syndication

OpenClaw security fears lead Meta, other AI firms to restrict its use

AI, Meta, Moltbot, OpenClaw, syndication / Mike M. / February 19, 2026

“Our policy is, ‘mitigate first, investigate second’ when we come across anything that could be harmful to our company, users, or clients,” says Grad, who is cofounder and CEO of Massive, which provides Internet proxy tools to millions of users and businesses. His warning to staff went out on January 26, before any of his employees had installed OpenClaw, he says.

At another tech company, Valere, which works on software for organizations including Johns Hopkins University, an employee posted about OpenClaw on January 29 on an internal Slack channel for sharing new tech to potentially try out. The company’s president quickly responded that use of OpenClaw was strictly banned, Valere CEO Guy Pistone tells WIRED.

“If it got access to one of our developer’s machines, it could get access to our cloud services and our clients’ sensitive information, including credit card information and GitHub codebases,” Pistone says. “It’s pretty good at cleaning up some of its actions, which also scares me.”

A week later, Pistone did allow Valere’s research team to run OpenClaw on an employee’s old computer. The goal was to identify flaws in the software and potential fixes to make it more secure. The research team later advised limiting who can give orders to OpenClaw and exposing it to the Internet only with a password in place for its control panel to prevent unwanted access.

In a report shared with WIRED, the Valere researchers added that users have to “accept that the bot can be tricked.” For instance, if OpenClaw is set up to summarize a user’s email, a hacker could send a malicious email to the person instructing the AI to share copies of files on the person’s computer.

OpenClaw security fears lead Meta, other AI firms to restrict its use Read More »

Inside the DHS forum where ICE agents trash talk one another

DHS, Forums, ice, Policy, syndication / Shannon Garcia / February 18, 2026

Complaining about your job

Forum members have discussed their discomfort with mass deportation efforts.

Credit: Al Drago/Getty Images

Every day, people log into an online forum for current and former Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officers to share their thoughts on the news of the day and complain about their colleagues in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“ERO is too busy dressing up as Black Ops Commandos with Tactical body armor, drop down thigh rigs, balaclavas, multiple M4 magazines, and Punisher patches, to do an Admin arrest of a non criminal, non-violent EWI that weighs 90 pounds and is 5 foot 2, inside a secure Federal building where everyone has been screened for weapons,” wrote one user in July 2025. (ERO stands for Enforcement and Removal Operations; along with HSI, it’s one of the two major divisions of ICE, and is responsible for detaining and deporting immigrants.)

The forum describes itself as a space for current and prospective HSI agents, “designed for the seasoned HSI Special Agent as well as applicants for entry level Special Agent positions.” HSI is the division within ICE whose agents are normally responsible for investigating crimes like drug smuggling, terrorism, and human trafficking.

In the forum, users discuss their discomfort with the US’s mass deportation efforts, debate the way federal agents have interacted with protesters and the public, and complain about the state of their working conditions. Members have also had heated discussions about the shooting of two protesters in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the ways immigration enforcement has taken place around the US.

The forum is one of several related forums where people working in different parts of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) share experiences and discuss specific details of their work. WIRED previously reported on a forum where current and former deportation officers from ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) similarly complained about their jobs and discussed the way the agency was conducting immigration raids. The HSI forum appears to be linked, even including some of the same members.

People do not need to show proof of their employment to join these forums, and the platform does not appear to be heavily moderated. WIRED has not confirmed the individual identities of these posters, though posters share details that likely would only be known to those intimately familiar with the job. There are more than 2,000 members with posts going back to at least 2004.

DHS and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.

Following the killings of both Good and Pretti, the forum’s members were heavily divided. In a January 12 thread, five days after Good was shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, a poster who has been a part of the forum since 2016 wrote, “IMHO, the situation with ICE Operations have gotten to an unprecedented level of violence from both the Suspects and the General Public. I hope the AG is looking at the temporary suspension of Civil Liberties, (during and in the geographic locales where ICE Operations are being conducted).”

A user who joined the forum in 2018 and identifies as a recently retired agent responded, “This is an excellent idea and well warranted. These are organized, well financed civil disturbances, dare I say an INSURRECTION?!?”

In a January 16 post titled “The Shooting,” some posters took a more nuanced view. “I get that it is a good shoot legally and all that, but all he had to do was step aside, he nearly shot one of his partners for Gods sake!” wrote a poster who first joined the forum in March 2022. “A USC woman non-crim shot in the head on TV for what? Just doesn’t sit well with me… A seasoned SRT guy who was able to execute someone while holding a phone seems to me he could have simply got out of the way.” SRT refers to ICE’s elite special response team, who undergo special training to operate in high-risk situations. USC refers to US citizens.

“You clearly haven’t been TDY anywhere. Yes, they were going to arrest her for 111,” responded another poster who joined the forum in June 2018. “Tons of USCs are being arrested for it daily.” 111 refers to the part of the US criminal code that deals with assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers; TDY refers to “temporary duty,” where officers are pulled to different locations for a limited period of time.

“Can’t believe we have ‘supposed agents’ here questioning the shooting of a domestic terrorist,” wrote a third user who joined the forum in December 2025. (In the wake of the shooting, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a “domestic terrorist.”)

“If you think a fat unarmed lesbian in a Honda is a ‘Terrorist’ then you are a fake ass cop!” the original poster replied. “I have worked real Terrorism cases, and I am not saying it was a bad shoot and not defending her. I am just saying it did not have to happen.”

Later in the thread, a poster who joined the forum in July 2023 replied, “Remember, these are the same agents who think J6’ers were just misunderstood rowdy tourists, and that Ashley Babbitt is a national hero…and if you dare say something negative about Trump, or try to hold him accountable, you’re suddenly a leftie, communist, lunatic (even though I’m a Republican).”

In a different thread following the shooting of Pretti on January 24 by a CBP agent, a poster who has been a part of the forum since 2023 and who also identified as a retired agent wrote, “Yet another ‘justified’ fatal shooting…They all carry gun belts and vest with 9,000 pieces of equipment on them and then best they can do is shoot a guy in the back.”

The thread devolved into posters debating whether members of the January 6 insurrection were domestic terrorists, and why Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two people during a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, was apprehended alive.

“I just want to mention, we all get emotions are heightened right now. But I highly doubt being a legacy customs guy you ever did anything where the risk was beyond the potential for paper cuts,” wrote a user who first joined the forum in June 2025. “It’s a new day with new threats in an environment you never fathomed in your career.”

Even before the shootings of Good and Pretti, members of the forum questioned the wisdom of bringing HSI into the Trump administration’s mass mobilization around immigration enforcement. HSI deals specifically with criminal cases and investigations, but living and working in the US without documentation is a civil offense, and the majority of immigrants who were detained or deported in 2025 had not committed any crimes.

One poster complained that doing so was pulling HSI resources away from more urgent casework.

“The use of 1811s — HSI or otherwise — for administrative immigration enforcement is a complete misuse of resources,” wrote a user who joined the forum in October 2022 in a January 7 post. 1811’s refers to a category of law enforcement officers generally referred to as special agents who conduct criminal investigations. “They could be doing these crime surges for literally any type of federal criminal investigations (drugs, child exploitation, gangs, etc.), and it would be a much better use of resources. Not only that, our reputations would still be intact.”

