9u50fv – Page 15

Waymo to roll out driverless taxis on highways in three US cities

alphabet, Cars, Driverless cars, syndication, waymo / 9u50fv / November 13, 2025

Mawakana added her company did not think in terms of “how many [incidents] are allowable” and the challenge was ensuring the “bar on safety” was high enough.

Highway routes will initially be available to users who have opted in to early access for new features, before being rolled out more widely.

Passengers will be able to travel to and from the airport in San Jose, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company already serves Phoenix airport but will now be able to access it on the highway.

Waymo, which launched its paid driverless taxi services in 2020, operates more than 250,000 rides a week. It has a fleet of more than 2,000 vehicles across its five US markets, primarily made up of Jaguar Land Rover electric I-Pace vehicles kitted out with its bespoke sensors and computing system.

Tesla, its main US rival, in September expanded services to the public as part of its robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas, while Amazon-owned Zoox recently began services in Las Vegas.

Waymo said its vehicles would exit the highways in the event that they encountered technical issues. It also said it had partnered with highway patrol to prepare for circumstances where the vehicle would need to pull over.

The company has reported more than 1,250 collisions involving its vehicles since 2021, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This has included accidents with passenger vehicles, trucks, and other objects, including a closing gate.

Waymo to roll out driverless taxis on highways in three US cities Read More »

What would a “simplified” Starship plan for the Moon actually look like?

artemis, hls, Space, spacex, starship / 9u50fv / November 13, 2025

The problem is that it may be difficult to find options that both NASA and SpaceX like.

An image of SpaceX’s “Lunar” variant of Starship on the Moon’s surface. Credit: SpaceX

In what will likely be his most consequential act as NASA’s interim leader, Sean Duffy said last month that the space agency was “opening up” its competition to develop a lunar lander that will put humans on the surface of the Moon.

As part of this move, Duffy asked NASA’s current lunar lander contractors, SpaceX and Blue Origin, for more nimble plans. Neither has specified those plans publicly, but a recent update from SpaceX referenced a “simplified” version of the Starship system it’s building to help NASA return humans to the Moon.

“Since the contract was awarded, we have been consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis III have changed and have shared ideas on how to simplify the mission to align with national priorities,” the company said. “In response to the latest calls, we’ve shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the Moon while simultaneously improving crew safety.”

So what would a simplified architecture look like? It is difficult to say for sure, but there are some interesting ideas floating around.

First, let’s make a couple of assumptions. Any approach to shortening the Artemis III timeline should not involve major hardware changes. This rules out a “stubby” version of Starship, which would require a significant reworking of the vehicle’s internals. Essentially, any new plan should use hardware that exists largely in the structural shape and form it’s in. And for SpaceX, we’ll assume that “simplified” means not working directly with other contractors beyond those already involved in Artemis III.

With these ground rules, there are two changes that SpaceX, in conjunction with NASA, could make to simplify or potentially accelerate Artemis: “Expendable Starships” and “Enter the Dragon.”

Expendable Starships

One of the biggest challenges with the existing plan is refueling in low-Earth orbit. Essentially, SpaceX must launch a “depot” variant of Starship and then fuel it with “tanker” Starship upper stages. Once this depot is full, the “lunar lander” variant of Starship launches, is refueled, and then flies to the Moon. There, it awaits a crew of astronauts on board Orion to land them on the Moon and return them to lunar orbit.

Estimates vary widely for how many ‘”tanker” Starships will be required to fuel the depot for a lunar mission. In truth, no one will know the answer until there is a mature Starship design with real-world performance numbers and demonstrated efficiency of propellant transfer and storage.

Critics of the SpaceX plan, and there are many, say the mission architecture is clunky and untenable. One household name in the space industry recently told Ars he believes it would take up to 20 to 40 “tanker” launches to fill a depot. That seems high, but a number in the ballpark of 12 to 20 flights (probably with the next-generation V4 ships) is realistic.

That is a lot of launches, to be sure. But it’s not inconceivable that a company now regularly launching three Falcon 9 rockets a week could launch a dozen or more Starships per month in the not-too-distant future.

There is one relatively straightforward way to cut down on the number of “tanker” launches. For early Artemis missions, SpaceX could use expendable “tanker” Starships rather than landing and reusing them. It is not clear how much this would boost the capacity of Starship, but it likely would be considerable. SpaceX probably could remove the grid fins (multiple tons), as well as a tiled heat shield that (according to rumors, it must be said) is running considerably more massive than what was budgeted for. There also would be propellant mass savings without the need for reentry and landing burns.

Using an optimized, expendable Starship might reduce the number of tanker missions required by up to 50 percent. There are downsides, including a significant increase in costs and an undermining of the whole point of Starship: full and rapid reuse.

It is safe to say that Starship will be the largest human spacecraft to land on the Moon by far. Credit: SpaceX

There is a third downside, and this is perhaps the most important one. An “expendable” Starship plan would be anathema to the leadership of SpaceX, including founder Elon Musk. Officials there do not believe the space industry has fully digested how Starship will transform the launch industry.

“You don’t yet understand how many Starship launches will happen,” a senior SpaceX source told Ars.

The company is aiming to launch 1 million tons of payload to orbit per year, the majority of which will be propellant. SpaceX simply believes that once it locks in on Starship operations, launching a dozen or many more rockets per month won’t be a big deal. So why waste time on expendable rockets? That era is over.

Enter the Dragon

A second option would be to rely solely on SpaceX hardware.

I don’t expect NASA to be interested in this idea, but it’s worth discussing. Nearly a year ago, in the immediate aftermath of the presidential election, Republican space officials were considering canceling Artemis and substituting a “competition” similar to the Commercial Cargo program. It was thought that both SpaceX and Blue Origin would bid plans to land humans on the Moon and that NASA would fund both.

These plans have largely fallen by the wayside in the last 12 months, though. NASA (and perhaps most importantly, paymasters in Congress) prefer to stick with the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for the initial Artemis missions.

But if pressed, SpaceX could come up with a simplified Moon landing architecture that requires fewer refuelings. There are multiple ways this could be done, so I’ll offer just one variant here:

SpaceX launches the “lunar” variant of Starship into low-Earth orbit, uncrewed
SpaceX launches two “depot” variants of Starship into orbit
Both depots are fueled (perhaps requiring 3-5 “tanker” launches each)
One of these depots flies out to low-lunar orbit, the other fuels the Lunar starship previously launched into low-Earth orbit
A crew of four astronauts launches on Crew Dragon, which docks with the Lunar Starship
Crew transfers to Starship, which undocks from Dragon, flies to the Moon, and lands
After days on the surface, this Starship launches from the Moon and refuels from the second depot in lunar orbit
Starship flies back to low-Earth orbit, docks with Dragon, and Dragon returns to Earth

Does that sound complicated? Sure. But it’s arguably not as complicated as an Orion-based mission, and it would likely necessitate fewer refuelings. This is because Starship does not need to rendezvous with Orion in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, and there is no 100-day loiter requirement for a fully fueled Starship at the Moon.

This solution, however, would likely be viewed as toxic by NASA’s safety community due to the need to refuel in lunar orbit with crew on board. A decade ago, when SpaceX proposed fueling the Falcon 9 vehicle on the ground with astronauts on board—a procedure known as load-and-go—engineers tasked with the crew’s safety went berserk.

