Perplexity, one of the fastest-growing AI search tools right now, is suddenly facing some serious heat. And this time, it’s not about accuracy or hallucinations.

A fresh lawsuit is raising uncomfortable questions about what actually happens to user data behind the scenes, especially when people assume their chats are private. And if the allegations hold any weight, this could be one of those moments that prompts many users to rethink how casually they share information with AI tools.

Is Perplexity’s “incognito mode” actually private?

According to a newly filed class-action lawsuit by an anonymous Perplexity user, John Doe, not quite. The complaint alleges that Perplexity’s so-called incognito mode is essentially a “sham” that fails to protect user data as most people would expect.

The lawsuit claims that user conversations, including potentially sensitive topics like financial advice, health concerns, or legal queries, were shared with third parties like Google and Meta. And as reported by Ars Technica, this happened even when users explicitly chose incognito mode, which is supposed to limit tracking and data collection.

What’s more concerning is the kind of data allegedly involved. Reports suggest that information such as IP addresses, email IDs, geolocation data, and even full chat transcripts may have been passed along for ad targeting purposes. The lawsuit also accuses Perplexity of embedding tracking tools similar to those used in online advertising, without clearly informing users. In some cases, it even claims that entire conversations could be accessed via publicly reachable links.

Why this lawsuit could change how we trust AI

This goes beyond one app as AI tools feel personal, which makes oversharing easy. The lawsuit also claims years of chats were shared with ad giants, and that Perplexity doesn’t clearly surface its privacy policy like rivals do.

If true, it could force stricter transparency across AI platforms. For now, they’re just allegations, but enough to make that next AI prompt feel a little less casual.

Tencent Holdings has launched ClawPro, an enterprise AI agent management platform built on OpenClaw, the open-source framework that has become the fastest-growing project in GitHub’s history and the unlikely centrepiece of a national technology craze in China. The tool, released in public beta by Tencent’s cloud division on Thursday, allows businesses to deploy OpenClaw-based AI agents in as little as 10 minutes, with controls for template selection, model switching, token-consumption tracking, and security compliance. During its internal beta, ClawPro was adopted by more than 200 organisations across finance, government, and manufacturing, sectors that require the kind of strict data governance that the open-source version of OpenClaw was never designed to provide.

ClawPro is the latest and most commercially significant addition to Tencent’s growing suite of OpenClaw products, which now spans individual users, developers, and enterprises. In March, the company released QClaw, a mini-programme that embeds OpenClaw inside WeChat, giving the framework access to the app’s 1.3 billion users. It simultaneously launched WorkBuddy, a workplace AI agent tested by more than 2,000 non-technical employees across human resources, administration, and operations, and ClawBot, a WeChat plugin supporting multi-modal interactions. The speed of the rollout reflects Tencent’s determination to position WeChat not just as a messaging platform but as the primary interface for the agentic AI wave that is reshaping how software gets used.

The object of all this enterprise engineering is a tool created by Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer who published the first version under the name Clawdbot in November 2025. The software, built to let large language models operate computers, call tools, and execute tasks autonomously, was renamed twice in three days in late January 2026, first to Moltbot after Anthropic raised trademark concerns over the phonetic similarity to “Claude,” then to OpenClaw because Steinberger found Moltbot “never quite rolled off the tongue.” In February, he announced he would be joining OpenAI and transferring the project to an open-source foundation. By that point, the project had already passed React to become the most-starred software repository on GitHub, a record it reached in 60 days that took React more than a decade. As of late March, OpenClaw had 335,000 GitHub stars, 27 million monthly visitors, 2 million active users, and more than 13,700 community-built skills on its ClawHub marketplace.

In China, the adoption curve has been extraordinary. The country now has more OpenClaw users than any other, roughly double the activity of the United States according to analysis by SecurityScorecard. The phenomenon has been given a name: “raise a lobster,” after OpenClaw’s crustacean logo and mascot, which Steinberger chose because a lobster sheds its shell to grow. Tencent organised public installation sessions in Shenzhen that drew retirees and students. Baidu held similar events in Beijing. A cottage industry of technicians began charging 500 yuan, around $72, for on-site installations. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang told CNBC that OpenClaw was “definitely the next ChatGPT.” The Chinese state media apparatus amplified the enthusiasm. “Claw-powered” one-person companies became a talking point at the National People’s Congress, and local governments began offering grants to startups building applications on the framework.

