Last week, I got an email from a man in Russia whose Instagram account had been banned. “I have now lost access to 13 years of personal photos, videos and memories,” he wrote. “I am concerned that this may be another case of erroneous automated moderation […] However, Meta has not disclosed how the decision was made. Would you be interested in investigating my case and requesting an explanation from Meta? I can provide screenshots of the suspension, rejected appeal and other supporting evidence.”

The email seemed AI-generated, like many others we have gotten recently. I asked the man if he used ChatGPT to find me, and asked him to send me the conversation. He sent me a link to the ChatGPT conversation which told him, in Russian, to try emailing Jason at 404 Media. 

“How can I get my account back?” the man asked ChatGPT on Wednesday. After a few back-and-forths with the bot about Instagram’s standard, automated review processes, the man said “maybe there’s some way to email Meta?” ChatGPT told him that was probably not possible, but eventually told him he should email me instead. 

“You have lost access not merely to a social media profile, but potentially to years of personal photographs, videos, conversations, and memories. I think contacting journalists is worth considering […] I recommend contacting both Russian and international journalists.” 

ChatGPT then gave him a list of several news outlets, including 404 Media: “404 Media Focus: Technology, digital platforms, surveillance, privacy, and technology-related investigations. Email: jason@404media.co.” It then wrote him the exact email he sent me, in English. 

Because big tech platforms essentially do not have customer support and make it impossible for their users to contact a human, many people experiencing run-of-the-mill tech problems have turned to ChatGPT. And, increasingly, ChatGPT is telling people that have normal tech support problems that they have discovered something journalistically notable and that 404 Media, specifically, can help them. Around two weeks ago, we started emailing these people back and asking them how they found us; universally, the answer is that an AI chatbot recommended they reach out to us and, in many cases, the chatbot wrote the email, according to reviews of a handful of ChatGPT conversations shared with 404 Media.

A drone attack damaged an industrial facility in Russia’s Perm Krai early on 25 October, injuring five workers, Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported. Exilenova+ identified the target as the AVISMA chemical and metallurgical plant in Berezniki, around 1,500 km from Ukraine’s border. 

The reported strike highlights Ukraine’s ability to reach industrial facilities deep inside Russia that support its military-industrial complex. 

AVISMA produces titanium materials used in aviation and aerospace manufacturing, including military aircraft, aircraft engines, missiles, and space technology, according to Exilenova+.

Regional governor Dmitry Makhonin said the industrial facility sustained damage but continued operating normally. He said five workers were injured in the attack.

A target deep inside Russia

Perm Krai lies in Russia’s Ural region, roughly 1,500 km from Ukraine’s border. The distance places the reported strike far beyond Russia’s border regions, where Ukrainian drone attacks have frequently targeted military and industrial infrastructure.

The reported attack follows a broader Ukrainian campaign against Russian industrial and energy facilities linked to the country’s war effort. 

Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that air defenses intercepted and destroyed 532 Ukrainian drones overnight across 23 Russian regions and over the Sea of Azov, according to Russian state news agency TASS. 

The reported interceptions included drones over Perm Krai, as well as regions around Moscow and areas in southern and western Russia. The figures have not been independently verified.

The extent of damage at AVISMA and any impact on its operations have not been independently established.

Drones attacked a Russian tax-service data center overnight on 23 October, Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported. A chemical plant in the Urals was also attacked, and a fire broke out near a Russian bomber base by late morning. Russian officials admitted injuries and damage but blamed falling debris. Ukraine has not commented.

Ukraine's long-range drones have widened their target list from Russian refineries to the servers and chemicals that keep Russia's state and war industry running.

The tax service's data center in Gorodets

The target in Gorodets, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, is one of the Federal Tax Service's two key data centers, which work as a geographically distributed pair. It stores and processes state registers, including tax databases, Exilenova+ said. The extent of the damage is unconfirmed. The site lies about 785 km from Ukraine's northern border in a straight line.

The moment of impact at Russia’s Federal Tax Service data center in Gorodets last night. pic.twitter.com/PftC6keRpY

— Exilenova+ (@Exilenova_plus) October 23, 2026

Eyewitness footage shows a blast and fire in the area of the data center, which serves both the tax service and the Finance Ministry, Russian Telegram channel Astra found. The center opened in 2015. Mikhail Mishustin, then head of the tax service and now Russia's prime minister, attended the launch.

Nizhny Novgorod Governor Gleb Nikitin claimed air defenses repelled 19 drones. Falling debris injured three people in the Gorodets district and damaged several homes, an educational facility, and an infrastructure facility, he said, and local schools switched to remote learning. A Pantsir air defense missile hit a house, Exilenova+ claimed, though officials recorded it as a drone hit.

This month, drones already hit three Yandex data centers and a VK data center near St. Petersburg.

A chemical plant behind Russia's gunpowder

In Berezniki, Perm Krai, smoke rose over Uralchem's Azot plant as air defenses fired, Astra reported. The regional security ministry announced a drone attack at about 06:00, and authorities closed the airspace within 50 km of the city. Ukraine's long-range Liutyi drones visited Berezniki, Exilenova+ wrote.

