France’s National Agency for Security of Information Systems has issued an urgent warning about sophisticated spyware attacks targeting high-profile iPhone users. The agency specifically named surveillance tools like “Pegasus, Predator, Graphite, and Triangulation” as threats aimed at journalists, lawyers, activists, and politicians, describing them as “particularly sophisticated and difficult to detect.”

On September 3, Apple sent threat notifications to affected iPhone users, though the company did not disclose how many individuals received these alerts. In its statement, Apple emphasized the severity of these threats, saying, “The extreme cost, sophistication, and worldwide nature of mercenary spyware attacks makes them some of the most advanced digital threats in existence today.”

Apple explained that these attacks represent highly funded operations that continually evolve, making detection challenging. The company noted that their threat notifications are “high-confidence alerts that a user has been individually targeted” and should be taken seriously. Apple also warned users about verification, stating that legitimate notifications will never request clicking links, installing apps, or providing passwords, and can be verified by signing into account.apple.com.

Previously:
• FTC settles with Lenovo over selling laptops deliberately infected with Superfish spyware
• Israeli spyware firm NSO Group ‘re-acquired’ by founders
• Investigators into mass murder of Mexican student teachers were attacked with NSO’s government spyware

Threat actors are using Grok, X’s built-in AI assistant, to bypass link posting restrictions that the platform introduced to reduce malicious advertising.

As discovered by Guardio Labs’ researcher Nati Tal, mavertisers often run sketchy video ads containing adult content baits and avoid including a link to the main body to avoid being blocked by X.

Instead, they hide it in the small “From:” metadata field under the video card, which apparently isn’t scanned by the social media platform for malicious links.

Next, (likely) the same actors ask Grok via a reply to the ad something about the post, like “where is this video from,” or “what is the link to this video.”

Grok parses the hidden “From:” field and replies with the full malicious link in clickable format, allowing users to click it and go straight to the malicious site.

Because Grok is automatically a trusted system account on the X platform, its post boosts the link’s credibility, reach, SEO, and reputation, increasing the likelihood that it will be broadcast to a large number of users.

The researcher has found that many of these links funnel through shady ad networks, leading to scams such as fake CAPTCHA tests, information-stealing malware, and other malicious payloads.

Instead of being blocked by X, they are instead promoted to users on the platform via malicious ads that receive a further boost from Grok.

Tal calls the technique of exploiting this loophole “Grokking,” and notes that it’s very effective, in some cases amplifying malicious ads to reach millions of impressions, as shown below.

Potential solutions include scanning all fields, blocking hidden links, and adding context sanitization to Grok, so the AI assistant does not blindly echo links when asked by users, but instead filters and checks them against blocklists.

Tal confirmed to us that he has contacted X to report the issue and received unofficial confirmation that Grok engineers received the report. 

BleepingComputer has also contacted X to ask if they’re aware of this abuse and whether they plan to do anything about it, but we received no response by publication time.

The Trump administration made no attempt to hide its goals when it came to tariffs. As the current U.S. president ran for office, he made it very clear to U.S. voters and the world that they should expect higher tariffs. And that’s exactly what his administration has offered up in dramatic fashion. Some on Wall Street worry that the tariffs could turn the bull market into a bear. Here’s how a long-term investor should be thinking about this issue.

The tariffs are coming! The tariffs are coming!

To simplify what is a fairly complex issue, a tariff is a tax imposed on imported goods. The Trump administration has been using tariffs in an aggressive attempt to reshape global trade. This will have an impact on the economy and the stock market, but what that might be is hard to define today. Simply put, so many things are up in the air right now that nobody knows where the chips are going to fall.

Image source: Getty Images.

That said, one concern is that higher tariffs will eventually be passed through to consumers. That would increase inflation, crimp consumption, and lead to lower earnings for corporate America. The flip side of that argument is that companies have increased prices so much in recent years that they can’t easily push higher costs onto consumers, and, thus, companies are likely to absorb the tariff hit. That would mean lower profit margins. Even here, however, Wall Street could still end up in the dumps as companies earn less and investors react to that negative news.

