In a tweet that’s been viewed 1.3 million times in the last six hours, OpenAI’s head of robotics announced their resignation. They said they “care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together,” so this “wasn’t an easy call,” but offered this reason for resigning:

AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.

This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I’m proud of what we built together.

“To be clear, my issue is that the announcement was rushed without the guardrails defined,” explains a later tweet. “It’s a governance concern first and foremost. These are too important for deals or announcements to be rushed.” And when asked how many OpenAI employees had left after OpenAI signed their new Pentagon deal, the roboticist said… “I can’t share any internal details.”

The roboticist previously worked at Meta before leaving to join OpenAI in late 2024, reports Engadget:

OpenAI confirmed Kalinowski’s resignation and said in a statement to Engadget that the company understands people have “strong views” about these issues and will continue to engage in discussions with relevant parties. The company also explained in the statement that it doesn’t support the issues that Kalinowski brought up. “We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our red lines: no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons,” the OpenAI statement read.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here comes another disappointment for ChatGPT users. As first reported by Sources‘ Alex Heath, OpenAI is yet again delaying its “adult mode” for ChatGPT. A company spokesperson told Heath that “we’re pushing out the launch of adult mode so we can focus on work that is a higher priority for more users right now.”

More specifically, OpenAI’s spokesperson said that things like “gains in intelligence, personality improvements, personalization, and making the experience more proactive” were being prioritized instead. However, the company still wants to release an adult mode, but it would “take more time,” according to the company spokesperson.

The reveal of ChatGPT’s adult mode dates back to October, when OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, posted on X that the company would roll out more age-gating as part of its “treat adults like adults” principle, adding that this would include “erotica for verified adults.” Altman originally said this adult mode would be available in December, but an OpenAI exec later said during a December briefing that it would instead debut in the first quarter of 2026. 

With Q1 almost coming to a close, we no longer have a timeframe for when ChatGPT’s adult mode will release. However, OpenAI began rolling out its age prediction tool in January, which may go hand-in-hand with the upcoming adult mode.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-is-reportedly-pushing-back-the-launch-of-its-adult-mode-even-further-213013801.html?src=rss

Astronomers have spotted a galaxy they believe is made of 99.9% dark matter, reports CNN — and it’s so faint, it’s almost invisible:

CDG-2, which is about 300 million light-years from Earth, appears to be so rich in dark matter that it could belong to a hypothesized subset of low surface brightness galaxies called “dark galaxies,” which are believed to contain few or no stars…. [Post-doctoral astrophysics/statistics fellow Dayi Li at the University of Toronto was lead author on a study about the discovery, and tells CNN] There is no strict definition of dark galaxies… but their existence is predicted by dark matter theories and cosmological simulations. “Where exactly do we draw the line in terms of how many stars they should have is still ambiguous, because not everything in astronomy is as clear-cut as we like,” he said. “To be technically correct, CDG-2 is an almost-dark galaxy. But the importance of CDG-2 is that it nudges us much closer to getting to that truly dark regime, while previously we did not think a galaxy this faint could exist.”

To observe CDG-2, the researchers used data from three telescopes — Hubble, the European Space Agency’s Euclid space observatory and the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii — along with a novel approach that involved looking for objects called globular clusters. “These are very tight, spherical groupings of very olds stars, basically the relics of the first generation of star formation,” Li said. Globular clusters are bright even if the surrounding galaxy is not, and previous observations have shown a relationship between them and the presence of dark matter in a galaxy, Li added. Because CDG-2 appears to have very few stars, there must be something else providing the mass that the clusters need to hold themselves together. Li and his colleagues assume that the source of the mass is dark matter.
The researchers found a set of four globular clusters in the Perseus Cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies immersed in a cloud of gas and one of the most massive objects in the universe. Further observations revealed a glow or halo around the globular clusters, suggesting the presence of a galaxy… Astronomers believe, Li explained, that after the formation of the clusters early in the galaxy’s existence, larger surrounding galaxies stripped it of the hydrogen gas required to make more individual stars like our sun. “The material that this galaxy needed to continue to form stars was no longer there, so it was left with basically just a dark matter halo and the four globular clusters.” The process, he added, would leave behind a skeleton or ghost of “a galaxy that pretty much just failed.” As a result of this formation mechanism, the galaxy only has 0.005% of the brightness of our own galaxy, Li said…

Studying potential dark galaxies is important because they provide nearly pristine views of the behavior of dark matter, according to Neal Dalal, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, who was not involved with the study.