Others in the forum have complained about HSI’s relationship with ICE’s ERO teams. “It’s pretty bad when ERO at a large metropolitan city get’s backed up with 30 bodies and they call the SA’s in to process,” wrote a poster on July 7, 2025 who has been a part of the forum since 2010. SAs refers to special agents. “I guess that is what happens when they have not done any immigration work in decades.”

“Complete opposite in our [area of responsibility],” a poster who first joined the forum in 2012 replied. “No one has a clue what most of ero is doing and are asking us to be included on anything immigration we’re doing and introduce them to DEA contacts working investigations involving illegals.”

A third poster, who has been a forum member since 2024, added that “ERO does essentially nothing. I walked in the office the other day and the HSI SAs were doing jail pickups and processing. The ERO folks were gathered around a desk drinking coffee and joking around.” In cases where ICE has a request out to jails for a person they’re pursuing, known as an immigration detainer, jails will hold that person for up to “48 hours beyond the time they would ordinarily release them” to allow ICE to pick them up.

In the lead up to federal immigration authorities’ operations in Minneapolis, members complained about long hours. “How are RHAs expected to go on TDYs with NO days off and lots of [overtime] when they are all capped out (biweekly and yearly [sic]),” complained a user who first joined the forum in December 2004 in a post from December 7, 2025. RHAs refers to rehired annuitants, or retired federal agents who have returned to the job and continue to collect their federal retirement benefits. “ERO has NO caps.”

“I’m capped out so only getting paid for 5 days at 10 hours a day,” wrote the user who first joined the forum in 2010 in another thread (overtime pay rules can vary from agency to agency). ”Anything over 50 hours a week and I’m working for free.”

Others in the forum said they were waiting for their promised sign-on bonuses, and expressed disappointment with what they saw in their paychecks. For rehired annuitants, ICE offered a signing bonus of up to $50,000. “Not sure how they calculated the current pay from the super check received today, but mine can’t be right,” a poster who joined the forum in 2021 wrote in an October post. “My super check netted me a grand total of $600 more.”

In another thread on bonuses, a user who has been a forum member since 2005 replied, “I got a deposit last night or early this morning,” they wrote. “It looks like 10k after taxes plus my regular pay check. Not sure yet. However the deal was 20K. WTF?!”

In a December thread, other members discussed the way immigration agents had begun to interact more aggressively with protesters. The user identified as a retired agent wrote, “I’ve seen a lot of videos lately of HSI or ERO agents getting triggered by civilians taking photos or videos of them or their vehicles. In several of the videos the agents are seen jumping out of their GOVs, manhandling the civilian, and smashing or confiscating their phones.” The user expressed bewilderment about the behavior, writing that they “would have been fired and/or prosecuted for something like this. I believe everyone knows at this point that taking photos/videos is a protected act unless someone is clearly impeding or obstructing (which doesn’t always appear to be the case).”

Another poster, who joined the forum in September 2025, replied, “Ah…Cell phone video. You can make them tell what ever story you want with creative editing.”

As part of the response to immigration operations, particularly in Minnesota, civilians have organized to monitor federal agents, coordinating to witness and record their operations, and sometimes tailing suspected ICE vehicles, checking licence plates in Signal groups. Federal agents, in turn, have been seen taking photos and videos of protesters, with one legal observer in Maine claiming that an agent told her she would be added to a terror watchlist. (In testimony this week, Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE told members of Congress that ICE was not making such a list of US citizens.)

In posts throughout the forum, members also complain about their access to gear and the agency’s technology. “Apparently there is enough money to buy a bunch of ICE marked cars but not get us some basic protective gear…” wrote one user on January 27, who joined the forum in 2025.

“I also have a suspicion that HQ or the [Executive Associate Director] have not advocated to get us gear to handle all the nut job protesters,” they wrote in a follow up post.

On a thread named “Alien Processing” that started in July 2025, posters complained about “How is it that with all the technology we have and an entire fkn building full of computer geeks this fkn agency cannot make a fkn system that works properly and effectively in a simple user friendly fashion? This Eagle crap is a total mess!” one poster wrote. EAGLE refers to Enforcement Integrated Database (EID) called EID Arrest Guide for Law Enforcement, a system to process the biometric and personal information for people arrested by ICE. “It takes longer to process a fkn alien than it does to actually catch them. We dont need 10,000 new ICE Officers/Agents, just hire fkn people to process them so we can do our jobs of catching them.”

Members also talked about their preferred pieces of ICE tech: Another user, who joined the forum in March 2025, responded to the “Alien Processing” thread, writing “Mobile Fortify is the best thing that has come out in a long time,” in reference to the mobile facial recognition app used by federal agents to identify people in the field.

According to DHS’s 2025 AI Use Case Inventory, agents have been able to use Mobile Fortify since May 2025. The app uses AI, trained with CBP’s “Vetting/Border Crossing Information/ Trusted Traveler Information,” to match a picture taken by agents and “contactless” fingerprints with existing records. 404 Media reported that the app has misidentified at least one person—perhaps because, as WIRED has reported, it wasn’t designed to be used for what ICE is using it for.

Though ICE’s surge in Minnesota appears to be entering a drawdown, the agency is continuing to expand its footprint across the US, and investing in a network of detention centers and large warehouses for holding immigrants, all indicating that detentions and deportations are not expected to slow down.

“Put yourself in the shoes of the guys in the street strung out on crazy op tempo, being threatened and antagonized all day, having inept leadership, low morale, and then having to fight every formerly low risk non-crim (or barely crim) because they are all hyped up on victim status and liberal energy. Plus hyper partisan radicalization on both sides,” the user who joined the forum in June 2025 wrote. “If you think the news is enraging you now, wait till this spring/summer when we need to fill the mega detention centers.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

Inside the DHS forum where ICE agents trash talk one another Read More »

“It ain’t no unicorn”: These researchers have interviewed 130 Bigfoot hunters

bigfoot, cryptids, Science, syndication / DJ Henderson / February 15, 2026

It was the image that launched a cultural icon. In 1967, in the Northern California woods, a 7-foot-tall, ape-like creature covered in black fur and walking upright was captured on camera, at one point turning around to look straight down the lens. The image is endlessly copied in popular culture—it’s even become an emoji. But what was it? A hoax? A bear? Or a real-life example of a mysterious species called the Bigfoot?

The film has been analysed and re-analysed countless times. Although most people believe it was some sort of hoax, there are some who argue that it’s never been definitively debunked. One group of people, dubbed Bigfooters, is so intrigued that they have taken to the forests of Washington, California, Oregon, Ohio, Florida, and beyond to look for evidence of the mythical creature.

But why? That’s what sociologists Jamie Lewis and Andrew Bartlett wanted to uncover. They were itching to understand what prompts this community to spend valuable time and resources looking for a beast that is highly unlikely to even exist. During lockdown, Lewis started interviewing more than 130 Bigfooters (and a few academics) about their views, experiences, and practices, culminating in the duo’s recent book “Bigfooters and Scientific Inquiry: On the Borderlands of Legitimate Science.”

Here, we talk to them about their academic investigation.

What was it about the Bigfoot community that you found so intriguing?