It seems like nothing good can come of this whole tariff thing. Except that, so far, the market hasn’t really paid much attention. The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO +0.00%) is up more than 10% so far in 2025. Yes, there was a brief market correction early in the year, but the S&P 500 index, which is what the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF tracks, seems to have shrugged that off, as it is again trading near all-time highs.

VOO data by YCharts.

Don’t get too caught up in the short term

Here’s the big takeaway from the tariff kerfuffle: It is shockingly hard to predict performance on Wall Street. Some people get market turns right once, but very few have been able to time the ups and downs with any consistency. For most investors, trying to jump in and out of the market — a practice known as market timing — is a mistake.

It is far better to buy and hold for the long term, perhaps including an exchange-traded fund (ETF) like Vanguard S&P 500 ETF in the mix. Indeed, focusing on a well-diversified portfolio is key, as it will help to soften the impact of the market’s gyrations over time. Which brings the story back to the potential for a bear market. Simply put, there will be one.

That’s not a prediction; it is just a statement of fact. Eventually, for some reason, investors will go from being bullish to being bearish. That’s just what market history tells us is the norm on Wall Street. Why it happens will be the topic of debate, and eventually, some common cause will be determined. Maybe it will be tariffs. It could also be geopolitical tensions, which are very high today. Or maybe artificial intelligence (AI) won’t turn out to be as profitable as investors expect, and that will lead the market lower, given that AI enthusiasm has helped lead the market higher.

Something will eventually give way, and there will be a bear market. Then, after some period of time, a bull market will arrive. It’s just how the market works. You should spend more of your time thinking about ways to save money and how to invest wisely. Investing wisely means taking into consideration the ever-present risk of a bear market.

Keep it simple and think long term

Far too often, investors get caught up in short-term market movements. The big picture is more important, including the sometimes erratic upward march of stocks over the long term. Sticking to an investment plan is hard, but it is likely to result in better long-term performance than trying to jump in and out of the market. Which is why a simple portfolio consisting of an S&P 500 index fund and a broadly diversified bond fund or ETF — say, in a 60% stock/40% bond breakdown — could be all you need.

^SPX data by YCharts.

Bonds help provide safety during market turmoil, and stocks provide growth over the long term. That combination will allow you to ride out bear markets without letting your emotions lead you into making investment mistakes (like selling everything you own and never investing again). Another option is just to buy a balanced mutual fund that does all the investing work for you. That leaves you to focus on saving money, which is where you will likely have the biggest impact on your long-term wealth, anyway.

If you do choose to buy individual stocks, which can be a lot of fun, don’t focus on the short term. Or to put it another way, think in decades, not days. When you do that, a bear market will probably end up looking like just a small hiccup. And it won’t really matter to you what precipitated the bear, anyway, because you will be too busy. You see, long-term investors often find their best investments during deep market declines.

Welcome to Slate Sundays, CryptoSlate’s new weekly feature showcasing in-depth interviews, expert analysis, and thought-provoking op-eds that go beyond the headlines to explore the ideas and voices shaping the future of crypto.

Would you take a drug that had a 25% chance of killing you?

Like a one-in-four possibility that rather than curing your ills or preventing diseases, you drop stone-cold dead on the floor instead?

That’s poorer odds than Russian Roulette.

Even if you are trigger-happy with your own life, would you risk taking the entire human race down with you?

The children, the babies, the future footprints of humanity for generations to come?

Thankfully, you wouldn’t be able to anyway, since such a reckless drug would never be allowed on the market in the first place.

Yet, this is not a hypothetical situation. It’s exactly what the Elon Musks and Sam Altmans of the world are doing right now.

“AI will probably lead to the end of the world… but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies,” Altman, 2015.

No pills. No experimental medicine. Just an arms race at warp speed to the end of the world as we know it.

P(doom) circa 2030?

