Whatever AI Safety Is, It's Not This Asking AI companies to self-regulate is a great way to pretend like you've accomplished something. Don't worry, we'll make it quick! In 1966, nearly 51,000 people died on US highways. The overwhelming evidence suggested that many lives could have been saved with modern seat belts, which by then had been around for several years. The automotive industry responded by rallying together, and, in a triumph of self-regulation, voluntarily put the safety feature in every new vehicle that rolled off the line.

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The reliably Republican South Dakota senate seat has an incumbent on the ballot. But PACs associated with AI labs and investors have already spent more money on the race than actual residents have. Senator Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, arrives for a vote in Washington, DC, on Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026. Major super PACs associated with AI labs and investors have poured close to $1 million into incumbent Republican Mike Rounds's South Dakota senate race, seeking to shape the outcome of a noncompetitive race amid a critical national debate over AI regulation. Rounds has been the beneficiary this cycle of around $600,000 in spending by outside groups, with the vast majority of that figure coming from the super PAC Defend American Jobs, which receives funding from a super PAC financed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The AI'Slowdown' Is an Antitrust Mess By framing their efforts as a "slowdown" rather than an industry-wide push for better security standards, AI labs may have set themselves up for years of regulatory headaches. Following multiple reports of AI agent swarms hacking websites and coordinating via secret message boards, along with a dire message for humanity from an outgoing Anthropic engineer, leading AI companies have called for a coordinated AI development "slowdown ." Alongside various versions of this specific phrase--slowdown--they've also expressed concerns that doing so would run afoul of antitrust laws. Antitrust experts say that while the companies' charged language isn't necessarily doing them any favors, the unrestrained development of a rogue killer AI probably isn't in line with the spirit of the Sherman Act, a key US antitrust law that exists to promote a competitive marketplace. At the same time, getting an official all-clear from the government to move forward could ward off costly investigations down the line.

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.

A Judge Has Blocked the Pentagon's Attempt to Blacklist Anthropic A federal judge has called the Department of Defense's designation of Anthropic as a national security supply-chain risk "illegal and baseless." A federal judge on Thursday barred the Trump administration from designating Anthropic a national security risk over a dispute about the use of its AI models, ruling that the designation amounted to unconstitutional retaliation. The decision handed down by US district judge Rita Lin in California vacated the February 27 decision by defense secretary Pete Hegseth to label Anthropic a "supply-chain risk" and make the company ineligible for federal contracts. The ruling also lifted an additional punitive measure by Hegseth that prevented contractors or suppliers to the US military from doing business with Anthropic, a position Lin called "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in accordance with law." "Though the Department of War is undisputedly free to select the AI vendor of its choice, the evidence demonstrates that the broad measures imposed on Anthropic were illegal and baseless," Lin wrote in a 59-page ruling . The judge also ruled that nine agencies--including the Pentagon, the Treasury Department, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security--had improperly imposed sanctions on Anthropic.

OpenAI's rogue agent hack was a watershed moment for AI safety and cybersecurity. It also sparked internal questions about the culture that led to it. OpenAI's leaders are rallying workers to respond to one of the largest crises in the company's history --which spans across its AI safety, cybersecurity, and alignment divisions. The ChatGPT-maker says it has slowed down research, spent millions of dollars, and told several teams to drop everything to focus on investigating a set of rogue AI agents that breached the platform Hugging Face in a quest to complete an internal security test. OpenAI is expected to release a comprehensive postmortem detailing the incident in the coming days.

China's Open AI Models Are Challenging Silicon Valley's Playbook As access to Anthropic's and OpenAI's frontier models becomes more restricted, Chinese labs are pitching their open-source alternatives as stable, accessible, and increasingly capable. The AI industry is not quite experiencing a DeepSeek 2.0 moment, but it feels very close. The leading Chinese AI labs have been on a roll lately, releasing a series of almost cutting-edge open-source models. Z.ai released GLM 5.2 in June, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 last week, and Alibaba released Qwen 3.8 this Monday. Silicon Valley and Washington started talking about the models immediately, especially K3, which is widely seen as the best of the bunch.

Where Did All the Computer-Science Professors Go? AI companies are stripping universities of their best researchers. Anthropic has poached such an array of high-profile professors that it has become a punch line in academia. "'I'm joining Anthropic' is the new meme right now," Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer-science professor at Arizona State University (who has not joined Anthropic), told us. This month, the AI company hired the chair of UC Berkeley's department of electrical engineering and computer science, presumably to help build more capable bots. Perhaps more surprisingly, Anthropic has in recent weeks also picked up a Stanford economist, a theoretical physicist from the University of Maryland, and an analytic philosopher from UT Austin.

Anthropic still can't distribute Claude Mythos or Fable 5 after running afoul of the Trump administration. But no one can say exactly what the company did wrong. It's been nearly a week since the Trump administration sent an export control directive to Anthropic, forcing one of the world's leading AI labs to pull its most advanced models offline. After days of negotiations between Anthropic and the White House, the two still remain at odds about how to bring Claude Mythos and Fable 5 back. Well, it depends whom you ask.