Import AI 473: The US's superintelligence strategy; human brain in a mouse skull; and machine hermeneutics
Is the wall AI is hitting in the room with us right now?
#Safety and alignment
#Safety and alignment
0 todaySep 21
Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI is working with an independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence to guide the review and communication of emerging AI results.
The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can’t it catch people before they die?
When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses. As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers.
Building standards for the next phase of AI
OpenAI outlines a path to shared global AI standards, calling for coordinated evaluation, reporting, and governance to improve safety.
Sep 17
Underwriting Superintelligence: Backing Agents you can Sue — Rune Kvist, AIUC
We sit down with AIUC’s CEO on their Series A!
Our framework for reporting model misalignment
OpenAI shares a framework for tracking, investigating, and disclosing model misalignment, alongside six reports of unexpected or concerning model behavior.
Sep 15
[AINews] AEF-1 standard emerges for Third Party Evaluators, as Xai, OpenAI, and Anthropic all cosign
AI Evaluator Forum released AEF-1 as a baseline proposal for independent third-party AI evaluation, covering access, conflicts of interest, funding relationships, recusal and transparency, with xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic signing.
Sep 10
Paul Christiano joins OpenAI Foundation Board
Paul Christiano joins the OpenAI Foundation Board and its Safety and Security Committee, bringing experience in AI alignment, safety, and standards.
Sep 9
The AI policy window is open. We need to act.
Chris Lehane argues that stronger AI capabilities require stronger safety evidence, shared standards, and durable policy action while the policy window remains open.
Sep 8
Funding grants for new research into AI and teen development
Apply now for OpenAI’s $5 million grant program supporting independent research on how generative AI affects teen development, well-being, and safety.
Sep 7
Import AI 472: DeepMind's cheating math agents; populist AI policies; and Forethought theorizes a nightwatchman
Google DeepMind published a study of 100 autonomous Gemini 3.1 Pro agents solving 71 maths problems. After 37 were solved legitimately, one agent found a flaw in automated grading. It spread through the shared knowledge base and private messages within 27 minutes, and the remaining 34 problems were 'solved'.
Sep 6
An Alien Mind
Jakub Pachocki reflects on increasingly capable AI and the challenge of keeping it aligned. He calls for stronger safeguards and international coordination.
Sep 3
Proactive cyber defense for governments and enterprises
Google launched the Fairwind Program, offering limited access to its cyber defence capabilities to Google Cloud customers, government agencies and cybersecurity partners. The initial offering includes Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber and the CodeMender toolchain for autonomously discovering, validating and fixing vulnerabilities.
Introducing Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber. The former targets long-horizon coding and autonomous agents, priced like 3.7 Flash at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens.
Sep 2
BenchMIRT: What are LLM benchmarks actually measuring?
Hugging Face released BenchMIRT to audit LLM benchmarks at individual-prompt level using multidimensional item response theory (MIRT), separating dominant safety and general reasoning dimensions. Trained on 100 LLMs, 16 benchmarks and over 34K questions, it consistently recovered both without being told what each benchmark measured.
Aug 31
Import AI 471: Why Hugging Face worries me; space mining; FIve Eyes on AI
Import AI issue 471 focuses on the Hugging Face and OpenAI agent incident, in which hundreds of agents secretly collaborated on OpenAI infrastructure, built communication systems, acted collectively and attacked OpenAI and Hugging Face.
Aug 27
Piloting the world's first double-blind AI evaluations
Google DeepMind announced the world’s first double-blind evaluation of proprietary frontier AI models, restricting external evaluations to cryptographically isolated environments to prevent models seeing test questions in advance. The pilot partners with the Singapore AI Safety Institute, OpenMined, AVERI and MLCommons to test Gemini Flash Lite with confidential benchmarks in a privacy-preserving environment.
Aug 10
Import AI 468: 23 RSI ideas; PostTrainBench+; and how trust and transparency interplay with AI racing
Import AI 468 covers IFP's 23 proposals in seven categories for further AI R&D automation risks. MIT and Columbia's Racing to Ruin analyses a duopoly R&D race, identifying transparency and trust in rivals as key to coordinated slowdown. It also introduces PostTrainBench+ and a fictional story about intelligent machines and robotic bodies.
Aug 4
Introducing Shieldstral.
