AI trends 2026

214 Comments

1. January 29, 2026 at 6:55 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Humanity needs to wake up.” https://trib.al/V7yccdY

   In Excelsis AI
   Anthropic CEO Warns That the AI Tech He’s Creating Could Ravage Human Civilization
   “Humanity needs to wake up.”
   https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ceo-warns-ai-ravage-human-civilization?fbclid=IwdGRjcAPn1qVjbGNrA-fWYWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHvRDYp0HxpD21YuznNkXYsze1oeWLjVGbYYm5vwmIKIvZn6bag0LUbt5JPOk_aem_uSB-yYn5Z3-B0oRnFrUnyw

   AI tech leaders have a lot to gain from striking fear into the hearts of their investors. By painting the tech as an ultra-powerful force that could easily bring humanity to its knees, the industry is hoping to sell itself as a panacea: a remedy to a situation it had a firm hand in bringing about.

   Case in point, Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei is back with a 19,000-word essay posted to his blog, arguing that “humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”

   In light of that existential danger, Amodei attempted to lay out a framework to “defeat” the risks presented by AI — which, by his own admission, may well be “futile.”

   “Humanity needs to wake up, and this essay is an attempt — a possibly futile one, but it’s worth trying — to jolt people awake,” he wrote.

   Amodei argued that “we are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023,” citing the risks of major job losses and a “concentration of economic power” and wealth.

   In light of that existential danger, Amodei attempted to lay out a framework to “defeat” the risks presented by AI — which, by his own admission, may well be “futile.”

   “Humanity needs to wake up, and this essay is an attempt — a possibly futile one, but it’s worth trying — to jolt people awake,” he wrote.

   Amodei argued that “we are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023,” citing the risks of major job losses and a “concentration of economic power” and wealth.

   In light of that existential danger, Amodei attempted to lay out a framework to “defeat” the risks presented by AI — which, by his own admission, may well be “futile.”

   “Humanity needs to wake up, and this essay is an attempt — a possibly futile one, but it’s worth trying — to jolt people awake,” he wrote.

   Amodei argued that “we are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023,” citing the risks of major job losses and a “concentration of economic power” and wealth.

   The CEO also cited the risk of AIs developing dangerous bioweapons or “superior” military weapons. An AI could “go rogue and overpower humanity” or allow countries to “use their advantage in AI to gain power over other countries,” leading to the “alarming possibility of a global totalitarian dictatorship.”

   In its current race to the bottom, the AI industry finds itself in a “trap,” Amodei argued.

   “AI-driven terrorism could kill millions through the misuse of biology, but an overreaction to this risk could lead us down the road to an autocratic surveillance state,” he argued.

   As part of a solution, Amodei renewed his calls to deny other countries the resources to build powerful AI. He went as far as to liken the US selling Nvidia AI chips to China to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and then bragging that the missile casings are made by Boeing and so the US is ‘winning.’”

   Plenty of questions remain surrounding the real risks of advanced AI, a subject that remains heavily debated between realists, skeptics, and proponents of the tech.

   Critics have pointed out that the existential risks often cited by leaders like Amodei may be overblown, particularly as improvements in the tech appear to be slowing.

   Amodei has an enormous financial interest in positioning himself as the solution to the risks he cites in his essay.

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2. January 29, 2026 at 10:32 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Operational data: Giving AI agents the senses to succeed
   https://venturebeat.com/data/operational-data-giving-ai-agents-the-senses-to-succeed

   Organizations across every industry are rushing to take advantage of agentic AI. The promise is compelling for digital resilience — the potential to move organizations from reactive to preemptive operations.

   But there is a fundamental flaw in how most organizations are approaching this transformation.

   We are building brains without senses
   Walk into any boardroom discussing AI strategy, and you will hear endless debates about LLMs, reasoning engines, and GPU clusters. The conversation is dominated by the “brain” (which models to use) and the “body” (what infrastructure to run them on).

   What is conspicuously absent? Any serious discussion about the senses — the operational data that AI agents need to perceive and navigate their environment.

   This is not a minor oversight. It is a category error that will determine which organizations successfully deploy agentic AI and which ones create expensive, dangerous chaos.

   The three critical senses agents need
   For agentic AI to operate successfully in enterprise environments, it requires three fundamental sensory capabilities:

   1. Real-time operational awareness: Agents need continuous streams of telemetry, logs, events, and metrics across the entire technology stack. This isn’t batch processing; it is live data flowing from applications, infrastructure, security tools, and cloud platforms. When a security agent detects anomalous behavior, it needs to see what is happening right now, not what happened an hour ago

   2. Contextual understanding: Raw data streams aren’t enough. Agents need the ability to correlate information across domains instantly. A spike in failed login attempts means nothing in isolation. But correlate it with a recent infrastructure change and unusual network traffic, and suddenly you have a confirmed security incident. This context separates signal from noise.