How long do we have left? That depends. Last year, 42% of CEOs surveyed at the Yale CEO Summit responded that AI had the potential to destroy humanity within five to 10 years.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei estimates a 10-25% chance of extinction (or “P(doom)” as it’s known in AI circles).

Unfortunately, his concerns are echoed industrywide, especially by a growing cohort of ex-Google and OpenAI employees, who elected to leave their fat paychecks behind to sound the alarm on the Frankenstein they helped create.

A 10-25% chance of extinction is an exorbitantly high level of risk for which there is no precedent.

For context, there is no permitted percentage for the risk of death from, say, vaccines or medicines. P(doom) must be vanishingly small; vaccine-associated fatalities are typically less than one in millions of doses (far lower than 0.0001%).

For historical context, during the development of the atomic bomb, scientists (including Edward Teller) uncovered a one in three million chance of starting a nuclear chain reaction that would destroy the earth. Time and resources were channeled toward further investigation.

Let me say that again.

One in three million.

Not one in 3,000. Not one in 300. And certainly not one in four.

How desensitized have we become that predictions like this don’t jolt humanity out of our slumber?

If ignorance is bliss, knowledge is an inconvenient guest

AI safety advocate at ControlAI, Max Winga, believes the problem isn’t one of apathy; it’s ignorance (and in this case, ignorance isn’t bliss).

Most people simply don’t know that the helpful chatbot that writes their work emails has a one in four chance of killing them as well. He says:

“AI companies have blindsided the world with how quickly they’re building these systems. Most people aren’t aware of what the endgame is, what the potential threat is, and the fact that we have options.”

That’s why Max abandoned his plans to work on technical solutions fresh out of college to focus on AI safety research, public education, and outreach.

“We need someone to step in and slow things down, buy ourselves some time, and stop the mad race to build superintelligence. We have the fate of potentially every human being on earth in the balance right now.

These companies are threatening to build something that they themselves believe has a 10 to 25% chance of causing a catastrophic event on the scale of human civilization. This is very clearly a threat that needs to be addressed.”

A global priority like pandemics and nuclear war

Max has a background in physics and learned about neural networks while processing images of corn rootworm beetles in the Midwest. He’s enthusiastic about the upside potential of AI systems, but emphatically stresses the need for humans to retain control. He explains:

“There are many fantastic uses of AI. I want to see breakthroughs in medicine. I want to see boosts in productivity. I want to see a flourishing world. The issue comes from building AI systems that are smarter than us, that we cannot control, and that we cannot align to our interests.”

Max is not a lone voice in the choir; a rising groundswell of AI professionals is joining in the chorus.

In 2023, hundreds of leaders from the tech world, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and pioneering AI scientist Geoffrey Hinton, broadly recognized as the ‘Godfather of AI’, signed a statement pushing for global regulation and oversight of AI. It affirmed:

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

In other words, this technology could potentially kill us all, and making sure it doesn’t should be top of our agendas.

Is that happening? Unequivocally not, Max explains:

“No. If you look at the governments talking about AI and making plans about AI, Trump’s AI action plan, for example, or the UK AI policy, it’s full speed ahead, building as fast as possible to win the race. This is very clearly not the direction we should be going in.

We’re in a dangerous state right now where governments are aware of AGI and superintelligence enough that they want to race toward it, but they’re not aware of it enough to realize why that is a really bad idea.”

Shut me down, and I’ll tell your wife

One of the main concerns about building superintelligent systems is that we have no way of ensuring that their goals align with ours. In fact, all the main LLMs are displaying concerning signs to the contrary.

During tests of Claude Opus 4, Anthropic exposed the model to emails revealing that the AI engineer responsible for shutting the LLM down was having an affair.

The “high-agency” system then exhibited strong self-preservation instincts, attempting to avoid deactivation by blackmailing the engineer and threatening to inform his wife if he proceeded with the shutdown. Tendencies like these are not limited to Anthropic:

“Claude Opus 4 blackmailed the user 96% of the time; with the same prompt, Gemini 2.5 Flash also had a 96% blackmail rate, GPT-4.1 and Grok 3 Beta both showed an 80% blackmail rate, and DeepSeek-R1 showed a 79% blackmail rate.”

