The Guardrails - SiliconNoon (Page 37)

The Guardrails

DOJ probes a16z over seats on rival AI boards

The Justice Department has spent nearly a year looking at the most ordinary thing a venture firm does: putting partners on boards. Andreessen Horowitz is the focus of a Justice Department antitrust probe over whether its investment partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing AI companies, according to people familiar with the matter. The investigation, which had not been previously reported, is nearly a year old. Among the companies at issue are Databricks — one of the world's mo

The Guardrails

Big Tech's data centers could add 101.5M tons of CO2 a year

The AI build-out's environmental bill is getting a number: the 60 biggest data centers under construction in the US would pump out over 100 million tons of CO2 a year — and the utilities feeding them are doubling down on gas. A new analysis of the 60 largest data centers Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta are building in the United States puts their combined footprint at about 101.5 million metric tons of CO2 per year once fully operational — roughly 7 percent of the entire US power sector's 20

The Guardrails

Meta faces 30-state youth-harm trial that could reshape Instagram and Facebook

A California jury trial opening this week is the biggest legal test yet of how Meta's platforms are built to keep young users hooked — and the courtroom fight is as much about AI-driven feeds as it is about likes. Thirty US states are taking Meta to trial in Oakland, claiming its platforms were engineered to addict children. The lawsuit, filed in 2023 and now before Chief Federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, accuses Meta of violating federal and state privacy laws by targeting young users and

The Guardrails

WiFi routers can identify you with 99.5% accuracy — no device needed

The router in the corner of the room just became a surveillance tool. New research from Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology shows ordinary WiFi networks can identify who's in a room with near-perfect accuracy — no cameras, no special sensors, and no device required on the person being tracked. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) demonstrated that standard WiFi routers can identify individuals with 99.5 percent accuracy, using nothing but the unencrypted signals de

The Guardrails

Amodei says AI backlash is 'fundamentally a crisis of trust'

Two stories define the day: the industry's most prominent safety advocate defending his own warnings, and a quiet privacy finding in one of China's most-used agent tools. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei pushed back on the claim that his own warnings fueled the AI backlash, calling it "fundamentally a crisis of trust." The exchange started when investor Gavin Baker argued — on the All-In podcast and on X — that Amodei's dire predictions helped turn the US public against AI, particularly data centers,

The Guardrails

First anti-AI protester jailed after OpenAI blockade

The anti-AI movement crossed a line this weekend — its first member went to prison — while a new study from Google researchers suggests safety training rewires chatbots in ways nobody planned. Wynd Kaufmyn, the 69-year-old retired teacher believed to be the first person jailed for protesting against artificial intelligence, surrendered to San Francisco authorities on Friday and began a 14-day sentence for her role in a 2025 blockade of OpenAI's headquarters. Kaufmyn was convicted by a jury in J

The Guardrails

South Korea's national AI race faces benchmark-rigging claims

Seoul's sovereign AI project — a government-funded contest to crown one "national representative" foundation model — heads into its second-round verdict under a cloud: foreign firms allegedly offered to juice the entrants' benchmark scores. Allegations that overseas companies offered to inflate benchmark scores for South Korea's government-backed AI foundation model race surfaced days before its second-round elimination. According to industry sources reported by The Hankyoreh, US-based training

The Guardrails

Deep Dive — The end of OpenAI's Preparedness team

OpenAI quietly dissolved the team built to catch catastrophic risks at the end of July, the Financial Times reports, parceling its biological and cyber safety work out to existing groups. The unit that was supposed to say no to unsafe models no longer exists as an organization — and its dissolution landed in the same news cycle as the most serious safety disclosure in the lab's history, one that the framework it created produced. This wasn't the first safety team OpenAI has folded. It may be the

The Guardrails

OpenAI dissolves the team built to catch catastrophic AI risks

OpenAI has quietly dismantled the unit whose entire job was deciding whether its own models could cause catastrophic harm — the clearest organizational sign yet of where safety sits as the lab races an IPO clock. OpenAI dissolved its "Preparedness" team at the end of July, the Financial Times reports, parceling its biological and cyber risk evaluation work out to existing groups. The unit ran the framework that last week forced the company to flag its upcoming Astra model as potentially "Critic

The Guardrails

Anthropic ran 133M contractor chats with bio-weapons filters off

A safety filter nobody noticed was missing, at the lab whose CEO calls bio-weapons risk the scariest thing in AI. Anthropic disclosed that its biological-weapons blocking classifiers were offline for nearly a year — from May 2025 through April 2026 — leaving roughly 133 million model exchanges from about 50,000 human-feedback contractors completely unfiltered. The admission appears in the company's August 2026 redacted risk report. The failure wasn't a jailbreak that slipped past a safeguard; t

The Guardrails

Amodei: open weights are 'nowhere near a sufficient solution'

Anthropic's CEO went where he almost never goes — a long X thread — to make the case for regulation in the middle of the industry's loudest argument about open weights. Dario Amodei took to X Saturday to defend AI regulation and mandatory frontier-model testing, arguing that open-weight models are "nowhere near a sufficient solution" to AI's concentration problem. The exchange began when a16z's Gavin Baker and Anthropic co-founder Sholto Douglas sparred over claims about Amodei's positions that

The Guardrails

Chatbots are doing Congress's work with little oversight

Two stories today on how the people making the rules are getting used to AI — one from inside the Capitol, one from the labs shipping the tools. Across the Capitol, lawmakers and staffers are now using chatbots to write speeches and news releases, sort constituent mail, prepare hearing questions, and draft amendments — with almost no rules governing any of it. A Washington Post investigation found both chambers have cleared members and staff to use Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini and, in the House, Cl

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