Mythos: too dangerous to release?
News from TechCrunch: DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search
May 26, 2026
Last week, after Google announced its huge overhaul to Search, I overheard a woman on the phone saying she was switching to DuckDuckGo because you can “opt out of using AI.” “Google just isn’t Google anymore,” she said. It seems that others had the same idea. Some have argued it will kill the open web, while others shared concerns that AI overviews surface inaccurate responses and take away control from users who might not want to use AI. It also overcomplicates simple things. Just try to Google the word “disregard.”
In response to Google’s changes, many have begun defecting to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused alternative that has never been able to break past Google’s dominance, accounting for only around 2% of the U.S. search market.
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News from Nature: Too dangerous to release: is Mythos the start of the restricted-AI era? What happens when AI companies produce models that they say the public can’t have — and how should users and governments react?
May 26, 2026
In April, the artificial-intelligence firm Anthropic announced it had made an AI model too dangerous to be released to the public. The company, based in San Francisco, California, said its Claude Mythos model was so powerful that it had found vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser currently in use. “The fallout — for economies, public safety, and national security — could be severe,” the company stated in a blogpost about Project Glasswing, its name for the limited release of the model to a group of 50 or so trusted organizations.
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News from Rolling Stone: Jack Osbourne Defends AI Ozzy Osbourne: ‘It’s Not Gonna be F**king Lame’ “This isn’t just like hooking up an image of my dad to ChatGPT,” he explained
May 26, 2026
Jack Osbourne spoke up in defense of the AI avatar of Ozzy Osbourne that was announced last week. The Osbournes partnered with Hyperreal and Proto Hologram to create an AI-powered Prince of Darkness, which will be able to speak with his fans and will be available in Proto Luma units in the U.K. and U.S. later this summer.
Jack and his mother Sharon Osbourne announced the project at Licensing Expo 2026 in Las Vegas, with Jack noting that “it’s kind of scary how it’s really very accurate.” Despite the family’s excitement, there has been some backlash from the public and from Osbourne’s fans. …
At the announcement, Sharon explained, “You can ask [the digital] Ozzy anything, and he will answer you in his own voice — and the answers will be what Ozzy would have said. We’re going to take it all around the world. People can talk to him and he will talk back.”
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News from Axios: Demis Hassabis pushes AGI urgency
May 26, 2026
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said at Google’s developer conference last week that humanity is standing in the “foothills of the singularity.” Society, he said, is running short on time to prepare for AGI.
Why it matters: AI leaders have warned for years that artificial general intelligence could arrive. What’s changing is the shrinking timeline and the increasingly urgent tone from people building it.
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News from The Decoder: George Hotz says coding agents will be “one of the most costly mistakes” in software development
May 25, 2026
Prominent programmer and hacker George Hotz warns that AI agents in software development do more harm than good…. In his blog post “The Eternal Sloptember,” Hotz argues that using AI agents in software development will become one of the industry’s most expensive mistakes….Large organizations are especially at risk, he says, because weaker developers can’t spot the flawed output….
The output is flawed, but in a way that’s “harder and harder to detect,” exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model, Hotz says.
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News from Gizmodo: 99% of CEOs Expect AI-Driven Layoffs in the Next Two Years. CEOs love automation, but don’t think humans and machines can coexist in the workforce, survey finds.
May 24, 2026
Virtually all CEOs surveyed in a recent study said they expect corporate AI initiatives to lead to layoffs within the next two years.
According to consulting firm Mercer’s Global Talent Trends report, 99% of CEOs are prepared for AI-driven layoffs in the short term. The report says that most executives believe redesigning work to incorporate automation will drive the greatest return on investment, but only 32% said they believed the workforce can optimally combine both human and machine capabilities.
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News from The Atlantic: ‘The Future of Truth’ Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.
May 23, 2026
Steven Rosenbaum has decided that the real villain behind the bogus quotes in his book is a chatbot. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that The Future of Truth, Rosenbaum’s much-discussed book about how AI shapes reality, contains more than half a dozen fake or misattributed quotes. Rosenbaum pinned some of them on his use of AI. He claimed responsibility for the errors and said he was investigating what went wrong. By the time I spoke with him on Thursday, though, he was pointing his finger elsewhere. ChatGPT “f**ked up the book,” Rosenbaum said.
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News from Axios: Trump’s AI executive order face-plant
May 22, 2026
Everything seemed set for a photo op with tech and AI CEOs surrounding President Trump yesterday as he signed a much-anticipated executive order on AI and cybersecurity.
- But it fell apart hours before the order was to be signed, as a top Trump adviser and some tech executives gave it a big thumbs down. And the president didn’t really want to regulate AI in the first place.
Why it matters: Any further delay of the order means more time for infighting and for the text to get bogged down in disagreements among different parts of the government and industry.
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News from Lawfare: No Bull: Anthropic v. Hegseth and DOD at the D.C. Circuit
May 21, 2026,
…On May 19, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument in Anthropic’s lawsuit against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the Department of Defense for its designation of the artificial intelligence (AI) company as a supply chain risk. Judges Karen LeCraft Henderson, Gregory Katsas, and Neomi Rao questioned counsel for both parties on if the D.C. Circuit has the authority to review the Pentagon’s designation decisions, the conceptual difficulty of delivering a static ruling for a technology whose capabilities and risks are rapidly changing, and more.
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News from AP News: Two men charged with creating AI-generated porn under new law targeting ‘deepfakes’
May 21, 2026
Federal prosecutors have charged two men with using artificial intelligence to create nude videos and photos of female celebrities under a newly enacted law meant to halt the spread of deepfake pornography.
Cornelius Shannon, 51, and Arturo Hernandez, 20, were both arrested Tuesday for generating sexually explicit AI content that drew millions of views online, according to criminal complaints.
The men — who do not appear to be connected — are among the earliest defendants to face charges under the Take It Down Act, a law signed last year by President Donald Trump that adds stricter penalties for publishing AI-created deepfakes and “revenge porn.” The bill drew bipartisan support, as well as the public backing of first lady Melania Trump.
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