As a huge fan of both drones and stun guns, I can’t help but get excited about the latest development in aerial weaponry: the stun gun drone, created by Chaotic Moon Studios, and shown off during SXSW festivities in a recent video shot by Popular Science (see below) at the Chaotic Moon offices.
The so-called Chaotic Unmanned Personal Intercept Drone, aka CUPID or “stun copter,” doles out 80,000 volts of electricity to poor saps who happen to cross its artificially intelligent path. The company, which creates all types of high-tech goodies, says it could potentially be used by law enforcement to apprehend criminals. As Engadget reports, one officer would fly the stun-gun-outfitted mini-copter, while another officer would control the stun gun. More likely, I think, is that the CUPID will be used by frat boys to hurt each other.
Built from a Tarot Hexacopter, a giant bladed contraption used to carry DSLR cameras, the stun copter is outfitted with a Phazzer Dragon “conductive energy weapon” – otherwise known as a TASER. But since TASER is a brand name, Phazzer has to pull some linguistic maneuvers to avoid getting shot down in the courts.
Believe it or not, the idea of outfitting a drone with electric weapons is far from new. The most notable creation may be the ShockerDrone (formerly known as the TaserDrone, but renamed for the same reason that Phazzer calls its products “conductive energy weapons”), which was created in 2012 by the evil geniuses at Hackaday. Whereas the CUPID shoots its electrified talons into its targets, however, the ShockerDrone simply has charged metal tape on its body, and runs into people to shock them.
Check out the CUPID stun copter below:
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.