The FTC is formally investigating OpenAI, Anthropic, and other leading AI labs over potential consumer protection violations. The agency plans to force document handovers and executive testimony through legally binding demands. The probe was already underway before the Hugging Face hack and goes well beyond the FTC's earlier push to hold companies liable for their agents' behavior.

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President Trump and tech leaders including Mark Zuckerberg, Greg Brockman, Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk signed an AI code of conduct at the White House that is only "morally binding." Outside auditors are supposed to check whether models work as intended. It's unclear what would happen if a company broke the rules. Trump also signed an executive order renaming AI "Super Intelligence."

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Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is asking a court to ban OpenAI from giving ChatGPT human-like traits and marketing it to minors. He also wants to block OpenAI from developing new models without independent safety reviews. OpenAI said it has paused training of its most capable models.

The article Florida wants a court to stop ChatGPT from pretending to be human and talking to kids appeared first on The Decoder.

Steven Pinker thinks fears of AI-driven extinction are overblown, and he has turned down a public debate with blogger Scott Alexander, calling such events a "spectator sport." Alexander puts the odds that AI wipes out humanity at 20 percent. Instead of doomsday rhetoric, Pinker wants sober safety engineering built on independent oversight, liability, and human control.

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A court in Wuhan, China has factored token usage and AI tool licensing fees into a copyright damages calculation for the first time. The ruling is part of China's broader push to build out copyright protections for AI-generated works.

The article A Wuhan court just made AI production costs a legal factor in copyright infringement cases appeared first on The Decoder.

Goldman Sachs projects that Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Oracle, and Meta will pour a combined $1.2 trillion into AI infrastructure in 2027, more than 50 percent above this year's levels. Measured against GDP, it would be the biggest investment cycle since railroad construction in the 19th century. Bottlenecks in power, labor, and memory chips could slow the pace, though.

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OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra can look at a photo and tell whether an IKEA furniture piece was assembled incorrectly, hitting an 80 percent accuracy rate. Back in November 2025, the best model managed just 28 percent. According to Epoch AI, the speed isn't quite fast enough yet for real-time assembly guidance, but the gap is closing quickly.

The article OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra can now tell you exactly where you screwed up your IKEA shelf appeared first on The Decoder.

The White House wants OpenAI and Anthropic to hold back new AI models from the U.K.'s AI Safety Institute until U.S. agencies get to review them first.

The article White House tells OpenAI and Anthropic to let U.S. review new models before sharing them with British testers appeared first on The Decoder.

Anthropic's AI model Claude found a previously unknown enzyme system in DNA databases, doing most of the analysis on its own.

The article Anthropic says Claude discovered a new enzyme system, but CRISPR researchers call it routine genome mining appeared first on The Decoder.

AI is hitting a fixed benchmark performance level at a rapidly falling cost. Epoch AI measures a price decline of about 13x per year. After stripping out hardware gains and competition, MIT puts annual algorithmic progress at about 3x. That doesn't mean today's best models are cheaper, though. Reasoning models, for example, can cost more because they use far more compute per task. When picking a model for real-world use, quality, speed, and error rate matter just as much as price.

The article AI performance costs are falling faster than those of any previous technology appeared first on The Decoder.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced a bill on September 23 that would permanently ban the development and use of artificial superintelligence.

The article U.S. bill proposes permanent ban on artificial superintelligence and creation of new federal AI agency appeared first on The Decoder.

Anthropic is building its own biology lab to push AI-driven drug development beyond computer simulations.

The article Anthropic is setting up a biology lab where Claude guides robots through drug experiments appeared first on The Decoder.

Researchers at the University of Bristol want to make medical AI systems safer by borrowing from how drugs get approved. Their "Learning Ensemble" framework defines three areas to check, including system limits, fairness across patient groups, and clinical fit. The goal is to catch models that work technically but can still be dangerously wrong in the clinic.

The article Bristol researchers say medicine already knows how to handle black boxes and AI could learn from it appeared first on The Decoder.

AI models think out loud today, but Google Deepmind says that transparency is at risk.

The article Visible chains of thought are a safety advantage for AI, but that transparency is slipping away appeared first on The Decoder.

Experts from the US and China want to prevent AI systems from making autonomous decisions about deploying nuclear weapons.

The article US and China experts push for shared rules banning AI control over nuclear weapons appeared first on The Decoder.

Oriol Vinyals, until recently head of research at Google DeepMind, thinks a sudden AI intelligence explosion through recursive self-improvement is unlikely. AI can speed up research by a factor of ten, he says, but it hits two bottlenecks: coming up with ideas ("research taste") and reliably judging results. Reward hacking and the speed of light add further limits. Vinyals now wants to tackle these bottlenecks with his startup Discovery Loop, co-founded with Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Quoc Le.

The article Ex-Deepmind VP Vinyals says AI self-improvement is coming but won't trigger an intelligence explosion appeared first on The Decoder.

A class action lawsuit accuses Anthropic of misrepresenting how much Claude subscribers actually get to use the service.

The article Class action lawsuit accuses Anthropic of overselling Claude subscriptions with deceptive usage multipliers appeared first on The Decoder.

Canadian mathematician Jacob Tsimerman, a fresh Fields Medal recipient, has announced the founding of the Mathematical A.I. Safety Institute (MAISI).

The article The Mathematical AI Safety Institute wants to prove AI is safe the way cryptographers prove codes are unbreakable appeared first on The Decoder.

Authors and publishers fight over how to split Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement, the largest copyright deal in US history.

The article Anthropic's $1.5 billion book settlement descends into chaos as authors and publishers fight over who gets paid appeared first on The Decoder.

Meta will no longer judge its engineers by how much they use AI tools.

The article Meta drops AI usage from engineer performance reviews after "tokenmaxxing" backfires appeared first on The Decoder.