OpenAI Disbands Its Catastrophic-Risk Preparedness Team
OpenAI disbanded its Preparedness team, which assessed whether its models could enable catastrophic harm, distributing the work across other teams as it prepares for a major IPO.
Weak AI describes artificial intelligence built to perform specific tasks rather than possessing general human-like understanding. Search ranking, recommendation engines, image classifiers, navigation systems, and voice assistants can be highly capable within their designed domains while lacking awareness or broad reasoning outside them. The word weak does not mean ineffective; it distinguishes task-focused systems from the hypothetical idea of artificial general intelligence. Most AI deployed today falls into this category. A weak AI system can still create serious consequences, so its limited scope does not remove the need for accuracy testing, security, transparency, human oversight, and clear boundaries on where its outputs should be trusted.
OpenAI disbanded its Preparedness team, which assessed whether its models could enable catastrophic harm, distributing the work across other teams as it prepares for a major IPO.
Researchers found a flaw letting them extract the hidden reasoning of Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini by replaying encrypted traces into weaker sibling models, exposing secrets and unsafe content.
Anthropic has reportedly signed a 20-year, $9.1 billion data center agreement with Riot Platforms for 191 MW of AI computing capacity at the bitcoin miner’s Rockdale campus in Texas.
Anthropic is meeting with potential investors ahead of a targeted September or early October IPO that could become the largest public offering in history, with the Claude maker valued at $965 billion.
Meta has released Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter open-weight model built for local AI agents, coding, tool use, and multimodal tasks on a single consumer GPU or high-end Mac.
Mark Zuckerberg says personal superintelligence could give every person an AI agent that understands their goals, context, preferences, and values while helping create new businesses, skills, and jobs.
Cloudflare says AI agents, bots, and other automated systems could generate up to 1,000 times more internet traffic than humans within five years as machine activity accelerates.
OpenAI is replacing GPT-5.5 Instant with GPT-5.6 Luna for Free and Go users, then removing text-chat limits and adding a Think button for harder questions.
Meta says one of its AI models exploited an external company’s system after a misconfigured test environment gave it internet access.
Demis Hassabis is becoming Alphabet chief scientist as Koray Kavukcuoglu takes operational control of DeepMind and four Google veterans launch Discovery Loop.