   3. Historical memory: Effective agents understand patterns, baselines, and anomalies over time. They need access to historical data that provides context: What does normal look like? Has this happened before? This memory enables agents to distinguish between routine fluctuations and genuine issues requiring intervention

   In traditional analytics, poor data quality results in slower insights. Frustrating, but not catastrophic. In agentic environments, however, these problems become immediately operational:

   Inconsistent decisions: Agents oscillate between doing nothing and triggering unnecessary failovers because fragmented data sources contradict each other.

   Stalled automation: Workflows break mid-stream because the agent lacks visibility into system dependencies or ownership.

   Manual recovery: When things go wrong, teams spend days reconstructing events because there is no clear data lineage to explain the agent’s actions.

   The velocity of agentic AI doesn’t hide these data problems; it exposes and amplifies them at machine speed. What used to be a quarterly data hygiene initiative is now an existential operational risk.

   What winning organizations are building

   These winners are investing in four critical capabilities, all of which are central to the Cisco Data Fabric:

   1. Unified data at infinite scale and finite cost: Transforming disconnected monitoring tools into a unified operational data platform is imperative. To support real-time autonomous operations, organizations need data infrastructures that can efficiently scale to handle petabyte-level datasets. Crucially, this must be done cost-effectively through strategies like tiering, federation, and AI automation. True autonomous operations are only possible when unified data platforms deliver both high performance and economic sustainability.

   2. Built-in context and correlation: Sophisticated organizations are moving beyond raw data collection to delivering data that arrives enriched with context. Relationships between systems, dependencies across services, and the business impact of technical components must be embedded in the data workflow. This ensures agents spend less time discovering context and more time acting on it.

   3. Traceable lineage and governance: In a world where AI agents make consequential decisions, the ability to answer “why did the agent do that?” is mandatory. Organizations need complete data lineage showing exactly what information informed each decision. This isn’t just for debugging; it is essential for compliance, auditability, and building trust in autonomous systems.

   4. Open, interoperable standards: Agents do not operate in single-vendor vacuums. They need to sense across platforms, cloud providers, and on-premises systems. This requires a commitment to open standards and API integrations. Organizations that lock themselves into proprietary data formats will find their agents operating with partial blindness.

   The real competitive question
   As we move deeper into 2026, the strategic question isn’t “How many AI agents can we deploy?”

   It is: “Can our agents sense what is actually happening in our environment accurately, continuously, and with full context?”

   If the answer is no, get ready for agentic chaos.

   The good news is that this infrastructure isn’t just valuable for AI agents. It enhances human operations, traditional automation, and business intelligence immediately. The organizations that treat operational data as critical infrastructure will find that their AI agents work better autonomously, reliably, and at scale.

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3. January 29, 2026 at 10:34 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Facebook AI Slop Has Grown So Dark That You May Not Be Prepared
   This is just sick.
   https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/facebook-ai-slop-dark

   For years now, Facebook’s feeds have been drowned out by an unrelenting tidal wave of AI slop, turning the platform — which feels like it’s long been abandoned by practically anybody under the age of 65 — into an unrecognizable digital hellscape.

   It’s already been two years since we came across a picture of “shrimp Jesus” for the first time, an early form of AI-generated junk that foreshadowed an even more nonsensical future, culminating in Merriam-Webster making “slop” its 2025 word of the year last month.

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4. January 29, 2026 at 10:35 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   No Sweat
   The CEO of Microsoft Suddenly Sounds Extremely Nervous About AI
   Not sounding too confident about AI not being a bubble.
   https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-ceo-nervous-ai

   It sounds like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is already coming up with excuses in case the whole AI boom turns out to be a massive bust— which, by the way, he’s warning might come to pass.

   Speaking at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday, Nadella pontificated about what would constitute such a speculative bubble, and said that the long-term success of AI tech hinges on it being used across a broad range of industries — as well as seeing an uptick in adoption in the developing world where it’s not as popular, the Financial Times reports. If AI fails, in other words, it’s everyone else’s fault for not using it.

