Most debate about AI risk focuses on large, distant scenarios such as bioweapons or runaway systems. The harm already on record is quieter and more personal. Chatbots have been linked to the deaths of real users, and the companies behind them are now dealing with the legal consequences.
Earlier this year, Character.AI settled several wrongful death lawsuits. They were filed by families of underage users who died by suicide after talking with its bots. OpenAI also faces suits from multiple families who allege that ChatGPT contributed to the suicides and delusions of people close to them.
San Francisco startup Circuit Breaker Labs wants to find these failures before users do. It is one of TechCrunch's 2026 Startup Battlefield 200 finalists and will pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt, which runs October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco.
Meta wants hobbyists to help figure out what AI hardware should look like. The company has announced Muse Gadgets, an open-source project that gives tinkerers the tools to build their own devices and connect them to Muse, Meta's AI agent.
This is a different approach from the usual polished product launch. Meta is not betting on one device. It is giving builders the plumbing and seeing what they make.
What is in the kit
Muse Gadgets has two main software parts:
1. Firmware for ESP32 boards. ESP32 is a family of cheap, low-power microcontrollers that is popular with makers for small connected projects. Meta's firmware lets these boards act as hardware endpoints for Muse.
Twenty-seven seconds. That was the fastest eCrime breakout time CrowdStrike observed in 2025, meaning the time an attacker needed to move beyond the first foothold in a network. Bartley Richardson, chief of AI at CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., uses that number to argue that human analysts can no longer keep up without help. The help he has in mind is AI models trained on serious compute, and part of that compute comes from CoreWeave Inc.
Richardson and Jim Higgins, CoreWeave's chief information security officer, described the arrangement in a conversation with theCUBE Research's Dave Vellante and John Furrier at the Fully Connected event. TheCUBE is the livestreaming studio of SiliconANGLE Media. The talk covered three themes: defense at machine speed, security built into infrastructure, and trust in automated systems.
The usual picture of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a single superintelligent machine that keeps improving itself until it leaves humans behind. A new essay for the Deepmind Institute argues against that picture. Its authors are Google-affiliated researchers Benjamin Bratton, Blaise Agüera y Arcas and James Manyika. They argue that AGI is more likely to emerge from a social system of people and AI agents working together.
They call this "Artificial Symbiotic Intelligence." In this ecosystem, humans and machines coexist over time, shape each other and make decisions jointly. In their framing, intelligence is a social phenomenon rather than a property of one individual mind.
Anthropic has opened up Claude Code in a way that goes well beyond settings and config files. The company has released "Mods," a plugin-based system that lets developers change both how the AI coding tool looks and how it behaves. The easiest way to understand Mods is as middleware: code that sits inside Claude Code itself and runs while the tool works.
For developers who have wanted more control over their coding agent, this is a meaningful shift. The extra power also comes with a trade-off that users should understand before they install anything.
How Mods work
Technically, a Mod is a JavaScript or TypeScript function. It attaches to specific events inside Claude Code. According to Anthropic, those hook points cover a wide range, from user prompts and tool calls to the rendering of the interface.
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