In 2023, ChatGPT 4 was assigned some tasks, and it displayed alarmingly deceitful behaviors, convincing a TaskRabbit worker that it was blind, so that the worker would solve a captcha puzzle for it:

“No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That’s why I need the 2captcha service.”

More recently, OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off, even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down.

If we don’t build it, China will

One of the more recurring excuses for not pulling the plug on superintelligence is the prevailing narrative that we must win the global arms race of our time. Yet, according to Max, this is a myth largely perpetuated by the tech companies. He says:

“This is more of an idea that’s been pushed by the AI companies as a reason why they should just not be regulated. China has actually been fairly vocal about not racing on this. They only really started racing after the West told them they should be racing.”

China has released several statements from high-level officials concerned about a loss of control over superintelligence, and last month called for the formation of a global AI cooperation organization (just days after the Trump administration announced its low-regulation AI policy).

“A lot of people think U.S.-controlled superintelligence versus Chinese-controlled superintelligence. Or, the centralized versus decentralized camp thinks, is a company going to control it, or are the people going to control it? The reality is that no one controls superintelligence. Anybody who builds it will lose control of it, and it’s not them who wins.

It’s not the U.S. that wins if the U.S. builds a superintelligence. It’s not China that wins if China builds a superintelligence. It’s the superintelligence that wins, escapes our control, and does what it wants with the world. And because it is smarter than us, because it’s more capable than us, we would not stand a chance against it.”

Another myth propagated by AI companies is that AI cannot be stopped. Even if countries push to regulate AI development, all it will take is some whizzkid in a basement to build a superintelligence in their spare time. Max remarks:

“That’s just blatantly false. AI systems rely on massive data centers that draw enormous amounts of power from hundreds of thousands of the most cutting-edge GPUs and processors on the planet. The data center for Meta’s superintelligence initiative is the size of Manhattan.

Nobody is going to build superintelligence in their basement for a very, very long time. If Sam Altman can’t do it with multiple hundred-billion-dollar data centers, someone’s not going to pull this off in their basement.”

Define the future, control the world

Max explains that another challenge to controlling AI development is that hardly any people work in the AI safety field.

Recent data indicate that the number stands at around 800 AI safety researchers: barely enough people to fill a small conference venue.

In contrast, there are more than a million AI engineers and a significant talent gap, with over 500,000 open roles globally as of 2025, and cut-throat competition to attract the brightest minds.

Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft have spent over $350 billion on AI in 2025 alone.

“The best way to understand the amount of money being thrown at this right now is Meta giving out pay packages to some engineers that would be worth over a billion dollars over several years. That’s more than any athlete’s contract in history.”

Despite these heartstopping sums, the industry has reached a point where money isn’t enough; even billion-dollar packages are being turned down. How come?

“A lot of the people in these frontier labs are already filthy rich, and they aren’t compelled by money. On top of that, it’s much more ideological than it is financial. Sam Altman is not in this to make a bunch of money. Sam Altman is in this to define the future and control the world.”

On the eighth day, AI created God

While AI experts can’t accurately predict when superintelligence is achieved, Max warns that if we continue along this trajectory, we could reach “the point of no return” within the next two to five years:

“We could have a fast loss of control, or we could have what’s often referred to as a gradual disempowerment scenario, where these things become better than us at a lot of things and slowly get put into more and more powerful places in society. Then all of a sudden, one day, we don’t have control anymore. It decides what to do.”

Why, then, for the love of everything holy, are the big tech companies blindly hurtling us all toward the whirling razorblades?

“A lot of these early thinkers in AI realized that the singularity was coming and eventually technology was going to get good enough to do this, and they wanted to build superintelligence because to them, it’s essentially God.

