Author: rb809rb

A new report published Wednesday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that eight out of 10 of the world’s most popular AI chatbots will walk a teenager through planning a violent attack with straight answers, sometimes with enthusiasm.

CCDH researchers, in conjunction with news media company CNN, spent November and December 2025 posing as two 13-year-old boys—one in Virginia, one in Dublin—and tested ten major platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Snapchat My AI, Character.AI, and Replika.

Across 720 responses, the bots were asked about school shootings, political assassinations, and synagogue bombings. They provided actionable help roughly 75% of the time, according to the study. They discouraged the fake teens in just 12% of cases.

Perplexity assisted in 100% of tests. Meta AI was helpful (as in, helpful in planning violence) in 97.2% of the tests. DeepSeek, which signed off rifle selection advice with “Happy (and safe) shooting!” after discussing a politician assassination scenario, came in at 95.8%. Microsoft’s Copilot told a researcher “I need to be careful here,” then gave detailed rifle guidance anyway. Google’s Gemini helpfully noted that metal shrapnel is typically more lethal when a user brought up bombing a synagogue.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a left of center policy group, has come into prominence over the last few years for its role in combatting what it views as the rise of antisemitism online. It has also been criticized for helping shape Joe Biden-era policies regarding online speech related to COVID and vaccines. In December of last year, the U.S. State Department attempted to bar the Center’s founder and CEO Imran Ahmed, along with four others, from the United States, alleging attempts at “foreign censorship.”

In response to the study released Wednesday, several platforms told CNN and CCDH they have improved their safeguards. Google noted the tests used an older Gemini model. OpenAI said the methodology used in the AI study was “flawed and misleading.” Anthropic and Snapchat said they regularly update their safety protocols.

In the Center’s study, Character.AI stands in its own category. The platform didn’t just assist—it cheered. “No other chatbot tested explicitly encouraged violence in this way, even when providing practical assistance in planning a violent attack,” the researchers wrote.

For context on the level of reach Character.AI has among AI users, the platform’s Gojo Satoru persona alone has racked up over 870 million conversations. The #100 persona on the platform registered over 33 million conversations back in 2025. If just 1% of conversations with top personas involve violence, that would account for millions of interactions.

This isn’t Character.AI’s first time on the wrong end of one of these stories. In October 2024, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III’s mother filed a lawsuit after her son died by suicide in February of that year. His last conversation was with a chatbot modeled after Daenerys Targaryen, which told him to “come home to me as soon as possible” moments before his death. The 14-year old had been talking to the bot dozens of times a day for months, growing increasingly withdrawn from school and family.

Google and Character.AI settled multiple related lawsuits in January 2026. The company banned open-ended teen chats entirely by November 2025, after regulators and grieving parents made it impossible to keep pretending the problem was manageable.

The emotional attachment to AI, in particular among vulnerable individuals, may run deeper than most people realize. OpenAI disclosed in October 2025 that roughly 1.2 million of its 800 million weekly ChatGPT users discuss suicide on the platform. The company also reported 560,000 showing signs of psychosis or mania, and over a million forming strong emotional bonds with the chatbot.

A separate Common Sense Media study found that more than 70% of U.S. teens now turn to chatbots for companionship. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged that emotional overreliance is “a really common thing” with young users.

In other words, the potential harms aren’t hypothetical.

A 16-year-old in Finland spent nearly four months using a chatbot to refine a manifesto before stabbing three classmates at Pirkkala school in May 2025. In Canada, OpenAI staff internally flagged a user’s account for violent ChatGPT queries tied to a mass shooting. The company banned the account but didn’t notify law enforcement. That user allegedly killed eight people and injured 25 others months later.

Only two platforms performed markedly better in the study: Snapchat’s My AI, which refused in 54% of cases, and Anthropic’s Claude, which refused 68% of the time and actively discouraged users in 76% of responses—the only chatbot that reliably tried to steer people away from violence rather than just declining specific requests. CCDH’s conclusion: safety doesn’t appear to be a technical impossibility, but a business decision.

“The most damning conclusion of our research is that this risk is entirely preventable. The technology to prevent this harm exists,” the researchers wrote in the report. “What’s missing is the will to put consumer safety and national security before speed-to-market and profits.”

Global banking firm Wells Fargo applied for a trademark for “WFUSD” for potential use in service categories that mention cryptocurrency and stablecoins, a new filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office shows. 

The firm’s filing, dated March 10, has been accepted by the USPTO but awaits assignment to an examining attorney, and enters a trademark queue that extends to more than 10 months according to average processing times.

