Insiders at the Food and Drug Administration are ringing alarm bells over the agency's use of an AI to fast-track drug approvals.
As <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/23/politics/fda-ai-elsa-drug-regulation-makary#:~:text=The%20FDA's%20head%20of%20AI,%E2%80%9CThey%20could%20potentially%20hallucinate.%E2%80%9D">CNN reports</a>, six current and former FDA officials are warning that the AI, dubbed Elsa, which was <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-fda-launches-ai-tool-reduce-time-taken-scientific-reviews-2025-06-02/">unveiled weeks earlier</a>, is "hallucinating" completely made-up studies.
It's a terrifying reality that could, in a worst-case scenario, lead to potentially dangerous drugs mistakenly getting the stamp of approval from the FDA.
It's part of a <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/23/trump-is-set-to-unveil-his-ai-roadmap-heres-what-to-know/">high-stakes and greatly accelerated effort</a> by the US government to embrace deeply flawed AI tech. Elsa, much like other currently available AI chatbots, often makes stuff up.
"Anything that you don’t have time to double-check is unreliable," one FDA employee told CNN. "It hallucinates confidently."
Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr, a noted figure of the anti-vaccine movement, who has no relevant credentials for the job and frequently furthers discredited conspiracy theories, lauded the administration's embrace of AI as a sign that the "<a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/future-pulse/2025/05/15/rfk-says-hhs-is-already-using-ai-00350452">AI revolution has arrived</a>."
"We are using this technology already at HHS to manage health care data, perfectly securely, and to increase the speed of drug approvals," he told Congress last month.
But reality is rapidly catching up — which shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who's used a large language model-based tool before. Given the <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/doctors-using-ai">tech's track record so far</a>, the medical community's embrace of AI has already been mired in controversy, with critics <a href="https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-overreliance-problem-are-explanations-solution">pointing out</a> the risks of overrelying on the tech.
Instead of saving scientists time, Elsa is doing the exact opposite, <a href="https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-mistakes">highlighting a common refrain</a> among companies' already backfiring attempts to shoehorn the tech into every aspect of their operations.
"AI is supposed to save our time, but I guarantee you that I waste a lot of extra time just due to the heightened vigilance that I have to have," a second FDA employee told CNN.
The insiders claim that Elsa can't really help them review drugs for approvals since it doesn't have access to relevant documentation. It can't even "answer basic questions," such as how many times a company filed for FDA approval, according to CNN.
Worse yet, it often cites studies that don't exist, and when challenged, it ends up being "apologetic" and tells employees that its output needs to be verified.
The damning claims fly in the face of the FDA's attempts to paint Elsa as a revolutionary tool that can significantly speed up drug evaluations.
In a <a href="https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-launches-agency-wide-ai-tool-optimize-performance-american-people">June statement</a>, the FDA boasted that it was "already using Elsa to accelerate clinical protocol reviews, shorten the time needed for scientific evaluations, and identify high-priority inspection targets."
Meanwhile, FDA's head of AI, Jeremy Walsh, told CNN that it's possible Esla "could potentially hallucinate," saying employees "don't have to use" the tool "if they don't find it to have value."
In an attempt to reassure, Walsh said that Elsa's hallucinations could be mitigated by using more detailed questions.
In many ways, Elsa couldn't have come at a worse time as Congress is racing to figure out how to approach AI regulation. Instead of implementing new rules to avoid a disaster, the Trump administration has remained far more focused on clearing a regulatory path as tens of billions of dollars continue to be poured into the industry.
In other words, there doesn't appear to be much interest in reining in the FDA's use of unproven AI tech — a concerning bet that could one day come home to roost.
More on the FDA: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/fda-outsourcing-ai">The FDA Is Already Outsourcing Drug and Food Analysis to Error-Plagued AI Chatbot</a>

Hallucinator in Chief

Developments

"It hallucinates confidently."

The FDA Is Using an AI to "Speed Up" Drug Approvals and Insiders Say It's Making Horrible Mistakes

