Bob Hartheimer, CEO of Tennessee’s Evolve Bank & Trust, was fired after U.S. law enforcement officials caught him propositioning a law enforcement officer posing as a 15-year-old boy on gay dating app Grindr.

On Oct. 19, an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation logged onto Grindr while pretending to be a teen boy, and a user called “Tomm” wrote a message to that person saying, “Hey any chance u would hu with an older and chill guy,” according to an affidavit from a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation that was unsealed on Tuesday.

The two discussed getting together in person later in the week, according to the affidavit. On Snapchat, they talked about the sex acts they might perform. “Tomm” asked for a photo of the “boy” without shorts on, and he also sent the undercover agent a picture of himself naked. The FBI was able to obtain an IP address for “Tomm” from Snapchat, as well as an address from Comcast, the affidavit showed.

Hartheimer was arrested in Memphis on Oct. 23 for attempted production of child pornography and transfer of obscene material to a minor, according to a warrant.

An Evolve spokesperson and Blake Ballin, a lawyer representing Hartheimer, told CNBC on Saturday that Evolve has fired the CEO.

“Bob’s family is aware of the charges,” Ballin wrote in an email. “His family loves and supports him and requests privacy during this difficult period in their lives. We have no further comment at this time.”

The Wall Street Journal reported on Hartheimer’s firing from Evolve Bank on Friday.

Evolve said its finance chief, Mark Mosteller, and its general counsel, Joelle Weltzin, will be in charge of the bank’s operations, as they were before the bank hired Hartheimer in August.

“We are in close contact with the U.S. Attorney’s office and have been assured that this is a personal matter and does not relate to the Bank or its operations in any way,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

Last year, Evolve was caught up in the bankruptcy of financial technology startup Synapse, which cut off access to a system for handling transactions and account details. Fintech apps such as Yotta worked with Evolve and other banks, with Synapse acting as a middleman.

Synapse’s method of keeping app users’ money in various banks, including Evolve, created accounting problems, and up to $96 million in deposits went missing. Thousands of Americans lost money, CNBC reported.

In 2024, Evolve also suffered a cyberattack, during which hackers obtained customer information and demanded a ransom. The bank said it did not pay any ransom and the data was eventually posted online.

“This is a structural change, demonstrating our continued commitment to doing the hard work to earn back the trust of our customers, employees, regulators, and investors,” Evolve said in an August statement announcing the selection of Hartheimer to replace CEO Scott Stafford, who retired after joining in 2004.

The bank touted Hartheimer’s experience as director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Division of Resolutions, as well as his years as a regulatory consultant for fintech companies.

“Over the past four decades, I’ve led, turned around, and advised institutions across the financial landscape,” Hartheimer wrote on his LinkedIn profile. 

The 100-year-old bank reported net losses for each of the first three quarters of 2025 after being profitable since 2003, according to data on file with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council.

— CNBC’s Dan Mangan and Hugh Son contributed reporting.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC. Versant would become the new parent company of CNBC upon Comcast’s planned spinoff of Versant.

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A week ago, OpenAI released a tool that can go online to shop for groceries or book a restaurant reservation. Now it is offering A.I. technology that can gather information from across the internet and synthesize it in concise reports.

OpenAI unveiled the new tool, called Deep Research, with a demonstration on YouTube on Sunday, days after showing the technology to lawmakers, policymakers and other officials in Washington.

“It can do complex research tasks that might take a person anywhere from 30 minutes to 30 days,” Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer, said at the event in Washington. By contrast, Deep Research can accomplish such tasks in five to 30 minutes, depending on the complexity.

Artificial intelligence researchers call this kind of technology an A.I. agent. While chatbots can answer questions, write poems and generate images, agents can use other software and services on the internet. This might involve anything from ordering dinner via DoorDash to synthesizing information from across the internet.

During the briefing on Capitol Hill, Mr. Weil showed the technology gathering information about Albert Einstein. He asked the tool to put together a detailed report about the physicist for a hypothetical Senate staff member preparing for a congressional hearing where Einstein is a nominee for U.S. Secretary of Energy.

In addition to providing information about Einstein’s background and personality, it generated five questions that a senator could ask the physicist to determine whether he was the right person for the job.

“It can surf the web and understand text and images and P.D.F.s,” Mr. Weil said. “And it can do this recursively. It can do one search and that leads to other searches and then it can synthesize all the information it has learned.”

Mr. Weil said that the reports generated by the tool included citations showing where the information was found. But A.I. technologies like this can still get things wrong or even make up information — a phenomenon that A.I. researchers call “hallucination.” This may mean that it provides incorrect citations.

OpenAI said that the tool may struggle to distinguish authoritative information from rumors and that it often failed to accurately convey when it was uncertain about the information it was delivering.

Still, Mr. Weil argued that the tool could help the United States accelerate economic growth. He added that the tool would be particularly useful for people in fields like finance, science and law.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)

OpenAI said that, beginning on Sunday, Deep Research would be available to anyone who is subscribed to ChatGPT Pro, a $200-a-month service that provides access to all of the company’s latest tools. It plans to also offer the tool via its other paid services.

The tool is based on the same technology that drives ChatGPT. This technology is what A.I. researchers call a neural network — a mathematical system that can learn skills by analyzing data.

