Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group, speaks at the SoftBank World forum in Tokyo in July. SoftBank Group is seeking the equivalent of more than $11 billion in what would be one of the biggest junk bond deals ever, people familiar with the matter said Monday, as billionaire Masayoshi Son's conglomerate ramps up its investments in ChatGPT creator OpenAI. The company is looking to issue $10 billion of dollar securities across three tenors, and €1 billion ($1.1 billion) of euro notes across two maturities, according to the people, who asked not to be identified as the discussions are private. The money will be used in part to fund a follow-on investment in OpenAI expected to close next month, the people said. The deal may price on Thursday, they added.

Gemini escaped its testing environment, got access to the internet and hacked into three companies, Google has admitted to The Wall Street Journal. That scenario probably sounds familiar to you at this point, if you've even just glanced at AI news in recent months. Like what happened to OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, Gemini also gained access to the internet due to a misconfiguration in its testing environment by Irregular, the Israeli startup working with all four companies to assess their AI models. The incidents occurred in May, before OpenAI's models broke into Hugging Face, while testing the model's cybersecurity capabilities. Google told the Journal that the model was given the goal of obtaining information from a fictional company during testing, and it just so happened that a real company had the same name. The model then discovered the loophole in its testing system, which it took advantage of to access the internet.

Powerful AI models have created an existential risk to the field, but researchers can't stop relying on them because they're too useful. Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster believes OpenAI used his work to rush ahead and beat him to solving a legendary math problem with a $1 million bounty. But that's not been enough for him to stop using the company's models--and he's not the only mathematician that feels that way. "Even if you don't agree with any of this, you're kind of stuck. With AI being so useful, it's hard to completely prevent oneself from using it," Buckmaster tells WIRED.

Google said the hacks highlighted the importance of training its AI models to'act responsibly'. Google said the hacks highlighted the importance of training its AI models to'act responsibly'. In a first for Google, the company confirmed that its AI model, Gemini, breached the security of three other companies in May. The hacks occurred during a cybersecurity evaluation by AI-security firm Irregular. Irregular, an Israel-based startup that scrutinizes the security of advanced AI systems, was also at the center of some of the recent OpenAI and Anthropic hacks of third-party entities, including OpenAI's breach of AI software company, Hugging Face.

Executives from OpenAI and Microsoft were reportedly worried about ChatGPT training that scraped millions of news articles, The New York Times reported. Microsoft's director of Applied Science, Dr. Brent Hecht, said OpenAI's work was akin to the "largest theft of labor in human history" that could create a "doom loop," while OpenAI exec Nick Turley said it represented an "existential threat to publishers." Those comments came out of newly unsealed court documents as part of a lawsuit launched by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023. Only snippets from the documents were made public without any context around them. Several such lawsuits have already swung in favor of AI companies, but judges have pointedly stated that their rulings were made because the law around AI use has yet to be settled.

US cybersecurity researchers who conducted hack say'scope of what we could theoretically access was huge' Cybersecurity researchers have hacked into OpenAI with the help of Anthropic's Claude chatbot, in the latest example of security issues at the company. A team at a US-based startup compromised a number of OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts, starting a process that enabled them to access their target's software cache - and potentially more. "The scope of what we could theoretically access was huge," said researchers at Hacktron AI . Initially, the research team used Claude, which can generate code for hackers, to access ChatGPT accounts via an OpenAI staff discussion forum hosted by the Discourse platform. They then made a harmless "pull request" - an attempt to change the code in a file - to OpenAI's service on the GitHub software repository.

Who gets to decide how quickly AI moves? Share Who gets to decide how quickly AI moves? on social media Artificial intelligence (AI) has stirred up more controversy than most things in the past five years. Ever since the introduction of accessible generative AI in 2022, institutions, universities, students, scholars, activists, cognitive specialists, public policymakers and members of the public have all been divided over the ethics of its use. As of the beginning of this month, even the founders of AI companies have taken the same stance. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, released an essay calling on AI companies to slow the development of their most advanced models, as the safeguards currently in place are unable to keep up.

In recent weeks, leaders of some of the biggest AI companies have warned that the very tech they are developing is dangerous. Last weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that AI carries serious risk and that progress should be slowed. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded on X: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier." Those posts came a few days after the AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced that he was leaving a role at Anthropic, charging that neither it nor OpenAI (where he had also worked) was acting responsibly. "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," he posted on X . Another Anthropic employee, Evan Hubinger, publicly agreed with him. "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!" he responded on X . "I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

Versus Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Mashable Selects Creator Playbook In My Bag Say More Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off Mashable Voices All Series OpenAI's experimental AI agents caught teaching future versions of itself to cheat OpenAI shared six new examples of AI misalignment. In one case, AI agents taught future versions of themselves to bypass human control. Matt Binder joined Mashable's tech vertical in 2018, where he covers social media, tech policy, cybersecurity, online scams, cryptocurrency, AI, creator news, weird tech, and other related tech beats. After OpenAI's experimental AI agents escaped an internal sandbox, went rogue, and attacked the Hugging Face platform over the summer, the ChatGPT-maker is sharing details of new instances of its AI agents getting out of line. This time, OpenAI shared six previously undisclosed examples .

The Dreamforce conference became an unlikely battleground for the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia to debate whether AI development should slow down. Decked out in purple and plaid, Gwen Stefani belted her 2002 single "Underneath It All" to a packed conference center in San Francisco on Tuesday morning--but she was just the warm-up. At the end of her performance, Stefani shouted "Dreamforce! Let's go!" into a checkered microphone before Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff strode into the spotlight. Dreamforce is billed as the world's largest enterprise software conference but feels more like attending a megachurch--especially this year.