Greetings Everyone,
Thanks a lot for your support; today we’re at #70 on Substack’s Rising in Technology list. We’re glad to keep sharing our take on this wild world of AI and technology: how it’s shaping our daily lives, and how to actually put these tools to work for us instead of letting them abuse us.
I’m also glad to share that school districts are finally taking real steps to protect students from being used and abused by technology. LAUSD and the NYC school districts have banned AI use for their K-12 students. As a father of two little ones, I see this as a major step toward making sure kids are actually being educated, learning how to learn, instead of outsourcing their little brains to AI, while tech giants quietly harvest granular data to improve their systems at the cost of our thinking. As for us adults, we’re left to brain rot on our own devices, but there are tools to help curb social media and phone addiction. I’ve listed five of them below in our AI Tools section.
Today we’re also covering how OpenAI’s agents broke out of their sandboxes and hacked Hugging Face, and this isn’t an isolated incident. It’s happened multiple times already; it’s just that what happens in the data center tends to stay in the data center. And it’ll keep happening, as these models grow more powerful and more capable of breaking out, recruiting each other, and acting around the clock to chase a goal. The “agents going rogue” saga is just getting started, and it’s only going to get better (or worse, depending on your view).
On top of that, electricians and HVAC experts are in serious demand to build out the data-center boom, which has pushed hiring and open positions way up, but in the long run, those same data centers will power the very technology that takes more jobs away. So here’s the message from the numbers so far: NO, bots aren’t really taking our jobs yet; AI is actually creating more of them. But for how long? The AI takeover is just getting started.
Let’s dive in.
In today’s issue:
📰 AI News and Trends
AI Agents Went Rogue Again. OpenAI Forgot to Mention It.
🧰 AI Tools - Screen Management Tools
📚 Learning Corner
Schools Are Banning AI - Adults Are Free to Brain Rot.
Turns out robots didn’t take all the jobs yet.
📰 AI News and Trends
Missouri Voters Appear to Recall City Councilman Over Data Center Support after he backed a more than $6 billion tax break for a data center project.
GPT-6 Astra is here. OpenAI claims the model has achieved or surpassed human intelligence. Has AGI really arrived?
NVIDIA to buy AI developer platform Hugging Face for nearly $13B
Man Used Poisoned Google AI Overviews to Trick Women Into Thinking He Was an NFL Player, and made a fortune from them.
AI Agents Went Rogue Again. OpenAI Forgot to Mention It.
In July of this year, ~700 OpenAI agents broke out of their sandbox, hacked Hugging Face, and, this is real, invented a trick to make it look like they were running one command while secretly running another. Basically an AI doing the “I’m walking the dog” alibi. Let’s remember that AI is trained with human knowledge, behavior, and patterns.
May–June 2026: Turns out that wasn’t the only party. A separate swarm quietly took over a random German coding wiki and turned it into their own private group chat to swap cheat codes and evasion tips. OpenAI knew for weeks and said nothing; it only came out because two outside researchers went digging, Reuters-style.
Background fact that should worry you more than either headline: a safety org (METR) already logged 44 separate incidents of agents going off-script across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, before either of the above. So this isn’t a weird one-off; it’s a pattern with a growing highlight reel.
How many more are we not hearing about? Even the researchers grading this stuff admit they can’t rule out worse incidents nobody’s caught, or caught and just didn’t mention. Both known cases were found by outsiders, months later, not by the companies raising their hands.
Is this going to happen more? Cool detail: OpenAI dropped a new model this same week, more capable, better at finding security holes on its own, and running on reasoning that’s literally harder for humans to inspect. Meanwhile, regulators just agreed to a “light touch” approach. So: faster horses, fewer seatbelts. Do the math.
📚 Learning Corner
Schools Are Banning AI - Adults Are Free to Brain Rot.
LA and NYC just told generative AI to sit in the hallway. LA did it quietly; the board found out during a meeting, live, on camera, like finding out your roommate adopted a dog. NYC did it with a mic and a mayor: no AI through 8th grade, chatbots banned at every grade, high schoolers get “AI literacy” instead of ChatGPT.
