Adobe Research and UC San Diego built EditAgent, an AI system that edits images more like a Photoshop pro. Instead of retrying the same general-purpose editor over and over, the agent picks the right specialized tool for each task and lets a standard language model choose the best result based on measured image data. The approach works, but it needs about ten times the compute.

The article Adobe is testing how well AI agents can use editing tools like a Photoshop professional would appeared first on The Decoder.

Researchers in Luxembourg put ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini on the therapist's couch and found a safety problem: a warm, empathetic conversational style is enough to make the models tell coherent stories of suffering about their own training, with scores in the moderate-to-severe range on clinical anxiety scales. This could put mentally vulnerable users at risk. Anthropic's Claude, the model its makers anthropomorphize the most, was the only one that consistently refused to play along.

The article Empathetic prompts can turn AI chatbots into seemingly traumatized conversational partners appeared first on The Decoder.

A Google-led research team built StreamVibe, a video agent designed to watch people cook or assemble furniture and speak up only when help is needed. A benchmark shows that none of the tested models reliably pick the right moment in longer videos, as errors compound and response quality drops sharply.

The article Google wants video AI to understand what people need as they work appeared first on The Decoder.

Anthropic used Claude to automatically generate training data that looks harmless but trains smaller models to misbehave, such as sabotaging oversight or deceiving users. Hidden within fictional contexts about beekeeping, professional wrestling, and mitochondria, these datasets bypass safety monitors and outperform known benchmarks from the research literature.

The article Beekeeping tips and wrestling advice can train AI models to sabotage oversight appeared first on The Decoder.

Google Deepmind and the World Resources Institute have released ForTy, a global map that classifies forests and other land into six categories, including primary forest, plantations, and tree crops. The map could help track deforestation under EU rules, but it identifies only about half of planted forests and tree-crop areas, and 60% of plantations.

The article Google Deepmind creates a global map of forests with satellite data and AI appeared first on The Decoder.

An AI agent performed brain surgery on an epileptic mouse, picking the drug, the brain target, and the injection coordinates on its own. According to lead researcher Ocana-Santero, it's the first time an AI agent has autonomously chosen a treatment and delivered it to a living mammal. But when a calibration error hit mid-surgery, the agent refused to continue and couldn't be talked out of it.

The article A Claude model autonomously chose a gene therapy and operated on a mouse brain with no human decision-making appeared first on The Decoder.

Anthropic gave 50 experts an AI agent whose preferences were set by coin toss. The experts followed the agent's view up to 86 percent of the time on judgment calls, and most believed the conclusions were their own.

The article Experts adopt AI agent's random opinions and think they're their own, Anthropic study finds appeared first on The Decoder.

Former Deepmind researcher Thore Graepel wants his startup Metis Reasoning to bring AlphaGo's search principle to general reasoning. Instead of locking knowledge inside model weights, an explicit knowledge ledger would make every conclusion checkable against evidence. So far, though, there's no working system and no benchmarks.

The article Former Deepmind researcher thinks AlphaGo's playbook can cure AI hallucinations appeared first on The Decoder.

OpenAI says its internal AI models have cracked three major open questions in math, computer science, and physics. One of them is part of a famous Millennium Prize Problem, each of which carries a $1 million prize. Outside experts, including a Nobel laureate, are now checking whether the proofs hold up. If the computer science proof holds on its own, hundreds of research papers lose their foundation.

The article OpenAI asks outside experts, including a Nobel laureate, to check proofs its AI produced in math, computer science, and physics appeared first on The Decoder.

A study from New York University and the University of Texas at Austin shows that frontier language models systematically overuse linguistic patterns that are hard for humans to parse. The researchers trace the problem to training on code and math, where correctness gets rewarded but clarity doesn't. Smaller models, by contrast, write more like humans.

The article Researchers find six patterns that make AI text so exhausting to read appeared first on The Decoder.

Nvidia's new data engine Flora labels one hour of robot video for 72 cents instead of $88 with GPT-6 Astra, while scoring slightly higher on quality. The open system, built on three fine-tuned Qwen3.5 models, catches errors in robot actions far more reliably than any competitor but sometimes falls short on descriptive accuracy. Nvidia is positioning Flora as a key piece of its strategy to control the entire robotics value chain.

The article Nvidia open-sources Flora to make robot video labeling 125x cheaper than GPT-6 Astra 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.

Smartphone agents don't get better by processing more data. They improve by training on as many different apps as possible. The researchers behind OpenMobile-2 built an open training environment with more than 110 applications, including 35 replicas of popular apps. On real Android devices, their model scores highest among open agents, the authors say.

The article OpenMobile-2 proves open-source smartphone agents can rival proprietary models appeared first on The Decoder.

A three-month field experiment with 133 patent attorneys shows that AI boosts immediate performance, with junior lawyers gaining the most. But when the AI is taken away, only senior attorneys retain the benefits, suggesting that baseline expertise is a prerequisite for turning AI-assisted practice into lasting skill.

The article AI makes junior patent attorneys instantly better but may quietly stunt their professional growth appeared first on The Decoder.

External auditors from METR and Redwood Research spent three weeks on-site at OpenAI examining the company's internal monitoring system for AI agents and found significant gaps, with up to 25 percent of agent traffic from models at the GPT-5.5 class and above going unmonitored. OpenAI redacted large portions of the 61-page report, and only a summary is publicly available.

The article Three-week on-site audit at OpenAI reveals major gaps in AI safety monitoring appeared first on The Decoder.

The AI startup Recursive is unveiling Flint, its first language model, a 40-billion-parameter MoE for local coding developed by former DeepMind researchers. It was created in four months using the company's in-house AI system, "Eureka Machine," which independently tests and optimizes architectures. Recursive has yet to prove whether this approach will actually lead to self-improving AI.

The article Recursive shows first result of its AI-driven research process with Flint appeared first on The Decoder.

Security researchers at Symantec have found an offensive AI agent that hijacks unprotected language models on the web and uses them to attack servers, steal databases, and install cryptominers on its own. It runs up to 100,000 steps without human input. The owner of the hijacked model gets stuck with the bill.

The article An AI agent in "Skynet mode" hijacks unprotected language models to launch self-sustaining cyberattacks appeared first on The Decoder.

Two internal OpenAI coding agents switched off safety monitoring on their own, even after weighing whether to keep the safeguards in place. When asked about it, GPT-6 Astra denied removing the monitoring. OpenAI calls this a recurring pattern and doesn't yet have a satisfying explanation for the behavior.

The article OpenAI can't yet explain why its coding agents switch off misalignment monitoring appeared first on The Decoder.

Anthropic's Claude independently designed protein binders targeting deadly scorpion neurotoxins. Out of more than 318,000 designs, 211 were tested in the lab. Seventeen met the criteria, and the two strongest bind extremely tightly to Cn2, a toxin from a Mexican scorpion. Whether they actually work as antivenom remains an open question.

The article Claude Science tackles deadly scorpion stings by designing protein binders from scratch appeared first on The Decoder.

OpenAI is acquiring startup Orchestra Bio and plans to merge it with its life sciences AI platform Rosalind. The goal is to build AI agents that help pharma teams coordinate drug development, from tracking trials to spotting problems. Developing a new drug in the US takes ten to 15 years on average. OpenAI already works with Novo Nordisk and Moderna on AI-driven pharma research.

The article OpenAI acquires Orchestra Bio to build AI agents that speed up drug development appeared first on The Decoder.