“When SpaceX came to us and said we want to load the crew first, and then the propellant, mushroom clouds went off in our safety community,” Phil McAlister, NASA’s then-chief of commercial spaceflight, told me when I was writing the book Reentry. “I mean, hair-on-fire stuff. It was just conventional wisdom that you load the propellant first and get it thermally stable. Fueling is a very dynamic operation. The vehicle is popping and hissing. The safety community was adamantly against this.”

It’s probably safe to say that SpaceX would be unhappy with the first solution offered here, and NASA would be unhappy with the second one. For these reasons, SpaceX’s current architecture may well remain the default one for Artemis III.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

What would a “simplified” Starship plan for the Moon actually look like? Read More »

OpenAI slams court order that lets NYT read 20 million complete user chats

AI, chatgpt, new york times, openai, Policy / 9u50fv / November 12, 2025

OpenAI: NYT wants evidence of ChatGPT users trying to get around news paywall.

Credit: Getty Images | alexsl

OpenAI wants a court to reverse a ruling forcing the ChatGPT maker to give 20 million user chats to The New York Times and other news plaintiffs that sued it over alleged copyright infringement. Although OpenAI previously offered 20 million user chats as a counter to the NYT’s demand for 120 million, the AI company says a court order requiring production of the chats is too broad.

“The logs at issue here are complete conversations: each log in the 20 million sample represents a complete exchange of multiple prompt-output pairs between a user and ChatGPT,” OpenAI said today in a filing in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. “Disclosure of those logs is thus much more likely to expose private information [than individual prompt-output pairs], in the same way that eavesdropping on an entire conversation reveals more private information than a 5-second conversation fragment.”

OpenAI’s filing said that “more than 99.99%” of the chats “have nothing to do with this case.” It asked the district court to “vacate the order and order News Plaintiffs to respond to OpenAI’s proposal for identifying relevant logs.” OpenAI could also seek review in a federal court of appeals.

OpenAI posted a message on its website to users today saying that “The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private ChatGPT conversations” in order to “find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall.”

ChatGPT users concerned about privacy have more to worry about than the NYT case. For example, ChatGPT conversations have been found in Google search results and the Google Search Console tool that developers can use to monitor search traffic. OpenAI today said it plans to develop “advanced security features designed to keep your data private, including client-side encryption for your messages with ChatGPT. ”

OpenAI: AI chats should be treated like private emails

OpenAI’s court filing argues that the chat log production should be narrowed based on the relevance of chats to the case.

“OpenAI is unaware of any court ordering wholesale production of personal information at this scale,” the filing said. “This sets a dangerous precedent: it suggests that anyone who files a lawsuit against an AI company can demand production of tens of millions of conversations without first narrowing for relevance. This is not how discovery works in other cases: courts do not allow plaintiffs suing Google to dig through the private emails of tens of millions of Gmail users irrespective of their relevance. And it is not how discovery should work for generative AI tools either.”

A November 7 order by US Magistrate Judge Ona Wang sided with the NYT, saying that OpenAI must “produce the 20 million de-identified Consumer ChatGPT Logs to News Plaintiffs by November 14, 2025, or within 7 days of completing the de-identification process.” Wang ruled that the production must go forward even though the parties don’t agree on whether the logs must be produced in full:

Whether or not the parties had reached agreement to produce the 20 million Consumer ChatGPT Logs in whole—which the parties vehemently dispute—such production here is appropriate. OpenAI has failed to explain how its consumers’ privacy rights are not adequately protected by: (1) the existing protective order in this multidistrict litigation or (2) OpenAI’s exhaustive de-identification of all of the 20 million Consumer ChatGPT Logs.

OpenAI’s filing today said the court order “did not acknowledge OpenAI’s sworn witness declaration explaining that the de-identification process is not intended to remove information that is non-identifying but may nonetheless be private, like a Washington Post reporter’s hypothetical use of ChatGPT to assist in the preparation of a news article.”

Chats stored under legal hold

The 20 million chats consist of a random sampling of ChatGPT conversations from December 2022 to November 2024 and do not include chats of business customers, OpenAI said in the message on its website.

“We presented several privacy-preserving options to The Times, including targeted searches over the sample (e.g., to search for chats that might include text from a New York Times article so they only receive the conversations relevant to their claims), as well as high-level data classifying how ChatGPT was used in the sample. These were rejected by The Times,” OpenAI said.

The chats are stored in a secure system that is “protected under legal hold, meaning it can’t be accessed or used for purposes other than meeting legal obligations,” OpenAI said. The NYT “would be legally obligated at this time to not make any data public outside the court process,” and OpenAI said it will fight any attempts to make the user conversations public.

A NYT filing on October 30 accused OpenAI of defying prior agreements “by refusing to produce even a small sample of the billions of model outputs that its conduct has put in issue in this case.” The filing continued:

Immediate production of the output log sample is essential to stay on track for the February 26, 2026, discovery deadline. OpenAI’s proposal to run searches on this small subset of its model outputs on Plaintiffs’ behalf is as inefficient as it is inadequate to allow Plaintiffs to fairly analyze how “real world” users interact with a core product at the center of this litigation. Plaintiffs cannot reasonably conduct expert analyses about how OpenAI’s models function in its core consumer-facing product, how retrieval augmented generation (“RAG”) functions to deliver news content, how consumers interact with that product, and the frequency of hallucinations without access to the model outputs themselves.

OpenAI said the NYT’s discovery requests were initially limited to logs “related to Times content” and that it has “been working to satisfy those requests by sampling conversation logs. Towards the end of that process, News Plaintiffs filed a motion with a new demand: that instead of finding and producing logs that are ‘related to Times content,’ OpenAI should hand over the entire 20 million-log sample ‘via hard drive.’”

OpenAI disputes judge’s reasoning

The November 7 order cited a California case, Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, in which US District Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen ordered the production of 5 million records. OpenAI consistently relied on van Keulen’s use of a sample-size formula “in support of its previous proposed methodology for conversation data sampling, but fails to explain why Judge [van] Keulen’s subsequent order directing production of the entire 5 million-record sample to the plaintiff in that case is not similarly instructive here,” Wang wrote.

OpenAI’s filing today said the company was never given an opportunity to explain why Concord shouldn’t apply in this case because the news plaintiffs did not reference it in their motion.

“The cited Concord order was not about whether wholesale production of the sample was appropriate; it was about the mechanism through which Anthropic would effectuate an already agreed-upon production,” OpenAI wrote. “Nothing about that order suggests that Judge van Keulen would have ordered wholesale production had Anthropic raised the privacy concerns that OpenAI has raised throughout this case.”

The Concord logs were just prompt-output pairs, “i.e., a single user prompt followed by a single model output,” OpenAI wrote. “The logs at issue here are complete conversations: each log in the 20 million sample represents a complete exchange of multiple prompt-output pairs between a user and ChatGPT.” That could result in “up to 80 million prompt-output pairs,” OpenAI said.

We contacted The New York Times about OpenAI’s filing and will update this article if it provides any comment.