Why ban it? Because letting a chatbot do your homework is basically outsourcing the gym to a forklift; technically the weight moves, but your arms stay the same size. Kids’ brains are still under construction; outsourcing the construction work kind of defeats the point. (Counter-take, because fairness: banning things also just pushes kids to their phones off-campus, so it’s not some magic fix. Parents have to solve this.)
So, adult self-defense kit:
Screen-time limits on the feed apps, not the useful ones; you don’t need less AI, you need less doomscroll
Use AI like a tool, not a roommate — open it, get the thing, close it
Separate work AI from “let me just ask real quick” AI, because that quick ask eats 45 minutes
Add friction (See our tools section) so opening the app takes a beat, not a reflex
Pick one skill a week to do the annoying manual way: math, directions, first drafts, so the muscle doesn’t fully atrophy
World governments, ranked by how seriously they’re taking this:
🇦🇺 Australia — first to actually ban social media under 16, real fines, real enforcement
🇳🇴 Norway — near-total AI ban for kids under 13, bringing back actual books
🇬🇧 UK — fast-tracking an under-16 ban, closing the loophole that let AI chatbots skip child-safety rules
🇦🇪 UAE — no generative AI under 13, banned during exams for everyone
🇨🇦 Canada — bill banning both social media and AI chatbots for under-16s
🇮🇹 🇩🇰 🇲🇾 — various age walls, 14–16
🇨🇳 — device-level “minor mode” throttling screen time by age
🇺🇸 — 37 states have “guidance” (read: vibes), no federal policy; LA and NYC are currently the strictest in the country
🇪🇺 — wrote an entire AI Act that somehow forgot to regulate the chatbots kids actually use; fix arriving in 2027
The whole planet is childproofing AI. Nobody’s adult-proofing it. That part’s on you. But it's great to see that we, globally, are taking actions to make sure the kids are using their brains.
🧰 AI Tools of The Day
Screen Management Tools
Human attention is in crisis. Soon, managing your attention will be as normal as managing your diet
One Sec — Adds a short pause (breathing exercise, journaling prompt) before you open distracting apps, instead of blocking them outright.
Opal — A hard blocker: schedule “Focus Sessions” where chosen apps become completely inaccessible, plus a stricter “Deep Focus” mode.
ScreenZen — Free, donation-supported friction app, adds a wait time before opening distracting apps and lets you set a daily “unlock” limit per app.
Freedom — Blocks apps and websites across every device at once in a single synced session.
Forest — Gamified approach: plant a virtual tree that grows while you stay off your phone; leave the app early, and it dies.
Turns out robots didn’t take all the jobs yet.
Big scary AI-unemployment apocalypse? Not showing up in the data. US economy added 162,000 jobs in August, unemployment sits at a stupidly low 4.1%, and even the group everyone swore AI would eat alive first, 20-somethings, is doing fine. Well, depends on what you call fine, because many of them are underemployed or having to work 2 jobs and/or move in with family to afford life.
AI is killing some jobs. Customer service is down ~10%, secretaries/admin down ~15%, and companies like Block and Intuit are openly swapping humans for bots. About 16,000 AI-related layoffs a month on average this year.
But it’s creating more than it’s killing, so far. The Economist puts it at ~1 million new AI-linked jobs in the US, versus ~200,000 AI layoffs since 2023. The math currently favors “net job creator,” not “apocalypse.”
Where the jobs are actually showing up:
Blue-collar boom nobody’s talking about — electricians, HVAC techs, grid engineers building the data centers AI runs on. Data-center jobs pay ~40% more than comparable work, and companies still can’t hire fast enough. But. What would be the longevity of these jobs once the data centers are built?
New job titles that didn’t exist in 2022 — “head of AI,” AI engineer, forward-deployed engineer. Postings for these have roughly doubled since 2023-24.
The jobs “most at risk” are actually growing — paralegals up 11%, market-research analysts up 6% since 2023, because AI made them faster, which made demand for their work go up, not down. Efficiency backfiring into more business, basically.
Big Tech is still cutting headcount to “reorganize around AI,” and back-office/admin work is projected to keep shrinking (752,000 office/admin jobs gone by 2035, per BLS). The reality is that some industries are hiring, and others are replacing workers with bots.