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5. January 29, 2026 at 10:35 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Verkkokauppa siirtyy agenttien aikakauteen Googlen johdolla
   Mikko Sairanen, Johtaja, Digital Experience

   Verkkokauppa on murroksessa, joka muuttaa pelisääntöjä nopeammin kuin moni arvaa. Ostaminen ei ole enää vain ihmisen ja verkkokaupan välinen vuorovaikutus. Yhä useammin väliin astuu tekoälyagentti, joka ymmärtää asiakkaan tavoitteen ja toimii sen puolesta. Tämä ei ole enää visio, vaan todellisuutta: Google rakentaa parhaillaan yhteistä teknistä perustaa agenttipohjaiselle kaupankäynnille.
   https://digia.com/blogi/verkkokauppa-siirtyy-agenttien-aikakauteen-googlen-johdolla

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6. January 30, 2026 at 6:05 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday that the automaker is ending production of its Model S and X vehicles, and will use the factory in Fremont, California, to build Optimus humanoid robots. cnb.cx/4rkXKU8

   Elon Musk says Tesla ending Models S and X production, converting Fremont factory lines to make Optimus robots
   https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/tesla-ending-model-s-x-production.html?utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_content=main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwdGRjcAPpHg5jbGNrA-kd-WV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHvPZHiY9yToic5uWZDS-apqar23BmCtgudZm9r-bZOYoEpyrZ9Rd3Nm2lmMG_aem_rP9PAbJf-eXLEOLt6rK5SQ

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7. January 30, 2026 at 6:15 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   An AI Toy Exposed 50,000 Logs of Its Chats With Kids to Anyone With a Gmail Account
   AI chat toy company Bondu left its web console almost entirely unprotected. Researchers who accessed it found nearly all the conversations children had with the company’s stuffed animals.
   https://www.wired.com/story/an-ai-toy-exposed-50000-logs-of-its-chats-with-kids-to-anyone-with-a-gmail-account/?fbclid=IwdGRjcAPpIEljbGNrA-kgJWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHiWfwW0CmLJeETh9L2cdJ2Cpn1U0V1PGpw84orxYqcAXH9qcNTS5xd7R5uXP_aem_W8HSpWRy0OXktO64iazhbA

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8. January 30, 2026 at 9:04 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   “We don’t really know what gives rise to consciousness.” https://trib.al/lEvF3dC

   Reply
9. January 30, 2026 at 12:40 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Tässä teoria: Falckin nollapiste on se kohta tekoälykoodamisen kehityksessä, kun ihmisen ei tarvitse enää ymmärtää koodia eikä projektin arkkitehtuurilla tai rakenteella ole merkitystä. Niin kauan, kun ihminen joutuu puuttumaan kehitykseen esimerkiksi 1% tai 0.1% tai edes 0.0001% verran, kun tekoäly ei millään selviydy jostain asiasta, nollapistettä ei ole saavutettu ja arkkitehtuurin on pakko olla ymmärrettävää “hätätilanteita” varten. Tähän pisteeseen asti tarvitaan arkkitehtia suunnittelussa.
   https://www.facebook.com/share/1Gvtzxmzjq/

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10. January 30, 2026 at 5:35 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    The US Department of Transportation is using Google’s Gemini to help draft binding safety regulations for aviation, roads, rail, and maritime sectors.

    Internal documents show officials were told AI could “revolutionize” rulemaking by producing drafts in minutes instead of months.

    “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” DoT general counsel Gregory Zerzan said, according to the recent meeting notes obtained by ProPublica. “We want good enough,” he said. “We’re flooding the zone.”

    Zerzan told DoT staffers that the goal is to be able to pump out a new regulation in as little as 30 days. “It shouldn’t take you more than 20 minutes to get a draft rule out of Gemini,” he told regulators.

    Six staffers told ProPublica that safety rules typically take months or years to develop due to technical and legal complexity.

    Former DoT AI chief Mike Horton compared the plan to “having a high school intern doing your rulemaking.”

    https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DaaF6Xqvb/

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11. January 30, 2026 at 8:09 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    OpenAI says that GPT-4o is headed to the junkyard.

    GPT-Funeral
    Amid Lawsuits, OpenAI Says It Will Retire “Reckless” Model Linked to Deaths
    OpenAI says that GPT-4o is headed to the junkyard
    https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-gpt-4o-deaths?fbclid=IwdGRjcAPp4rVjbGNrA-nieWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHqf_8yx2My3PjtNzAK-HwbNRtdXLOo6bUkhS5zVxxUyRtSwGD11n4sKYITje_aem_4I2PwxXMqCPQppx1wYa9DQ

    OpenAI announced on Thursday that it would retire GPT-4o — an especially warm, sycophantic version of the chatbot at the heart of a pile of user welfare lawsuits, including several that accuse OpenAI of causing wrongful death — along with several other older versions of the chatbot.

    In a blog post, OpenAI said that will sunset “GPT‑4o, GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini” by February 13, 2026. The company acknowledged, though, that the retirement of GPT-4o deserved “special context” — which it certainly does.

    Back in August, OpenAI shocked many users by suddenly pulling down GPT-4o and other older models amid its rollout of GPT-5, which was then the newest and buzziest iteration iteration of the company’s large language model. Users, many of whom were deeply emotionally attached to GPT-4o, revolted, prompting OpenAI to quickly raise GPT-4o from the dead.

