ChatGPT's new AI agent can browse the web and create PowerPoint slideshows. In a separate incident, a company built a product feature that ChatGPT had fabricated. Meanwhile, Google hid a secret message within the list of 3,295 researchers on an AI paper.

In other AI news, a human defeated an AI model in a world coding championship, and the technology is being blamed for making the traditional résumé obsolete.

Cybersecurity reports cover several threats: nearly one million browsers have been turned into website-scraping bots via malicious extensions, GitHub has been abused to distribute malware-as-a-service payloads, and hackers tied to Israel are reportedly waging cyberwar on Iran’s financial system.

In tech commentary, author Gil Duran discusses "The Nerd Reich" and the authoritarian tendencies of tech billionaires.

• https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/07/why-it-takes-3295-people-to-write-one-google-ai-paper
• https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/07/browser-extensions-turn-nearly-1-million-browsers-into-website-scraping-bots
• https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/exhausted-man-defeats-ai-model-in-world-coding-championship
• https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/07/chatgpts-new-ai-agent-can-browse-the-web-and-create-powerpoint-slideshows
• https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/707010/gil-duran-the-nerd-reich-tech-billionaires-authoritarianism-dictator
• https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/06/israel-tied-predatory-sparrow-hackers-are-waging-cyberwar-on-irans-financial-system
• https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/the-resume-is-dying-and-ai-is-holding-the-smoking-gun
• https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/07/malware-as-a-service-caught-using-github-to-distribute-its-payloads
• https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/chatgpt-made-up-a-product-feature-out-of-thin-air-so-this-company-created-it