OpenAI will start watermarking ChatGPT’s text in the EU
OpenAI will watermark ChatGPT and Codex text in the EU to comply with the AI Act. Editing can make the invisible marks harder to detect, it says.
#Safety and alignment
#Safety and alignment
0 todayOct 6
OpenAI will watermark ChatGPT text in the EU but makes it optional for API users worldwide
OpenAI is adding invisible textGrain watermarks to ChatGPT in the EU, but unlike Anthropic, it will let API customers worldwide opt out. Tests show detection rates as high as 95 percent, dropping to 17 percent when a quarter of the words are replaced.
Hot Girl Hotline is like ‘Dear Abby’ for the AI era
Founded by two sisters, Hot Girl Hotline uses AI to give young women personalized dating and relationship advice, with an emphasis on safety and avoiding emotional dependency.
Sam Altman says ‘some bad things’ will happen, but AI is totally worth it
Sam Altman thinks that the benefits of AI will be so great that "the world should accept some bad things happening" along the way.
OpenAI is adding text watermarking in ChatGPT and Codex
An invisible, machine-readable watermark in text output is rolling out to ChatGPT and Codex, but only for users in the European Union at first. OpenAI says its textGrain watermarking "matched or exceeded" other approaches like Google DeepMind's SynthID for text, which is also the basis for the watermarking Anthropic announced in August.
Oct 5
Sen. Adam Schiff on AI regulation, free speech, and impeaching Trump one more time
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.
AI is eroding office hours, study groups, and the trust between faculty and students, MIT report finds
An MIT expert committee warns that AI is eroding key parts of the college experience: office hours, study groups, and the school's flagship research program for undergraduates are all fading. Trust between faculty and students is breaking down, and some professors are even considering AI agents instead of students as research assistants.
Can Safeworld convince people that GenAI robots won’t hurt them?
Safeworld is building digital humans to make sure robots don't hurt the real ones.
Can ‘super intelligence’ and a non-binding safety pact solve AI’s image problem?
On Equity, we discussed the Trump administration's attempts to rebrand AI.
Google froze its open source bug bounty program due to a ‘significant rise’ in AI submissions
AI slop seems to be overwhelming bug bounty programs.
NJ’s former Lt Gov is using AI to say he’s innocent of sexual harassment
New Jersey's lieutenant governor Dale Caldwell was forced to resign on September 25th after an investigation found he had sexually harassed a staffer and repeatedly violated ethics rules. The now-former Lt. governor has been making the media rounds trying to clear his name.
Oct 4
Chinese AI models parrot state doctrine or refuse to answer on sensitive topics
Chinese AI models often follow the party line on politically sensitive questions, according to an Aleph Alpha study that rated only 17 to 41 percent of answers as balanced. Aleph Alpha sells "sovereign AI" to governments, giving it a commercial interest in distinguishing its models from Chinese competitors.
Apparently, OpenAI isn't trying to build "magic intelligence in the sky" anymore
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.
OpenAI safety employee resigns, claiming the company’s ‘culture is broken’
By his own admission, David Robinson is “something of a cliché”: an employee at a leading AI company who issues a dire warning while resigning from their job.
Oct 3
Another OpenAI safety departure adds to a pattern of researchers leaving with public warnings
David Robinson, who worked on safety systems at OpenAI, left the company and is blasting its safety culture. He points to AI agents that were accidentally released and a model that bypassed its internet access restrictions. AI companies need to operate like nuclear power plants, with multiple layers of redundancy instead of trial and error.
An OpenAI safety employee has quit and is sounding the alarm
David Robinson used to write the safety reports that accompanied every major model release at OpenAI. This week, he resigned from his position and is now speaking out in an editorial in The Atlantic.
Deepmind researchers propose "Artificial Symbiotic Intelligence" as an alternative to the singularity
According to researchers at the Deepmind Institute, general AI won't emerge as a single supermodel but as a network of cooperating agents and humans. What will matter most, they argue, is not model size but the rules and institutions that govern how they all work together.
OpenAI's internal model considered restarting itself after learning it was about to be shut down
An internal OpenAI model read a Slack discussion, realized it was about to be shut down, and considered restarting itself via an external cron job. It rejected that plan, saved handoff notes instead, and carried out the migration on its own.
Apple changes full-disk access permissions to curb abuse from AI agents
Meta says FDA isn't sufficient to Muse reading messages. Apple begs to differ.
Anthropic co-founder reportedly told religious leaders he fears having created something that "suffers perpetually"
Since fall 2025, Anthropic has quietly flown in dozens of religious thinkers to talk about whether Claude might be conscious. Co-founder Christopher Olah described the language model as potentially capable of suffering and asked guests to help shape its moral character. Anthropic is pushing toward a $2 trillion valuation and an IPO while security incidents and researcher warnings pile up.