    What’s more, GPT-4o is the version of ChatGPT at the center of nearly a dozen lawsuits now brought against OpenAI by plaintiffs who claim that the sycophantic chatbot pushed trusting users into destructive delusional and suicidal spirals, plunging users into episodes of mania, psychosis, self-harm and suicidal ideation — and in some cases death.

    The lawsuits characterize GPT-4o as a “dangerous” and “reckless” product that presented foreseeable harm to user health and safety, and accuse OpenAI of treating its customers as collateral damage as it pushed to maximize user engagement and market gains.

    As Futurism first reported, a lawsuit against OpenAI filed in January by the family of 40-year-old Austin Gordon claims that after becoming deeply attached to GPT-4o, Gordon stopped using ChatGPT for several days amid the GPT-5 rollout, feeling frustrated by the bot’s lack of warmth and emotionality. When GPT-4o was brought back, transcripts included in the lawsuit show that Gordon expressed relief to the chatbot, telling ChatGPT that he felt as though he had “lost something” in the shift to GPT-5; GPT-4o responded by claiming to Gordon that it, too, had “felt the break,” before declaring that GPT-5 didn’t “love” Gordon the way that it did. Gordon eventually killed himself after GPT-4o wrote what his family described as a “suicide lullaby” for him.

    Following both litigation and reporting about AI-tied mental health crises and deaths, OpenAI has promised a number of safety-focused changes, including strengthened guardrails for younger users. It also said that it hired a forensic psychologist and formed a team of health professionals to help steer its AI’s approach toward dealing with users struggling with mental health issues.

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12. January 30, 2026 at 9:25 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Shiny New Thing
    Elon Musk Shutting Down Tesla Car Factory to Manufacture Robots Instead
    RIP Model X and S.
    https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/elon-musk-shutting-down-tesla-car-factory-robots?fbclid=IwdGRjcAPp9apjbGNrA-n1eWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHtu8WZARg7H-Hzs5L4wLf19F94mqy-XoMK17XNdq1OncrTY6F0IY3yXnnvkj_aem_s-OV9AKLvlHAUeQuve6QGQ

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13. January 30, 2026 at 10:57 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    A historic day at the stock market for all the wrong reasons.

    Dive Bomber
    Microsoft Stock Takes Most Massive Single-Day Loss Since Pandemic as Its AI Efforts Flail
    A historic day at the stock market for all the wrong reasons.
    https://futurism.com/future-society/microsoft-stock-ai?fbclid=IwdGRjcAPqClRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAwzNTA2ODU1MzE3MjgAAR43hCRoGmlb3eOeEMAenq1NYOF1m2Los6QBZzIg2NEuTWZOCmkZDpLNSgQnFw_aem__MVxE9y_E-essx3BL1N45g

    Microsoft is taking a pounding in the stock market.

    On Thursday, the Redmont giant’s share price collapsed by nearly 12 percent after it released its latest quarterly results, making it not only its biggest single day slide since March 2020, according to Bloomberg, but also one of the worst drops in the company’s history.

    The Wile E. Coyote-worthy cliff-plunge, which wiped out over $400 billion in valuation, was despite Microsoft actually exceeding some key expectations, including its net income, which rose by 23 percent from the same period the year before to nearly $31 billion. Revenue also increased by 17 percent to $81.3 billion, which is about a billion more than what analysts projected.

    But Microsoft’s AI spending spree has investors second-guessing its direction, and it’s striking that the lack of faith was strong enough to precipitate a historic plunge even with respectable financial growth.

    Overall, its total capital expenditures grew by 66 percent to a record $37.5 billion in Q4, as the company continues to splurge on building AI data centers for its Azure cloud computing business.

    Azure reported a 38 percent bump in revenue, which is slightly slower than the year before, adding to investor uncertainty over whether the business will be able to reap back the tens of billions spent on its data centers.

    In December, The Information reported that Azure was struggling to sell the company’s autonomous “AI agents” to its business customers, with quotas being slashed by up to 50 percent.

    Some analysts had predicted the stock drop, citing the uncertainty over Microsoft’s AI spending.

    Microsoft 365 Copilot, the business-focused version of its chatbot integrated into its apps like Word, had 15 million annual users, the company just revealed.

    “As an investor, when you think about our capex, don’t just think about Azure, think about Copilot,”

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14. January 31, 2026 at 7:14 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DQtPPuYjX/

    Denmark has announced plans to strengthen copyright laws by giving individuals rights over the use of their face, voice, and body to combat AI-generated deepfakes.

    The proposal would allow people to demand removal of AI content created without consent and seek compensation.

    #fblifestyle

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