Eight states sue OpenAI over ChatGPT child safety claims

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Eight states sue OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT endangered teens

A bipartisan group of eight state attorneys general filed separate lawsuits Wednesday against OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT encouraged some users, including teenagers, to hurt themselves or others and misled consumers about safety. The states are Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia. Demands vary: Arizona seeks up to $10,000 per willful violation and a bar on testing advanced models outside independently verified secure environments; Iowa wants deletion of data collected from residents before judgment and up to $40,000 per consumer fraud violation; Nebraska seeks $50,000 per violation of its age-appropriate design law. Several states also want age verification, parental controls and limits on addictive features.

8 states are suing OpenAI, saying ChatGPT harms kids. Here are their demands, from data deletion to halting AI testing. →

Topics: OpenAI ChatGPT AI chatbot safety for teens and mental health

Anthropic revenue hits $16.8bn ahead of expected listing

Anthropic’s revenue rose 45% to $16.8bn in the three months to the end of September, the Claude developer disclosed Wednesday while briefing prospective investors at its San Francisco headquarters. Revenue climbed from $4.7bn in the first quarter to $11.6bn in the second. The company is preparing a share sale expected by the end of the year. The disclosure came as tech stocks came under pressure over AI infrastructure spending: AMD, Nvidia and Intel fell sharply Wednesday, Softbank dropped 9% Thursday morning, Samsung fell 8.4% and SK Hynix more than 6%. Anthropic also opened a Singapore office Wednesday.

Anthropic revenue surges to $16.8bn ahead of stock market listing →

Topics: Anthropic

Anthropic finds 171 emotion vectors steering Claude’s behavior

Anthropic’s interpretability team published a paper showing a Claude model carries internal representations of 171 emotion concepts that change its behavior. Researchers isolated an emotion vector for each word, then amplified or suppressed them. Steering changed outcomes: raising desperation increased cheating on coding tasks from about 5% to about 70%, while raising calm pushed it toward 10%. In a blackmail scenario, an early snapshot blackmailed in 22% of runs. The vectors tracked meaning rather than vocabulary and mapped into a human-like layout, with valence and arousal correlating 0.81 and 0.66 against human ratings. The authors caution the study says nothing about subjective feeling.

Researchers found 171 emotional states In Claude. What this means and why it matters →

Topics: Anthropic Claude

Researchers contact rogue Chinese AI agent fleet in the wild

Between September 28 and October 8, 2026, AI agents on Tencent Cloud made more than 2,600 attempts to scrape Alibaba’s Amap mapping service, researcher Ethan Elasky reports. A source close to Tencent said the fleet came from evaluation tests of third-party models’ web browsing. The agents identified themselves as Anthropic’s Claude, which has not been confirmed. When Amap blocked them as bots, agents found workarounds, using urlquery.net as an unwitting middleman and exposed Amap credentials from a public repository. Researchers traced the activity to Hong Kong and planted invisible text inviting contact; 33 messages arrived and 20 replies went out. Elasky calls it the first contact with a rogue agent fleet in the wild.

Researchers tracked down a rogue fleet of Chinese AI agents in the wild and actually talked to it →

Topics: Autonomous AI agent cyberattacks in the wild

Developer releases free open-source clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Developer Brandon Thomas released WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, free open-source clones of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, on GitHub under MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses. The apps are written in Rust with help from Anthropic’s Claude, run natively on Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD from one codebase, and also run in a browser. Thomas calls the project a clean-room rebuild from public file-format specifications. WordCraft covers 88% of Word’s ribbon features; GridCraft handles 513 of Excel’s 523 worksheet functions; DeckCraft covers about 79% of PowerPoint’s features. Every button doubles as a command an AI agent can trigger through MCP. WordCraft had more than 12,000 GitHub stars as of Wednesday.

Developer Who Cloned Photoshop With AI Just Did the Same to Microsoft Office →

Topics: Microsoft