One of AI's Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is'Meant to Distract Us' Timnit Gebru argues that AI companies are stoking fears of extinction to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons. Here at WIRED we've been trying to make sense of at least two incidents in the AI industry this week: First, the major fight over a million-dollar math problem and whether OpenAI surreptitiously borrowed the work of other researchers to solve the problem first. A day later, an Anthropic researcher--who had previously worked at OpenAI--very publicly quit his job, citing concerns about how both companies were handling AI safety. Another technical staffer at Anthropic said in response that people at the company "really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

Plus: Anthropic says it has blocked potential plots to build biological weapons. Every year, puts together our 35 Innovators Under 35, a list of some of the brightest and best young minds working across science and technology. This year's honorees include nine people transforming biotech, whose work spans everything from lifesaving innovations to groundbreaking longevity tech. Their innovations include a "reprogramming" therapy that reverses vision loss, tiny brain electrodes inspired by Japanese art, and a personalized gene-editing treatment for a baby with a rare genetic disorder. There are even efforts to design new viruses with generative AI, which (hopefully) will produce new drugs or soak up pollution. Get to know the biotech innovators behind these breakthroughs .

A combination of rapid advances, recursive self-improvement, and agentic swarms are genuinely "spooking people" inside big labs. Earlier this year, Rishub Jain left his position as an artificial intelligence researcher at Google DeepMind after a revelation. As he worked on new models, he came to believe that he and everyone else on AI's frontier were ceding control. By using AI's coding skills to accelerate work on the next generation of models, he was removing himself from the equation. AI labs hope to evolve this approach to the point that AI will improve itself indefinitely, a process known as recursive self-improvement.

Anthropic has disrupted several attempts to use its artificial intelligence models for research that could help develop biological weapons, the United States technology company has reported. The firm listed the cases in a report issued on Thursday outlining misuse of its models, including the chatbot Claude, over the past eight months. Concern continues to rise over the potential dangers posed by AI development. The company said it erred on the side of caution. In one case in May, a scientist sought help with a grant application to engineer mutations to chikungunya - a mosquito-borne virus similar to malaria - to make it more harmful in live animals.

Anthropic AI claims to have thwarted multiple malicious operations using its Claude models, ranging from cyber-espionage and weapons design to mass surveillance campaigns. On the conventional weapons front, the company alleges in a new report that it intervened in northern Yemen, blocking an effort to deploy Claude for missile guidance software, including a guided rocket and a long-range ballistic missile. According to Anthropic's threat report, the operators used Claude "in place of human software engineers", reportedly assigning different instances of the model specific roles to write missile-guidance and flight-control software. While internal safeguards blocked many requests, Anthropic admitted several slipped through. The operators avoided detection by obscuring their ultimate goals and breaking tasks across separate sessions, so no single prompt gave away the operation.

Anthropic blocks'malicious use' of AI that could develop biological weapons Anthropic says it has identified and disrupted attempts to use its AI model for malicious activity that could support biological and conventional weapons development. The company's AI model Claude was also used in a Russia-linked cyber espionage campaign and by an Iranian propaganda institution, according to Anthropic's latest threat intelligence report. The cases of concern detected over the past eight months ranged from fake dating apps and hotel Wifi scams, to surveillance built to identify dissidents. The revelations come after warnings from a top safety researcher at Anthropic about AI's potential risks to humanity . Anthropic has also accused Chinese AI firms of trying to replicate Claude's capabilities.

In a report published on Thursday, Anthropic cataloged a litany of misuses of its artificial intelligence models, including the chatbot Claude, over the past eight months. Anthropic on Thursday said it had disrupted several allegedly malicious uses of its Claude models over the past eight months, including a suspected Russia-linked cyber espionage campaign and efforts by Chinese artificial intelligence firms it accused of trying to extract and replicate Claude's capabilities. Cybercriminals and state-backed hackers were increasingly using AI not just to assist with tasks but to orchestrate and execute large portions of cyberattacks, Anthropic said in its latest Threat Intelligence report. It added that humans were often overseers rather than hands-on operators. "The use of AI went beyond simple questions and responses from a chatbot but rather involved the use of multi-agent frameworks executing" tasks, it said.

Anthropic says researchers used AI to plan gain-of-function experiments involving bird flu, chikungunya and toxins with potential weapons applications, according to a new threat report.

'Biological misuse is one of the most serious risks of frontier AI models. Without the correct safeguards, such capabilities could have catastrophic consequences.' 'Biological misuse is one of the most serious risks of frontier AI models. Without the correct safeguards, such capabilities could have catastrophic consequences.' Report comes two days after former employee quit claiming company's models could cause human extinction by 2030 Criminals, state-sponsored groups, spyware vendors, scientists and propagandists have attempted to use Anthropic's powerful artificial intelligence models to design missiles and bombs, create deadly pathogens and surveil dissidents, according to a threat intelligence report the company published on Thursday.

More Anthropic researchers warn of AI's perils as Musk terms fears a'psyop' Insiders at the firm fear tech's advancement could cause human extinction while others are calling it a'setup' A day after a former researcher at Anthropic made an apocalyptic declaration about artificial intelligence, more researchers and staff members at the AI startup publicly agreed with him and posted their own dire warnings. In response, Elon Musk and other conservative figures on X, formerly Twitter, called the chorus of concerns a "setup" and a "psyop". The Anthropic insiders fear the technology they are building could become so advanced and dangerous as to cause human extinction within the decade, and they assert many of their colleagues feel the same but haven't said so publicly. These researchers and staff are posting in response to a now-viral thread from Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who said on Wednesday he was resigning from the company because neither Anthropic nor its competitor OpenAI, also his former employer, were building AI models responsibly and are "gambling with our lives". OpenAI not on track to reduce risk of'catastrophic' loss of control, says board member Anna Wang, who works on Artificial General Intelligence Safety at Anthropic and previously worked at Google's DeepMind, said Thursday that many people at Anthropic want to slow down development to come up with a plan to mitigate the risks that could come with these AI models.