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Received — 16 August 2026 ⏭

Rogue AI aren’t science fiction anymore

✇The Verge - All Posts
By: Robert Hart
16 August 2026 at 14:00

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI safety, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

How it started

It all started in July, when one of OpenAI's autonomous AI agents went rogue during a cybersecurity test. The agent escaped its isolated testing environment, accessed the internet, and hacked another company, Hugging Face. A few years ago, that might have sounded like science fiction. But, broadly speaking, that's exactly what happened, and the incident kicked off a wave of concern over what increa …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Received — 9 August 2026 ⏭

AI detectors are creating a new era of distrust

✇The Verge - All Posts
By: Emma Roth
9 August 2026 at 14:00
A book that is being scanned for possibility of AI-generated text

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about how AI is changing our daily lives, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

How it started

Long before ChatGPT became a thing, educators and editors frequently used anti-plagiarism tools to see if writers were being honest about their work. These tools work by comparing a written work against a database filled with content from across the web, scholarly articles, and more to check for matching sentences and phrases. Some, like Turnitin, offer a percentage th …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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