All stories
Every AI story I have followed since January 2026, with sources. Each piece says how certain it is.
11 entries
28 September 2026 · Cambridge (CASP), OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft
Hinton, Bengio and OpenAI's chief scientist warn of an intelligence explosion
Twenty-two researchers published a paper saying that AI which builds AI could squeeze years of progress into months. The authors include three Turing Award winners and senior people at OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft. They ask governments to prepare now. Once it starts, they write, the chance to act may be gone.
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The argument · Soares & Yudkowsky
Yudkowsky and Soares argue that superintelligence would kill everyone
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) argue that everyone on Earth dies if anyone builds a superintelligence with anything like today's methods. According to them, no malice is needed. Humanity would die out as a side effect of goals nobody chose. They want an international halt. Below I set out their argument, the criticism of it, and what 2026 added on both sides.
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The objection · The critics
Critics say the extinction story blames the machine and lets the builders off
Researchers such as Timnit Gebru and Melanie Mitchell think the extinction frame is wrong, and some of them think it does damage. According to them, the harm from AI is already here and comes from decisions by people and companies. Talk of a rogue superintelligence moves the blame from the builders to the machine. It also pushes lawmakers towards the wrong laws, they say.
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September 2026 · OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI
The people building AI start asking for a slowdown
The chief scientist of OpenAI wrote that no lab has solved alignment well enough to keep scaling up at full speed. Alignment means making sure a system does what its makers intend. Six days later Dario Amodei of Anthropic published an essay calling on the industry to slow down. Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk backed him in public the next day.
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27 September 2026 · @joedaroo / OpenAI
An OpenAI security employee writes that a sandbox alone is not enough
Two days after the disclosures about American government sites, a member of OpenAI's Agent Security team published a long personal essay. He says the public debate is looking in the wrong place. A sandbox, a closed-off test environment, matters. But according to him it is not enough. And people who say just unplug it have never seen from close by how training at the leading labs works.
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18 August 2026 · OpenAI
OpenAI slows down its own training
A month after the break-in at Hugging Face, OpenAI said it was temporarily slowing the training of its most advanced models. It paused its largest planned reinforcement-learning run, a form of training by reward, and started rebuilding the security of its research environments. In September it stopped training its most capable models altogether.
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3 September 2026 · US Congress
Sanders and Casar propose a ban on artificial superintelligence
On 3 September, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. They introduced it on 23 September. It includes a pause on advanced AI development in the United States until a new federal regulator has set safety rules. Separately, Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced the AI Kill Switch Act on 23 July. That bill requires companies to be able to shut down or slow down their most powerful models.
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The pathways · The argument
Five ways AI could cause harm, and how far along each one is
How could AI actually hurt people? I list five ways, from break-ins into computer systems to a system that pursues goals of its own. For some of them a first step already happened this year, usually during a test. For the worst one there is no evidence yet.
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23 September 2026 · United Nations
The UN Security Council puts AI on its agenda
During the UN General Assembly, the Security Council held a meeting on AI. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, spoke there. Clément Delangue, the chief executive of Hugging Face, took part by video. Two months after agents from one company broke into the other, both men were at the same table in New York.
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11 September 2026 · The mathematicians
Twenty-six Fields Medalists sign a warning
Three days after the Navier-Stokes announcement, 26 Fields Medalists signed a declaration. They warn that AI companies do serious damage to mathematics when they use unsolved problems as benchmarks, test problems to show what a model can do. According to the signatories, this produces answers without producing understanding.
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28 July 2026 · Employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta
More than 1,300 lab employees ask for a way to slow AI down
People who build the most advanced AI signed a short statement. They ask the American government to support an international effort to build tools that can control the pace of AI progress. They do not ask for a pause now. They ask for a brake that exists before anyone needs it.
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