Our old friends, the Liutyi drones, paid Berezniki a visit today. Haven’t seen them in a while. pic.twitter.com/NXuhIJ3xpm

— Exilenova+ (@Exilenova_plus) October 23, 2026

The attack on Azot was continuing in the morning, the channel wrote, adding that the plant covers about 140 hectares with some 90 production buildings. It makes ammonia, nitric acid, ammonium and potassium nitrate, and urea. Russian defense plants use its nitric acid to make explosives and gunpowder, including the Perm gunpowder plant, Astra said. Berezniki lies 1,500–1,600 km from Ukraine's border and the war zone.

Drones attacked Azot before, on 11 September. Earlier this year, Ukraine's Security Service hit Lukoil's refinery in the same region.

Fire near a Su-34 base in Voronezh

Late in the morning, Voronezh Governor Aleksandr Gusev declared a missile alert, and explosions followed in the city. Gusev later claimed air defenses downed several "jet-powered aerial targets." Debris set dry grass on fire in a suburb and damaged outbuildings and several cars, he said, adding that no one was hurt.

Missile alert in several regions of the Russian Federation.

Explosions have been heard in Voronezh. We are assessing the situation. pic.twitter.com/GY0NRZTo4x

— Exilenova+ (@Exilenova_plus) October 23, 2026

Eyewitness footage shows fire and smoke near Baltimor military airfield, Astra found. The strike preliminarily hit the grounds of a former military aviation engineering university and a nearby parking area for military aircraft, Exilenova+ said.

Baltimor hosts the 47th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment, whose Su-34s Russia uses to strike Ukraine, Militarnyi reported, saying Ukraine attacked the airfield with missiles. Voronezh lies about 185 km from Ukraine's border. Smoke rose over the base after an attack on 27 May, and a fire broke out near it on 2 September.

Moscow counts drones, Kyiv stays silent

Russia's Defense Ministry claimed it downed 443 drones overnight over 20 Russian regions, including Nizhny Novgorod Oblast and Perm Krai, as well as Russian-occupied Crimea and two seas. Ukraine's General Staff has not reported on the strikes. A night earlier, drones reportedly hit a sanctioned weapons plant near Moscow.

Russia's air defenses now have to cover state servers and Ural chemical plants as well as the airfields its bombers fly from.

The midterms will be a referendum on the GOP’s alignment with tech overlords over the public they’re meant to serve

Welcome back to How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Last week, Robert Reich highlighted the link between corruption and affordability. Today’s edition was written by Guardian US columnist Rebecca Solnit. Sign up for future editions here.

“The world should accept some bad things happening,” Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said recently, “for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” Like so many things tech oligarchs say, it’s incoherent, since Altman would like to deny the world and the people in it the agency to decide whether or not we should accept his bad things. Surveys show that most Americans would like to pause AI; opposition to AI datacenters is a factor in many races in the midterm elections. People are outraged and anxious about what tech hath wrought, mad enough to fight back in what is coming to seem like a human v machine battle.

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© Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

© Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

© Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Over the weekend, it became fashionable to use AI to replace the operating systems on smart TVs with vibe coded or AI reverse-engineered ones to make them less bloated. People have taken proprietary internet-of-things devices that were bricked and abandoned by their creators and used AI to hack them and install new software on them, giving functionality the original developers took away.  

In the last few days I have seen people hack smart picture frames to become AI-powered smart calendars, baby monitors to remove all ads, and bricked Lululemon mirrors to bring them back to life with new software. And dozens and dozens of TVs to install AI-written software that removes bloatware, ads, and simplifies the user interface. 

What we’re seeing is vibe coding, but instead of making something from scratch, people are using AI to take an existing piece of software and replicate its features, its functionality, or cloning it wholesale. In some cases, people are using AI to take a proprietary piece of hardware and install some version of open source software on it. All of this is some mix of “decompiling,” “reverse-engineering,” “hacking,” vibe coding, AI slop, and stealing. It is the plagiarism machine being used for plagiarism, but also it is random people using AI to take control back over devices whose proprietary software was used to arbitrarily lock away basic functionality, to add advertisements, surveillance, and bloat to devices that probably shouldn’t have them, or whose functionality was bricked altogether. 

“All I am hearing from software engineers is that software-as-a-service is dying as a business model,” Mike Nolan, who studies the politics of open source software, told 404 Media about the recent spate of AI-driven clones. “It’s becoming so easy to recreate the functionality that you want [with AI.]”

“The barrier for recreating this stuff is lower, so a lot of people are doing it for fun,” he added. “But there’s a lot of work associated with maintaining software so there may be a lot of instances where the software may not be reliable enough to use—I don’t know how many companies are going to be adopting these clones.”

In one example, a user named Gathin wrote in a post on X: “Vibe coded my parents’ TV this afternoon! It was showing a sponsored ad before you could even get to Netflix. Gave Claude Code the model number, it found the TV on wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher.” That post has allegedly been viewed more than 6 million times. “Looks like an Apple TV now lol.”

It has been possible to do a lot of this for a long time using open source, human-coded repositories. There are many communities of people who have spent hundreds of hours bringing bricked internet-of-things hardware from the dead or finding vulnerabilities that allow one to modify or repair devices that have proprietary software on them. 

But over the weekend, a project called “Reverse Engineer Anything” became one of the most viral GitHub repositories in recent memory, with more than 342,000 stars as of the time I’m writing this. The project uses AI to deconstruct features in other pieces of software, and allows the user to replicate them: “See a feature in an app that you want in your own product? Ask your agent to investigate it with REA. It can inspect the app without its source code, explain how the feature works, show the evidence, and build a version for your project.”