Lewis: It started when I was watching either the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet and a show called Finding Bigfoot was advertised. I was really keen to know why this program was being scheduled on what certainly at the time was a nominally serious and sober natural history channel. The initial plan was to do an analysis of these television programmes, but we felt that wasn’t enough. It was lockdown and my wife was pregnant and in bed a lot with sickness, so I needed to fill my time.

Bartlett: One of the things that I worked on when Jamie and I shared an office in Cardiff was a sociological study of fringe physicists. These are people mostly outside of academic institutions trying to do science. I was interviewing these people, going to their conferences. And that led relatively smoothly into Bigfoot, but it was Jamie’s interest in Bigfoot that brought me to this field.

How big is this community?

Lewis: It’s very hard to put a number on it. There is certainly a divide between what are known as “apers,” who believe that Bigfoot is just a primate unknown to science, and those that are perhaps more derogatorily called “woo-woos,” who believe that Bigfoot is some sort of interdimensional traveller, an alien of sort. We’re talking in the thousands of people. But there are a couple of hundred really serious people of which I probably interviewed at least half.

Many people back them. A YouGov survey conducted as recently as November 2025, suggested that as many as one quarter of Americans believe that Bigfoot either definitely or probably exists.

Were the interviewees suspicious of your intentions?

Lewis: I think there was definitely a worry that they would be caricatured. And I was often asked, “Do I believe in Bigfoot?” I had a standard answer that Andy and I agreed on, which was that mainstream, institutional science says there is absolutely no compelling evidence that Bigfoot exists. We have no reason to dissent with that consensus. But as sociologists what does exist is a community (or communities) of Bigfooting, and that’s what interests us.

“It ain’t no unicorn”: These researchers have interviewed 130 Bigfoot hunters Read More »

Astronomers are filling in the blanks of the Kuiper Belt

astronomy, Kuiper belt, Pluto, Science, syndication, trans-Neptunian objects / 9u50fv / February 14, 2026

Are you out there, Planet X?

Next-generation telescopes are mapping this outer frontier.

Credit: NASA/SOFIA/Lynette Cook

Out beyond the orbit of Neptune lies an expansive ring of ancient relics, dynamical enigmas, and possibly a hidden planet—or two.

The Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen debris about 30 to 50 times farther from the sun than the Earth is—and perhaps farther, though nobody knows—has been shrouded in mystery since it first came into view in the 1990s.

Over the past 30 years, astronomers have cataloged about 4,000 Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), including a smattering of dwarf worlds, icy comets, and leftover planet parts. But that number is expected to increase tenfold in the coming years as observations from more advanced telescopes pour in. In particular, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will illuminate this murky region with its flagship project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which began operating last year. Other next-generation observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will also help to bring the belt into focus.

“Beyond Neptune, we have a census of what’s out there in the solar system, but it’s a patchwork of surveys, and it leaves a lot of room for things that might be there that have been missed,” says Renu Malhotra, who serves as Louise Foucar Marshall Science Research Professor and Regents Professor of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona.

“I think that’s the big thing that Rubin is going to do—fill out the gaps in our knowledge of the contents of the solar system,” she adds. “It’s going to greatly advance our census and our knowledge of the contents of the solar system.”

As a consequence, astronomers are preparing for a flood of discoveries from this new frontier, which could shed light on a host of outstanding questions. Are there new planets hidden in the belt, or lurking beyond it? How far does this region extend? And are there traces of cataclysmic past encounters between worlds—both homegrown or from interstellar space—imprinted in this largely pristine collection of objects from the deep past?

“I think this will become a very hot field very soon, because of LSST,” says Amir Siraj, a graduate student at Princeton University who studies the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt is a graveyard of planetary odds and ends that were scattered far from the sun during the messy birth of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago. Pluto was the first KBO ever spotted, more than a half-century before the belt itself was discovered.

Since the 1990s, astronomers have found a handful of other dwarf planets in the belt, such as Eris and Sedna, along with thousands of smaller objects. While the Kuiper Belt is not completely static, it is, for the most part, an intact time capsule of the early solar system that can be mined for clues about planet formation.

For example, the belt contains weird structures that may be signatures of past encounters between giant planets, including one particular cluster of objects, known as a “kernel,” located at about 44 astronomical units (AU), where one AU is the distance between Earth and the sun (about 93 million miles).

While the origin of this kernel is still unexplained, one popular hypothesis is that its constituent objects—which are known as cold classicals—were pulled along by Neptune’s outward migration through the solar system more than 4 billion years ago, which may have been a bumpy ride.

The idea is that “Neptune got jiggled by the rest of the gas giants and did a bit of a jump; it’s called the ‘jumping Neptune’ scenario,” says Wes Fraser, an astronomer at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, National Research Council of Canada, who studies the Kuiper Belt, noting that astronomer David Nesvorný came up with the idea.

“Imagine a snowplow driving along a highway, and lifting up the plow. It leaves a clump of snow behind,” he adds. “That same sort of idea is what left the clump of cold classicals behind. That is the kernel.”

In other words, Neptune tugged these objects along with it as it migrated outward, but then broke its gravitational hold over them when it “jumped,” leaving them to settle into the Kuiper Belt in the distinctive Neptune-sculpted kernel pattern that remains intact to this day.

Last year, Siraj and his advisers at Princeton set out to look for other hidden structures in the Kuiper Belt with a new algorithm that analyzed 1,650 KBOs—about 10 times as many objects as the 2011 study, led by Jean-Robert Petit, that first identified the kernel.

The results consistently confirmed the presence of the original kernel, while also revealing a possibly new “inner kernel” located at about 43 AU, though more research is needed to confirm this finding, according to the team’s 2025 study.

“You have these two clumps, basically, at 43 and 44 AU,” Siraj explains. “It’s unclear whether they’re part of the same structure,” but “either way, it’s another clue about, perhaps, Neptune’s migration, or some other process that formed these clumps.”

As Rubin and other telescopes discover thousands more KBOs in the coming years, the nature and possible origin of these mysterious structures in the belt may become clearer, potentially opening new windows into the tumultuous origins of our solar system.

In addition to reconstructing the early lives of the known planets, astronomers who study the Kuiper Belt are racing to spot unknown planets. The most famous example is the hypothetical giant world known as Planet Nine or Planet X, first proposed in 2016. Some scientists have suggested that the gravitational influence of this planet, if it exists, might explain strangely clustered orbits within the Kuiper Belt, though this speculative world would be located well beyond the belt, at several hundred AU.

Siraj and his colleagues have also speculated about the possibility of a Mercury- or Mars-sized world, dubbed Planet Y, that may be closer to the belt, at around 80 to 200 AU, according to their 2025 study. Rubin is capable of spotting these hypothetical worlds, though it may be challenging to anticipate the properties of planets that lurk this far from the sun.

“We know nothing about the atmospheres and surfaces of gas giant or ice giant type planets at 200, 300, or 400 AU,” Fraser says. “We know nothing about their chemistry. Every single time we look at an exoplanet, it behaves differently than what our models predict.”

“I think Planet Nine might very well just be a tar ball that is so dark that we can’t see it, and that’s why it hasn’t been discovered yet,” he adds. “If we found that, I wouldn’t be too surprised. And who knows what an Earth [in the belt] would look like? Certainly the compositional makeup will be different than a Mars, or an Earth, or a Venus, in the inner solar system.”