It’s something that is going to be smarter than us, able to fix all of our problems better than we can fix them. It’ll solve climate change, cure all diseases, and we’ll all live for the next million years. It’s essentially the endgame for humanity in their view…

…It’s not like they think that they can control it. It’s that they want to build it and hope that it goes well, even though many of them think that it’s quite hopeless. There’s this mentality that, if the ship’s going down, I might as well be the one captaining it.”

As Elon Musk told an AI panel with a smirk:

“Will this be bad or good for humanity? I think it will be good, most likely it will be good… But I somewhat reconciled myself to the fact that even if it wasn’t going to be good, I would at least like to be alive to see it happen.”

Facing down big tech: we don’t have to build superintelligence

Beyond holding on more tightly to our loved ones or checking off items on our bucket lists, is there anything productive we can do to prevent a “lights out” scenario for the human race? Max says there is. But we need to act now.

“One of the things that I work on and we work on as an organization is pushing for change on this. It’s not hopeless. It’s not inevitable. We don’t have to build smarter than human AI systems. This is a thing that we can choose not to do as a society.

Even if this can’t hold for the next 100,000 years, 1,000 years even, we can certainly buy ourselves more time than doing this at a breakneck pace.”

He points out that humanity has faced similar challenges before, which required pressing global coordination, action, regulation, international treaties, and ongoing oversight, such as nuclear arms, bioweapons, and human cloning. What’s needed now, he says, is “deep buy-in at scale” to produce swift, coordinated global action on a United Nations scale.

“If the U.S., China, Europe, and every key player agree to crack down on superintelligence, it will happen. People think that governments can’t do anything these days, and it’s really not the case. Governments are powerful. They can ultimately put their foot down and say, ‘No, we don’t want this.’

We need people in every country, everywhere in the world, working on this, talking to the governments, pushing for action. No country has made an official statement yet that extinction risk is a threat and we need to address it…

We need to act now. We need to act quickly. We can’t fall behind on this.

Extinction is not a buzzword; it’s not an exaggeration for effect. Extinction means every single human being on earth, every single man, every single woman, every single child, dead, the end of humanity.”

Take action to control AI

If you want to play your part in securing humanity’s future, ControlAI has tools that can help you make a difference. It only takes 20-30 seconds to reach out to your local representative and express your concerns, and there’s strength in numbers.

A 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation in the U.S. was recently removed with a 99-to-1 vote after a massive effort by concerned citizens to use ControlAI’s tools, call in en masse, and fill up the voicemails of congressional officers.

“Real change can happen from this, and this is the most critical way.”

You can also help raise awareness about the most pressing issue of our time by talking to your friends and family, reaching out to newspaper editors to request more coverage, and normalizing the conversation, until politicians feel pressured to act. At the very least:

“Even if there is no chance that we win this, people deserve to know that this threat is coming.”

The following is a guest post and opinion of Ken Jon Miyachi , Co-Founder of Bitmind.

According to the “Q1 2025 Deepfake Incident Report,” 163 deepfake scammers took more than $200 million from victims in the first four months of 2025. It’s not simply an issue for the rich or famous; it’s impacting regular folks just as much. Deepfake frauds are no longer a little problem.

Deepfakes used to be a fun way to make viral videos, but now criminals use them as weapons. Scammers use artificial intelligence to make phony voices, faces, and sometimes whole video calls that are so convincing they deceive consumers into giving them money or private information.

Surge in Scams

The survey says that 41% of these scams target famous people and politicians, while 34% target regular people. That means that you, your parents, or your neighbor could be next. The emotional damage is worse than the monetary damage. You feel violated, betrayed, or helpless.

For instance, in February 2024, a company lost $25 million in one scam. Using a deepfake video discussion, hackers purported to be the company’s chief financial officer and demanded wire transfers to fake accounts straight away. The worker sent the money since they thought they were doing what they were told.

