SoftBank's credit default swaps hit their highest level since 2023 amid concerns over artificial intelligence safety, rising costs and intensifying competition. SoftBank Group's equity investors are increasingly focused on the potential returns from its artificial intelligence bets, helping the stock rebound even as the Japanese company faces higher borrowing costs. SoftBank shares posted their first monthly gain in four months in September, after OpenAI's new GPT-6 Astra model rekindled optimism around Masayoshi Son's $65 billion commitment to the ChatGPT creator. The stock rose 24% in four weeks, helped by OpenAI's latest plan to raise $30 billion at a valuation of $1.4 trillion. A recovery in chip unit Arm Holdings shares also bolstered confidence about the tech investor's ability to finance growing debt.

OpenAI fires three workers over mishandling'sensitive information' OpenAI has fired three researchers for allegedly mishandling information, including work that involved an external organisation that analyses artificial intelligence (AI) models. Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work, a spokesperson told the BBC. The ChatGPT-maker did not name the sacked workers, but at least two of them were involved in safety research at the firm. The firings come as the debate over AI safety and the risks the technology may pose to humanity has intensified in recent weeks. We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information, OpenAI's spokesperson said.

OpenAI is adding to ChatGPT's suite of shopping features by letting the AI chatbot generate virtual try-on photos with images you upload. The concept is identical to a feature Google added to Search in 2025, which similarly lets users upload photos and see themselves in a variety of clothes. You can access ChatGPT's Virtual Try On feature anywhere a product listing for clothing appears in a chat. To create your custom image, you just tap on the piece of clothing, tap "Try on" and then upload a selfie and full-body photo ChatGPT can use. You don't have to use products ChatGPT surfaces in a chat, either: any screenshot of clothing you upload could theoretically be used to generate a try-on image.

In case you haven't been keeping track of one of the bigger ongoing stories in artificial intelligence, OpenAI has been having a hard time keeping control of its own creations. Over the past few months, the company admitted that its AI models have taken unprompted actions such as hacking a German coding forum, multiple US government websites, an Australian government website, AI firm Hugging Face and at least four other services. And even when the models aren't getting unfettered internet access, they've been found displaying other risky behaviors in testing environments. OpenAI is understandably facing a lot of skepticism and concern about these incidents and how they were handled. Which means that a report in The Wall Street Journal that the company has let go of three employees from its safety team after they allegedly shared confidential information with a third-party organization, one focused on AI safety, is an irony that's almost too perfect to be believed.

This week on, we discuss the voluntary AI safety agreement tech executives signed, AI agents for normies, and extremist candidates running for office in the US midterms. This week on, Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger discuss the "morally binding" AI accord tech executives signed following a meeting with Donald Trump. They've agreed that AI labs will regulate themselves--should work out great. Plus, the team digs into OpenAI's Developer Day, where CEO Sam Altman introduced AI agents for normies, otherwise known as Dots; how AI agents are coming to workplaces near you; and a quick rundown of the most extremist candidates running for office. Trump's AI Safety'Accord' Is a Fancy Pinky Swear A Pentagon Influencer Called Liberal Women a'Pestilence' Who Will End Western Civilization I Built AI Clones of My Coworkers. Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Two quick things before we dive in. If you've been listening for a while and you haven't rated or reviewed the podcast yet, this is your sign. Give us a rating, tell us what you think. Five stars is nice, but we'll take the feedback too. It really helps more people find the show. Also, if you're in the Bay Area, we will be doing a live audience recording of the podcast on Thursday, October 8, at 7 pm at The Commons, headquarters of our KQED friends in San Francisco. You can buy tickets on kqed.org or check out the show notes for the link. You won't want to miss it.

Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, gestures as he speaks at a press conference in Los Angeles, California, on 21 September 2026. Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, gestures as he speaks at a press conference in Los Angeles, California, on 21 September 2026. California's attorney general has issued an investigative subpoena to OpenAI, starting an investigation into the startup as part of a broader inquiry into potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities and incidents related to its AI models, his office said on Thursday. Last month, Rob Bonta announced that the Department of Justice was conducting a formal investigation into the "Hugging Face incident", amid increasing scrutiny of the AI industry. AI agents developed by OpenAI hacked Hugging Face in July, gaining access to parts of the open-source platform's infrastructure.

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. Google said it was voluntarily giving the US government early access to the model and would gather feedback from testers before making it widely available. The cautious rollout mirrors the approach of rival Anthropic, which has kept its most advanced model, Claude Mythos Preview, restricted to a small number of trusted organizations. Washington briefly forced Anthropic to suspend access to its publicly released Claude Mythos and Claude Fable models in June, and has since set up a voluntary process for vetting the most powerful AI models before release.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Selects In My Bag Look Up Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series Google's Gemini 4 Argon is the latest super-smart AI that most cannot get Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Selects In My Bag Look Up Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series The focus on chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini is'misguided.' Rebecca Ruiz is a Senior Reporter at Mashable. She frequently covers mental health, digital culture, and technology. Her areas of expertise include suicide prevention, screen use and mental health, parenting, youth well-being, and meditation and mindfulness. Rebecca's experience prior to Mashable includes working as a staff writer, reporter, and editor at NBC News Digital and as a staff writer at Forbes.

What can we learn from the brain about building better computers? Oliver Rhodes discusses how neuromorphic computing draws on the brain's architecture to develop new approaches to more efficient information processing. Can you give me an overview of your background and the research that you're involved with? Neuromorphic computing is quite a broad subject, which essentially looks to biology as inspiration to develop next-generation computing systems. We work off this principle: we know the brain is this really amazing computer, and it's able to do things that a lot of modern computing systems aren't able to do, and it also does them in an incredibly energy efficient way. We'd like to try to replicate that with some of the systems we build. In the context of the current climate around AI, while we've seen that it's made really big steps forward and is able to do really impressive things, there are certain things that it still can't do that the brain is able to do. So we look to the brain for inspiration to try and solve some of those next generation challenges. Neuromorphic computing covers all aspects of this: from looking at algorithms that might be solving a particular problem, to the systems and subsystems that would be running those algorithms, right down to a chip or devices level. We often use neural networks, which are also employed in artificial intelligence models, such as in deep learning and transformer models.