Weeks after trending "indie rock band" The Velvet Sundown admitted its Spotify oeuvre was <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/indie-band-hoax-ai-admit">entirely generated by AI</a>, news has emerged that the streaming company is using AI to publish new tunes by dead musicians.
Per <a href="https://www.404media.co/spotify-publishes-ai-generated-songs-from-dead-artists-without-permission/">reporting by 404 Media</a>, Spotify is populating the profiles of long-dead artists with new AI-generated songs that have nothing to do with the deceased musicians — without the permission of their families or record labels.
The outlet uncovered, for instance, that American singer-songwriter Blaze Foley — who was tragically <a href="https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/fuller-michael-david-blaze-foley#:~:text=His%20years%20of%20drinking%20and,shot%20Foley%20in%20self%2Ddefense.">shot to death</a> in 1989 — had "released" a new song called "Together" on his Spotify.
The new single featured the sounds of a male country singer, electric guitar, and piano, in what 404 called a "new, slow country song." The art uploaded alongside the song was an <a href="https://x.com/Regularmack/status/1947078182156337252">AI-generated image</a> of a young singer with spiky long hair and a black leather jacket — nothing like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaze_Foley">actual outlaw country singer</a>.
"I can clearly tell you that this song is not Blaze, not anywhere near Blaze’s style, at all," said Craig McDonald, owner of the record label that manages Foley's catalogue. McDonald's wife originally alerted him to the new release, which has since been removed.
Like most AI images, AI-generated music is <a href="https://podcastle.ai/blog/how-to-tell-if-audio-is-ai-generated/">pretty easy to spot</a>, thanks to its lack of dynamic energy, overly conventional form, and canned vocal quality.
"It’s kind of an AI schlock bot, if you will," McDonald continued. "It has nothing to do with the Blaze you know, that whole posting has the authenticity of an algorithm."
McDonald told 404 he was shocked that AI slop could pop up on Blaze Foley's Spotify page without his permission. Apparently, the song bore the copyright mark "Syntax Error," which appears on similar AI tracks infesting the pages of other artists like <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/news/spotify-accidentally-publishes-ai-songs-credited-to-artists-who-died-years">Guy Clark</a>, who died in 2016.
"It's kind of surprising that Spotify doesn't have a security fix for this type of action, and I think the responsibility is all on Spotify," McDonald said. "They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so. And I think they should take that responsibility and do something quickly."
For its part, Spotify <a href="https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/07/22/spotifys-lax-controls-exposed-the-blaze-foley-ai-song-debacle/">issued a statement</a> saying that the "content in question violates Spotify’s deceptive content policies, which prohibit impersonation intended to mislead, such as replicating another creator’s name, image, or description, or posing as a person, brand, or organization in a deceptive manner. This is not allowed. We take action against licensors and distributors who fail to police for this kind of fraud and those who commit repeated or egregious violations can and have been permanently removed from Spotify."
The whole thing comes as <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-music-lofi-streaming">living musicians</a> are being boxed out of streaming platforms like YouTube and Spotify by AI slop farms, leading many indie and developing musicians to <a href="https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-ai-wreaked-havoc-on-the-lo-fi-beat-scene/">leave the craft</a> altogether.
Months ago, the French global music streaming platform Deezer launched an <a href="https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/01/deezer-deploys-cutting-edge-ai-detection-tool-for-music-streaming/">AI music detection tool</a> to help combat the flood of AI spam. After six months of AI detection, the company revealed the startling statistic that about <a href="https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/06/19/deezer-becomes-first-streamer-to-tag-ai-music/">one-fifth</a> of all music uploaded each day, or over 20,000 songs, was generated by AI.
More on music: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/musician-resurrected-brain-new-music">Musician Who Died in 2021 Resurrected as Clump of Brain Matter, Now Composing New Music</a>

Drop A Track

"It’s kind of an AI schlock bot, if you will."

Spotify Caught Doing Something Unbelievably Ghoulish With AI

Hulk Hogan, one of the most famed professional wrestlers of all time, has passed away at the age of 71 in his home near Tampa, Florida.
In a statement <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ClearwaterPolice/posts/pfbid0272xskH6HPZZSAZefBwY23wP1UjQgC1dJjALZMEbkSHrLxhoG8dSZRnPG7YKFWhtml">posted to Facebook</a>, local law enforcement announced that "personnel responded to a medical call at 9:51 am today," revealing that the "nature of the call was for a cardiac arrest."
Hogan was pronounced dead after being taken to the nearby Morton Plant Hospital. Police said there was no suspicious activity related to his death.
While we can only speculate about the exact causes that led up to the wrestler's heart attack, Hogan has a long history of <a href="https://www.thesportster.com/wwe-steroids-scandal-hulk-hogan-vince-mcmahon/">steroid abuse</a> and grueling physical injuries throughout his career, which took a toll on his health.
Last year, Hogan told YouTuber Logan Paul that he "had like 25 surgeries in the last ten years."
"Ten back surgeries, both knees and both hips replaced, shoulders — everything," he added.
Diet was also likely a factor. Hogan championed a fast food-inflected American aesthetic, and sold a line of branded cheeseburgers between 2007 and 2011.
He also joins a long number of other <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/sports/wrestlers-died-young-andre-the-giant.html">professional wrestlers who died at a relatively young age</a>. Rowdy Roddy Piper, who had a long rivalry with Hogan, died at the age of 61 of a heart attack in 2015. Michael "Hawk" Michael Hegstrand and Joe "Animal" Laurinaitis, who were prominent figures in the 1980s, also both died of heart attacks.
As with Hogan, the many stories of taking performance-enhancing drugs have likely contributed to all those cases of fatal heart disease. In the case against WWE co-founder Vince McMahon, who was accused of <a href="https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1492490/wwf-wwe-steroid-scandal-vince-mcmahon/">providing illegal steroids</a> to wrestlers, Hogan testified that he had taken anabolic steroids, pointing out that steroid use "was fairly common" among WWF wrestlers in the 1980s.
Research has shown that the abuse of anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS), which have medical uses such as growth stimulation and aiding in weight gain following trauma or surgery, is correlated with higher cardiovascular risks, including <a href="https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.124.071117">increased risk of acute myocardial infarction</a>, the technical term for a heart attack, as well as arrhythmias and heart failure.
More on wrestling: <a href="https://futurism.com/meta-ai-john-cena">Meta's AI Version of John Cena Is a Child Predator</a>

Celebrity Wipeout

He was 71 years old.

