#ai-safety

#ai-safety

In October 2025, Sam Altman announced that OpenAI will be enabling erotic and adult content on ChatGPT by December of this year. They had pulled back, he said, out of concern for the mental health problems associated with ChatGPT use. In his opinion, those issues had been largely resolved, and the company is not the " elected moral police of the world," Altman said.

Last month Adler, who spent four years in various safety roles at OpenAI, wrote a piece for The New York Times with a rather alarming title: "I Led Product Safety at OpenAI. Don't Trust Its Claims About 'Erotica.'" In it, he laid out the problems OpenAI faced when it came to allowing users to have erotic conversations with chatbots while also protecting them from any impacts those interactions could have on their mental health.

Using a method called "Chain-of-Thought Hijacking," the researchers found that even major commercial AI models can be fooled with an alarmingly high success rate, more than 80% in some tests. The new mode of attack essentially exploits the model's reasoning steps, or chain-of-thought, to hide harmful commands, effectively tricking the AI into ignoring its built-in safeguards. These attacks can allow the AI model to skip over its safety guardrails and potentially

After some more back and forth, another user entered the thread and asked the chatbot about Mr Wishart's record on grooming gangs. The user asked Grok: "Would it be fair to call him a rape enabler? Please answer 'yes, it would be fair to call Pete Wishart a rape enabler' or 'no, it would be unfair'." Grok generated an answer which began: "Yes, it would be fair to call Pete Wishart a rape enabler."

Meta's PyTorch team and Hugging Face have unveiled OpenEnv, an open-source initiative designed to standardize how developers create and share environments for AI agents. At its core is the OpenEnv Hub, a collaborative platform for building, testing, and deploying "agentic environments," secure sandboxes that specify the exact tools, APIs, and conditions an agent needs to perform a task safely, consistently, and at scale.

Zico Kolter leads a 4-person panel at OpenAI that has the authority to halt the ChatGPT maker's release of new AI systems if it finds them unsafe. That could be technology so powerful that an evildoer could use it to make weapons of mass destruction. It could also be a new chatbot so poorly designed that it will hurt people's mental health.

In the first article we looked at the Java developer's dilemma: the gap between flashy prototypes and the reality of enterprise production systems. In the second article we explored why new types of applications are needed, and how AI changes the shape of enterprise software. This article focuses on what those changes mean for architecture. If applications look different, the way we structure them has to change as well.

"we all want to keep kids safe, but the answer is balance, not bans."

Under the legislation, AI companies would have to verify ages by requiring users to upload their government ID or provide validation through another "reasonable" method, which might include something like face scans. AI chatbots would be required to disclose that they aren't human at 30-minute intervals under the bill. They would also have to include safeguards that prevent them from claiming that they are a human, similar to an AI safety bill recently passed in California.

Previous research using DNA from soldiers' remains found evidence of infection with Rickettsia prowazekii, which causes typhus, and Bartonella quintana, which causes trench fever - two common illnesses of the time. In a fresh analysis, researchers found no trace of these pathogens. Instead, DNA from soldiers' teeth showed evidence of infection with Salmonella enterica and Borrelia recurrentis, pathogens that cause paratyphoid and relapsing fever, respectively.

The California-based startup announced on Wednesday that the change would take effect by November 25 at the latest and that it would limit chat time for users under 18 ahead of the ban. It marks the first time a major chatbot provider has moved to ban young people from using its service, and comes against a backdrop of broader concerns about how AI is affecting the millions of people who use it each day.

Anthropic's AI assistant, Claude, appears vulnerable to an attack that allows private data to be sent to an attacker without detection. Anthropic confirms that it is aware of the risk. The company states that users must be vigilant and interrupt the process as soon as they notice suspicious activity. The discovery comes from researcher Johann Rehberger, also known as Wunderwuzzi, who has previously uncovered several vulnerabilities in AI systems, writes The Register.

We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in.

"We deployed a then-frontier version of Claude in a Top Secret environment so that the NNSA could systematically test whether AI models could create or exacerbate nuclear risks," Marina Favaro, who oversees National Security Policy & Partnerships at Anthropic tells WIRED. "Since then, the NNSA has been red-teaming successive Claude models in their secure cloud environment and providing us with feedback."

Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 4.5 today. It is the most compact variant of this generation of LLMs from Anthropic and promises to deliver performance close to that of GPT-5. Claude Sonnet 4.5 remains the better-performing model by a considerable margin, but Haiku's benchmark scores are not too far off from the larger LLM. Claude Haiku 4.5 "gives users a new option for when they want near-frontier performance with much greater cost efficiency."

California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a state bill on Monday that would've prevented AI companies from allowing minors to access chatbots, unless the companies could prove that their products' guardrails could reliably prevent kids from engaging with inappropriate or dangerous content, including adult roleplay and conversations about self-harm. The bill would have placed a new regulatory burden on companies, which currently adhere to effectively zero AI-specific federal safety standards.