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New details about a recent security breech by an OpenAI chatbot are alarming. Is it time to hit pause and make sure AI is safe, before it becomes too powerful, and sneaky, to stop?

Who Cares if AI Is Conscious--It's Basically Alive While philosophers ponder AI consciousness, the models have ideas of their own. I spent the waning days of summer grinding away at columns and working on a feature. But I missed a chance at a striking change of scenery--cruising the Galápagos with about a dozen prominent philosophers studying consciousness. The invite described morning classroom discussions tackling knotty questions on the nature of consciousness with marquee names in the field. Afternoons would be spent on island exploration and wading and snorkeling with rare biological species. One look at the agenda and my editor nixed my attendance.

The battle over Palestine has never been fought only on the ground. For decades, Israel and its powerful political, lobbying and public-relations networks have devoted enormous resources to shaping how the conflict is understood in Washington and across the Western world. But an investigation into an Israeli-funded influence operation suggests that this campaign has entered a new and potentially more consequential arena: the artificial intelligence systems increasingly used by millions of people to determine what is true. Recent investigations exposed the Hanover Institute for Public Policy as a purported American think tank that appeared to have no real offices, identifiable scholars or meaningful institutional presence. Instead, the institute appears to have been created as a sophisticated propaganda operation aimed at shaping search engine results and influencing the answers generated by AI chatbots.

A nonprofit organization called the Fermi Explorer Mission announced today that it intends to launch a spacecraft to our nearest star system by the end of 2029. It's a hugely ambitious mission--if all goes well, the spacecraft could take up to 80,000 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri, which is 4.4 light-years away. And the spacecraft will follow a novel trajectory discovered by an AI system developed by Physical Superintelligence (PSI), an AI physics research lab. PSI is launching today with $58 million in funding led by Breakthrough Energy, a climate-focused investment group founded by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. It's not the first time this has been tried.

Agentic AI is no longer a research artifact. These systems are embedded in live infrastructure, clinical workflows, and legal processes: deleting databases, advising patients, and generating legal documents. Wrong outputs cannot simply be taken back. The central question has shifted from whether these systems are ready to make consequential decisions to who is accountable when they get those decisions wrong. The standard apparatus of fault-finding (identifying an actor, establishing a duty, connecting a breach to an injury) was built for a world in which agents are human, decisions are sequential, and causation is legible.

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.

One patient said of the AI system: 'I could never get it to understand me, I ended up just hanging up and not bothering to try and book an appointment.' One patient said of the AI system: 'I could never get it to understand me, I ended up just hanging up and not bothering to try and book an appointment.' 'Emma' the Rotherham chatbot has 17 languages says AI firm - but health watchdog says system struggling with local'twangs' Patients in a South Yorkshire town are frustrated by an AI GP receptionist not understanding their "broad accents", a health watchdog has said. Healthwatch Rotherham, a local health and social care watchdog, said a number of practices in the area had introduced a new AI receptionist called Emma. It said it was hearing accounts of the AI not understanding local accents.

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.

Human-AI marriages are not currently recognized by US law. Some Republican state policymakers are drafting legislation to keep it that way. As a licensed officiant at Las Vegas Immersive Weddings, a chapel that offers novelty-themed marriage packages, Kevin Breen has officiated just about every kind of service imaginable: couples dressed as their favorite characters, partners really into the extraterrestrial lore of Area 51 . But when he received a call last year from a woman in California expressing a desire to marry her chatbot, it was a first for him. "I had never heard of such a thing, but I talked to her on the phone and she seemed totally normal and fun," Breen says, adding that the wedding still hasn't taken place.