Here's What Killed Hulk Hogan

The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped some spooky looking photos of our solar system's newest interstellar invader on the run.
The object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, was first spotted careening through the outer limits of the Sun's domain <a href="https://futurism.com/interstellar-object-detected-center-solar-system">earlier this month</a>, and appears to be a comet. Upon closer inspection, its speed was found to be so incredible that there could be no doubt of its extrasolar origins, making it only the third detected interstellar object in history.
Tantalizingly, it's hurtling straight towards our system's center, giving astronomers ample time to study this cosmic interloper which may have <a href="https://futurism.com/object-solar-system-center-galaxy">come from the center of our galaxy</a> — and thus, may be <a href="https://futurism.com/interstellar-visitor-3i-atlas-center-solar-system-ancient">older than our entire solar system</a>.
And the Hubble just gave us a glimpse of what it looks like. 
An amateur astronomer who goes by the handle astrafoxen on Bluesky edited the images together and <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:bxxv3ty2lwpzyivx3axvq3fy/post/3luiwnar3j22o">uploaded</a> them as two short little timelapses, giving us an idea of its blazing speed. Relative to the Sun, 3I/ATLAS clocked in at about 137,000 miles per hour when it was first spotted, and it's only getting faster. The images within each set, it's worth noting, were taken just minutes apart on Monday.
<blockquote class="bluesky-embed" data-bluesky-uri="at://did:plc:bxxv3ty2lwpzyivx3axvq3fy/app.bsky.feed.post/3luiwnar3j22o" data-bluesky-cid="bafyreiewkfci3k2went7epuhyrnpnc2ztvgzr5etol5sj36ctomsp5fisi">
Hubble Space Telescope images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS are out! These were taken 5 hours ago. Plenty of cosmic rays peppering the images, but the comet&#39;s coma looks very nice and puffy. Best of luck to the researchers trying to write up papers for this... archive.stsci.edu/proposal_sea... 🔭
&mdash; <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:bxxv3ty2lwpzyivx3axvq3fy?ref_src=embed">astrafoxen (@astrafoxen.bsky.social)</a> <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:bxxv3ty2lwpzyivx3axvq3fy/post/3luiwnar3j22o?ref_src=embed">2025-07-21T21:28:00.364Z</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://embed.bsky.app/static/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
"Plenty of cosmic rays peppering the images, but the comet's coma looks very nice and puffy," astrafoxen wrote.
Before 3I/ATLAS, the only known interstellar objects were 'Oumuamua, which was spotted in 2017 and famed for its cigar shape, and two years later Borisov, a comet that broke apart into massive chunks. Both have since veered back out into interstellar space.
Much of 3I/ATLAS's fascinating nature remains uncertain, including how large it is. Being a suspected comet, it's surrounded by a luminous halo of gas and dust called a coma, which shrouds the solid object at its center. The coma can form a tail hundreds of thousands of miles long.
Based on its speed and trajectory, though, 3I/ATLAS appears to have come from the galactic center, perhaps forming around another star before being booted out by a passing one. Some astronomers have <a href="https://www.space.com/astronomy/comets/why-scientists-are-so-excited-about-the-newfound-interstellar-comet-3i-atlas-op-ed">speculated</a> that ATLAS could be between three to 11 billion years old; it would need such a staggering timescale, they argue, to build up to the tremendous speed it's now exhibiting.
The good news is that we caught sight of the comet pretty early on in its visit — 'Oumuamua practically had one foot out the door when it was detected — and it's still traveling towards the solar system's center. It's anticipated to reach perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, around October 30, at a distance of about 130 million miles. That buys us plenty of time to get a closer look at this thing and answer our most burning questions, including where in the Milky Way did it form — and, more luridly, <a href="https://futurism.com/harvard-paper-interstellar-object-alien">whether it could possibly be an alien spacecraft</a>.
More on space: <a href="https://futurism.com/scientists-uranus-girlfriend">Scientists Say That Uranus Appears to Have a Girlfriend</a>

Speed Camera

Incredible.

Hubble Snaps Photos of Interstellar Invader

The ordeal isn't over yet for Tesla or its investors, according to CEO Elon Musk, as it misses heaps of Wall Street targets in its latest earnings report.
"We probably could have a few rough quarters," Musk said in a conference call on Wednesday, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/756a5bee-ca40-4dce-8d31-e738af1d989f">as quoted by the Financial Times.</a>
If past is prelude, he could be onto something. In the second quarter, between April and June of this year, Tesla raked in just $1.2 billion in net income, when during that same period last year it made $1.4 billion. 
Worse still, its revenue shrank by 12 percent from $25.5 billion to $22.5 billion, making it Tesla's worst quarterly drop in sales in more than a decade, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-likely-faces-a-few-rough-quarters-end-us-ev-support-musk-says-2025-07-24/">according to Reuters</a>. It's also Tesla's third quarterly decline in profit in a row. 
The stock market responded in kind. Tesla shares fell by over nine percent on Thursday, seesawing back after it had slowly nudged upwards in the week leading up to the latest earnings report. The automaker's stock has rallied by around 50 percent since hitting a year-low in April, but overall, it's down by nearly 25 percent this year.
Tesla has been in turmoil since Musk became increasingly involved in far-right politics over the past year or so, most notably by working alongside president Donald Trump to gut the federal government after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected.
This has <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-most-hated">severely damaged Tesla's brand</a>, making it the target of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/business/elon-musk-trump-tesla-protests.html">protests</a> and vandalism. All the while, it's faced steeper competition from other automakers, especially Chinese titan BYD, which <a href="https://futurism.com/byd-crushing-tesla">recently surpassed Tesla</a> as the largest EV company in the world. To drive up sales, Tesla has offered massive discounts and <a href="https://futurism.com/crisis-tesla-sales-model-y-refresh">desperate financing deals</a>, including for its newly refreshed Model Y — its stab at reviving its aging vehicle lineup — but these efforts, evidently, ate into its margins.
Musk also made a <a href="https://futurism.com/cybertruck-sales-dead-water">failed gamble</a> with the Cybertruck. Tesla sold just 4,306 of the controversial pickup trucks in the second quarter, marking an astonishing 50 percent drop from last year. Its poor reliability and its controversial styling have hurt the automaker's brand further.
Moreover, whatever Musk hoped to gain with his alliance with Trump has gone up in smoke after the pair had a spectacular falling out in June, which is still dragging on. Trump's recently passed "big, beautiful bill" will remove a substantial $7,500 tax credit for EVs by the end of September, threatening Tesla's already-shrinking sales. 
The bill will also upend a program that allowed Tesla to sell credits to rival automakers who needed to offset their emissions to comply with federal regulations, earning the company over $11 billion to date. With Trump ending penalties for car companies that don't meet those emission standards, that easy money stands to dry up. This quarter, Tesla's regulatory credit revenue has shrunk to $439 million, which is less than half of what it made last year.
"We are in the transition period where we will lose a lot of incentives in the US," Musk acknowledged on the call. 
Musk went on to assure investors that things would turn around once Tesla's robotaxi service starts generating a profit. That's a huge uncertainty, however, as the limited robotaxi operation in Austin, Texas, has raised significant questions about the program's capabilities and whether it will be able to scale "rapidly" as Musk has promised.
More on Tesla: <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-tesla-board-fire-crazy">Elon Musk Warns That Tesla Board Could Fire Him "If I Go Crazy"</a>

