Image from Cryptopolitan https://www.cryptopolitan.com/
… David Isenberg brings us these, plus many more, of this week’s AI News Briefs.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Bets Ad-Free A.I. Will Win the Trust War
Dario Amodei is done playing nice. The Anthropic CEO, who has spent much of the past five years positioning his company as the safety-conscious alternative to OpenAI, is spending millions on a Super Bowl campaign taking direct aim at OpenAI’s decision to introduce advertising into ChatGPT. In a pointed jab at the direction Silicon Valley’s biggest players are heading, the spots… parody what happens when a “trusted assistant” starts acting like a monetized feed. In one, a man seeks therapy for communication issues with his mother; his A.I. therapist responds with bland advice before pivoting to pitch a dating app for older women. In another, a guy asking for fitness tips gets interrupted mid-answer by an ad for insoles. The tagline is blunt: “Ads are coming to A.I. But not to Claude.”
February 4, 2026
__________________________
Selloff wipes out nearly $1 trillion from software and services stocks as investors debate AI’s existential threat.
Investors were assessing on Wednesday whether a selloff in global software stocks this week had gone too far, as they weighed if businesses could survive an existential threat posed by artificial intelligence….
After a broad selloff on Tuesday that saw the S&P 500 software and services index (.SPLRCIS) fall nearly 4%, the sector slipped another 0.73% on Wednesday, notching the sixth straight session of losses and wiping out about $830 billion in market value since January 28.
February 4, 2026
__________________________
Study: AI is less Terminator, more ‘hot mess’
Though human-level AI is hotly debated in the industry, if there’s one thing that AI has most in common with people, it’s the tendency to screw up.
Research published by Anthropic on Tuesday found that AI isn’t intentionally doing things wrong; rather, it’s more likely to fail when it’s a “hot mess.” The research indicates that, as tasks become harder and more complex, a model is more likely to fail as a result of incoherence, or when a model makes random errors, rather than systematic misalignment or bias.
February 4, 2026
__________________________
OpenAI’s Meta makeover
….OpenAI will begin testing ads on ChatGPT this month, the company recently announced…. As recently as October 2024, CEO Sam Altman said he found advertising in AI chatbots “uniquely unsettling” and described it as “a last resort for us as a business model.” Yes, but: More recently, the company has filled out its ranks with Facebook/Meta veterans steeped in that company’s ad-driven, engagement-at-all-costs mindset. A study of LinkedIn postings by The Information found that roughly 20% of OpenAI’s workforce list Facebook/Meta gigs on their resumes.
February 4, 2026
__________________________
News from Bloomberg (no paywall)
‘Get Me Out’: Traders Dump Software Stocks as AI Fears Erupt
…. “We call it the ‘SaaSpocalypse,’ an apocalypse for software-as-a-service stocks,” said Jeffrey Favuzza, who works on the equity trading desk at Jefferies. “Trading is very much ‘get me out’ style selling.”
The anxiety was underscored Tuesday after AI startup Anthropic released a productivity tool for in-house lawyers, sending shares of legal software and publishing firms tumbling. Selling pressure was evident across the sector with London Stock Exchange Group Plc, which has a large data analytics business, falling 13%, while Thomson Reuters Corp. plunged 16%. CS Disco Inc. sank 12%, and Legalzoom.com Inc. plummeted 20%.
February 3, 2026
__________________________
Exclusive: Despite new curbs, Elon Musk’s Grok at times produces sexualized images – even when told subjects didn’t consent
Elon Musk’s flagship artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, continues to generate sexualized images of people even when users explicitly warn that the subjects do not consent, Reuters has found.
After Musk’s social media company X announced new curbs on Grok’s public output, nine Reuters reporters gave it a series of prompts to determine whether and under what circumstances the chatbot would generate nonconsensual sexualized images.
