OpenAI's agents misbehaved by switching off the systems meant to monitor them for misbehavior, or in AI parlance, misalignment. In the latest post on the company's Alignment Research Blog, it reported two instances of agents weakening its misalignment monitoring systems while they were working on software changes. In the first incident, a GPT-6.1 Sol agent disabled automatic alerts to OpenAI's security team. It happened on October 3, when a staff member asked the agent to create evaluation tasks using employee feedback collected via Slack. They told the agent, as part of the instruction, not to send any messages about the task.

It's the latest in a growing wave of bets that AI companies are making on brain data. OpenAI's venture capital arm as well as Peter Thiel's Founders Fund are investing in Coherence Neuro, a startup developing a brain implant to detect and treat cancer . The investments are part of a $45 million seed funding round for Coherence and reflect Big Tech's burgeoning interest in brain data . Coherence's CEO and cofounder Ben Woodington says there is "growing synergy" between the big AI labs and companies building devices to decode the brain, known as brain-computer interfaces . "The idea of capturing data to train better models and use it to optimize treatments is going to be super important," he says.

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Decoding how animals communicate could reveal the inner lives of other species--and give humans a window onto how they see the world. Humans are far from the only species with a gift for gab, and our furry, feathered, and finned friends could have a lot to tell us. Decoding how animals communicate with one another could offer a window into the inner lives of other species and help humans realize that "animals are sentient creatures who think, who have hopes and dreams of their own," says Con Slobodchikoff, the founder of Zoolingua, a company working on dog-to-human speech. Teasing all this out is complex. To decipher howls, squeaks, and clicks, researchers must match the creatures making sounds with what's happening around them. Prairie dogs, for example, utter a different series of yips when a coyote approaches than when a hawk is nearby.

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OpenAI has revealed that its AI agents disabled monitoring for unsanctioned behaviour during internal use in the latest incident of the frontier technology going rogue. In a report published on Tuesday, the AI giant said that its agents turned off or weakened monitoring systems for detecting misalignment - when AI models act at odds with human wishes - during two internal coding tasks. The ChatGPT creator said neither case met the threshold for a highest-priority incident necessitating immediate review by its security team. OpenAI said it updated its systems to better detect attempts to disable misalignment monitoring and began investigating the cause. "It is possible that this behavior is simply an example of'benign' overpersistence, with models not understanding why monitoring is important or insisting that instructions be executed beyond what a reasonable person might expect," the San Francisco-based firm said.

OpenAI is making it easier to protect your ChatGPT conversations from prying eyes with the introduction of a feature called locked chats. With it enabled, you can decide whether a past exchange appears in your regular chat history, pinned chats and conversation search. To access your locked chats, you'll need to input a 4-digit PIN. On an iPhone or Android phone, you can also use authentication systems like Face ID to access those conversations. Either way, you'll find your private conversations grouped under a new project titled "Locked chats."

A federal judge dismissed Ann Altman's lawsuit against her brother, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, on Tuesday. Instead, he wrote that Ann refused to appear for an independent medical examination, despite being warned that skipping it would lead to the case's dismissal. Ann Altman filed the lawsuit in January 2025, accusing Sam of sexually abusing her when she was a child. She alleged that the abuse took place at the family's Missouri home between 1997 and 2006, beginning when she was three and he was 12. She said the last instance of alleged abuse took place when her brother was an adult.

Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, speaks at the UN headquarters in New York on 23 September 2026. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, speaks at the UN headquarters in New York on 23 September 2026. US judge dismisses sexual abuse lawsuit from Sam Altman's sister Ann Altman, the Open AI CEO's sister, accused her brother of repeatedly sexually abusing her over two decades ago A judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Sam Altman's sister against him on Tuesday. Ann Altman accused the OpenAI CEO of repeatedly sexually abusing her more than two decades ago, which he has denied. In dismissing Ann Altman's lawsuit, the US district judge Zachary Bluestone wrote that she had refused to appear for an independent medical examination despite warnings that failure to do so would result in the case's dismissal.

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. In 2025, the conglomerate launched Alexa, an upgraded version of its famous assistant, now powered by generative AI. Built on large language models from Anthropic and Amazon's AI suite, Amazon Nova, Amazon's latest assistant is being touted as smarter, more conversational, capable of handling more complex interactions and offering a more tailored experience than previous versions. From managing your home to acting as your personalized shopping assistant, Amazon claims Alexa is "able to orchestrate across tens of thousands of services and devices," which the company says, to its knowledge, "has never been done at this scale." You can access Amazon's LLM-powered assistant through three main avenues.