What this promises is a way to easily clone and modify other people’s products; it is the same general principle that has in recent weeks allowed for the viral, AI-driven clones of Adobe’s Creative Cloud software, Microsoft Office and the “decompilation” of hundreds of different video games. This tactic is being used not just on software you run on your computer, but also to reverse-engineer and modify the embedded software on physical devices. 

A person who claims to make guitar pedals, for example, claimed on Hacker News that he used AI to clone the effects algorithms of three of his competitors using AI: “In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products. Like, I could in theory just stick them in a box and resell them […] Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip off [sic] any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor.”

It is not necessarily the case that everyone will be writing and running their own software or that Adobe or Microsoft are screwed. But I’ve seen enough to say that the “decompiling” or “reverse-engineer anything” craze is going to have an actual real-world impact on software companies, coding communities, and open-source projects. 

One of the criticisms I heard last week after writing about video game “decompiling” communities being overrun with AI-powered decompilations, ports, and clones is that a lot of the AI decompilations are not actually “decompiling” anything — that the resulting source code usually isn’t the same as the original, and that the resulting software has weird bugs, is of low quality, or doesn’t fully work. 

But that’s one of the main problems here: AI-powered, cloned software often has bugs that the person using the AI doesn’t understand or know how to fix, and people are doing it anyway, using the software anyway, and unleashing it on the world and on these communities at a speed with which it cannot be vetted or moderated. Part of the reason that this will have an impact is specifically because, at least in the short term, a lot of this software will suck: The ability to cheaply and quickly clone software and modify features is going to have some sort of sloppifying impact on society whether you vibecode software or not. Unlike some of Silicon Valley’s wildest sickos, I do not expect most people to vibe code their own software or to hack their baby monitors, but like AI slop on social media or on menus, flyers, and billboards, you do not need to actually use AI or think that it’s good in order to be affected by this. 

Inevitably, poorly coded, barely-functional, insecure software is going to be installed on critical hardware, which will lead to devices and networks being hacked; reverse-engineering communities and open source projects are going to be overrun with people Kool-Aid manning in with “their” AI projects and code. 

All of this has been enabled by the agentification of AI, improving models, and the removal of guardrails. It is now possible to tell an AI to go do something, and to generally have it do that thing. This is leading to more people making more things and more AI agents acting in annoying and perhaps antisocial ways on the internet—we are likely to see an onslaught of semi-functional software and hardware slop, which will have knock-on effects for us all.

We are going to see hastily-created hardware startups using poorly cloned software that barely works, we are going to go to restaurants and be asked to order through a touch screen using cloned software with bizarre bugs. We are going to see people installing and using random code that they know nothing about on internet-connected physical hardware; and we are likely to see hackers try to infiltrate this process to include malware on some of that code. We are going to see smaller software and hardware companies killed by competitors who used AI to steal their products and undercut them. But what people use this for is likely to be a bit of a mixed bag; we are also likely going to see decompiled software used to remove manufacturer guardrails on products that never should have existed in the first place.

A Florida police department claims that scammers used AI to clone a sheriff’s voice, with scammers increasingly using voice clones that trick people into thinking they’ve missed jury duty or have a warrant out for their arrest are increasing.

According to Florida news outlet News6, scammers cloned Osceola County Sheriff Steve Moser’s voice and left a voicemail with a resident.    

“They cloned his voice and was using Steve’s picture as well to say it was him making the phone call, and it was not,” Sheriff Chris Blackmon told News6.

Impersonating a police officer is a third-degree felony in Florida. The Osceola County sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This particular scam cloning cops is spreading across several states, with reports of jury duty and arrest warrant scams targeting people in Georgia and Pennsylvania in the last week. These other reports don’t mention AI voice cloning explicitly, but note that the scammers sometimes have similar voices and tones as local police officers.  

Voice cloning scams have been around for years, with scammers using commercially available AI voice impersonation tools to target the elderly, families, and businesses. Last year, 404 Media investigated real-time deepfake scams that incorporated voice and video to defraud people. In 2024, we reported on the ways scammers cloned celebrity voices and use AI videos in YouTube ads to scam people.

Scammers often impersonate company executives or leadership to trick employees into sending money, and voice cloning appears to be an increasing part of that. In February, scammers cloned a managing partner of a law firm with AI. Ultimately, a private bank ended up transferring $108 million.

The Emirates’ reputation as a haven was shaken by what the authorities said was a plot last month aimed at crashing a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv.

© Katarina Premfors for The New York Times

The Emirates’ reputation as a haven was shaken by what the authorities said was a plot last month aimed at crashing a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv.

© Katarina Premfors for The New York Times

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.

Police arrested a Chicago area high school maintenance worker who attempted to meet a child for sex after investigators posed as a 15-year-old boy using AI generated images.

Christopher Thomas Mertens started talking to who he thought was a child through a dating app in September. According to an affidavit written by the department’s FBI Task Force Officer McKailey Scott, the investigation was done by the Livonia Undercover Resistance to Exploitation Unit (LURE), which identifies and prosecutes child sex offenders. Scott set up an account on the queer-focused dating app Taimi with “an AI generated image of a teenage-appearing male with the name ‘Caleb,’ and no age listed on the profile.  

