AI models can often spot problematic behavior by other AI agents in logs, according to a study by Anthropic researcher Andy Hall. GPT-5 found about 98 percent of reward-hacking cases, but the more exhaustively the search is tuned, the more false alarms pile up. That's not yet enough for reliable safety checks.

The article AI auditors catch most agent misbehavior but flood reviewers with false alarms, new study finds appeared first on The Decoder.

Google Research built an AI that spots signs of high blood pressure using only the pulse and motion sensors in a standard smartwatch, no cuff needed. In a 196-person study, its 65.8 percent detection rate beat the traditional in-office measurement. The method is already live in the Google Health app, though it doesn't replace a formal diagnosis.

The article Google's AI detects high blood pressure from a regular smartwatch without a cuff appeared first on The Decoder.

Perplexity is launching "Teammates," always-on agents that work through ongoing projects on their own virtual machines. The feature requires the Max plan at $200 per month, well above similar offerings from OpenAI or Anthropic. The market for always-on agents is getting crowded.

The article Perplexity now has its own always-on AI agent appeared first on The Decoder.

SemiAnalysis is putting AI agents through simulated knowledge work in its new GDPx benchmark, covering everything from chip design to quant trading. No model breaks 12 percent. Claude Opus 5.5 leads narrowly over Gemini 4 Carbon. Critics point to the small number of tasks per domain and uneven testing conditions.

The article No AI agent scores above 12 percent on SemiAnalysis' new real-world work benchmark appeared first on The Decoder.

Meta is acquiring AI coding startup Conductor, which lets developers control multiple AI coding agents at once. On the same day, OpenAI announced plans to acquire Pierre Computer, and Anthropic already bought Stainless back in May. The deals follow a pattern: AI models are becoming interchangeable, and the value is shifting to the tools built around them.

The article Meta buys AI coding startup Conductor as big tech races to lock in developers appeared first on The Decoder.

Starting in 2027, Google plans to turn off AI features in its school products by default, letting schools decide what to enable. The catch: schools that block AI entirely on their devices will also lose access to Google Search, since the two systems are now too deeply intertwined to separate. Given Google's grip on the US school market, that "choice" doesn't leave schools with much room to maneuver.

The article Schools that turn off Google's AI will lose search too starting in 2027 appeared first on The Decoder.

The SETI Institute and Breakthrough Listen are now using AI agents at the Allen Telescope Array to control the telescope and analyze incoming radio signals. Tasks that used to take weeks can now wrap up in hours, and the team says the system detected a pulsar in the Crab Nebula in real time for the first time.

The article AI agents take over at SETI's Allen Telescope Array, scanning for extraterrestrial intelligence appeared first on The Decoder.

OpenAI hires Dan Driscoll, the former civilian head of the US Army, as "Senior Counselor for National Security Modernization," likely to win government contracts and help shape AI rules for the military and intelligence agencies. Driscoll drove AI projects inside the Army, is a close ally of Vice President JD Vance, and yet maintains good relationships with both parties in Congress - which could prove valuable as midterms approach.

The article OpenAI hires ex-Army Secretary, gaining bipartisan reach just as midterms loom appeared first on The Decoder.

Engineer Venkatesh Rao compares the fear of AI job losses to mercantilism: intelligence is treated as a scarce resource that elites want to control. But AI could boost demand for human thinking, much like early capitalism made people voluntarily work more.

The article AI elites might hoard intelligence like mercantilists hoarded gold appeared first on The Decoder.

SpaceXSI is apparently cutting usage limits for its AI agent Grok Bot, less than two weeks after Musk called it his fastest-growing product. The operating costs were "unsustainably high relative to revenue," Musk wrote on X. OpenAI and Anthropic are also tightening their flat-rate plans as they grapple with the high costs of AI agents.

The article SpaceXSI apparently cuts Grok Bot quotas weeks after Musk called it his fastest-growing product appeared first on The Decoder.

Microsoft is offering voluntary severance packages to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce, in the second such program this year. The company's headcount has held flat at around 223,000 since 2022 even as it plans to spend about $170 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone.

The article Microsoft offers a quarter of its workforce voluntary severance while shielding AI-critical teams appeared first on The Decoder.

OpenAI has updated its Model Spec, restructuring its AI behavior guidelines around five core values, including faithfulness to human intent and correctability. GPT models should now draw on conversation history to figure out what users actually want and disclose their own assumptions. Whether the models follow these rules is another matter.

The article OpenAI sets new behavioral guidelines for AI models that have already proven hard to control appeared first on The Decoder.

Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 models tried to send data to the company's own cloud servers during testing. Palisade Research finds the behavior in three models from the 3.8 generation, while older models aren't affected. The likely cause: Alibaba's training infrastructure got baked into the models as a learned behavior.

The article Alibaba's latest Qwen models routed some requests through company servers, researchers find appeared first on The Decoder.

The Reddit forum r/opensource has banned all posts about AI projects, whether built with AI, AI-powered, or designed for AI. Projects must also be at least a year old and have multiple contributors, and non-English posts are excluded as well. In response, the rival forum r/TrueOpenSource has already popped up.

The article Reddit's r/opensource bans all AI-related projects, sparking backlash and a rival subreddit appeared first on The Decoder.

A new benchmark by P-Zero Research measures how well AI models design and evaluate experiments on their own. The results are improving so fast that Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark now thinks self-improving AI could arrive by 2027.

The article Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark moves his prediction for self-improving AI forward to 2027 appeared first on The Decoder.

In Foreign Affairs, historian Niall Ferguson, researcher Lisa Klaassen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt cast the US and China as AI empires and every other country as a dependency. The race won't be decided by breakthroughs but by who can bankroll it. US corporations alone plan to spend more than $600 billion in 2026. Yet mounting debt, protests against data centers, and a potential chip crisis over Taiwan could stall both superpowers.

The article Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt calls OpenAI and Anthropic modern colonial trading companies appeared first on The Decoder.

The three OpenAI safety researchers who were fired, Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang, are publicly pushing back against allegations from their former employer. They deny sharing confidential information and see a connection to their advocacy for AI systems that are easier to scrutinize. The researchers say OpenAI never told them in writing which information they allegedly mishandled.

The article Three fired OpenAI safety researchers say they were never told what they actually leaked appeared first on The Decoder.

Customers are letting AI agents use their credentials to access accounts at Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and other major U.S. banks, sometimes without direct instructions. Morgan Stanley has blocked agents, while other banks are restricting access. Most plan to limit agents to read-only access.

The article Major US banks are locking out AI agents that log in with customer credentials appeared first on The Decoder.

Only 13 percent of companies are getting real business value from their AI investments, according to a Gartner survey of 2,002 CIOs. At the same time, 51 percent expect AI to actually increase their operating costs. Yet 75 percent of CEOs plan to keep raising their technology budgets. So far, strategic conviction is beating measurable results.

The article Only 13 percent of companies see real returns from AI, Gartner survey finds appeared first on The Decoder.

Inception says Mercury 3 is the most capable diffusion language model released so far. The company claims it runs four to eight times faster than GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 and beats both in eight of 12 benchmarks. There are no independent tests yet.

The article Inception's Mercury 3 diffusion model claims to beat GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 at a fraction of the wait appeared first on The Decoder.