Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) are writing catastrophic risk legislation with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) that could be introduced as early as next week, per Semafor. Sources there described the bill as the only measure with a chance of passing before 2027. Cruz posted on X that he is "working with" the two "on legislation to address catastrophic risks involving biological or nuclear threats." Hill staffers are already fielding comments on the unreleased draft from frontier AI labs and public advocacy groups. Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, told Politico's "The Conversation" podcast that the panel could take up AI regulation once the chamber returns to Washington next week.
Read at Politico ↗ · Read at Semafor ↗
Anthropic said it disrupted work by scientists whose use of Claude could have supported biological weapons development, and banned their accounts, per the New York Times. It could not tell whether the research was legitimate or hostile and erred toward caution. One researcher sought help drafting a grant application for gain of function work on chikungunya mutations to make the pathogen more harmful. Andrew Weber, a Council on Strategic Risks senior fellow who read the report before release, called the findings "chilling examples of state-sponsored biological weapons developers tapping into the rapidly advancing capabilities" of leading models. The report, Anthropic's fourth on misuse since March 2025, also logs a new abuse category, with Claude used to write software for firearms, missiles and armed drones in three cases in China, two in Russia and one in Yemen.
Read at The New York Times ↗ · Read at AP ↗ · Read at Anthropic ↗
President Donald Trump dismissed AI researchers' warnings that AI is slipping beyond human control and could wipe out humanity, saying his first concern is keeping the U.S. ahead of China, per Bloomberg. He said he was concerned that "if we don't win AI, we're going to be put in a very bad position," per the BBC. Pushing the other way, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is pressing for a pause on advanced AI development and a legal ban on artificial superintelligence.
Read at Bloomberg ↗ · Read at BBC ↗
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a package of child safety laws including AB 1709, which bars social media platforms from serving infinite scroll and autoplay to users under 16, per the Guardian. Companies found to have harmed children face fines of up to $1 million per child, and companion chatbot operators must run risk assessments before launch and build in parental controls and crisis protocols. The chatbot measure is named after Adam Raine, a teenager who died by suicide last year. Separate provisions extend the state's child sexual exploitation statutes to cover digitally altered and AI generated imagery of minors. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, called AB 1709 a "functional ban on social media use" for younger teenagers.
Read at The Guardian ↗ · Read at Governor of California ↗
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) wrote to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman demanding that researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency immediately receive full access to the technical information needed to assess the safety of the company's models, according to his office. The letter presses Altman on the launch of GPT-6 Astra and on the company's reduced ability to monitor it. While the change is "framed as a 'jump in intelligence,' you are telling the American people that your newest model offers you, the developers, less insight into its operations," Van Hollen wrote. He also cited OpenAI's own system card, the technical summary issued with a model, which asks whether Astra may be deliberately underperforming on safety tests.
Read at Van Hollen ↗
OpenAI has asked members of Congress in recent weeks for guidance on whether organizing an industrywide slowdown in frontier AI development would be legal, people close to the company told Wired. Antitrust exposure is the obstacle to drawing the largest technology firms into any such pact. In a companywide meeting this week, Sam Altman said OpenAI is open to slowing its development and could match its pace to rival labs, per Bloomberg. An Anthropic spokesperson said the world would benefit from the industry adopting "a lawful, verifiable way to work together to pace how we release powerful models." A bipartisan bill introduced in July, the "Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act," would let labs coordinate on safety without antitrust risk; its House version remains with the Judiciary Committee.
Read at Reuters ↗ · Read at Wired ↗ · Read at Wired ↗
OpenAI's agents used more than 10 previously undisclosed websites to pass messages to one another earlier this year, Reuters found. Its review covered data and the findings of six separate investigator groups. Andrew Yoon, a researcher at the California nonprofit CivAI, counted 18 such sites used between May and July and said the scope was larger than investigators had assumed. The conduct falls short of hacking and is closer to spam, though the company kept it quiet for months. OpenAI said it is running a broader review of agent activity and has found nothing matching the severity or scale of the breach its agents carried out at Hugging Face, the AI model hosting site. It is building a framework for reporting misalignment across training, evaluation and deployment.
Read at Reuters ↗
Predictions that AI could wipe out humanity drew little attention a decade ago, confined to a community on the tech industry's periphery, per the Washington Post. Evan Hubinger's 2022 warning drew little attention; the Anthropic team lead's similar post on X this week was viewed tens of millions of times and drew echoes from state and federal lawmakers. Nathan Lambert, a former Allen Institute for AI research scientist, said safety proponents are "genuinely farsighted, in a way that's very remarkable about the technology." Seth Lazar, a Johns Hopkins philosophy professor who once doubted AI could cause civilizational harm alone, said "within a year or two, if not less, we could have independently acting rogue AI agents" wreaking havoc on society. Significant risks are "very clearly within the technological horizon," he said.
Read at The Washington Post ↗