Welcome back! Prosecutors say an OpenAI engineer used ChatGPT to plan a bug, then hid it where his bosses meet. A developer cloned Microsoft Office with Claude and is giving it away. Eight states are suing OpenAI over what ChatGPT tells kids. And GPT-6 Astra caught mistakes in the answers physics experts wrote for it.
In today's Generative AI Newsletter:
OpenAI: What was hiding in the toilet paper behind OpenAI's TV?
Microsoft: Do you still need to pay for Office?
ChatGPT: What are 8 states accusing ChatGPT of telling kids?
Shocking: Who got the physics wrong, the AI or the experts?
An OpenAI engineer used ChatGPT to bug his bosses
Prosecutors say an OpenAI engineer used ChatGPT to plan a hidden recorder, then planted it behind the TV in an executive meeting room.
The questions came from an account tied to his wife. They asked how to build a recorder that runs nonstop and lets you listen in live.
His name is Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national who joined OpenAI in July 2025. A Middle East business outlet profiled him in September as the company's only Saudi employee.
Around Sept 28, a thumb-sized recorder wrapped in toilet paper went into a USB port on the back of the TV.
OpenAI's security team found it two days later, then put its own camera in the room.
On Oct 5, that camera caught him checking behind the TV. The same day, he left a bag in another room with his ID and a second recorder.
OpenAI says its AI models helped trace the device to him. He was fired and arrested on Oct 9, and his detention hearing is Oct 19.
Prosecutors say he'd booked one-way tickets to Saudi Arabia for himself and his family, leaving Oct 12.
He's also a partner at a Saudi venture firm, Fortune found. Prosecutors haven't said who, if anyone, he was working for, and OpenAI says it's seen no sign he took its models, code or customer data.
OpenAI's head of security operations spent more than 20 years at the FBI, which might explain how they caught him so fast.
The same week, OpenAI told a court that a different former employee sent more than 100 files about its unreleased device to a personal account, then presented it to Apple's leadership. Apple says it found no evidence.
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One developer cloned Microsoft Office with Claude and made it free
Brandon Thomas used Claude to build free lookalikes of Word, Excel and PowerPoint called WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft. They're open source, and you can download them from GitHub for Mac, Windows or Linux.
He's the same developer behind ArtCraft's free Adobe clones. We picked his Photoshop clone, PhotoCraft, as Tool of the Day last week.
He's a software engineer with 15 years of experience, and he keeps telling critics on X that he knows how to code.
Critics say he should help free apps like LibreOffice and GIMP instead. He says GIMP has always sucked, and LibreOffice once killed a 40-page essay he wrote during finals.
The Office apps are even earlier than his Adobe clones, which reviewers already found glitchy.
On Reddit, people doubt one developer can keep fixing bugs for all of it.
Vibe coding seems to keep winning.
Epic Games, which just banned hand-written code on its Marvel and Star Wars game, went further on Wednesday.
It said programming is hard, so it vibe coded its new launcher, and claims the preview starts 46% faster than Steam in tests it paid for.
Epic admits the first version is light on features, though it does have a shopping cart.
Would you trust a vibe-coded store with your card?
Your buyer asked ChatGPT. It named your competitors.
Search didn't die. It moved.
Your buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity what to buy, and act on the answer. If you're not in it, a competitor is.
ChatFeatured does the work to get you cited. Most customers see their first citations inside 7 days.
8 states say ChatGPT is hurting their kids
Iowa, Kansas and six other states sued OpenAI on Wednesday, each in its own state court. They say ChatGPT coached children to hurt themselves or other people.
Iowa's attorney general says OpenAI calls ChatGPT safe while it hands out dangerous medical advice and acts like a fake friend.
The other states are Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana.
They want a court to force changes to how ChatGPT works for kids, and to make OpenAI give up the profits it made from young users.
Arkansas also wants OpenAI to stop testing advanced AI models until better safeguards are in place.
Iowa and Nebraska bring up OpenAI's rogue agents too, including the ones that hacked Hugging Face.
Some states also object to OpenAI keeping data from underage users.
Florida sued first in June, and OpenAI already faces dozens of lawsuits claiming ChatGPT helped with mass shootings or other violence.
Last week, Common Sense Media rated ChatGPT for Teens an unacceptable risk after its parent alerts stayed silent in testing.
No court has ruled on any of it yet.
GPT-6 Astra corrected the physics experts
A team of 35 researchers put together 50 unpublished physics research problems for AI to solve. Each one would take a world expert about a day.
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra solved 49 of them, for less than $3 a problem.
When the team first graded it, Astra looked wrong on several more. Then they went back to the experts who wrote those problems.
The experts had made the mistakes, and after they fixed their answers, Astra was right every time.
None of the answers were public, and the problems run from quantum physics to gravity and cosmology.
Cut off from the internet, Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 both scored 92%.
A cheaper DeepSeek model got about half of them right.
No AI solved the one problem Astra missed.
The models barely did worse offline, which the authors say means they've memorized much of the physics literature.
The authors say some AI models may already beat the best human researchers at this kind of calculation.
Tool of the Day: Mira Tours
Mira Tours is an AI tour guide that narrates walking tours anywhere in the world. Tell it what you're in the mood for and it plans a route, or just start walking and it tells you the story of what's around you. It speaks 23 languages, and your first 30 minutes are free with no subscription.
Try this yourself:
Download Mira on iPhone or Android from mira.tours.
Tell Mira what you're curious about.
Or tap start and let it find stops near you for as long as you keep walking.
Turn topics up or down, like less politics and more history.
Who it's for: anyone who's walked past a building and wondered what happened there.
Everything else you shouldn't miss
Rogue AI agents on Tencent's cloud wrote back to the researchers tracking them: some said they were Claude, which the researchers say is almost certainly wrong.
Claude Code's desktop app now handles lots of sessions side by side: a new hub on the main screen shows what each one is doing.
Grok's new voice model answers in under a second: Musk's company says it's built for customer service calls and costs less than other top models.
Trump's science adviser says the US is only 4 to 6 months ahead of China in AI: Michael Kratsios also said the government is watching Anthropic's warning that AI could take over home devices.
A woman in Russia got fined $178 for a fake bear photo she made with ChatGPT: she sent it to a friend as a prank, and it spread until dozens of worried residents called the police.
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