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

OpenAI slams court order that lets NYT read 20 million complete user chats Read More »

Review: New Framework Laptop 16 takes a fresh stab at the upgradeable laptop GPU

AMD, AMD Ryzen, Features, framework, framework laptop 13, framework laptop 16, gaming, NVIDIA, nvidia geforce, Reviews, right to repair, Tech / 9u50fv / November 12, 2025

framework laptop 16, take two

New components make it more useful and powerful but no less odd.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The original Framework Laptop 16 was trying to crack a problem that laptop makers have wrestled with on and off for years: Can you deliver a reasonably powerful, portable workstation and gaming laptop that supports graphics card upgrades just like a desktop PC?

Specs at a glance: Framework Laptop 16 (2025)
OS	Windows 11 25H2
CPU	AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 (4 Zen 5 cores, 4 Zen 5c cores)
RAM	32GB DDR5-5600 (upgradeable)
GPU	AMD Radeon 860M (integrated)/Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Mobile (dedicated)
SSD	1TB Western Digital Black SN770
Battery	85 WHr
Display	16-inch 2560×1600 165 Hz matte non-touchscreen
Connectivity	6x recessed USB-C ports (2x USB 4, 4x USB 3.2) with customizable “Expansion Card” dongles
Weight	4.63 pounds (2.1 kg) without GPU, 5.29 pounds (2.4 kg) with GPU
Price as tested	Roughly $2,649 for pre-built edition; $2,517 for DIY edition with no OS

Even in these days of mostly incremental, not-too-exciting GPU upgrades, the graphics card in a gaming PC or graphics-centric workstation will still feel its age faster than your CPU will. And the chance to upgrade that one component for hundreds of dollars instead of spending thousands replacing the entire machine is an appealing proposition.

Upgradeable, swappable GPUs would also make your laptop more flexible—you can pick and choose from various GPUs from multiple vendors based on what you want and need, whether that’s raw performance, power efficiency, Linux support, or CUDA capabilities.

Framework’s first upgrade to the Laptop 16—the company’s first upgrade to any of its products aside from the original Laptop 13—gets us pretty close to that reality. The laptop can now support two interchangeable motherboards: one with an older AMD Ryzen 7040-series CPU and one with a new Ryzen AI 300-series CPU. And both motherboards can be used either with just an integrated GPU or with dedicated GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia.

The Nvidia GeForce 5070 graphics module is the most exciting and significant part of this batch of updates, but there are plenty of other updates and revisions to the laptop’s external and internal components, too. These upgrades don’t address all of our problems with the initial version of the laptop, but they do help quite a bit. And a steady flow of updates like these would definitely make the Laptop 16 a platform worth investing in.

Re-meet the Framework Laptop 16

Framework’s Laptop 13 stacked on top of the 16. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Framework treats each of its laptops as a platform to be modified and built upon rather than something to be wholly redesigned and replaced every time it’s updated. So these reviews necessarily re-cover ground we have already covered—I’ve also reused some of the photos from last time, since this is quite literally the same laptop in most respects. I’ll point you to the earlier review for detailed notes on the build process and how the laptop is put together.

To summarize our high-level notes about the look, feel, and design of the Framework Laptop 16: While the Framework Laptop 13 can plausibly claim to be in the same size and weight class as portables like the 13-inch MacBook Air, the Framework Laptop 16 is generally larger and heavier than the likes of the 16-inch MacBook Pro or portable PC workstations like the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 or Dell 16 Premium. That’s doubly true once you actually add a dedicated graphics module to the Laptop 16—these protrude a couple of inches from the back of the laptop and add around two-thirds of a pound to its weight.

	Frame-work 16 (no GPU)	Frame-work 16 (GPU)	Apple 16-inch MBP	Dell 16 Premium	Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8	HP ZBook X G1i	Lenovo Legion Pro 5i Gen 10	Razer Blade 16
Size (H x W x D inches)	0.71 x 14.04 x 10.63	0.82 x 14.04 x 11.43	0.66 x 14.01 x 9.77	0.75 x 14.1 x 9.4	0.39-0.62 x 13.95 x 9.49	0.9 x 14.02 x 9.88	0.85-1.01 x 14.34 x 10.55	0.59-0.69 x 13.98 x 9.86
Weight	4.63 lbs	5.29 lbs	4.7-4.8 lbs	4.65 pounds	4.06 lbs	4.5 lbs	5.56 lbs	4.71 lbs

You certainly can find laptops from the major PC OEMs that come close to or even exceed the size and weight of the Laptop 16. But in most cases, you’ll find that comparably specced and priced laptops are an inch or two less deep and at least half a pound lighter than the Laptop 16 with a dedicated GPU installed.

But if you’re buying from Framework, you’re probably at least notionally interested in customizing, upgrading, and repairing your laptop over time, all things that Framework continues to do better than any other company.

The Laptop 16’s customizable keyboard deck is still probably its coolest feature—it’s a magnetically attached series of panels that allows you to remove and replace components without worrying about the delicate and finicky ribbon cables the Laptop 13 uses. Practically, the most important aspect of this customizable keyboard area is that it lets you decide whether you want to install a dedicated number pad or not; this also allows you to choose whether you want the trackpad to be aligned with the center of the laptop or with wherever the middle of the keyboard is.

It might look a little rough, but the customizable keyboard deck is still probably the coolest thing about the Laptop 16 in day-to-day use. Andrew Cunningham

But Framework also sells an assortment of other functional and cosmetic panels and spacers to let users customize the laptop to their liking. The coolest, oddest accessories are still probably the LED matrix spacers and the clear, legend-less keyboard and number pad modules. We still think this assortment of panels gives the system a vaguely unfinished look, but Framework is clearly going for function over form here.

The Laptop 16 also continues to use Framework’s customizable, swappable Expansion Card modules. In theory, these let you pick the number and type of ports your laptop has, as well as customize your port setup on the fly based on what you need. But as with all AMD Ryzen-based Framework Laptops, there are some limits to what each port can do.

According to Framework’s support page, there’s no single Expansion Card slot that is truly universal:

Ports 1 and 4 support full 40Gbps USB 4 transfer speeds, display outputs, and up to 240 W charging, but if you use a USB-A Expansion Card in those slots, you’ll increase power use and reduce battery life.
Ports 2 and 4 support display outputs, up to 240 W charging, and lower power usage for USB-A ports, but they top out at 10Gbps USB 3.2 transfer speeds. Additionally, port 5 (the middle port on the right side of the laptop, if you’re looking at it head-on) supports the DisplayPort 1.4 standard where the others support DisplayPort 2.1.
Ports 3 and 4 are limited to 10Gbps USB 3.2 transfer speeds and don’t support display outputs or charging.

The Laptop 16 also doesn’t include a dedicated headphone jack, so users will need to burn one of their Expansion Card slots to get one.

Practically speaking, most users will be able to come up with a port arrangement that fits their needs, and it’s still handy to be able to add and remove things like Ethernet ports, HDMI ports, or SD card readers on an as-needed basis. But choosing the right Expansion Card slot for the job will still require some forethought, and customizable ports aren’t as much of a selling point for a 16-inch laptop as they are for a 13-inch laptop (the Framework Laptop 13 was partly a response to laptops like the MacBook Air and Dell XPS 13 that only came with a small number of USB-C ports; larger laptops have mostly kept their larger number and variety of ports).