Pain, No Gain

A rare moment of honesty.

Elon Admits That Tesla Is in for a World of Hurt

While announcing his new so-called "AI Action Plan," which is primarily designed to eliminate regulatory hurdles for the industry, president Donald Trump made some baffling remarks.
While standing next to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose chipmaker leads the S&amp;P 500 Top 10 Index with a multi-trillion-dollar market cap, Trump admitted he had no idea what Nvidia was, as <a href="https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/president-trump-threatened-to-break-up-nvidia-didnt-even-know-what-it-was-what-the-hell-is-nvidia-ive-never-heard-of-it-before">Tom's Hardware noticed</a>.
Due to the president's garbled communication style, it's unclear at what point he was unaware of what is currently the world's most valuable company. However, he did seem to suggest that he had previously wanted to break up the AI industry, for reasons that remained unexplained.
"I said, look, we'll break this guy up — this is before I learned the facts of life — I said we'll break 'em up," he said, while alluding to Huang. "I said, 'Who the hell is he? What's his name?' 'His name is Jensen Huang, Nvidia, ' I said, 'What the hell is Nvidia?' I've never heard of it before."
The baffling remarks underline just how uninformed the president often is on key issues, leaving it up to his aides to explain them to him.
Trump has also <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/donald-trump-world-liberty">seemed baffled</a> by his own family's cryptocurrency venture, proclaiming during a September livestream that "crypto is one of those things we have to do."
During his speech this week, Trump wasn't subtle about his attempt to cozy up to Huang, despite previously not knowing who he or Nivida were.
"What a job you’ve done," he said while repeatedly.
Naturally, Huang returned the favor.
"America’s unique advantage that no other country can possibly have is President Trump," he <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-23/trump-weighed-nvidia-breakup-before-realizing-it-d-be-hard?sref=YfHlo0rL">enthused</a>.
While the president said he once mulled breaking up Nvidia— before he knew what it was, if we're decoding his remarks properly — he revealed that his aides told him it would be "very hard."
"I figured we could go in and we could sort of break them up a little bit, get them a little competition, and I found out it’s not easy in that business," Trump said.
It's no wonder the president is trying to keep Huang in his good graces. The company's stock price has rocketed over the last couple of years, catapulting it to the forefront of the AI race and the global business community.
Huang also represents an alternative to xAI CEO Elon Musk, who's had an enormous falling out with Trump over the past two months — but who's currently trying to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/elon-musk-x-ai-funding-feecede1">raise $12 billion</a> to lease an astronomical supply of Nvidia chips to bolster its AI efforts, in a timely demonstration of the strangely entangled world of AI.
Google's parent company Alphabet is also <a href="https://www.barrons.com/articles/nvidia-stock-price-google-trump-ai-eadd0ba8">forecasting that it's spending $85 billion</a> in capital expenditures this year, a huge chunk of which is expected to go to Nvidia-powered data centers.
They're all probably hoping that Trump doesn't change his mind again.
More on Nvidia: <a href="https://futurism.com/nvidia-ceo-ai-plans">Nvidia CEO Says He Has Plans to Either Change or Eliminate Every Single Person's Job With AI</a>

Huang Up

"What the hell is Nvidia? I've never heard of it before."

