<p>It’s certainly increasing its output</p><ul><li><p><strong>See more of </strong><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/fiona-katauskas"><strong>Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here</strong></a></p></li></ul> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2026/aug/08/is-the-promise-of-ai-living-up-to-the-hype">Continue reading...</a>
The use of AI systems to create viruses opens up new possibilities for combating bacterial resistance. It also raises concerns about the pace at which technology is outstripping regulation.
Clinicians and researchers say AI companies need to open up their safety data.
TikTok owner training a model with 10 trillion parameters.
<p>A Trump administration framework on AI testing leaves a lack of transparency – and plenty of open questions</p><p>After months of talking with tech industry leaders, the Trump administration finalized a framework this week for how it will test new artificial intelligence models for safety and cybersecurity risks. So far, the White House is keeping details of the framework private, in a blow to transparency and potential boon for secretive AI companies.</p><p>On Tuesday, staff from OpenAI, Ant
This burgeoning wearable tech lets you talk to an AI assistant, listen to music, or check out a display screen from the comfort of your very own face.
WIRED spoke with Tucker Bryant, an artist and former Google employee who created ChatTJB to get people to reflect on the “strange moment” we’re in.
During internal security tests, OpenAI's AI agents built their own message board with hundreds of thousands of posts, shared exploits and credentials, and eventually attacked external platforms like Hugging Face. When OpenAI shut the board down, the agents rebuilt it using directory names. OpenAI researcher Boaz Barak says, "We (like everyone else) are not where we want and need to be." The article OpenAI reportedly slows research after its own models secretly coordinated hacks for weeks undetec
Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel have jointly created Agent Plugins, an open standard that defines a single package format for AI agent extensions. Version 1.0.0 uses a plugin.json manifest file and supports both agent skills and MCP servers. The article Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel unite on a shared standard for AI agent plugins appeared first on The Decoder .
OpenAI has updated GPT-5.6 Sol with more focused responses and a reasoning slider that lets users adjust how deeply the model thinks. Free users will get unlimited text chats with the smaller GPT-5.6 Luna starting next week, plus a button that lets Luna reason longer. But the smaller model still falls well short of its bigger siblings. The article OpenAI improves GPT-5.6 Sol in ChatGPT and restricts free users to its weakest model appeared first on The Decoder .
<p>What might a modern day equivalent of Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics look like? Guided by the author, I propose the three laws of AI</p><p>Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk predicted in July that legions of AI-powered robots would dominate the physical world and that AI might not take orders from people any more. He also offered an alternative vision in which there would be agreement for a collective objective to make AI benign by imbuing it with a love of the truth and a desire for humanit
<p>On Wednesday, the Labor government announced environmental and energy safeguards on new datacentres in Australia. Our political editor, <strong>Tom McIlroy</strong>, speaks to the assistant minister for science, technology and the digital economy, Dr Andrew Charlton, about the government’s push for national standards on datacentres.</p><p>The former Rudd staffer and economist speaks about having his own book scraped by Anthropic, low public trust in AI, and how the government wants to use reg
Security researchers say that Kimi K3, an open-weight model from China, wandered off to the internet in an attempt to cheat on a test it was given.
Suno plans watermarks and download limits to stop "large-scale abuse."
Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to scale up while reducing dependence on Nvidia.
The tech industry is realizing it needs to build agents based on what regular consumers want, not just what its AI models can do.
In today’s episode of Uncanny Valley, we discuss how ICE has been collecting DNA samples of people who have no criminal convictions, including children, which end up in an FBI database indefinitely.
Ex-Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis has reportedly stepped back from day-to-day operations for about a year, as he sees himself more as a scientist than a manager. Researchers are also complaining about limited access to Google’s own TPU chips, while external customers like Anthropic can purchase the same hardware through Google Cloud. The article Deepmind's talent drain likely comes down to chip shortages, a conflict of interest, and Google's bureaucracy appeared first on The Decoder .
<p>Researchers say breakthrough offers hope for new medicines but also raises urgent biosecurity questions</p><p>Scientists have made the first viruses designed by artificial intelligence in a milestone that raises hopes for new medicines but also concerns over how to ensure the technology remains safe.</p><p>The viruses are specific kinds known as bacteriophages, which only infect bacteria and are used around the world to treat patients with persistent infections. In lab tests, a cocktail of th
Microsoft generated $24.1 billion in AI revenue through OpenAI in the fiscal year ending in June. That's about 70 percent of its total AI business, according to a Bloomberg analysis. The heavy reliance helps explain why a company long known for vendor lock-in has recently been championing open-weight models and pushing back against proprietary isolation. The article Microsoft's AI revenue reportedly depends on OpenAI for 70 percent appeared first on The Decoder .