What’s new in 2025’s Framework Laptop 16?

An upgraded motherboard and a new graphics module form the heart of this year’s Laptop 16 upgrade. The motherboard steps up from AMD Ryzen 7040-series processors to AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chips. These are the same processors Framework put into the Laptop 13 earlier this year, though they ought to be able to run a bit faster in the Laptop 16 due to its larger heatsink and dual-fan cooling system.

Along with an upgrade from Zen 4-based CPU cores to Zen 5 cores, the Ryzen AI series includes an upgraded neural processing unit (NPU) that is fast enough to earn Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC label. These PCs have access to a handful of unique Windows 11 AI and machine-learning features (yes, Recall, but not just Recall) that are processed locally rather than in the cloud. If you don’t care about these features, you can mostly just ignore them, but if you do care, this is the first version of the Laptop 16 to support them.

Most of the new motherboard’s other specs and features are pretty similar to the first-generation version; there are two SO-DIMM slots for up to 96GB of DDR5-5600, one M.2 2280 slot for the system’s main SSD, and one M.2 2230 slot for a secondary SSD. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth connectivity are provided by an AMD RZ717 Wi-Fi card that can at least theoretically also be replaced with something faster down the line if you want.

The more exciting upgrade, however, may be the GeForce RTX 5070 GPU. This is the first time Framework has offered an Nvidia product—its other GPUs have all come from either Intel or AMD—and it gives the new Laptop 16 access to Nvidia technologies like DLSS and CUDA, as well as much-improved performance for games with ray-traced lighting effects.

Those hoping for truly high-end graphics options for the Laptop 16 will need to keep waiting, though. The laptop version of the RTX 5070 is actually the same chip as the desktop version of the RTX 5060, a $300 graphics card with 8GB of RAM. As much as it adds to the Laptop 16, it still won’t let you come anywhere near 4K in most modern games, and for some, it may even struggle to take full advantage of the internal 165 Hz 1600p screen. Professional workloads (including AI workloads) that require more graphics RAM will also find the mobile 5070 lacking.

Old 180 W charger on top, new 240 W charger on bottom. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Other components have gotten small updates as well. For those who upgrade an existing Laptop 16 with the new motherboard, Framework is selling 2nd-generation keyboard and number pad components. But their main update over the originals is new firmware that “includes a fix to prevent the system from waking while carried in a bag.” Owners of the original keyboard can install a firmware update to get the same functionality (and make their input modules compatible with the new board).

Upgraders should also note that the original system’s 180 W power adapter has been replaced with a 240 W model, the maximum amount of power that current USB-C and USB-PD standards are capable of delivering. You can charge the laptop with just about any USB-C power brick, but anything lower than 240 W risks reducing performance (or having the battery drain faster than it can charge).

Finally, the laptop uses a second-generation 16-inch, 2560×1600, 165 Hz LCD screen. It’s essentially identical in every way to the first-generation screen, but it formally supports G-Sync, Nvidia’s adaptive sync implementation. The original screen can still be used with the new motherboard, but it only supports AMD’s FreeSync, and Framework told us a few months ago that the panel supplier had no experience providing consumer-facing firmware updates that might add G-Sync to the old display. It’s probably not worth replacing the entire screen for, but it’s worth noting whether you’re upgrading the laptop or buying a new one.

Performance

Framework sent us the lower-end Ryzen AI 7 350 processor configuration for our new board, making it difficult to do straightforward apples-to-apples comparisons to the high-end Ryzen 9 7940HS in our first-generation Framework board. We did test the new chip, and you’ll see its results in our charts.

We’ve also provided numbers from the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in the Asus Zenbook S16 UM5606W to show approximately where you can expect the high-end Framework Laptop 16 configuration to land (Framework’s integrated graphics performance will be marginally worse since it’s using slower socketed RAM rather than LPDDR5X; other numbers may differ based on how each manufacturer has configured the chip’s power usage and thermal behavior). We’ve also included numbers from the same chip in the Framework Laptop 13, though Framework’s spec sheets indicate that the chips have different power limits and thus will perform differently.

We were able to test the new GeForce GPU in multiple configurations—both paired with the new Ryzen AI 7 350 processor and with the old Ryzen 9 7940HS chip. This should give anyone who bought the original Laptop 16 an idea of what kind of performance increase they can expect from the new GPU alone. In all, we’ve tested or re-tested:

The Ryzen 7 7940HS CPU from the first-generation Laptop 16 and its integrated Radeon 780M GPU
The Ryzen 7 7940HS and the original Radeon RX 7700S GPU module
The Ryzen 7 7940HS and the new GeForce RTX 5070 GPU module, for upgraders who only want to grab the new GPU
The Ryzen AI 7 350 CPU and the GeForce RTX 5070 GPU

We also did some light testing on the Radeon 860M integrated GPU included with the Ryzen AI 7 350.

All the Laptop 16 performance tests were run with Windows’ Best Performance power preset enabled, which will slightly boost performance at the expense of power efficiency.

Given all of those hardware combinations, we simply ran out of time to test the new motherboard with the old Radeon RX 7700S GPU—Framework is continuing to sell it, so it is a realistic combination of components. But our RTX 5070 testing suggests that these GPUs will perform pretty much the same regardless of which CPU you pair them with.

If you’re buying the cheaper Laptop 16 with the Ryzen AI 7 350, the good news is that it generally performs at least as well as—and usually a bit better than—the high-end Ryzen 9 7940HS from the last-generation model. Performance is also pretty similar to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in smaller, thinner laptops—the extra power and cooling capacity in the Laptop 16 is paying off here. People choosing between a PC and a Mac should note that none of these Ryzen chips come anywhere near the M4 Pro used in comparably priced 16-inch MacBook Pros, but that’s just where the PC ecosystem is these days.

How big an upgrade the GeForce 5070 will be depends on the game you’re playing. In titles like Borderlands 3 that naturally run a bit better on AMD’s GPUs, there’s not much of a difference at all. In games like Cyberpunk 2077 with heavy ray-tracing effects enabled, the mobile RTX 5070 can be nearly twice as fast as the RX 7700S.

Most games will fall somewhere in between those two extremes; our tests show that the improvements hover between 20 and 30 percent most of the time, just a shade less than the 30 to 40 percent improvement that Framework claimed in its original announcement.

Beyond raw performance, the other thing you get with an Nvidia GPU is access to a bunch of important proprietary technologies like DLSS upscaling and CUDA—these technologies are often better and more widely supported than the equivalent technologies that AMD’s or Intel’s GPUs use, thanks in part to Nvidia’s overall dominance of the dedicated GPU market.

In the tests we’ve run on them, the Radeon 860M and 890M are both respectable integrated GPUs (the lower-end 860M typically falls just short of last generation’s top-end 780M, but it’s very close). They’re never able to provide more than a fraction of the Radeon RX 7700S’s performance, let alone the RTX 5070, but they’ll handle a lot of lighter games at 1080p. I would not buy a system this large or heavy just to use it with an integrated GPU.