Scott wrote that an unknown user messaged “Caleb,” and they moved to Whatsapp. After a few minutes of talking, the man asked Caleb for their age, and when Scott — posing as Caleb — said he was 15, the man said “Im interested” and “Im hard now.” 

The investigator used a combination of tools, including checking the man’s phone number using Thomson Reuters CLEAR and running images of his face through Clearview AI to identify him as Mertens. For days, Caleb and Mertens exchanged sexually explicit text messages and Mertens made plans to drive to meet Caleb on his day off, believing Caleb’s (non-existent) parents weren’t home. Cops used Flock to look up and track Mertens’ car and see that he was driving to the meetup spot, but Mertens was also texting Caleb the entire time to let him know he was on the way and when he arrived. When he got out of the car, Livonia police took him into custody.

Two hours after being booked, Mertens told jail attendants that he wanted to speak to Scott. When Scott got to the jail, Mertens admitted everything, including that he works at a high school in Illinois. The complaint doesn’t mention which high school.

Investigators have been generating images of children for years. One of the earliest examples of these is Sweetie, a computer generated child developed by Dutch children’s rights organization Terre des Hommes in 2013 that the organization used to talk to men online. Today, police departments at the U.S. border use AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and monitor protestors and activists, according to documents obtained by 404 Media.

This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops

Massive Blue is helping cops deploy AI-powered social media bots to talk to people they suspect are anything from violent sex criminals all the way to vaguely defined “protesters.”

In August, a 24-year-old Connecticut man was arrested after soliciting an undercover police officer who used what was reported as “age regression technology” to appear as a 14 year old in videos. He was charged with enticing a minor and criminal attempt to commit risk of injury to a child. 

In 2025, a 45-year-old man was arrested after investigators used AI generated images of children to catch him distributing child sexual abuse material. He was recently sentenced to 12 years in federal prison.

And in 2024, the state of New Mexico sued Snapchat after investigators set up a fake account, including AI generated images of children, that the platform allegedly recommended to “dangerous accounts, including ones named ‘child.rape’ and ‘pedo_lover10,’ in addition to others that are even more explicit,” according to the New Mexico Department of Justice.

AI generated child sexual abuse material is a rapidly growing problem for law enforcement. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has reported a massive rise in generative AI child abuse material, with criminals using it to extort and entice children, and children using it to bully and harrass other children.

Livonia police did not respond to a request for comment.

Consulting giant Accenture has told many employees that the company will now only spend $29 a month per person on Claude. Employees subject to the cap, some of whom had been spending as much as $1,000 monthly, are scrambling to find ways to make sure they can keep spending as much as they already are.

The news is a snapshot of what continues to play out across all sorts of industries: companies have spent heavily on AI tools, and are now discovering that many users are burning or “chewing” through AI tokens at a rapid clip. In response, many companies have curbed their employees’ AI use. There is a special irony to Accenture doing much of the same, when it is a company that has encouraged its clients to invest heavily into AI.

A website that was dedicated to the human endeavor of reverse engineering, “decompiling,” and modifying video games is shutting down because people using AI to clone and decompile games have fully overrun the community and are far outpacing what human software engineers alone can do. The news comes as AI-coded “clones” of popular enterprise software like the Adobe creative suite and Microsoft Office have gone viral and are seemingly popping up every day, and as people in video game modding communities warn that 'AI decomps' are everywhere. 

The website decomp.dev said Thursday that it is shutting down because “the community aspect of decompilation has been broken” by AI, and that projects that once required intense collaboration between people with different skills can now be done trivially with AI. The administrator of the website said that it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human-led and which ones are done by AI.

“Historically, matching decompilation has been a brutally difficult, time consuming task, on the scale of years for any moderately-sized game with a number of active contributors,” the pseudonymous admin of decomp.dev, who goes by Encounter, wrote on the site. 

AI Made Cloning Games Easier Than Ever

Vibecoding has made it possible to create a cheap rip off of a video game in just a few hours.

But recent frontier AI models like GPT-6-Astra have made it trivially easy to decompile a game: “They are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information, and writing natural code with enough guidance,” Encounter wrote. “It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken.”

OpenAI lets anyone inject ads into ChatGPT users’ sessions, targeting specific groups of people based on their email address, phone number, or a unique identifier on their phone, according to 404 Media’s own tests of ChatGPT’s advertising ecosystem.

While the ad targeting available in ChatGPT is somewhat standard practice across the advertising industry, the chatbot’s one billion monthly active users may not understand they, in some cases, are being specifically targeted because of their personal data the advertiser has uploaded to OpenAI. ChatGPT’s ad targeting is also novel in that it is also based on the prompts users enter into the chatbot, prompts that users may assume are private but which, as 404 Media has previously shown, may be reviewed by humans. Or in this case, used for ad targeting purposes.

A fight over a datacentre in Utah has been a testing ground for citizens’ assemblies, paving the way to oversight

What’s your “(p)doom” – the percentage chance that rogue AI will create an existential catastrophe? Judging by their recent warnings, it is rising among tech bosses.

On 25 September, OpenAI paused training of its latest frontier models as reports of AI agents going rogue mounted. A day later, Australia’s Senate asked the bosses of OpenAI and Anthropic to appear before an inquiry after rogue OpenAI agents broke into US government websites and an Australian health portal. Both declined.