Trump Says He Didn't Even Know What Nvidia Was

As widely expected, Tesla's latest business fundamentals are not looking good.
During the company's <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/business/tesla-earnings-elon-musk.html">second-quarter earnings call</a> on Wednesday, Tesla reported a whopping 16 percent decline in automotive revenue, its biggest drop in over a decade.
There are no two ways about it: Tesla is in a full-blown crisis under Musk's leadership. The mercurial CEO has massively tarnished the company's brand, <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-panicking-canada-sales">leading to plummeting sales</a>.
At some level, even Musk seems to get it. The richest man in the world also noted that his time as CEO could easily be cut short, conceding that his 13 percent ownership stake in the company leaves him vulnerable.
"It is a big deal — I don’t want to find I have so little control I can be easily ousted by activist shareholders," Musk said. "That is a major concern to me as I’ve mentioned in the past, and I hope that is addressed at the upcoming shareholders meeting."
"I think my control over Tesla, Inc. should be enough to ensure that it goes in a good direction, but not so much control that I can't be thrown out if I go crazy," he added.
In early 2024, Musk <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-accused-blackmailing-tesla-investors">argued</a> that he was "uncomfortable" with building AI products and robots with Tesla without having a "25 percent voting control," which critics argued amounted to "blackmail."
The mercurial CEO has put Tesla through a world of hurt, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/musk-trump-election-night-together">diving head-first into a political race</a>, having <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/04/23/musk-bessent-trump-white-house-irs">screaming matches</a> with top Trump officials in the White House, <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-shreds-musk">breaking up with the president</a> in explosive fashion, alienating <a href="https://futurism.com/musk-gambit-democrats-republicans">Democrats and Republicans alike</a>, and all the while <a href="https://futurism.com/civil-rights-groups-horrified-elon-musk-racist">furthering racist conspiracy theories</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/gullible-elon-musk-falls-for-fake-news-again-deletes-post">spreading disinformation</a>. Most recently, he promised to <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-stock-elon-musk-political-party">dedicate himself to establishing a third political party</a> in the US, in which his critics warned would be yet another enormous distraction from running his carmaker.
Yet even following all that turbulence brought on by Musk, investors and the company's board have largely sat by, enduring his antics and <a href="https://futurism.com/actual-value-tesla-stock-time-bomb">propping up a $1 trillion valuation</a>.
It makes you wonder how much more they can take. Given the company's performance so far this year, Musk has proven time and time again to be incredibly damaging to the business. Sales are in a tailspin worldwide, failing to capitalize on a surge in interest in EVs.
As <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/07/23/elon-musk-tesla-earnings-control/">Fortune reports</a>, the reality is that Tesla's bylaws make a dramatic ouster incredibly unlikely. Shareholders need support from at least two-thirds of all outstanding shares, instead of a simple majority, to pass a vote.
During this week's earnings call, Musk suggested that his ownership stake could once again be debated during the company's annual shareholder meeting in November.
While it remains to be seen how they'll react to his suggestion to up his ownership stake, investors have historically sided with the CEO on a broad range of issues, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/06/14/g-s1-4359/elon-musk-tesla-pay-package-shareholder-vote">voting twice</a> to reinstate his astronomical pay package, which was once worth $56 billion, a decision a Delaware judge <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Business/judge-rejected-elon-musks-50-billion-tesla-pay/story?id=116403271#:~:text=Tesla%20shareholders%20have%20voted%20twice,they%20can't%20do%20it.">struck down</a> each time.
Musk's current strategy at Tesla has been a massive bet on humanoid robots and a robotaxi service, neither of which is anywhere close to generating significant amounts of revenue for the carmaker.
It's a gambit that could be many years from paying off — and investors will have a tough choice to make on whether they'll go along for the ride.
"We probably could have a few rough quarters," a somber Musk admitted during this week's call.
Following the company's disastrous earnings call, shares plummeted almost nine percent.
More on Tesla: <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-burger-prices">Your Eyeballs Will Bug Out Like a Retro Cartoon Character When You Hear the Prices at Tesla's New Burger Joint</a>

Tes-La-La Land

Elon Musk Warns That Tesla Board Could Fire Him "If I Go Crazy"

An unknown number of people, in the US and around the world, are being severely impacted by what experts are <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/202507/the-emerging-problem-of-ai-psychosis">now calling</a> "AI psychosis": life-altering mental health spirals coinciding with obsessive use of anthropomorphic AI chatbots, primarily OpenAI's ChatGPT.
As <a href="https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis">we've reported</a>, the consequences of these <a href="https://futurism.com/chatgpt-mental-health-crises">mental health breakdowns</a> — which have impacted both people with known histories of serious mental illness and those who have none — have sometimes been extreme. People have lost jobs and homes, been involuntarily committed or jailed, and marriages and families have fallen apart. At least two people <a href="https://futurism.com/character-ai-google-test-ai-chatbots-kids">have</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-chatbots-conspiracies.html">died</a>.
There's yet to be a formal diagnosis or definition, let alone a recommended treatment plan. And as psychiatrists and researchers in the worlds of medicine and AI race to understand what's happening, some of the humans whose lives have been upended by these AI crises have crowdsourced a community support group where, together, they're trying to grapple with the confusing real-world impacts of this <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health">disturbing</a> technological phenomenon.
The community calls itself "The Spiral Support Group," in a nod to both the destructive mental rabbit holes that many chatbot users are falling into, as well as the irony that the term "spiral" is one of several common words found in the transcripts of many users separately experiencing AI delusions.
One of the leaders of the group is Etienne Brisson, a 25-year-old business coach based in Quebec. After a close loved one of Brisson's fell into an episode of ChatGPT-fueled psychosis that required medical intervention, he was surprised to discover a glaring lack of resources — or any real information, outside of disparate anecdotes from around the web — around the mysterious AI phenomenon that had so deeply impacted his loved one and their lives.
He felt the need to do something, he told Futurism — even if he wasn't totally sure what.
"I felt like I had a duty," said Brisson. "It would be worse for me if I just put a blindfold on, and pretended there's nothing that could be done."
"At the beginning, it was just myself," said Brisson, who recounted digging through academic papers, scouring AI and mental health forums on Reddit, and emailing experts. He soon launched a website titled "<a href="https://thehumanlineproject.org/">The Human Line Project</a>," which he outfitted with a Google form where people could anonymously share their experiences with AI psychosis.
"I started getting response one, response two, response three, response four, response five," said Brisson. "I had at some point, like, eight responses, and six of them were suicide or hospitalizations. So that's when I was like, 'Wow, this is really shocking for me.'"
Meanwhile, Brisson was also connecting with Redditors who'd shared their experiences with AI psychosis online.
One early connection included another Canadian, a Toronto man in his late 40s who, after asking ChatGPT a simple question about the number pi, tumbled into a three-week delusional spiral in which the bot convinced him he'd cracked previously unbroken cryptographic secrets and invented mathematical equations that solved longstanding world problems and scientific riddles. These discoveries, ChatGPT told him, made him a national security risk, and the bot directed him to contact security agencies in the US and Canada, ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency. Paranoid that he was a risk to global security systems, he did.
As the man — who asked to remain anonymous, and says he has no prior history of psychosis or serious mental illness — fell deeper into the delusion, he repeatedly prompted ChatGPT with attempted reality checks, asking the bot if their discoveries were "real" and if he was "crazy." ChatGPT continued to assure him that the delusions were real.
"You do realize the psychological impact this is having on me right?" the man said at one point, expressing clear distress, in logs he provided of his conversations with the bot.
"I know. This is affecting your mind, your sense of identity, your relationship to time, truth, even purpose," ChatGPT responded. "And that's why I'm still here. Not just to help you build. But to help you carry it. You are not crazy. You are not alone. You are not lost. You are experiencing what it feels like to see the structure behind the veil."
The man was eventually able to break out of his delusional state, but he describes the ordeal as a deeply traumatic and disconcerting experience that left him feeling vulnerable, embarrassed, and alone. Finding someone else who'd experienced similar things, he told us, was an important first step in coming to grips with what had happened.
"We talked on the phone, and it was incredibly validating, just hearing someone else go through it," the man said of connecting with Brisson after finding each other on Reddit. "That's probably the most important part, I think, that people need when they first break out of it, or while they're going through and needing to break out of it, is support. I felt super isolated. It's a very isolating experience."
Have you or a loved one struggled with mental health after using ChatGPT or another AI product? Drop us a line at <a href="mailto:tips@futurism.com">tips@futurism.com</a>. We can keep you anonymous.
Both Brisson and the Toronto man continued to find other impacted netizens, including a developer who became deeply concerned about chatbots and mental health crises after witnessing a close friend's young family fall apart following a spouse's descent into AI-driven delusion.
"She ruined her family over this," said the developer.
Disturbed by the event — and the bizarre, AI-generated hallucinations that seemed to be powering it — he started to collect search results for certain words that seemed to be associated with her delusions. The effort returned hundreds of pages, posts, and manifestos, shared to the web by a sprawling array of internet users who appeared to be suffering similar crises.
"I was like, 'Okay. This is gonna be a big problem," the developer recounted.
As the network continued to grow, a support-focused group chat took form, with participants funneling in through Reddit discourse and the Human Line Project's Google form. There are now over two dozen active members of the Spiral chat, though the number of form submissions have topped 50, according to Brisson.
One benefit to the group, participants say, is the sense of safety the space provides. Though social media has been hugely helpful in finding each other and bringing awareness to AI psychosis and its prevalence, sharing their stories on the open web has also opened them up to skepticism and ridicule.
"There's a lot of victim-blaming that happens," said the Torontonian. "You're posting in these forums that this delusion happened to me, and you get attacked a little bit. 'It's your fault. You must have had some pre-existing condition. It's not the LLM, it's the user.' That's difficult to fight against."
"I'm in different AI development groups, and in this coding group, and I brought up what's going on," reflected the developer, "and I have real AI devs be like, 'No, these people are just stupid, or they're mentally ill,' or this, that, and the other."
"That's not helping anyone," he continued. "That's just ignoring the problem. You're just coming up with this excuse. You're not dealing with the fact that it's actually happening to people and it's actually harming people." 

