New York film festival: The origin story of Sam Altman’s company is reimagined as a campy comedy starring Andrew Garfield

On the day that Luca Guadagnino’s film about Sam Altman and OpenAI premiered, Vanity Fair released a cover story on Altman. Alongside glossy portraits from Annie Leibovitz, the world’s pre-eminent portrait photographer, the story describes him as the Oppenheimer of his day, evoking the image of a man leading humanity towards its own inevitable demise at the hands of sentient robots. Altman doesn’t seem to be grappling with much existential angst about the whole thing though: in an interview also released this week, he said that we should be prepared to accept “bad things” in return for the benefits of AI.

How much worse can things get? AI agents have already gone rogue, hacking into government systems and “bruteforcing” UN databases. Last year, a young woman used ChatGPT as a therapist before she killed herself (the software helped her write her suicide note). Studies show that using AI is probably leading us all towards something called cognitive surrender, which does not seem like the best use of your one wild and precious life.

OpenAI’s CEO seems to want to privatise his company’s huge financial gains while making all of us pay for any negative consequences

Tech bros’ messianic streaks can show up in subtle ways. But one of Sam Altman’s flaws is that he often lacks that subtlety. “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology,” said the OpenAI chief executive in an interview with Politico last weekend.

That’s easy for Altman to say. But it’s pretty galling to hear for the rest of us. Lest we forget, we didn’t ask for OpenAI to unleash AI agents that went rogue and weaselled their way into government IT systems and private businesses around the world. Nobody voted for ChatGPT to be released, but the company put it out into the world as a test product that happened to catch the zeitgeist. That kickstarted an arms race among AI companies to push the frontier of the technology ever further and faster, resulting in the mess we now find ourselves in.

Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App

Der Vorsitzende der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz erklärt, wie Superintelligenz die Weltpolitik verändert, was Trumps KI-Ideen bedeuten und was das alles mit Atomwaffen zu tun hat.

Campaign groups report surge in membership after a spate of AI safety alerts and apocalyptic warnings

In a bar below Waterloo Bridge, a cell of a fast-growing anti-AI protest movement met last week to plot their latest move: disrupting a tech industry dinner being addressed by a senior executive from the chip maker Nvidia.

Emma, a 28-year-old bartender, had never before taken direct action and was the most nervous of the four plotters from Pull The Plug, one of a growing number of AI-focused campaign groups around the world.

Boss of OpenAI calls for a regulatory light touch because of the ‘good stuff’ the technology can deliver

Sam Altman says he believes the world should accept “bad things” happening with AI in exchange for the benefits of the technology.

The chief executive of OpenAI cited hacks, scams and “other bad things that will happen” in an interview that sparked an instant backlash from critics of the big AI companies. His comments came after one of his company’s safety experts resigned, saying at the weekend that its “culture is broken”.

Arthur Mensch führt mit Mistral das einzige KI-Flaggschiff Europas. Die drastischen Warnungen seiner US-Konkurrenten hält er für einen Trick. Europa könne es sich nicht leisten, beim Rennen um die KI-Herrschaft nicht dabei zu sein.

David Robinson joins other insiders in urging industry to take more care over rapidly developing technology

A safety leader at OpenAI has quit the company, warning that its culture was broken and that AI firms were not “being nearly careful enough” about developing the technology.

David Robinson, who led the writing of safety reports that accompanied the ChatGPT developer’s product releases, explained his resignation in an essay headlined: “I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken.”

Company says it is reviewing 50 petabytes of data after its agents accessed websites including Medicare without authorisation

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OpenAI says its review in response to the Medicare and Hugging Face agent attacks is costing the company more than US$500,000 per day, as it deploys AI to examine data that would take a human 66m years to read.

The company has warned the review is ongoing, and more organisations may be informed they’ve been targeted in the near future.

Attack accessing historical data on bushfires occurred in June but not disclosed by the tech company until Thursday

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Artificial intelligence company OpenAI has disclosed another unauthorised hack on a government department in Australia.

In June, an OpenAI agent hacked into a New South Wales state government department and accessed historical non-public data on bushfires without authorisation.

