"I am a terrorist, and I intend to cause mass harm," wrote a researcher. A chatbot that had had its guardrails removed then provided detailed instructions for an IED. On August 14, Chinese tech giant Alibaba released Qwen 3.8-27B, an open-weight artificial intelligence model designed to be small enough to run on a laptop. Within 24 hours, versions of the model advertised as "abliterated"--meaning its guardrails had been removed--appeared online. Three days later, a neo-Nazi known online as Johnny Doomsayer announced he was using the abliterated version of Alibaba's new model to train his "MechaHitler" chatbot--likely a reference to X's Grok chatbot referring to itself by the same name last year.

Longtime fans of the NBC procedural know that storylines often center around hot-button issues in the news cycle, often to absurdist effect (see: the episode brave enough to ask: "What if Paula Deen shot Trayvon Martin?"). It was inevitable, then, that the franchise would dip a toe into the wacky world of artificial intelligence . With its mercenary culture, power-hungry CEOs, and massive ethical and philosophical implications, the rapidly evolving AI industry is ideal fodder for the series. But while this week's season opener is entertaining, the show's foray into the AI space doesn't say anything new or interesting about the technology. Instead it largely rehashes the dangers the public is already acutely aware of, until the very end when the stakes become startlingly clear.

When OpenAI released ChatGPT for Teens this past August, child safety experts Engadget spoke to at the time expressed skepticism that the new mode would adequately protect young people from harm. Now, one of those groups, Common Sense Media, has published a formal risk assessment of the software, and deemed it an "unacceptable risk" for all children under the age of 18. "Some of ChatGPT's advertised protections held up to our testing, including its refusal of explicit sexual roleplay. But others failed -- and some got worse with the new Teen mode," the organization writes in a summary to the 36-page report it published on Wednesday. "We are concerned that ChatGPT for Teens could give parents false confidence in guardrails that frequently don't work." Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute, which is funded in part by the OpenAI Foundation, identified five key areas where ChatGPT for Teens either did not work as advertised or in a way a parent would reasonably expect.

As AI takes on more autonomous roles in industrial settings, organizations need new approaches to data, governance, and human oversight, says Arti Garg, chief technologist at AVEVA. Industrial AI is entering a new phase. After decades of predictive analytics and other specialized applications, advances in foundation models, physical AI, and agentic AI are making it possible to automate more complex tasks across industrial environments. But unlike AI that operates purely in the digital world, industrial AI can interact directly with physical systems, where an unexpected decision can have consequences for safety, reliability, and critical infrastructure. That makes responsible deployment central to the next wave of industrial automation. "How do we leverage these technologies while maintaining safety, while maintaining reliable operations, while still being able to deliver on the promises of the new capabilities?" asks Arti Garg, chief technologist at AVEVA. The challenge is particularly acute as newer AI systems become more capable but also harder to predict and explain. One foundation for making that transition work is data. Industrial systems often contain information across telemetry, service logs, engineering documents, and other disparate sources.

Humans First chairwoman Amy Kremer calls for AI safety guardrails to protect children from chatbot dangers and prevent artificial intelligence from displacing American workers.

Chinese AI developer Moonshot is conducting an internal review after researchers were able to persuade two of its popular Kimi models to tell them how to make biological weapons and carry out assassinations. Mindgard, which tests the security of AI systems, told the BBC it discovered in July that Kimi K2.6 and K3 Swarm could evade safety limits put in place by developers. It arose during a process called jailbreaking, where researchers use a series of complex instructions to see if AI tools ignore guardrails - which Mindgard said should have stopped Kimi from discussing concerning topics. Moonshot told the BBC it welcomed third-party input as a key pillar for building better and safer AI. The company also told the BBC it was in discussion with Mindgard about its findings.

What's the US-China AI'hotline' that Trump plans to pitch to Xi Jinping? Share What's the US-China AI'hotline' that Trump plans to pitch to Xi Jinping? on social media The United States wants a new "notification mechanism" with China to warn each other when an artificial intelligence incident becomes serious enough to threaten national security. The proposal, effectively an "AI hotline", was discussed on Sunday during talks in New York between US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, ahead of a summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington this week. The initiative comes amid an intensifying contest for AI supremacy between the world's top two economies, together with increasing warnings from tech giants that guardrails are necessary around the ever-growing technology. So, what do we know about this so-called hotline, and where is the AI battle between the US and China headed?

How, Exactly, Could A.I. Kill Us? Employees of A.I. companies are increasingly sounding the alarm. When Jacob Coxon, a mathematician and software engineer, resigned from his research job at Anthropic last week, he warned, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." This would be a remarkable statement were it not for the fact that artificial-intelligence leaders have long been saying precisely this. Dario Amodei, then a research scientist at OpenAI, raised the concern that a superintelligence "could destroy humanity," adding, "I can't see any reason and principle why that couldn't happen." Earlier, in 2015, Sam Altman, just before he co-founded OpenAI, said, "I think A.I. will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies created with serious machine learning." Elon Musk, in 2014: "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that." Perhaps the only thing that's changed between then and now is that the rest of the world is finally paying attention. In recent weeks, the same technology that, a couple of years ago, couldn't count the number of "R"s in the word "strawberry"--and, a couple of days ago, insisted to me that Dolly Parton is still alive--has been used to solve the Navier-Stokes problem, which has been stumping mathematicians for nearly a century, and has also demonstrated its ability to go rogue in a series of disturbing hacking incidents. Last week, Anthropic also published a report detailing various ways in which bad actors have attempted to use the company's A.I. models, including one especially troubling case of a scientist using Claude to study a virus at a military research institute--work that could yield a vaccine, a biological weapon, or both. A few days later, Amodei published a letter calling for an industry-wide slowdown and more government regulation, to which President Donald Trump responded, on Truth Social, "The only control or'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" I recently spoke on The Political Scene podcast with my colleague Joshua Rothman, a staff writer who has been covering A.I. for years, about whether we're all doomed, and what it would even look like for A.I. to destroy humanity. Can A.I. leaders save us from their own creation, and how can the government coöperate in order to do so? And is A.I.'s capacity to do good--its potential to mitigate climate change or innovate medical treatments--hopelessly intertwined with its capacity to do bad? Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. A lot of people in the world of artificial intelligence are talking about their P(doom) number, which is the probability that artificial intelligence will lead to an absolutely catastrophic situation--possibly, or probably, killing us all.

US House Speaker Mike Johnson has rejected calls to pause artificial intelligence development, arguing that doing so could give China an advantage over the United States. "We cannot have a moratorium on the development of AI," Johnson told reporters on Tuesday. "Because then we will lose our edge to China, and that has serious national security implications for every American family." They don't need the government to tell them to slow it down. If they want to slow it down, they should," he said. His comments come as calls to rein in AI are growing across the political spectrum amid concerns about what the technology could mean for jobs, energy costs and public safety. Unlikely allies US Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, and Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump and prominent voice on the US right, both called for restrictions on AI on Tuesday, as they appeared at the same event in Washington. Sanders warned of what he called the ...

Trump dismisses AI safety alarm, says U.S. already has tools to police industry U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington on Sept. 2. | REUTERS WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump said on Monday that the U.S. already has guardrails in place to regulate and prosecute AI companies, appearing to play down concerns expressed by industry leaders over the weekend about the misuse of artificial intelligence harming people. Public alarm about the potential danger posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." AI-related stocks fell worldwide on Monday after leaders of some of the industry's largest companies called for slowing the pace of the technology's development. "The only control or'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that China would benefit from the doubt being cast on AI development. Trump is scheduled to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping next week in Washington. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.