Robert Minchin, an astronomer at New Mexico’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory, told CNN that “it seems likely that other very dark galaxies will be found by this method in the future.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deep in the Angolan Highlands lurks a rumored new species of elephant. Conservationist and ornithologist Steve Boyes has been searching for this elusive herd for years and the story of his journey is the focus of Ghost Elephants, a haunting, evocative documentary directed by Werner Herzog. The film debuted at the Venice International Film Festival last summer and is now coming to National Geographic and Disney+.

It might seem unusual for an ornithologist to embark on a quest to find remote pachyderms, but for Boyes the connection is perfectly natural.  He grew up in South Africa and wanted nothing more than to be an explorer, just like the people he read about every month in National Geographic magazine. “I grew up waiting for the magazine to arrive; I wanted the maps,” Boyes told Ars. “Those would become my garden, or the field beyond, or the river—wild places imagined and real.”

Boyes’ parents frequently took him and his brother out into the wild, including visits to Botswana and Tanzania. “We used to embed ourselves in baboon troops and walk with impalas,” said Boyes, and while his brother feared elephants, Boyes was walking with them from a young age. Ghost Elephants contains some gorgeous underwater footage of elephant feet plodding through the water, and elephants swimming on their sides, behavior that matches Boyes’ own experiences with the animals. Under the right circumstances, if they don’t feel threatened, elephants “will come and swim around you and with you and interact with you,” he said. “So elephants have always fascinated me.”

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When NASA crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos in 2022, it altered both Dimorphos’ orbit around its parent asteroid, Didymos, and the two objects’ orbit around the sun, according to new research. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a press release that this “marks the first time a human-made object has measurably altered the path of a celestial body around the Sun.” It’s a promising result as scientists work to find a feasible method of defending Earth from hazardous space objects.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission was designed to demonstrate one possible way of deflecting such an object, targeting the non-threatening moonlet Dimorphos, which is about 560 feet wide. NASA quickly declared it a success after its initial analysis showed the planned collision shortened Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos, the larger of the two objects in the binary asteroid system. In a follow-up study published in 2024, a team at NASA’s JPL reported that Dimorphos’ orbital period had been trimmed by about 33 minutes, as its path was nudged roughly 120 feet closer to Didymos than before. The latest study now indicates that the whole binary system was affected, not just Dimorphos. 

Didymos and Dimorphos have a 770-day orbital period around the sun, which lead author Rahil Makadia said has been changed by “about 11.7 microns per second, or 1.7 inches per hour.” That might not sound like much, but according to Makadia, “Over time, such a small change in an asteroid’s motion can make the difference between a hazardous object hitting or missing our planet.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasas-dart-spacecraft-changed-a-binary-asteroids-orbit-around-the-sun-in-a-first-for-a-human-made-object-210529924.html?src=rss

“It took Anthropic’s most advanced artificial-intelligence model about 20 minutes to find its first Firefox browser bug during an internal test of its hacking prowess,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

The Anthropic team submitted it, and Firefox’s developers quickly wrote back: This bug was serious. Could they get on a call? “What else do you have? Send us more,” said Brian Grinstead, an engineer with Mozilla, Firefox’s parent organization.
Anthropic did. Over a two-week period in January, Claude Opus 4.6 found more high-severity bugs in Firefox than the rest of the world typically reports in two months, Mozilla said… In the two weeks it was scanning, Claude discovered more than 100 bugs in total, 14 of which were considered “high severity…” Last year, Firefox patched 73 bugs that it rated as either high severity or critical.

A Mozilla blog post calls Firefox “one of the most scrutinized and security-hardened codebases on the web. Open source means our code is visible, reviewable, and continuously stress-tested by a global community.” So they’re impressed — and also thankful Anthropic provided test cases “that allowed our security team to quickly verify and reproduce each issue.”
Within hours, our platform engineers began landing fixes, and we kicked off a tight collaboration with Anthropic to apply the same technique across the rest of the browser codebase… . A number of the lower-severity findings were assertion failures, which overlapped with issues traditionally found through fuzzing, an automated testing technique that feeds software huge numbers of unexpected inputs to trigger crashes and bugs. However, the model also identified distinct classes of logic errors that fuzzers had not previously uncovered…

We view this as clear evidence that large-scale, AI-assisted analysis is a powerful new addition in security engineers’ toolbox. Firefox has undergone some of the most extensive fuzzing, static analysis, and regular security review over decades. Despite this, the model was able to reveal many previously unknown bugs. This is analogous to the early days of fuzzing; there is likely a substantial backlog of now-discoverable bugs across widely deployed software.

“In the time it took us to validate and submit this first vulnerability to Firefox, Claude had already discovered fifty more unique crashing inputs” in 6,000 C++ files, Anthropic says in a blog post (which points out they’ve also used Claude Opus 4.6 to discover vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel).

