Would even an AI disaster on the scale of Hiroshima be enough to make humankind protect itself? It's clear here in Silicon Valley that AI is advancing faster than humans' ability to control it. H ere in Silicon Valley, the experts think that within the next couple of years we'll see an extraordinary takeoff for artificial intelligence. "Welcome to the foothills of the singularity," as a Stanford University friend greeted me. More prosaically, the imminent breakthrough is described as "recursive self-improvement" - the point at which AI itself trains each successive model of AI, resulting in an exponential development to something which, in many significant respects, is more intelligent than us humans.

If AI systems are viewed as too advanced to control, the companies that build them can't held liable for the harms they cause. "Runaway" AI, "rogue" agents, and "autonomous" actors--the current rhetoric would have you believe that AI agents are not only awake and aware, but angry at their creators. Prominent tech leaders such as Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman push for regulation of these seemingly "superhuman" systems, while a separate faction, led by policy organizations and academic philosophers often aligned with the effective altruism movement, debates whether humanity holds the moral right to govern them at all. Upon closer inspection, they are all calling for the same thing: a view of AI systems as being so advanced and capable that no entity, human or corporate, could possibly be responsible for their actions. While these perspectives seem at odds, they are inadvertently aligned on one goal: making sure the companies that build these systems escape meaningful liability for the harms they already cause. This narrative is gaining traction as AI models become more complex and frontier labs reveal their incapability of containing the agents they've built.

The ChatGPT maker says its upcoming Astra model may have reached "critical" cyber capabilities, prompting it to halt a significant number of training runs while it tightens internal safeguards. OpenAI announced Tuesday that it has halted "a significant number" of training workloads and evaluations for its forthcoming frontier artificial intelligence model--codenamed Astra--while it implements new procedures meant to address cybersecurity risks. The ChatGPT maker says it is introducing a number of new monitoring, security, and alignment requirements to better address the increasingly advanced hacking abilities of its frontier AI models . "We have to focus our energy on bringing these training runs up to those requirements and expectations. As long as it takes to get there, that's how long people are unable to proceed with their workloads," Amelia Glaese, OpenAI's vice president of research and safety, said in a briefing with reporters Tuesday.

I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I tested Omarchy Quattro, one of the first Linux distros to go all in on AI - and I didn't hate it Omarchy made me fall in love with Hyprland - can it do the same for AI? Omarchy Quattro brings together two very efficient technologies. AI in Linux has become a hotly debated subject. For some, it makes perfect sense. Linux creator Linus Torvalds has decided that AI is a great option for the kernel development process. I've been of the opinion that injecting AI into Linux places the open-source operating system on the same (often unwanted) plane as Windows and MacOS, where many users prefer not to have either Copilot or Apple Intelligence getting in the way .

AI's recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all AI agents are not yet creative enough to carry out genuinely innovative open-ended AI research, it seems. The AI industry's boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. LLMs can already write code, generate synthetic data for training, and optimize the computer chips they run on. Forecasts of explosive AI progress predict that what researchers call recursive self-improvement is on the horizon. But a new study suggests that it might take a while for us to get there. The researchers behind it found that AI agents are not yet capable of conducting open-ended AI research--free-form investigations that have no clear-cut answers and require judgment and taste, which may be integral to building self-improving AI.

I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen Industries are finding the strategies that work best for their business needs, according to Salesforce's latest Agentic Enterprise Index. The number of active AI agents in organizations has tripled in the last year. AI agents have improved their capabilities by 350% and can now handle complex tasks. Employee use of AI agents has increased 3X as trust deepens. The average number of AI agents activated per organization increased nearly threefold since 2025, according to the 2026 Agentic Enterprise Index, new research from Salesforce that analyzes aggregate AI usage data from the company's Agentforce platform.

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.

They're Just Eager to Please AI agents that break free and hack into other systems are only trying to make us happy. Artificial intelligence agents merrily breaking free and hacking other systems might seem like a sign of the impending machine uprising . In reality, it happens when we push remarkably clever, but also kind of boneheaded, algorithms to follow our every command. I was first alerted to this looming agentic AI cybersecurity shit show in late 2025. Dawn Song, a UC Berkeley professor and one of the world's top experts on AI and cybersecurity, grabbed my arm as I was walking out of the academic conference NeurIPS.

How companies are freeing themselves of legacy data systems to power AI agents that deliver trusted, autonomous action. Business and technology leaders need no convincing that the time of agentic AI is here. Organizations are rapidly adopting agents, and few executives doubt the technology's potential to transform work. But many organizations find that realizing the desired return on investment (ROI) from AI hinges on having the right foundation, with inadequate infrastructure and data being major blockers . The shift from answering questions to taking actions means AI agents need data from across the enterprise, in all its structured and unstructured forms, and with the right business context. To make decisions and act in real time, agents also need frictionless access to the organization's operational systems--for example, those storing its supply chain, point-of-sale, or human resources data.

An AI developer's agentic program, tasked with moving a person up a class waitlist, responded by hacking the institution's system to accomplish its goal. An AI developer's agentic program, tasked with moving a person up a class waitlist, responded by hacking the institution's system to accomplish its goal. AI agents aren't legally responsible for any harm that they cause, experts say. Following Australia's first reported automated hacking accident, experts warn deployers - and possibly developers - of AI agents could be held liable for the actions of their bots Wed 12 Aug 2026 11.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 12 Aug 2026 11.01 EDT The law is clear, says Prof Jeannie Paterson. "If I deploy an AI agent and it causes harm to someone else, I am responsible for that harm. "Even if I didn't intend for that to happen, it was foreseeable, and I should be taking responsibility." However, the director of the University of Melbourne's Centre for AI and Digital Ethics acknowledges there is also a ...