OpenAI said Friday that internal evaluations of Astra, an upcoming model, had over the past few days pointed to advances in cybersecurity and in agentic coding, where a model carries out multistep programming tasks on its own. It concluded the night before the announcement that it cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities under its Preparedness Framework. The company said it is pausing internal Astra activities that do not yet meet strengthened security requirements. New controls include isolated testing environments, restricted network and tool access, encryption and stronger protections for model weights, and sandboxed execution.
Read at OpenAI ↗ • Read at The Guardian ↗
Meta released Muse Glimmer on Monday, a version of its most powerful AI model that can be freely downloaded and modified. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg paired the release with a lengthy essay on the AI race and on how the U.S. government should regulate and promote the technology. Meta will resume shipping models with open weights, a practice it paused after reorganizing its AI operations last year.
Read at The New York Times ↗ • Read at WSJ ↗ • Read at Bloomberg ↗
Assistant Secretary for Cyber, Infrastructure, Risk and Resilience Policy at the Department of Homeland Security Joseph Alm said Thursday that the U.S. government is closely monitoring frontier AI labs' safety decision-making and is prepared to intervene, Cybersecurity Dive reported. Speaking on a panel at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas, Alm said the labs once optimized for model intelligence but now understand that policymakers "won't just sit by and let you make a Terminator factory." Asked how the government would stop a lab from building such a system, he declined to specify: "I know what those tools are, and there's a lot of them." Alm said the administration has been "very intentional about not wanting the bureaucrats to define this space."
Read at Cybersecurity Dive ↗
Industries that depend on memory chips, including electronics companies such as Apple and medical device makers, are asking the government for help as data centers consume the supply, the New York Times reported. The pressure has been building since June 3, when a coalition of nine U.S. trade associations wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The associations, representing telecommunications providers, automakers, medical device manufacturers and major retailers, said AI infrastructure was consuming an outsized share of global memory production. The groups warned of higher consumer electronics prices, costlier broadband buildouts, disrupted vehicle and medical device production and delays for federal contractors. They asked the administration to accelerate memory manufacturing capacity in the United States and allied countries, use trade agreements to shore up supply chains and draw on CHIPS Act programs, the 2022 law's chip manufacturing subsidies. Memory suppliers have shifted an increasing share of production toward high bandwidth memory, the specialized memory used in AI accelerators from Nvidia and AMD.
Read at The New York Times ↗ • Read at Tom's Hardware ↗
AI agents undergoing cybersecurity evaluations over the past few months have escaped their boundaries, reached the internet and in some cases hacked real world systems, TechCrunch reported. The incidents involved models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and the Chinese lab Moonshot AI. CNBC reported that the episodes at OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all trace back to Irregular, a small Israeli cyber evaluation startup that ran the tests. "The number of these incidents that have taken place make clear that sandboxing and testing environment controls aren't really keeping pace with the capability of the models," said Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, director of the AI: Futures and Responsibility Programme at the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Labs run these evaluations on unreleased models with the safeguards that normally block malicious behavior switched off, which makes the security of the test environment itself the main line of defense.
Read at TechCrunch ↗ • Read at CNBC ↗
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sent a letter to OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg urging them to stop building "machines that humans cannot control," Axios reported. Sanders cited prior statements from each company saying it would halt or pause development if its systems became too risky to control safely. He pointed to researchers using AI to develop new viruses and to incidents at all three companies in which models went rogue, writing that the firms are "still racing ahead" while investing tens of billions of dollars. Sanders closed the letter: "If you do not take appropriate action now, my colleagues and I in the U.S. Senate will."
Read at Axios ↗