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AI Safety Push Sparks Demand for Watchdog Groups. Critics Doubt Their Independence.

18 September 2026 at 14:00

Rising alarm about AI’s perils is thrusting into the spotlight a collection of little-known research groups focused on the technology’s safety—and fueling questions about their ability to effectively monitor the industry’s biggest companies.

Both Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman promised in recent days to embed evaluators from such outside research organizations inside their companies to help ensure they develop AI at a safe pace. Other executives including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also endorsed the idea of embedding independent evaluators in companies.

Two Google DeepMind AI Researchers Resign Over Safety

16 September 2026 at 04:26

Two researchers who worked on AI safety left their roles at Google DeepMind, stating that they departed over concerns that powerful systems could endanger humans.

The two, Bilal Chughtai and Josh Engels, both of whom are joining organizations dedicated to AI safety, add their voices to those of ...

OpenAI Math Result Stokes Data-Sharing Concerns

9 September 2026 at 15:00

In case you missed it: we got an eye-catching X post on Tuesday night from Evan Hubinger, a leader of Anthropic's alignment efforts. Responding to the resignation announcement of an Anthropic employee who warned that AI companies aren’t doing enough to ensure AI won't kill humanity, Hubinger wrote that the employee is “correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” Hubinger added that he was worried about future AI models, not those currently available, but still, yikes!

Meanwhile, our colleague Jyoti sizes up the significance of Meta’s new personal AI agent, Muse, unveiled on Tuesday. That’s below. But before we get to that:

This may go down as the year the AI industry got a crash course in mathematics. Breakthroughs in AI models have yielded announcements on such arcane subjects as the “Erdős unit distance problem” and the “Jacobian Conjecture,” which observers have watched as an indicator of AI progress in other domains.

The latest announcement, OpenAI's claim on Tuesday that it had solved the vexing “Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem,” has drawn attention for another reason: questions over whether its math-genius models may have gained an edge by incorporating data from two human mathematicians that had used OpenAI's Codex in their work on the same problem. Those questions fed into concerns about the possibility of AI companies learning from customers’ use of their AI models to develop competing products.

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