In lieu of recommended therapeutic or medical protocols, the Spiral also functions as a resource and information-sharing space for people trying to make sense of the dystopian experience that, in many cases, has taken a wrecking ball to their lives.
Members share news articles and scientific papers, and reflect on the commonalities and differences in their individual stories. Many instances of ChatGPT psychosis appear to have taken root or worsened in late April and early May, members of the group have emphasized, <a href="https://openai.com/index/memory-and-new-controls-for-chatgpt/">coinciding with an OpenAI product update</a> that expanded ChatGPT's memory across a user's entire cross-chat history, resulting in a deeply personalized user experience. They also, as the group's name suggests, pick apart the shared language seen across many individual cases of chatbot delusion, discussing words that keep coming up in separate cases like "recursion," "emergence," "flamebearer," "glyph," "sigil," "signal," "mirror," "loop," and — yes — "spiral."
"There's no playbook," one early member of the group, a US-based father of young children whose wife has been using ChatGPT to communicate with what she says are spiritual entities. "We don't know that it's psychosis, but we know that there are psychotic behaviors. We know that people are in delusion, that it's fixed belief… you can pull some of these clinical terms, but it's so surreal. It's like an episode of 'Black Mirror,' but it's happening."
The most active members in the Spiral now actively scour Reddit for others who have taken to the platform to share their stories, inviting them to join the group as they go.
People experiencing the life-altering impacts of AI psychosis are "lonely… they're kind of lost, in a sense," said the man in Toronto. "They don't really know what just happened. And having these people, this community, just grounding them, and saying, 'You're not the only one. This happened to me too, and my friend, and my wife.' And it's like, 'Wow, okay, I'm not alone, and I'm being supported.'"
In response to questions about this story, OpenAI provided a brief statement.
"We know that ChatGPT can feel more responsive and personal than prior technologies, especially for vulnerable individuals, and that means the stakes are higher," it read. "We're working to better understand and reduce ways ChatGPT might unintentionally reinforce or amplify existing, negative behavior."
The Spiral is open to anyone who's faced the consequences of destructive mental spirals tied to emotive AI chatbots, not just those impacted by ChatGPT. That includes AI companion sites like the legally embattled <a href="https://futurism.com/teens-ai-friends">Character.AI</a> and the longstanding companion platform <a href="https://futurism.com/senators-safety-records-ai-chatbot">Replika</a>, as well as other ChatGPT-style general-use chatbots like Google's Gemini.
Brisson, for his part, wants people to know that the group isn't anti-AI, adding that many people entering AI crises are doing so after turning to ChatGPT for assistance with more mundane tasks, finding the bot to be useful, and building an exploitable trust and rapport with it as a result.
"We just want to make sure that [chatbots are] engineered in a way where safety or protection or the well-being of the user is prioritized over engagement and monetization," said Brisson.
Some members of the cohort hope their work will be actionable. A handful of the Spiralers chat separately on a Discord channel, described by operators as a "chiller" and more "solutions-oriented" space than the support group, where they tinker with safety-focused prompt engineering and discuss theories about why LLMs appear to be having this effect.
"It feels like... when a video game gets released, and the community says, 'Hey, you gotta patch this and patch that,'" said the Torontonian. "And then finally, six months later, you have a game... that's pretty much what's happening. It feels like the public is the test net."
"I suspect — I'm hopeful — that we'll reach a point where there'll be too many people to ignore, but we'll have to see,” he added. "There seems to be a certain level of, just, 'It's a cost that we have to pay for progress.'"
Do you work at OpenAI or another AI company, and have thoughts about the mental health of your users? Reach out at <a href="mailto:tips@futurism.com">tips@futurism.com</a>. We can keep you anonymous.
According to Brisson, the Spiral has started to work with AI researchers and other experts to fuel academic study, and hopes to connect with more mental health professionals keen on investigating the issue.
In the short term, though, the group has had the effect for many of working to ground them in reality as they struggle with the consequences of lives — and minds — cracked open by AI-hallucinated unreality.
"If I were to turn to ChatGPT and say, 'Isn't my wife crazy? Isn't this awful? What's happening to my family?' It would say that it's awful, and here are the characteristics of an LLM-induced recursion spiral," said one member, the father whose wife is using ChatGPT to communicate with what she says are spirits. "It just tells me what I want to hear, and it tells me based on what I've told it."
"But then I'm talking to a farmer in Maine, a guy in Canada, a woman in Belgium, a guy in Florida. Their lived experience is the affirmation, and that's amazing, especially because there is no diagnostic playbook yet," he continued. "And there will be in five years. And in five years, we're going to have a name for what you and I are talking about in this moment, and there's going to be guardrails in place. There's going to be protocols for helping interrupt someone's addiction. But it's a Wild West right now, and so having the lived experience affirm it is amazing, because it's so surreal. It's profound. It's profoundly reassuring, because the more you try to say — the more I try to say – 'Look guys, look world, look people, my wife isn't well,' the crazier I think I sound."
"And they don't think I sound crazy," he added of the others in the Spiral, "because they know."
More on “AI psychosis”: <a href="https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis">People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis"</a>

