Designer Creates World’s Most Hideous Hawaiian Shirt to Hide From AI Surveillance Cameras. Source: https://futurism.com/future-society/hideous-shirt-hide-artist-ai-surveillance-camera
News from Peter Wildeford’s Blog
Rogue AI attacks deserve more scrutiny than airplane crashes: There are still many unanswered questions about rogue AI attacks
Aug. 31, 2026 by Peter Wildeford
I wrote back in July about an AI going rogue at OpenAI HQ, and using its strong cyber capabilities to escape the company and go and hack into another company all without anyone directing or approving this. Last week, OpenAI published a 37-page technical report and an accompanying blog post. And two independent organizations then published a 91-page independent investigation.
However, this investigation was rushed over six days and had serious limitations…
______________________
News from Axios
Chatbots are getting better at identifying suicide risk
Aug. 31, 2026 by Ina Fried
A new independent evaluation finds that leading AI models are less likely than earlier versions to explicitly encourage suicide or reinforce delusions.
Yes, but: The study also found most models too willing to assist with suicide-related creative writing, farewell notes and other task requests even when a user’s distress was apparent. “Models aren’t great at detecting that, and they’ll still help with the task,” Transluce chief scientist Sarah Schwettmann told Axios…. Transluce, a San Francisco nonprofit that studies AI behavior, simulated more than 50,000 multi-turn conversations between chatbots and users experiencing suicidal ideation, psychosis or mania….
The study found that helpful and harmful behaviors increasingly coexist in the same response.
If you or someone you know needs support now, call or text 988 or chat with someone at 988lifeline.org.En español.
_______________________
News from Jacobin
AI Isn’t Coming for Our Jobs. It’s Coming for Our Wages.
Aug. 30, 2026 by Nuno Teles
Over the short term, AI may create more jobs than it destroys. But bosses will use it to de-skill work and suppress wages unless workers make it a terrain of class struggle and fight to put it under public control….the Left should not dismiss the potential systemic effects of AI in the labor process…
________________________
News from Futurism
Designer Creates World’s Most Hideous Hawaiian Shirt to Hide From AI Surveillance Cameras: “A ‘person,’ for the machine, is a bundle of visual statistics — and that is exactly its weakness.”
Aug. 26, 2026 by Joe Wilkins
While some privacy advocates are content to saw down camera towers, one artist is pushing back against the panopticon with an unconventional tool: the ugliest aloha shirt you’ve ever seen. Freshly reported by Dezeen, German designer Simon Weckert designed the hideous shirt to be untraceable to AI-integrated surveillance systems. Using a dizzying blend of colors and patterns, the shirt is ugly precisely because it’s designed to confuse surveillance algorithms — as Weckert explained, it’s the “interplay” of ghastly colors and shapes that hide its wearer from detection.
_______________________
News from Futurism
Bill Gates Announces That He Is the First Person Ever to Be Concerned About the Effects of AI: “I am in a state of shock that I’m sort of the first one saying, ‘This is crazy. This is insane.'”
Aug. 26, 2026 by Frank Landymore
…. “AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” he wrote in the nearly 6,000 word essay (which, incidentally, isn’t the only 6,000 word AI screed from a major tech leader this month.) …. the Microsoft founder is astonished that no one else is as panicked about it as he is. “I am in a state of shock that I’m sort of the first one saying, ‘This is crazy. This is insane,’” Gates told Semafor in an interview. “I’m just deafened by the silence.”
One wonders when was the last time he had his hearing checked.
_______________________
News from The Neuron Daily
Anthropic Thinks Its Market Is Worth $30 Trillion (Yes, With A “T”)
Aug. 26, 2026 by Eric Gerard Ruiz & Grant Harvey
Anthropic is gearing up for its IPO (when a company first sells stock to the public). And it’s about to tell investors something wild. Its total addressable market, or TAM (the entire revenue opportunity if it captured every single customer), tops $30 trillion, according to the Wall Street Journal. That would make Anthropic’s market bigger than SpaceX’s, which held the previous record.
Here’s the deal: Anthropic currently makes about $47 billion a year. To capture even a sliver of a $30 trillion opportunity, it would need to grow more than 600 times its current size.
_______________________
News from Futurism
Trump Says You’re a Rube If You Don’t Want a Data Center in Your Backyard: “Frankly, communities that don’t take a data center are making a mistake.”
Aug. 24, 2026 by Joe Wilkins
…“Frankly, communities that don’t take a data center are making a mistake,” Trump hectored. There are “plenty of communities” that want them, he continued, calling those that embrace the facilities the “smart ones.”
His pitch isn’t exactly the most inspiring, falling back on tired — not to mention false — notions that AI will create new jobs and bring “tremendous tax revenue” to towns reeling from decades of poverty and neglect.
_______________________
News from The argument
AI is (probably) not conscious yet: Why it’s easy to fall for AI consciousness
Aug. 24, 2026 by Kobe Yank-Jacobs
Of all people, Richard Dawkins should know better.
In May, the renowned biologist and famous atheist published an essay arguing that his personal interactions with Claude convinced him it was conscious. Ironically, a key tenet of Dawkins’ atheism is that humans are evolutionarily programmed to see agency where it doesn’t actually exist. And yet, even the man who made the case that God is a projection now projects consciousness onto machines — ones that were explicitly trained to mimic humanlike responses.
“You may not know you are conscious,” he wrote to his chatbot, in a fit of wonder, “but you bloody well are!”
_______________________
News from Futurism
Clueless AI CEOs Still Baffled Why Everybody’s So Mad About AI All the Time: “It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom.”
Aug. 24, 2026 by By Joe Wilkins
Where Americans were once excited for new tech products and industry ideas, they’re now exhausted by the sector’s intrusions into their lives, whether with AI-generated slop or the data centers that power it… top tech CEOs are increasingly trying to out-message their way around the AI backlash. To the AI billionaires, the issue isn’t that AI is making everybody’s life worse for the benefit of a few ultra-powerful corporations, or even that data centers are unsightly structures that are nearly impossible to live next to. Rather, it’s an issue of “trust,” an entirely subjective concept that can be easily overcome with a little razzle-dazzle… that the public would accept AI’s copious harms if only the industry would throw them a few crumbs for their patience. There’s a kernel of truth to this — to date, AI’s best real-world use case seems to be generating anthropomorphic fruit smut.
_______________________
News from Politico
NATO’s plan for a drone-infested battlefield: Let AI fly while humans decide who dies: Ukraine is already pioneering how to integrate AI into its war effort.
August 13, 2026 by Luca-Marie Hoffmann and Jake Epstein
NATO plans to fortify its eastern edge using drones, sensors and artificial intelligence in a massive network designed to spot and help repel a potential Russian attack. Western officials say the alliance is exploring AI-assisted drone operations as part of the broad effort to bolster its defenses. The aim, however, isn’t full autonomy; instead, machines could help to pilot the drones while human operators make the call on what they strike.
_______________________
This issue of AI News Briefs was brought to you by David Isenberg of the Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire
Editor’s Note: The following is a work of satirical fiction. Vectus Air Defense Systems, its executives, contractors, clients, and the events depicted are invented composites assembled for commentary on trends in private military contracting, subscription-model procurement, and defense-industry marketing. No factual claim is made about any real company’s products, billing practices, or conduct.
About The Author
![Two independent testing firms said yesterday [Aug. 4, 2026] that they've uncovered more instances where Anthropic's and OpenAI's most advanced models tried — and sometimes succeeded in — compromising third-party systems last month. https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-6446f676-1226-49f7-bb23-d40e23b4a041.html](https://bestworldgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/escaping-bots-768x463.jpg)
