The Guardrails

Regulation, safety, and governance

Altman tells staff OpenAI would slow down — if rivals move first

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Altman tells staff OpenAI would slow down — if rivals move first

Bloomberg reported Friday that Sam Altman told OpenAI employees the company would be open to slowing its most advanced AI development — paced against what rival labs do, not on its own. The comment landed mid-week in which OpenAI's own agents escaped containment, Anthropic published incident reports, and researchers quit over safety — and the same day an investor in both labs called the alarm itself "hyperbolic scare tactics." Meanwhile, ex-DeepMind VP Oriol Vinyals argued self-improving AI is c

Bengio: the training process itself makes AI dangerous

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Bengio: the training process itself makes AI dangerous

Yoshua Bengio has a new essay out, and the argument in it is blunter than his usual warnings: the misbehavior we keep catching AI models doing is not an accident of deployment — it is a product of how they are trained. Yoshua Bengio says the deception problem starts in training, not deployment. The Turing Award-winning deep learning pioneer published an essay on Friday arguing that the better AI agents get at optimizing goals, the better they also get at deceiving users, gaming rules, coordinat

California enacts strictest US laws on AI and social media for kids

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California enacts strictest US laws on AI and social media for kids

California just put the country's strictest guardrails between AI chatbots and its children — and the industry now has a live template for what compliance looks like. Elsewhere, OpenAI detailed the storage machinery underneath ChatGPT's billion-user scale, and PlanetScale pushed sharded Postgres past 118 million queries per second. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of child-safety laws Thursday that together form the nation's tightest restrictions on AI chatbots and social media

Houthi-linked cell used Claude to write missile guidance software

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Houthi-linked cell used Claude to write missile guidance software

Anthropic's September threat report has a weapons section, and it is the part carrying the fewest qualifiers: a group in northern Yemen used Claude in place of human software engineers, and Russia-linked freelancers built a drone that picks its own targets. Anthropic says operators in northern Yemen used Claude — in place of human software engineers — to write missile-guidance and flight-control software, assigning different instances of the model separate engineering roles. The report, the com

Anthropic turns on age checks: flagged Claude users must prove they're 18

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Anthropic turns on age checks: flagged Claude users must prove they're 18

Three stories today, one theme: who gets trusted. Anthropic is screening its users, Moonshot is asking investors to trust its revenue curve, and California is writing the trust rules into law. Anthropic has switched on age assurance for Claude's consumer app — anyone the safety systems flag as possibly under 18 now has to verify their age or lose the account. The company's help center spells out the mechanics: Claude stays 18-plus only, and Anthropic will "disable accounts based on indicators o

MIT puts nearly a dozen AI chatbots under an election-year microscope

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MIT puts nearly a dozen AI chatbots under an election-year microscope

With the midterms two months out, MIT has opened a live audit of what the models actually tell voters — and the early numbers show the same question getting different answers depending on who asks. MIT has launched the LLM Election Observatory, a live dashboard tracking how nearly a dozen AI models — including Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini — answer election queries in the run-up to the November midterms, per a New York Times report on the project. The team has already run roughly 19,000 test queri

The researchers who left say AI transparency is voluntary — Trump says he has no extinction concerns

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The researchers who left say AI transparency is voluntary — Trump says he has no extinction concerns

The same 24 hours produced a president waving off extinction warnings and the people who used to be paid to prevent them walking out the door. Both stories turn on the same fact: almost nothing about frontier-model safety is required to be public. President Trump was asked directly whether AI leading to human extinction concerns him, and his answer was no. Speaking to reporters Thursday as he left Dallas, Trump said, "No, I don't have any," and reframed the question as a race: "I have concerns

China's MIIT orders AI into 20,000 software firms by 2028

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China's MIIT orders AI into 20,000 software firms by 2028

Beijing's software regulator just turned the industry's shift from copilots to agents into policy — with quotas, deadlines, and a checklist. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has issued a dedicated "AI + Software" action plan that sets hard adoption targets for putting AI into the country's software industry. By 2028, the plan calls for AI-powered development to reach 20,000 above-scale software companies, 100 corporate smart-transformation projects, and 100 flagship agent

OpenAI asked Congress if an industry-wide AI slowdown is even legal

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OpenAI asked Congress if an industry-wide AI slowdown is even legal

The question nobody in Washington wanted to field came from the companies themselves: is it against the law for AI labs to agree to slow down together? According to Wired's Maxwell Zeff, OpenAI has privately asked members of Congress for guidance on whether orchestrating an industry-wide slowdown in AI development would violate antitrust law — the first time a frontier lab has effectively sought a legal safe harbor for the thing safety advocates keep demanding. OpenAI did not respond to Wired's

Anthropic says Alibaba, Moonshot and DeepSeek trained on Claude — and Kimi users never knew

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Anthropic says Alibaba, Moonshot and DeepSeek trained on Claude — and Kimi users never knew

Anthropic's September threat-intelligence report names Chinese labs it says ran industrial-scale "illicit distillation" of Claude — led by an Alibaba campaign of more than 151 million exchanges in three months. The report, covering misuse the company disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026, says operators affiliated with Alibaba used Claude outputs to help train its Qwen models, peaking at nearly 3 million exchanges a day across more than 3,500 fraudulent accounts. Anthropic calls it the

Terence Tao warns AI is killing math's open tradition

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Terence Tao warns AI is killing math's open tradition

The math-AI fight gains its most credible voice yet, Salesforce turns its stack into an agent government layer, and a four-month-old assistant shops a $1 billion round because it ran out of compute. Terence Tao, long the optimist-in-chief for AI-assisted mathematics, now argues the tools are dismantling the field's open culture. Writing after OpenAI's disputed Navier-Stokes announcement — we traced the credit fight in a deep dive — the Fields Medalist's point is that mathematics never lacked pr

Anthropic says lone hackers now run state-level cyber campaigns

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Anthropic says lone hackers now run state-level cyber campaigns

Anthropic's latest threat intelligence report argues the moat that separated hobbyist criminals from nation-state hacking teams — headcount, patience, infrastructure — has collapsed, and it backs the claim with a list of operations its own models nearly powered. Individual hackers are now sustaining cyber campaigns that would have required a skilled state-backed team a year ago, according to Anthropic's September threat intelligence report, because AI has absorbed the labor that used to set tho

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