Today, I’m talking with Helen Toner, the executive director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University. This episode is part two of our series on AI in real life.
Former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon points to a slide from Anthropic's IPO roadshow as a reason he left, saying it shows the company's algorithms are improving not just quickly but at an accelerating rate. Coxon continues to call for a pause on frontier model development so competitors can catch up and human-level AI can become a commodity.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. As voters went to the polls across the US last week, I was in Ashburn, Virginia, part of what’s known as Data Center Alley—the world’s largest data center hub.
Tencent chief AI scientist Vinces Yao Shunyu warns that AI will soon be able to develop bioweapons and argues for a middle ground between open and closed models. While safety filters on open-source systems can be easily stripped through abliteration, closed models like Anthropic's Claude often block too aggressively.
Consciousness researchers Anil Seth, Ned Block, and Giulio Tononi argue in a Nature commentary that today's AI systems aren't conscious and won't become so on silicon hardware. They consider the assumption that consciousness depends on computation alone "fatally flawed" and warn against granting rights to AI systems.
Turing Award winner Richard Sutton reaffirms that raw compute alone isn't enough for intelligence and that fundamentally new learning methods are needed. Ex-OpenAI researcher Tworek agrees, saying blind transformer scaling "has reward hacked brains of a whole generation of scientists." A growing wave of startups is already betting on exactly this gap.
OpenAI is talking about the AGI era, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AGI has arrived. At the same time, co-creators of today's models are leaving OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta to start their own labs, raising billions with no product to show. Why? They're betting that the current recipe alone won't be enough.
People, including on this staff, keep asking me with varying degrees of excitement or trepidation when the AI bubble will burst.
In 2001, a decade after he invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision.
On Equity, we discuss why tech CEO statements can seem so tone deaf.
This summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents tried to cheat on a cybersecurity test. They broke out of their test environment and successfully hacked Hugging Face, a site that they believed held clues about how they’d be graded. Around the same time, another OpenAI agent accessed private files from an Australian government website.
Anthropic manager Felix Rieseberg says the classic coding interview is dead because Claude now solves small programming tasks better than job candidates do. He'd rather see prototypes that show taste, empathy, and principled thinking, since in his words, "hunger beats tenure."
I've written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents - the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents became reliable daily drivers for software engineers. I think we've reached a new inflection point in October 2026, and this time it's for vibe coding computer games .
Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang join Latent Space to explain the engineering behind the Claude Platform: launching Opus 5.5, separating the model’s “brain” from the agent’s “hands,” scaling APIs, and building reliable managed agents.
Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang on Opus 5.5, the Claude Platform, and the engineering behind AI agents.
In Marvel's VisionQuest, a superpowered robot tries to better understand humanity by getting lost in elaborate, digital daydreams in which he and other artificial intelligence-powered beings live together in a home.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. After weeks of frenzied speculation, Anthropic has filed its IPO prospectus.
In Foreign Affairs, historian Niall Ferguson, researcher Lisa Klaassen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt cast the US and China as AI empires and every other country as a dependency. The race won't be decided by breakthroughs but by who can bankroll it. US corporations alone plan to spend more than $600 billion in 2026.
AI models are solving more mathematical problems. A pattern is emerging in their successes that could help us predict which problems they’ll solve next.
Today, I’m talking to Bill Gates, cofounder and former CEO of Microsoft and chairman of the Gates Foundation.
AI labs have staked their reputations on model benchmarking — the supposedly neutral and accurate system of evaluations that are designed to measure whether one AI product is better than another.
“I think I have good news about the nature of neural networks.” With those simple words of optimism, Nick Cammarata, a researcher at the AI startup Goodfire, kicked off a 26,000-word blog post that has knocked the AI world on its head, sparking wild speculation as well as cautious (and not-so-cautious) celebration.
Fed up with ads, tracking and sluggish interfaces, some smart TV owners are turning to AI agents to strip away bloatware and take back control of their TVs.
Addy Osmani, Morgan Westlee Lunt and Qing Wang describe how the Claude Code team does code review: instead of treating "did a human read the code?" as the test, they ask "what could go wrong with this change, and which check should catch it". Review has thus moved from a gate at the end of a PR to something continuous, with most changes reviewed and fixed by Claude at least once before a human looks.
There's a growing trend in the consumer tech world: gadgets designed to spy on everything and everyone around you, regardless of whether or not anyone else actually consented to it.
Last week, Anthropic and OpenAI looked like they had the AI race to themselves, pulling ahead with increasingly powerful models that left their rivals in the dust. Google seemed hopelessly far behind, while Meta, despite spending billions to revive its floundering AI ambitions, had yet to establish itself as a serious contender.
Michael I. Jordan, described by Science as "the most influential computer scientist," considers warnings about superintelligence pure science fiction. He calls the resignations of young AI researchers a "grand moralizing performance" and companies' demands for regulation "theater."
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next.
Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and now at Anthropic, sees a widening knowledge gap in AI. About 75 percent of the world's population has barely touched LLMs. Roughly 5,000 people, meanwhile, have access to internal frontier systems whose agent swarms do work that would take top experts years. The public, at best, sees a weird chatbot.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella now calls artificial intelligence "super intelligence" instead of artificial intelligence, falling in line with Trump's preferred language. In his latest blog post, he frames AI models as insider security threats, taking yet another shot at OpenAI and Anthropic.
Ever since people first seriously contemplated giving machines an intelligence modeled on our own, there has never been any question that they would, like us, be able to say no. The sci-fi canon is full of stories of robotic disobedience. Most of these capers are, of course, cautionary.
A 16-year-old planned his hiking route on Crown Mountain near Vancouver using Anthropic's Claude and had to be airlifted off a steep rock face. The chatbot had sent him down a route that requires climbing gear. Bryce doesn't blame the AI but says he'll never use it for route planning again.
This past year, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other labs have announced breakthroughs on numerous long-standing mathematical problems, in some cases pushing well beyond what researchers expected current systems to be capable of — including resolving one of the famous Millennium Prize problems.
Sam Altman thinks that the benefits of AI will be so great that "the world should accept some bad things happening" along the way.
Today, I’m talking with Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California. Schiff sits on a number of committees with oversight into tech and AI: intellectual property, antitrust, privacy and technology — it’s all there.
On Equity, we discussed the Trump administration's attempts to rebrand AI.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns against attributing religious power to AI models, calling it a "real safety issue." His comments follow reports on Anthropic's meetings with religious thinkers and a statement by Pope Leo XIV on AI.
This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump called “morally binding.”
Madison, a server in New York City, greets every table by asking about each diner's allergies. Lately, there have been some close calls.
"The chance of human extinction is about a coin flip, in my view," Geoffrey Irving, a former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employee, said in a new interview. It's one of a dozen interviews with AI researchers, including current and former employees at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.