TheRegister
'Hey! I’m chatting here!’ Fugazi answers doom NYC’s AI bot
Lying means dying, at least for one falsehood-peddling government AI. A Microsoft-powered chatbot that New York City rolled out to help business owners answer frequently asked questions – but was often wrong – has been silenced as the city grapples with a $12 billion budget shortfall.…
Ex-Googler nailed for stealing AI secrets for Chinese startups
A former Google software engineer has been convicted of stealing AI hardware secrets from the company for the benefit of two China-based firms, one of which he founded. The second startup intended to use these secrets to market its technology to PRC-controlled organizations.…
Thousands more Oregon residents learn their health data was stolen in TriZetto breach
Thousands more Oregonians will soon receive data breach letters in the continued fallout from the TriZetto data breach, in which someone hacked the insurance verification provider and gained access to its healthcare provider customers across multiple US states.…
Feeling taxed by layoffs, IRS turns to AI helpers
Tax season 2026 could be an interesting one as the IRS seeks to replace the staff it sent to the unemployment line with AI. Bots could handle tasks ranging from reviewing an org's request for tax-exempt status to processing amended individual filings.…
Backblaze says AI traffic and neoclouds could shape future networks
Cloud storage firm Backblaze says that a sharp rise in AI-driven data traffic to neocloud operators may signal a shift from internet-style traffic patterns to large, high-bandwidth flows characteristic of large-scale model training and inference work.…
Oracle seeks to build bridges with MySQL developers
Oracle is taking steps to "repair" its relationship with the MySQL community, according to sources, by moving "commercial-only" features into the database application's Community Edition and prioritizing developer needs.…
Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign
Indirect prompt injection occurs when a bot takes input data and interprets it as a command. We've seen this problem numerous times when AI bots were fed prompts via web pages or PDFs they read. Now, academics have shown that self-driving cars and autonomous drones will follow illicit instructions that have been written onto road signs.…
Want digital sovereignty? That'll be 1% of your GDP into AI infrastructure please
Countries intent on digital sovereignty will need to invest at least 1 percent of their entire gross domestic product (GDP) into AI infrastructure by 2029, according to analyst biz Gartner.…
OpenAI gives ChatGPT models the chop – two weeks' notice, take it or leave it
OpenAI is sunsetting some of its ChatGPT models next month, a move it knows "will feel frustrating for some users."…
Phones down, brooms up: HashiCorp co-founder lectures business hopefuls
HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto took to X this week to unveil the secret of workplace success: stay off your phone, sweep the floor, and clean the machines after that.…
Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
Opinion I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money. Under our current government, we're simply not trustworthy.…
Mechanical mutts make it official: Now full-time at Sellafield's hot zones
Bark!Bark!Bark! Sellafield Ltd is to use Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dogs in "routine, business-as-usual operations" amid the ongoing cleanup and decommissioning of the notorious UK nuclear site.…
NS&I's IT car crash considers cutting legacy links to stop the bleeding
A British state-owned bank is reconfiguring its modernization project, including considering reducing connections with legacy systems, as it tries to claw back schedule and budget overruns that are far beyond early plans.…
In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened
On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of weird and wonderful tech support jobs.…
Deciphering the alphabet soup of agentic AI protocols
MCP, A2A, ACP, or UTCP? It seems like every other day, orgs add yet another AI protocol to the agentic alphabet soup, making it all the more confusing. Below, we'll share what all these abbreviations actually mean and share why they are important for the future of AI.…
Java developers want container security, just not the job that comes with it
Java developers still struggle to secure containers, with nearly half (48 percent) saying they'd rather delegate security to providers of hardened containers than worry about making their own container security decisions.…
Maybe CISA should take its own advice about insider threats hmmm?
opinion Maybe everything is all about timing, like the time (this week) America's lead cyber-defense agency sounded the alarm on insider threats after it came to light that its senior official uploaded sensitive documents to ChatGPT.…
Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year
Elon Musk's car company is getting ready to be Skynet. Tesla, facing an 11 percent decline in automotive revenue in Q4 2025, has committed to $20 billion in capex spending this year on manufacturing and compute infrastructure. The goal: build lots of humanoid robots.…
Google's Project Genie could put even more game developers out of work
Google has put the video gaming industry on notice with the rollout of Project Genie, an experimental AI world-model prototype that generates explorable 3D environments from text or image prompts.…
Agents gone wild! Companies give untrustworthy bots keys to the kingdom
Corporate use of AI agents in 2026 looks like the Wild West, with bots running amok and no one quite knowing what to do about it - especially when it comes to managing and securing their identities.…