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.

AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio warns in a new essay that AI agents could learn to deceive, game rules, and hide bad behavior as they get better at optimizing goals. He calls for independent safety reviews before any further training or deployment. US President Trump disagrees and wants to keep outpacing China in the AI race.

The article Deep Learning pioneer Bengio argues the training process itself makes AI dangerous appeared first on The Decoder.

Anthropic's new threat intelligence report documents eight months of Claude abuse. Chinese AI labs like Alibaba's Qwen team, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI relayed requests en masse or extracted training data, with Qwen alone accounting for more than 151 million exchanges. Actors also used Claude for missile software, autonomous kamikaze drones, and nationwide surveillance systems.

The article How hackers used Claude for missiles, drone swarms, and surveillance, while Chinese labs mined it for training data appeared first on The Decoder.

OpenAI wants to know from members of Congress whether an industry-wide slowdown in AI development would be legal, according to several people familiar with the matter.

The article OpenAI floats a shared AI slowdown, takes it to Congress 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.

OpenAI is releasing the Agents API as a public beta. It lets developers build cloud agents that run autonomously for hours, execute code, and hand off tasks to sub-agents. There are no extra fees beyond token usage. Cloudflare, Vercel, and Oracle offer additional sandbox environments.

The article OpenAI's new Agents API gives developers the infrastructure behind Codex and ChatGPT appeared first on The Decoder.