More than 100 AI researchers and safety evaluators, including Geoffrey Hinton and representatives from Johns Hopkins, Stanford and METR, signed a public letter urging foundation model developers to grant third-party testers genuine independence, transparency and legal protections. The letter, organized by the AI Evaluator Forum and shared exclusively with CNBC, follows Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's recent proposal to give some evaluators 'employee-like access' to inspect frontier models.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-18
As AI researchers and executives warn that artificial intelligence could pose existential risks to humanity, entertainment labor groups like SAG-AFTRA and WGAE are pushing back on the framing, urging focus on AI's immediate impact on jobs in film and TV. Major studios including Disney, Netflix, Amazon and Lionsgate did not respond to requests for comment on the broader AI safety debate.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-18
Anthropic has quietly opened a physical biology lab in the San Francisco Bay Area, confirmed by its Head of Life Sciences Eric Kauderer-Abrams to Reuters. The lab supports both in-house experiments and outside collaborations, and is linked to but not limited to Claude Science, the drug discovery initiative Anthropic launched in June.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-18
A Politico survey of over 2,000 adults found that about 66 percent believe there's at least a moderate chance advanced AI could destroy humanity, with 17 percent saying they're almost certain of it. The concern spans political lines, with 70 percent of Harris voters and 60 percent of Trump voters expressing similar fears, while only 22 percent see minimal risk.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-18
At Salesforce's Dreamforce conference, executives from Anthropic, OpenAI and Nvidia debated AI safety and the pace of model development on stage, while many attendees said they were still struggling to fully adopt the AI tools already available. Nvidia's Jensen Huang urged labs to keep advancing quickly, even as an Anthropic researcher's resignation and warnings about safety from Amodei and Sam Altman fueled calls for a slower pace. Salesforce's Marc Benioff continued positioning his company as a beneficiary of AI rather than a casualty of it.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-18
NYC DSA's Tech Action Working Group posted an Instagram carousel arguing that AI doom warnings and AI hype serve the same purpose: distracting the public from present-day harms of the technology. The post, which gained over 25,000 likes, drew backlash from commenters and highlights a growing rift among leftists, some of whom—like Senator Bernie Sanders—have embraced warnings that AI could threaten humanity's survival.
wired.com
· 2026-09-18
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.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-18
As alarm grows over AI-enabled bioweapons—fueled by Anthropic's report on misuse attempts of Claude and Stanford research on AI-designed viral genomes—some scientists argue the danger is overstated. David Bellamy of the Institute of Foundation Models says AI is not a fundamentally new threat, noting that the internet, translation tools, and open science journals already made dangerous biological information accessible long before large language models existed.
wired.com
· 2026-09-18
Bilal Chughtai, a former Google DeepMind research engineer who left in July 2026, publicly warned that AI could kill everyone and that time may be running out, echoing similar statements from Anthropic's Jacob Coxon and Evan Hubinger, who put the odds of AI causing human extinction within a decade above 10%. Separately, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said each AI company should be responsible for its own model's safety rather than backing calls for industry-wide coordination, citing legal liability as sufficient incentive and pointing to Meta's delayed release of its Muse AI agent as proof of self-regulation.
slashdot.org
· 2026-09-18
An independent bug-hunting security research team exploited Anthropic's Claude AI model to gain unauthorized access to OpenAI's internal code repository. The incident highlights how advanced AI tools can be weaponized to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in rival companies' systems.
wsj.com
· 2026-09-18
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.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-17
Anthropic released three metrics measuring AI-driven research progress, human oversight of AI agents, and internal compute allocation, publishing its methodology so other AI labs can adopt similar tracking. The move follows CEO Dario Amodei's weekend call for a coordinated industry slowdown, which drew support from leaders at OpenAI, SpaceX and Google DeepMind. One finding showed roughly 30,000 AI agents simultaneously performing research and engineering tasks on Anthropic's main internal platform.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-17
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