The enthusiasm collided with reality almost immediately. In March, China’s National Computer Emergency Response Team warned that OpenClaw had “extremely weak default security configuration” and that attackers could exploit the tool by embedding malicious instructions in web pages or distributing poisoned plugins. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s National Vulnerability Database published formal security guidelines urging users to run only the latest version, minimise internet exposure, and grant the agent the minimum permissions necessary. State-owned enterprises and government agencies, including the country’s largest banks, received notices warning them against installing OpenClaw on office devices. Several were instructed to report existing installations for security review and possible removal. Bloomberg reported that China moved to curb OpenClaw use at banks and state agencies, a striking reversal for a tool the government had been celebrating weeks earlier.

Tencent’s own relationship with OpenClaw has not been without friction. On 11 March, Tencent Cloud launched SkillHub, a Chinese-localised mirror of OpenClaw’s ClawHub marketplace, by scraping more than 13,000 skills from the original registry. The bulk scraping pushed Steinberger’s server costs into five digits and caused slowdowns on official servers. He complained publicly on X. Five days later, Tencent Cloud and Tencent AI appeared on OpenClaw’s official sponsor list, providing lightweight application servers for one-click deployment. The episode encapsulated a dynamic familiar in Chinese tech: a European project supplies the foundational innovation, Chinese companies scale it faster than anyone else, and the relationship between creator and commercialiser oscillates between parasitism and partnership.

The competitive context is fierce. Alibaba, which holds a 35.8 per cent share of China’s AI cloud market compared with Tencent’s smaller position, integrated its Qwen AI assistant across Taobao, Tmall, Alipay, and other consumer platforms, reaching 300 million monthly active users by early 2026 and delivering roughly 140 million first-time AI shopping experiences during a Chinese New Year promotional campaign. ByteDance is pursuing platform independence through Douyin and a state-media partnership. Baidu’s AI-powered business now accounts for 43 per cent of its core revenue, up from 26 per cent a year ago. Tencent’s strategy depends on WeChat’s unmatched distribution, its 1.3 billion users, and the bet that AI agents will become features of existing super-apps rather than standalone products. The company spent 18 billion yuan on AI products in 2025 and plans to double that in 2026.

ClawPro is the piece of that strategy designed to generate cloud revenue. Enterprise AI agent deployments require infrastructure, compute, model hosting, security layers, and compliance tooling, all of which Tencent can bill for even when the underlying agent framework is free. The 200 organisations that trialled ClawPro during its internal beta represent the beginning of a conversion funnel: take the enthusiasm for a consumer phenomenon, channel it through enterprise-grade tooling, and extract recurring cloud revenue from the result. It is the same playbook that European cloud companies have used to monetise open-source software, applied at a scale and speed that only the Chinese tech ecosystem can achieve.

The security concerns are not trivial. OpenClaw, by design, grants AI agents broad access to local files and the ability to communicate with external services. In an enterprise context, a misconfigured agent could exfiltrate sensitive documents, execute unauthorised transactions, or expose internal systems to prompt-injection attacks. The tension between the open-source community’s permissive defaults and the compliance requirements of banks, government agencies, and manufacturers is precisely the gap that ClawPro is designed to fill. Whether Tencent’s security layer is robust enough to satisfy Chinese regulators, who have already demonstrated their willingness to restrict the tool entirely, will determine whether the year of governed AI produces governed AI agents or merely governed press releases about them.

The broader significance of the OpenClaw phenomenon is what it reveals about the geography of AI adoption. The tool was built by a single developer in Austria, renamed after a trademark dispute with an American AI company, transferred to an open-source foundation after its creator joined OpenAI, and then adopted at a velocity in China that dwarfs anything that has happened in the West. The country that produced DeepSeek, the AI model that rattled Silicon Valley’s assumption that scale required American infrastructure, is now demonstrating that it can also adopt, adapt, and commercialise foreign AI tools faster than the markets that created them. Tencent’s ClawPro is, in that sense, less a product launch than a proof of concept for a pattern that will repeat: the open-source AI stack is global, but the speed of enterprise adoption is determined by the ecosystems that can distribute it. In China, that ecosystem runs through WeChat, and WeChat runs through Tencent.

A former core infrastructure engineer has pleaded guilty to locking Windows admins out of 254 servers as part of a failed extortion plot targeting his employer, an industrial company headquartered in Somerset County, New Jersey.

According to court documents, 57-year-old Daniel Rhyne from Kansas City, Missouri, remotely accessed the company’s network without authorization using an administrator account between November 9 and November 25.

