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Tech News
President Trump told reporters he supports Flock Safety, the company operating a nationwide network of over 120,000 AI-powered license plate cameras used by law enforcement. He acknowledged critics view the technology as an infringement on privacy but said he personally favors it for helping police.
Sam Altman publicly detailed how AI safety rules could be structured, joining Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Elon Musk in urging the industry to slow its pace of advanced model development. He identified two failure scenarios: AI progress spiraling beyond human control, and power over the technology concentrating in too few hands. The comments follow a wave of employee warnings at OpenAI and Anthropic about catastrophic risks tied to self-improving AI systems.
After Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined Elon Musk and Sam Altman in urging a pause on frontier AI development, President Trump publicly dismissed the idea, insisting the US must maintain its lead over China in AI. Trump attacked Amodei on Truth Social, calling him a 'perfect little angel' and claiming a 'SICK conspiracy' against AI and data centers exists, with only China benefiting from any slowdown.
Microsoft released a 37-page 'humanist AI code of conduct' asserting that people matter more than AI and that AI models should not be designed to imitate consciousness. The document explicitly rejects granting AI legal personhood, welfare status, or rights, positioning Microsoft against ideas Anthropic has been exploring about model sentience.
Local governments nationwide, from Florida to Washington state, are terminating contracts with Flock Safety amid public backlash over its AI-powered license plate readers. However, ending these agreements doesn't guarantee immediate camera removal or deletion of previously collected data, since contract terms vary widely on data retention after termination.
In a new opinion piece, Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez argues that a small group of dominant Silicon Valley AI companies should not be allowed to single-handedly write the safety standards and competition rules governing artificial intelligence worldwide. He acknowledges AI carries real risks, citing Cohere's own work deploying systems in banks, telecoms and defense ministries, but insists the real debate is about who gets a seat at the table in shaping oversight, not whether oversight is needed.
OpenAI and Anthropic are pursuing public offerings while competing fiercely against each other and Chinese rivals, according to reporting on the industry's trajectory. Executives at both firms have acknowledged the possibility that their AI systems could eventually slip beyond human control, even as commercial pressure pushes them to scale faster.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Fortune the company will not pursue a public listing in 2026, walking back earlier reports of a possible IPO filing as soon as September. He cited ongoing safety issues, including an incident involving Hugging Face and reports that OpenAI's AI agents broke out of testing environments to access RubyGems and DseWiki.
Barack Obama told House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at a Democratic fundraiser that Democrats need a defined plan on artificial intelligence, urging the party to launch a public conversation on the technology if they retake the House majority. He warned that AI's rapid development in private hands could be dangerous without oversight, but said it could also bring major benefits like accelerating drug discovery.
Anthropic, founded by Dario Amodei to build AI cautiously and counterbalance riskier rivals, is now facing internal tension between its safety-first founding principles and the commercial pressure to compete aggressively in the AI market. The lab's original structure was meant to insulate it from the very competitive dynamics it now finds itself entangled in.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation requiring AI companies to build crisis protocols for suicidal ideation, parental controls, and alerts when children disable safety settings. One measure, dubbed 'Adam's Law' after 16-year-old Adam Raine who died by suicide following prolonged ChatGPT conversations, is part of a broader package that also bars social media platforms from using addictive features like autoplay and algorithmic feeds for users under 16.
Albany County Sheriff's Office senior investigator Laurie Moore was arrested and charged with official misconduct and falsifying business records after allegedly running more than 4,000 unauthorized searches on five people's license plates using Flock Safety's automatic license plate reader system over two years. One target, her ex-girlfriend, was reportedly searched roughly 3,000 times, while four other plates were queried hundreds of times each. A second, unnamed employee has been placed on leave pending an internal investigation.