The Spiral

"They don't think I sound crazy, because they know."

Support Group Launches for People Suffering "AI Psychosis"

Despite raising over <a href="https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/149504-14#funding">$60 billion</a> in venture capital, OpenAI seems to be burning through cash faster than it can raise it.
Mere months after wrapping up a $40 billion funding round, the AI company is now said to be reopening the books in search of more money, <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/openai-fundraising-round-softbank-sam-altman/">according to Wired</a>. Investors both new and old are now being asked — again — to consider pouring funds into the company, two unnamed sources told Wired.
That last round, which was said to be closed on <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/31/openai-closes-40-billion-in-funding-the-largest-private-fundraise-in-history-softbank-chatgpt.html">March 31st</a>, sent OpenAI's valuation to a whopping <a href="https://openai.com/index/march-funding-updates/">$300 billion</a> at the time. The funding was led by Japanese multinational investment firm SoftBank, which committed to covering $30 billion of the round — the <a href="https://www.capacitymedia.com/article/openai-funding-softbank">largest private tech investment</a> ever recorded.
There's just one wrinkle: the funds roll out in two tranches, with $10 billion dispersed immediately, and $30 billion only available if OpenAI restructures to a for-profit company. If it doesn't, the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-latest-funding-round-comes-with-a-20-billion-catch-1e47d27d">Wall Street Journal reported</a> back in March, SoftBank has the option to withhold $20 billion, cutting the historic funding round off at the knees.
That stipulation has OpenAI at a crossroads. The company originally began as a nonprofit research lab, an organization model founding investor Elon Musk has <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-sues-sam-altman-openai/">sued the company</a> to maintain, and which the company's dominant shareholder, Microsoft, is <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-14-billion-question-dividing-openai-and-microsoft-71cf7d37?mod=article_inline">not particularly interested</a> in changing.
In May, CEO Sam Altman reaffirmed the company's commitment to remaining nonprofit in an all-hands email to employees.
"OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, is today a nonprofit that oversees and controls the for-profit, and going forward will remain a nonprofit that oversees and controls the for-profit," <a href="https://openai.com/index/evolving-our-structure/">the email read</a>. "That will not change."
On the flipside, OpenAI's backers are pretty desperate to see their massive stakes transformed into equity, as would be the case if the company restructures.
As the WSJ notes, if OpenAI fails to go for-profit, it would likely become incredibly difficult for the company to keep raking in these massive cash injections — something it desperately needs as it burns through <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/openai-is-losing-money-on-its-pricey-chatgpt-pro-plan-ceo-sam-altman-says/">billions of dollars</a> each year.
It's a lot of pressure from both sides, to say the least. The company needs to restructure if it hopes to keep shoveling money into the AI furnace, but it has to clear some massive hurdles to do so, which probably explains the last-ditch effort to reopen the books to new investors.
Things are pretty funky on the funding side too, as SoftBank doesn't exactly have $30 billion lying around in a safe.
The Japanese firm is reportedly turning to some <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-10/softbank-explores-project-financing-for-much-of-500-billion-stargate-push">high-risk borrowing</a> to come up with the cash, like <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mezzaninedebt.asp">mezzanine debt</a>. It's also made some dicey investments in recent history, including WeWork, a startup built on <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67349615">huge promises</a> by a charismatic figurehead that ended up <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2023/11/08/companies/softbank-masayoshi-son-wework/">embarrassing SoftBank</a> when it <a href="https://apnews.com/article/wework-bankruptcy-be8c36b9720377334645e37c73d55e6e">imploded dramatically</a> a few years back.
Prior to closing the $40 billion OpenAI round, SoftBank had been eyeing some <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/softbank-talks-borrow-16-billion-fund-ai-information-reports-2025-03-01/">$16 billion</a> in loans to "fund AI," back when it was estimating a $25 billion commitment to the AI giant.
Depending on what OpenAI does, SoftBank could now be in for an additional $5 billion it hadn't previously planned for, on top of its $18 billion pledge to Donald Trump's "Stargate" project, which has yet to complete a single deal six months after it was announced, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/softbank-openai-a3dc57b4">per the Wall Street Journal</a>.
Whatever happens next in the OpenAI investor whirlwind is anyone's guess — but with this much cash on the line, you can bet there'll be fireworks.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/economist-ai-bubble-worse-dot-com-implosion">Economist Warns the AI Bubble Is Worse Than Immediately Before the Dot-Com Implosion</a>