Throughout this time, he allegedly scheduled tasks on the company’s Windows domain controller to delete network admin accounts and to change the passwords for 13 domain admin accounts and 301 domain user accounts to “TheFr0zenCrew!”.

The prosecutors also accused Rhyne of scheduling tasks to change the passwords for two local admin accounts, which would affect 3,284 workstations, and for two more local admin accounts, which would impact 254 servers on his employer’s network. He also scheduled some tasks to shut down random servers and workstations on the network over multiple days in December 2023.

Subsequently, on November 25, Rhyne emailed a number of his coworkers a ransom email titled “Your Network Has Been Penetrated,” saying that all IT administrators had been locked out of their accounts and that server backups had been deleted to make data recovery impossible.

Additionally, the emails threatened to shut down 40 random servers daily over the next ten days unless the company paid a ransom of 20 bitcoin (worth roughly $750,000 at the time).

“On or about November 25, 2023, at approximately 4:00 p.m. EST, network administrators employed at Victim-1 began receiving password reset notifications for a Victim-1 domain administrator account, as well as hundreds of Victim-1 user accounts,” the criminal complaint reads.

“Shortly thereafter, the Victim-1 network administrators discovered that all other Victim-1 domain administrator accounts were deleted, thereby denying domain administrator access to Victim-1’s computer networks.”

Forensic investigators found that on November 22, Rhyne used a hidden virtual machine and his account to search the web for information on clearing Windows logs, changing domain user passwords, and deleting domain accounts as he planned his extortion plot.

One week earlier, Rhyne made similar web searches on his laptop, including “command line to remotely change local administrator password” and “command line to change local administrator password.”

Rhyne was arrested in Missouri on Tuesday, August 27, and released after his initial appearance in federal court. The hacking and extortion charges to which he pleaded guilty carry a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.

Earlier this month, a North Carolina data analyst contractor was found guilty of extorting his employer, Brightly Software (a Software-as-a-Service company previously known as SchoolDude), for $2.5 million.

Automated pentesting proves the path exists. BAS proves whether your controls stop it. Most teams run one without the other.

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Ronan Rogers and Ruth Callanan discuss innovation in the west of Ireland and the evolution of Ireland’s STEM careers.

Ireland’s medtech sector is moving beyond traditional biomedical engineering, according to Ronan Rogers, the senior R&D director for cardiac ablation solutions at Medtronic. He explained the region has built “real depth”, not just in medtech, but across key areas such as pharmaceutical science, advanced analytics and digital technology. Areas that are now “increasingly converging”.

“That diversity of opportunity is a huge strength for Ireland,” he told SiliconRepublic.com. “It allows people from different professional backgrounds to find meaningful, high‑impact careers in healthcare, while helping Ireland move further up the value chain as a centre for complex, globally relevant innovation.”

Having recently expanded its Galway-based pharmaceutical laboratory, the Medtronic facility now serves as a west of Ireland hub for high-tech innovation and the evolving needs of the global healthcare space. Rogers is of the opinion that this is reflective of the convergence of the country’s medtech divisions.

Noting that the primary purpose of the lab “is to integrate pharmaceutical, engineering and analytical expertise under one roof to address the complex challenges of combination products, [that is] where a medical device and a medicine work together”.

“We see that convergence very clearly in this laboratory and there is a wide range of career paths in our industry, whether that’s a pharmacist drawn to the faster innovation cycles and applied science of medtech, or a software developer who wants to use their skills to solve real healthcare challenges and code with a deeper sense of purpose.”

What opportunities exist?

With the expansion comes the opportunity for students and professionals to consider a new role, either as part of Medtronic or within Galway’s thriving life science and medtech spaces.  

“Galway offers a unique innovation ecosystem where infrastructure, academic partnerships and a significant medtech footprint all provide a strong foundation for sustaining Ireland’s leadership in the life sciences sector,” said Ruth Callanan, Medtronic’s director of site quality. 

With the investment focused on significantly expanding R&D capability and technical depth within a critical space in the Irish medtech sector, Medtronic has increased lab space by almost a half and introduced analytical technologies that didn’t exist there before.

Callanan said: “This creates the conditions for future high‑value work as programmes grow. It strengthens Galway’s ability to attract and retain highly specialised talent, pharmaceutical scientists, chemical and materials engineers and it allows work that was previously outsourced internationally to be done here in Ireland.

“Over time, as demand and activity scale, we do expect this capability to support additional specialist roles, phased in over the coming years. Importantly, it reinforces Ireland’s position at the forefront of advanced medtech R&D and reflects a broader industry trend toward self-sufficiency in high-tech analytical testing.”

