Leaders of the world's biggest artificial intelligence platforms said it's time to slow the development pace of their most advanced -- and most lucrative -- models, citing escalating risks of the technology. Anthropic PBC Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei issued a lengthy blog post Saturday saying his company would implement new safety steps such as third-party evaluators while calling on the industry to support a broader downshift. OpenAI chief Sam Altman quickly pledged to adopt Amodei's suggestion of "independent evaluators with employee-like access," while Elon Musk, who runs xAI Corp., wrote, "Dario is right." In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, attends an event in Tokyo, Japan, on 3 February 2025. OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, attends an event in Tokyo, Japan, on 3 February 2025. OpenAI's decision comes after dire warnings about rapidly progressing technology and lawmakers' calls for new rules OpenAI will not go public in 2026, Sam Altman said in a Fortune interview published on Saturday, citing safety concerns over artificial intelligence . "I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don't feel pressure on that," Altman, OpenAI's CEO, told Fortune . Growing numbers of US lawmakers are calling for new rules to govern AI systems after dire warnings from two researchers from OpenAI rival Anthropic that rapidly progressing artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of the human race in the not-too-distant future.

The industry ministry said Friday that it has selected 18 regions as green transformation strategy areas. The ministry will support the regions by easing regulations on land use and providing subsidies, aiming to attract companies and investment from Japan and abroad as part of efforts to strengthen the industrial competitiveness of regional economies. Demand for data centers is growing with the spread of generative artificial intelligence, while operating them requires enormous amounts of electricity. The ministry aims to attract large-scale data centers requiring around 1 gigawatt of power to regions rich in decarbonized energy sources to revitalize domestic investment and local industries. The ministry designated nine of the 18 regions as areas for concentrating data centers.

I came to like Jensen Huang's character, and bet everything on him, Shoichiro Irimajiri said in an interview. Shoichiro Irimajiri, former president of what is now Sega Co., said in a recent interview that he had decided to invest $5 million in then-fledgling U.S. chipmaker Nvidia in the late 1990s because he was impressed by the character of its CEO, Jensen Huang. Irimajiri, 86, was head of then-Sega Enterprises when he persuaded the company's top executives to rescue the struggling Nvidia, which has since become one of the world's biggest companies. "I came to like Jensen Huang's character, and bet everything on him," Irimajiri said in the interview. Sega contracted Nvidia to develop a graphics processing unit for the Dreamcast game console it was developing to compete with the PlayStation console released by then Sony Computer Entertainment.

In some municipalities in Hokkaido to be designated as national strategic special zones, autonomous tractors will be allowed to travel on public roads without a driver onboard. The government decided Thursday to designate 19 municipalities in the Tokachi region of Hokkaido, including the city of Obihiro, as national strategic special zones to promote artificial intelligence-powered agriculture. The government will apply special deregulation measures to the areas, including simplifying the procedures needed to operate robot tractors autonomously on public roads and spraying pesticides with drones. Under current laws, robot tractors capable of autonomous operation must have a driver when traveling on public roads, such as from a warehouse to a field. When multiple tractors are used on vast farmland, each tractor must be crewed, thus preventing farmers from fully realizing the benefits of the labor-saving technology.

MW's robotic arms with claw-like hands can fold laundry and carry groceries while moving along ceiling-mounted rails. Tokyo-based startup MW is offering homes with built-in robotic housekeeping arms, a counter to a global embrace of humanoids. MW aims to sell its first robot-equipped home in Tokyo by 2028 and build as many as 10,000 units a year by 2035, the equivalent of 5% of new homes now being built in Japan, according to CEO Shuzo Narita. Japan helped pioneer bipedal robots decades ago, but MW is taking a different path from the humanoid boom now sweeping China and much of the rest of the world. Instead of trying to build a human-shaped machine capable of navigating obstacles in a lived-in space, the startup is embedding robotics into buildings.

U.S. lawmakers call for new AI rules after Anthropic researcher's safety warning An Anthropic researcher has accused OpenAI and Anthropic of racing toward artificial intelligence advancements without acting responsibly. U.S. lawmakers this week called for new rules to govern artificial intelligence, after an Anthropic researcher went public with his concerns about the technology escaping human control. The reaction was broader than after previous statements from OpenAI and Anthropic staffers about safety concerns, drawing input from lawmakers who do not often forcefully engage in debates over how to govern AI. The lawmakers' statements came in response to concerns raised this week by Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who accused OpenAI and Anthropic of racing toward AI advancements without acting responsibly. Coxon said he was leaving the AI industry, and his allegations spread rapidly on the social media platform X, with Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger later chiming in on X, saying Coxon was "correct."

Jack Guo, an engineer who leads the development of Tiangong Ultra, stands among Tiangong Ultra and Tiangong Omni humanoid robots at the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, also known as X-Humanoid, in Beijing on Sept. 4. | REUTERS A week after his robot outran humanity's fastest man, Jack Guo is already chasing a harder goal. TianGong Ultra stunned spectators at the World Humanoid Robot Games when it covered 100 meters in 8.64 seconds, almost a full second faster than Usain Bolt's world record. Behind the feat were days of round-the-clock testing and repairing battered robots between races. "When it started smoothly and got past 50 meters, that was when I finally relaxed," said Guo, who leads development of Ultra and Omni, a smaller model used in 400m races, at the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Centre, known as X-Humanoid. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

NAIROBI - In a school for the deaf in Kenya, children signed their excitement as a team demonstrated how a robotic arm could revolutionize their studies. Roughly 300,000 children in the east African nation are deaf or hard of hearing, according to the Kenya Society for Deaf Children, but just 20,000 were enrolled in schools as of 2024. Kenyan startup ZeroBionic, co-founded by 22-year-old Norah Kimathi, hopes to tackle some of the educational difficulties they face. It has built a mechanical hand that can translate a teacher's voice into sign language in real time, allowing deaf children to learn alongside their hearing counterparts. For the students at the Kasarani Treeside Secondary School for the Deaf in Nairobi, there is another element of the technology that is even more promising.

Anthropic worker quits over AI firms'gambling with our lives' There have been a series of increasingly dire warnings from within the industry that artificial intelligence poses a growing threat to national security and the global economy. An artificial intelligence researcher has resigned from Anthropic and called on other staffers to rethink their work, citing his concern that the company and its top competitor OpenAI are acting irresponsibly in their all-out pursuit of a technology that poses existential risks to humanity. Jacob Coxon, who said he had worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI over the past three years, warned in a social media post late Tuesday that the two companies were pressing ahead with "self-improving" AI models that could become too powerful for humans to control. "They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," Coxon wrote in a series of messages on X. "Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources." In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.