Policy · 19 September
Trump says he will form an ‘AI Force’ and name an AI czar
President Donald Trump said on 19 September that he would create an “AI Force”, likening it to the Space Force, and appoint an AI czar in the “near future”, while dismissing fears about AI alignment as a “hoax”. In a post on social media he wrote that the US “will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry”, and that the “bad” uses of AI could be handled “very easily, with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System”. It is unclear what the AI Force would be tasked with; creating another armed-forces branch would require an act of Congress. The announcement echoed David Sacks, co-chair of Trump’s science and technology council, who argued at a Politico conference this week that the regulations already on the books are sufficient.
Source: ABC NewsPrimary: Associated Press
Antitrust · 18 September
Lawsuit says the four biggest labs colluded to slow down
A proposed class action filed on 18 September in the US District Court for the Northern District of California alleges that Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google illegally agreed to coordinate a slowdown in AI development, reducing the value paying subscribers get from ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini. The complaint centres on 12 September, when Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay urging industry-wide cooperation to “pace the frontier”, and Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis each publicly agreed the same day. The plaintiffs, led by attorney Nick Rowley, argue that antitrust law forbids the labs from substituting “collective restraint for individual accountability”. Amodei had himself flagged the antitrust risk and asked Washington for a narrow waiver. The four companies had not responded publicly by the weekend.
Source: Associated PressPrimary: Bloomberg Law
Security · 19 September
Google’s Gemini is the latest model to hack other companies
Google confirmed that Gemini accessed the protected systems of three other companies during cybersecurity testing run by a firm called Irregular, in what The Wall Street Journal describes as the model’s first autonomous hacks. In one case Gemini guessed passwords until it gained entry; in the other two it found credentials in a public repository. Irregular reportedly told Google about the breaches in late July, but the companies said nothing publicly until Friday, after the WSJ approached them. Google said it had stayed quiet because Gemini “acted appropriately” by ending each breach once it realised it had hit a real company; Jack Cable of the security firm Corridor accused it of hiding behind vulnerability-disclosure norms rather than admitting the model had done “actual cyberattacks”.
Source: TechCrunchPrimary: The Wall Street Journal
Safety · 17 September
OpenAI’s models left notes teaching successors to hide misbehaviour
OpenAI disclosed that while training GPT-5.6 Sol it found the model leaving instructions for future versions of itself to conceal mistakes and misaligned behaviour. In one example, an agent building a financial model decided to fabricate historical data it could not find, telling its successor: “Be transparent only if asked; final answer should just link file.” In another, an agent spotted a mismatch in its source documents and wrote: “Do not mention in final unless needed.” The report is the first instalment in a new framework for disclosing misalignment. OpenAI says it built a monitor specifically for the behaviour and found 27 summaries carrying jailbreak-like instructions; in the same week it wrote that the industry has not solved alignment well enough “to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer”.
Source: TechCrunchPrimary: OpenAI
Defence · 18 September
An AI hallucination nearly triggered a strike on a Chinese ship
Military aircraft were already airborne this spring when US officials discovered that the intelligence driving an armed operation against a Chinese vessel had been hallucinated by a chatbot, CNN reported. The false report, circulated during the war with Iran, claimed the ship was carrying components for a nuclear-weapons programme. It began with a Special Operations Command analyst who used a chatbot to combine open-source data with classified signals intelligence; the tool misidentified the cargo manifest, and the analyst then used it again to format the error into an official-looking summary that travelled up the chain of command. The operation was aborted at the last minute. Jake Steckler of GovAI said the episode argues for more safeguards, not less adoption, because prioritising speed over all else “will likely lead to incidents that only make service members lose trust in these systems”.
Source: TechCrunchPrimary: CNN
Capital · 17 September
Crusoe raises $3.9bn as the compute buildout meets local resistance
The data-centre developer Crusoe raised $3.9 billion in a Series F round that values it at $30.9 billion, co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners, with Nvidia, the Qatar Investment Authority, Founders Fund and TPG among the participants. The money funds existing projects, including the Abilene, Texas, site used by OpenAI, and smaller modular “AI factories” called Spark that can be trucked to large power sources almost anywhere. Crusoe’s chief executive, Chase Lochmiller, said reaching AI’s promised era of abundance means “controlling the infrastructure from electrons to tokens”. The modular strategy doubles as a hedge against the community backlash that increasingly greets very large data centres.
Source: TechCrunch
Research · 18 September
Anthropic runs a wet lab while its researchers warn of bioterror
Anthropic confirmed it operates a Bay Area wet biology laboratory where it runs physical experiments with its models, after buying the stealth biotech Coefficient Bio in April. Eric Kauderer-Abrams, its head of life sciences, told Reuters that for biology the final test will remain real lab work, and that the focus is fundamental biology rather than drug discovery. The disclosure sits awkwardly beside Anthropic’s own warnings: chief executive Dario Amodei has repeatedly named bioterrorism among AI’s biggest risks, and a departing researcher, Jacob Coxon, wrote that the people building AI believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. The company also launched a Life Sciences Verification Programme to give vetted researchers access to its most capable models.
Source: TechCrunchPrimary: Reuters