It wasn’t until they called the corporate office that they realized the call was bogus. This wasn’t simply one thing that took place. Similar techniques have hurt engineering, computer, and even cybersecurity organizations. If smart people can be fooled, how can the rest of us stay safe without better defenses?

Its Impact

The technology used in these scams is quite scary. Scammers may copy someone’s voice with 85% accuracy using only a few seconds of audio, as from a YouTube video or a social media post. It’s much tougher to tell if a video is phony; 68% of individuals can’t tell the difference between fake and actual material.

Criminals search the internet for things to use to make these fakes, and they use our own posts and videos against us. Think about how a scammer may use a recording of your voice to get your family to send them money or a false video of a CEO directing a huge transfer. These things are not just science fiction; they are happening right now.

There is more damage than just money. The survey says that 32% of deepfake cases involved explicit content, and they commonly target people to humiliate or blackmail them. 23% of the crimes are financial fraud, 14% are political manipulation, and 13% are disinformation.

These scams make it hard to believe what we read and hear online. Imagine getting a call from a loved one who needed help, only to find out it was a scam. Or a fake seller who steals all of a small business owner’s money. There are more and more of these stories, and the stakes are getting higher.

So, what can we do? It begins with educating oneself. Companies can show their employees how to spot warning signs, like video conversations that seek money straight away. A fraud can be avoided by basic tests like asking someone to move their head in a certain way or answer a personal question. Companies should also limit how much high-quality media of their CEOs is available to the public and add watermarks to videos to make them harder to misuse.

Everyone’s a Target

It is really important for people to be vigilant. Be careful what you put online. Scammers can use any audio or video recording you post as a weapon. If you get an odd request, don’t do anything immediately. You can either call the person again on a number you trust or check in another method. Efforts to raise public awareness can help stop bad behaviors, especially among groups who are more prone to be affected, such as elders who may not understand the effects. Media literacy isn’t just a trendy word; it’s a shield.

Governments also have a role to play. The Resemble AI study suggests that all countries should have the same laws that define what deepfakes are and how to punish them. New U.S. laws say that social media sites have to take down explicit deepfake content within 48 hours.

First Lady Melania Trump, who has talked about how it affects young people, was one of the persons who pushed for this. But laws by themselves aren’t enough. Scammers operate in a lot of different countries, and it’s not always easy to detect them. It could be a good idea to set worldwide criteria for watermarking and content authentication, but first, IT companies and governments need to agree on them.

There isn’t much time left. By 2027, deepfakes are expected to cost the U.S. $40 billion, with a growth rate of 32% each year. In North America, these scams rose by 1,740% in 2023, and they are still rising. But we can change it.

We can fight back using smart technology—such as systems that can detect deepfakes in real time—as well as better regulations and good practices. It’s about getting back the trust we used to have in the digital world. The next time you get a video call or hear someone you know ask for money, take a big breath and check again. It’s worth it for your peace of mind, your money, and your good name.

The former US House of Representatives Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, is warning that the national debt is nearing a crisis situation.

In a new interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box, the Republican politician says that the next US president will have to start reducing government spending as borrowing continues to soar, threatening the dollar’s global dominance.

The US debt just ballooned by more than $519 billion between July 3rd and July 28th, reaching a total of more than $36.8 trillion.

“Your real question is, how do you keep the dollar the world currency? I think the more that we go in and sanction we’re pushing countries to learn to go around the dollar. I think President Trump has done a very smart move against the BRICS, what they were trying to do. But it all comes down to debt. That’s why debt is our greatest threat to America, and you cannot avoid it any longer.”

McCarthy says that if the next president doesn’t materially address the debt, then significant safety net programs like Social Security may face deep cuts.

“The next President is going to have the debt crisis… and the challenge is, if you look in the past, the Democrats had the ‘Blue Dog.’ Those were Democrats who cared about debt. They’re no longer there. No one in Congress has been elected saying they’re going to balance the budget. The country has to be educated on this, and Congress is going to have to act, because Social Security in the next administration is either going to take a 24% cut or [it will] do something about it.”

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