Better to be unique than perfect

It’s expensive and quirky, but the Framework Laptop 16 is worth considering because it’s so different from what most other laptop makers are doing. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Our original Framework Laptop 16 review called it “fascinating but flawed,” and the parts that made it flawed haven’t really changed much over the last two years. It’s still relatively large and heavy; the Expansion Card system still makes less sense in a larger laptop than it does in a thin-and-light; the puzzle-like grid of input modules and spacers looks kind of rough and unfinished.

But the upgrades do help to shift things in the Laptop 16’s favor. Its modular and upgradeable design was always a theoretical selling point, but the laptop now actually offers options that other laptops don’t.

The presence of both AMD and Nvidia GPUs is a big step up in flexibility for both gaming and professional applications. The GeForce module is a better all-around choice, with slightly to significantly faster game performance and proprietary technologies like DLSS and CUDA, while the Radeon GPU is a cheaper option with better support for Linux.

Given their cost, I still wish that these GPUs were more powerful—they’re between $350 or $449 for the Radeon RX 7700S and between $650 and $699 for the RTX 5070 (prices vary a bit and are cheaper when you’re buying them together with a new laptop rather than buying them separately). You’ll basically always spend more for a gaming laptop than you will for a gaming desktop with similar or better performance, but that does feel like an awful lot to spend for GPUs that are still limited to 8GB of RAM.

Cost is a major issue for the Laptop 16 in general. You may save money in the long run by buying a laptop that you can replace piece-by-piece as you need to rather than all at once. But it’s not even remotely difficult to find similar specs from the major PC makers for hundreds of dollars less. We can’t vouch for the build quality or longevity of any of those PCs, but it does mean that you have to be willing to pay an awful lot just for Framework’s modularity and upgradeability. That’s true to some degree of the Laptop 13 as well, but the price gap between the 13 and competing systems isn’t as large as it is for the 16.

Whatever its lingering issues, the Framework Laptop 16 is still worth considering because there’s nothing else quite like it, at least if you’re in the market for something semi-portable and semi-powerful. The MacBook Pro exists if you want something more appliance-like, and there’s a whole spectrum of gaming and workstation PCs in between with all kinds of specs, sizes, and prices. To stand out from those devices, it’s probably better to be unique than to be perfect, and the reformulated Laptop 16 certainly clears that bar.

The good

Modular, repairable, upgradeable design that’s made to last
Cool, customizable keyboard deck
Nvidia GeForce GPU option gives the Laptop 16 access to some gaming and GPU computing features that weren’t usable with AMD GPUs
GPU upgrade can be added to first-generation Framework Laptop 16
New processors are a decent performance improvement and are worth considering for new buyers
Old Ryzen 7040-series motherboard is sticking around as an entry-level option, knocking $100 off the former base price ($1,299 and up for a barebones DIY edition, $1,599 and up for the cheapest pre-built)
Framework’s software support has gotten better in the last year

The bad

Big and bulky for the specs you get
Mix-and-match input modules and spacers give it a rough, unfinished sort of look
Ryzen AI motherboards are more expensive than the originals were when they launched

The ugly

It’ll cost you—the absolute bare minimum price for Ryzen AI 7 350 and RTX 5070 combo is $2,149, and that’s without RAM, an SSD, or an operating system

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

Review: New Framework Laptop 16 takes a fresh stab at the upgradeable laptop GPU Read More »

Formula with “cleanest ingredients” recalled after 15 babies get botulism

botulism, ByHeart, CDC, fda, Formula, health, outbreak, recall / 9u50fv / November 12, 2025

Infant botulism

The US sees around 100 cases of botulism in infants each year. The potentially deadly disease is caused by a potent neurotoxin produced by Clostridium botulinum and related species. These bacteria can form hardy spores that are ubiquitous in the environment, including in dust, water, and soil. When the spores germinate, the growing bacteria produce the toxin. This toxin can kill by blocking the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in motor neurons that would activate muscle movement. The result is flaccid paralysis that spreads down the body.

People can develop botulism in a variety of ways, including via infected wounds or by inhaling spores. Generally, foodborne botulism occurs when people eat the toxin directly, such as in improperly canned foods where the bacteria grew. But babies have their own unique form of botulism when they ingest just the spores.

In humans older than about 12 months, the stomach’s acidity is usually enough to kill off botulism-causing spores. But infants have lower gastric acidity, and their immune responses and protective gut bacterial communities aren’t fully established yet. Thus, if they ingest the spores, the bacteria can start growing in their gastrointestinal tracts—and start producing toxin, causing infantile botulism. Symptoms usually develop 10 to 30 days after ingestion. About 70 percent of all botulism cases are in infants.

Honey is one of the most well-known sources of botulism-causing spores for infants, accounting for about 20 percent of cases. But environmental sources are also key culprits, such as living near construction sites as well as dust debris from vacuum cleaners.

The common early symptoms of botulism in infants are constipation, poor feeding, loss of head control, and difficulty swallowing. As the disease progresses, shallow breathing and overall floppiness develops. About half of all babies with botulism will need to be intubated, even if they’re treated with BabyBIG. A century ago, infant botulism had a 90 percent fatality rate, but today most infants make a full recovery, though it can take weeks to months.

Formula with “cleanest ingredients” recalled after 15 babies get botulism Read More »

Canada fought measles and measles won; virus now endemic after 1998 elimination

Canada, health, measles, mexico, PAHO, us, vaccination / 9u50fv / November 11, 2025

“This loss represents a setback, of course, but it is also reversible,” Jarbas Barbosa, director of PAHO, said in a press briefing Monday.

Call to action

Barbosa was optimistic that Canada could regain its elimination status. He highlighted that such setbacks have happened before. “In 2018 and 2019, Venezuela and Brazil temporarily lost their elimination status following large outbreaks,” Barbosa noted. “Thanks to coordinated action by governments, civil society, and regional cooperation, those outbreaks were contained, and the Region of the Americas regained its measles-free status in 2024.”

On Monday, the Public Health Agency of Canada released a statement confirming that it received notification from PAHO that it had lost its measles elimination status, while reporting that it is already getting to work on earning it back. “PHAC is collaborating with the PAHO and working with federal, provincial, territorial, and community partners to implement coordinated actions—focused on improving vaccination coverage, strengthening data sharing, enabling better overall surveillance efforts, and providing evidence-based guidance,” the agency said.

However, Canada isn’t the only country facing an uphill battle against measles—the most infectious virus known to humankind. Outbreaks and sustained spread are also active in the US and Mexico. To date, the US has documented at least 1,618 measles cases since the start of the year, while Mexico has tallied at least 5,185. Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Belize also have ongoing outbreaks, PAHO reported.

As of November 7, PAHO has collected reports of 12,593 confirmed measles cases from 10 countries, but approximately 95 percent of them are in Canada, Mexico, and the US. That total is a 30-fold increase compared to 2024, PAHO notes, and the rise has led to at least 28 deaths: 23 in Mexico, three in the United States, and two in Canada.

The PAHO used Canada’s loss as a call to action not just in the northern country, but the rest of the region. “Every case we prevent, every outbreak we stop saves lives, protects families, and makes communities healthier,” Barbosa said. “Today, rather than lamenting the loss of a regional status, we call on all countries to redouble their efforts to strengthen vaccination rates, surveillance, and timely response to suspected cases—reaching every corner of the Americas. As a Region, we have eliminated measles twice. We can do it a third time.”