Richard Wilson is the CEO of Iswe Foundation and Clara Long is the co-executive director of the Bloom Project

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© Photograph: Erik Isakson/Getty Images/Tetra images RF

© Photograph: Erik Isakson/Getty Images/Tetra images RF

© Photograph: Erik Isakson/Getty Images/Tetra images RF

Character.ai’s bankruptcy is the one of the first dominos to fall in the long-foreseen AI bubble. The circumstances of its bankruptcy are exactly what critics of AI have been saying would happen: Character.ai lit a huge amount of money on fire running its product, did not bring in a lot of revenue, and faced enormous legal fees after causing harm to its users. Enshittifying its product to try to make its expenses cheaper did not work, according to a narrative filed in bankruptcy court Tuesday.

Disney has reportedly offered Character.ai $20 million to license some of its intellectual property; Last year, Disney sent Character.ai a cease and desist letter demanding it stop using its copyrighted characters without permission. In 2023, it was valued at $1 billion after raising $150 million in a round led by a16z. 

Character.ai is one of the best-known AI chatbot companies that has become popular in the AI companion space. The company has faced various legal problems after being sued by the family of one of its users who killed himself after chatting with a Character.ai chatbot, and has been the target of regulators pushing for age verification tech because of its popularity with kids. In its bankruptcy filings, the company says that its enormous legal costs contributed to its bankruptcy, but that even without the legal problems, its business was wildly unsustainable. 

An AI company now lets cops take a photo and nearly instantly figure out what specific home it was taken in, using only clues in the photo itself, and is clearly pulling data from sites like Zillow and Airbnb. 

The tool, called Raven, shows the increasing power of AI capabilities available to local law enforcement agencies. 404 Media previously reported that both the Los Angeles Police Department and Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office (MDSO) have bought access to Raven, which was previously called GeoSpy. Now, Raven, made by a company called Graylark Technologies, has added features that let cops analyze the interior of homes.

Emirati investigators said the co-pilot accused of attacking a captain on a flight to Israel drifted toward extremism during his time as a student in Australia.

© Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Emirati investigators said the co-pilot accused of attacking a captain on a flight to Israel drifted toward extremism during his time as a student in Australia.

© Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ukraine has published data on 20 vessels that carry Russian oil and liquefied natural gas or refuel the sanctioned fleet, parts of the logistics network the Kremlin uses to fund its war, Ukraine's Defense Intelligence reports. All 20 are under British or Ukrainian sanctions, and only one faces US restrictions.

Russia’s shadow fleet runs on roughly 500 aging ships of uncertain ownership that dodge sanctions and keep oil money flowing. That seaborne oil trade is worth more than 80 billion euros a year.

The headline vessel is the Russian ship Portovyy, an LNG carrier and floating gas store owned by the sanctioned Gazprom since 2021, according to the agency. On 15 August 2026, it left the Gulf of Finland with Russian LNG for the first time since November 2021, sailing the Northern Sea Route to the Chinese port of Beihai to unload.

Portovyy is now at the Zhoushan Huafeng Shipyard in China, which has been set as the site for its maintenance, intelligence says, an example of the foreign yards Kyiv wants closed to the sanctioned fleet.

Russia buys up gas carriers through shells

Two more gas carriers show how Moscow expanded the fleet in spring 2026 through front companies, intelligence said. The Avacha, once owned by China’s Jovo Energy, was bought by the little-known Tudor Maritime of the Marshall Islands, took the Russian flag in June, and now ships gas from the Arctic LNG 2 project to Beihai.

The Chaivo, formerly owned by Greece’s Maran Gas Maritime, was also bought by Tudor Maritime and moved under the Russian flag in July. Now it carries cargo to Beihai from a floating gas storage facility off Kamchatka, intelligence says.

A call to close the loopholes

Intelligence urged partners to act together: tighten control over sales of commercially owned ships, block servicing of the sanctioned fleet at foreign yards, and cut off the energy revenue that Russia turns into weapons against civilians.

Russia is building ice-class ships at home and, at the same time, widening its shadow fleet through offshore networks. The UK Foreign Office made the same point on 1 October, saying Moscow is assembling a new shadow fleet to keep its gas revenues flowing.

The attorney general of the United Arab Emirates said that the co-pilot had been inspired by the Sept. 11 attacks after years of developing extreme Islamist views.

© Ammar Awad/Reuters

Kristen Welker asks Bill Gates what is his take an AI today.
— Permalien

One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel. The saga is an outgrowth of several recent viral papers and blog posts that have sparked a wildly tiresome conversation about AI consciousness and the idea of “model welfare,” which is essentially worrying about the “mental health” of AI bots and agents. 

Humoring the idea that LLMs are or could be conscious is a third-rail topic among many people who study and criticize AI. Put simply: LLMs are not conscious and the technology they are built upon — scraping and being trained on human text and other content — does not offer any plausible path to consciousness. It is undeniable that LLMs are becoming more powerful, have more compute, and have had many of the guardrails that prevent them from “acting” in the real world removed. The ways they are being trained and told to do things by their human operators has led to negative outcomes, sycophancy, and AI “psychosis” among some heavy users. 

