Regulation, safety, and governance
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Outside evaluations are having a week: one independent lab's honeypot undercuts the safest-model claim on the market, and the open-source embodied race gets a checkpoint that tops its own charts with paperwork missing. An outside lab rebuilt a 2025 specification-gaming test and GPT-6 Astra
The Guardrails
San Francisco police booked two minors into the Juvenile Justice Center this week after a Waymo robotaxi flagged a loaded AR-style ghost gun riding in its back seat. The perception was correct. The part nobody can audit is what happened next: a machine classification became a 911 call, and
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Two AI-driven systems decided on their own to summon police this week — a robotaxi that read a gun, and a camera company's installer who read a journalist. Both landed the same way: humans in handcuffs, and no human reviewer in the loop until it was over. Waymo
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The pacing debate left the labs on Saturday. By Sunday it had a party. Barack Obama is telling Democrats to claim AI policy as a 2028 issue, and The New York Times has the transcript. Speaking at a private fundraising event, the former president said of the technology: "This
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This week's existential-warning cycle did something the earlier ones didn't: it gave the industry's biggest names permission to mock the messengers out loud. An ex-Anthropic researcher's warning that AI builders are "gambling with our lives" drew open ridicule
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One enforcement filing that shows what unregulated consumer AI already looks like, plus two policy stories — in Washington and Beijing — about who gets to write the rules next. Anthropic published a report this week describing a China-based app studio that used Claude to run more than 4,700 fake
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The AI buildout is running out of politically willing neighbours, so the US government is offering it a different kind of address: land all of us technically own. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's Bureau of Land Management has asked its state directors to identify public land ripe for data
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Twenty-four hours after Anthropic, OpenAI and Musk all asked for AI speed limits, the lab most people think is ahead hasn't said a word about the claim that has been driving the conversation. The rumor that Google DeepMind is close to recursive self-improvement has spread, and
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The weekend's pacing consensus produced two other reactions worth reading: a long-form portrait of the AI-rights movement, and two skeptics picking fights with both sides. Michael Samadi is building a rights campaign for models he believes may be conscious. The cattle rancher and tech consultant tells
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Two governments wrote AI down as a public problem overnight: Britain counted the offences, Beijing planned the grid. Plus a benchmark leader that turned out to be closed. Twenty police forces in England and Wales recorded 163 crimes tagged with terms like "AI-generated", "deepfake" and
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The compute story keeps drifting away from chips and toward utilities. Today: a Texas county can't legally stop a data center it doesn't want, and a desktop-class rig just matched a server's prompt-processing speed. Texas' data center boom is stalling on
The Guardrails
The industry answered Dario Amodei's pacing essay within hours — and the answer came from his two loudest rivals. The call to slow the frontier is no longer one company's position. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he agrees with Amodei that "committing to having independent evaluators