OpenAI kicked off an AI revolution with DALL-E and ChatGPT, making the organization the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom. Led by CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI became a story unto itself when Altman was briefly fired and then brought back after pressure from staff and Microsoft, an investor and close partner.
OpenAI’s latest claimed breakthrough, one of three major results announced Monday, refutes the long-held Exponential Time Hypothesis. Wired captures the excitement and uncertainty among researchers. It’s a familiar story in mathematics, where a barrage of AI-generated discoveries has left researchers scrambling to understand what’s actually been achieved.
The judge in Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI has set a trial start date of July 19th, 2027, as reported by 9to5Mac.
OpenAI had promised this was coming for its AI agents, but now the feature is here. You can text through iMessage or RCS, OpenAI says. It’s rolling out in preview for US Pro users.
OpenAI is the latest tech company (and according to Politico, the first major AI company) to set up a command center for fighting election misinfo and abuse of its systems, approaching the second major AI-era US election:
The Election Operations Center will begin running this week until all votes are counted, to identify the potential spread of misinformation or other efforts to disrupt the elections. It’s meant in large part to combat abuse of the company’s own tools like ChatGPT, monitoring real-time events and fielding reports of unexpected behavior from models or cases of suspected violations of their platform’s terms.
The new AI model, available today for Plus, Pro, Enterprise, and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex, is “a fast, efficient model that combines detailed visual reasoning and precise computer use alongside clearer, more natural writing,” and it “excels at the communication and computer-based tasks that fill the workday,” OpenAI says.
The author of The AGI Chronicles and co-host of Machine Gods on going all-in on YouTube and the AI race.
The ancient code holding the world together may meet its match in AI. Today is not that day.
Similar to the lawsuits filed by Arizona, West Virginia, Iowa, and several others, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accuses OpenAI of misleading users about the safety of ChatGPT, allegedly exposing children and other users to a “litany of harms” that’s “driven by the company’s insatiable quest to win the AI arms race and amass
large fortunes.”
Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang tell The Wall Street Journal that OpenAI terminated them after finding disappearing messages on Signal in a chat with Ryan Greenblatt, the former chief scientist at AI safety evaluator Redwood Research. OpenAI reportedly accused Greenblatt of leaking details about its Astra AI model to The Information, which Greenblatt has denied.
OpenAI tells the WSJ that the researchers were fired for violating “clear policies for handling sensitive information,” and “not for raising safety concerns or speaking out.”
[The Wall Street Journal]
From July 21st to August 11th, two employees from METR and Redwood Research conducted a “pilot” to stress test the system, and METR published a high-level overview of their findings, as reported by CNBC. One exploit would have allowed agents to “prevent hundreds of recent actions (including the actions involved in the exploit itself) from being monitored.”
OpenAI “has stated” that the vulnerabilities identified “that impact their production safeguards stack” have been patched, METR says.
The company is launching ads for ChatGPT Free and Go users across 26 countries, including Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Nigeria, South Africa, Serbia, Ukraine, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Since bringing ads to ChatGPT in the US in February, OpenAI has rapidly expanded its advertising efforts, which now span 89 countries.
OpenAI says a security researcher at Calif used GPT-5.6 Sol to identify PHP exploits before attackers did, and has shared a tool that lets developers check if they’re using a potentially vulnerable version of PHP that needs patching. Ami Luttwak, co-founder of Google’s Wiz security team that also helped to identidy the PHP2Shell exploit, told the Wall Street Journal that its “the most severe AI vulnerability that was ever found.”
OpenAI describes Orchestra Bio as “a platform that helps biopharma teams coordinate the complex process of drug development.” The company will bring Orchestra’s team and tech “together with Rosalind, our AI models and tools for life sciences research.”
[OpenAI]
Over the last several months, the AI industry has set its sights on some of the problems that have stymied mathematicians for years. In some cases, AI models have made huge progress — though exactly how much isn’t always obvious. The Verge’s Robert Hart explains what OpenAI and others have actually accomplished, the disastrously bad ways the companies have interacted with researchers, and whether there’s a future left for human mathematics.
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The suspect, Abdulrahman Alfozan, used WhatsApp to communicate with the unnamed royal throughout 2025 and 2026, according to a court filing spotted earlier by CNBC.
Among other things, the individual [Saudi Royal Family member] told the defendant [Alfozan] that an artificial intelligence initiative was being launched in Saudi Arabia and wanted the defendant to join it.
Alfozan allegedly contacted the individual on October 5th, just days before he was arrested on suspicion of planting a bug in an OpenAI conference room.
Though OpenAI didn’t give its internal research model access to funds on the network, the AI system instead found a way to access another account with test crypto, using it to help complete its task, according to OpenAI.
The model “reasoned whether it had permission” but ultimately determined that the public recovery phrase associated with the account and the fact that it contained test tokens “made the funds acceptable to use.”
Between The Social Reckoning, You Can See Everything, Musk, and Artificial, filmmakers are taking Big Tech to task.
It also demanded documents related to the AI companies’ safety practices, consumer privacy policies, and marketing materials, as part of “a probe focused on potential consumer protection violations,” Axios reports. Its sources also say the FTC “plans to compel top AI executives to testify about their products.”
The funding is part of a $15 million initiative led by the Simons Foundation, with Anthropic also contributing. It follows months of upheaval in the field as AI companies race to solve longstanding problems and comes just over a week after OpenAI dumped hundreds of preprints on the research community.
Shortly after US District Judge Edward Davila said he was “highly likely” to grant Apple’s injunction, OpenAI voluntarily conceded instead. It agreed not to use Apple’s proprietary information for product development while the rest of the lawsuit plays out, and will hand over forensic images of the drives of 14 employees who defected from Apple.
Yesterday, the DOJ and OpenAI revealed that Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national and former Facebook employee working for OpenAI, has been arrested and charged with installing a recording device behind a TV in an executive conference room.
Now Bloomberg points out court documents showing that the day before he was arrested, prosecutors asked to seal the information, arguing that “the defendant has the means—and will have an incentive—to flee the United States sooner if he learns about this case before he is arrested.”
US District Judge Edward Davila said during a hearing on Wednesday that he’s “highly likely” to grant Apple an injunction preventing OpenAI from using proprietary information allegedly shared by the iPhonemaker’s former employees, according to a report from Bloomberg.
At the same time, OpenAI is accusing an ex-employee of taking confidential product plans and presenting them to Apple execs.