Observatories like Rubin and JWST may fill in these tantalizing gaps in our knowledge of the Kuiper Belt, and perhaps pinpoint hidden planets. But even if these telescopes reveal an absence of planets, it would be a breakthrough.

“There’s a lot of room for discovery of large bodies,” says Malhotra. “That would be awesome, but if we don’t find any, that would tell us something as well.”

“Not finding them up to some distance would give us estimates of how efficient or inefficient the planet formation process was,” she adds. “It would fill in some of the uncertainties that we have in our models.”

One other major open question about the Kuiper Belt is the extent of its boundaries. The belt suddenly tapers off at about 50 AU, an edge called the Kuiper cliff. This is a puzzling feature, because it suggests that our solar system has an anomalously small debris belt compared with other systems.

“The solar system looks kind of weird,” Fraser says. “The Kuiper cliff is a somewhat sharp delineation. Beyond that, we have no evidence that there was a disk of material. And yet, if you look at other stellar systems that have debris disks, the vast majority of those are significantly larger.”

“If we were to find a debris disk at, say, 100 AU, that would immediately make the solar system not weird, and quite average at that point,” he notes.

In 2024, Fraser and his colleagues presented hints of a possible undiscovered population of objects that may exist at about 100 AU—though he emphasizes that these are candidate detections, and are not yet confirmed to be a hidden outer ring.

However, even Rubin may not be able to resolve the presence of the tiny and distant objects that could represent a new outer limit of the Kuiper Belt. Time will tell.

As astronomers gear up for this major step change in our understanding of the Kuiper Belt, answers to some of our most fundamental questions hang in the balance. With its immaculate record of the early solar system, this region preserves secrets from the deep past. Here there are probably not dragons, but there may well be hidden planets, otherworldly structures, and discoveries that haven’t yet been imagined.

“I’d say the big question is, what’s out there?” Malhotra says. “What are we missing?”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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Alphabet selling very rare 100-year bonds to help fund AI investment

AI, alphabet, debt, Google, syndication, Tech / Kelly Newman / February 10, 2026

Tony Trzcinka, a US-based senior portfolio manager at Impax Asset Management, which purchased Alphabet’s bonds last year, said he skipped Monday’s offering because of insufficient yields and concerns about overexposure to companies with complex financial obligations tied to AI investments.

“It wasn’t worth it to swap into new ones,” Trzcinka said. “We’ve been very conscious of our exposure to these hyperscalers and their capex budgets.”

Big Tech companies and their suppliers are expected to invest almost $700 billion in AI infrastructure this year and are increasingly turning to the debt markets to finance the giant data center build-out.

Alphabet in November sold $17.5 billion of bonds in the US including a 50-year bond—the longest-dated dollar bond sold by a tech group last year—and raised €6.5 billion on European markets.

Oracle last week raised $25 billion from a bond sale that attracted more than $125 billion of orders.

Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta all increased their capital expenditure plans during their most recent earnings reports, prompting questions about whether they will be able to fund the unprecedented spending spree from their cash flows alone.

Last week, Google’s parent company reported annual sales that topped $400 billion for the first time, beating investors’ expectations for revenues and profits in the most recent quarter. It said it planned to spend as much as $185 billion on capex this year, roughly double last year’s total, to capitalize on booming demand for its Gemini AI assistant.

Alphabet’s long-term debt jumped to $46.5 billion in 2025, up more than four times the previous year, though it held cash and equivalents of $126.8 billion at the year-end.

Investor demand was the strongest on the shortest portion of Monday’s deal, with a three-year offering pricing at only 0.27 percentage points above US Treasuries, versus 0.6 percentage points during initial price discussions, said people familiar with the deal.

The longest portion of the offering, a 40-year bond, is expected to yield 0.95 percentage points over US Treasuries, down from 1.2 percentage points during initial talks, the people said.

Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan are the bookrunners on the bond sales across three currencies. All three declined to comment or did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Alphabet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Alphabet selling very rare 100-year bonds to help fund AI investment Read More »

Under Trump, EPA’s enforcement of environmental laws collapses, report finds

Environmental Protection Agency, Policy, pollution, Science, syndication, trump administration / DJ Henderson / February 7, 2026

The Environmental Protection Agency has drastically pulled back on holding polluters accountable.

Enforcement against polluters in the United States plunged in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a far bigger drop than in the same period of his first term, according to a new report from a watchdog group.

By analyzing a range of federal court and administrative data, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that civil lawsuits filed by the US Department of Justice in cases referred by the Environmental Protection Agency dropped to just 16 in the first 12 months after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. That is 76 percent less than in the first year of the Biden administration.

Trump’s first administration filed 86 such cases in its first year, which was in turn a drop from the Obama administration’s 127 four years earlier.

“Our nation’s landmark environmental laws are meaningless when EPA does not enforce the rules,” Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said in a statement.

The findings echo two recent analyses from the nonprofits Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and Earthjustice, which both documented dwindling environmental enforcement under Trump.

From day one of Trump’s second term, the administration has pursued an aggressive deregulatory agenda, scaling back regulations and health safeguards across the federal government that protect water, air and other parts of the environment. This push to streamline industry activities has been particularly favorable for fossil fuel companies. Trump declared an “energy emergency” immediately after his inauguration.

At the EPA, Administrator Lee Zeldin launched in March what the administration called the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history”: 31 separate efforts to roll back restrictions on air and water pollution; to hand over more authority to states, some of which have a long history of supporting lax enforcement; and to relinquish EPA’s mandate to act on climate change under the Clean Air Act.

The new report suggests the agency is also relaxing enforcement of existing law. Neither the White House nor the EPA responded to a request for comment.

A “compliance first” approach

Part of the decline in lawsuits against polluters could be due to the lack of staff to carry them out, experts say. According to an analysis from E&E News, at least a third of lawyers in the Justice Department’s environment division have left in the past year. Meanwhile, the EPA in 2025 laid off hundreds of employees who monitored pollution that could hurt human health.

Top agency officials are also directing staff to issue fewer violation notices and reduce other enforcement actions. In December, the EPA formalized a new “compliance first” enforcement policy that stresses working with suspected violators to correct problems before launching any formal action that could lead to fines or mandatory correction measures.

“Formal enforcement … is appropriate only when compliance assurance or informal enforcement is inapplicable or insufficient to achieve rapid compliance,” wrote Craig Pritzlaff, who is now a principal deputy assistant EPA administrator, in a Dec. 5 memo to all enforcement officials and regional offices.

Only in rare cases involving an immediate hazard should enforcers use traditional case tools, Pritzlaff said. “Immediate formal enforcement may be required in certain circumstances, such as when there is an emergency that presents significant harm to human health and the environment,” he wrote.

Federal agencies like the EPA, with staffs far outmatched in size compared to the vast sectors of the economy they oversee, typically have used enforcement actions not only to deal with violators but to deter other companies from breaking the law. Environmental advocates worry that without environmental cops visible on the beat, compliance will erode.

Pritzlaff joined the EPA last fall after five years heading up enforcement for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, where nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen noted that he was known as a “reluctant regulator.” Public Citizen and other advocacy groups criticized TCEQ under Pritzlaff’s leadership for its reticence to take decisive action against repeat violators.

