ai safety

OpenAI and Anthropic now sit on the public stage while Microsoft and Amazon wage a quieter, higher‑stakes contest for the cloud and compute hegemony that will shape the AI decade ahead. Background: how we got here The current alignment — OpenAI with Microsoft and Anthropic with Amazon — is the...

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s call for an outright, legally enforced shutdown of advanced AI systems — framed in his new book and repeated in interviews — has reignited a fraught debate that stretches from academic alignment labs to the product teams shipping copilots on Windows desktops; the argument is...

Satya Nadella’s blunt message to Microsoft employees — that the company must undergo a “messy” and relentless transformation to survive the AI era — captures a high-stakes strategy that is already reshaping products, teams, and internal culture across the company. Background Microsoft’s...

Microsoft’s latest in‑app prompt — a subtle “Try experimental AI features” banner inside Microsoft Paint — is the first public sign of a broader program internally referred to as Windows AI Labs, an opt‑in testbed Microsoft appears to be rolling out to let users preview and evaluate pre‑release...

Microsoft has quietly begun rolling out an opt‑in testing channel called Windows AI Labs, a program that invites selected users to try experimental AI features inside built‑in Windows 11 apps — first observed in Microsoft Paint — and which appears designed to gather structured feedback and...

I opened Paint and a small banner asked me to join “Windows AI Labs” — an opt‑in program that, according to the on‑screen card and an attached programme agreement, will let selected users test experimental AI features inside Microsoft Paint before those features are broadly released. Overview...

Generative AI assistants such as Microsoft Copilot can accelerate data analysis — but only when the person using them understands the code they produce, checks the results, and controls the data fed into the system; used blindly, they’re a fast path to plausible-looking but flawed numbers...

AI has moved from an experimental novelty to a default tool in British lecture theatres and student workflows — and a new YouGov survey shows that the change is already reshaping how undergraduates study, submit assessments, and think about their careers. The headline figures are simple but...

Mustafa Suleyman’s blunt declaration that machine consciousness is an illusion has refocused a technical debate into an operational warning for product teams, regulators, and everyday Windows users: the immediate danger is not that machines will quietly wake up, but that they will be engineered...

Microsoft’s MAI launch is a deliberate pivot: the company is taking the pieces it once licensed, packaging them with native infrastructure and orchestration tools, and betting the future of productivity on a team of specialized agents rather than a single, monolithic brain. This matters for...

OpenAI’s decision to add parental controls to ChatGPT this fall marks a consequential shift in how families, schools, and regulators will manage students’ interactions with generative AI—an acknowledgement that technical safeguards alone have not prevented harm and that human-centered...

NewsGuard’s latest audit has landed as a clear, uncomfortable signal: the most popular consumer chatbots are now far more likely to repeat provably false claims about breaking news and controversial topics than they were a year ago, and the shift in behavior appears rooted in product trade‑offs...

AI chatbots are now answering more questions — and, according to a fresh NewsGuard audit, they are also repeating falsehoods far more often, producing inaccurate or misleading content in roughly one out of every three news‑related responses during an August 2025 audit cycle. (newsguardtech.com)...

Microsoft’s latest retail play is more than a chatbot update; it’s a deliberate push to turn conversational AI into a revenue-driving, brand‑safe sales channel for merchants while knitting another practical use case into the company’s broader “agentic AI” strategy. The Personal Shopping Agent —...

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s head of consumer AI, has bluntly declared that the idea of machine consciousness is an “illusion” and warned that intentionally building systems to appear conscious could produce social, legal, and psychological harms far sooner than any technical breakthrough in...

Mustafa Suleyman’s blunt diagnosis — that machine consciousness is an “illusion” and that building systems to mimic personhood is dangerous — has reframed a debate that until recently lived mostly in philosophy seminars and research labs. His argument is practical, not metaphysical: modern...

Microsoft’s move to fold Anthropic’s Claude models into Office 365 marks a clear turning point in the company’s AI strategy: after years of heavy reliance on OpenAI, Microsoft is now building a multi-vendor, task‑optimized Copilot that mixes Anthropic, OpenAI, and its own in‑house models to...

Switzerland’s bold Apertus release, new compact reasoning models from Nous Research, and a spate of open multilingual and on-device models this week underline a clear trend: AI is moving from closed, cloud‑only monoliths toward a more diverse ecosystem of open, efficient, and task‑specific...

The AI you keep open in a browser tab is doing more than answering queries — it's broadcasting something about how you think, what you value, and how you want the world to work. A recent cultural riff that maps people to their preferred models — from OpenAI’s GPT‑5 users to xAI’s Grok fans and...

At some point in the early 21st century, the public debate over artificial intelligence shifted from abstract speculation to urgent planning: could the next leap in AI turn into a civilization-scale crisis, and if so, what can people do now to reduce the odds? A high-profile scenario known as AI...