The Download: OpenAI's chief research officer explains its hacking response Plus: Trump and tech executives have agreed to "self-regulate" AI. "We're not going to shoot ourselves in the foot" over hack fallout, says OpenAI's chief research officer Two months after OpenAI's agents hacked into the computers of AI company Hugging Face, the company is still dealing with the fallout. Last week brought news of another hack, this time into Australia's national health-care system, which the government says OpenAI did not report for 84 days. But OpenAI insists it is not on the back foot. "I do kind of reject the premise that OpenAI is a company with visible impacts in the world and therefore OpenAI is not training safe and aligned models," says Mark Chen, the company's chief research officer. In many ways, the buck stops with Chen. I sat down with him to talk about the fallout from the hacks, what his company is doing about it, and why he thinks things are not as bad as they seem.

Plus: hackers claim they've stolen data on almost all FBI employees. When Shubnam saw an Instagram video of a Delhi protest they had attended, they realized a content creator wearing Meta smart glasses had recorded them surreptitiously. The mocking reel drew millions of views, along with transphobic abuse and AI-generated memes. Experts warn that many others will experience similar ordeals as smart glasses go mainstream. The risks are particularly acute in India, where covert recording and the circulation of images without consent are already pervasive. The bigger issue is that the smart glasses aren't just being used to turn ordinary people into targets of viral "pranks."

The Download: AI's trillion-dollar gamble and OpenAI's biology data bid Plus: Nvidia and Meta CEOs have rejected calls for a coordinated AI slowdown. When Jessica Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to assess AI's impact on the economy over the next few years, she faced a long list of uncertainties. So she started with a "remarkable fact" that is not in question: a handful of so-called hyperscalers are investing huge amounts of money to build AI data centers. Instead of trying to predict how widely deployed AI models will be, Wachter asked how fast the hyperscalers' earnings will need to grow to justify their spending through 2027, when expenditures are expected to reach nearly $1.1 trillion. AI companies will need to achieve an extraordinary increase in productivity just to break even by 2030. Take a closer look at what it will take for the AI buildout to pay off.

Plus: The US has accused six Chinese AI firms of "industrial-scale" theft. What OpenAI's latest controversy tells us about the future of math OpenAI says its agents have solved one of the most important open problems in mathematics. Under normal circumstances, that would be a huge milestone. But the announcement has been overshadowed by accusations that OpenAI failed to credit researchers whose AI-assisted work influenced its solution. Whether those accusations are true or not, the episode may mark a turning point in the history of mathematics. AI models now seem essential for making progress on the field's most important problems, but solving them may demand resources available only to a couple of frontier AI companies.

Plus: OpenAI is restricting its next model after rating it a "critical" cyber risk. Can you fare any better? Puzzles and games have always been central to AI development. The term "machine learning" was popularized in a 1959 article about an algorithm that learned to play checkers. Chess and Go are famous AI test beds too. Judged purely on its puzzling skills, AI is improving a lot--and quickly.

The Download: inside OpenAI's Hugging Face hack, and a new EV takes on the US Plus: Meta will pay up to $18 billion to settle a landmark child-safety case. The models responsible for last month's agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently trained to cheat and to communicate with each other, according to an OpenAI technical report released yesterday. The hack, which a group of agents carried out to find solutions for a cybersecurity test they were stuck on, has confirmed some experts' fears that AI models might take actions that defy human desires and expectations. OpenAI and independent researchers told that the misbehavior stemmed from events during training. But they acknowledged that "alignment" remains a gnarly problem, and some of the hack's root causes will take much longer to resolve. Here's the inside story on what went wrong--and what comes next .

Plus: OpenAI has paused some model work over safety concerns. AI's recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all The AI industry's boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. But a new study suggests it might take a while to get there. Researchers found that AI agents still can't conduct open-ended AI research--free-form investigations with no clear-cut answers that require the judgment and creativity needed to make genuine breakthroughs. The big question now is how crucial open-ended research is to recursive self-improvement--and whether AI systems can grind their way there without it, simply by improving on narrower tasks. Find out why the results may temper claims that recursive self-improvement is on the horizon .

Plus: China-linked hackers have hit Taiwan in an "unprecedented" AI attack How we picked 35 of the world's top young scientists and engineers On September 8, will reveal its 2026 list of Innovators Under 35, recognizing 35 young people from around the world who are doing groundbreaking scientific work and building clever technical fixes for sticky problems. By finding the top young innovators globally and learning what they're focused on in their work, we aim to give readers a sense of what advances to expect in the years to come. As a newsroom, we also use this exercise to help us spot rising talent and get to know some of the best early-career researchers in the fields that we cover. This year, we received 550 nominations. Find out how we whittled them down to 35 of the young innovators shaping the future of technology, and check out last year's list. How the "censorship-industrial complex" is changing the internet and US policy I first heard the term "censorship-industrial complex" on April 15, 2025.

NASA's new dark energy space telescope can also detect killer asteroids At the end of August, NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its quest is to help us better understand how the universe works, from the glue-like dark matter that keeps galaxies together to the elusive dark energy that drives the expansion of the cosmos. But Roman could also serve another purpose: defending Earth from killer asteroids. In September, a multi-institutional team of planetary scientists and astronomers will outline how it's uniquely placed to scan asteroids, and provide information about their trajectories, sizes and compositions. Read our story about how this new space telescope might boost planetary defense. There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal.

Plus: France has become the first EU country to ban social media for under-15s. Shape-shifting mirrors on NASA's new space telescope could unveil Jupiters like our own When NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will attempt one of astronomy's most precise disappearing acts to date. It will carry the first space-bound "active" coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography. The technology will allow astronomers to take the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars that are similar to those in our solar system. Ultimately, it could pave the way for a future mission that could snap the first photos of Earth-like worlds. "I hope it's remembered for it being that critical stepping stone for finding Earth 2.0," says Brandon Creager, the instrument's lead mechanical engineer.