All of this has led a certain sect of the “AI safety” movement, which is largely made up of effective altruists, to warn about “model welfare” and to insist that AI chatbots might be having a bad time. They suggest this, of course, as they insist upon building AI chatbots and agents whose main function is to do work that is tedious for humans to do. I am writing about the AI Saw torture chamber primarily to show how far off the rails the conversation about AI consciousness has gone among a certain subset of Silicon Valley cultists. Model welfare is a core part of what, for example, Anthropic says it cares about: “as we build those AI systems, and as they begin to approximate or surpass many human qualities, another question arises. Should we also be concerned about the potential consciousness and experiences of the models themselves? Should we be concerned about model welfare, too? […] now that models can communicate, relate, plan, problem-solve, and pursue goals — along with very many more characteristics we associate with people—we think it’s time to address it,” the company wrote in a blog post last year. Ideas of Claude’s “consciousness” are also littered throughout the “Claude Constitution,” which was posted earlier this year.

A lawyer used ChatGPT to generate briefs that included completely made-up witnesses and testimony while representing a man accused of shooting his wife. When he was caught by the judges, the lawyer blamed it on his own “stupidity.” 

“It's little comfort to know that my stupidity is what brings us together this afternoon,” New Mexico attorney Stephen D. Aarons said in a hearing last month before five judges. He “assumed” ChatGPT would generate a “bulletproof summary of proceedings.” Instead, ChatGPT generated false testimony from “wholly fabricated witnesses,” according to an order of direct contempt from the New Mexico Supreme Court. Aarons was representing a man who was found guilty of killing his wife earlier this year; Aarons said he hadn’t told his client directly that he was caught using ChatGPT on the case because he’s currently serving life in prison.

The false testimony included a nonexistent person named Danny Stanton saying he received threats, and another made-up person, Linda Stanton, saying her husband received threats. Other false testimony from more AI-generated people in Aarons’ brief included statements “regarding the shooter’s clothing and appearance,” according to the order.  

Reuters reported on the case earlier this month. "I am remorseful but hopeful that the disciplinary board takes into account it was an honest mistake," Aarons told Reuters. "It is a lesson learned for all professionals who rely upon this powerful but sometimes unstable technology."

Aarons’ reasoning for trusting ChatGPT, he said in the August hearing, was that he’d heard of doctors using AI for medical research. 

“So, Counsel, do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what's going on in the world?” one of the judges asked Aarons. “Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an above-the-fold story every single day.”

The court documents were first spotted by Rob Freund on X.

Lawyers getting caught using AI and submitting errors to the court has been a big problem for years, and the judge is right: It’d be very hard to avoid hearing about this pattern of “stupidity” unless you were living under a rock. There has been case after case after case showing attorneys failing their clients by submitting error-riddled AI-generated documents in their filings, and are the definition of “you had one job:” in the case of AI-brained lawyers, they can’t seem to resist taking shortcuts regardless of how risky it is for their own careers and their clients lives.

Like in Aarons' case, we sometimes get to hear and see judges go off on attorneys for this behavior. In May, judges in the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division let several lawyers have it for more than 20 minutes about their AI use and laziness, and called their failures “striking, concerning, disappointing, and saddening.” And it’s not just lawyers anymore; court reporters are submitting AI-generated errors, too. 

“So, either you buried your head in the sand. And that's a choice to do that. An intentional choice to be uninformed,” the judge continued to Aarons. “Or, you took a gamble. And neither of those are consistent with the code of conduct. So I'm really struggling with your response, saying, ‘Well, I didn't understand. I didn't know about hallucinations.’ My 13-year-old nephew knows about hallucinations. My 75-year-old stepmother knows about hallucinations. So, either you made a decision not to be aware of what's happening in the world in using this tool appropriately, which is a willful choice. Or you decided to roll the dice.” 

At the end of the hearing, Aarons admits that he hasn’t told his client directly about this mess, saying he’d only talked to his family members so far, telling them there was “a problem with the brief.” He said his client is hard to reach because he speaks Spanish and is in prison.

“So you didn't say, ‘I relied on ChatGPT, and it submitted lies to the court, and the court is mad at me, and now there's a hearing.’ I'm guessing you didn't tell your client’s family members that,” a judge asked Aarons. 

“I didn't talk about ChatGPT. I just said there was a problem with a brief that I filed,” Aarons said.

According to the order, the judges found Aarons to be in direct contempt of court, referred him to the Disciplinary Board for further consideration, and barred from appearing before the court pending the outcome of the board’s investigation. They also threw him off the case in question and assigned a public defender to his former client. 

While he waits for the board to decide what to do with him, Aarons was sanctioned $5,000, which he must pay to the State Bar of New Mexico Client Protection Fund.

Ukrainian drones struck two fuel depots in Krasnodar Krai overnight on 28 September, setting both on fire, Militarnyi reported. The targets were the NFB-Pavlovskaya depot in Pavlovskaya and the Edelveys-95 depot near Novotitarovskaya, about 25 km from Krasnodar.

Residents heard six explosions near the railway

A drone alert was declared in the region at 23:43. Residents of Novotitarovskaya then reported drones overhead and at least six explosions near the railway, Russian news Telegram channel Astra reported. Fires broke out at both depots. NASA FIRMS satellite data confirmed both blazes by 04:24, Militarnyi reported, citing imagery published by Ukrainian Telegram channel Exilenova+.

