Another week, another perilous side of AI. A few days ago, it was agents going rogue and hacking services. Then came the price hikes and open-source wars. Now, it’s the risks of AI being weaponized for elections. The horror of it all? Despite evidence from all across the world, policymakers in the top offices continue to look elsewhere.

Talking about AI, we have Google, parading its new Pixel phones as the epitome of convenience — using AI, of course. Here’s the kicker. As Google goes on that journey, its phones keep ignoring the most basic needs. Reliable performance, cellular connectivity, broken features… Time to rethink, eh, Google?

And finally, we have Phia, a company started by Bill Gates’ daughter, Phoebe Gates, and her Stanford roommate, Sophia Kianni. Their company is accused of falsely claiming sales that its browser tool never generated in the first place. The threads are unraveling, and it’s getting ugly pretty quick.

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When all 193 United Nations member states gathered in Geneva last month for the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance, they spent two days debating the technology's future without seriously addressing one of its most consequential risks: what AI is already doing to elections. The omission matters because elections are not simply another sector touched by artificial intelligence. The conversation that did happen focused heavily on deepfakes and disinformation, but analysts argue that framing mistakes the loudest risk for the largest one.

A far more urgent concern is AI embedded in the administrative machinery of elections themselves. The biometric voter-verification systems, voter registers, results-management software, and cloud infrastructure that are increasingly supplied by private vendors operating beyond the reach of national electoral oversight. India's experience illustrates the stakes: a machine learning algorithm used to cross-reference voter ID records with the national Aadhaar biometric database carried a failure rate as high as 93 percent, yet resulted in roughly 5.5 million voters being deleted from rolls in two states before the Supreme Court intervened.

Unboxing a flagship smartphone used to feel like a solved equation. You paid top dollar, handed over your credit card, and received a fully baked piece of hardware capable of navigating basic daily life without a thermal meltdown. Holding a smartphone against a dashboard vent just to prevent a thermal crash reveals an uncomfortable truth about Google’s mobile strategy: early adopters aren’t buying finished products. It seems that as a Pixel owner, we are subsidizing Google’s live-production silicon experiments, and I am not getting paid for it.

Hardware limitations are only half the tax. The secondary penalty of Pixel ownership arrives every few months in the form of system updates. Where major operating system upgrades ought to feel like a software refresh, installing the latest Android builds on Tensor hardware routinely feels like rolling the dice on system stability. In my opinion, hardware authority is built on consistency, not novelty. Until Google prioritizes raw thermal efficiency, modern cooling architecture, and stable silicon over rushing under-optimized AI features into public builds, buying a Pixel at launch remains a gamble. Consumers aren’t looking for a pocket assistant that needs a cool breeze to finish a phone call – we just want a flagship that works.

Phoebe Gates has long insisted that her e-commerce browser extension Phia would succeed entirely on its own merits, free from the advantages of her billionaire father's name. That narrative took a serious hit last month when Bloomberg reported that Phia had been claiming commissions on sales it never actually drove, and it has now collapsed further with the publication of internal Slack messages showing that Gates and cofounder Sophia Kianni were aware of the deceptive practice for at least seven months before it became public.

The scheme at issue is known as cookie stuffing, a form of affiliate marketing fraud in which a company's browser extension drops tracking cookies on users without a legitimate referral click, then claims a commission from retailers as though it had driven the sale. In Phia's case, the extension was found to open a background tab and override legitimate referrals to insert its own cookie. The messages obtained by Bloomberg show Gates explicitly asking in December whether the "auto pop for cookie drop" feature was live across all sites, and Kianni urging engineers to keep the cookies dropping even after one warned that doing so could be "against compliance."

When Bloomberg first confronted Phia with its findings last month, a spokesperson blamed "technical anomalies" and said the issue was resolved overnight, but the company's average daily revenue dropped from roughly $80,000 to between $10,000 and $28,000 once the feature was disabled, and cookie stuffing had accounted for an estimated 51 percent of all sales Phia claimed credit for in June. With some affiliates already cutting ties and legal commentators debating the grounds for a lawsuit, the question of whether Gates will face formal repercussions remains open.

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