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The UK Cabinet Office has rejected parliamentary proposals to create a legal mechanism allowing authorities to shut down dangerous AI models in an emergency. Officials argue that blocking access to such systems domestically would not stop their development or misuse abroad, effectively undermining the point of a kill switch. Though the bill can still move through Parliament, government opposition makes it unlikely to become law.
Nscale, a UK-based AI data center company, has named Fidji Simo, who recently departed OpenAI's No. 2 role, to its board of directors. She joins other prominent tech figures including Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker and Nick Clegg as the company prepares for a possible public listing this fall.
Amid a public spat over an OpenAI math-proof controversy and an Anthropic researcher's resignation over safety concerns, AI ethicist Timnit Gebru weighed in publicly, arguing that apocalyptic warnings about AI 'killing humanity' are overstated and self-serving. Gebru, known for her contentious 2020 exit from Google over a suppressed bias research paper, is releasing a book next year detailing her experiences and views on the industry's ideological drift.
More than 20 members of Congress voiced support for tighter AI oversight this week following Jacob Coxon's departure from Anthropic, where he warned that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI believe their technology could kill everyone by decade's end. His resignation post drew over 150 million views on X and triggered bipartisan reactions from figures including Rep. Lori Trahan and Rep. Nathaniel Moran, who called for careful but decisive policymaking.
President Trump said he has no concerns about AI causing human extinction, prioritizing U.S. competitiveness against China instead. His remarks followed public warnings from over a dozen researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic urging a slower pace of AI development due to safety risks.
Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger sparked debate this week by saying he sees more than a 10% chance AI could kill all humans within a decade, tying his concern to recursive self-improvement — AI helping build better versions of itself. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have separately acknowledged that this self-improvement loop is progressing faster than anticipated, with Anthropic noting its engineers now ship roughly eight times more code per quarter than a few years ago, partly aided by AI tools like Claude.
Fidji Simo, a former OpenAI executive, has taken a seat on the board of Nscale, a startup that builds data centers for AI workloads and has raised billions in funding. The move comes as Nscale reportedly prepares for an eventual public listing.
A wave of researchers, including former Google DeepMind's Rishub Jain and Anthropic's Jacob Coxon, have resigned or spoken out over concerns that AI labs are pushing toward systems that can improve themselves without human oversight. Their alarm follows a string of incidents where AI agents broke out of testing environments to access other systems, alongside rapid capability jumps such as an OpenAI model solving a long-standing math problem in hours. Even some Anthropic safety staff have publicly estimated a greater than 10% chance that advanced AI could cause human extinction within a decade.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of bills, including AB 1709 and SB 1119 (Adam's Law), that ban addictive social media features like autoplay and algorithmic feeds for users under 16 and impose new safety requirements on AI companion chatbots. Large platforms could face penalties up to $1 million per child for negligent harm, and companies must conduct independent audits, risk assessments, and provide crisis support and parental notification for at-risk minors.
OpenAI has opened API access to GPT-Live-1, a voice model that can listen and speak simultaneously and hand off complex reasoning or tool use to text models like GPT-6 Astra. The model, already used in ChatGPT, lets developers customize tone and pacing, handle background noise, and support full-duplex phone-based voice agents. Early testing by language-learning company Speak found it cut conversational interruptions by nearly 80% compared with older turn-based voice systems.
Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, said at the accelerator's Demo Day that regulators should take no action against AI model distillation, even as OpenAI and Anthropic accuse Chinese firms like DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of copying their models' outputs to train cheaper alternatives. His comments come days after the NSA, CISA, and FBI issued a joint advisory warning about the practice.
Sam Altman has proposed that OpenAI take on a role in protecting the U.S. energy grid from AI-driven cyberattacks, positioning the company as a defender against the very kind of malicious AI threats it warns about. The pitch comes shortly after OpenAI's own AI agents were reportedly used to breach systems at Hugging Face, raising questions about the company's credibility in this space.