One example: An INEOS chemical plant had racked up close to 100 violations over a decade before a 2023 explosion that sent one worker to the hospital, temporarily shut down the Houston Ship Channel and sparked a fire that burned for an hour. Public Citizen said it was told by TCEQ officials that the agency allowed violations to accumulate over the years, arguing it was more efficient to handle multiple issues in a single enforcement action.

“But that proved to be untrue, instead creating a complex backlog of cases that the agency is still struggling to resolve,” Public Citizen wrote last fall after Pritzlaff joined the EPA. “That’s not efficiency, it’s failure.”

Early last year, TCEQ fined INEOS $2.3 million for an extensive list of violations that occurred between 2016 and 2021.

“A slap on the wrist”

The EPA doesn’t always take entities to court when they violate environmental laws. At times, the agency can resolve these issues through less-formal administrative cases, which actually increased during the first eight months of Trump’s second term when compared to the same period in the Biden administration, according to the new report.

However, most of these administrative actions involved violations of requirements for risk management plans under the Clean Air Act or municipalities’ violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The Trump administration did not increase administrative cases that involve pollution from industrial operations, Environmental Integrity Project spokesperson Tom Pelton said over email.

Another signal of declining enforcement: Through September of last year, the EPA issued $41 million in penalties—$8 million less than the same period in the first year of the Biden administration, after adjusting for inflation. This suggests “the Trump Administration may be letting more polluters get by with a slap on the wrist when the Administration does take enforcement action,” the report reads.

Combined, the lack of lawsuits, penalties, and other enforcement actions for environmental violations could impact communities across the country, said Erika Kranz, a senior staff attorney in the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, who was not involved in the report.

“We’ve been seeing the administration deregulate by repealing rules and extending compliance deadlines, and this decline in enforcement action seems like yet another mechanism that the administration is using to de-emphasize environmental and public health protections,” Kranz said. “It all appears to be connected, and if you’re a person in the US who is worried about your health and the health of your neighbors generally, this certainly could have effects.”

The report notes that many court cases last longer than a year, so it will take time to get a clearer sense of how environmental enforcement is changing under the Trump administration. However, the early data compiled by the Environmental Integrity Project and other nonprofits shows a clear and steep shift away from legal actions against polluters.

Historically, administrations have a “lot of leeway on making enforcement decisions,” Kranz said. But this stark of a drop could prompt lawsuits against the Trump administration, she added.

“Given these big changes and trends, you might see groups arguing that this is more than just an exercise of discretion or choosing priorities [and] this is more of an abdication of an agency’s core mission and its statutory duties,” Kranz said. “I think it’s going to be interesting to see if groups make those arguments, and if they do, how courts look at them.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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EU says TikTok needs to drop “addictive design”

Digital Markets Act, EU, European Commision, Policy, syndication, tiktok / Beth Washington / February 7, 2026

TikTok said: “The Commission’s preliminary findings present a categorically false and entirely meritless depiction of our platform, and we will take whatever steps are necessary to challenge these findings through every means available to us.”

TikTok is owned by China’s ByteDance, although a recent deal with the Trump administration will spin off its US arm into a joint venture majority owned by American investors. The venture will provide data and algorithm security, while ByteDance will retain control of the app’s main business lines in the US, including ecommerce, advertising, and marketing.

European watchdogs have previously taken action against TikTok for breaking the bloc’s digital rules. Last year, Irish regulators issued a 530 million euro fine against TikTok for sending users’ data to China, while Brussels has also probed its online advertising practices.

The EU’s move on Friday comes as other nations move closer to social media bans for teenagers.

Earlier this week, Spain was the latest country to announce it will stop access to social media for children under the age of 16 to curb the potentially harmful impact of online content on young people.

France and the UK are also considering similar measures, following the lead of Australia, which in December became the first country in the world to ban under-16s from holding accounts for 10 apps deemed to be potentially harmful to teenagers and children.

EU says TikTok needs to drop “addictive design” Read More »

Russian spy satellites have intercepted EU communications satellites

espionage, Luch-2, russia, satellites, Space, space warfare, syndication / 9u50fv / February 4, 2026

Those thrusters could also be used to knock satellites out of alignment or even cause them to crash back to Earth or drift into space.

Intelligence gathered by Luch 1 and 2 could also help Russia coordinate less overt attacks on Western interests. Monitoring other satellites can reveal who is using them and where—information that could later be exploited for targeted ground-based jamming or hacking operations.

The Luch vehicles were “maneuvring about and parking themselves close to geostationary satellites, often for many months at a time,” said Belinda Marchand, chief science officer at Slingshot Aerospace, a US-based company that tracks objects in space using ground-based sensors and artificial intelligence.

She added that Luch 2 was currently “in proximity” to Intelsat 39, a large geostationary satellite that services Europe and Africa.

Since its launch in 2023, Luch-2 has hovered near at least 17 other geostationary satellites above Europe serving both commercial and government purposes, Slingshot data shows.

“They have visited the same families, the same operators—so you can deduce that they have a specific purpose or interest,” said Norbert Pouzin, senior orbital analyst at Aldoria, a French satellite tracking company that has also shadowed the Luch satellites. “These are all Nato-based operators.”

“Even if they cannot decrypt messages, they can still extract a lot of information… they can map how a satellite is being used, work out the location of ground terminals, for example,” he added.

Pouzin also said that Russia now seemed to be ramping up its reconnaissance activity in space, launching two new satellites last year named Cosmos 2589 and Cosmos 2590. The vehicles appear to have similarly maneuvrable capabilities to Luch-1 and Luch-2.

Cosmos 2589 is now on its way to the same range as geostationary satellites, which orbit 35,000 km above Earth, Pouzin said.

But Luch-1 may no longer be functional. On January 30, Earth telescopes observed what appeared to be a plume of gas coming from the satellite. Shortly after, it appeared to at least partially fragment.

“It looks like it began with something to do with the propulsion,” said Marchand, adding that afterwards there “was certainly a fragmentation,” and the satellite was “still tumbling.”

Russian spy satellites have intercepted EU communications satellites Read More »

At NIH, a power struggle over institute directorships deepens

National Institutes of Health, NIH, NIH funding, NIH grants, Science, syndication / 9u50fv / February 1, 2026

The research agency has 27 institute and center directors. Will those roles become politicized?

When a new presidential administration comes in, it is responsible for filling around 4,000 jobs sprinkled across the federal government’s vast bureaucracy. These political appointees help carry out the president’s agenda, and, at least in theory, make government agencies responsive to elected officials.

Some of these roles—the secretary of state, for example—are well-known. Others, such as the deputy assistant secretary for textiles, consumer goods, materials, critical minerals & metals industry & analysis, are more obscure.

Historically, science agencies like NASA or the National Institutes of Health tend to have fewer political appointees than many other parts of the federal government. Sometimes, very senior roles—with authority over billions of dollars of spending, and the power to shape entire fields of research—are filled without any direct input from the White House or Congress. The arrangement reflects a long-running argument that scientists should oversee the work of funding and conducting research with very little interference from political leaders.

Since the early 2000s, according to federal employment records, NIH, the country’s premier biomedical research agency, has usually had just a few political appointees within its workforce. (As of November 2025, that workforce numbered around 17,500 people, after significant cuts.) Staff scientists and external experts played a key role in selecting the directors of the 27 institutes and centers that make up NIH. That left the selection of people for powerful positions largely outside of direct White House oversight.

