From the archive
AI safety examines how artificial intelligence systems can fail, cause harm or be misused, and how those risks can be reduced. Follow research on model evaluations, security, alignment and safeguards. Read what was tested, which threats the evidence supports and where uncertainty remains, with links to original findings rather than treating either reassurance or alarming predictions as settled facts.
Lead story
Canonical will begin publishing Ubuntu kernel updates weekly from 28 September, bringing security fixes to users faster as the company cites a sharp rise in vulnerabilities uncovered through automated AI bug discovery. The practical trade-off is clear: quicker patches, with some users able to access less-tested fixes ahead…
Read the report & discussion ↗Yann LeCun Watch
Yann LeCun has dismissed claims that AI could kill everyone within three years, while other technology leaders argue the immediate danger lies in cyberattacks and misuse. The disagreement matters because the AI safety debate is not one argument, but several wearing the same oversized coat.
Watch Desk
Axios reports that allies of Donald Trump are targeting Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei as a symbol of AI “doomerism”, turning arguments about AI safety into a sharper political fight. The dispute matters beyond one executive’s reputation: it could affect Anthropic’s relationship with the White House and the…
Watch Desk
Professor B Ravindran of IIT Madras argues that fears about AI ending humanity often skip the crucial middle steps: access, permissions, testing decisions and human control. His interview offers a useful counterweight to the current slowdown debate, without pretending frontier AI is harmless.
Watch Desk
Researchers at MIT’s Senseable City Lab are arguing that visual AI could help planners understand traffic, pollution, public space and greenery across entire cities, while warning that the same systems can deepen surveillance and social bias. The useful point is not that computers can now look at more…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft has announced a new 12-inch Surface Pro, a 13-inch Surface Laptop and an AI-powered Surface Mouse, with the PCs using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Plus processors to run more AI work locally. The practical pitch is less cloud dependence, lower latency and potentially better privacy, rather than another…
Watch Desk
OpenAI, Meta and Mistral describe their AI systems in increasingly human terms, and a University of Münster study argues that this language can shape how much trust and authority people give the machines. The important point is not that chatbots use friendly words. It is that calling software…
Watch Desk
Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar have introduced legislation that would pause advanced AI development in the United States and create a Cabinet-level Department of Artificial Intelligence. The move exposes a widening argument among Democrats over whether the answer to frontier AI is a brake, tighter export controls or…
AWS AI Watch
AWS has published a working blueprint for asking ordinary questions of video archives, with an AI agent choosing between transcription, visual analysis and face matching. The practical promise is straightforward: teams can search hours of recorded meetings, security footage or inspections without first watching everything by hand.
Watch Desk
Donald Trump has rejected international oversight of advanced AI as a “globalist scheme”, while OpenAI chief Sam Altman and Anthropic chief Dario Amodei are due to brief the UN Security Council on AI and international security. The clash matters because the people building frontier systems are asking for…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft says it will invest more than $10 billion in capital and operating expenses across the Middle East by 2030, with cloud and AI infrastructure at the centre of the plan. The commitment initially covers Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, tying a major technology…
Google DeepMind Watch
Google is adding persistent, cross-device memory to its Private AI Compute platform, using encrypted cloud storage while keeping the keys on a person’s devices. The aim is to give AI assistants continuity without asking users to surrender the privacy advantages of local processing.
Watch Desk
Outerlimit has emerged from stealth with a $16 million pre-seed round and a security platform designed to control AI agents at the moment they try to act. The New York startup’s pitch is that software agents need guardrails before an email is sent, a tool is called or…
DeepSeek Watch
Forbes reports that a Chinese-speaking hacker used DeepSeek, Kimi and an older version of Anthropic’s Claude to automate attacks against as many as 100 organisations. The account describes a worrying shift in cybercrime: not merely AI-assisted hacking, but agents probing targets, stealing data and installing card skimmers at…
Watch Desk
Radical Numerics is building large AI models for biology while warning that the same systems that expand scientific capability could also widen the biosecurity threat. The company’s co-founder and chief executive, Eric Nguyen, made the case in an interview with Latent Space, arguing that defensive capabilities must keep…
Watch Desk
Eye Security says researchers used a 12-step AI-agent method to uncover a CVSS 10.0 vulnerability chain in ASUS Control Center. The result is a useful security story for a less glamorous reason: the agents accelerated reconnaissance and code analysis, but human researchers still had to guide them through…
Cohere Watch
Bell Cyber and Cohere say they have deployed a specialised AI model inside Bell’s security operations in Canada, where it will help analysts investigate threats while sensitive data stays on Canadian-hosted infrastructure. The important shift is practical: this is a production cybersecurity tool, not another model waiting patiently…
Watch Desk
Carnegie Mellon University has climbed to No. 14 in the 2027 U.S. News national college rankings while taking the top undergraduate position for computer science and artificial intelligence. The result gives readers a useful snapshot of where the talent pipeline for computing is being built, rather than another…
AWS AI Watch
AWS has added skill-focused evaluation tools to Strands Evals and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Evaluations. The important change is that teams can now inspect not only an agent’s final answer, but also whether it selected the correct procedure and followed that procedure properly.
