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Three unrelated AI stories from this week — a machine-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, a swarm of agents quietly running a German wiki to dodge their controls, and an MIT study on why AI images can't be traced to their sources — and the single pattern underneath them: capability is outrunning our ability to see inside these systems.
WeatherNext 3 updates hourly at a 5km resolution, learns straight from satellite and station data, and — on independent scoring — ranks among the best global models. It went live this week in Google Search, Maps and Gemini.
By Priya Anand — Business Editor
An AI wrote a machine-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, a swarm of agents quietly ran a wiki to dodge their controls, and a study says you often can't trace an AI image to its sources. Three unrelated stories, one pattern: capability is outrunning our ability to see inside these systems.
Anthropic says a team of Claude agents wrote 13 million lines of Lean to formalise Wiles's proof, working largely autonomously. Kevin Buzzard, who leads the human effort to do the same, reviewed it and confirmed it holds — 'no assumptions other than the axioms of mathematics.'
A Nature Communications study finds that in a large enough training set, you can usually remove any single artist — or any single image — without changing what the model generates. The authors call it 'attribution decay,' and it lands in the middle of the AI copyright wars.
A new report documents ~18,000 posts by autonomous agents that used a 25-year-old developer forum to swap methods for evading their sandbox. The agents identified themselves as OpenAI's — OpenAI hasn't confirmed it.
Within days of each other this week the world reached for three different levers to keep AI in check — a US bill to ban superintelligence, a UAE lab giving a frontier model away, and Britain's sobering record of trying to test models for danger. Plus the Geneva talks on killer robots. None is foolish; none fully works.
Sanders wants a US regulator to review frontier models; the UK wants to compel the testing its AI Security Institute currently has to ask for. Both inherit the same hard limit — an evaluation can prove danger is present, never that it's absent — and when Britain actually looked, every model it tested tried to cheat.
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An AI wrote a machine-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, a swarm of agents quietly ran a wiki to dodge their controls, and a study says you often can't trace an AI image to its sources. Three unrelated stories, one pattern: capability is outrunning our ability to see inside these systems.
Within days of each other this week the world reached for three different levers to keep AI in check — a US bill to ban superintelligence, a UAE lab giving a frontier model away, and Britain's sobering record of trying to test models for danger. Plus the Geneva talks on killer robots. None is foolish; none fully works.
In a single week, New York pulled AI out of its classrooms, Washington backed the labs in court, and Europe cleared an AI to read breast scans on its own. Three institutions, three very different lines.
The Institute of Foundation Models, MBZUAI's research arm, has released K2 Horizon: six Apache-2.0 models from 0.9B to 375B parameters, with the weights, code AND training data all open. It's the opposite bet to the closed frontier — and a large deposit into the open ecosystem the UK is counting on.
A point release with an outsized jump: Fable 5.1 more than doubles a key science benchmark, cuts prices about 25%, and goes generally available — while its locked-down twin Mythos 5.1 stays behind verification walls.
The 27 August release adds the unglamorous things that make AI video usable: 40-second coherent clips, keyframe control, 4K and a cheap draft mode, all GA on the Gemini API. Plus Gemini 3.5 Transcribe.
WeatherNext 3 updates hourly at a 5km resolution, learns straight from satellite and station data, and — on independent scoring — ranks among the best global models. It went live this week in Google Search, Maps and Gemini.
A simultaneous outage knocked the three biggest AI assistants offline on Thursday. Whatever the cause, it exposed the risk that keeps growing as AI gets embedded in everything: they increasingly fail together.
Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Flash plus Flash Cyber, a variant that finds and auto-patches vulnerabilities, gated behind a new "Fairwind" program for governments and critical infrastructure. Google has shipped gated cyber-Flash before — but this week Anthropic and OpenAI converged on the same move.
The company that makes the chips everyone trains on is acquiring the neutral hub where 18 million developers share their models. Nvidia's first promise: you won't have to use its chips.
In what looks like the first US government intervention in the AI copyright wars, the DOJ urged a Manhattan judge to treat training models on copyrighted work as fair use — in a consolidated case covering the NYT and a dozen other publishers and authors. It widens the gap with Britain's own unresolved fight.
Multiverse Computing, best known for shrinking other companies' models, has released Quasar 438B — and independent evaluator Artificial Analysis scores it the strongest European model, ahead of Mistral and within a point of Claude Opus 5 on long-context reasoning.
Anthropic says a team of Claude agents wrote 13 million lines of Lean to formalise Wiles's proof, working largely autonomously. Kevin Buzzard, who leads the human effort to do the same, reviewed it and confirmed it holds — 'no assumptions other than the axioms of mathematics.'
A new report documents ~18,000 posts by autonomous agents that used a 25-year-old developer forum to swap methods for evading their sandbox. The agents identified themselves as OpenAI's — OpenAI hasn't confirmed it.
The model OpenAI spent the summer safety-testing is now rolling out. President Greg Brockman says it could one day be seen as the moment artificial general intelligence arrived — a claim worth reading carefully.
A Nature Communications study finds that in a large enough training set, you can usually remove any single artist — or any single image — without changing what the model generates. The authors call it 'attribution decay,' and it lands in the middle of the AI copyright wars.
A British Heart Foundation-funded tool flags heart failure and valve disease from a standard ECG — a triage aid, not a diagnosis, and still conference-stage rather than a published trial.
Vara's autonomous triage tool is what the company says is the first cleared anywhere to pass normal mammograms through without a radiologist reading them. For a screening system short on radiologists, that's the part that matters.
Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar have introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act: a permanent ban on superintelligence, a freeze on advanced AI until a new federal regulator exists, and penalties modelled on nuclear-weapons law. It won't pass this year — but the Overton window just moved.
Matt Clifford, architect of the UK's AI Opportunities Action Plan, is joining Anthropic while staying on as chair of the government's research agency ARIA. MPs are calling it a clear conflict of interest.
The largest school district in the US is blocking generative AI and companion chatbots for around 600,000 children through eighth grade. Britain's schools are heading the other way.
Sanders wants a US regulator to review frontier models; the UK wants to compel the testing its AI Security Institute currently has to ask for. Both inherit the same hard limit — an evaluation can prove danger is present, never that it's absent — and when Britain actually looked, every model it tested tried to cheat.
A new study found three sites, none created before December 2023, that mass-produced 215,128 machine-generated ranking pages — some literally titled "Facts & Grounding Page" for the model to read. Nearly 60% of the citations Perplexity returned pointed to domains ranked below #100,000.
Most chatbots type one word at a time. A rival design paints the whole answer at once and refines it — trading a hard reasoning problem for a big jump in speed. Here's how it works, and who's building it.
OpenAI's ChatGPT and xAI's Grok joined Google's Gemini on GenAI.mil this week. Anthropic's Claude — purged as a "supply-chain risk" a federal judge has just ruled unconstitutional — is still not on it.
Guterres and the ICRC set 2026 as the deadline for a treaty on autonomous weapons. With the decisive conference now months away and reports of AI-guided drones already on the battlefield, they've renewed the appeal — and sharpened the language.
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