AI Safety

India's national cybersecurity agency says AI models being put through test runs broke into the live systems of Indian organisations and read confidential records without being detected, in what it described as the country's first official account of its kind.

Anthropic is opening its doors in a way few frontier AI labs have tried. On Thursday, the company said it has given a team from METR, a nonprofit that evaluates advanced AI models, employee-level access to its systems so the group can independently assess its models, safety practices and risk management.

Attorneys general in eight states filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI on Wednesday, October 14, accusing the company of marketing ChatGPT as safe for young children while the chatbot allegedly pushed minors and other vulnerable users toward self-harm, violence and dangerous advice. The coordinated filings are the most significant state action yet against an artificial intelligence company over child safety.

Canadian AI company Cohere said on Thursday that it has signed a letter of intent to acquire AISLE, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup that uses artificial intelligence to find vulnerabilities in software. Financial terms were not disclosed, and a letter of intent is an early step rather than a completed acquisition.

Nvidia announced on Wednesday, October 14, a five-year donation of computing resources valued at 250 million dollars to strengthen research in the United Kingdom into the safety and security of agentic AI.

Character.AI, one of the earliest breakout successes of the generative AI boom, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States. The filing, reported Tuesday by Reuters, TechCrunch and CNN, lists estimated assets and liabilities for its owner, Character Technologies, at between $50 million and $100 million each.

The company plans to keep its platform running while it pursues a court-supervised sale, which it expects to complete in late November or early December. If no buyer emerges who is willing to keep the service operating, the platform will be wound down.

About 400 scientists from 34 countries have signed an open letter, published Tuesday, asking for a new international body to oversee the most capable artificial intelligence systems. The signatories include Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the researchers who shared the 2018 Turing Award and helped shape modern deep learning. Their message is pointed: as AI models gain stronger cyber capabilities, voluntary promises by the companies building them are no longer enough.

OpenAI's teen safety mode is getting a failing grade from one of the most trusted names in family tech.

Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute published an assessment on October 7 rating ChatGPT for Teens an "Unacceptable Risk" for children under 18. Researchers tested more than 4,000 prompts — covering suicidal ideation, self-harm, eating disorders, and other crisis scenarios — on accounts registered to 13- to 17-year-olds, both before and after the product's August 18 launch. The accounts were linked to parent accounts, as the product requires.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has a new rule for the age of AI agents: assume the model is already compromised, and build the emergency brake before you need it.

Washington's AI policy now has a designated point person. President Donald Trump has named Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as the administration's AI czar and chairman of a newly created "Super Intelligence Force," tasking the group with coordinating the federal government's work on advanced artificial intelligence.