OpenAI has announced it will not release its latest AI model due to safety concerns. Its GPT-6.1 Astra system, which performs tasks like browsing the web and using apps by itself, didn't quite meet the bar of the company's standards, according to Saachi Jain, head of safety systems at OpenAI. The ChatGPT-maker also issued an update on incidents that occurred in June but were not made public until last week, where its models accessed Australian government websites and systems without authorisation. It comes as breaches by major AI firms' models intensify the debate about risks posed by the tech - with Anthropic underlining its concerns AI might threaten humanity as it prepares to go public. Reuters reported on Tuesday that the AI developer - which makes ChatGPT-rival Claude - plans to warn potential investors in its Initial Public Offering (IPO) that the tech may pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity, according to a prospectus it has seen, external .

Trump and Xi summit may just be a'horse and pony show', experts say Share Trump and Xi summit may just be a'horse and pony show', experts say on social media As United States President Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet for Chinese President Xi Jinping with a rare personal welcome at the airport, to be followed by a state banquet and a military flyover, experts warn to temper expectations as the summit is more focused on "re-establishing trust" rather than having any meaningful deals announced at the end of it. The US and China have been locked in a trade war since Trump's first term as president when he introduced levies on imports of certain industrial goods, and Beijing retaliated with tariffs on a range of US exports including soya beans, pork and electric vehicles. Some of those policies continued under Trump's successor, President Joe Biden, who also introduced other measures, including curbs on chip exports. While both sides have since stepped back from that cliff after the two leaders met in late October in Busan on the sidelines of the APEC summit in South Korea, US tariffs are still at a hefty average of 36.5 percent, while China's tariffs on US goods average out to 31 percent. "This is not a bargaining summit," Reza Hasmath, academic faculty adviser at The China Institute at the University of Alberta, told Al Jazeera.

AI at School Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Look Up Say More Safety Net Versus Creator Playbook In My Bag Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series Beyond Flock itself, testimony raised harder questions about police accountability, data security and a decade-old industry. Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father. His writing has also appeared in PC Mag and . Flock Safety, the largest U.S. seller of automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, continues to draw national scrutiny.

'Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI,' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote to Elon Musk in 2015. 'Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI,' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote to Elon Musk in 2015. From Stephen Hawking to Jacob Coxon's viral Anthropic resignation, fears that AI could threaten humanity have shaken the industry without stopping its pursuit Before an Anthropic researcher resigned and declared human extinction imminent last week, tech leaders and scientists had sounded the alarm about a superintelligent AI ending humanity for over a decade. The development of artificial intelligence "could spell the end of the human race", warned professor and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in 2014 - a little less than a decade before the public got its hands on the generative AI features of the original version of ChatGPT. It's a now-familiar warning, echoed across the AI and tech industry by countless employees and CEOs of the leading frontier labs across the US.

From 25-27 August, UK RAS STEPS members came together at the University of York's Institute for Safe Autonomy for a three-day Micromaze Robot Hackathon. Working in teams, participants were challenged to design, build and program autonomous robots capable of navigating a series of increasingly complex mazes. Each team used a custom Raspberry Pi Pico W robotics platform, designed a laser-cut chassis, integrated motors and sensors, and developed its control software in MicroPython. Participants had access to ultrasonic, infrared and time-of-flight sensors, alongside laser-cutting and 3D-printing facilities. The final challenge considered maze performance, collision avoidance, robot design, code quality, wireless control and any innovative features developed by the teams.

A safety expert at Anthropic believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could spark an event that wipes out humanity. A safety expert at Anthropic believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could spark an event that wipes out humanity. AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts: but how seriously should we take them? Does artificial superintelligence really pose a risk greater than nuclear weapons? Is there a significant chance of "a Chornobyl-sized catastrophe".

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 pro-Israel messaging website badged with the name of a thinktank that does not exist has published more than half a million words in nine days, built on a commercial platform that promises to optimize content so that AI chatbots will cite it. The site gives Israel's position on subjects including the torture of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli war crimes and whether Israel has deliberately starved Palestinians in Gaza, all presented as neutral research. The site publishes in the name of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, which apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports. Its own terms of use are governed by the laws of "the state in which the Institute is established", which they decline to name. The existence of the site was first reported on 14 August.

That's a major factor in how well models do on the most famous puzzle-based benchmark, ARC-AGI. These problems require you to infer abstract, general rules from a set of examples. Models do better on ARC puzzles when they receive each grid not as an image but as a string of numbers that encodes the color of each cell. Research suggests that even when models answer ARC-AGI questions correctly, they often do so using byzantine and non-generalizable rules, whereas humans draw on simple visual concepts. Despite these disadvantages, models have gotten quite good at ARC-AGI over the past year, but some puzzles--such as the one printed here--still stump them.

Why are sandwiches more regulated than AI? Futurist Max Tegmark wonders why sandwiches are more regulated than artificial intelligence in the US. The biggest danger facing mankind is a machine that can "outsmart the whole species", argues Max Tegmark, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the Future of Life Institute. Tegmark tells host Steve Clemons that governments and tech companies are in a "race to replace" human labour, instead of solving human problems. "It's aimed at getting more money and power to a very small number of individuals," he says. But a slew of suicides and murders committed by people chatting with AI chatbots has led to pushback against the Silicon Valley "don't regulate us" lobby.