“Anthropic “also rolled out Claude Code Security, an automated code security testing tool, last month,” reports Axios, noting the move briefly rattled cybersecurity stocks…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is going to need to find a new head of robotics. Caitlin Kalinowski, OpenAI’s now-former head of robotics, posted on X that she was resigning from her role, while criticizing the company’s haste in partnering with the Department of Defense without investigating proper guardrails.

Kalinowski, who previously worked at Meta before leaving to join OpenAI in late 2024, wrote on X that “surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.” Responding to another post, the former OpenAI exec explained that “the announcement was rushed without the guardrails defined,” adding that it was a “governance concern first and foremost.”

OpenAI confirmed Kalinowski’s resignation and said in a statement to Engadget that the company understands people have “strong views” about these issues and will continue to engage in discussions with relevant parties. The company also explained in the statement that it doesn’t support the issues that Kalinowski brought up.

“We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our red lines: no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons,” the OpenAI statement read.

Kalinowski’s resignation may be the most high-profile fallout from OpenAI’s decision to sign a deal with the Department of Defense. The decision came just after Anthropic refused to comply with lifting certain AI guardrails around mass surveillance and developing fully autonomous weapons. However, even OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, said that he would amend the deal with the Department of Defense to prohibit spying on Americans.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openais-head-of-robotics-resigns-following-deal-with-the-department-of-defense-195918777.html?src=rss

“Within 24 hours of the first US-Israeli strikes on Iran, ships in the region’s waters found their navigation systems had gone haywire,” reports CNN, “erroneously indicating that the vessels were at airports, a nuclear power plant and on Iranian land.

“The location confusion was a result of widespread jamming and spoofing of signals from global positioning satellite systems.”

Used by all sides in conflict zones to disrupt the paths of drones and missiles, the process involves militaries and affiliated groups intentionally broadcasting high-intensity radio signals in the same frequency bands used by navigation tools. Jamming results in the disruption of a vehicle’s satellite-based positioning while spoofing leads to navigation systems reporting a false location. Though commercial vessels are not the target, the electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters on February 28, according to a report from Windward, a shipping intelligence firm. Jamming and spoofing also slowed marine traffic moving through the Strait of Hormuz, a congested shipping lane that handles roughly 20% of the world’s oil and gas exports and where precise navigation is essential, Windward’s data showed…. Daily incidents have more than doubled, rising from 350 when the conflict began to 672 by March 2, the firm reported.

As use of this warfare tactic grows, experts worry the impacts could reach far beyond battlespaces…. In June 2025, electronic interference with navigation systems was thought to be a factor in the collision between two oil tankers, Adalynn and Front Eagle, off the coast of the UAE… The number of global positioning system signal loss events affecting aircraft increased by 220% between 2021 and 2024, according to data from the International Air Transport Association. Last year, IATA said that the aviation industry must act to stay ahead of the threat.

Cockpits are seeing their navigation displays “literally drift away from reality,” said a commercial pilot, who didn’t want to be identified because he was not permitted to speak publicly. He said that he and his colleagues have experienced map shifts, where the aircraft location appears to move up to 1 mile away from the actual flight path, false altitude information that leads to phantom “pull up” commands, and systems suggesting an aircraft was on a taxiway, a path that connects runways with various airport facilities, when taking off. These incidents force pilots to rely on manual actions that increase workload, often during the most exhausting points of long-haul flights, he said.

“Alternative navigational tools that don’t rely on GPS, but instead harness quantum technology, are also in development,” the article points out, “but remain a long way off operational use.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following in the footsteps of Australia, Indonesia will be the latest country to limit social media usage for children under 16. Meutya Hafid, Indonesia’s communication and digital affairs minister, announced that a new government regulation will require “high-risk” platforms to delete any accounts from Indonesia that are under 16, starting on March 28.

Hafid said in the announcement that the implementation would be done in stages, starting with major platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Roblox and Bigo Live, a live-streaming platform based in Singapore. The minister added that all platforms will have to fulfill compliance obligations from the Indonesian government, but didn’t specify what they were. In response to the ban, a Meta spokesperson told The New York Times that the company hasn’t received an official regulation from the country yet and was awaiting details.

While Australia was the first country to implement such a sweeping ban on social media, many other countries are currently in the process of doing the same. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced last month that the country is also ready to ban social media for users under 16, while Malaysia‘s cabinet approved a similar ban that will reportedly go into effect sometime this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/indonesia-announces-a-social-media-ban-for-anyone-under-16-174634956.html?src=rss