In recent months, OpenAI has developed versions of the technology that can “reason” through tasks, determining through trial and error what actions to take. Deep Research is based on the company’s newest reasoning technology, OpenAI o3.

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In the past week, OpenAI’s Operator has done the following things for me:

• Ordered me a new ice cream scoop on Amazon.

• Bought me a new domain name and configured its settings.

• Booked a Valentine’s Day date for me and my wife.

• Scheduled a haircut.

It did these tasks mostly autonomously, although I did have to nudge it along from time to time and occasionally rescue it from a loop of failed attempts.

If you’re just catching up — or if you’ve been distracted by the DeepSeek news this week, which has overshadowed all other A.I. news — Operator is a new so-called A.I. agent released last week by OpenAI.

The tool, which was billed as a “research preview,” is only available to people who pay $200 a month for the company’s highest subscription tier, ChatGPT Pro. It gives users the ability to direct an A.I. agent that can use a web browser, fill out forms and take other actions on a user’s behalf.

A.I. agents are all the rage in Silicon Valley right now. Some industry insiders think they’re the next big step in A.I. capabilities, because an A.I. agent that can use a computer can actually accomplish valuable real-world tasks, rather than just provide assistance. Many of the leading A.I. companies, including Google and Anthropic, are testing autonomous agents that they claim that companies will eventually be able to “hire” as full-fledged workers.

I upgraded my ChatGPT subscription to put Operator through its paces and see what an A.I. agent could do for me.

On the surface, Operator looks a bit like regular ChatGPT, except that when you give it a job — “Buy me a 30-pound bag of dog food on Amazon,” for example — Operator opens a miniature browser window, types “Amazon.com” into the address bar and starts clicking around, trying to follow your instructions.

It might ask a few clarifying questions. (Do you want chicken-flavored or beef-flavored food? Overnight shipping or two-day?) Then, once it’s feeling confident it has made the right choice, Operator prompts you for a final confirmation, puts the dog food in your cart and places the order. (Operator won’t enter passwords or credit card numbers — you have to take over the mini-browser and type those things in yourself — but it does the rest on its own.)

The whole point of Operator is that you don’t have to supervise it — it can carry out tasks in the background while you’re doing other things. But I found myself glued to the window, mesmerized by the sight of a self-driving web browser clicking on buttons, typing words into boxes and selecting from drop-down menus, all on its own. Look, Ma, a computer using a computer!

Operator also did impressively well on a few relatively simple tasks I gave it:

• It successfully ordered lunch on DoorDash for my colleague Mike and sent it to his house. (I didn’t tell it what to order him, but Operator chose a Mexican restaurant, picked out a handful of dishes for him and even tipped the delivery person $7.)

• It responded to hundreds of unread LinkedIn messages for me, after I gave it control of my LinkedIn profile. (Although, to my horror, it also registered me for a webinar.)

• It made $1.20 for me by setting up accounts on websites that offer small cash rewards for filling out surveys. (It might have made more, but I started to feel guilty for spamming the surveys with fake, robot-written answers.)

But Operator also failed at a bunch of other tasks and revealed its limitations:

• It couldn’t scan my recent columns and add them to my personal website, because Operator’s browser was blocked from entering the Times’s website. (It’s also blocked from a number of other sites, including Reddit and YouTube. The Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement related to the training of A.I. models.)

• It wouldn’t play online poker for me. (Operator responded, “I’m unable to assist with gambling or related activities,” which seemed like a reasonable rejection, given the chaos a gambling bot could create.)

• And it was prevented from logging into a number of sites by CAPTCHA tests. (Which I found reassuring, given that the whole point of CAPTCHAs is to deter robots.)

In all, I found that using Operator was usually more trouble than it was worth. Most of what it did for me I could have done faster myself, with fewer headaches. Even when it worked, it asked for so many confirmations and reassurances before acting that I felt less like I had a virtual assistant and more like I was supervising the world’s most insecure intern.

This is, of course, early days for A.I. agents. A.I. products tend to improve from version to version, and it’s a good bet that the next iterations of Operator will be better. But in its current form, Operator is more an intriguing demo than a product I’d recommend using — and definitely not something most people need to spend $200 a month on.

That said, I think it’s a mistake to write off A.I. agents. When they become more capable, they could start to substitute for human workers in some occupations. (OpenAI and Meta have already said they’re building A.I. engineer agents.) And some experts worry that more powerful, unrestrained A.I. agents could pose safety risks, if they learn to carry out commands like “drain a bank account” or “execute a cyberattack.”

Setting a bunch of A.I. agents loose on the internet could also provoke a backlash from web publishers, e-commerce sites and other businesses that rely on human-generated traffic to pay their bills. (If you’re a business buying ads on Amazon, you want those ads to be seen by humans, not bots pretending to be humans.) In the future, I can imagine more websites taking steps to block A.I. agents or steer them toward certain pages or products.

Right now, A.I. agents are too incompetent to be much of a threat. But it doesn’t take much imagination to envision a near future where most of the web will consist of robots talking to robots, buying things from robots and writing emails that only other robots will read.

The self-driving internet is almost here, in other words — get your clicks in while you can.

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