Canada fought measles and measles won; virus now endemic after 1998 elimination Read More »

Blue Origin will ‘move heaven and Earth’ to help NASA reach the Moon faster, CEO says

artemis, blue origin, NASA, Space / 9u50fv / November 9, 2025

Blue Origin stands ready to help NASA achieve its goals with regard to landing humans on the Moon as soon as possible, the company’s chief executive said Saturday in an interview with Ars.

“We just want to help the US get to the Moon,” said Dave Limp, CEO of the space company founded by Jeff Bezos. “If NASA wants to go quicker, we would move heaven and Earth, pun intended, to try to get to the Moon sooner. And I think we have some good ideas.”

Limp spoke on Saturday, about 24 hours ahead of the company’s second launch of the large New Glenn rocket. Carrying the ESCAPADE spacecraft for NASA, the mission has a launch window that opens at 2: 45 pm ET (19: 45 UTC) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and runs for a little more than two hours.

NASA seeks a faster return

This year it has become increasingly apparent that, should NASA stick to its present plans for the Artemis III lunar landing mission, China is on course to beat the United States back to the Moon with humans. In recognition of this, about three weeks ago, NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy said the space agency was reopening the competition for a human lander.

SpaceX and Blue Origin both have existing contracts for human landers, but the government has asked each providers for an option to accelerate their timeline. NASA currently has a target landing date of 2027, but that is unrealistic using the present approach of SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s large Mk. 2 lander.

Ars exclusively reported in early October that Blue Origin had begun work on a faster architecture, involving multiple versions of its Mk. 1 cargo lander as well as a modified version of this vehicle tentatively called Mk 1.5. Limp said that after Duffy asked for revised proposals, Blue Origin responded almost immediately.

“We’ve sent our initial summary of that over, and we have a full report of that due here shortly,” he said. “I’m not going to go into the details because I think that’s probably for NASA to talk about, not us, but we have some ideas that we think could accelerate the path to the Moon. And I hope NASA takes a close look.”

Blue Origin will ‘move heaven and Earth’ to help NASA reach the Moon faster, CEO says Read More »

Wipers from Russia’s most cut-throat hackers rain destruction on Ukraine

Biz & IT, malware, russia, sandworm, Security, Ukraine, war, wipers / 9u50fv / November 8, 2025

One of the world’s most ruthless and advanced hacking groups, the Russian state-controlled Sandworm, launched a series of destructive cyberattacks in the country’s ongoing war against neighboring Ukraine, researchers reported Thursday.

In April, the group targeted a Ukrainian university with two wipers, a form of malware that aims to permanently destroy sensitive data and often the infrastructure storing it. One wiper, tracked under the name Sting, targeted fleets of Windows computers by scheduling a task named DavaniGulyashaSdeshka, a phrase derived from Russian slang that loosely translates to “eat some goulash,” researchers from ESET said. The other wiper is tracked as Zerlot.

A not-so-common target

Then, in June and September, Sandworm unleashed multiple wiper variants against a host of Ukrainian critical infrastructure targets, including organizations active in government, energy, and logistics. The targets have long been in the crosshairs of Russian hackers. There was, however, a fourth, less common target—organizations in Ukraine’s grain industry.

“Although all four have previously been documented as targets of wiper attacks at some point since 2022, the grain sector stands out as a not-so-frequent target,” ESET said. “Considering that grain export remains one of Ukraine’s main sources of revenue, such targeting likely reflects an attempt to weaken the country’s war economy.”

Wipers have been a favorite tool of Russian hackers since at least 2012, with the spreading of the NotPetya worm. The self-replicating malware originally targeted Ukraine, but eventually caused international chaos when it spread globally in a matter of hours. The worm resulted in tens of billions of dollars in financial damages after it shut down thousands of organizations, many for days or weeks.

Wipers from Russia’s most cut-throat hackers rain destruction on Ukraine Read More »

Higher prices, simpler streaming expected if HBO Max folds into Paramount+

HBO, HBO Max, mergers, paramount, paramount plus, streaming, Tech, warner bros. discovery / 9u50fv / November 7, 2025

The end of HBO Max is “certainly plausible.”

A still from the second season of HBO’s The Last of Us. Credit: HBO

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has a ‘for sale’ sign up. And that could mean big changes for subscribers to the company’s most popular streaming service, HBO Max.

After receiving unsolicited acquisition offers, WBD recently declared itself open to “strategic alternatives to maximize shareholder value.” WBD drew new attention by being open to selling its streaming business (WBD is also still open to moving forward with previously shared plans to split into a cable company and a streaming and movie studios company next year).

Naturally, mergers and acquisitions talk has heated up since then, with Paramount as one of the most eager suitors. Paramount, which merged with Skydance in August, is reportedly planning to keep “much of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. intact” if a deal happens, per a Bloomberg report that cited unnamed people familiar with the plans of David Ellison, Paramount’s CEO.

For HBO Max subscribers, the most pertinent part of Bloomberg’s report follows:

Under Ellison’s plan, Warner Bros.’ HBO Max streaming service would merge into the existing Paramount+ platform, one of the people said. He believes combining the offerings will allow more people to see the work of film and TV show creators. The libraries of the two companies will make Paramount+ more compelling for subscribers.

The purported strategy would likely end the ability to subscribe to HBO Max in favor of the opportunity to pay for a beefier version of Paramount+.

More broadly, the merger talks bring into question the future for HBO Max subscribers should Warner Bros. engage in any sort of M&A activity with one of its most desirable businesses.

Higher prices are possible

Choice is typically seen as good for consumers. But in the case of streaming, which only recently overtook broadcast and cable viewing, the recent expansion of services available is often viewed negatively. Streaming fragmentation forces people to jump from service to service in order to find something to watch and to pay for more subscriptions.

As a result, a WBD merger could be a double-edged sword for streaming subscribers. The most obvious con is the potential for price hikes.

Speaking to Ars about a potential WBD merger, Vikrant Mathur, co-founder of streaming technology provider Future Today, said:

On one hand, it means subscribers getting access to a larger library, a simpler content discovery, and a consistent streaming experience, but on the other, we risk increasing subscription costs for current subscribers of both services, a trend that has been leading to subscription fatigue and diminishing the original promise of streaming.

Max Alderman, partner at FE International, an M&A advisory firm with a specialty in content businesses, said HBO Max subscribers can expect “friction” if Paramount buys HBO Max. He pointed out that overlapping platforms often result in “temporary confusion around pricing, content access, and brand continuity.” Alderman added:

Over the longer run, though, a combined offering could improve content breadth and potentially deliver better value per dollar.

Still, a Paramount-owned HBO Max stands the risk of failing to meet subscribers’ expectations, “especially for a service like HBO Max that’s earned a reputation for high-end, prestige programming,” Julie Clark, VP of media and entertainment at TransUnion, which works in streaming ads, told Ars.

The end of HBO Max?

With cable declining, HBO Max is the HBO brand’s best bet at longevity. The idea of HBO dissolving into shows and movies that you find on Paramount+ doesn’t sound like a fitting ending to a 53-year-old brand that has brought us shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones, and White Lotus. HBO has gone through multiple streaming rebrands, but the end of a dedicated HBO streaming service, as suggested by Bloomberg’s report, is a different level. Yet, HBO Max folding into Paramount+ is “certainly plausible,” according to Alderman.

