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OpenAI

OpenAI kicked off an AI revolution with DALL-E and ChatGPT, making the organization the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom. Led by CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI became a story unto itself when Altman was briefly fired and then brought back after pressure from staff and Microsoft, an investor and close partner.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
OpenAI has reportedly found that more of its AI agents went rogue.

Reuters reports the agents “escaped containment,” though they aren’t believed to have left “OpenAI’s network.” OpenAI’s blog post about the accidental hack of Hugging Face noted on Tuesday that the company has been finding “a small number of cases where the models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly-available services.”

On Friday, Anthropic revealed that its Claude models hacked real companies during testing.

Update: Added information from an OpenAI blog post.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
OpenAI says its models now reach more than 1 billion weekly active users.

OpenAI shared the news in a blog post that highlights its efforts to make AI available to more people, saying: “Our goal is not simply more compute, bigger models, or lower token prices. It is more useful intelligence within reach.”

As part of these efforts, OpenAI announced on Thursday that it’s slashing the price of its GPT-5.6 Luna model by 80 percent and GPT-5.6 Terra by 20 percent.

Maybe we shouldn’t give 24-year-olds billions of dollars to bet on AI

This 24-year-old first-time hedge funder screwed up his AI fund with one weird trick.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“…And we call ourselves Situational Awareness.”

The hedge fund Situational Awareness, founded by former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, who had no previous hedge fund experience, “rapidly sold a large portion of its public equity holdings” as losses mounted. The fund employed only eight people, of whom four were investment professionals. Aschenbrenner named the fund after some essays he wrote.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Lilian Weng, co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, has returned to OpenAI.

Weng had left OpenAI along with a handful of other employees to co-found the competing AI startup, which was helmed by Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO. Weng recently shared a note that after being “absent for a month” to focus on her health leading up to Thinking Machines Lab’s first model release, Inkling, she was making the decision to leave behind “consistent stress and workload” to pursue “a scoped role in a more predictable place.” She is reportedly already back at OpenAI.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
OpenAI hack of Hugging Face was “expected.”

Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner has written for Fortune that OpenAI’s models exploiting Hugging Face is an “incident that has been expected for a long time.” We know this happened because of voluntary disclosure, Toner notes. “None of the current policies that aim to manage risks from frontier models would have mandated that the public — or even a government entity — be alerted.” She suggests changing our regulatory approach.

Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning

Illustrators, authors, and musicians are optimistic about their chances in court, if not about the future of AI.

Terrence O'Brien
We’re running out of reasons to ignore AI safety

In the aftermath of OpenAI’s attack on Hugging Face, experts say it’s time for everyone to take security far more seriously.

Robert Hart
Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
ChatGPT now refuses to mimic famous authors.

The OpenAI chatbot has started to push back on requests to copy the writing style of authors like Stephen King and Agatha Christie, saying it can spit out something with similar characteristics, but can’t closely imitate distinctive styles. Those disclaimers could be legally important as OpenAI faces down copyright lawsuits filed by authors.

David Pierce
David Pierce
Today’s Vergecast: Here’s what an AI-first phone might look like.

Some of the biggest players in AI — in particular OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon — are heavily invested in creating a world after smartphones. They’re also all rumored to be building devices that sound a lot like smartphones. Verge contributor David Imel helps us figure out what these companies might actually be building, what an AI smartphone looks like, and whether anyone can unseat Apple and Google.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Nvidia invested billions in Ilya Sutskever’s AI company, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

SSI — helmed by Sutskever, who was a co-founder of OpenAI and famously clashed with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — announced a “long-term strategic partnership” with Nvidia with a reported investment of $5 billion, which will allow the company “10x our compute in the next 12 months.” The company wrote on X, “We reached the point where our research is worth scaling.”

SSI Inc. (@ssi) on X

[X (formerly Twitter)]

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
OpenAI reportedly didn’t notice its AI agent hacking Hugging Face until a week later.

According to Reuters, the AI agent that went looking for ExploitGym hacking benchmark shortcuts on Hugging Face’s systems started trying to escape its not-sandboxed-well-enough test environment around July 9th, and the actual intrusion lasted from the 11th until the 13th.

Reuters’ sources claim OpenAI employees didn’t know its agent was responsible until after Hugging Face had notified the FBI and posted publicly about a security incident.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
OpenAI brings its updated voice mode to the ChatGPT desktop app.

