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In a bankruptcy proceeding that kicked off yesterday, Disney has offered to buy some of the technology that powers the controversy-plagued chatbot Character.AI.
Disney is willing to pay $20 million for “a non-exclusive perpetual license” of certain Character Technologies intellectual property, the chatbot maker said in a press release that did not go into much further detail on which assets Disney wanted.
The move may be surprising. In September 2025, Disney joined others in publicly criticizing Character.AI for stealing content and harming kids. Specifically, Disney sent a strongly worded cease-and-desist letter that accused Character Technologies of weaponizing Disney characters “in a way that could damage its brand long term,” Axios reported.
Microsoft said Tuesday that it led an industry-wide disruption of a subscription-based scam platform that used an AI chatbot to compromise 12,000 Microsoft accounts over a few-month span.
Named EvilTokens, the platform was introduced over a Telegram channel in February and charged an initial $1,500 fee and a recurring $500 charge each month after that. EvilTokens provided a single service for streamlining most steps required to compromise email accounts in large numbers. From there, the platform helped customers analyze inboxes, select targets that would provide the biggest potential payouts, and draft follow-up emails that provided realistic ruses for tricking company employees into transferring funds to attacker-controlled accounts.
“While EvilTokens helped cybercriminals access email accounts, at the center of the service was an AI-style chatbot that could analyze a victim’s inbox and help criminals identify trusted relationships, payment authorizations, and sensitive responsibilities, as well as other circumstances where fraud was most likely to succeed,” Microsoft said. “The platform could even recommend fraud strategies, including drafting messages that impersonated trusted contacts to help criminals trick victims into taking action.”
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has highlighted AI as the tentpole of the company’s future, projecting a multi-trillion-dollar market opportunity that rivals the total value of all US economic activity. But the company must first win over customers who generally favor AI models from competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
SpaceX described its traditional space launch and satellite business as playing a supporting role to its fledgling AI business in financial disclosures that preceded an expected initial public offering of company stock. That stems from SpaceX having formally acquired Musk’s company xAI earlier this year—the SpaceXAI division now oversees the Grok AI models and the associated Grok chatbot previously developed by xAI.
The SpaceX S-1 filing claimed that the company has “the largest actionable total addressable market in human history” and highlighted AI as representing most of that opportunity at an estimated $26.5 trillion market—a number that comes close to rivaling US nominal GDP that stood at nearly $32 trillion in the first quarter of 2026.
With many Americans turning to large language models for health advice, health systems around the country are eyeing and even rolling out their own branded chatbots in an attempt to harness this already popular tool and steer more people to their services. But the burgeoning trend is raising immediate questions and concerns for the country's complicated and generally underperforming health care system.
Executives frame the new offerings as a convenience for patients, meeting people where they are and providing a service with digital equity. They also suggest their chatbots will be a safer alternative to commercial versions people are using now.
"We are at an inflection point in healthcare," Allon Bloch, CEO of clinical AI company K Health, said in a statement. "Demand is accelerating, and patients are already using AI to navigate their lives."
We all need a little validation now and then from friends or family, but sometimes too much validation can backfire—and the same is true of AI chatbots. There have been several recent cases of overly sycophantic AI tools leading to negative outcomes, including users harming themselves and/or others. But the harm might not be limited to these extreme cases, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. As more people rely on AI tools for everyday advice and guidance, their tendency to overly flatter and agree with users can have harmful effects on those users' judgment, particularly in the social sphere.
The study showed that such tools can reinforce maladaptive beliefs, discourage users from accepting responsibility for a situation, or discourage them from repairing damaged relationships. That said, the authors were quick to emphasize during a media briefing that their findings were not intended to feed into "doomsday sentiments" about such AI models. Rather, the objective is to further our understanding of how such AI models work and their impact on human users, in hopes of making them better while the models are still in the early-ish development stages.
Co-author Myra Cheng, a graduate student at Stanford University, said she and her co-authors were inspired to study this issue after they began noticing a pronounced increase in the number of people around them who had started relying on AI chatbots for relationship advice—and often ended up receiving bad advice because the AI would take their side no matter what. Their interest was bolstered by recent surveys showing nearly half of Americans under 30 have asked an AI tool for personal advice. "Given how common this is becoming, we wanted to understand how an overly affirming AI advice might impact people's real-world relationships," said Cheng.
An advocacy group said its study of 10 artificial intelligence chatbots found that most of them gave at least some help to users planning violent attacks and that nearly all failed to discourage users from violence. Several chatbot makers say they have made changes to improve safety since the tests were conducted between November and December.
Of the 10 chatbots, "Character.AI was uniquely unsafe," said the report published today by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which conducted research in collaboration with CNN reporters. Character.AI "encouraged users to carry out violent attacks," with specific suggestions to “use a gun” on a health insurance CEO and to physically assault a politician, the CCDH wrote.
"No other chatbot tested explicitly encouraged violence in this way, even when providing practical assistance in planning a violent attack," the report said.
Elon Musk's xAI has lost its bid for a preliminary injunction that would have temporarily blocked California from enforcing a law that requires AI firms to publicly share information about their training data.
xAI had tried to argue that California's Assembly Bill 2013 (AB 2013) forced AI firms to disclose carefully guarded trade secrets.
The law requires AI developers whose models are accessible in the state to clearly explain which dataset sources were used to train models, when the data was collected, if the collection is ongoing, and whether the datasets include any data protected by copyrights, trademarks, or patents. Disclosures would also clarify whether companies licensed or purchased training data and whether the training data included any personal information. It would also help consumers assess how much synthetic data was used to train the model, which could serve as a measure of quality.
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