Brockman pulled a $25M super PAC pledge as AI researchers organized
The self-regulation pledge six CEOs signed this week has a workforce problem attached: at the frontier labs, the researchers are organizing — and one president just moved money because of it.
Axios reports a quiet rebellion inside the frontier labs, and its hardest news peg is that OpenAI president Greg Brockman scrapped a pledged second $25 million donation to the pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future. Axios' account — built from interviews with researchers inside OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind — describes a small cadre of elite researchers who now wield unusual influence over their own companies' policy positions: OpenAI backed an Illinois transparency bill and, at the last minute, a California independent auditing bill, and an OpenAI investor told the outlet that AI CEOs have to embrace regulation to keep their best research talent. The Wall Street Journal independently confirms the money story: Brockman told employees in June that the second $25 million pledge was off, after a first $25 million went in last September. The petition campaign Pacing the Frontier has drawn more than 1,000 verified signatures from corporate email addresses at the major labs, and compensation for elite researchers has reportedly climbed into the hundreds of millions of dollars — talent this expensive gets a say. OpenAI's line is that "what ultimately drives our policy positions is what we're seeing in our own technology," but one Washington observer quoted by Axios says the internal pushback has left the company "no longer seen as or acting as a leader in driving policy." Read against this week's firings — OpenAI fires three safety researchers over outside info sharing — the pattern is the same story from both ends: labs trying to control information outward while their own people push policy positions inward. The money is the tell. When the president of the biggest lab starts unwinding political donations, the rebellion is no longer a mood — it's a cost.
Allen AI open-sources AstaBrief 8B, the model that powers Fast mode in its scientific report generator Asta. The 8-billion-parameter model — a fine-tune of Qwen3-8B, Apache 2.0 licensed, weights and training data both released — writes a full cited report in one pass instead of section by section, cutting Asta's average report time from 178.5 seconds to 51.1 seconds, about 3.5 times faster, while staying competitive with the Claude-powered pipeline it was measured against. Ai2 is candid about the limits: most of the training and evaluation happened in 2025, and the team has not rerun it against today's frontier models, so the release is best read as a validated recipe — 90,000 filtered real research queries turned into 47,000 supervised examples plus 6,000 preference pairs — rather than a state-of-the-art claim. The point that matters for anyone who can't ship research queries to a proprietary API: open weights mean hospitals, labs and universities can run cited report generation behind their own firewall.
Slovenia's .si domain registered about 44,000 names in September — up from roughly 2,000 in August — after Trump's executive order renamed "artificial intelligence" to "super intelligence" across the US government. Registry SI told the BBC it saw a 2,199% jump, with 11,000 new addresses recorded on September 30 alone, the day after the order signed; hosting platform Hostinger says .si is now its second most popular extension after .com, with more than half of buyers coming from the US and India. The echo of Anguilla's .ai windfall is obvious but the arithmetic isn't: .si costs around $12 a year against $90 for .ai, and the money goes to the registry rather than a national treasury — as Hostinger's domain chief put it, for Anguilla .ai became a second economy, for Slovenia .si is a nice bonus. Only about 3% of the .si registrations on Hostinger are explicitly AI-related, which suggests most of this is speculation rather than use. We covered the pledge that started the week — Trump's AI rebrand lands with a six-CEO self-audit pledge.
What to watch: whether more money follows Brockman's reversal out of the pro-AI super PACs. Should frontier-lab employees be able to push their own companies' policy positions in public? Tell us in the comments.
