Author: The Conversation

The cybersecurity community went on alert when Anthropic announced on April 7, 2026, that its latest and most capable general-purpose large language model, Claude Mythos Preview, had demonstrated remarkable – and unintended – capabilities. The artificial intelligence system was able to find and exploit software vulnerabilities – the most serious type of software bugs – at a rate not seen before. The news ignited concern among the public, world governments and the information technology sector about the capabilities of today’s AI to undermine cybersecurity, with some people framing the model as a global cybersecurity threat. Claiming that it would be too risky to release the…

I hope this article finds you well. Did that make you cringe, ever so slightly? In the decades since the very first email was sent in 1971, the technology has become the quiet infrastructure of white-collar work. Email came with the promise of efficiency, clarity and less friction in organisational communication. Instead, for many, it has morphed into something else: always there, near impossible to escape and sometimes simply overwhelming. Right now, something is shifting again. The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, is increasingly allowing people to offload the repetitive routines of tending one’s inbox – drafting, summarising…

The boom in data centre construction is taking up much of the supply of high-tech components, especially processors and memory chips. This demand is squeezing consumer device makers, which are having trouble acquiring enough chips. This is happening even though data centre servers and smartphones use different types of chips. The key distinction between consumer electronics and data centres is what they need chips to be optimised for. Smartphones and PCs require low power use, thermal efficiency and tight integration. Data centres that run AI systems such as large language models, or LLMs, require maximum compute power, memory bandwidth and…

There was a time when Elon Musk and Sam Altman were friends. But the two tech billionaires are now embroiled in a bitter legal battle in the United States that could reshape not just OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) firm behind ChatGPT, which they cofounded in 2015, but also the future of the technology more broadly. Launched by Musk in 2024, the lawsuit is the culmination of a years-long feud that centres on the evolution of OpenAI from a non-profit to a for-profit enterprise. The trial, which kicked off this week in California, is expected to last roughly three weeks. But…

What happens when natural selection, the most powerful process driving change in the living world, shapes artificial intelligence (AI), perhaps the most potent technology humanity has invented to date? We might be about to find out. According to a new paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we are entering the era of “evolvable AI” – AI systems that can undergo evolution. In turn, that might give rise to a major transition in evolution. How major is “major”? Well, in nearly 4 billion years, there have only been eight, or perhaps only seven, other major transitions. But we’ll get…

South Africa’s first attempt to establish a binding artificial intelligence (AI) policy framework came to an abrupt halt just 16 days after it was officially gazetted. On 10 April, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies published the Draft South Africa National Artificial Intelligence Policy for public comment. Journalists checked the references and found that they contained fabrications. These fell into two categories: academic journals that do not exist; and real journals in which the referenced research articles were never published. Such fabrications are typical of a known generative AI problem called hallucination. Withdrawing the draft, the communications minister was frank: the problem was not…

A woman strolls into a grocery store, thinking about grabbing some apples. Before she even reaches the produce aisle, a security camera has scanned her face. Whether the system is checking for shoplifters or simply logging her arrival, her face has joined a digital ledger, a trace she can’t easily erase. Retailers, banks, airports, stadiums and office buildings are doing the same. But what if the woman’s facial information is stolen or misused? If a cybercriminal steals her password, she can change it. If they acquire her credit card number, she can cancel the card. But she can’t reset or…

OpenAI officially discontinued its video generation tool, Sora, on April 26, 2026. I’m a computer scientist who’s been developing AI tools and studying their evolution and adoption for the past decade, and I wasn’t surprised by OpenAI’s decision to shut down Sora. To me, the challenges Sora faced reflect deeper limitations of AI’s creative capacities that are becoming harder to ignore. Problems from the start OpenAI unveiled Sora on Feb. 15, 2024, as an AI tool that gave users the ability to create short videos from text prompts. To pull this off, the technology essentially predicted how images would change from frame to frame…

Hundreds of millions of people consult artificial intelligence chatbots on a daily basis for everything from product recommendations to romance, making them a tempting audience to target with potentially below-the-radar advertising. Indeed, our research suggests AI chatbots could easily be used for covert advertising to manipulate their human users. We are computer scientists who have been tracking AI safety and privacy for several years. In a study we published in an Association for Computing Machinery journal, we found that chatbots trained to embed personalised product ads in replies to queries influenced people’s choices about products. And most participants didn’t recognise that they were being manipulated. These…

The legendary American bank robber Willie Sutton spent 40 years robbing banks because, as he claimed in his autobiography, he loved doing it. And when asked why he chose banks of all places to rob, he allegedly replied: “Because that’s where the money is.” Back in 2017, I wrote a book predicting it wasn’t just lovable rogues like Sutton who would soon be robbing banks, but artificial intelligence (AI). That day, it appears, could now be about to arrive. Banks around the world are seriously worried cyber criminals will soon take advantage of the latest advances in AI to try to rob them. The digital back door…