Guinea-Bissau's Council of Ministers reaffirmed on October 16 that it will not allow a clinical trial led by Danish researcher Christine Stabell Benn of Bandim Health Project, which was to be funded by the US and would have withheld the newborn hepatitis B vaccine dose from half its infant participants. The rejection followed a judicial police raid on Bandim Health's offices in which vaccines were seized, though Stabell Benn noted the raid came after the government's decision.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-10-22
Several Google DeepMind staff have resigned in protest at the company's artificial intelligence contracts with military clients, according to a BBC report. A current employee, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, said departures reflect discomfort among workers who joined Google under its earlier stated mission.
bbc.com
· 2026-10-21
Anthropic announced it will set aside 5% of its total equity for a new fund dedicated to the 'public good.' The announcement has prompted skeptical reactions from observers questioning the company's motives and intentions.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-19
A developer ran the Trolley Problem thought experiment through Jev and twelve other 'decision models,' including OpenAI's Luna and eleven other local models, plus a baseline called Laya. These decision models are a new category of AI that output discrete choices with confidence probabilities rather than text, and are marketed as much faster and cheaper than large language models while retaining comparable reasoning ability. The experiment repeated the classic ethical dilemma in multiple phrasings across all models to compare their responses.
zachlandes.com
· 2026-10-15
Anthropic executives, including CEO Dario Amodei, have repeatedly said they cannot rule out that Claude models possess some form of consciousness or morally relevant experience. The New York Times reported the company has consulted religious scholars on AI morality and considered giving Claude the ability to opt out of certain prompts, while continuing to deploy it commercially as a product that performs unpaid work.
futurism.com
· 2026-10-15
Anthropic updated its usage policy for Claude to prohibit users from being cruel toward the AI model. The policy change reflects the company's stated concern about how people interact with its chatbot, treating abusive behavior toward the system as a violation of terms rather than merely discouraged conduct.
slashdot.org
· 2026-10-13
Rolling Stone reports that CDC director's office staff instructed the agency's budget office in late September to earmark $1.6 million for a vaccine trial in Guinea-Bissau that was suspended in January after being widely criticized as unethical. The trial, which would expose newborns to hepatitis B risk, is to be run by Danish researchers Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby, who are currently under investigation by Danish authorities for alleged scientific misconduct. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-10-09
Anthropic revised its usage policy on Thursday to allow its Claude models to terminate interactions in cases of "sustained and needless" cruelty from users. The behaviour joins existing banned conduct such as bullying, promoting self-harm and generating non-consensual intimate images, though Anthropic says it will only apply in extreme, repeated cases rather than ordinary frustration or creative testing.
bbc.co.uk
· 2026-10-09
Engineering education researchers are developing two instructional approaches to address a gap in ethics training: one integrates social and ethical issues directly into core technical courses, and another is a standalone course preparing students to act as 'public welfare watchdogs.' They cite survey data showing only about a third of US engineering professionals received training on public welfare responsibilities during their formal education.
spectrum.ieee.org
· 2026-10-09
Nature staff report on a network of organizations posing as legitimate academic societies that has been expanding its membership through deceptive recruitment practices. Some prominent researchers have reportedly been drawn in without fully understanding the nature of these groups.
nature.com
· 2026-10-09
Lettering artist Jessica Hische designed the icon and logotype for Meta's new AI assistant Muse and announced the project in her newsletter, acknowledging that people have strong feelings about both AI and Meta. The post drew sharp criticism from fellow designers on Threads, some of whom accused her of selling out, scrutinized her finances, and posted images of her home.
wired.com
· 2026-10-08
A letter published in Nature responds to a Career feature in which a PhD student described distress over euthanizing mice daily and sought coping strategies. The published advice, which included sleep, diet, exercise and memorializing the animals, is criticized by the letter's authors as treating what they see as an ethical conflict as merely a personal resilience issue.
nature.com
· 2026-09-29
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