Whatever AI Safety Is, It's Not This Asking AI companies to self-regulate is a great way to pretend like you've accomplished something. Don't worry, we'll make it quick! In 1966, nearly 51,000 people died on US highways. The overwhelming evidence suggested that many lives could have been saved with modern seat belts, which by then had been around for several years. The automotive industry responded by rallying together, and, in a triumph of self-regulation, voluntarily put the safety feature in every new vehicle that rolled off the line.

Trump's AI Safety'Accord' Is a Fancy Pinky-Swear Six major AI companies signed a voluntary agreement with the White House this week vowing to implement safeguards. On Tuesday, executives for Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia all signed "The White House Accord on Super Intelligence," which was announced following a luncheon held by President Donald Trump. The effort was an act of "tremendous self-regulation," as Trump put it, but the agreement is not the sweeping AI regulation that people inside the companies themselves have been asking for. And while failing to honor these public commitments could count as illegally lying to consumers, even that wouldn't be enough to trigger massive reforms. The statement says that companies "should implement" several things: First, they should ensure they have "robust internal controls" to monitor their models' capabilities and ability to not go rogue or hack things in unintended ways.

The company said its latest Astra model would undergo more work to meet safety standards, and issued an apology for the way it handled the hacking of an Australian government website. OpenAI has cancelled plans to release its latest GPT-6.1 Astra system next month after the model failed to meet safety standards. Research and safety leaders decided not to ship the model after finding it was worse at sticking to human users' values and goals than previous systems, OpenAI told WIRED. "It didn't quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it's done," head of safety systems Saachi Jain said. The company said it has other new models coming soon which do meet its safety standards and plans to release other Astra models in future. The agent accessed non-public data, ran commands, and wrote files onto the server.

A US-China AI Hotline Won't Be Ready for a While As the US and China race to become the dominant power in the AI industry, the countries also appear to be figuring out ways to communicate on national security issues. As US president Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping prepare to meet in Washington for a state dinner at the White House on Thursday, AI has become a top priority . Tech executives from OpenAI and Nvidia have confirmed their attendance at the dinner, as a number of key agenda items are on the table. Chief among them is a US proposal to establish an AI notification system with China, akin to the Cold War hotline with Moscow, which would allow each country to alert the other about national security issues related to AI. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent first announced the notification system on Sunday with Chinese vice premier He Lifeng. But for all the high-level progress, Trump administration officials tell they expect it to still take a number of weeks to finalize an agreement, even if they are optimistic that the hotline could be in place before the year's end.

As industry leaders urge a global slowdown in artificial intelligence development for the sake of humanity, the two superpowers driving the technology's rapid advancement have given no indication they intend to hit the brakes. The United States and China, which are locked in a fierce strategic rivalry, have each rebutted calls to slow the pace of AI development, even as industry executives and researchers stress the need for international cooperation to avoid exposing humans to catastrophic - or even existential - risks. Observers anticipated measures that, at best, would fall far short of the coordinated slowdown that many experts said is needed. "The two countries host nearly all frontier labs and most of the models people download," said Alvin Wang Graylin, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, describing agreed guardrails between the US and China as "close to a precondition" for safe AI. "A safety regime covering one side's models covers half the problem," Wang Graylin said. Hampering the prospects for US-China cooperation, analysts said, are mutual mistrust and divergent perceptions of the primary risks involved.

AI, Tariffs, Rare Minerals: What to Expect From Trump's Upcoming Summit With Xi Jinping Washington and Beijing have grown ever more linked in the AI boom, making hardware exports and technological restrictions hefty bargaining chips in negotiations. Of all the events in the United Nations General Assembly taking place this week, the most anticipated by far is the upcoming meeting between Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping. Though the majority of the diplomatic activities are happening in New York, this face-to-face between the two leaders will take place at the White House. Trump is scheduled to personally welcome Xi at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday, September 23--an unusual diplomatic gesture, as US presidents do not typically go to the airport to welcome foreign leaders. Ahead of that airport reunion, a US delegation led by Treasury secretary Scott Bessent and trade representative Jamieson Greer is meeting with He Lifeng, China's vice premier of the State Council, to set the agenda.

Officials discussed setting up a mechanism for the two countries to notify each other of AI incidents which could threaten national security. Talks have begun between US and Chinese officials to propose a mechanism for the two countries to notify each other of artificial intelligence incidents which could threaten national security. The framework, called the US China AI Dialogue, would also see representatives from both countries meet again to discuss the technology and try to align on common goals and threats, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. "We think that, just like with any cross-border activity, that moving from opaque to more transparency between the number one and the number two AI powers in the world is very important," Bessent told reporters on Sunday. Bessent said the discussions picked up from where they had been left off after US President Donald Trump's visit to Beijing in May.

AI labs are toying with an industry-wide pact to slow development. Meanwhile, widely available AI chatbots are already helping uncover a tidal wave of security flaws. AI doomers have recently traded one worst-case scenario for another, putting aside a potential software vulnerability apocalypse to focus on the possibility of rogue AI causing mass human death in the next decade. As AI leaders consider a cooperative slowdown on frontier model development, though, one aspect of the cybersecurity sea change has already arrived thanks to existing, broadly available capabilities in mainstream AI products, including open weight models. A tidal wave of vulnerabilities uncovered using AI has only accelerated in recent months--piling more pressure on under-resourced, and very human, IT and security teams and straining volunteers who maintain crucial open source software.

Here's How an AI Slowdown Could Actually Be Enforced Even if big AI companies agree to a pause, ensuring that nobody tries to sneak ahead could prove tricky. Many AI researchers seem to firmly believe that the technology they are developing could someday prove very dangerous . What's less clear--even among AI's technical elite --is precisely how to keep these mercurial algorithms in check. In recent years researchers have thrown around all sorts of ideas for preventing AI from turning nasty. They include less controversial plans such as tighter government regulations, new ways of measuring progress, and probing the inner workings of models, as well as more outlandish proposals like placing tracking devices inside GPUs, and even ceremonially destroying large numbers of AI chips. With political and public pressure now growing for a more measured approach to building AI, however, the answer to keeping AI safe is still unclear.

The reliably Republican South Dakota senate seat has an incumbent on the ballot. But PACs associated with AI labs and investors have already spent more money on the race than actual residents have. Senator Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, arrives for a vote in Washington, DC, on Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026. Major super PACs associated with AI labs and investors have poured close to $1 million into incumbent Republican Mike Rounds's South Dakota senate race, seeking to shape the outcome of a noncompetitive race amid a critical national debate over AI regulation. Rounds has been the beneficiary this cycle of around $600,000 in spending by outside groups, with the vast majority of that figure coming from the super PAC Defend American Jobs, which receives funding from a super PAC financed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.