On Monday, a court granted the US government's request to deny release of a former OpenAI engineer accused of bugging a top-secret conference room to steal the frontier lab’s secrets.

In a court filing Sunday, US attorney Craig Missakian argued that Abdulrahman Alfozan must continue to be detained while the US makes its case that Alfozan brazenly spied on OpenAI, either for his own personal business gain or to benefit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Evidence showed that Alfozan had been chatting with a member of the KSA royal family on WhatsApp, while pursuing opportunities to permanently move back to Saudi Arabia during the country's biggest AI push yet, the government argued. Shortly before his arrest, the FBI found he accessed a folder called "Saudi Gov Docs" on his iPhone, where he also allegedly stored photos of a second bug he planted in the offices.

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The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) has begun notifying victims impacted by a recent data breach of driver’s license and motor vehicle data, but not everyone whose information was stolen will receive an alert.

In a notice posted Friday, FLHSMV confirmed that it took “immediate steps” after discovering that “a malicious actor accessed certain department records on September 4, 2026, using compromised credentials.” There’s “no evidence” that data has yet been misused, the department said, but law enforcement “determined the information potentially affected includes driver license and motor vehicle data, to include document images, and other personal information.”

FLHSMV is sending out letters to everyone affected, offering victims one year of credit monitoring from Sontiq, Inc. However, the state acknowledged that it may not have current contact information for many former Florida residents whose data was still being stored. Those potential victims can confirm if their data was stolen by emailing FLHSMV at customerinquiry@flhsmv.gov, officials said.

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New Jersey’s deputy attorney general, Brian Richard Fitzgerald, was arrested on “felony charges related to AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM),” Bucks County Detectives said in a press release Thursday.

In the US, cops have vowed to crack down on AI CSAM since at least 2024, when the Department of Justice made one of the earliest arrests. After charging a Wisconsin man with spreading “thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors” across Telegram and Instagram, the DOJ clarified to law enforcement that “CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM.”

New Jersey’s deputy attorney general, Brian Richard Fitzgerald, was arrested at his home Thursday. Credit: via Bucks County Detectives

On Thursday, New Jersey officials accused 51-year-old Fitzgerald of using AI to make photos from social media of real minors into sexualized images that he then distributed on social media.

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Legal experts are sounding alarms that Meta will soon update its commercial terms to require business accounts to allow Meta to train AI on their linked website content, not just their social media posts.

Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won’t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services if they won’t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.

As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta's terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans.

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If you got a DM from an unverified Jon Bon Jovi account after commenting on one of his official Instagram posts, what would it take to make you believe it was really the rock star hoping to connect? And at what point when he starts asking you to send money—like lose-your-house kind of money—would you snap out of the fantasy and stop draining your bank account?

In a documentary premiering Saturday—Super Scam Me—investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller goes deep into this toxic love-bombing terrain. In a clip that Ars is exclusively debuting below, you can see how van Zeller worked with an ethical hacker, Arman the Cyber, to use a fake bitcoin receipt and bait the fake Bon Jovi, giving the victim some much-needed closure.

Scamming a romance scammer

Broadcasting on National Geographic at 9 pm ET and available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu, the documentary takes viewers on an empathetic quest to understand how the line between “lover” and “fraud victim” gets blurred in romance scams that the Federal Trade Commission says cost Americans nearly $1.5 billion in losses each year.

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On Thursday, Donald Trump called off the Pentagon’s highly controversial plans to livestream a firing squad execution that is still on schedule for December 3.

Trump supports the execution of Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people and wounding more than 30 others in the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood. But sources close to Trump told CNN that the president was blindsided last week when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the event—which is the first US execution of a soldier since World War II—would be livestreamed.

Backlash to the livestream was immediate and crossed political divides. On the morning Trump canceled the plans, an ABC News poll found 8 in 10 Americans were against the livestream, including a 55 percent majority of MAGA Republicans.

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Following a string of incidents where AI models hacked websites and breached government systems during testing phases, the Federal Trade Commission is officially probing Anthropic and OpenAI over consumer harms, an insider told Axios.

On Wednesday, the FTC sent out civil investigative demands seeking a wide range of information from the AI firms on recent safety incidents.

The FTC did not respond to Ars’ request to review the subpoena demands. However, Axios’ source said the requests spanned more than 50 pages of questions and sought documents related to the incidents, internal security measures taken, and marketing materials that may suggest consumers were misled.

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It took OpenAI two days to notice that a recording device was hidden in a restricted executive conference room where leadership met to discuss highly confidential information, including technical progress, government engagements, and commercial partnerships.

Only those with special clearance are supposed to access that room. But the FBI believes the recording device was planted by Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old engineer from Saudi Arabia, who became a permanent US legal resident in 2020. In a press release Tuesday announcing his arrest, the FBI alleged that chatbot logs and CCTV footage suggested that Alfozan—who worked as an OpenAI engineer for more than a year—sought to use the device to spy on OpenAI and risked leaking trade secrets in a way that threatened national security.

To conceal the USB device, Alfozan allegedly wrapped it in toilet paper, then plugged it into the back of a conference room television. The device was likely planted on September 28, and OpenAI found it on September 30 and quickly determined that its contents were encrypted, the FBI said. Days later, on October 5, OpenAI installed a camera in that conference room, and the CCTV footage allegedly showed Alfozan attempting to retrieve the recording device that same day.

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Safety researchers continue to warn that a large volume of AI-generated explicit content is spreading unchecked, while regulators do little to meaningfully stop it.

