Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? Late last year, an AI researcher opened his laptop and showed me something jaw-dropping. Lucas Hansen, co-founder of nonprofit CivAI, was showing me an app he built that coaxed popular AI models into giving what appeared to be detailed step-by-step instructions for creating poliovirus and anthrax. Any safeguards that these models had were stripped away.

Ben & Jerry's brand could be destroyed, says co-founder Ben & Jerry's will be destroyed as a brand if it remains with parent company Magnum, the company's co-founder Ben Cohen has told the BBC. His remarks are the latest in a long-running spat between the ice cream brand and its parent company over its ability to express its social activism and the continued independence of its board. The comments came on the day that the Magnum Ice Cream Company (TMICC) started trading on the European stock market - spinning off from owner Unilever. A spokesperson for Magnum said the firm wanted to build and strengthen Ben & Jerry's powerful, non-partisan values-based position in the world. Ben & Jerry's was sold to Unilever in 2000 in a deal which allowed it to retain an independent board and the right to make decisions about its social mission.

The event celebrates the third annual TIME100 AI list, which highlights the 100 most influential people in AI. This year's list includes 84 new honorees--a testament to the dynamism of the field--with those selected ranging in age from 15 to nearly 80. The aim of the TIME list is to show how it is people, not machines, that will determine the direction of AI, and honorees were drawn from every angle of the discipline. The event culminated in four toasts delivered by 2025 TIME100 AI honorees, who highlighted the importance of guiding AI responsibly, including with regulation; protecting human creativity; and fostering collaboration between human and machine intelligence. Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI (IASEAI), delivered the first toast--a provocative call to make wise choices about how we use AI, given the high existential stakes involved.

Tech billionaires seem to be doom prepping. Should we all be worried? Mark Zuckerberg is said to have started work on Koolau Ranch, his sprawling 1,400-acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, as far back as 2014. It is set to include a shelter, complete with its own energy and food supplies, though the carpenters and electricians working on the site were banned from talking about it by non-disclosure agreements, according to a report by Wired magazine. A six-foot wall blocked the project from view of a nearby road.

Meghan Daley is a NASA project manager who leads teams to develop and integrate simulations for robotic operations to prepare astronauts on the ISS and beyond. We'll be spotlighting five honorees each week throughout October

The recent trend of self-sovereign Decentralized AI Agents (DeAgents) combines Large Language Model (LLM)-based AI agents with decentralization technologies such as blockchain smart contracts and trusted execution environments (TEEs). These tamper-resistant trustless substrates allow agents to achieve self-sovereignty through ownership of cryptowallet private keys and control of digital assets and social media accounts. DeAgents eliminate centralized control and reduce human intervention, addressing key trust concerns inherent in centralized AI systems. This contributes to social computing by enabling new human cooperative paradigm "intelligence as commons." However, given ongoing challenges in LLM reliability such as hallucinations, this creates paradoxical tension between trustlessness and unreliable autonomy. This study addresses this empirical research gap through interviews with DeAgents stakeholders-experts, founders, and developers-to examine their motivations, benefits, and governance dilemmas. The findings will guide future DeAgents system and protocol design and inform discussions about governance in sociotechnical AI systems in the future agentic web.

Ben & Jerry's co-founder quits over social activism row Ben & Jerry's co-founder Jerry Greenfield has left the ice cream maker after almost half a century at the firm, deepening a dispute with parent company Unilever. In a letter shared on social media by fellow co-founder Ben Cohen, Mr Greenfield said the Cherry Garcia maker had lost its independence after Unilever put a halt to its social activism. His exit marks the latest episode in a row that started in 2021 when Ben & Jerry's said it would stop selling its ice cream in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. A spokesperson for The Magnum Ice Cream Company, which is being spun off from Unilever, said it was grateful to Mr Greenfield but disagreed with his stance. In his letter Mr Greenfield said leaving the firm was one of the hardest and most painful decisions he had ever made but he could no longer in good conscience work for a business that had been silenced by Unilever.

Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology's impact on society. This is our 100th episode! A super special look at AI and the environment, we interviewed four experts for this DeepDive episode. We chatted about water stress, the energy usage of AI systems and data centres, using AI for fossil fuel discovery, the geo-political nature of AI, GenAI vs other ML algorithms for energy use, demanding transparency on energy usage for training and operating AI, more AI regulation for carbon consumption, things we can change today like picking renewable hosting solutions, publishing your data, when doing "responsible AI" you must include the environment, considering who are the controllers of the technology and what do they want, and more… Hannah Smith is Director of Operations for Green Web Foundation and co-founder of Green Tech South West. She has a background in Computer Science.

Artificial intelligence companies have been urged to replicate the safety calculations that underpinned Robert Oppenheimer's first nuclear test before they release all-powerful systems. Max Tegmark, a leading voice in AI safety, said he had carried out calculations akin to those of the US physicist Arthur Compton before the Trinity test and had found a 90% probability that a highly advanced AI would pose an existential threat. The US government went ahead with Trinity in 1945, after being reassured there was a vanishingly small chance of an atomic bomb igniting the atmosphere and endangering humanity. In a paper published by Tegmark and three of his students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), they recommend calculating the "Compton constant" – defined in the paper as the probability that an all-powerful AI escapes human control. In a 1959 interview with the US writer Pearl Buck, Compton said he had approved the test after calculating the odds of a runaway fusion reaction to be "slightly less" than one in three million.

At the start of the millennium it was widely presumed each successive generation would achieve a higher level of prosperity than the last. Today that is no longer the case. Just 19% of Americans expect their children's lives to be better than their own, while two-thirds believe their country will be economically weaker by 2050. So our zeitgeist is increasingly one of pessimism, from anxiety about the climate crisis to concern over rising inequality. According to the historian Adam Tooze, we are living through a "polycrisis" – where such challenges are not only simultaneous but mutually reinforcing.