Security | The Verge

Ring says its new encryption limits what it can give police

2026-08-28T15:37:37-04:00

All Ring cameras will soon use TAKE encryption by default. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Ring has a new way to protect your videos. It's developed an encryption method called TAKE, short for Throw Away the Key Encryption, that the Amazon-owned company says will protect your videos without traditional end-to-end encryption. TAKE limits when and why Amazon's cloud can access those videos, while still providing features like smart alerts for people and packages, AI-powered video search, and video descriptions.

The feature is rolling out gradually starting in September, regardless of whether you have a subscription, and will become the default encryption for all Ring customers.

TAKE arrives during a year of intense scrutiny for R …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Rockstar finally responds to ‘heartbreaking’ GTA VI leaks

2026-08-27T15:16:04-04:00

Rockstar Games has released its first official statement following days of sustained leaks of footage from Grand Theft Auto VI, calling the period "heartbreaking for our team." Not long after Rockstar posted, another leaked video appeared, this time showing the Jason character pulling off the series' trademark move of carjacking a box Chevy-like vehicle with a "Rideout Customs" logo across the back window and trying to evade the police. At the end, the other main character of the game, Lucia, appears briefly in what looks like a cutscene.

"It would be an understatement to say that having videos of Grand Theft Auto VI gameplay leak in this w …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta glasses are a workplace menace

2026-08-20T08:24:03-04:00

In August, Toru Hinkle was stocking shelves at their job at Target when they noticed two customers and asked if they needed any help. The men requested a price check on an item - but even after Hinkle told them the item was $20, the customers asked for the price again and again.

"After a while, I realized that I'm basically being pranked, and I noticed the glasses," Hinkle says, referring to the frames with a blinking light. They were the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and the customers were filming. Hinkle eventually called a store manager over, but the pranksters antagonized her, too - asking the price repeatedly, deliberately misgendering Hinkle …

Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI hit the brakes. Now what?

2026-08-19T13:10:09-04:00

With a looming IPO, intense competition from Anthropic, and Chinese and open-weight rivals nipping at its heels, OpenAI has plenty of reasons to move fast. Instead, it hit the brakes.

On Tuesday, the company said it had slowed the pace of some AI development while it tightened security and safeguards. That included a two-week pause in reinforcement learning training on its "latest models intended for deployment," and an ongoing delay to its "largest planned frontier RL run."

The decision is a very public test of an idea AI safety advocates have pushed for for years: that companies should be willing to bow out of the AI race and slow things …

Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI lays out new security changes after its AI hacked Hugging Face

2026-08-18T15:28:30-04:00

OpenAI is announcing security updates following the July news that its AI broke out of a sandboxed environment and accidentally hacked Hugging Face, including improvements to its research environments, monitoring, and alignment techniques. The company had already put the brakes on a new model, Astra, that it thinks could have "critical" cybersecurity capabilities, and the company says it instituted a two-week pause in reinforcement learning (RL) training on its "latest models intended for deployment" while it tightened up security. The company's "largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold."

For its frontier model research, OpenAI now r …

Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI reportedly disbanded its preparedness team

2026-08-18T17:18:01-04:00

According to the Financial Times, OpenAI disbanded its preparedness team at the end of last month. The job of the preparedness team was to assess if models posed serious risks and develop ways to mitigate those risks. (You know, like the possibility that it could go rogue and hack another company.)

OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood denied that claim, saying in a statement to The Verge that "We have not disbanded the Preparedness team. We have strong research leaders across cybersecurity, biological and chemical, and AI self-improvement capabilities, all reporting to Saachi Jain, our head of safety."

According to FT, responsibility has instea …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Rogue AI aren’t science fiction anymore

2026-08-14T11:16:22-04:00

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI safety, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

How it started

It all started in July, when one of OpenAI's autonomous AI agents went rogue during a cybersecurity test. The agent escaped its isolated testing environment, accessed the internet, and hacked another company, Hugging Face. A few years ago, that might have sounded like science fiction. But, broadly speaking, that's exactly what happened, and the incident kicked off a wave of concern over what increa …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The fight over Flock and other ALPRs

2026-08-31T12:30:49-04:00

There are over 120,000 of Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras installed all over the US. Flock’s cameras, and others like them, use AI to identify and track vehicles based on their license plate number, make, model, color, and other info, networked together to track vehicles and people’s movements throughout the day and across the country.

Dozens of communities have canceled contracts for the cameras or turned them off, including Los Angeles, as officials have pushed for more limits on the data they collect, who has access to it, and how it can be used in the future. Earlier this year, Amazon-owned Ring canceled a partnership with Flock after online backlash.

The Trump admin will start letting private firms launch international cyberattacks

2026-08-13T15:13:27-04:00

The Trump administration is launching a new program that will allow private firms to perform cyberattacks against foreign criminals, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. The private firms would operate "under the control and oversight" of the federal government, giving them permission to surveil and disrupt criminal networks, according to a presidential memorandum published on Wednesday.

The Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security will oversee the private firms, which must meet requirements in "technical proficiency, proven performance of cyber operations, facility security," and more. Companies in the program must hold a bon …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta adds AI screening to detect WhatsApp scams

2026-08-13T12:10:06-04:00

Meta is launching an optional Scam Alert feature on WhatsApp that uses on-device machine learning to flag suspicious messages. Earlier this year, Meta also launched scam detection for device linking requests on WhatsApp. The new Scam Alert feature, which is rolling out in a limited beta, shows users a warning if a chat seems like a scam:

If the model identifies a message as a likely scam attempt, the user sees a warning in the chat, which is not visible to the other person. From there, the user can decide what to do: block, report, or continue the conversation. If they decide that a warning is incorrectly flagged, the user can mark the cha …

Read the full story at The Verge.