Step into the future

She explained the new lab will enable experts to integrate processes as the facility will be responsible for the entire life cycle of product development, from early phase R&D through to post-market oversight.

She added: “The laboratory utilises advanced LCMS [liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry] and GCMS [gas chromatography-mass spectrometry] technologies, which act as ‘molecular microscopes’. This allows our scientists to identify unknown compounds or impurities at extremely precise levels.”

According to Rogers, the new lab has a role to play in what he believes to be the reshaping of how STEM careers in Ireland are perceived and pursued, with Callanan noting this creates for students and professionals opportunities to engage with careers that bridge the gap between various scientific disciplines. 

“A laboratory of this size and complexity requires students and professionals with a wide range of skills and experience across multiple disciplines,” she said. 

“Just as importantly,” added Rogers, “we’re sending a clear signal to pharmacists, chemists and analytical scientists that medtech offers deep, intellectually challenging career paths that go well beyond traditional manufacturing or even classical biomedical engineering.”

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When to watch Man City vs. Liverpool

• Saturday at 7:45 a.m. ET (4:45 a.m. PT)

Where to watch Man City vs. Liverpool

• Man City vs. Liverpool will air in the US on ESPN and ESPN Plus, and is also available via ESPN Select or ESPN Unlimited.

The pick of this weekend’s FA Cup quarterfinals sees Man City host Liverpool in a blockbuster cup clash at the Etihad Stadium. 

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Man City’s goal with this last-eight faceoff is to move a step closer to claiming the prize following last month’s Carabao Cup triumph over Arsenal. City’s route to the quarterfinals has seen it beat Exeter and Salford before easing past Premier League Newcastle 3-1 at St. James’ Park in the previous round.

Liverpool, meanwhile, comes into this cup tie looking to get back to winning following their Premier League defeat to Brighton before the international break. With the Reds out of the EPL title race and also eliminated from the Champions League, this tournament provides their final opportunity to claim the silver cup this season, as well as ease the mounting pressure on manager Arne Slot amid what has so far been a disappointing campaign. 

Manchester City takes on Liverpool at the Etihad Stadium on Saturday. Kickoff is set for 12:45 p.m. BST local time in the UK, which is 7:45 a.m. ET or 4:45 a.m. PT in the US and Canada, and 10:45 p.m. AEDT in Australia.

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Livestream Man City vs. Liverpool in the US

Every match from this point in the tournament will be available to stream live on ESPN Plus, which is accessible via the network’s ESPN Select or ESPN Unlimited streaming packages. ESPN Select carries ESPN Plus and is the cheaper option at $13 per month.

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ESPN’s streaming platforms have been shaken up in recent months. The sports network now offers two tiers with its new direct-to-consumer setup: ESPN Select and ESPN Unlimited. ESPN Select is essentially what ESPN Plus used to be, with the same content available to subscribers, including FA Cup soccer, for $13 per month. If you want full access to ESPN’s networks and services, such as ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3, ESPNews and ESPN Deportes, as well as all of ESPN Select’s content, then ESPN Unlimited is the way to go. It costs $30 per month.

Livestream Man City vs. Liverpool in the UK

TNT Sports and the BBC are sharing duties for the FA Cup this season, with this Sunday afternoon game set to be shown on TNT Sports 1.

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You can access TNT Sports via Sky Q, Virgin Media and EE TV as part of a TV package.

Alternatively,TNT Sports has a new streaming home with the launch of HBO Max in the UK. It costs £31 either way and comes in a package that includes Discovery Plus’ library of documentary content.

A bundle including HBO Max’s entertainment plan alongside TNT Sports currently costs £31 per month. 

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Livestream Man City vs. Liverpool in Canada

Canadian soccer fans looking to watch this FA Cup fixture can watch all the action live via Sportsnet.

Sportsnet is available via most cable operators, but cord-cutters can subscribe to the standalone streaming service Sportsnet Plus instead, with prices starting at CA$30 per month or CA$250 per year for the standard plan.

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Livestream Man City vs. Liverpool in Australia

Football fans in Australia can watch FA Cup matches live on the streaming service Stan Sport.

Stan Sport will set you back AU$20 a month, on top of a Stan subscription, which starts at AU$12. It is worth noting the streaming service is offering a seven-day free trial. On top of select FA Cup matches, a subscription gives you access to Premier League, Champions League and Europa League action, along with international rugby and Formula E.

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