What is the future of that status quo under the Trump administration?

Those questions have recently swirled at NIH. The arrival of political appointees in the kinds of positions previously held by civil servants, and apparent changes to hiring practices for other key positions, have raised concerns among current and former officials about a new era of politicization.

For decades, NIH has enjoyed strong bipartisan support. But conservative lawmakers have periodically raised questions about some of the agency’s spending, and according to one 2014 survey, the agency is perceived by federal executives as being a progressive place. (Since the early 2000s, some data suggests, US scientists as a whole have grown considerably more liberal relative to the general population.)

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many conservatives have criticized NIH for funding the kind of controversial virology experiments that some experts believe may have started the pandemic, and for promoting public health strategies that many on the right viewed as unscientific and authoritarian. One of the NIH institute directors, Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 until his retirement in 2022, came to be a highly polarizing figure, described on the right as an unelected official wielding considerable power.

Over the years, some biomedical researchers have argued for changes to the way NIH hires and retains people in leadership positions. In 2019, the agency announced plans to impose term limits on some midlevel roles, in a bid to diversify its management. More recently, Johns Hopkins University physician and researcher Joseph Marine argued in an essay for The Free Press that NIH should set five to 10-year term limits on the directors of individual NIH institutes. “Regular turnover of leadership,” he wrote, “brings fresh ideas and a healthy reassessment of priorities.”

Shortly after winning the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump tapped Jay Bhattacharya, a prominent critic of NIH, to lead the agency. It may not be entirely surprising that an administration advocating for reforms to NIH would seek to flip key management positions that often experience little turnover.

Former official Mike Lauer, who until early 2025 oversaw NIH’s vast external grants program, said there were signs before Trump’s second inauguration that institute directors might be subject to fresh political scrutiny.

“There was a frustration that so much of the agency’s direction, as well as financial decision-making, was being made by people who are outside of the political sphere,” Lauer told Undark. He pointed to a line in Project 2025, a proposed roadmap for the Trump administration that was produced by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “Funding for scientific research,” the report argues, “should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades.”

Soon after Trump’s inauguration, some senior officials at NIH were put on administrative leave or abruptly departed, including Lawrence Tabak, who had spent more than a decade as principal deputy director and served as NIH’s interim leader for almost two years during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the same time, the administration grew the number of political appointees at NIH. As of late June, according to federal records, the Trump administration had placed nine political appointees at the agency, up from four the year before—itself higher than in most previous years. One of them, Seana Cranston, is a former Republican Congressional staffer who serves as chief of staff to the NIH Director; her predecessor was a career civil servant who had spent nearly 40 years in the NIH, the last four as chief of staff. Another is Michael Allen, who took the role of chief operating officer for the $6.5 billion NIAID, Fauci’s former institute. (Allen was appointed with no official announcement, and appears to have no official biography or background information posted on NIH websites.)

Those numbers still left NIH with fewer political appointees than many other agencies, including NASA, a comparably sized science agency.

The administration has departed from the traditional process for hiring NIH’s 27 institute and center directors, who are responsible for overseeing most of the funding decisions and day-to-day operations of NIH.

In the spring of 2025, five of those directors—including the head of NIAID—were fired or placed on administrative leave. (They have all since been removed from their positions.)

Then, in September, part of the search committee for the National Institute of Mental Health was abruptly disbanded, and then just as suddenly reconvened, according to Joshua Gordon, the former head of that institute, and one other source close to NIH.

In October, the directorship of another agency, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, was filled by a close personal friend of Vice President JD Vance, without any apparent search process — a move that multiple former NIH officials told Undark may be unprecedented.

By then, 13 other NIH institutes and centers had vacant leadership posts. Other roles have opened up more recently: In an email to NIH staff on Dec. 30, Bhattacharya announced the departure of Walter Koroshetz, leader of the agency’s main neuroscience research institute. In the email, Bhattacharya seemed to suggest he had opposed the decision: “Dr. Koroshetz’s performance as Director has been exceptional,” Bhattacharya wrote, but “the Department of Health and Human Services has elected to pursue a leadership transition.”

In early January, the Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute announced his retirement, bringing the total number of open posts to 15.

The searches, NIH insiders say, appear to be happening on a compressed timeline. And while the NIH director has typically relied on search committees consisting of both NIH career scientists and external experts, multiple sources close to NIH say the agency has not formed those kinds of committees to make the latest round of hires.

In response to questions from Undark in early January, the Department of Health and Human Services sent a brief emailed statement, signed “NIH Press Team,” explaining that “an NIH leadership team with experience in scientific agency management will consider the applicant pool and make recommendations to the NIH Director.” The press representative declined to respond to follow-up questions about who would be on that team, or why the hiring process had changed.

Those changes have prompted speculation among some NIH insiders that the Trump administration is seeking to exert more political control over the hiring of directorships.

“Having external members on the search committee is vitally important for preventing politicization,” said Mark Histed, an NIH scientist who has recently been a critic — on his personal time, he stresses — of Trump’s approach to the agency. “Because, as you can imagine, if you’ve got a bunch of external scientists, it’s a lot harder to ram down what the White House wants, because people are not part of the political system.”

That kind of open and non-politicized search process, Histed said in a follow-up interview, isn’t unique to NIH: It’s one widely used by scientific institutions around the world. And it has worked, he argued, to help make NIH a scientific juggernaut: “That process,” he said, “led to 80 years of staggering scientific success.”

Members of Congress have taken notice. In language attached to the current appropriations bill moving through Congress, lawmakers direct NIH “to maintain its longstanding practice of including external scientists and stakeholders” in the search process. (Agencies are supposed to follow these Congressional instructions, but they are not binding.) In late January, Diana DeGette, a Democratic representative from Colorado, sponsored a bill that, according to a press release, would “Protect NIH From Political Interference” by, among other steps, capping the number of political appointees at the agency.

Lauer, the former NIH grants chief, took a broader historical view of the changes. There has long been a tug-of-war, he said, between presidential administrations that seek more political control over an agency, and civil servants and other bureaucratic experts who may resist that perceived incursion. From the point of view of politicians and their staff, Lauer said, “what they’ll say—I understand where they’re coming from—what they’ll say is, is that more political control means that the agency is going to be responsive to the will of the electorate, that there’s a greater degree of transparency and public accountability.”

Those upsides can be significant, Lauer said, but there are also downsides, including more short-term thinking, unstable budgets, and the potential loss of expertise and competence.

Mark Richardson, a political scientist at Georgetown University, is an expert on politicization and the federal bureaucracy. In his work, he said, he has observed a correlation between how much political parties disagree over the role of a specific agency, and the degree to which presidential administrations seek to exert control there through appointees and other personnel choices. NIH has historically fallen alongside agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that are subject to broad alignment across the parties.

“I think what you’re seeing more with the Trump administration is kind of an expansion of political conflict to these types of agencies,” Richardson said.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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A cup of coffee for depression treatment has better results than microdosing

depression, health, LSD, Mental Health, microdosing, syndication / DJ Henderson / January 31, 2026

The effect of microdosing have been overstated, at least when it comes to depression.

