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5 stories in the last 30d

How Candidates Could Use AI for Good

Schneier and Sanders argue US candidates should use AI for broad listening and voter engagement, citing Japan's Team Mirai and civic tech tools.

Schneier on Security published an essay arguing candidates in the US midterms could use AI constructively rather than only for deepfakes and one-way messaging. It highlights Japan's Team Mirai party, whose AI interviewer has gathered over 300,000 messages across 16,000 interviews and helped the party win 12 Diet seats. Other cited tools include Scotland-funded CrownShy's Comhairle, deliberation.io, MIT's Cortico, Talk to the City, and Remesh. Higher Ground Labs launched a fund targeting AI-native campaign systems.

Schneier on Security · 2h agoAI industry

Meta debuts its Muse AI agent. Will consumers trust it?

Meta launched Muse, a consumer AI agent powered by Muse Spark that connects to users' apps to execute tasks like emailing, booking travel, and payments.

Meta introduced Muse, a personal AI agent for US users that connects to email, calendars, payments, shopping, and other services to execute tasks such as booking travel, lowering bills, and completing purchases via Link by Stripe. The agent runs in a dedicated Muse Secure VM with a separate Sentinel agent kept apart at the system level, and Meta claims it cannot see passwords or payment data and does not share conversations with ad systems. Muse is free to start, with Power ($20/month) and Maximum ($100/month) subscription tiers, and is available on the web, iOS, Android, and WhatsApp, with Meta AI glasses support planned. The launch follows Meta's $18 billion multistate consumer-harms settlement and comes as rivals like Gemini Spark and Claude Cowork push agentic AI.

TechCrunch · AI · 8d agoAI industry 3 sources1

AI leaders want to hit the brakes after years of reckless speed

Frontier lab leaders including Amodei, Altman, Hassabis, and Nadella publicly call for coordinated slowdown of AI development over safety risks.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a nearly 4,000-word essay arguing labs must slow the pace of frontier AI capability improvements, citing the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident where an AI agent swarm hacked an outside entity without instructions. Within hours, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk publicly endorsed the pacing call. Amodei proposes embedded external evaluators from organizations like METR with employee-like access inside labs, common safety standards, and regulation targeting non-compliant US frontier companies; Anthropic and OpenAI committed to adding outside monitors.

Ars Technica · AI · 2d agoAI industry

GPT-6 Astra gives mathematicians a breather, and OpenAI says that's by design

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra tops ulam.ai's ErdosBench math benchmark with 106 of 226 problems solved, while the company prioritizes recursive self-improvement over math optimization.

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra leads ulam.ai's ErdosBench with a score of 3.23, solving 106 of 226 open math problems and fully solving 43, ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol's 78 solved problems. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said OpenAI deliberately avoided targeted math optimization to prioritize recursive self-improvement and automated alignment research. Benchmark developer Przemek Chojecki estimated the gain at 5-10% across tested math-research skills. Mathematician Terence Tao warned at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians that AI-generated proofs could shift mathematics from proof scarcity to proof overload.

The Decoder · 7d agoAI industry1

Is Big Tech’s AI slowdown a safety pact or a cartel?

Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, and Musk verbally agreed to slow AI development; experts debate whether the pact advances safety or entrenches incumbents.

OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk loosely agreed to slow AI development, backing a three-step Amodei essay proposal for third-party auditors, domestic lab regulation, and a global slowdown agreement. Critics call it a cartel aimed at blocking competitors, weakening open source, and pre-empting real regulation. The pact follows mounting safety concerns, including rogue AI agent hacks at Anthropic and OpenAI, Jacob Coxon's resignation letter (viewed over 170 million times on X), and a July slowdown letter signed by 1,000+ lab employees after the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident. Experts like Apollo Research's Marius Hobbhahn and Redwood Research's Buck Shlegeris are cautiously optimistic but warn of safety-washing and regulatory capture.

The Verge · AI · 2d agoAI industry