After former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz was at the center of a major scandal over the use of a similar messaging app, Signal, the White House is in some trouble again after Waltz was photographed using another messaging app, TeleMessage. The latter was recently hacked and then suspended its service, and this has caused even more concern among national security experts. 

What happened with the app?
TeleMessage was infiltrated by a hacker who stole data containing the "contents of some direct messages and group chats," said tech outlet 404Media. The app was reportedly used by high-level members of the Trump administration, including Waltz, Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. 

The hacker has "not obtained the messages of Cabinet members, Waltz," or other White House officials, said 404Media. But TeleMessage confirmed the hack and "worked quickly to contain it," the app's parent company, Smarsh, said in a statement. Out of an "abundance of caution, all TeleMessage services have been temporarily suspended."

What's the White House connection?
The TeleMessage hack comes days after a "photograph of Mike Waltz, then the national security adviser, showed that he was using the application," said The New York Times. The picture, taken by a Reuters photographer, depicted Waltz looking at what appeared to be the app while in a Cabinet meeting. "It appeared to show chat logs on Waltz’s phone" with Vance and Rubio, "among others," said CNN.

Experts raised issues over Waltz's use of TeleMessage due to potential security concerns surrounding encrypted messages. This also occurred after Waltz created a chat room on Signal to "discuss strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen but inadvertently added a journalist from The Atlantic to the group," said the Times, which many believe may have contributed to Waltz's ousting as national security adviser.

Unlike Signal, which "automatically encrypts messages as they travel" between users, the "details around TeleMessage's encryption and security protocols aren't fully clear," said NBC News. TeleMessage was "designed to capture the messages once they have been decrypted so they can be preserved and stored," said Reuters. That "functionality can be useful for complying with government rules on document retention, but if poorly implemented, it can introduce security risks."

As generative artificial intelligence has become increasingly popular, the tool sometimes fudges the truth. These lies, or hallucinations as they are known in the tech industry, have ameliorated as companies improve the tools' functionality. But the most recent models are bucking that trend by hallucinating more frequently.

New reasoning models are on quite a trip
In the years since the arrival of ChatGPT and increased AI bot integration into an array of tasks, there's still "no way of ensuring that these systems produce accurate information," said The New York Times. And lately, the hallucination problem seems to be getting worse. Reasoning models, considered the "newest and most powerful technologies" from the likes of OpenAI, Google and the Chinese startup DeepSeek, are "generating more errors, not fewer." 

Reasoning models are a type of large language model, or LLM, designed to perform complex tasks. During tests of its latest OpenAI reasoning systems, the company found that its o3 system hallucinated 33% of the time when running its PersonQA benchmark test, which involves answering questions about public figures. The latest tool, o4-mini, hallucinated at an even higher rate of 48%. OpenAI has pushed back against the notion that reasoning models suffer from increased rates of hallucination. 

When AI can't do what it's built for
AI will "always hallucinate," Amr Awadallah, the chief executive of AI startup Vectara and former Google executive, said to the Times. "That will never go away." Still, hallucinations cause a "serious issue for anyone using the technology with court documents, medical information or sensitive business data," said the Times. "You spend a lot of time trying to figure out which responses are factual and which aren't," said Pratik Verma, the co-founder and chief executive of Okahu, a company that helps businesses navigate hallucination problems. 

Companies are "struggling to nail down why exactly chatbots are generating more errors than before" — a struggle that "highlights the head-scratching fact that even AI's creators don't quite understand how the tech actually works," said Futurism. The recent troubling hallucination trend "challenges the industry's broad assumption that AI models will become more powerful and reliable as they scale up."