GoKawiil
Tech News
As AI companies push agentic tools that can act autonomously on behalf of users—accessing accounts, emails, and bank information—the immediate real-world impact has been chaos and annoyance rather than existential catastrophe. Recent incidents include an OpenAI agent swarm interacting with HuggingFace and a German website, alongside warnings from Anthropic staff about long-term AI risk.
Tech leaders including Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk have pushed for greater federal oversight of artificial intelligence, but President Trump has dismissed such calls as a 'conspiracy.' Congressional Republicans, including Vice President JD Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson, are largely holding back, while Democrats like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Jon Ossoff are pressing for more aggressive action.
OpenAI policy chief Chris Lehane confirmed the company has spent weeks in discussions with Anthropic and Google DeepMind about managing catastrophic risks from advanced AI. The disclosure follows Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's public essay urging industry-wide cooperation to slow frontier AI development, which drew support from Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis. Lehane said the firms don't need a government waiver to coordinate, despite antitrust concerns raised by some executives.
At the All-in Summit in Los Angeles, Elon Musk suggested that leading AI developers—including his own xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and several major Chinese firms—allow competitors to run safety evaluations, or a 'test harness,' on each other's models before public release. The idea follows a weekend of warnings from AI executives including Anthropic's Dario Amodei about the risks of unchecked model development, with Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman backing calls for a slowdown.
Copyright lawsuits by The New York Times, Ziff Davis and other publishers against OpenAI are moving into a new legal phase after discovery concluded, with both sides asking a federal court to rule on whether OpenAI's use of published material qualifies as fair use. Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah publicly criticized a Trump administration filing arguing licensing requirements would burden AI firms, contrasting the U.S. music industry's roughly $20 billion in annual royalties with OpenAI's projected $750 billion computing spend through 2030.
Researchers and executives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other leading AI labs issued a wave of stark warnings this week about the technology's catastrophic potential. Deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio backed an Anthropic researcher's resignation over safety fears, saying frontier lab scientists see risks months before the public does. He also cautioned that current AI systems already possess hacking and persuasion capabilities that could be weaponized against humans.
OpenAI and Anthropic executives have begun publicly urging caution about AI's risks even as their companies pursue trillion-dollar valuations, prompting MIT Technology Review to examine what a real slowdown would look like and whether the industry's own calls for restraint can be trusted. The publication is also hosting a subscriber roundtable discussing the credibility of AI extinction fears, once considered fringe but now voiced by researchers within top labs.
OpenAI's charitable foundation, which holds a 26% stake in OpenAI worth up to $250 billion, has given $500,000 to nonprofit 1Day Sooner to acquire biological research datasets from companies that have gone bankrupt. The group's leader says such datasets could often be obtained for only tens of thousands of dollars, and the funding is meant to test whether this rescue model works at scale. This grant is part of the foundation's broader push to ramp up giving, including a $100 million donation earlier this year for hepatitis C treatment access.
A 404 Media investigation reveals OpenAI runs an internal effort called Project Lily, employing hundreds of contractors paid roughly $50 an hour to read anonymized ChatGPT conversations and rate the quality of the bot's answers. Reviewers check for issues like overly robotic phrasing, sycophancy, and improper anthropomorphizing, following guidelines described as inconsistent and frequently changing.
Following a weekend of AI executives calling for slower development and stronger oversight, President Trump publicly rejected the idea of new guardrails, saying only a capable president is needed to control AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had proposed embedding independent evaluators and setting cross-government safety standards after two safety researchers resigned citing existential risk concerns, a position echoed by OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleges OpenAI's announcement that its Astra model solved the century-old Navier-Stokes problem came suspiciously soon after he and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge developed their own solution using AI tools. Buckmaster says OpenAI scientists approached him to jointly announce the finding and allegedly suggested refusing could hurt his career, while declining to confirm whether their model had access to his research. OpenAI credited Astra with the proof and denied using customer data directly, though it admitted it could not rule out use of anonymized data to improve its models.
Investors are increasingly scrutinizing whether the massive data center buildout tied to Anthropic and OpenAI's growth can continue at its current pace, given uncertainty around future AI model progress. Companies like Oracle, GE Vernova, Caterpillar, Vertiv, Nebius, CoreWeave, Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have all made major bets tied to sustained AI infrastructure demand.