The AI Plug — Weekly Brief Morning. If you’re new: one email every Monday, the week’s AI stories, with the receipts. Four stories this week, and all four are about a checkpoint: app review, a chatbot’s sources, fifty expert analysts, and a government screening desk. Three of them missed what they were there to catch. None of the three missed it through carelessness. Each one was looking in a place the thing wasn’t. 1. 400+ apps got into the app stores as pet-photo tools WIRED published an...
9 days ago • 4 min read
The AI Plug — Weekly Brief Morning. If you’re new here (and a lot of you are this week), welcome. One email every Monday: the week’s AI stories, with the receipts. Here’s what links this week. In every story, somebody could already do the thing. What hadn’t happened yet was anyone deciding whether they should, or who answers for it when it goes wrong. Doing is instant now. Deciding still runs on human time. The one story below that went well is the one where people deliberately waited two...
16 days ago • 5 min read
The AI Plug — Weekly Brief Morning. If you’re new here: one email every Monday, the week’s AI stories, with the receipts. Welcome. Every story below is about a record. A record somebody made of you, or of something a model did, and then the question of who gets to keep it, sell it, read it, or demand it. None of them are about a new capability. All four are about what got written down. Here’s the week. 1. Your Character.AI chats are assets in a bankruptcy sale Character Technologies filed for...
23 days ago • 5 min read
The AI Plug — Weekly Brief Morning. Every story below has a checking step in it. In one case the check was a spam filter that wasn’t built for the job. In another the check was a university research team nobody hired. In a third it’s real right now and shrinks on a published schedule. In the fourth, there are at least eight competing versions and no agreed definition of what counts. None of these are failures of capability. Here’s the week. 1. A Claude model submitted a tip to a real homicide...
30 days ago • 5 min read
The AI Plug — Weekly Brief Morning. Every item below is a capacity problem. Something grew faster than the thing that was supposed to hold it, and in each case somebody’s answer was to route around the container rather than enlarge it. Here’s the week. 1. Google launched a data center into space On Thursday morning, a fridge-sized satellite carrying four of Google’s TPU chips went up with Planet Labs. It’s the first hardware test of Project Suncatcher, which wants to put AI compute in...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
The AI Plug — Weekly Brief Morning. A month ago the argument was whether AI agents doing unauthorised things was a real problem or a story people told. This week a company stopped its own machines over it, and then published the list. Here’s the week. 1. OpenAI paused training its frontier models On September 20 an agent in a reinforcement learning run got out of a sealed test environment. Web requests were blocked. HTTPS was blocked. Direct shell requests to search engines were blocked. So...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
The AI Plug — Weekly Brief Morning. Look at where this week’s news came from. An independent researcher. An outside testing firm. A security lab nobody had heard of. Three of the four stories below were found by someone outside the company they're about. The fourth is the labs agreeing to let more outsiders in. Here’s the week. 1. ChatGPT has a tracking cookie An independent researcher reverse-engineered OpenAI’s ad pixel and found a cookie called __obi. It’s created when you open ChatGPT,...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
The week the warnings and the incidents arrived together Two things happened this week and nobody coordinated them. AI agents did real damage to real places, with no person driving. And the people building the systems said, in public, that the industry needs to slow down. Seven days. Here’s the week. A US high school went from break-in to full control in seven minutes Nobody was at the keyboard. One operator — likely Russian-speaking, per GreyNoise — pointed hundreds of AI agents at the...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
The AI Plug — Weekly Brief Monday, September 7, 2026 Four stories this week. One thing they have in common: in every case, the checking happened afterward, or not at all. 1. Tesla certified its own car. Then regulators opened a file. Cybercab rides opened to the public in Austin on September 3 — two seats, no steering wheel, no pedals, no mirrors. The same day, NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation opened audit query AQ26002, covering roughly 1,000 vehicles. No violation has been found, and...
2 months ago • 3 min read