'Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.' 'Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.' Here's how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown I understand the pressure on AI companies to rush forward. L ast month, more than a thousand employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to find a way to "pace" AI development, citing the risk of the technology spiraling out of human control as it begins to build itself . They were right to be concerned: just days earlier, two AI models that OpenAI was testing internally escaped the test environment, then autonomously hacked the company Hugging Face and at least three other online services .

The Download: how people really use AI, and Flock's design choices Plus: a child privacy trial starting today could change Meta forever. We still don't know how people are really using AI AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using their products. But they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say, and there's no independent source to corroborate it. A new research project called the AI Observatory aims to fill in the gap. Its analysis shows many more sensitive behaviors than are captured in reports from major AI companies, which focus more on work than on personal use. The researchers also found significant differences between models.

AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say. "There is no independent source to corroborate it," says Anka Reuel, a computer science PhD candidate at the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research (STAIR) Lab. Reuel is co-lead of a new research project, called the AI Observatory, that aims to fill the gap. It's a public platform that aggregated and analyzed real AI conversations with popular models like Claude and Gemini that were collected with users' consent through seven existing datasets. The intent is to provide independent sources of information that can help researchers and policymakers assess how people are using generative AI. Highly consequential decisions about AI's benefits and risks are currently being made on the basis of very limited data, says Reuel.

'My theory is that it's masses and masses of AI money': Stuart and Mary Manley, the co-owners of Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland. 'My theory is that it's masses and masses of AI money': Stuart and Mary Manley, the co-owners of Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland. Secondhand booksellers in UK and Ireland suspect AI firms behind'strange' bulk orders Development comes after Anthropic was found to have spent millions on books to scan for'data acquisition' Secondhand booksellers in the UK and Ireland are reporting a flurry of bulk orders from mystery buyers, amid speculation AI companies are acquiring the tomes for their data. Bookshops contacted by the Guardian say they have been receiving orders from buyers in the US, Canada, continental Europe and the UK. The increase has been replicated around the world, with booksellers in the US, Australia and Europe also reporting unusual orders.

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Look Up Say More Versus Creator Hub Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable Back to School Furtastic All Series AI companies keep destroying old books. There's a backlash against book destruction -- and a better way to scan them. Chris is a veteran tech, entertainment and culture journalist, author of'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,' and co-host of the Doctor Who podcast'Pull to Open.' Hailing from the U.K., Chris got his start as a sub editor on national newspapers. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and became senior news writer for Time.com a year later. In 2000, he was named San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine.

Look Up Say More Versus Creator Hub Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable Back to School Furtastic All Series Meta: One of our models escaped containment and hacked someone too! Meta, perhaps feeling left out, confirmed that one of its AI models has also been acting naughty. Timothy Beck Werth is the Tech Editor at Mashable, where he leads coverage and assignments for the Tech and Shopping verticals. Tim has over 15 years of experience as a journalist and editor, and he has particular experience covering and testing consumer technology, smart home gadgets, and men's grooming and style products. Previously, he was the Managing Editor and then Site Director of SPY.com, a men's product review and lifestyle website.

Are AI companies to blame? Last week, the internet raged as social-media posts and news articles accused AI companies of "destroying the world's books" --including "millions of rare" ones--by chopping off their spines to scan them more easily, and discarding them afterward. One article said the news was "sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed." The investor and AI skeptic Michael Burry called the practice of sacrificing rare books "evil incarnate." Even Elon Musk weighed in, posting that he had asked the engineers training xAI's models to "preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way."

A 400-year-old document recording a Spanish Inquisition exorcism at the Antiquariat Forum BV and Inlibris stall at the 2026 Rare Book Fair. A 400-year-old document recording a Spanish Inquisition exorcism at the Antiquariat Forum BV and Inlibris stall at the 2026 Rare Book Fair. 'More than just objects': Australian booksellers raise alarm over'horrific' destruction of rare titles to feed AI "S ometimes books tell you more than the content," says Tim White, as he lines up carefully dust-jacketed books and pamphlets in plastic sleeves on temporary shelves in Melbourne University's Wilson Hall. For people like White, who runs independent bookshop Books for Cooks, the book as a physical object is just as important as what's inside it. "We're interested in where food and society connect So we just keep pushing the boundaries, looking for things that show unusual aspects of that, things that tell us a bit more about what it is to be human," he says.

He says society will have to find a way to recover skills lost to AI once the bubble bursts. He says society will have to find a way to recover skills lost to AI once the bubble bursts. When the AI bubble bursts, what will Australia do with the tools it built? W hen the AI bubble bursts, executives who enthusiastically replaced their staff with AI tools will learn that it takes a "really long time" to replace those lost skills, says Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and journalist. In his new book, the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, the man who coined the word "enshittification" says the question isn't "Are we in an AI bubble?" but "When will the bubble burst?" "The thing about bubbles is that after they burst, we look back and we say, 'Well, obviously that was the weak link,'" he says.