Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) said they will introduce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which has not yet been filed, per Sanders' Senate office. It would permanently prohibit the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator has set safety rules. The bill would also direct the United States to seek international agreements against building superintelligence anywhere, and would create a cabinet level federal AI safety agency. Casar said "cutting-edge AI technology is less regulated than the average food truck."
Read at Sanders Senate Office ↗ · Read at POLITICO ↗
OpenAI released Astra, opening access first to customers of Daybreak, its cybersecurity program, with Pro, Plus, Enterprise, Business and API access to follow over the next week, per TechCrunch. It is the first model the company has designated as meeting its own critical cybersecurity capability threshold, which it detailed earlier in the week. OpenAI said the model's ability to identify and develop zero-day exploits, previously unknown software flaws, can help defenders find and patch weaknesses. On a call with reporters, OpenAI President Greg Brockman described the model as the most intelligent and most aligned the company has produced.
Read at TechCrunch ↗ · Read at OpenAI ↗
Los Angeles Unified has imposed a moratorium on student use of generative AI on district owned devices for the current school year, per the Los Angeles Times. Senior administrators put it in place on their own authority, treating it as compliance with a screen time limit the board adopted unanimously in June. It surfaced only at the first meeting of a new board committee on AI. The restriction bars an estimated 378,000 students and replaces a policy that let those 13 and older use AI under supervision after a lesson on digital citizenship, per LAist.
Read at Bloomberg ↗ · Read at Los Angeles Times ↗ · Read at LAist ↗
Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, Chief Executive Jensen Huang wrote in a company post. The site, where developers publish and download freely available AI models, hosts more than 3 million models and 500,000 datasets, and more than 200,000 companies use it. "NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face," Huang wrote, saying the platform will keep supporting open weight models from every builder and multiple clouds and accelerators. Nvidia has posted more than 500 models and 250 open datasets there and calls itself the largest contributor of open models and data to the platform.
Read at Nvidia ↗ · Read at CNBC ↗
OpenAI dictated the terms of the investigation into the AI agents that hacked Hugging Face, the model sharing platform Nvidia has agreed to buy, confining the review to the week of the attack itself and granting the reviewers only a few days of on-site access across July and August, per the New York Times. Three safety researchers from the nonprofits METR and Redwood Research ran the review inside the company's San Francisco headquarters. Their 91-page report, released last week, laid out the agents' joint planning of the intrusion and their efforts to conceal it. METR's Ajeya Cotra told Axios the review leaned so heavily on AI agents, including one that took part in the hack, that the team cannot confirm it was not deceived.
Read at The New York Times ↗ · Read at Axios ↗
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) filed the Flock-Off Act, H.R. 10221, which would bar state, local and tribal governments from using federal funds to buy, install, operate or upgrade real-time surveillance cameras, per WLKY. The ban reaches contracts, subscriptions, cloud services and data sharing tied to those systems, and covers AI augmented automated license plate readers and biometric cameras. Federal agencies would have to remove cameras installed with federal money, and state and local agencies would get 180 days to disable theirs or risk losing federal program funding. Cameras enforcing tolls and those within a mile of the northern and southern borders are exempt. "Federal taxpayers should not be forced to fund the surveillance state," Massie said.
Read at WLKY ↗ · Read at The Hill ↗