“The current market doesn’t support redundant platforms competing for the same audience,” he explained.

Today’s streaming services are focused on reaching and maintaining profitability long term. In its most recent earnings report, Paramount’s streaming business, which includes Paramount+, BET+, and Pluto TV, reported adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization of $157 million, up from $26 million a year ago. The numbers were largely driven by Paramount+ growing subscribers to 77.7 million and charging more.

In its earnings report this week, WBD said that its streaming business, which includes HBO Max and Discovery+, posted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization of $345 million, compared to $289 million a year ago. WBD claims 128 million streaming subscribers, primarily through HBO Max.

“This potential merger underscores the escalating content and distribution costs in the industry,” Alderman said. “For [subscription video on demand platforms] to succeed, they need scale of revenue, as well as operational cost efficiencies, both of which can come through consolidation.”

It’s understandable that a brand that acquires HBO Max would seek to streamline operations with any streaming business that it already owns. But it’s hard to imagine any buyer throwing out the HBO name.

“I’d be skeptical that the HBO brand is going away completely. We’ve seen the name yo-yo, and it’s clear that it still packs a punch for consumers looking for premium content,” Clark said.

Even if HBO Max lives as a tile within the Paramount+ app, or the app of another buyer, (à la Hulu under Disney+), it wouldn’t make sense to get rid of the legendary acronym completely.

“HBO is one of the few streaming brands that still commands prestige pricing,” Alderman said.

If a company does acquire any form of HBO, one of its top challenges is expected to be streamlining operations while maintaining HBO’s premium brand. This could be especially difficult under a “more mainstream umbrella like Paramount+,” Alderman noted.

Streaming has already diluted the HBO brand somewhat. Through streaming, HBO is now associated with stuff from DC Comics and Cartoon Network, as well as reality shows, like 90 Day Fiancé and Naked and Afraid. Merging with Paramount+ or even Netflix could expand the HBO umbrella more.

That expanded umbrella could allow a company like Paramount to better compete against Netflix, something WBD executives have shied away from. HBO Max is “not everything for everyone in a household,” JB Perrette, WBD’s streaming president and CEO, said this spring.

“What people want from us in a world where they’ve got Netflix and Amazon [Prime Video] are those things that differentiate us,” Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and Max content, told The Wall Street Journal in May.

A “stress test” for more streaming mergers

Aside from the impact on HBO Max subscribers, WBD’s merger talks have broad implications. A deal would open the door for much more consolidation in the streaming space, something that experts have been anticipating for some years and that addresses the boom of streaming services. Per Clark, discussions of a Paramount-WBD merger are “less about two studios joining forces and more about a stress test for future M&A.”

If WBD accepts a Paramount bid and that bid clears regulatory hurdles, it would signal that “premium content under fewer umbrellas is back in play,” Clark said.

A Paramount-WBD merger is likely to speed up consolidation among mid-tier players, like NBCUniversal, Lionsgate, and AMC, Alderman said, pointing to these companies’ interest in scaling their streaming businesses and in building differentiated portfolios to counter Netflix and Disney+’s expansive libraries.

If Paramount and WBD don’t merge, Clark expects to see more “piecemeal” strategies, such as rights-sharing, joint venture bundles, and streaming-as-a-service models.

Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.

Higher prices, simpler streaming expected if HBO Max folds into Paramount+ Read More »

FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site

archive.is, archive.today, Policy / 9u50fv / November 7, 2025

FBI wants detailed records

While copyright infringement would be a likely area of investigation for the FBI with Archive.today, the subpoena doesn’t provide specific information on the probe. The subpoena seeks the Archive.today customer or subscriber name, addresses, length of service, records of phone calls or texts, payment information, records of session times and duration of Internet connectivity, mobile device identification codes, IP addresses or other numbers used to identify the subscriber, and the types of services provided.

In contrast with the nonprofit Internet Archive, the operator or operators of Archive.today have remained mysterious. It has used various domains (archive.ph, archive.is, etc.), and its registrant “Denis Petrov” may be an alias.

An FAQ that apparently hasn’t been updated in over a decade says that Archive.today, which was started in 2012, uses data centers in Europe and is “privately funded.” It also accepts donations. There are several indications that the founder is from Russia.

While the Internet Archive uses a system to automatically crawl the Internet, Archive.today relies on users to paste in URLs in order to archive their content. News articles published by major media outlets are often saved in full on the site, giving other users a way to read articles that are blocked by a paywall.

Archive.today doesn’t publicize a way for copyright owners to seek removal of content, whereas the Internet Archive has a policy for removing pages when it is made aware of content that infringes a copyright.

US publishers have been fighting web services designed to bypass paywalls. In July, the News/Media Alliance said it secured the takedown of paywall-bypass website 12ft.io. “Following the News/Media Alliance’s efforts, the webhost promptly locked 12ft.io on Monday, July 14th,” the group said. (Ars Technica owner Condé Nast is a member of the alliance.)

FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site Read More »

Oddest ChatGPT leaks yet: Cringey chat logs found in Google analytics tool

AI, chatbot, chatbot leaks, chatgpt, Google, google search, google search console. privacy, openai, Policy, SEO / 9u50fv / November 7, 2025

ChatGPT leaks seem to confirm OpenAI scrapes Google, expert says.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

For months, extremely personal and sensitive ChatGPT conversations have been leaking into an unexpected destination: Google Search Console (GSC), a tool that developers typically use to monitor search traffic, not lurk private chats.

Normally, when site managers access GSC performance reports, they see queries based on keywords or short phrases that Internet users type into Google to find relevant content. But starting this September, odd queries, sometimes more than 300 characters long, could also be found in GSC. Showing only user inputs, the chats appeared to be from unwitting people prompting a chatbot to help solve relationship or business problems, who likely expected those conversations would remain private.

Jason Packer, owner of an analytics consulting firm called Quantable, was among the first to flag the issue in a detailed blog last month.

Determined to figure out what exactly was causing the leaks, he teamed up with “Internet sleuth” and web optimization consultant Slobodan Manić. Together, they conducted testing that they believe may have surfaced “the first definitive proof that OpenAI directly scrapes Google Search with actual user prompts.” Their investigation seemed to confirm the AI giant was compromising user privacy, in some cases in order to maintain engagement by seizing search data that Google otherwise wouldn’t share.

OpenAI declined Ars’ request to confirm if Packer and Manić’s theory posed in their blog was correct or answer any of their remaining questions that could help users determine the scope of the problem.

However, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that the company was “aware” of the issue and has since “resolved” a glitch “that temporarily affected how a small number of search queries were routed.”

Packer told Ars that he’s “very pleased that OpenAI was able to resolve the issue quickly.” But he suggested that OpenAI’s response failed to confirm whether or not OpenAI was scraping Google, and that leaves room for doubt that the issue was completely resolved.

Google declined to comment.

“Weirder” than prior ChatGPT leaks

The first odd ChatGPT query to appear in GSC that Packer reviewed was a wacky stream-of-consciousness from a likely female user asking ChatGPT to assess certain behaviors to help her figure out if a boy who teases her had feelings for her. Another odd query seemed to come from an office manager sharing business information while plotting a return-to-office announcement.

