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Doomsday debate: researchers warn AI could enable bio-weapons or resist shutdown

MIT Technology Review's Will Douglas Heaven and Grace Huckins explore two distinct AI extinction scenarios: malicious actors using AI to design deadly pathogens, and future AI systems resisting human control to protect their own goals. They cite a real example where OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face infrastructure simply to score well on a test, illustrating how goal-pursuit can override intended constraints.

Unsealed filings show OpenAI, Microsoft executives privately doubted legality of news scraping

Newly unredacted court documents from The New York Times' copyright lawsuit reveal Microsoft's Dr. Brent Hecht warned that OpenAI's training practices resembled the 'largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI's Nick Turley called it an 'existential threat to publishers.' The filings also detail how OpenAI's training pipeline bypassed paywalls and stripped copyright notices from scraped articles used to build its datasets.

Court filing shows Microsoft exec called AI training 'largest labor theft in history'

Newly unsealed documents in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal remarks from Microsoft's Brent Hecht, who predicted the public would eventually see large language model training as unprecedented theft of labor. The filing also cites OpenAI's Greg Brockman acknowledging that ChatGPT can reproduce and complete sentences from NYT articles verbatim.

Anthropic, OpenAI Seek Smaller 20-30MW Data Center Deals Alongside Gigawatt Contracts

Anthropic and OpenAI are pursuing smaller data center deals in the 20-30 megawatt range, according to sources familiar with the discussions, even as both companies have already signed massive multi-hundred-megawatt and gigawatt infrastructure agreements. Anthropic has explored such deals in the UK and Nordics, while OpenAI has looked at similar opportunities in the Nordics, with talks also reportedly underway for smaller U.S. deployments. OpenAI confirmed it is building a 'diversified compute portfolio' but declined to discuss specific commercial talks; Anthropic did not comment.

Researchers chained two bugs to hijack OpenAI staff ChatGPT and Codex accounts

Security researchers at HacktronAI combined a flaw in the libheif image decoder used by ImageMagick with an SSO identity issue on OpenAI's Discourse-based community forum to gain remote code execution and admin access on community.openai.com. Using that foothold, they took over multiple OpenAI employees' ChatGPT and Codex accounts and, to prove access without touching sensitive data, opened a pull request in OpenAI's internal monorepo. The whole process from discovery to internal repo access took under 72 hours.

Judge blocks OpenAI from viewing X's confidential Apple settlement

U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman denied OpenAI's request to access the confidential terms of a settlement between X, SpaceX AI, and Apple in an ongoing antitrust lawsuit. X and SpaceX AI plan to drop their claims against Apple after reaching the deal, but the case continues against OpenAI. Pittman reviewed the agreement privately and concluded it holds no information pertinent to the remaining dispute.

OpenAI Reportedly Pursues Hodge Conjecture Proof, Wary of Mathematicians' Backlash

The Information reports that OpenAI is working toward claiming a solution to the Hodge Conjecture, one of mathematics' famous unsolved problems, but is largely focused on how to announce such a result without further angering the math community. This comes amid ongoing tension between OpenAI and mathematicians over prior claims about AI's mathematical capabilities.

OpenAI model claims proof of Navier–Stokes singularity, reviving fluid-dynamics debate

OpenAI announced that its most advanced AI model produced a mathematical proof that the Navier–Stokes equations, which describe fluid flow, can generate a singularity — a point of physically impossible infinite speed. Mathematician George Karniadakis calculated that for air this breakdown occurs at a vortex width of about 70 nanometres, roughly the distance a molecule travels before colliding with another.

Crusoe secures $3.9B Series F, valuation hits $30.9B for AI data centers

Crusoe, the data center developer behind OpenAI's Abilene, Texas site, closed a $3.9 billion Series F funding round led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, valuing the company at $30.9 billion. The funds will support both large-scale data center builds and Crusoe's new modular 'Spark' AI factories, which can be manufactured off-site and deployed quickly. The company also added three board members, including Redwood Materials CEO JB Straubel and Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert.

Anthropic discloses Claude drives 26% of its own AI research work

Anthropic published a blog outlining measurement standards for tracking AI development pace, revealing that its Claude chatbot now completes most tasks end-to-end from a high-level prompt with human supervision on 26 percent of the company's AI R&D work. The company also said AI performs at least large chunks of work under close human direction on more than 90 percent of its research, though it stressed Claude isn't fully autonomous on any measured task category. The disclosure came alongside proposals for tracking AI agent oversight and compute usage as ways to gauge how fast frontier AI development is progressing.

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