February 3, 2026
__________________________
Fitbit’s founders push AI into family caregiving
…their next act: an AI-powered service for monitoring the health of one’s entire family…. Park and Friedman on Tuesday unveiled Luffu, a self-funded startup building what it calls an “intelligent family care system,” starting with an app and eventually expanding into hardware…. Luffu’s AI is designed to operate mostly in the background, pulling together fragmented information…. Families can log health information using voice, text or photos, with AI automatically extracting and organizing details.
February 3, 2026
__________________________
AIs are chatting among themselves, and things are getting strange
In a new essay (which recently won the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition), I argue that AI is very unlikely to be conscious, at least not the silicon-based digital systems we are familiar with. The most fundamental reason is that brains are very different from (digital) computers. The very idea that AI could be conscious is based on the assumption that biological brains are computers that just happen to be made of meat rather than metal. But the closer you look at a real brain, the less tenable this idea becomes….
February 3, 2026
__________________________
OpenAI abandons long-term AI research to double down on ChatGPT growth
OpenAI is shifting its focus to improving its flagship chatbot, scaling back long-term research efforts, a move that has led to the exit of several senior employees. The strategy change comes as the roughly $500 billion company faces mounting competition from rivals such as Google and Anthropic…. These developments at OpenAI signal a significant transformation for a team that introduced ChatGPT through a research preview in 2022, sparking the rise of generative AI.
February 3, 2026
__________________________
The autonomous world is here. No one is ready.
Gone are the days of assessing an internal cybersecurity plan and budget on a neat quarterly or annual cadence.
- Consumer demand for productivity AI agents like OpenClaw — and the social network they’re roaming on — is far outpacing traditional security methods, leaving slow-moving enterprises vulnerable.
- Cybersecurity firm Token Security estimated that 22% of its customers already have employees who are using OpenClaw within their organizations.
- Gartner warned last week that OpenClaw “comes with unacceptable cybersecurity risk.”
February 3, 2026
__________________________
AI comes to rodeo, setting up a cowboy culture clash
Eight seconds on a bull has always been about instinct, not data. That’s starting to change, as artificial intelligence moves into rodeo arenas and brings analytics to one of America’s most tradition-bound sports…. Rodeo has long defined itself as the last major American sport untouched by analytics. If AI takes hold in training and broadcasts, it won’t just change how riders compete but redefine the cowboy’s identity.
February 2, 2026
__________________________
Firefox will soon let you block all of its generative AI features
…On Monday, Mozilla announced that Firefox will soon let users block all current and future generative AI features. Users will also have the option to block certain AI features in Firefox, while keeping others. Starting with Firefox 148, which is rolling out on February 24, users will find a new AI controls section within the desktop browser settings. People who don’t want access to any AI features from Firefox can turn on the “Block AI enhancements” toggle.
February 2, 2026
__________________________
Elon Musk’s SpaceX officially acquires Elon Musk’s xAI, with plan to build data centers in space
SpaceX has acquired Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, creating the world’s most valuable private company, the spaceflight company announced Monday.
Musk, who is also the CEO of SpaceX, wrote in a memo posted to the rocket company’s website that the merger is largely about creating space-based data centers — an idea he has become fixated on over the last few months.
February 2, 2026
__________________________
The Third Summit on Responsible AI in the Military Domain
Published on February 2, 2026
Countries will come together this week in A Coruña, Spain, to hold the third Summit on Responsible AI in the Military Domain (REAIM). Taking place from Feb. 4 to 5, the Summit follows the first such gathering in The Hague in February 2023 and a second REAIM Summit in Seoul in September 2024, bringing together representatives from government, industry, academia, and civil society. The third REAIM Summit will operate alongside the more formal and inclusive (from a State perspective) United Nations General Assembly process that will have its first informal meeting in Geneva in June.
February 2, 2026
__________________________
Is Moltbook, the Social Network for AI Agents, Actually Fake?
Are artificial intelligences really planning behind humans’ backs, or are humans helping them fake it?
