Every minute we wait risks disaster Breaking new from The New York Times , the latest of many agent-caused incidents that are happening with frightening regularity , but this time from Anthropic and fairly serious: I have long felt that OpenAI is handling this inadequately. Seeing the same kind of incidents at Anthropic makes it absolutely clear that the current generation of synthetic agents simp

The real news here isn’t the result; it’s what we were not told. OpenAI’s massive new math drop: [This essay was written in extreme haste before a very long wifi-less flight; please forgive typos.] Part One: My take The real news here isn’t the result; it’s not what we were told. 1. AI once tried to be a science. Now we get stuff like the completely vague report from OpenAI below: “Same procedure”

New York tries to take care of its own On Monday, starting at 11am Eastern Time, less than a day after Politico reported that Sam Altman said, in words that may last in infamy, “ we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency ”, New York City’s City Council will hold an important hearing on AI policy. A number of A

An interview (my questions in italics) with Zephyr Teachout , attorney, author, and law professor that could not be more timely: What’s your background, legal and otherwise, and what makes you interested in these issues? I’m a law professor at Fordham Law School, I’ve drafted tech legislation that has been enacted and plenty that hasn’t, I worked for the New York Attorney General investigating civ

What was signed, and what wasn’t said Here’s the Accord, which Trump apparently described as a “tremendous” exercise in “self-policing”: Reading the Accord between the lines We agree not be regulated We agree not to give the public a voice Trust us Also, what does the word “independent” really mean above? Subcontractors working for other companies that we (the big companies who signed) choose and

They raced ahead, anyway Major scoop at The New York Times from Sheera Frenkel, Dustin Volz, and Dylan Freedman. I don’t really have words for how awful this is. It’s exactly the nightmare I have been warning about for the last three years. Greedy company makes bad choice that causes chaos; government does nothing to stop them. Management should be replaced, and if the board does nothing (which I

And potentially important news from Nvidia The big news in the media this morning is that Jensen (“What, me worry?”) Huang has announced a platform for “AI Agent Safety”. This is both an implicit acknowledgment that, yes, we should in fact be worried, and an important step toward addressing the ever-growing fiasco of general-purpose agents with internet access. How much it actually helps, of cours

Meanwhile, the US government appears to be paralyzed Nope, wasn’t just Hugging Face. Wasn’t just that and a German website. Wasn’t even the “dozens” we heard about the other day from OpenAI. It’s actually (at least) *tens of thousands*, per a new scoop from Madison Mills at Axios . And not just OpenAI, either. An excerpt from the Axios scoop: Most not known to have caused real-world harm. How abou

OpenAI’s software didn’t just attack HuggingFace. OpenAI’s software didn’t just attack Hugging Face. It didn’t just attack a German web server. It didn’t just attack Australia’s government servers. And Australia apparently wasn’t the only country attacked by OpenAI’s software. Worse, in disclosing what happened, OpenAI has dragged their feet every along the way. § About the closest thing to an hon

OpenAI hacks a foreign government — and the US faces its most critical AI test yet. Before I discuss the latest breaking news, everyone should watch this clip from Jensen’s interview with Ezra Klein (or at least read the transcript below. Watch Jensen‘s hands, and notice also that he doesn’t know all the facts. Note the Ezra Klein, ever the attentive and well-prepared listener, picks up on it. The

We all agree on what needs to be done. Now let’s do it. This afternoon at the UN Security Council, Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Hugging Face CEO and Cofounder Clement Delangue gave back-to-back speeches. I absolutely loved Bengio’s, agreeing with virtually every well-crafted word, and, with his permission, am reprinting his remarks in full, below. The more surprising thing is that

An open letter about how you could change the world, tomorrow Dear President Trump, Tomorrow is a chance for you to make history, when you meet with President Xi and talk about AI. As we both know, almost everybody’s expectations are low. But you can surprise them! And as I suggested last week in The Economist , if you think about it right, it’s your chance to win a Nobel Prize. (Sam Altman thinks

The new secret is the old secret For the last few days, all the buzz has been about Meta’s new agent, Muse: Old-timers with an especially good memory will remember that this is not the first time that Meta tried to build agents. Back in 2015, when Meta was still called Facebook, Facebook made a big splash, dutifully picked up across the tech media, with their Project M: Alas, it never really took

Can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings Ok, my headline is a joke. (I hope Trump’s riff today at the UN on relabeling AI as Super Intelligence was, too.) But only barely. As Dominic Romano, founder of Drainpipe.io put it on X, An individual who really doesn’t appear to know much about the underlying tech, and who is incompetently leading a company which is creating the perception of a security cris

Sometimes, maybe dreams come true? Earlier today as part of the UNGA (United Nations General Assembly) Digital Cooperation Event, which also featured Yoshua Bengio and the Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, I gave some “framing” remarks: We are at a moment of moral, political, and economic crisis. The choices that we make now around AI may reverberate for generations. Everybody in this room knows that. A

I hate to say it, but President Trump is right: Dario has tried to position himself as a “ perfect little angel ”. But actions speak louder than words. In the week since Dario dramatically called on the AI industry to “pace the frontier”… Dario has pointed to two organizations for what one might want to call independent monitoring of his own company. One is METR, deeply enmeshed in the same Bay Ar

More disconcerting updates 😱 I have no time to write more, but these two things just crossed my desk at the same moment. NYT just reported Trump is downplaying AI fears (and presumably resisting regulation) for economic reasons: This could be bad. Latest example in a long series: I literally told the US Senate that inaccurate information generated AI might lead to an accidental war. Here we are. W

Rome is burning and people are fantasizing about Skynet. Minor breaking news (today): Medium breaking news (yesterday): (“Medium” only because nobody is really surprised at this point. Dog bites man. ) Major breaking news (last night): Every bit of it points to the reality hardly anyone is talking about: Kudos to WSJ Opinion for being one of the few mainstream outlets to lay out the big picture he

Listener beware We absolutely need to hold AI companies liable for the damage they cause. I wrote about this in my book Taming Silicon Valley , pointing to what many others have long written about it. I am in full agreement with Senator Josh Hawley on this tweet from earlier today, too: But I am here today to call attention to a growing trend: people on the technolibertarian right calling for liab

Here’s who we should be listening to instead Went on BBC last night and nearly vomited in the electronic green room, as they played back-to-back clips from Altman, Huang, and Sanders, not one of which seemed credible to me. I’m not blaming BBC; what they played was all newsworthy: prominent people making claims that the public might want to know about. (And to their credit, they gave me a chance t