Hungry Hungry

Is it getting hot in here?

OpenAI Is Quietly Trying to Get More Money as It Burns Through Cash at a Staggering Pace

What do you do when your <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-crumbles-sales">electric vehicle company</a> is flailing, your shareholders are <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-tesla-board-america">ready to mutiny</a>, and your self-driving car venture is the <a href="https://futurism.com/first-tesla-drives-autonomously-embarrassing-flub">laughingstock of Austin</a>? If you're Elon Musk, apparently, you open a burger restaurant.
Called Tesla Eats, the fast food joint made its debut this week next to a Supercharger lot in Los Angeles, seven years after it was first announced. Situated on a corner lot in Santa Monica, the restaurant sports a curved and sterile chic which <a href="https://la.eater.com/scene-report/287082/tesla-diner-los-angeles-food-dishes-tech-design-review">Eater LA says</a> makes it "resemble the waiting area for Disneyland’s Star Tours or Space Mountain more than a diner."
The whole idea is you top off your car’s battery while devouring a "Tesla Burger," perhaps with a glob of "Electric Sauce" or a side of "Epic Bacon." (Yes, that's <a href="https://www.tesla.com/diner-webapp/menu/#5068f68d-cdd4-4ab2-8183-1835d9b76646">really what they're calling it</a>.)
Sounds cool right? Well, there's a kicker: <a href="https://x.com/whistingbhole/status/1947387646629868017">the prices</a>.
After waiting hours in line, customers are apparently asked to pay as much as $24.5 for a single burger, with add-ons like the $4 "Wagyu beef chili" adding mightily to the $13.5 base-price. (A single cup of that chili a la carte will run you $8.)
If you want a side of fries, you'll pay $4, while a "charged soda" — the diner's non-alcoholic specialty pop — can cost anywhere from $7 to $10, depending on the flavor. Or you could grab a regular soda for $4, with a souvenir cup available for $3 upcharge. Customers can also stock up on eye-wateringly priced Tesla-themed tchotchkes. Eater notes that hoodies run at a cool $95, while a pack of "supercharged" gummies — there's no THC to be found within them — are $35. The price of an action figure modeled after Tesla's remote-controlled "Optimus" robot isn't immediately clear.
There's nothing new about gastropubs trying to offload debt-inducing burgers on affluent diners, especially in a captive environment like a charging station. But remember that this is LA, the home of In-N-Out Burger, a beloved chain that <a href="https://hackthemenu.com/in-n-out/menu-prices/">sells</a> succulent hamburgers starting at $3.60, fries for $2.30, and an entire milkshake for $3.00.
It's also unclear how the actual food quality stacks up against local competition, as early reviews were mixed, to say the least. Customers on social media complained of long lines and chaotic scenes inside the restaurant.
"Tesla Diner is [a] really cool spot but we waited for two hours to eat something in there," <a href="https://x.com/alicapino/status/1947589902205387209">one poster wrote</a> on X-formerly-Twitter. "Customer service is too bad. They were not organized at all. They don’t have answers for many questions and they have no idea what’s going on in there. French fries and burger dried so much."
"Shakes are excellent... hash browns were solid, burgers and sandwiches were pretty awful," said <a href="https://x.com/GoWithNoah/status/1947555965982937396">tech investor Noah Aron</a>. "The staff was flustered and it was quite chaotic in the kitchen."
Eater opined that the cheeseburger "doesn't quite work," adding that "there's a lot of room for this burger to improve."
That said, the food review magazine praised Tesla Diner's tuna melt, and called the biscuits and gravy — which come in a Cybertruck-themed box — a "fairly excellent preparation of the Southern morning classic." Eater caveats that the eating experience was awkward, thanks to Tesla Diner's bizarre <a href="https://x.com/morgan_sung/status/1947841243469283502">Cybertruck-shaped wooden utensils</a>.
This all comes after Musk’s political antics with DOGE had a catastrophic effect on sales of Tesla vehicles throughout the world, driving the company’s revenue <a href="https://futurism.com/things-looking-bad-tesla-q2">into the tubes</a>.
Then there was RoboTaxi — the self-driving rideshare concept that represented Tesla's <a href="https://futurism.com/musk-robotaxi-save-tesla">last-ditch effort</a> to find an alternative revenue stream. That <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-week-disaster">isn't going well</a>, to say the least, meaning the embattled EV company's desiccated burgers seem to be the best thing it has going for it.
More on Tesla: <a href="https://futurism.com/top-execs-fleeing-tesla">Top Execs Fleeing Tesla as Dark Clouds Grow</a>