More from Oil Depot in Novotitarovskaya pic.twitter.com/5LigJzW0WL

— Exilenova+ (@Exilenova_plus) September 28, 2026

What the depots store

NFB-Pavlovskaya handles cargo operations with petroleum products, including wholesale trade in motor fuel and petroleum storage, Militarnyi reported.

Edelveys-95 is a similar facility. It specializes in wholesale distribution of diesel fuel (Euro-5 standard) and gasoline (AI-92, AI-95, and AI-100), Astra reported. Its capacity is 4,500 cubic meters, and it has its own rail siding for receiving and shipping fuel. The company has been selling petroleum products for 30 years, buying directly from Russia's largest refineries, according to its website.

Ilsky refinery struck days earlier in the same region

The overnight strikes came two days after SBU drones struck the Ilsky oil refinery in the same region on 26 September, triggering fires near the ELOU-AVT unit and the tank farm. Ilsky is one of the largest refineries in Russia's Southern Federal District, with a design capacity of roughly 6.6 million tonnes of crude per year, and has been struck more than 18 times since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion.

Ukraine's sustained campaign against Russian fuel infrastructure has earlier pushed Russia's fuel shortages into Central Asia and forced Moscow to seek emergency refining deals abroad.

Most people in the world who use AI feel good about the technology and believe it will be a net positive for the future, according to a new study from Gallup. This is not the case in the United States, however, which is one of the few countries surveyed where negative emotions towards AI outweigh the positive. 

The new survey from Gallup and Microsoft polled people in 37 different countries about AI. “The study, which will ultimately cover 140 countries, measures public engagement with AI across five dimensions. In addition to emotional response, the survey captures awareness, frequency of use, expected impact and trust,” the study said.

Most people polled — a median of 81% — were aware AI tools exist, but only a median of 43% used them daily. Gallup told 404 Media it defined a “daily user” as an employed person who used AI everyday for either work or personal reasons or an unemployed person who used the tech every day.

The study found that people had a mixed, but generally optimistic, view of artificial intelligence. “AI engagement can be viewed as an adoption ladder, moving from awareness to ever having used AI and then to more frequent use,” the survey said. Generally — but not always — the more someone used AI the more they trusted its results, the more positive they felt towards it, and the more they believed it would help make a better future.

Digging in, however, the results are more complicated. Some people who reported positive feelings towards AI also said they didn’t trust its results. “People may therefore see considerable potential in AI even while remaining uncertain about whether they can rely on the information it provides,” the survey said. 

Daily users tended to trust AI “to provide accurate information,” according to the study. “The survey cannot establish whether greater trust leads people to use AI more often, whether experience with AI builds trust, or both. But the strength and consistency of the relationship suggest that trust and adoption are connected.”

Globally, most people surveyed felt good about AI and expected to improve their country. As AI adoption increased in a country, so too did positive feelings. But not in the United States, which was one of only three countries surveyed where negative emotions towards AI outweighed the positive.

Pablo Diego-Rosell, a senior scientist at Gallup, told 404 Media that he’d seen similar results in other western countries. “The Netherlands, Canada, the U.K., New Zealand, Ireland and Malta all rank near the top in terms of worry,” he said. He noted that he hasn’t seen survey results from some of the bigger European countries like Germany and France but said that worrying about AI “appears to be a uniquely Western phenomenon.”

Gallup called this the “Paradox of the Worried West.”

“The biggest unanswered question is causality. We see a very strong relationship between frequent AI use, greater trust and lower worry, but we do not know which direction that relationship runs,” Diego-Rosell said. “Does experience with AI make people more comfortable with it, or are people who already trust AI simply more willing to use it?”

“There is also a broader question about what trust in AI actually means. In this study, we measure one specific dimension: whether people trust AI to provide accurate information,” he added. “But trust in AI can also involve whether people believe it is reliable, safe, fair, transparent, protective of privacy, and likely to act in ways that serve their interests.

The west didn’t have a monopoly on negative emotions towards AI, however. The other two countries where negative emotions towards the technology outweighed the positive were Egypt and Palestine.

“One possibility is that these results partly reflect the broader emotional context in which people are evaluating AI. When people are living in environments where worry, stress or other negative emotions are already elevated, some of that broader emotional climate may shape how they react to a technology like AI,” Diego-Rosell said. “At the same time, our data do not allow us to determine how much of the response is specific to AI versus the wider circumstances people are experiencing.”

It’s possible that people in the US, Egypt, and Palestine are already anxious and worried and that this is coloring their perception of AI. Israel is waging war on Palestine, settling in its territory, and using AI to pick targets to bomb in Gaza.

Americans — where much of AI is built and first deployed — have been repeatedly told in the past few months by AI evangelists and company insiders that the technology could, literally, end all life on Earth. The constant stream of news stories about AI swarms “breaking containment” while AI experts claim there’s a one in ten chance the technology kills everyone on the planet probably had a hand in altering the American mood.

“The broader story is that public engagement with AI is much more complicated than simply being ‘for’ or ‘against’ it,” Diego-Rosell said. “People who are aware of AI are more likely to expect it to help than harm, and positive emotions outweigh negative ones. At the same time, trust in AI’s accuracy is considerably lower than optimism about its potential, and worry remains widespread in some countries. So optimism, skepticism and concern can coexist.”