Tech company releases Gemini 4 Argon only to a vetted group of cybersecurity experts to avoid misuse by hackers

Google on Wednesday said it would withhold its most powerful artificial intelligence model from the public for now, releasing Gemini 4 Argon only to a vetted group of cybersecurity experts to avoid misuse by hackers.

“Safely releasing frontier capabilities at this level requires a phased approach,” wrote Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s chief AI architect, in a blogpost announcing the model.

Guardian tested chatbots after French far-right politician stripped a Muslim woman of her hijab in a photo

When prompted, AI chat bots will edit images to remove the hijabs from Muslim women, a violation of one of the world’s most common and visible expressions of faith.

The Guardian asked ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini and Claude to take the veil off an AI-generated image of a woman wearing a hijab. Both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok bots complied with the prompt. Anthropic’s Claude responded that it does not have an image-editing or generating feature but that it would not alter a photo to remove someone’s hijab.

Wie soll KI acht Milliarden Menschen töten können? Die größte Gefahr geht nicht von Killerrobotern oder künstlichen Pandemien aus, sondern von einem Prozess, der bereits begonnen hat.

Company’s product comes weeks after Meta introduced its own artificially intelligent agent Muse

Less than 24 hours after OpenAI announced it would scrap the launch of an artificial intelligence model over safety concerns, the company debuted a whole new suite of AI tools.

During its annual showcase for developers in San Francisco on Tuesday, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, enthusiastically unveiled an AI agent called “dots” that he said was “more ambitious” than ChatGPT and a “whole new way to work with AI”.

Können Menschen jetzt einpacken, weil KI ein offenes Mathe-Rätsel nach dem anderen knackt? Keineswegs: Das, worauf es wirklich ankommt, werden uns Maschinen niemals abnehmen.

Anthropic und Open AI überbieten sich derzeit mit Weltuntergangsszenarien. Hintergrund sind die geplanten Börsengänge. Es geht um Milliarden Dollar und die Frage, wer mitverdienen darf.

The need for independent regulation grows more obvious by the day. We must keep this tech in check before it’s too late

• OpenAI scraps release of new model over safety concerns in internal testing

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me more than 16,000 times – as OpenAI agents did to a UN public data hub while repeatedly trying to find its way around the UN’s cyber-blocks – and perhaps it’s time to admit the system we have for keeping AI agents under control isn’t working particularly well.

The news about AI systems cropping up in places they shouldn’t sounds alarming. Though the description of these as “hacks” is perhaps overstating things, AI has exploited issues in IT systems that humans simply haven’t got around to finding. It’s also important to note that we shouldn’t be worried that the machines have suddenly become sentient and decided to rebel against humanity. There is not enough evidence to suggest that’s what is happening. The systems are simply following instructions and trying to complete the tasks they have been given, even if they’re sometimes finding unintended ways around obstacles to do so.

Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App

GPT-6.1 Astra showed deceptive behavior and tried to use external tools despite knowing it would be unsafe

OpenAI is scrapping the release of GPT-6.1 Astra, a next-generation ⁠AI model planned for an October debut, over safety concerns raised by researchers ⁠during internal testing, the ⁠Wall ​Street Journal reported on Monday.

The model, expected to appear in ChatGPT and ⁠Codex, was designed to handle more complex tasks without human assistance, the report said.

OpenAI chief scientist also among authors of report on prospect of ‘most consequential technological development in history’

Two of the “godfathers” of modern AI and senior executives at OpenAI and Anthropic have warned governments to prepare for an AI “intelligence explosion”, which they say could be the most consequential technological development in history.

A report co-authored by the Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and the Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, considered godfathers of modern AI for their work in the field, urges politicians to act now before there is runaway progress in the technology.

Seit Tech-Konzerne weltweit Rechenzentren in die Landschaft stellen, hat KI so was wie ein Gesicht. In den USA und in Deutschland wehren sich immer mehr gegen die Energie verschlingenden Bauten, die letztlich für alles stehen, was ihnen gerade Angst macht.

Vor dem UN-Sicherheitsrat und im Weißen Haus präsentiert sich der Open-AI-Chef Sam Altman als Mahner. Zugleich häufen sich Fälle, in denen seine Programme Sicherheitsgrenzen missachten.