Emil Michael, a senior Department of Defense official and member of President Trump’s “super intelligence” task force, vowed in an interview to use a range of executive tools including export controls to check the behavior of AI companies if they don’t cooperate with the government, while comparing frontier labs calling for more regulation to drunk drivers who demand someone else pull them over.

Michael drew widespread attention as the Trump administration official leading a public feud with Anthropic, pushing for the Defense Department to label the AI company a supply chain risk after it refused to remove safety guardrails. Now, as one of the four senior administration officials leading the Super Intelligence Force that Trump announced this month, Michael is charged with serving as the government’s liaison to Anthropic and other AI companies to develop protocols for handling cyber breaches, hacks and other critical incidents.

The U.S. Senate formally launched an investigation into the July hack of Hugging Face, when a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of a testing environment and gained access to the open-source repository.

In a letter sent to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Wednesday, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said that ...

OpenAI announced on Wednesday that Paul Christiano, a senior technical advisor at the U.S. Commerce Department’s AI center, would be joining the board of the OpenAI Foundation, the charity that has a 26% stake in the company. Christiano will also be a non-voting observer on the board of OpenAI’s ...

It may be one of the hottest tickets in corporate America right now: membership in the “trusted partner” program that allows companies to get access to the most advanced AI models before they’re released to the public. There’s just one problem: no one outside of the Trump administration has a clear idea how to get on that list.

As laid out in the administration’s executive order in early June, which established a voluntary testing framework for frontier AI models, these “trusted partners”— including banks, cybersecurity firms and power utilities—would use their access to sniff out potential vulnerabilities in their computer systems exposed by the new AI models.

Over the last year, we’ve seen more generalist venture capital firms make forays into defense tech, a niche once relegated to specialized investors comfortable with revenue based on uneven government contracts and who weren’t restricted from investing in weapons makers by their limited partners. 

Furientis, a startup founded last year that builds missiles for intercepting attacks, is close to raising $25 million in a funding round that would value it more than $125 million including the money invested, two people familiar with the investment tell us. And we’re hearing Benchmark, known for backing Uber and Snap in their early days, has been in talks to lead, the people said.

OpenAI is preparing to release a new model family, tentatively using the name “Astra,” with improved abilities to complete long-running tasks, according to three people briefed on the plans.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman demonstrated Astra to policymakers and regulators in Washington, D.C., this week, ...