then sent information about the DOD system, including login credentials, to a high-risk third-party website. The centralized system contains controlled unclassified information (CUI), which is considered sensitive and not to be released to the public without review. CUI can include information about critical infrastructure, nuclear submarine propulsion, and vulnerabilities to chemical and biological terrorism.

Bluesky tells WIRED it blocked links to a leaked archive of information on 41,000 ICE, CBP, and other DHS workers because it contains people's contact information, shared without their authorization. Bluesky is blocking users from opening links to a newly leaked archive of records on more than 41,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors, and labels the pages "malicious." The files include people's email addresses and phone numbers, "shared without their authorization," Bluesky tells WIRED, in violation of its community guidelines . The company says it chose to block the links, rather than remove individual posts, "to avoid limiting public discussion or restricting broader access to reporting and commentary." The DHS records, published Wednesday by the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, list employees' and contractors' names, contact information, and membership in internal groups, tied in some cases to surveillance and undercover operations.

A government watchdog is considering a probe into the Home Office's use of ChatGPT technology to process asylum claims amid concerns over the tools' accuracy and secrecy surrounding their use. A UK government watchdog is considering an investigation into the Home Office's use of generative AI tools to process asylum applications, WIRED has learned. The potential probe follows lawmakers and researchers publicly questioning the tools' accuracy and the government's secrecy around their use. The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (ICIBI), which monitors the Home Office's management of borders, immigration, and customs, has asked digital rights nonprofit Open Rights Group (ORG) to share more information on the tools as it draws up plans for the topics it will inspect next year, campaigner Sara Alsherif tells WIRED. ORG's findings come from a six-month investigation into the tools, which involved 11 parliamentary questions, two ministerial letters, and 10 public records requests that attempt to pry details from the Home Office, which has withheld details on the tools.

From heat maps to Signal chats to war rooms, volunteers across the US are ready to act if federal immigration agents show up on Election Day. The Franklin County board of elections building at 1700 Morse Street in central Columbus, Ohio, is an early voting site for next week's midterms . It is also located in the middle of the large Somali American community that was targeted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency's Operation Buckeye last December. The campaign was designed, the agency said, to find "the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens." The result was a paltry number of arrests, months of sustained harassment, and a lingering feeling that ICE agents could return at any minute, especially around election time.

Kids' Content Is Deeply Broken. Low-quality AI-generated content currently dominates children's media. Maka, a streaming platform run by child development experts, is offering an alternative. If you have young kids or if you know somebody who does, then you know about YouTube's AI slop problem. Videos targeted at children on the platform are often filled with bizarre and hyperstimulating content that's AI generated .

Now It's Chasing the Rest of Science AI may soon be the default way to solve theoretical problems in economics, high-energy physics, and other fields, MIT researchers tell WIRED. Last week, I attended a talk at MIT by Neil Thompson, who studies progress in computing and artificial intelligence . Over the course of just half an hour, Thompson made a convincing case that several scientific fields are about to be upended by AI. As mathematicians reel from the way AI is automating their field, Thompson's latest study suggests that probability, statistics theory, economic theory, high-energy theory, gravitation and cosmology, and quantum physics may be next, thanks to the rapidly evolving capabilities of frontier models. Between mid-2024 and mid-2026, the study shows, the best AI models went from being able to correctly solve about 2 percent of theoretical problems in these fields to about 35 percent of such problems.

Men Can't Stop Faking How Much They Know About AI More than half of the men surveyed in a new Harvard study claimed to recognize AI leaders who were, in fact, totally fictional. Say you're a guy who reads WIRED--you know a thing or two about artificial intelligence . You recognize the names of well-known people developing AI, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman . But do you know who Mira Murati is? In a new survey of more than 5,400 Americans, 73 percent of male respondents told Harvard researchers they knew who Altman was.

"There's a perception of mobster behavior" from leading AI companies, one mathematician tells WIRED as OpenAI prepares to release more than 100 new solutions to unsolved problems. In August, OpenAI convened around 40 mathematicians to discuss what to do if AI outpaces human capabilities in the field. The company hinted that its powerful models had solved hundreds of long-standing math problems, say people who were in attendance, but company representatives assured attendees it would not release the solutions all at once--an assurance OpenAI spokesperson Lindsay McCallum says the company is "not aware of"--and, worried by how the community might react, sought advice on how to publish the findings. Attendees responded with "a mixture of excitement and dread," but the meeting was a promising first step, recalls Northwestern University mathematician Bryna Kra. The group, she tells WIRED, asked the firm not to just publish them in a blog or tweet, like they had done with 10 problems earlier that month .