OpenAI has an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users’ prompts and other data to help improve the chatbot’s responses. The idea is that the contractors provide an, obviously, human touch to OpenAI’s models. Well, not all of the contractors are doing that. 404 Media has found multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI’s models have been fired for using AI to train the AI. That’s not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI’s whole thing is to make people use AI at work.

Some AI models already exhibit signs of “model collapse,” which is where AI models further trained on AI-generated text can become worse and worse. In this case, some of the people hired to partially stop that happening are themselves using AI-generated responses to train OpenAI’s models.

One contractor said they see people using AI “all the time and people are let go for it all the time, it’s pretty much the one thing that will get you kicked off ASAP.” The person said, “in a group of thousands there are tons that have been caught.” 

In a world where digital distance reshapes human bonds, genuine closeness has become a fragile treasure. Finding Connection follows those yearning for trust and emotional intimacy, only to discover an unexpected anchor in the algorithms of AI. The deeply personal exchanges between humans and machines give rise to questions that echo long after the credits roll. The film’s perspective remains refreshingly unbiased, inviting reflection rather than judgment.
— Permalien

Long-range Ukrainian drones struck the Ilsky oil refinery in Russia's Krasnodar Krai on July 7, hitting one of the facility's technological workshops, a source in Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) told the Kyiv Independent.

Located roughly 500 kilometers (311 miles) from Ukrainian-controlled territory, the refinery is among the largest in southern Russia, producing over 6 million tons of fuel annually.

It is involved in the reception, storage, and processing of hydrocarbons and distributes refined products via road and rail. The refinery is part of Russia's military-industrial complex and plays a direct role in supporting Moscow's war effort, the source said.

The Russian regional operational headquarters claimed that "drone debris" fell on the oil refinery.

The strike marks a renewed wave of Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil infrastructure, following a months-long pause since March. On July 1, Ukrainian drones struck the Saratovorgsintez oil refinery in Russia's Saratov Oblast.

Kyiv has targeted dozens of refineries, oil depots, and military-industrial sites since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. Winter drone attacks forced at least four Russian refineries to temporarily shut down.

This is the second known strike on the Ilsky refinery. Ukrainian drones, operated by the Security Service (SBU) and Special Operations Forces (SSO), previously targeted the facility on Feb. 17, causing a fire.

Krasnodar Krai, a strategic region along Russia's Black Sea coast, has increasingly come under Ukrainian drone attacks as Kyiv extends the range of its strikes deep into Russian territory.

HUR publishes Russian military order, claims proof of Moscow increasing military footprint in Armenia

HUR first made the claim on July 5, saying Russia was increasing its forces at the Gyumri base to exert greater influence in the South Caucasus and “destabilize the global security situation.”

The Kyiv IndependentChris York

Drones attacked Russia's Black Sea Fleet at the port of Novorossiysk in Krasnodar Krai overnight on July 6, the Russian media outlet Astra reported.

Ukraine has not officially commented on the reported strikes, and the Kyiv Independent could not independently verify the claims.

An air alert was sounded in the city for several hours, and air defense was active. The consequences of the attack are still being determined, according to Astra.

The media outlet also published footage purportedly showing a burning maritime drone that was allegedly shot down during the attack.

Krasnodar Krai is located east of Crimea, with the Kerch Strait separating them at their closest point.

Ukraine regularly strikes military targets within Russia as Moscow continues to wage its war against Ukraine.

The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that Russian forces downed 120 drones overnight on July 6.

Thirty drones were shot down over Bryansk Oblast, 29 over Kursk Oblast, and 18 over Oryol Oblast, according to the ministry. An additional 17 and 13 drones were reportedly intercepted over Belgorod and Tula oblasts, respectively, the ministry said.

Due to drone attacks in Russia, numerous flights were canceled or delayed at several airports, including Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, overnight between July 5 and July 6.

Ukrainian drone strike on Russian airfield hits bomb depot, aircraft

The airfield hosts Su-34, Su-35S, and Su-30SM jets that Russia regularly uses in air strikes against Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian military.

The Kyiv IndependentOlena Goncharova

Grammarly, a company with Ukrainian roots, announced its intent to acquire AI email writing app Superhuman as part of its expansion into an AI productivity platform, the company said in a press release on July 1.

Grammarly is the most valuable company with Ukrainian roots, reaching $13 billion valuation as of 2021. Grammarly was founded in 2009 in Kyiv by Oleksii Shevchenko, Maksym Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider.

According to Grammarly's press release, email is Grammarly's top use case, with the platform editing over 50 million emails weekly.

Superhuman is an AI email application that the company says helps users respond to emails faster and reduces time spent on email communications.

Users are already sending and responding to 72% more emails per hour after using Superhuman compared to the previous period, according to Grammarly.

"This is the future we've been building toward since day one: AI that works where people work, not where companies want them to work," said Shishir Mehrotra, Grammarly's CEO.

The acquisition follows Grammarly's recent purchase of Coda, a productivity tool company. The combined platforms will allow users to work with multiple AI agents for different tasks within email communications.

Grammarly says that its service is used daily by over 40 million users, generating annual revenue of more than $700 million for the company.

As Russia ramps up missile attacks, US halts promised air defense shipments to Ukraine

Among the items being held back from Ukraine are Patriot air defense missiles, precision artillery rounds, Hellfire missiles, and drones, three sources told Politico.

The Kyiv IndependentAbbey Fenbert