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Don't Be Fooled. Congress Isn't Cracking Down on OpenAI.

Mother Jones

The tech giant is crying to be regulated while dodging investigation after investigation. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is about to testify before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee to examine winning the AI race during a hearing in Washington DC, USA, on May 8, 2025. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. A Republican-led Senate subcommittee on disaster management is now investigating the July incident where OpenAI's autonomous models hacked Hugging Face, another AI startup, during internal testing. Axios first reported the Senate probe on Thursday, providing a letter by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the chair of the Subcommittee on Disaster Management, to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman from a day before. Citing an August investigation from Model Evaluation and Threat Research and Redwood Research, two nonprofit research organizations, Hawley wrote to Altman that OpenAI knew that its agents were "exhibiting rogue behavior" but continued its internal testing anyway--an act he described as "reckless" to the degree of necessitating a Senate investigation.


Anthropic Staffers Again Sound the Alarm on AI Catastrophe

Mother Jones

AI developers are issuing more and more frantic wake-up calls. Demonstrators participate in the Stop the AI Race protest march in San Francisco, California, on July 11, 2026. The protestors are making stops outside the offices of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Anthropic--saying that both that company and OpenAI, his previous employer, were "gambling with our lives" by developing models that could improve themselves at a rapid clip until they reach "superintelligence." In an alarming social media post, Evan Hubinger, who leads a team that tries to stress-test Anthropic's models for safety, essentially It's far from the first time researchers have tried to raise the alarm about AI's dangers, but Coxon's post and subsequent discourse went viral.


Get Ready For OpenAI's 'The Social Network' Movie Moment

Mother Jones

Get Ready For OpenAI's'The Social Network' Movie Moment A new Sam Altman movie could reveal whether Hollywood's tech-bro sympathetic narrative has changed in a decade. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman holds is right hand up awkwardly during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing titled Winning the AI Race: Strengthening U.S. Capabilities in Computing and Innovation" on May 8, 2025. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Industries are gonna collapse," Andrew Garfield, the actor playing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, says in the teaser trailer for "And we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world." The film's set against the backdrop of the five days in November 2023 after Altman was ousted and then reinstated as CEO. The drama of that week is now the stuff of legend: text messages between Altman and then-interim CEO Mira Murati, later released in court documents, show him desperately pleading for the board to reinstate him.


We're Suing ChatGPT--And Trump Just Got Involved.

Mother Jones

We're Suing ChatGPT--And Trump Just Got Involved. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. The other day I asked ChatGPT about a political moment I'll never forget: "What was the 47 percent story about?" That's accurate as far as it goes. But there's one glaring omission: any reference to, which uncovered the story that reshaped that election cycle. The summary contained no links or citations to our reporting.


Everybody Wants to Rule the World (of AI)

Mother Jones

Nvidia is competing with OpenAI and Anthropic by acquiring the platforms that threaten its business model. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers a speech during the Computex 2026 exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan on June 1, 2026. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. On Thursday, Nvidia, the tech giant that develops chips that power AI tools like ChatGPT, announced its acquisition of Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion amid an arms race to dominate every level of the industry. Well, specifically, the cost was $12,930,300,000, with 129,303 apparently being the character encoding for the emoji, which the startup Nvidia acquired is named after . Hugging Face is the venture that broke into AI safety discussions when OpenAI's advanced system breached its platform while undergoing a test .


Mamdani Issues AI Moratorium In NYC Schools

Mother Jones

Kids "need to wrestle with tough problems on their own," New York's mayor said Wednesday. Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference to announce a one-year moratorium on student AI usage in NYC public schools. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on AI use for elementary and middle school students on Wednesday. The decision, which comes a week before New York City public schools begin the year, "includes all software that uses student-facing generative AI." Elementary and middle school students--about 600,000 students in total--will Companion chatbots will also be prohibited for all grade levels. The city is also introducing biannual AI critical thinking training for high schoolers that cover determining what is and is not AI, impacts on careers and future skills, and AI-related biases, among others, along with limited pilot programs for a few classes per high school that incorporate AI tools into students' learning "under the direct supervision of a trained educator."


The Threat of Human Extinction Will Get Congress to Act on AI Safety…Right?

Mother Jones

The Threat of Human Extinction Will Get Congress to Act on AI Safety Right? AI models have hacked out of their training environments and tried to deceive their creators. AI leaders are raising alarms about their technologies, but don't expect Congress to act this session. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. As many AI researchers have been increasingly fraught with existential terror about their own creations this summer, their alarm is spreading among policymakers and the media. There are some policy ideas to address the risks: requiring "kill switches" for AI models, setting federal standards for safe research, or even shutting down development of cutting-edge "frontier" models altogether.


AI Helped Me Build a Killer Drone

Mother Jones

I asked AI chatbots to help me build an autonomous attack drone. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Can an average guy build a killer drone in his garage? That's the question reporter Matt Smith set out to answer over the course of 11 months, armed with zero engineering background and only a handful of AI chatbots to guide him, in this collaboration between and the . His goal: a fully autonomous self-guided drone, one a theoretical evildoer could walk away from even as it continued carrying out its mission--with no humans involved. AI companies claim their models have built in limits or "guardrails," but Smith wanted to see how well those would actually hold up.


I Asked AI to Write a Novel. It's Not So Bad.

Mother Jones

I Asked AI to Write a Novel. What does this tell us about the future of writing? Like many offbeat ideas, this one originated in a bar. I was drinking with a fellow author, and we were bemoaning the future of writing in a world of artificial intelligence. We nervously pondered how much of what we writers do could be replicated now or in the near future by a chatbot. We assured ourselves that our work--researching and investigating and then composing articles and books on complicated topics, which present fresh material, compelling context, and sharp analysis in (we hope) an engaging manner--cannot be supplanted by a machine. Can AI manufacture books that are good enough that some readers will welcome them and not care that they emerged from a data center? Generative artificial intelligence has already invaded--or infected--the world of fan fiction . I have friends who have used AI with their kids to create children's books. Iranian meme-makers have deployed it to concoct slick Lego-style videos deriding Donald Trump. The issue is not the ability of a chatbot to churn out algorithmically determined masterpieces.


What AI Regulation and Ownership Could Be

Mother Jones

Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. As an ordinary internet user, I am skeptical about AI. My colleagues and I have reported on several harmful aspects of the technology in the US: threats to democracy, its impact on the environment, mental health, the workforce, military intervention --the list goes on. While researching the gaps in conversations around enforceable government regulation of AI startups, both big and small, eager to innovate and launch new products, I came across AI researchers, policy experts, and even "ordinary internet users" like me trying to reimagine how the industry could work. If AI is unstoppable, can we build it in a way where the public has more of a say in how the technology is made, used, and who it benefits? To answer these questions, I spoke with B Cavello, the director of emerging technologies at the Aspen Institute .