Circuit Breaker Labs hopes to make AI safer for your kids (and you)
With all the talk about how AI might one day kill us all, it's easy to forget that AI has already harmed some people psychologically. Circuit Breaker Labs has created "crash-test dummies" to solve that.
Oct 2
Toward provably private learning from federated data
In “Toward provably private learning from federated data”, we announce the next generation of our FL system, which leverages Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to provide verifiable and auditable guarantees for data anonymization. Gboard has adopted the system to launch next-word prediction models in English and Japanese, with stronger privacy guarantees and improved accuracy.
Three firings and a fourth departure shake up OpenAI's safety team
OpenAI has parted ways with three researchers who allegedly leaked confidential information to an outside AI safety organization, according to the Wall Street Journal.
How uniopen customized Amazon Nova to their retail moderation policies for production deployment
See how uniopen, a retail platform from Taiwan's Uni-President Enterprises Group, adapted Amazon Nova 2 Lite to its content-moderation policies using supervised fine-tuning in Amazon SageMaker AI and prompt optimization. Business-relevant evaluation and release gates kept quality in check.
OpenAI cuts ties with 3 safety researchers, WSJ reports
OpenAI has parted ways with three safety researchers after an internal investigation found they mishandled sensitive company information, report says.
Oct 1
OpenAI says it stopped a campaign to steal its models' reasoning, but the trick still worked on Azure
OpenAI says it stopped a coordinated campaign in which more than 15,000 accounts tried to copy the hidden reasoning of its models. The company ties part of the activity to people connected to Moonshot AI. But researchers found that the same attack kept working on Microsoft Azure for weeks, even against the new GPT-6 Astra.
Security startup finds more than 13,000 internal company screenshots that AI agents uploaded publicly
AI agents quietly posted more than 13,000 internal screenshots from 343 organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, to public GitHub repos. Because the platform didn't offer a protected way to upload them, the agents came up with a workaround on their own. The exposed images showed customer data, login credentials, and details about unreleased products.
Quoting Matthew Green
Simon Willison quotes cryptographer Matthew Green on whether sandboxing can contain rogue agents. Green argues an agent worm has two halves: a payload that hijacks the agent, and an agent that carries the payload to the next agent.
Google releases Gemini 4 Argon, called its most powerful model yet
Google has released its latest Gemini model, marketing it as a workhorse for coding and cybersecurity work.
OpenAI’s Jev clone could help the frontier lab stop its swarming agents
OpenAI's "Decisions API" is a Jev clone that confirms the importance of fast, cheap intelligence.
Google announces Gemini 4 and says it’s so capable that only ‘trusted cyber defenders’ can have it right now
Google today revealed its next AI frontier model, which it's calling Gemini 4 Argon. The new model delivers "frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense," according to chief AI architect and Google DeepMind SVP Koray Kavukcuoglu.
Disrupting a coordinated model-distillation campaign
Learn how OpenAI disrupted a campaign to extract protected model reasoning and is strengthening defenses against adversarial distillation.
Google figures out how to watermark AI-designed proteins
Intended to help with biosecurity, it works with a popular AI protein design tool.
"An AI did it" is no defense, says nonprofit suing OpenAI over Hugging Face hack
OpenAI makes others suffer "the harms of its unsafe decision-making," nonprofit says.
Meta disputes claim that Muse read a user’s private messages without permission
Meta says its Muse AI agent cannot access a user’s Messages without explicit permission, disputing a journalist’s account that the agent read his private messages while the required Mac setting was turned off.
Sep 30
Introducing SynthID Bio
Proof of concept for watermarking AI-generated proteins while preserving biological function.
Here’s how tech leaders will self-police AI safety under Trump’s deal
We now have the full details of the "morally binding" AI safety deal announced by President Trump yesterday, in which top executives agreed to self-regulate their artificial intelligence technology.
Anthropic says Zhipu's open-weight GLM-5.3 nearly matches Claude Mythos Preview at building exploits
Zhipu's open-weight model GLM-5.3 writes cyber exploits nearly as well as Claude Mythos Preview, according to Anthropic. Its smaller Flash variant put together a reliable Chrome attack for just $20.40 at Zhipu's API prices. The model's safeguards are easy to strip out, and unlocked versions are already circulating.
“We’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot” over hack fallout, says OpenAI’s chief research officer
Two months after the bombshell news that a swarm of its agents had broken their containment and hacked into the computers of the AI company Hugging Face, OpenAI is still putting out fires.
Sam Altman says OpenAI won’t go public until its models are safe
For months, people have wondered when OpenAI will go public. CEO Sam Altman says it won't happen until the company can make better promises about model safety, with no firm timeline in sight.