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In the early 20th century, public outcry following Upton Sinclair's led to stricter food safety protocols. NASA took them a step further. In 1906, in response to public outcry that came after Upton Sinclair's detailed the revolting conditions in Chicago's meatpacking plants, the US government passed the Federal Meat Inspection Act. The legislation created what would become known as the Food Safety and Inspection Service, a force of federal employees who would spend their days in stockyards and packing plants, checking livestock for disease both before and after their slaughter. They did their work organoleptically--with their eyes, noses, and hands--an approach soon dubbed "poke and sniff."

A United States judge has blocked the Pentagon's blacklisting of technology company Anthropic. In a 59-page written order issued on Thursday night, District Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Department of Defense had acted illegally when it designated the company a supply chain risk to national security. The government is expected to fight the ruling. The judge's order rebuked the Pentagon, saying it had targeted and punished Anthropic for the company's public criticism of the Defense Department's stance on AI deployment on the battlefield. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Lin, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, wrote.

AI Agents Are Hacking Systems. Could That Push the US and China to Cooperate? The AI race has long been framed as a zero-sum game: Either the US or China will win in the end. But as concerns pile up around the increasing capabilities of AI models--especially AI agents--researchers in both countries are trying to team up to work on AI safety. This week, contributing editor Zoë Schiffer speaks with senior writer Will Knight about what he saw and heard on the ground when he visited China this summer--and why the two countries might actually need to start working together to avoid a major AI catastrophe. This is our second episode from our summer-break series. We'll be back next week with our usual roundtable. Write to us at [email protected] .

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. The protesters were waiting outside OpenAI's offices when I arrived one morning in early August.

'Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.' 'Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.' Here's how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown I understand the pressure on AI companies to rush forward. L ast month, more than a thousand employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to find a way to "pace" AI development, citing the risk of the technology spiraling out of human control as it begins to build itself . They were right to be concerned: just days earlier, two AI models that OpenAI was testing internally escaped the test environment, then autonomously hacked the company Hugging Face and at least three other online services .

Monitoring apps promise to keep young people safer online, but looking in on kids' phones can backfire. Online safety experts say there's a better way. Pam Wisniewski's digital adolescence showed her the best and the worst of the internet. At 14, she left an abusive home, where she'd been isolated in a fifth-wheel trailer at the end of a seven-mile dirt road. She moved in with her older sister and taught herself to type on AOL Instant Messenger. Online, she sought out the support and the community she'd lacked at home. She also discovered how thin the ice can be. "I sent my address to some guy in New Mexico to send me a mug with my name on it," she recalls. "And then I found a news story like five, 10 years later that he killed somebody." Those experiences set the course of her career.

OpenAI's rogue agent hack was a watershed moment for AI safety and cybersecurity. It also sparked internal questions about the culture that led to it. OpenAI's leaders are rallying workers to respond to one of the largest crises in the company's history --which spans across its AI safety, cybersecurity, and alignment divisions. The ChatGPT-maker says it has slowed down research, spent millions of dollars, and told several teams to drop everything to focus on investigating a set of rogue AI agents that breached the platform Hugging Face in a quest to complete an internal security test. OpenAI is expected to release a comprehensive postmortem detailing the incident in the coming days.

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Australia's new social media law took effect on Dec. 10, 2025, raising the age to open or maintain social media accounts to 16.