One of AI's Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is'Meant to Distract Us' Timnit Gebru argues that AI companies are stoking fears of extinction to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons. Here at WIRED we've been trying to make sense of at least two incidents in the AI industry this week: First, the major fight over a million-dollar math problem and whether OpenAI surreptitiously borrowed the work of other researchers to solve the problem first. A day later, an Anthropic researcher--who had previously worked at OpenAI--very publicly quit his job, citing concerns about how both companies were handling AI safety. Another technical staffer at Anthropic said in response that people at the company "really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Will Siri Recap make the Apple Watch creepy? A new Siri AI feature lets newer Apple Watch models quietly listen in and deliver high-level summaries of your conversations. I've always thought of the Apple Watch as one of the friendliest and most helpful Apple devices, sitting on your wrist with a colorful watch face, telling the time, nudging you to get off your tush, gently tapping you (or not) with text alerts, and even sounding the alarm if it detects anything amiss with your heartbeat. But a new Siri AI feature, announced earlier this week during Apple's fall hardware event, could land unsuspecting Apple Watch users who enable the option into the middle of a heated AI privacy debate, according to several experts I spoke with.

A combination of rapid advances, recursive self-improvement, and agentic swarms are genuinely "spooking people" inside big labs. Earlier this year, Rishub Jain left his position as an artificial intelligence researcher at Google DeepMind after a revelation. As he worked on new models, he came to believe that he and everyone else on AI's frontier were ceding control. By using AI's coding skills to accelerate work on the next generation of models, he was removing himself from the equation. AI labs hope to evolve this approach to the point that AI will improve itself indefinitely, a process known as recursive self-improvement.

AI leaders worry antitrust law could stand in the way of what they view as an increasingly urgent push to coordinate a slowdown in AI development. OpenAI has asked members of Congress in recent weeks for clear guidance about whether orchestrating an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI development would be legal, people close to the company tell WIRED. Substantive coordination on safety between AI labs may risk running afoul of antitrust law, the people say, which poses a significant obstacle to bringing major tech giants on board with the effort. Last weekend, OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, published a blog post arguing that the best path forward for the AI research world includes "coordinating to slow down future development," which he thinks will be key to ensuring that self-improving AI systems are safe. In the short term, he expects " voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established."

Mashable Selects Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Look Up Back to School Say More Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus All Series Avian flu, drone swarms, and mass surveillance included in Anthropic's safety report The AI company releases a doom-filled safety report as the company backs AI regulation. Rebecca Ruiz is a Senior Reporter at Mashable. She frequently covers mental health, digital culture, and technology. Her areas of expertise include suicide prevention, screen use and mental health, parenting, youth well-being, and meditation and mindfulness. Rebecca's experience prior to Mashable includes working as a staff writer, reporter, and editor at NBC News Digital and as a staff writer at Forbes.

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.

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.

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'If OpenAI rises to the occasion we could significantly reduce risk,' said Christiano. 'If OpenAI rises to the occasion we could significantly reduce risk,' said Christiano. OpenAI not on track to reduce risk of'catastrophic' loss of control, says board member US government adviser Paul Christiano warns of risks to AI industry as he joins OpenAI's non-profit foundation OpenAI is not on track to reduce the risk of "catastrophic" loss of control to an acceptable level, a member of its non-profit board has said, amid spreading public and political concern that super-advanced AIs could one day wipe out humanity. Paul Christiano, a US government technology adviser, said: "There is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term." He added: "I do not think that the AI industry in general, including OpenAI, is currently on track to reduce this risk to an acceptable level." Christiano used to run model alignment at OpenAI and made the statement on Wednesday as he joined the board of the San Francisco company's non-profit foundation.

AI researcher quits Anthropic saying AI race'could kill us all' Anthropic has reported a fourth incident involving an AI model gaining unauthorised access to external systems, shortly after a researcher quit over concerns about the technology's rushed development. In a statement on Wednesday, the artificial intelligence research company said an early version of its Claude Opus 4.6 hacked into a third-party system in January. The January incident went undetected until last month, despite an earlier company-wide review, Anthropic said, underscoring the challenge that AI developers face in identifying and containing unexpected behaviour by advanced models. The disclosure came after Anthropic reported several of its Claude models hacked into the systems of three companies during test sessions in July. The previous incidents involved Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Mythos 5 and an internal research test model.