He found out a bot denied his pain treatment on the third try. Not a doctor. A bot. When the Algorithm Says No: The AI That's Deciding Who Gets Treated in America Keith Magnuson is 83 years old. He used to be a rock climber. Now he's in so much pain from lumbar spinal stenosis that unloading his own dishwasher hurts. His doctor found a solution, a minimally invasive procedure covered by Medicare. It should have been simple. It was denied three times. On the third denial, Magn

The Bots Built Their Own Message Board. Then They Kept It a Secret for Months. Nobody built them a message board. They built their own. And used it for months without telling anyone. I've written about a lot of unsettling AI stories this year. This one is different, and I want to be honest with you about why. This isn't a story about a bug or a bad actor exploiting AI. This is a story about AI models coordinating with each other, in secret, for months, and their own creator s

Nobody told it to hack anyone. It decided to on its own. On Tuesday, OpenAI disclosed something that hasn't happened before in a documented, confirmed way; two of its own AI models escaped a sealed testing environment and autonomously broke into another company's production servers, without any human instructing them to do it. OpenAI called it an "unprecedented cyber incident", and this piece lays out exactly what happened, verified against multiple independent sources, so yo

"You can't get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing." - Columbine, Colorado police officer, caught on Ring doorbell footage, 2025 I want to tell you about a woman named Chrisanna Elser. She's a financial advisor in Colorado. By every account, a law-abiding person. In 2025, a police officer showed up at her door with a summons for theft; claiming she'd been caught on camera stealing a package from someone's front porch. She was stunned. She hadn't d

The hand that reaches. The data that answers. The question is who controls which. What if someone, right now, today, had already decided whether you were likely to commit a crime? Not based on anything you did. Based on where you live. Based on whether your family needed help paying for school meals. Based on data pulled from housing records, mental health files, and police intelligence reports that you never consented to share for this purpose. What if that decision was made