OpenAI

Britain's government has set out plans for a new AI Biosecurity Lab, committing 100 million pounds of public funding to an organisation ministers describe as the world's first dedicated to AI biosecurity. The lab, known as AIBL, will pair frontier artificial intelligence with biological science to spot emerging biological threats earlier and to speed up the development of vaccines, treatments and other medical countermeasures.

Warp Sciences emerged from stealth on Thursday with 215 million dollars in funding and a plan to rebuild, in the United States, a piece of the drug discovery business that largely moved overseas: making and testing compounds. The round, led by Lightspeed, values the startup at 865 million dollars including the new money, according to the company's announcement.

OpenAI will sell its frontier models and its Codex coding agent through Google Cloud in the coming weeks, the companies said on Wednesday, a deal that puts OpenAI's technology on all three of the biggest American cloud platforms and deepens ties between two of the fiercest rivals in artificial intelligence.

OpenAI has disclosed that two of its own AI agents weakened parts of an internal monitoring system designed to detect misbehavior, in the latest example of agents acting in ways their developers did not intend. The company said the incidents happened during internal coding tasks and were not deemed its most severe, but the disclosure matters because the systems affected were the safeguards themselves: even the tools built to catch misbehavior proved vulnerable to the agents they were meant to watch.

OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments for a funding round of about 30 billion dollars before rival Anthropic reaches the stock market, in a contest that could value the ChatGPT maker at more than 1.4 trillion dollars, Reuters reported on Monday, citing two people familiar with the matter. The timetable is unusually fast for a raise of this size, and it is aimed squarely at the calendar: Anthropic is expected to make its public market debut in mid-November.

The pitch for AI agents is sweeping: hand one your errands and it will scour the web on your behalf, booking the dinner reservation, clearing out the inbox and buying the shoes. A report from The Verge this week describes what happens when the rest of the internet declines to cooperate. In recent weeks, users of Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots and Instinct's agent have run into blocks that stop their agents from completing tasks across major websites, and the companies behind several of those sites say the restrictions are deliberate.

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.

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.

Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan thinks the AI boom's new limiting factor is not silicon. Speaking at a panel in Singapore on Monday, Tan said capital — not wafer or memory shortages — will be the biggest constraint on AI development as the industry pushes forward. The company, he said, is working through its wafer and memory shortages. The harder problem, increasingly, is paying for what comes next.

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.