In his last few executive orders signed as California governor, Gavin Newsom, whose final term ends in January, issued one asking for independent verification of artificial intelligence models and set up an expert committee to create kill switches for AI agents that could go rogue and cause harm. In 2024, Newsom vetoed a bill, passed in the state assembly, asking for similar requirements that the governor has now called for in his executive order. Newsom said at the time that it would amount to "thwarting the promise of this technology". "He is in a lame duck period here," says Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), unsure that the measures will pass in the remainder of his term. "He is setting up his next thing."

Kanishka Narayan said the UK would'play its part' in coordinating an international response to AI safety. Kanishka Narayan said the UK would'play its part' in coordinating an international response to AI safety. Cyber-attack like OpenAI Medicare breach'seems likely' in UK, says minister Mon 12 Oct 2026 09.52 EDTLast modified on Mon 12 Oct 2026 11.36 EDT An AI-driven cyber-attack like the OpenAI breach of Australia's healthcare system is likely, "if not inevitable", in the UK, according to a senior minister. Kanishka Narayan, the UK AI minister, indicated that the British government's own cyber defences would be bypassed by a technology that has developed highly sophisticated skills in cybersecurity. In a speech on Monday, Narayan said an incident in June when an OpenAI agent - a computer program acting autonomously - infiltrated Medicare, Australia's universal healthcare system, could be repeated in the UK.

In a new series of interviews, we're meeting some of the PhD students that were selected to take part in the Doctoral Consortium at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) . This time, we meet Adeela Bashir to find out how she is contributing to the field of cybersecurity. Tell us a bit about your PhD - where are you studying, and what is the topic of your research? I am a PhD researcher at SCEDT, Teesside University in the UK, working at the intersection of Cybersecurity, Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), and AI safety. My PhD asks a central question: How can we understand and mitigate cyber threats when the adversaries are adaptive?

As industry leaders urge a global slowdown in artificial intelligence development for the sake of humanity, the two superpowers driving the technology's rapid advancement have given no indication they intend to hit the brakes. The United States and China, which are locked in a fierce strategic rivalry, have each rebutted calls to slow the pace of AI development, even as industry executives and researchers stress the need for international cooperation to avoid exposing humans to catastrophic - or even existential - risks. Observers anticipated measures that, at best, would fall far short of the coordinated slowdown that many experts said is needed. "The two countries host nearly all frontier labs and most of the models people download," said Alvin Wang Graylin, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, describing agreed guardrails between the US and China as "close to a precondition" for safe AI. "A safety regime covering one side's models covers half the problem," Wang Graylin said. Hampering the prospects for US-China cooperation, analysts said, are mutual mistrust and divergent perceptions of the primary risks involved.

With AI models from major companies all recently breaking out of their constraints, California's governor proposed creating a "kill switch" as part of a comprehensive solution. In an executive order signed by Gavin Newsom on Friday, California will convene national experts to create new recommendations for AI safety during a two-month time frame. "We're going to speed up our work on substantial and responsible AI oversight before it's too late," Newsom said in a press release. "We're going to do this thoughtfully but with urgent velocity; the stakes are too high to wait or delay action." The panel of experts will be tasked with submitting recommendations to Newsom's office, which would then update state laws surrounding AI safety.

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Rumman Chowdhury, CEO and founder of the nonprofit Humane Intelligence, understands the concerns expressed by the DSA working group. Chowdhury, who formerly led the machine learning ethics, transparency, and accountability team at Twitter, thinks that all the attention that the AI safety discourse is generating will ultimately be beneficial to frontier labs. "[The companies] grab all the attention, time, energy, and money by spouting really extreme perspectives. But then they actually backtrack to where we sit, all while they discount all of our expertise," she says. "I think it's hard for normal people to think of how the mind of a venture capitalist works and these investors work. The scarier and more fantastic these CEOs make these companies seem, the more investors want in on it."

The US and China agree that advanced AI poses serious risks. But Beijing is deeply skeptical of a deal that prioritizes keeping US companies ahead. For years, many of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley have argued that the US is locked in an AI arms race with China, and that the consequences of losing would be disastrous. But over the past week, those same executives have started emphasizing a different message. AI has the potential to become so dangerous, tech leaders say, that the two countries urgently need to work together to slow the race down.

As OpenAI's Hugging Face incident has brought discussions about AI safety to the forefront, the company's CEO has clarified that it will not be looking to file for an initial public offering in 2026. In an interview with Fortune, Sam Altman said that "given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public." In response to a question about OpenAI going public in 2026 or 2027, Altman said "not 2026," contradicting a report from earlier this year that the AI giant would file for an IPO as soon as September. Instead, Altman suggested that OpenAI will be focusing on AI safety and alignment, while still being interested in making improved models and products. Beyond the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI's agents reportedly once again broke out of testing environments to hack into two other organizations, RubyGems and DseWiki.

Anthropic's CEO warns that the makers of artificial intelligence "owe it to humanity to try" to slow down. Four days after a researcher publicly quit his job at Anthropic, warning that top AI firms are not "acting responsibly" and that their products might be on track to "kill us all," the company's CEO, Dario Amodei, seemed to basically agree. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," Amodei wrote in a 3,800-word essay that he published today on his personal website and posted to social media. By now, we've all become accustomed to AI industry figures issuing dire prophecies about the power of their products. Yet Amodei's essay stands out for its urgency and for the moment at which it arrived.