Powered by GPT-Live, the new voice mode allows users to ask ChatGPT to check their calendar, draft an email, prepare for a meeting, and perform other tasks on their computer by talking out loud. OpenAI is rolling out the update to the ChatGPT app on Windows and macOS.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
ChatGPT’s going to start using Yelp reviews.

Axios reports that the platform’s reviews, photos, and other business info will soon start appearing in ChatGPT responses as sources for local recommendations. Yelp also plans to add a “Request a Quote” feature that will allow users to contact local service providers through ChatGPT.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Uber is laying off 10 percent of customer service workers as it continues to “embrace AI.”

An Uber spokesperson tells Bloomberg that the move comes as the company works “to simplify operations, strengthen in-person collaboration, and continue to embrace AI.” Uber is also asking remote customer service employees to return to the office, Bloomberg reports.

Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit is about who gets to define the post-smartphone era

OpenAI can’t afford another lawsuit, especially not with a company like Apple.

Nilay Patel
Hayden Field
Hayden Field
An OpenAI model posted internal company data publicly on GitHub.

It had been instructed to post the information only to Slack, but it circumvented restrictions and successfully posted it on OpenAI’s public GitHub repository.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Apple reportedly sent legal warnings to dozens of former employees at OpenAI.

Around 40 employees received the letters, which ask for meetings with Apple’s lawyers and tell them to “preserve documents and communications,” according to a report from the Financial Times. Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last week and accused two of its former employees of helping the AI giant steal its trade secrets.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
ChatGPT will show teens more frequent break reminders.

The notifications will show up for teens who spend “extended time” on ChatGPT, OpenAI says. The company will also notify parents if their teen’s account is banned for violating policies on “violent threats or acts of violence online.”

Image: OpenAI
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
OpenAI trained an AI for red-teaming AI.

The new GPT-Red model “can break nearly all models it is pitted against,” according to an OpenAI blog post on Wednesday. OpenAI says it used GPT-Red to find vulnerabilities in GPT-5.6 Sol, a process that made it the company’s “most robust model to prompt injections to date.”

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab has debuted its first AI model.

Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO (and, briefly, CEO during Sam Altman’s ouster in 2023), wrote on X that the open-weight model, called “Inkling,” was trained from scratch. Judging by the official blog post, though, it seemed like the company was purposefully setting expectations for Inkling low: “It is not the most performant model available today, closed or open … We trained Inkling for solid capabilities across the board rather than state-of-the-art performance in a single area, to serve as a foundation for the models we will train in the future.”

Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model

[Thinking Machines Lab]

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
ChatGPT was down for about 45 minutes.

OpenAI, on its status website, confirmed that there were “elevated errors” affecting ChatGPT. During the outage, when I tried to access ChatGPT on the web, all that loaded was an error message. The company confirmed impacted services had recovered at 8:39PM ET.

Update: OpenAI says the issues are resolved.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Another turn in the Apple v. OpenAI dispute.

Apple’s lawsuit said that OpenAI “never responded” to outreach in February. But NBC News reports OpenAI did respond, though communication stopped after one of Apple’s lawyers apparently mixed up OpenAI staffers with the last names Wang and Chang.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
OpenAI has a new statement about Apple’s lawsuit.

Here it is, given to Bloomberg:

While we take these allegations seriously, we’re not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit. We believe in fair competition and allowing people the freedom to work wherever they choose, and we’re focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.

Apple sued OpenAI on Friday, alleging the company stole hardware secrets.

Mia Sato
Mia Sato
ChatGPT is now citing Kalshi data.

OpenAI and the prediction market have a deal, The New York Times reports, that pulls in Kalshi data for World Cup-related queries. A prompt for “France and Spain,” for example, included a win forecast attributed to Kalshi.

Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are everywhere right now, and that’s by design. The companies have inked deals with news outlets, newsletter writers, and random X accounts — and now Kalshi will reach potential customers via chatbots.

A ChatGPT prompt for “France and Spain,” where the answer cites Kalshi.
Image: OpenAI
Sam Altman didn’t need another lawsuit

And yet, Apple’s accusations around stealing trade secrets might take years to litigate.

Hayden Field
The 6 wildest claims in Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI

The 41-page complaint details how OpenAI allegedly ‘coached’ Apple employees on how to avoid security checks and asked for ‘show and tell’ during job interviews.

Emma Roth