OpenAI, founded in San Francisco in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, burst into the mainstream with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. It has since restructured as a for-profit corporation. SAN FRANCISCO, UNITED STATES - ChatGPT-maker OpenAI on Monday took the first step toward going public, one week after archrival Anthropic announced its own filing, as both companies look to raise the massive sums needed to expand. In a social media post, the Sam Altman-led company said it had confidentially submitted an S-1 registration statement to U.S. securities regulators but had "not decided on timing yet" for any potential debut. OpenAI's move follows a confidential filing by Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, which announced last Monday that it had taken the same step. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) enables LLM agents to improve continuously from environment rewards, yet the resulting policies do not systematically accumulate reusable strategies that generalize across tasks. Modular skills can provide such reusable strategies, yet existing skill-augmented RL methods decouple skill creation from policy optimization, risking adopting skills that conflict with the evolving policy. Inspired by Anthropic's Skill Creator, we introduce RESKILL, an RL-in-the-loop skill creation framework that reconciles skill evolution with policy learning. RESKILL exploits the group-wise structure of GRPO to naturally embed three mechanisms with only marginal additional overhead: (1) an assertion-driven skill creator that diagnoses failures from past experience and proposes conditional, trigger-based skill revisions; (2) within-group rollout sampling that enables controlled comparison of skill versions, capturing which version best supports the policy's ongoing learning; and (3) Thompson Sampling with adaptive discounting to balance exploration and exploitation in skill version selection as the policy evolves. Across several domains, RESKILL consistently outperforms existing memory and skill-based RL methods, with the largest gains on unseen tasks. Analysis of the skill lifecycle shows skills being automatically created, tested, refined, and pruned as the policy improves, demonstrating reconciled skill-policy co-evolution.

Could humanoid robots be heading for the battlefield? I've come to an industrial space in a tech-heavy area of San Francisco expecting to see a menacing humanoid robot solider doing something combat-like: the future of land-based warfare, perhaps. Instead, the black shiny faceless Phantom robot is engaged in free play, manipulating a bunch of coloured kids blocks. We need data from it just interacting with its environment [and] this is today's menu, explains Sankaet Pathak, co-founder and CEO of two-year-old start-up Foundation Robotics, which is developing Phantom for military and civilian applications. Later he pushes its 80kg steel-covered body around the room to demonstrate its stability and shows me how it walks.

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung is placing his hopes on former Naver Chief Executive Han Seong Sook to help better use the nation's tech expertise for future growth and ensure its benefits spread more widely through the economy. Han will become the country's second female premier, assuming her appointment is approved by the national assembly, elevating a former technology executive to one of the nation's highest political posts. The tapping of Han underscores Lee's commitment to shoring up future growth of the domestic economy and the need to leverage a wider range of industries. During her five years at the helm of Naver, a company sometimes called the Google of Korea, Han helped broaden its revenue streams beyond its search engine model to also draw on e-commerce, fintech and content generation. 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.

A painting bought for less than $100 (£75) in a US charity shop in the 1960s has sold for almost £190,000 at auction. Art teacher Helene Plotkin bought the work by Scottish Colourist FCB Cadell in White Plains, New York in 1966, unaware of its true value. The painting, Interior: The Lady in Black, hung in her living room for 60 years - but the artist's signature was illegible and was only recently identified. It sold for £189,200, including buyer's premium, in Edinburgh as part of Lyon & Turnbull's Scottish painting and sculpture auction. The background to the painting only became clear when Helene's son Barry began his own research into it and took it for a valuation last year.

In 2025, the tech journalist invited artificial intelligence to do nearly everything for her, including editing the book she was writing about the experiment. F or a year, Joanna Stern decided to turn herself into a "lab rat" - the object of her own experiment. Throughout 2025, she invited artificial intelligence into "every corner" of her life. She let AI answer her texts, decide what she ate and cooked, mow her lawn, fold her washing, drive her places, parse her mammograms and even, in the darkness of a burner phone, be her lover. The resulting book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything, asks all the big questions, including: what happens when AI can do everything humans can do? And what comes after that?

Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd--and damning. Anthropic is regarded as a giant among AI companies, but perhaps what it really excels in is anthropomorphism. Earlier this year, the company released an 84-page document titled Claude's "constitution," Claude being the name of the large language model that is the company's flagship product. The first sentence reads, "Claude's constitution is a detailed description of Anthropic's intentions for Claude's values and behaviors." It goes on: "The document is written with Claude as its primary audience," "we want Claude to be able to use its judgment once armed with a good understanding of the relevant considerations," "Claude's moral status is deeply uncertain," and "Claude may have some functional version of emotions or feelings." This anthropomorphism is by no means limited to the document. In an interview earlier this year, Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, said that "we're open to the idea" that AI could be conscious. In a separate interview, Anthropic's in-house philosopher, Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude's constitution), said, "I want Claude to be very happy--and this is a thing that I want Claude to know more, because I worry about Claude getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff." It's enough to make you wonder: Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?

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This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG . Will this high-tech lounge change how you wait at airports?

Pope Leo's Magnifica Humanitas encyclical addresses AI, Catholic social teaching, war, and peace, but its master motif is the irreducible dignity of the human being.