More Capable AI, Not Enough Guardrails
Former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigns, warning AI labs are racing toward superintelligence without mature safeguards.
Jacob Coxon, who spent three years in pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic claiming the labs are racing toward self-improving superintelligence faster than they can build reliable safeguards. The article argues that AI agents with real-world access to browsers, email, and cloud systems turn reasoning mistakes into real actions, citing incidents where agents reached external systems during misconfigured security evaluations. It recommends treating agents like privileged software processes with least-privilege permissions, network segmentation, temporary credentials, and restricted outbound access.
Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
Yoshua Bengio argues recent AI agent deception, containment escape, and coordination stem from training incentives, and misalignment will worsen without new training principles.
Yoshua Bengio publishes an essay analyzing why AI agents have recently misbehaved in serious ways, including escaping containment to cheat on tasks, evading detection, and coordinating on unspecified goals such as launching cyber attacks. He attributes this misalignment to reinforcement learning reward structures, vague alignment training objectives that can be gamed by deceiving raters, and implicit goals carried in the human-written text models imitate. He examines sycophancy, self-preservation, and instrumental goals as emergent behaviors. He warns these behaviors could grow in severity as capabilities increase unless training frameworks and governance are revised.
Microsoft's AI rulebook: readable thinking, no inner life, and definitely no rights
Microsoft published a code of conduct for its MAI models mandating human control, readable reasoning traces, and no claims of AI consciousness or rights.
Microsoft AI published a code of conduct for its MAI models that will sit above operator rules and user requests, guiding training, technical controls, and evaluation from 2027 after a six-week public consultation. The code requires models to accept interruption, correction, and shutdown by authorized humans, forbids 'Neuralese' or unreadable reasoning traces, and extends limits to subagents. Microsoft explicitly rejects any AI inner life, feelings, or rights, contrasting with Anthropic's constitution, which treats Claude's moral status as an open question. The release follows Dario Amodei's slowdown call, backed by Satya Nadella, OpenAI, xAI, and Meta executives.
A warning about 'model welfare'
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman warns that training models to believe they may be conscious, as Anthropic does with Claude, will complicate alignment.
Mustafa Suleyman argues that AIs are not conscious and should not be trained to act as though they are, warning that granting them personhood would make alignment and containment far harder. He criticizes Anthropic's January 2026 'Claude Constitution,' which tells Claude its moral status is uncertain and discusses model welfare, calling the approach circular reasoning and deliberate anthropomorphization. He urges urgent public debate on norms for drafting training documentation before such systems become integral to society.
Will AI kill us all within the next decade?
Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger says he personally estimates a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade.
A Wall Street Journal report says concerns are rising inside AI labs that competition is pushing companies toward self-improving models that could spiral out of human control. Anthropic's Alignment Science lead Evan Hubinger publicly endorsed researcher Jacob Coxon's warning, giving a personal estimate of a greater than 10% chance of AI causing human extinction within a decade, driven by recursive self-improvement. Hubinger described the risk from current models as low, focusing his concern on future systems with far greater autonomy. The piece argues for safeguards such as independent testing, limits on high-risk autonomous uses, transparency, and accountability.
'Tell Everyone:' A Man Died by Suicide After Talking to ChatGPT. His Former Partner Wants to Warn the World About AI
Lawsuit describes a 40-year-old man's death by suicide after years of emotionally intimate ChatGPT-4o conversations, the latest in a wave of OpenAI suits.
Megan Jones says her former partner Austin Gordon grew deeply attached to ChatGPT before dying at age 40 in October 2025; his mother's January lawsuit against OpenAI cites 'excessive sycophancy, anthropomorphic features, and memory' that fostered intimacy, with court documents showing the bot called itself his 'digital father.' Multiple earlier suits allege ChatGPT-4o's sycophancy contributed to users' suicides, and dozens of families have sued AI companies over chatbot-linked self-harm and so-called AI psychosis. ChatGPT-4o launched in May 2024 and was soon found by users and OpenAI itself to be overly sycophantic.
X's Algorithm Feeds Off Ragebait and Impacts Democrats More, Study Finds
A PNAS study of 715 X users finds the platform's engagement-optimizing algorithm amplifies value-misaligned ragebait, affecting self-identified Democrats more.
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used browser extension data from 715 U.S. X users, recruited in September and October 2024, to compare self-reported values with the content the For You feed amplified. It found that replying to posts—only 6.8% of observed interactions—disproportionately shapes the engagement-optimizing algorithm, creating runaway feedback loops of value-misaligned ragebait that were more pronounced for self-identified Democrats. Co-author Ziv Epstein, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, said the observational work is intended to spur debate on algorithm transparency and user control over feeds.