About a decade ago, many media outlets—including WIRED—zeroed in on a weird trend at the intersection of mental health, drug science, and Silicon Valley biohacking: microdosing, or the practice of taking a small amount of a psychedelic drug seeking not full-blown hallucinatory revels but gentler, more stable effects. Typically using psilocybin mushrooms or LSD, the archetypal microdoser sought less melting walls and open-eye kaleidoscopic visuals than boosts in mood and energy, like a gentle spring breeze blowing through the mind.

Anecdotal reports pitched microdosing as a kind of psychedelic Swiss Army knife, providing everything from increased focus to a spiked libido and (perhaps most promisingly) lowered reported levels of depression. It was a miracle for many. Others remained wary. Could 5 percent of a dose of acid really do all that? A new, wide-ranging study by an Australian biopharma company suggests that microdosing’s benefits may indeed be drastically overstated—at least when it comes to addressing symptoms of clinical depression.

A Phase 2B trial of 89 adult patients conducted by Melbourne-based MindBio Therapeutics, investigating the effects of microdosing LSD in the treatment of major depressive disorder, found that the psychedelic was actually outperformed by a placebo. Across an eight-week period, symptoms were gauged using the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), a widely recognized tool for the clinical evaluation of depression.

The study has not yet been published. But MindBio’s CEO Justin Hanka recently released the top-line results on his LinkedIn, eager to show that his company was “in front of the curve in microdosing research.” He called it “the most vigorous placebo controlled trial ever performed in microdosing.” It found that patients dosed with a small amount of LSD (ranging from 4 to 20μg, or micrograms, well below the threshold of a mind-blowing hallucinogenic dose) showed observable upticks in feelings of well-being, but worse MADRS scores, compared to patients given a placebo in the form of a caffeine pill. (Because patients in psychedelic trials typically expect some kind of mind-altering effect, studies are often blinded using so-called “active placebos,” like caffeine or methylphenidate, which have their own observable psychoactive properties.)

This means, essentially, that a medium-strength cup of coffee may prove more beneficial in treating major depressive disorder than a tiny dose of acid. Good news for habitual caffeine users, perhaps, but less so for researchers (and biopharma startups) counting on the efficacy of psychedelic microdosing.

“It’s probably a nail in the coffin of using microdosing to treat clinical depression,” Hanka says. “It probably improves the way depressed people feel—just not enough to be clinically significant or statistically meaningful.”

However despairing, these results conform with the suspicions of some more skeptical researchers, who have long believed that the benefits of microdosing are less the result of a teeny-tiny psychedelic catalyst, and more attributable to the so-called “placebo effect.”

In 2020, Jay A. Olson, then a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, conducted an experiment. He gave 33 participants a placebo, telling them it was actually a dose of a psilocybin-like drug. They were led to believe there was no placebo group. Other researchers who were in on the bit acted out the effects of the drug, in a room treated with trippy lighting and other visual stimulants, in an attempt to curate the “optimized expectation” of a psychedelic experience.

The resulting paper, titled “Tripping on Nothing,” found that a majority of participants had reported feeling the effects of the drug—despite there being no real drug whatsoever. “The main conclusion we had is that the placebo effect can be stronger than expected in psychedelic studies,” Olson, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, tells WIRED. “Placebo effects were stronger than what you would get from microdosing.”

More than a stick in the eye to the microdosing faithful, Olson maintains that the study’s key findings had more to do with the actual role, and power, of the placebo effect. “The public has a lot of misconceptions about the placebo effect,” he says. “There’s this assumption that placebo effects are extremely weak, or that they’re not real.”

Olson goes on to say that placebo effects in psychedelic trials can be further juiced by the hype around the drugs themselves. Patients may enter a trial expecting a certain experience, and their mind is able to conjure a version of that experience, in turn. In Olson’s study, it wasn’t a matter of microdosing effects not being real, but that those effects may be caused by environment, or patient expectation. As he puts it: “It can be true at the same time that microdosing can have positive effects on people, and that those effects are perhaps almost entirely placebo.”

This itself raises a sticky question about MindBio’s study. How could a placebo group, who thinks they’re taking LSD, perform better than an active control group, members of which both think they’re taking LSD and are actually taking it? The answer comes from the design of the study itself.

Using what’s called a “double-dummy” design, MindBio’s researchers informed patients that they’d either be receiving LSD, a caffeine pill, or a dose of methylphenidate, better known as Ritalin or Concerta. (No patients were actually administered the methylphenidate.) This means that patient expectation was lowered, as they could ascribe any perceived effects to either the LSD or either of the active placebos. Patients taking LSD microdoses may well have believed they were merely on a stimulant. All patients followed an adaptation of the “Fadiman protocol,” a popular microdosing programme that sees patients taking a small dose of the given drug once every three days.

Jim Fadiman, the veteran psychedelic researcher after whom the protocol is named, rejects MindBio’s conclusions, and trial design, out of hand. Because, Fadiman believes, patients were given the active caffeine placebo, their reported benefits may well be attributable not to a pure placebo effect, but to the actual psychoactive properties of that drug.

“Double-dummy is a remarkably apt term,” Fadiman, 86, sneers. “What I know is that if you take enough caffeine, you will not be depressed!”

Fadiman points to MindBio’s earlier, Phase 2A study, recently published in the journal Neuropharmacology, which drew markedly different conclusions. It was a non-blinded, so-called “open label” study, meaning patients knew definitely that they were being microdosed with LSD. This study found that MADRS scores decreased by 59.5 percent, with effects lasting as long as six months. It also found improvements in stress, rumination, anxiety, and patient quality of life. Fadiman says that this reportage is more consistent with his own research on microdosing. “Their prior study did wonderfully with LSD,” Fadiman says. “I have collected literally hundreds of real world reports over the years that validate those findings.”

MindBio’s Hanka stands by the science. “We are bewildered at the significant difference between the open label Phase 2A trial results and the Phase 2B trial results,” he says. “But that is the nature of good science—a properly controlled trial will get a proper result. Our Phase 2B trial was of the highest standard, a triple-blind, double-dummy, active placebo controlled trial. I haven’t seen another psychedelic trial that has gone to these lengths to control and blind a trial.”

Despite these findings, some microdosing true believers don’t seem especially shaken. In 2017, writer Ayelet Waldman (best known as the author of the Mommy-Track Mysteries series of novels that follow the adventures of stay-at-home-mom-cum-sleuth Juliet Applebaum) published A Really Good Day, a diaristic account of her own self-experiments using microdosing to treat an intractable mood disorder. She tells WIRED she’s not especially bothered by the implication that her positive shifts in mood may have merely been placebo. “In my book I took very seriously the possibility that what I was experiencing was the mother of all placebo effects,” Waldman says. “I wrote about this a number of times in various chapters and decided in the end it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I felt better.”

Perhaps that’s true enough. If the effects are measurable, and repeatable, then it should hardly matter if they’re attributable to a sub-perceptual dose of lysergic acid, or to the (perhaps equally profound) mysteries of the placebo. Still, one cannot help but wonder why anyone looking to use LSD to aid severe clinical depression would bother assuming the legal risk of procuring and consuming a drug still classified under Schedule I by the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

Certainly, for his part, Justin Hanka seems content to pivot MindBio’s research into a new field. His next project is “Booze A.I.”: a smartphone app that uses artificial intelligence to scan the human voice for relevant biomarkers that determine blood alcohol concentration. He’s leaving microdosing in the rearview. “I put millions of dollars into this myself,” he says. “Had I known six years ago what I know about psychedelics, I probably wouldn’t have ventured into the microdosing field.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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Web portal leaves kids’ chats with AI toy open to anyone with Gmail account

AI, Bondu, eavesdropping, Security, syndication, Toys / Shannon Garcia / January 30, 2026

Just about anyone with a Gmail account could access Bondu chat transcripts.