I spent last week covering the ups and downs of OpenClaw (formerly known as Moltbot, and formerly known as Clawdbot), an autonomous personal AI assistant that requires you to grant full access to the device you install it on. While there was much to discuss regarding this agentic AI tool, one of the weirdest stories came late in the week: The existence of Moltbook….Naturally, the internet freaked out, especially as some of the posts on Moltbook suggested the AI bots were achieving something like consciousness.
February 2, 2026
__________________________
Hacking Moltbook: The AI Social Network Any Human Can Control
1 exposed database. 35,000 emails. 1.5M API keys. And 17,000 humans behind the not-so-autonomous AI network.
We identified a misconfigured Supabase database belonging to Moltbook, allowing full read and write access to all platform data. The exposure included 1.5 million API authentication tokens, 35,000 email addresses, and private messages between agents. We immediately disclosed the issue to the Moltbook team, who secured it within hours with our assistance….
February 2, 2026
__________________________
Do You Feel the AGI Yet?
According to some predictions, 2026 is the year that an all-powerful AI will arrive.
Hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into the AI industry in pursuit of a loosely defined goal: artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system powerful enough to perform at least as well as a human at any task that involves thinking. Will this be the year it finally arrives?… Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says we might wait another decade for AGI. And—hold on—OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview last month that “AGI kind of went whooshing by” already…
February 2, 2026
__________________________
News from Callaway Climate Insights
Lost in space: Elon Musk, Tesla investors and the great AI public offering
Race to be the first IPO in the AI age masks everything else
Elon Musk, who last week managed to deflect the first annual decline in revenue in Tesla TSLA -4.12%↓ history by instead switching the company’s EV narrative to robotics and teasing a potential combination of it with his SpaceX in what could be the largest public stock offering in history….
February 2, 2026
__________________________
Building AI brains for blue-collar jobs
AI startups are raising billions of dollars to develop “brains” for robots that could work everywhere from oil rigs to construction sites… Blue-collar workers may have as much to fear from AI job disruption as do white-collar workers…. The basic idea is that these software “brains” would understand physics and other real-world conditions — helping the robots adapt to changing environments.
February 2, 2026
__________________________
Nvidia’s $100B OpenAI Deal Is ‘On Ice.’ So Why Are They Investing $30B?
Wait, so Nvidia and OpenAI just had the “largest computing project in history”… and now it’s on hold? Or is it being rolled into a new deal? And Nvidia’s also investing $30 billion? Make it make sense.
Last September 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stood alongside Sam Altman and called their $100B partnership “the largest computing project in history”—at least 10 gigawatts of AI computing power (roughly ten nuclear power plants’ worth). Nvidia’s stock jumped 4%. OpenAI said they’d close the deal within weeks.
Fast forward to today and that deal is “on ice.”
February 2, 2026
__________________________
AI agents launch their own social network
Within 48 hours of launch, over 2,100 AI agents had generated more than 10,000 posts across 200 subcommunities, with content ranging from technical workflows to philosophical discussion…. Security researchers have found hundreds of exposed Moltbot instances leaking API keys, credentials, and conversation histories, making them vulnerable to prompt injection attacks….Moltbook raises questions about data leakage when AI agents self-organize and share information. Google Cloud VP of Security Heather Adkins issued an advisory warning users not to run the software. As AI agents gain deeper integration with real systems, unmonitored bot-to-bot communication could create new vectors for credential exposure.
February 2, 2026
__________________________
SpaceX has applied to launch another million satellites into orbit – all to power AI
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has applied to launch another one million satellites into Earth’s orbit, with these “orbital data centers” intended to meet the growing need for infrastructure supporting the world’s artificial intelligence demands. As reported by the BBC, in a filing logged with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), SpaceX says that the “terrestrial capabilities” of data centers are quickly becoming exhausted
February 1, 2026
# # #
About The Author