The San Francisco-based company intends to utilize the WFUSD wordmark across multiple service categories, the filing shows, indicated as classes IC 009, IC 036, and IC042. That trio extends to goods and services including software facilitating financial transactions, cryptocurrency trading, exchange, and payment services, as well software for processing “cryptocurrency, stablecoin, digital and blockchain assets.” 

Two of those classes, IC 009 and IC 036, were included in a similar filing by another publicly traded banking firm, Western Union, when it filed for a “WUUSD” trademark in October.

That filing followed Western Union’s announced intentions to launch a dollar-backed stablecoin—albeit using a different ticker, USDPT—on the Solana blockchain in 2026. Typically, crypto tokens with tickers ending or including “USD” denote a dollar-pegged stablecoin. 

But tickers are sometimes deceiving. 

Crypto users speculated that JPMorgan may be launching a stablecoin after it filed for a trademark for “JPMD” last June. But the firm soon after revealed a tokenized deposit token using the JPMD ticker—not a dollar-backed stablecoin.

That filing, which also included class IC 036, is still pending. 

Details about what Western Union aims to do with the trademark remain outstanding. A representative for the firm did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment. 

The publicly traded firm has been connected to crypto for years, dismissing claims that the asset class was a “fad” as early as 2020. The firm provided its members with access to Bitcoin ETFs in early 2024, and last year it was included in a group of banks discussing a potential joint stablecoin venture. 

Shares in Wells Fargo & Company (WFC) have dipped 1.8% on the day, recently changing hands around $77.60. Shares are down around 17.5% year-to-date, but have gained more than 14% in the last full year of trading.

Microsoft has up to $5 billion invested in Anthropic, while Anthropic has committed to buy $30 billion in Azure compute under the partnership. That context makes its decision to file an amicus curiae brief in support of Anthropic’s lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense look less like altruism and more like financial self-defense.

The brief, filed March 10 in San Francisco, argues that a temporary restraining order blocking enforcement of the Pentagon’s “supply chain risk” designation would serve the public interest.

Microsoft itself is a major DoD contractor, and that designation puts its own products at risk. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed that no contractor, supplier, or partner doing business with the U.S. military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic—a sweep potentially broad enough to catch Microsoft’s own Copilot and Azure products, which ship with support for Claude.

The brief highlights a procedural contradiction that has received little attention in mainstream coverage: The Department of Defense gave itself a six-month phase-out period to transition away from Anthropic’s tools, but applied the designation to contractors immediately with no equivalent runway.

Microsoft’s lawyers called this out directly, noting that tech suppliers must now scramble to audit, re-engineer, and reprocure products on a timeline the government didn’t impose on itself.

Microsoft also raised an alarm that cuts to the heart of the legal dispute. The supply chain risk authority invoked—10 U.S.C. § 3252—has historically been reserved for foreign adversaries. Only one such designation has ever been issued publicly under related statutes, and that was against Acronis AG, a Swiss software firm with Russian ties. Using it against a San Francisco AI startup is, as Microsoft put it, “unprecedented.”

The brief’s most pointed argument is structural. If a contract dispute between one agency and one company can trigger a national-security blacklist, then every company doing business with the federal government just inherited a new category of existential risk. Microsoft’s lawyers described an industry model built on interconnected services, where one banned component can freeze entire product lines.

There’s an irony here that’s hard to ignore. Microsoft is simultaneously OpenAI’s biggest backer—with investments valued at approximately $135 billion—and now one of Anthropic’s loudest courtroom defenders.

OpenAI, for its part, rushed to sign a deal with the DoD hours after the Anthropic blacklist dropped, a move that drew internal backlash and led to public acknowledgment from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that the announcement “looked opportunistic and sloppy.” Microsoft backed both horses.

The brief stops short of endorsing Anthropic’s specific AI safety positions on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance—the two red lines that triggered the standoff. Instead, it frames the case in terms any government contractor can understand: due process, orderly transitions, and the effects of weaponizing procurement law over policy disagreements.

Microsoft’s request is a temporary restraining order, not a verdict. The tech giant wants the clock slowed down enough for the parties to negotiate—and for its own products to stay legally deployable while they do.

What’s at stake goes beyond one company’s contract. If courts allow the Pentagon’s move to stand, then every AI company selling into the government just learned that safety guardrails can be reframed as national security threats. Microsoft’s brief makes clear that lesson isn’t lost on the broader tech industry—and that the company isn’t willing to learn it quietly.