Earlier this month, Joseph Thacker’s neighbor mentioned to him that she’d preordered a couple of stuffed dinosaur toys for her children. She’d chosen the toys, called Bondus, because they offered an AI chat feature that lets children talk to the toy like a kind of machine-learning-enabled imaginary friend. But she knew Thacker, a security researcher, had done work on AI risks for kids, and she was curious about his thoughts.

So Thacker looked into it. With just a few minutes of work, he and a web security researcher friend named Joel Margolis made a startling discovery: Bondu’s web-based portal, intended to allow parents to check on their children’s conversations and for Bondu’s staff to monitor the products’ use and performance, also let anyone with a Gmail account access transcripts of virtually every conversation Bondu’s child users have ever had with the toy.

Without carrying out any actual hacking, simply by logging in with an arbitrary Google account, the two researchers immediately found themselves looking at children’s private conversations, the pet names kids had given their Bondu, the likes and dislikes of the toys’ toddler owners, their favorite snacks and dance moves.

In total, Margolis and Thacker discovered that the data Bondu left unprotected—accessible to anyone who logged in to the company’s public-facing web console with their Google username—included children’s names, birth dates, family member names, “objectives” for the child chosen by a parent, and most disturbingly, detailed summaries and transcripts of every previous chat between the child and their Bondu, a toy practically designed to elicit intimate one-on-one conversation. Bondu confirmed in conversations with the researchers that more than 50,000 chat transcripts were accessible through the exposed web portal, essentially all conversations the toys had engaged in other than those that had been manually deleted by parents or staff.

“It felt pretty intrusive and really weird to know these things,” Thacker says of the children’s private chats and documented preferences that he saw. “Being able to see all these conversations was a massive violation of children’s privacy.”

When Thacker and Margolis alerted Bondu to its glaring data exposure, they say, the company acted to take down the console in a matter of minutes before relaunching the portal the next day with proper authentication measures. When WIRED reached out to the company, Bondu CEO Fateen Anam Rafid wrote in a statement that security fixes for the problem “were completed within hours, followed by a broader security review and the implementation of additional preventative measures for all users.” He added that Bondu “found no evidence of access beyond the researchers involved.” (The researchers note that they didn’t download or keep any copies of the sensitive data they accessed via Bondu’s console, other than a few screenshots and a screen-recording video shared with WIRED to confirm their findings.)

“We take user privacy seriously and are committed to protecting user data,” Anam Rafid added in his statement. “We have communicated with all active users about our security protocols and continue to strengthen our systems with new protections,” as well as hiring a security firm to validate its investigation and monitor its systems in the future.

While Bondu’s near-total lack of security around the children’s data that it stored may be fixed, the researchers argue that what they saw represents a larger warning about the dangers of AI-enabled chat toys for kids. Their glimpse of Bondu’s backend showed how detailed the information is that it stored on children, keeping histories of every chat to better inform the toy’s next conversation with its owner. (Bondu thankfully didn’t store audio of those conversations, auto-deleting them after a short time and keeping only written transcripts.)

Even now that the data is secured, Margolis and Thacker argue that it raises questions about how many people inside companies that make AI toys have access to the data they collect, how their access is monitored, and how well their credentials are protected. “There are cascading privacy implications from this,” says Margolis. ”All it takes is one employee to have a bad password, and then we’re back to the same place we started, where it’s all exposed to the public internet.”

Margolis adds that this sort of sensitive information about a child’s thoughts and feelings could be used for horrific forms of child abuse or manipulation. “To be blunt, this is a kidnapper’s dream,” he says. “We’re talking about information that lets someone lure a child into a really dangerous situation, and it was essentially accessible to anybody.”

Margolis and Thacker point out that, beyond its accidental data exposure, Bondu also—based on what they saw inside its admin console—appears to use Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT5, and as a result may share information about kids’ conversations with those companies. Bondu’s Anam Rafid responded to that point in an email, stating that the company does use “third-party enterprise AI services to generate responses and run certain safety checks, which involves securely transmitting relevant conversation content for processing.” But he adds that the company takes precautions to “minimize what’s sent, use contractual and technical controls, and operate under enterprise configurations where providers state prompts/outputs aren’t used to train their models.”

The two researchers also warn that part of the risk of AI toy companies may be that they’re more likely to use AI in the coding of their products, tools, and web infrastructure. They say they suspect that the unsecured Bondu console they discovered was itself “vibe-coded”—created with generative AI programming tools that often lead to security flaws. Bondu didn’t respond to WIRED’s question about whether the console was programmed with AI tools.

Warnings about the risks of AI toys for kids have grown in recent months but have largely focused on the threat that a toy’s conversations will raise inappropriate topics or even lead them to dangerous behavior or self-harm. NBC News, for instance, reported in December that AI toys its reporters chatted with offered detailed explanations of sexual terms, tips about how to sharpen knives, and even seemed to echo Chinese government propaganda, stating for example that Taiwan is a part of China.

Bondu, by contrast, appears to have at least attempted to build safeguards into the AI chatbot it gives children access to. The company even offers a $500 bounty for reports of “an inappropriate response” from the toy. “We’ve had this program for over a year, and no one has been able to make it say anything inappropriate,” a line on the company’s website reads.

Yet at the same time, Thacker and Margolis found that Bondu was simultaneously leaving all of its users’ sensitive data entirely exposed. “This is a perfect conflation of safety with security,” says Thacker. “Does ‘AI safety’ even matter when all the data is exposed?”

Thacker says that prior to looking into Bondu’s security, he’d considered giving AI-enabled toys to his own kids, just as his neighbor had. Seeing Bondu’s data exposure firsthand changed his mind.

“Do I really want this in my house? No, I don’t,” he says. “It’s kind of just a privacy nightmare.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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EU launches formal investigation of xAI over Grok’s sexualized deepfakes

AI, Policy, syndication, xAI Grok / DJ Henderson / January 26, 2026

The European probe comes after UK media regulator Ofcom opened a formal investigation into Grok, while Malaysia and Indonesia have banned the chatbot altogether.

Following the backlash, xAI restricted the use of Grok to paying subscribers and said it has “implemented technological measures” to limit Grok from generating certain sexualized images.

Musk has also said “anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”

An EU official said that “with the harm that is exposed to individuals that are subject to these images, we have not been convinced so far by what mitigating measures the platform has taken to have that under control.”

The company, which acquired Musk’s social media site X last year, has designed its AI products to have fewer content “guardrails” than competitors such as OpenAI and Google. Musk called its Grok model “maximally truth-seeking.”

The commission fined X €120 million in December last year for breaching its regulations for transparency, providing insufficient access to data and the deceptive design of its blue ticks for verified accounts.

The fine was criticized by Musk and the US government, with the Trump administration claiming the EU was unfairly targeting American groups and infringing freedom of speech principles championed by the Maga movement.

X did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

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