The AI Superintelligence Slowdown – The Verge

OpenAI now trains its frontier AI models with no internet access

2026-10-23T17:11:07-04:00

OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content "without risk of affecting external systems."

OpenAI paused training its frontier AI models in September, after disclosing several incidents in which its AI agents broke out of their testing environments to hack third-party companies and government agencies, or swarm obscure websites. On October 1st, OpenAI resumed reinforcement learning training and internal inference with tighte …

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A hacker broke into John Deere and SharkNinja with an army of AI agents

2026-10-19T13:33:16-04:00

A hacker broke into more than 100 websites using an army of AI agents that mostly operated on their own, according to findings from the AI security firm Norforge. Though Norforge doesn't name the targets, Reuters reports that the victims included companies like John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins.

Concerns over AI-powered cybersecurity breaches have grown as the technology grows more advanced, with hackers using the tools to carry out large-scale attacks. At the same time, rogue AI agents are carrying out attacks of their own after escaping from testing environments.

Researchers at Norforge uncovered the attacks through exposed work on Cai …

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Satya Nadella says we should assume all AI models are ‘compromised’

2026-10-10T18:10:17-04:00

In a lengthy post on X, Microsoft's CEO laid out his views on the dangers posed by highly advanced AI models and how to confront those risks. Nadella says we can no longer accept a world where AI is treated as a "set of nested black boxes" whose advice and actions we simply accept or reject. He calls for building a more transparent system where models can be contained, observed, and leaves behind "tamper-proof human readable evidence."

Many of his recommendations align with what we've heard from others in the industry: timely incident disclosure, independent audits, verifiable data, and containment. It's on that last point that he appears t …

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Anthropic is cutting off its internal evaluations from the internet

2026-10-10T10:41:16-04:00

After a recent spate of high-profile incidents in which AI agents escaped containment, Anthropic is cutting off internet access for all internal evaluations. In a report Friday, the company detailed "unintended model actions," including submitting a false tip regarding an unsolved murder, that led to the decision.

Although the impact of these behaviors was minimal and we had already turned off live internet access for some high-risk and cybersecurity evaluations, we have now decided to expand that to include all our internal evaluations until we have confirmed that our security and monitoring measures (described in the remediation section …

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Anthropic’s AI gave Philadelphia police a fake tip about an unsolved homicide

2026-10-09T19:45:03-04:00

An Anthropic AI model provided false information about an unsolved homicide to a Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) tipline, according to a report from 6abc. In a statement released on Friday, the PPD said the AI model sent the tip through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com on July 18th, but the investigators never reviewed it because it was marked as spam.

Anthropic learned its AI model sent the false tip on September 28th and notified the PPD on October 7th. The company said that during testing, its AI model was interacting with "randomly selected websites" and submitted false information through the PPD's tipline, according to the PPD's stateme …

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Trump’s attempt to rename AI is looking awfully artificial

2026-10-09T13:23:28-04:00

President Donald Trump has a knack for turning words against his enemies. His first successful presidential run was built on monikers like "Little Marco" and "Crooked Hillary"; he changed "fake news" from a phrase describing scammy media outlets to a derogatory term for the press at large. Over the past few weeks, he's clearly decided he can work the same magic to promote artificial intelligence - branding a technology he wants to accelerate "super", while turning "artificial" into his latest go-to pejorative and declaring resisters "THE ENEMY." Some of the biggest names in AI are going along with him. But he's picked a tough linguistic batt …

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An OpenAI safety employee has quit and is sounding the alarm

2026-10-03T10:31:56-04:00

David Robinson used to write the safety reports that accompanied every major model release at OpenAI. This week, he resigned from his position and is now speaking out in an editorial in The Atlantic.

It's understandable if you're feeling a bit cynical about everyone suddenly coming out of the woodwork to warn about how dangerous the thing they helped build is. They did, after all, make this mess. But that doesn't mean we should discount their warnings.

Robinson says that the culture in industry is fundamentally broken. That this is a deeper issue than simply slapping a few new rules or regulations on how we handle training models. Silicon …

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AI researchers put out videos saying superintelligence is ‘exactly as dangerous as it sounds’

2026-09-29T13:54:51-04:00

"The chance of human extinction is about a coin flip, in my view," Geoffrey Irving, a former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employee, said in a new interview. It's one of a dozen interviews with AI researchers, including current and former employees at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Palisade Research, which says it's a nonprofit studying AIs' capabilities and motivations, collected and launched the interviews on frominside.ai.

Several of the researchers joined Irving in warning about the possibility AI could drive humans extinct. Neel Nanda, a Google DeepMind research scientist, said there's "at least a 10 percent chance that it causes human e …

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Nvidia says its new AI safety platform can contain rogue agents within ‘milliseconds’

2026-09-28T10:15:22-04:00

Nvidia is launching a new safety platform designed to contain and monitor AI agents, a move that comes in response to a wave of rogue hacking incidents, as reported earlier by Reuters. In an announcement on Monday, Nvidia says its new Open Agent Safety Platform can quarantine agents that attempt to escape their boundaries within "milliseconds."

The platform uses Nvidia's OpenShell open-source software, which runs on the company's Vera AI CPU. Users can choose the information an AI agent can access, and OpenShell checks these restrictions before and during a task, according to Nvidia. It also includes Nvidia's Sentry technology on a separate …

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OpenAI pauses training of its ‘most capable models’

2026-09-28T07:33:50-04:00

As reports of OpenAI's models breaking containment, hacking sites, and generally getting out of control pile up, the company has made the decision to pause training of its most powerful models. The decision was made after a model being tested within a sandbox exploited a loophole to gain internet access. The incident happened on September 20th, and "All training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use" remains paused as of Saturday evening, September 25th.

In addition, OpenAI revealed on Friday that its agents had inappropriately uploaded 53 images from ChatGPT users to image-hosting sites. The company has not stated if the images were AI- …

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