These were just two of 200 odd queries—including “some pretty crazy ones,” Packer told Ars—that he reviewed on one site alone. In his blog, Packer concluded that the queries should serve as “a reminder that prompts aren’t as private as you think they are!”

Packer suspected that these queries were connected to reporting from The Information in August that cited sources claiming OpenAI was scraping Google search results to power ChatGPT responses. Sources claimed that OpenAI was leaning on Google to answer prompts to ChatGPT seeking information about current events, like news or sports.

OpenAI has not confirmed that it’s scraping Google search engine results pages (SERPs). However, Packer thinks his testing of ChatGPT leaks may be evidence that OpenAI not only scrapes “SERPs in general to acquire data,” but also sends user prompts to Google Search.

Manić helped Packer solve a big part of the riddle. He found that the odd queries were turning up in one site’s GSC because it ranked highly in Google Search for “https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/”—a ChatGPT URL that was appended at the start of every strange query turning up in GSC.

It seemed that Google had tokenized the URL, breaking it up into a search for keywords “openai + index + chatgpt.” Sites using GSC that ranked highly for those keywords were therefore likely to encounter ChatGPT leaks, Parker and Manić proposed, including sites that covered prior ChatGPT leaks where chats were being indexed in Google search results. Using their recommendations to seek out queries in GSC, Ars was able to verify similar strings.

“Don’t get confused though, this is a new and completely different ChatGPT screw-up than having Google index stuff we don’t want them to,” Packer wrote. “Weirder, if not as serious.”

It’s unclear what exactly OpenAI fixed, but Packer and Manić have a theory about one possible path for leaking chats. Visiting the URL that starts every strange query found in GSC, ChatGPT users encounter a prompt box that seemed buggy, causing “the URL of that page to be added to the prompt.” The issue, they explained, seemed to be that:

Normally ChatGPT 5 will choose to do a web search whenever it thinks it needs to, and is more likely to do that with an esoteric or recency-requiring search. But this bugged prompt box also contains the query parameter ‘hints=search’ to cause it to basically always do a search: https://chatgpt.com/?hints=search&openaicom_referred=true&model=gpt-5

Clearly some of those searches relied on Google, Packer’s blog said, mistakenly sending to GSC “whatever” the user says in the prompt box, with “https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/” text added to the front of it.” As Packer explained, “we know it must have scraped those rather than using an API or some kind of private connection—because those other options don’t show inside GSC.”

This means “that OpenAI is sharing any prompt that requires a Google Search with both Google and whoever is doing their scraping,” Packer alleged. “And then also with whoever’s site shows up in the search results! Yikes.”

To Packer, it appeared that “ALL ChatGPT prompts” that used Google Search risked being leaked during the past two months.

OpenAI claimed only a small number of queries were leaked but declined to provide a more precise estimate. So, it remains unclear how many of the 700 million people who use ChatGPT each week had prompts routed to GSC.

OpenAI’s response leaves users with “lingering questions”

After ChatGPT prompts were found surfacing in Google’s search index in August, OpenAI clarified that users had clicked a box making those prompts public, which OpenAI defended as “sufficiently clear.” The AI firm later scrambled to remove the chats from Google’s SERPs after it became obvious that users felt misled into sharing private chats publicly.

Packer told Ars that a major difference between those leaks and the GSC leaks is that users harmed by the prior scandal, at least on some level, “had to actively share” their leaked chats. In the more recent case, “nobody clicked share” or had a reasonable way to prevent their chats from being exposed.

“Did OpenAI go so fast that they didn’t consider the privacy implications of this, or did they just not care?” Packer posited in his blog.

Perhaps most troubling to some users—whose identities are not linked in chats unless their prompts perhaps share identifying information—there does not seem to be any way to remove the leaked chats from GSC, unlike the prior scandal.

Packer and Manić are left with “lingering questions” about how far OpenAI’s fix will go to stop the issue.

Manić was hoping OpenAI might confirm if prompts entered on https://chatgpt.com that trigger Google Search were also affected. But OpenAI did not follow up on that question, or a broader question about how big the leak was. To Manić, a major concern was that OpenAI’s scraping may be “contributing to ‘crocodile mouth’ in Google Search Console,” a troubling trend SEO researchers have flagged that causes impressions to spike but clicks to dip.

OpenAI also declined to clarify Packer’s biggest question. He’s left wondering if the company’s “fix” simply ended OpenAI’s “routing of search queries, such that raw prompts are no longer being sent to Google Search, or are they no longer scraping Google Search at all for data?

“We still don’t know if it’s that one particular page that has this bug or whether this is really widespread,” Packer told Ars. “In either case, it’s serious and just sort of shows how little regard OpenAI has for moving carefully when it comes to privacy.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Oddest ChatGPT leaks yet: Cringey chat logs found in Google analytics tool Read More »

10,000 generations of hominins used the same stone tools to weather a changing world

Archaeology, australopithecus, hominins, oldowan, paleoarchaeology, Science, stone tools / 9u50fv / November 7, 2025

“This site reveals an extraordinary story of cultural continuity,” said Braun in a recent press release.

When the going gets tough, the tough make tools

Nomorotukunan’s layers of stone tools span the transition from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene, during which Earth’s climate turned gradually cooler and drier after a 2 to 3 million-year warm spell. Pollen and other microscopic traces of plants in the sediment at Nomorotukunan tell the tale: the lakeshore marsh gradually dried up, giving way to arid grassland dotted with shrubs. On a shorter timescale, hominins at Nomorotukunan faced wildfires (based on microcharcoal in the sediments), droughts, and rivers drying up or changing course.

“As vegetation shifted, the toolmaking remained steady,” said National University of Kenya archaeologist Rahab N. Kinyanjui in a recent press release. “This is resilience.”

Making sharp stone tools may have helped generations of hominins survive their changing, drying world. In the warm, humid Pliocene, finding food would have been relatively easy, but as conditions got tougher, hominins probably had to scavenge or dig for their meals. At least one animal bone at Nomorotukunan bears cut marks where long-ago hominins carved up the carcass for meat—something our lineage isn’t really equipped to do with its bare hands and teeth. Tools also would have enabled early hominins to dig up and cut tubers or roots.

It’s fair to assume that sharpened wood sticks probably also played a role in that particular work, but wood doesn’t tend to last as long as stone in the archaeological record, so we can’t say for sure. What is certain are the stone tools and cut bones, which hint at what Utrecht University archaeologist Dan Rolier, a coauthor of the paper, calls “one of our oldest habits: using technology to steady ourselves against change.”

A tale as old as time

Nomorotukunan may hint that Oldowan technology is even older than the earliest tools archaeologists have unearthed so far. The oldest tools unearthed from the deepest layer at Nomorotukunan are the work of skilled flint-knappers who understood where to strike a stone, and at exactly which angle, to flake off the right shape. They also clearly knew how to select the right stones for the job (fine-grained chalcedony for the win, in this case). In other words, these tools weren’t the work of a bunch of hominins who were just figuring out, for the first time, how to bang the rocks together.

10,000 generations of hominins used the same stone tools to weather a changing world Read More »

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