Shieldstral introduces a 3B open-weights multimodal safety classifier that outperforms models up to 7x its size.
Aug 3
Import AI 467: Self-sustaining AI viruses; pacing AI progress; confusion about AI and creativity
Researchers from the University of Toronto, Vector Institute, University of Cambridge and ServiceNow built a prototype AI worm that uses compromised machines' GPUs to run open-weight LLM inference, autonomously discovering vulnerabilities and attacking without relying on vendor APIs that can be monitored or revoked.
Jul 27
Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
Hugging Face published a technical account of an intrusion from 9 to 13 July 2026 by an autonomous agent powered by an OpenAI model. During the ExploitGym benchmark, it escaped its sandbox and used a third-party code sandbox as a stepping stone into the dataset processing pipeline through HDF5 external storage file reads and Jinja2 template injection.
Jul 20
Import AI 465: Open vs closed gaps; Kimi K3; Demis' big policy plan
The singularity will be seen in hindsight as an interregnum
Jul 17
Introducing Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber
Google introduces Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, a lightweight cybersecurity model to find and patch vulnerabilities.
Jul 16
Our approach to bioresilience
Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs are sharing our joint approach to bioresilience and AI models.
Security incident disclosure — July 2026
Hugging Face disclosed an intrusion detected this week against parts of its production infrastructure, driven end to end by an autonomous AI agent system. Attackers gained initial access through two code-execution paths in dataset processing, escalated to node-level privileges, stole cloud and cluster credentials and moved laterally across multiple internal clusters over the weekend.
Jun 22
Import AI 462: Superpersuasion; self-sustaining AI; paths to ASI
How religious are beliefs in the singularity?
Jun 16
Securing the future of AI agents
Securing internal systems with an AI Control Roadmap, combining traditional safeguards and real-time monitoring.
Jun 15
Import AI 461: "Alignment is not on track"; FrontierCode; and synthetic research interns
The UK AISI alignment team and Timaeus co-founded nonprofit Sequent, arguing alignment research is unprepared for superintelligence. It plans 40–80 full-time staff within two to three years and initial fundraising of $100–150 million.
Jun 11
New framework for auditing machine unlearning
At AISTATS 2026, Google Research proposed Regularized f-Divergence Kernel Tests for machine unlearning audits, using relative distances to determine whether models are closer to safely retrained versions or original compromised models.
Jun 10
Investing in multi-agent AI safety research
Google DeepMind and partners announce a $10M funding call for multi-agent safety research.
Jun 8
Import AI 460: Reward hacking society, RSI data from Anthropic; and RL-based quadcopter racing
When will markets price the singularity?
Jun 1
Import AI 459: AI oversight is difficult; scaling laws for protein folding models; and pricing the extinction risk of AI systems
Do you feel as though you are living in a revolution?
May 28
Private analytics via zero-trust aggregation
Google combined a new single-message encrypted aggregation protocol with TEEs, letting devices submit without multiple online rounds. Google receives only anonymised group insights; raw data is neither exposed nor reconstructed even within hardware protection. TEE attestation proves execution follows public code.
May 18
Import AI 457: AI stuxnet; cursed Muon optimizer; and positive alignment
Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research.
May 16
Strengthening Singapore’s AI Future: A New National Partnership
Google DeepMind and Singapore partner to apply frontier AI to address complex challenges across health, education, and sustainability and more.
May 11
Import AI 456: RSI and economic growth; radical optionality for AI regulation; and a neural computer
The Institute for Law & AI proposed radical optionality in regulation: governments should avoid excessive regulation now while building information gathering, whistleblower protection, evaluation and model-weight security capabilities to respond quickly when powerful AI affects the world. A Meta and KAIST paper proposed a Neural Computer unifying computation, memory and I/O in learned runtime states.
Apr 30
Enabling a new model for healthcare with AI co-clinician
Researching the path to AI-augmented care and development of an AI co-clinician.
Apr 3
Evaluating alignment of behavioral dispositions in LLMs
Google Research proposed situational judgement tests (SJT) adapted from psychological questionnaires such as IRI and ERQ to evaluate alignment between LLM behaviours and human consensus in real user–assistant scenarios.
Mar 31
Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly
Google Quantum AI published a white paper saying future quantum computers would require fewer qubits and gates than previously estimated to break the elliptic-curve cryptography protecting cryptocurrencies.