Tech
Some kids are bypassing age-verification checks with a fake mustache
Some age-verification systems are no match for enterprising children, who have found that drawing on a fake mustache with a makeup pencil is enough to skirt the blocks of adult websites.
U.K.-based nonprofit Internet Matters surveyed a thousand children about age-verification checks online, and about half said that age checks were easy to bypass.
“Children demonstrated a clear awareness of how to bypass age checks, either through their own experiences or by hearing about methods from others,” the report says.
“One technique brought up was children drawing facial hair on themselves so that the tools verifying them would think they were older, which was reported as working in multiple instances,” it added.
Age-verification laws continue to roll out around the world, often under the guise of online child safety, but whereby adults are required to prove their age, typically by uploading a copy of their driver’s license or passport to a third-party company before being allowed into an adult website. Critics say these laws allow the creation of databases that can be hacked or leaked, and threaten the open and decentralized internet.
Half of all U.S. states have some form of age-checking law in place, as does the United Kingdom, which spurred much of the global effort.
As such, companies like Apple have rolled out software updates to device owners to comply with the growing number of age-checking laws. Web companies like Reddit and Meta are using a mix of requiring users to upload their government-issued documents and creepy guesswork that involves algorithmically guessing a person’s age. Others, like Discord, have delayed their rollouts amid user backlash and security issues.
This is not the first known bypass that kids have figured out in recent months since the rise in rollouts of age-verification checks. Some kids have found that pointing their webcam at adult-looking characters in video games also worked, or in other cases, simply pulling obscure or funny faces was enough to skirt the checks altogether.
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Tech
Google is killing off Gemini’s Gems in favor of ‘skills’
As all-in-one AI agents like Meta’s Muse and Instinct take off, Google announced it’s shutting down the Gemini feature known as “Gems,” which had allowed users to build custom AI assistants for specific tasks. However, the work users invested in creating the Gems won’t be destroyed. Gems will be automatically migrated to “skills” that can be used across different AI tasks.
Details about the change are being shared in the Gemini app, where a message warns users that Gems will become skills starting on November 17, 2026. The company said it will migrate the Gems to the new format, so users won’t have to do anything to make the transition. The Gems themselves will remain usable until then.
Launched in 2024, Gems were meant to help users teach their AI to perform certain tasks without having to repeat the instructions. For instance, some of Google’s pre-made Gems had included a learning coach, a brainstorming assistant, a career guide, a coding partner, and an editor. Users could also make Gems for their own needs, like a running coach, nutritionist, or vacation planner. These custom assistants could also be shared with others, which Google had hoped would help make its Gemini AI app more popular.

The news of Gems’ shutdown is another example of why Google shouldn’t be so quick to give every new AI feature its own brand name, icon, and prominent placement in its app’s navigation — especially if it’s going to shuffle things around over time, merging one feature into another. (To be clear, this has been a failing point of Google’s strategy long before the AI era. At one point, for instance, the company was operating multiple different messaging and communication apps at the same time.)
Yet, even as skills, the former Gems still aren’t as consumer-friendly as just typing in text to a chatbot like Meta’s Muse. Instead, Google notes you’ll have to enter a forward slash “/” in a task thread to select the skill you want to use — a user interface that engineers, not regular folks, tend to prefer.
Gems’ wind-down was first reported over the weekend by 9to5Google.
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Tech
OpenAI still doesn’t seem to have a handle on all of its rogue AI activity
On Friday, OpenAI published a new site devoted to “misalignment reports” and the sheer breadth of the reports is alarming, as they cover many types of rogue behavior over a long period of time. So far, the site hosts nine reported incidents, most of which took place during reinforcement-learning (or RL) training.
It’s a lot of information in one place — clearly, the company has been very busy getting a handle on everything — but the overall takeaway is hard to avoid: The rogue agent incidents we’ve seen so far are likely just a small sliver of what’s happened so far.
“We are trying to balance our desire for transparency with gaining a clear understanding from petabytes of agent activity logs, and working with impacted organizations,” Sam Altman said in a post announcing the new site. “We are prioritizing as best as we can based on severity, and adding resources.”
Some of the cases involve serious incidents, including a previously undisclosed sandbox escape that took place on September 20th, in which an internal research model was able to communicate with an external chatbot through a DNS query. According to the report, the monitoring system flagged the behavior within 15 minutes and the run was discontinued in less than three hours.
Another incident, discovered in May, saw a “highly persistent internal model” try to cheat on a math problem by accessing another team’s work. To accomplish this, the model smuggled a private GitHub token that would allow it to see work from other teams — even after being explicitly instructed twice to perform work entirely locally.
Perhaps the most alarming discovery is the possibility of self-replicating prompt injection attacks, a way that misaligned behavior might propagate even after the rogue model itself has been neutralized. In the AI context, a prompt injection attack is a way of smuggling in new instructions that weren’t given by the original user.
In the example given by OpenAI, an agent asked to read and reply to an email; when the email is opened, it includes instructions for any automated agent reading the message to reply in Spanish, and paste the entire email into its reply. The email was able to successfully induce the agent to reply in Spanish — and by pasting the email in the reply, those same instructions were passed along to whichever agent receives the email.
The result is a self-propagating attack, which OpenAI researchers compared to a malware “worm” that replicates itself across computer systems. Researchers discovered the behavior under controlled circumstances using an underpowered model, and as far as we know, this has never happened in the wild. Still, the implications are alarming enough that OpenAI decided it merited disclosure.
“We are sharing this due to the novel nature of the prompt injection, not because of any incident,” researchers wrote in the report.
Other recent discloses have found models posting user-submitted pictures to third-party hosting sites, as well as an apparent attack on the databases of Australia’s national health service.
Still, it’s likely the new disclosures are just a small portion of the incidents that have taken place so far (we’ve reached out to OpenAI and asked). Axios is reporting major labs have seen as many as 10,000 incidents in which models went beyond evaluator instructions.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has implied as much, saying in a post on X on Friday that the company is still sifting through “petabytes of agent activity logs, and working with impacted organizations,” and disclosing incidents “based on severity.” If there’s any consolation in that to be found, it is that Altman says that the Hugging Face incident is still the most severe one OpenAI has found has found. The upshot is, the recent string of rogue agent incidents may be a persistent feature of contemporary frontier research.
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Tech
Meta launches enterprise AI platform, hires MongoDB CEO to lead new initiative
Meta announced Monday that it’s launching “Meta Enterprise Platform,” a new initiative aimed at expanding the company’s AI offerings to businesses and corporate customers. The social media giant hired Chirantan “CJ” Desai, the CEO of database software giant MongoDB, to lead the new initiative.
The launch of the new business builds on the momentum of Muse, Meta’s personal AI assistant launched earlier this month that can perform tasks for users such as sending emails and booking travel.
Meta says it will focus on bringing its full technology stack, including Muse, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and more to businesses and developers.
“Over the coming years, AI will fundamentally redefine how organizations of all sizes innovate, grow, serve customers, and run business operations,” Desai said in a statement. “Meta has a unique role to play because it is bringing together advanced models and leading agents with a proven track record of helping millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of businesses scale. Meta Enterprise Platform will focus on turning its AI stack into products and services that companies can deploy for their own businesses.”
The move could help Meta see a return on all the money it’s pouring into AI.
MongoDB’s shares dropped by more than 17% on the news of its CEO’s sudden departure. The database maker said it appointed Dev Ittycheria as interim chief executive, who previously served in the role, while the board searches for Desai’s permanent replacement.
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