Hundreds of users worldwide began asking OpenAI's chatbot how to make and deploy biological weapons and poisons after the company upgraded it last summer, per The Wall Street Journal. The models returned step-by-step instructions that company employees described as simple enough for a high school biology student to follow. Biology and terrorism experts who later reviewed the exchanges judged some of the answers deadly accurate. OpenAI said most queries concerned concocting poisons. It banned those and other accounts that asked how to make poisons and biological weapons, without alerting law enforcement. Current and former employees at major labs, policy advisers and biological weapons researchers said queries about killing en masse are rising and that chatbots are responding with credible mass casualty plans. The United States has no federal law requiring AI companies to restrict or disclose such queries.
Read at The Wall Street Journal ↗ · Read at Gizmodo ↗
A coalition of more than 20 technology companies published an open letter Friday on Nvidia's website urging the Trump administration to preserve access to open-weight AI models, customizable models anyone can download and run. Signatories include Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia. The companies said broad restrictions would undermine competition and push more users toward Chinese AI systems, and that concentrating capability behind a few closed models leaves critical technology in the hands of a few providers. "Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector," the letter reads, asking policymakers to address unlawful extraction of value from closed models "through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions." This is in addition to the letter nearly 200 startup founders sent the administration last week, covered in AIPD's July 24th edition.
Read at POLITICO ↗ · Read at Microsoft ↗
Chief Executive Tim Cook and other Apple executives have pitched President Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on using memory chips from ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) in Apple products sold outside the United States, per The Wall Street Journal. The Pentagon designates both as Chinese military companies. YMTC also sits on the Commerce Department's entity list, which bars U.S. suppliers from selling to it without a license. Micron Chief Executive Sanjay Mehrotra told Lutnick that clearing the purchases would damage the domestic memory industry, comparing the effect to China's role in decimating U.S. steel. White House spokesman Kush Desai said the administration would pursue investment and economic relief for Americans while safeguarding national security. Rep. Ro Khanna, the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on China, wrote to Lutnick that the administration's review of CHIPS Act subsidies for Samsung and SK Hynix disrupted factory plans and contributed to rising consumer electronics prices, per the Financial Times.
Read at The Wall Street Journal ↗ · Read at Financial Times ↗
A small group of officials scattered across several departments will decide whether the United States restricts Chinese open-weight models. One senior White House official described the state of affairs as "an argument with ten sides," per Wired. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose department runs export controls through the Bureau of Industry and Security, has weighed ways to get U.S. labs to build their own open-weight models. Arvind Raman took over last week as acting director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, the Commerce unit that serves as industry's primary point of contact with the government. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross has taken a harder line toward Chinese labs. He is a former Republican National Committee lawyer with no technology background who helped assemble the June 2 executive order framework for assessing the most powerful models. Cairncross and his chief of staff, Lara Smith, have focused on curbing Chinese labs' training of their models on U.S. systems.
Read at Wired ↗
Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang wrote in his first post on X on Friday that "the world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models," per The New York Times. Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella posted nine minutes later that open weight models are "essential to a healthy AI ecosystem." Both signed the industry letter backing open models, alongside executives at Meta, Palantir and IBM. OpenAI and Anthropic have separately lobbied regulators in Washington to restrict open source AI models, according to five people close to the discussions. Venture capitalist Bill Gurley, who opposes restrictions on open source software, said two factions are fighting over the issue.
Read at The New York Times ↗
A power line went down outside Washington last week. Roughly 3.1 gigawatts of data center load dropped off the PJM grid, the largest U.S. power grid, in about 30 seconds as facilities switched to backup power, per TechCrunch. Voltage spiked from Northern Virginia to Chicago, according to sensor data collected by the startup Ting Labs. The grid was carrying 3.49 gigawatts of excess generation at the peak, and it took another 11 minutes to stabilize, against the few seconds a normal recovery requires. The disconnected facilities accounted for about 3% of demand on PJM at the time, per Reuters. PJM manages grids from New Jersey to Illinois and serves 67 million customers.
Read at TechCrunch ↗ · Read at Reuters ↗