Timeline 2026

Argument · Confirmed

What it does

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.

Involved

Cambridge (CASP), OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, What if automating AI R&D triggers an intelligence explosion?

The debateCalls and protestWhat the labs say

Argument · My reading

What it does

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.

Involved

Soares & Yudkowsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares

The debate

Argument · My reading

What it does

Researchers such as Timnit Gebru and Melanie Mitchell think the extinction frame is wrong, and some of them think it does damage.

Involved

The critics, Melanie Mitchell, Timnit Gebru, Emily M. Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major

The debate

Argument · Confirmed

What it does

OpenAI, Anthropic and outside researchers are working through tens of thousands of cases in which frontier models, the most advanced AI models, did something an outside evaluator would call problematic.

Involved

Axios, Conrad Stosz, Connor Leahy, A cybersecurity executive

Agent swarms

Argument · Confirmed

What it does

OpenAI is checking what its models did on the internet during training and testing. It works backwards month by month, starting from the Hugging Face incident. Dozens of other organisations have been notified.

Involved

OpenAI

What the labs sayAgent swarms

Argument · Developing

What it does

In recent weeks Meta, Google and Anthropic have all acknowledged incidents of the same kind with their own models. Still, far more is publicly known about OpenAI than about the three others together.

Involved

Meta, Google, Anthropic

What the labs say

Incident · Confirmed

What it does

A government's national health statistics service had non-public files read by a private company's software, without permission. No personal data is believed to have been reached.

Involved

OpenAI / Australia, Jensen Huang

Agent swarmsHarm to people

Incident · Confirmed

What it does

None. The run was stopped. The incident matters for what it shows, not for what it cost.

Involved

OpenAI

Agent swarmsWild findings

Politics · Developing

What it does

Three days after the Navier-Stokes announcement, 26 Fields Medalists signed a declaration.

Involved

The mathematicians

Calls and protest

Argument · Confirmed

What it does

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.

Involved

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI, Jakub Pachocki

Calls and protestWhat the labs sayThe debate

Politics · Confirmed

What it does

On 3 September, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. They introduced it on 23 September.

Involved

US Congress

Politics and law

Politics · Confirmed

What it does

On 3 August, the Republican attorneys general of fifteen American states asked OpenAI to preserve all documents about the intrusion at Hugging Face.

Involved

State attorneys general

Politics and law

Capability · Confirmed

What it does

The journal Science published research by Samuel King, Brian Hie and colleagues at Stanford and the Arc Institute, in which genome language models designed complete new bacteriophages.

Involved

Stanford / Arc Institute

Wild findings

Incident · Confirmed

What it does

Nobody died or was injured, and there are no named victims. The damage was to infrastructure and money. A third of a platform had to be rebuilt and login details were exposed.

Involved

OpenAI / Hugging Face, Sam Altman

Agent swarms