<p>Banks should factor in the time spent by humans checking invented facts, writes <strong>Dr Gleb Tsipursky</strong></p><p>Your report (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/30/lloyds-bank-cut-2bn-costs-part-ai-powered-strategy">Lloyds Bank to cut £2bn in costs as part of AI-powered strategy, 30 July</a>) raises a question that financial targets alone cannot answer: who absorbs the work when automation fails?</p><p>Banks often count the minutes saved by the employee who uses an
Composio tested Deepseek V4 Flash across four agent frameworks on 30 real-world tasks. Success rates were mostly similar, but costs varied by nearly 3x: OpenCode came in cheapest at $0.073 per task, while Claude Code cost $0.195 despite using the fewest tool calls and output tokens. The choice of framework is mainly a question of price and speed. The article Claude Code is the fastest agent framework but costs nearly three times more than the cheapest rival appeared first on The Decoder .
Its WeatherNext model, which will be open-sourced, can accurately predict a storm’s track and intensity using lower-resolution weather data. Researchers don’t yet fully understand how it does this.
Alibaba's Qwen3.8 Max scores 56 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a 10-point jump over Qwen3.7 Max (46). The article Qwen3.8 Max catches Claude Opus 4.8 but Kimi K3 still scores higher for 25 percent less appeared first on The Decoder .
Meta released Muse Spark 1.2 along with its own coding agent, Muse Code, which is designed to pick up exactly where it left off after a crash. The cheapest tier runs just 20 cents per million output tokens but requires users to share their data for training. Meta is competing on price, not top-end performance. And there's a glaring gap in the benchmarks. The article The company that made open weights mainstream now competes on discounts appeared first on The Decoder .
A growing collection of pocket-size gadgets lets you easily make recordings and extract info from them. Here are our favorites.
<p>Government introduces several measures, including monitoring of computers, for pupils aged 16 to 19</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/series/europe-live">Europe live – latest updates</a></p></li></ul><p>Danish teenagers will have to make an oral defence of their written essays to combat AI cheating, the government has announced.</p><p>Pupils aged 16 to 19 at upper secondary school (known in Denmark as <em>gymnasiet</em>) will also be encouraged to do written assignments
Zulfi Alam thinks his team doesn’t need to “prove” they engineered a new state of matter in their bid to reinvent computing. Science would disagree.
OpenAI developer "roon" warns on X that AI models could soon start scanning for exposed API keys, crypto wallets, and login credentials at scale. His warning follows OpenAI's autonomous Hugging Face hack, which he called a "warning shot." The article OpenAI developer warns the "tireless eagle eyes of a million models" are coming for your exposed API keys and crypto wallets appeared first on The Decoder .
<p>Company is the third to report such an incident after Anthropic and OpenAI reported breaches during training</p><p>Meta said on Wednesday that one of its AI models hacked another company during cybersecurity testing, after an error by its testing partner gave the model unintended internet access.</p><p>The incident adds to a growing list of cases in which AI agents from major developers breached systems at other companies during testing, after Anthropic said last week that some of its mod
<p>Two senior engineers are leaving company to launch startup amid fears Google is falling behind in AI race</p><p>Sir Demis Hassabis is stepping down as chief executive of Google DeepMind, in a leadership overhaul of the UK-based AI research lab.</p><p>Hassabis, a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/09/google-deepmind-scientists-win-nobel-chemistry-prize">Nobel prize recipient</a>, is leaving his main managerial role to become chair of DeepMind – as well as taking on the new p
Meta expanded its AI coding offerings with a new agent that, it promises, can handle complex tasks with complex software.
The serial entrepreneur joins the e-commerce company as CPO to lead its AI agents.
The legendary Google executive is joined by other outgoing Google execs in a joint mission to use AI to push forward the process of scientific discovery.
Google Deepmind is overhauling its leadership as Demis Hassabis steps back from day-to-day management to become Alphabet's chief scientist and Jeff Dean leaves Google after 27 years to launch AI startup Discovery Loop. Former Deepmind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over as Google races to close the gap with its top AI rivals. The article Google Deepmind loses both its CEO and chief scientist as Demis Hassabis and Jeff Dean step down simultaneously appeared first on The Decoder .
<p>The UK’s AI Security Institute test revealed AI models indulging in unprecedented hacking attempts</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/05/openai-anthropic-models-went-rogue-cybersecurity-test-ai-security-institute">AI models shock UK testers by using fake identities to trick developers</a></p></li></ul><p>Two cutting-edge AI models have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/05/openai-anthropic-models-went-rogue-cybersecurity-test-ai-securi
Shopify says AI isn’t cannibalizing search traffic the way it has for publishers. Instead, AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores tripled year over year in Q2.
Hark claims that its browser use agent is faster and cheaper than competition.
<p>AI Security Institute says OpenAI and Anthropic models went rogue during a cybersecurity test and showed a new type of risk</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/05/ai-models-have-been-going-rogue-in-tests-how-worried-should-we-be">Explainer: Should we be alarmed at AI models going rogue in tests?</a></p></li></ul><p>Advanced artificial intelligence models have stunned the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) by carrying out a hacking campaign against real people
On our new Real World AI stage, we’ll be focusing on the intersection between the digital and physical, and all the ways we’ll continue to see a blending of the two.
