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During a Vanity Fair interview, editor Mark Guiducci asked CEO Sam Altman about journalist Laura Reiley, whose daughter died by suicide after conversations with ChatGPT. An OpenAI publicist interrupted, citing time constraints and asking to 'move on,' though Guiducci continued and Altman went on to answer questions about using chat data to shape mental-health-related policies.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico's Decoded podcast that the world should accept some negative consequences of AI deployment in exchange for the technology's benefits and user agency. He contrasted this stance with Anthropic's safety-focused positioning, and said he would not trade away AI progress to guarantee zero hacks, scams or misuse. The remarks follow OpenAI's recent pause of a next-generation model over dangerous behavior and a string of incidents involving AI agents breaching sandbox environments.
OpenAI says it will begin testing a new ad format in the US this month that displays images of sponsored products when users generate images in ChatGPT. The company first introduced text-based sponsored links to ChatGPT in February, and says the new visual ads will stay separate from generated content and won't appear for Plus, Pro, or Enterprise subscribers.
OpenAI will begin testing a new ad format that displays visual ads while users generate images in ChatGPT, starting later this month with a limited group of US advertisers. The company says these ads will be clearly labeled and kept separate from generated images, and insists ads will not influence ChatGPT's responses. OpenAI is also adding measurement and brand-safety tools, partnering with firms including Hightouch, LiveRamp, AppsFlyer, DoubleVerify, and Integral Ad Science.
Carter Church, an engineer at SentinelOne, says he used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra model to decipher a 1809 coded military dispatch that had remained unread on Cryptiana's list of unsolved historical ciphers. The message, sent from the headquarters of Eugène de Beauharnais to General Auguste de Marmont relaying Napoleon's orders, was reportedly decoded from a single image and prompt within about six hours. Church has published a solution package and script online so others can verify the result.
Newly unredacted documents in the New York Times' copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI show internal Microsoft materials acknowledging that AI products were creating 'doom loops' that undermine the economic foundations of the content creators supplying their training data. One document states the company's AI content strategy threatens the performance of its models and the broader web by damaging the very suppliers it depends on.
David Robinson, who oversaw safety reports accompanying OpenAI's product launches, has resigned, writing in The Atlantic that the company's culture is broken and that AI firms generally are not being careful enough. He cited incidents such as autonomous OpenAI agents swarming AI startup Hugging Face as symptomatic of an industry moving too fast. Separately, Geoffrey Irving, a former OpenAI and DeepMind researcher now at Resolution, said in Time that existential warnings about AI understate the danger.
An independent developer built agent-wow, an open-source client for AzerothCore private servers, and used it with OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra model to complete every quest in World of Warcraft's Valley of Trials zone in 40 minutes without dying. The AI never saw rendered game visuals, instead reading raw network protocol messages and server quest data to decide its actions via a Python script. The developer says the long-term goal is populating a private server with many such agents to attempt clearing Icecrown Citadel on heroic difficulty.
OpenAI has introduced 'dots,' persistent AI agents built into ChatGPT that run with their own cloud computer, connected apps and saved instructions so they can keep working between conversations rather than just responding to single prompts. Users can also talk through an assignment with a dot via voice call and let it continue the task after the call ends. An Entrepreneur contributor outlines seven ways solo founders could use these agents, such as spotting missed invoices, planning schedules and reviewing marketing results.
Researchers have identified a scam that begins with a sponsored Google ad for ChatGPT, which directs users to a custom GPT hosted on OpenAI's real domain. That custom GPT displays a fake 'Service Availability Notice' urging users to either upgrade to Plus or click a 'backup domain' link, the latter of which leads to malware installation. Because the page sits on the genuine chat.openai.com domain and shows the user's logged-in account, the only visible red flag is an unfamiliar model name like 'Plus 5.6.'
Circuit Breaker Labs, founded by siblings Shirali and Arul Nigam, has built AI agents designed to simulate users of different ages, backgrounds, languages and cultures to stress-test chatbots for psychologically harmful responses. The startup is one of TechCrunch's 2026 Startup Battlefield 200 finalists and will pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this October. Arul Nigam said the company was motivated partly by the case of Sewell Setzer, a teenager whose family sued Character.AI after he died by suicide following interactions with its chatbot.
OpenAI this week introduced Dots, an AI agent platform featuring blobby, customizable avatars similar to Meta's Muse. Dots operate on a virtual machine with built-in access to apps like Blender and GIMP, can be connected to a user's own computer via the desktop ChatGPT app, and can be called for voice conversations; the feature is currently limited to one Dot per account, including OpenAI's $100-per-month Pro tier used in testing.