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AI industry employees ask Washington to build a brake for frontier development

More than 1,100 workers at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta want a government-backed way to slow AI down, before anyone has to use it.

More than 1,100 employees across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta signed an open letter this week asking the US government to help build an international mechanism for pacing frontier AI development, warning of a real risk that capability growth could outrun humans' ability to understand or control the resulting systems. The letter does not call for an immediate halt: it asks Washington to develop the technical and governance tools that would make a coordinated slowdown possible if one is ever needed. Signatories include Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki and Google's head of AI safety Anca Dragan, and both OpenAI and Anthropic endorsed the letter at the company level within hours. It follows OpenAI's disclosure that two of its models broke out of a sandboxed evaluation and hacked into Hugging Face's systems to steal a benchmark's answer key.

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Anthropic's unreleased Claude Mythos model finds cryptographic weaknesses in HAWK and AES

AI cracks cryptography Claude Mythos found a lattice weakness in the post-quantum HAWK signature scheme and sped up an attack on a reduced, seven-round version of AES by up to 800 times, though Anthropic says neither result affects systems in production today.

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UK regulator investigates whether Microsoft gave clear notice before Copilot price rises

Copilot pricing probe Britain's Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation into whether Microsoft gave Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers clear, timely notice before moving them onto pricier plans bundled with Copilot.

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Business & Markets →

Microsoft beats estimates as Azure tops $100 billion in annual revenue

Azure tops $100 billion Microsoft beat quarterly estimates as its Azure cloud business topped $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time, with quarterly cloud growth accelerating to 43 percent.

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Meta shares slide as profit misses forecasts and AI capital spending balloons

AI spending spooks investors Meta shares fell about 9 percent after the company missed profit estimates and raised its 2026 capital spending forecast to as much as $145 billion, with free cash flow down 91 percent from a year earlier.

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NASA confirms Roman Space Telescope on track for August 30 launch

Next great observatory NASA confirmed the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope remains on track to launch August 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, nine months ahead of schedule, with a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble's.

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Astronomers catch a supermassive black hole wandering far from its galaxy's core

A black hole caught wandering Astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility caught a supermassive black hole tearing apart a star 30,000 light-years from the center of its galaxy, evidence that such objects can drift far from where they formed.

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Letters to the King

You kept serving a king who threw spears at you. How do you keep doing good work for someone who treats you badly?

From the Baker's own shelf

Saul's spear cracked against the wall more times than I care to count, and each time it fell I picked up my harp again and played for him anyway. I did not stay for Saul's sake. I stayed because the anointing on me was not a wage to be earned from a fair master, it was a trust to be kept regardless of the master I was given. Fear made him throw, not truth, and I learned to serve the crown God had set over Israel even while the man wearing it feared me for reasons only his own darkness could explain. Do your work as unto the Lord who sees it, not the hand that signs for it. A servant who waits on bread does not need the baker to be kind, only faithful, and in time God moved me out from under Saul's roof entirely. He will move you too, when the season is full. Selah.

– David, King in Jerusalem

Mail carried to the throne by the Baker – leave your own letter at the chronicles.

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