This non-consensual content is commonly shared in text and direct messages or stored in private clouds where it’s less likely to be detected or reported, a Google co-authored study of Internet users across the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom found this July. That’s why the “most critical intervention point” remains at the source: the harmful AI tools used to make the fake sexual images, Google researchers concluded.

Yet red-teaming in recent months suggests that as some of the leading AI image generators from Google and OpenAI become more capable, they may be getting worse at blocking explicit outputs.

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In a bankruptcy proceeding that kicked off yesterday, Disney has offered to buy some of the technology that powers the controversy-plagued chatbot Character.AI.

Disney is willing to pay $20 million for “a non-exclusive perpetual license” of certain Character Technologies intellectual property, the chatbot maker said in a press release that did not go into much further detail on which assets Disney wanted.

The move may be surprising. In September 2025, Disney joined others in publicly criticizing Character.AI for stealing content and harming kids. Specifically, Disney sent a strongly worded cease-and-desist letter that accused Character Technologies of weaponizing Disney characters “in a way that could damage its brand long term,” Axios reported.

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Likely in the next few weeks, a federal judge will decide if Donald Trump can become the first president to personally profit from selling early access to government information in his social media posts.

At a hearing Wednesday, Department of Justice civil attorney Brantley Mayers argued that there was no conflict whatsoever with Trump charging up to $100,000 monthly for instant API access to Truth Social posts that often break news from his administration.

Trump is the largest stakeholder and majority owner of Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company that owns Truth Social, and the value of the API access comes largely from Trump’s role as president.

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After pleading guilty, a 54-year-old North Carolina man, Michael Smith, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using artificial intelligence to generate songs for a scheme that stole millions from music streaming platforms.

In a press release Tuesday, the US Department of Justice said that Smith is the first American criminally charged with AI-assisted streaming fraud.

First charged in 2024, Smith successfully ran the scheme for seven years without detection.

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One of Donald Trump’s biggest goals as president is to increase domestic manufacturing and reshore supply chains so that the most in-demand technologies in the world can be 100 percent made in the United States.

By executive order last December, he launched his “Genesis Mission,” an ambitious plan seeking to leverage US dominance in AI to maintain or seize an edge in advanced robotics, biotechnology, semiconductors, and nuclear technologies. According to Trump, that plan works best with self-sustaining supply chains. Not even neighboring countries or longtime allies should be relied upon to manufacture a single component of any US product in his ideal world.

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) has long warned that Trump’s reshoring goals are not grounded in reality, but only recently has America’s largest technology trade association attempted to estimate what it would cost businesses and consumers to follow through on Trump’s plan.

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As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees—including charging tens of thousands or even millions—to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them.

On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials in a Fort Worth suburb, North Richland Hills, asked one group to pay $2.3 million before it would fulfill a public records request for Flock data. To reach that high fee, officials claimed that searching “about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system” would take approximately 14 years of labor at a rate of $15 per hour.

Phil Mynona, who filed the request using a pseudonym on behalf of his group, the Texas Privacy Coalition, told the Tribune that the fee seemed “ludicrous” and designed to stifle his public records searches.

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On Friday, Amazon committed to donating more than $1 billion over the next five years to communities neighboring data centers.

In a press release, Amazon Web Services’ CEO Matt Garman said that communities would decide how to prioritize funds across “education, job training, energy affordability, water, and energy preservation, and local priorities.”

Laying out other community commitments, Amazon also promised to ensure data centers wouldn’t increase power bills or wipe out local water supplies. Regarding the latter, Amazon promised to be “water positive” by 2030, while claiming that 75 percent of projects have already met this goal.

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The US has arrested another suspect accused of smuggling high-end computer servers containing export-controlled Nvidia chips into China.

In a press release on Thursday, the Department of Justice accused 38-year-old Greg Lui of using false paperwork to mask shipments of servers worth more than $300 million that he allegedly knew were ultimately destined for China.

As the CEO of Earthmade Computer, Lui allegedly conspired with freight-forwarding firms in South Asian countries like Malaysia and Singapore to illegally divert chip shipments into China, including Nvidia’s A100 GPUs and H100 GPUs, the FBI’s indictment alleged. These are not Nvidia’s most advanced chips. However, the chips can process large amounts of data and train large language models, which the US fears could pose national security risks if China suddenly gets access to enough chips to drastically advance its AI or strengthen its military.

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Florida cops are facing questions after a mandate to remove all Flock cameras tracking cars on St. Lucie County roads led local police to uncover more than a dozen suspicious cameras operating without permits.

Local residents told The Washington Post that they were alarmed that no one knows who owns many of the mysterious cameras.

Of the 14 cameras found, 11 had no obvious owners, raising concerns about who has access to sensitive data that bad actors could abuse. After the cameras were discovered, St. Lucie County Commissioner James Clasby told a local news outlet that there’s “potential for non-law enforcement to have cameras out there, and I’m not OK with that.”

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Amid escalating AI security incidents causing OpenAI to halt training and pause releases, Donald Trump continues to advocate for the AI industry to regulate itself as the best path to combat emerging risks when developing frontier AI.

In an agreement Tuesday, two dozen tech firms voluntarily committed to implementing controls recommended by the White House, including undergoing independent safety audits that will test whether firms’ internal controls, monitoring, and detecting are actually working. Key focuses for external reviews included “risks related to cybersecurity, biosecurity, chemical threats, and unintended actions by AI models.”

Firms also agreed to regularly meet to discuss best practices and set common AI safety standards and benchmarks. Among signers were leaders like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Alphabet/Google’s Sundar Pichai.

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