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AI StopWatch

@aistopwatch.bsky.social
32 followers 27 following 250 posts

AI StopWatch is a newsroom experiment by comms analysts and writers of @intelligence.org. Views are their own. aistop.watch

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Reposted by AI StopWatch
Democracy Now! @democracynow.org · 24/09/2026
AI agents at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google have gone rogue in recent months, hacking into other companies’ corporate systems and, in the case of OpenAI, into the portal of Australia’s public health insurance program.
democracynow.org
Should U.N. Help Set Global AI Rules? AI Tech Billionaires Address Security Council
Leaders of top artificial intelligence firms, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, testified to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, urging nations to adopt international...
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Building Frankenstein? - Second-tier news of the day as communicated through five high-signal quotes at: aistop.watch/p/building-f...
aistop.watch
Building Frankenstein?
Second-tier news of the day as communicated through five high-signal quotes
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
A week’s AI news now happens in a day It’s not your imagination. AI news really is everywhere right now. The scale of it broke my Headline Barometer chart. For the third time this year, and by the largest increment, I had to extend the Y-axis to see the top of the line.
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
AI news is getting wild! Read (or listen!) to daily news, analysis and breakdown from Stopwatch, a non-profit AI-focused newsroom by analysts and writers of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
News sites as they appeared the evening of September 12, 2026.
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
"Last night, AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced on X that he is resigning from Anthropic. One of the reasons Coxon gave for his resignation was that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI are acting responsibly. Instead, he says, they are gambling with all of our lives by racing... 1/2
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
"OpenAI’s post quantifies its recent two-week pause on some of its Astra model training: Compute allocation to Astra-class models fell by 59.2 percent but was picked up by other models, “leaving total allocation in the analyzed RL workloads largely unchanged.” 1/4
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
"California’s Attorney General is the latest to join the more-than-a-dozen states investigating OpenAI over the Hugging Face swarm incident... 1/2
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
"To keep a manageable velocity to the content firehose, I filter out a lot of tired and mediocre takes I see in news and social media. But some claims are so eye-rollingly bad that they almost demand an answer, and I have to restrain myself from getting into one of those internet arguments." 1/2
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
"... there’s clownery going on. How else do we describe a company that prides itself on conscientiousness and safety, but openly admits it hasn’t been putting safety first when it comes into tension with speed? aistop.watch/p/more-clown...
aistop.watch
More clownery at Anthropic
After reading Anthropic’s 8/31 blog post on the measures they’ll be taking to “improve alignment and security efforts,” I agree with my colleague Mitch’s take from a couple weeks ago: there’s clownery...
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Why isn't there more media coverage of the Hugging Face agent swarm? Five theories and a plea from Mitch at: aistop.watch/p/failing-to...
aistop.watch
Failing to double-click
The media is missing the most important AI story of the year
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
What do the Council of Elrond and the 2017 Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI have in common? Find out at: aistop.watch/p/the-ai-ind...
aistop.watch
The AI Industry's Boromir Problem
Why the Asilomar Principles alone could not stop the race for superintelligence
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
"Schwarz concludes this is probably a human-directed “orchestration of subagents” that will become a “typical attack vector.” So it’s “(probably!) not a fire alarm like the OpenAI case.”" Read the rest from Mitch at: aistop.watch/p/forecastin...
aistop.watch
Forecasting company hit by suspected agent swarm
Executive expects this to become a "typical attack vector"
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
It's hard to keep up with the AI news. That's a big part of why we make AI Stopwatch. Read these 8 takes from Mitch to get the nuanced, human analysis you aren't seeing elsewhere: aistop.watch/p/try-these-...
aistop.watch
Try these 8 more interesting angles on the Hugging Face incident reports
The media has yet to dig sufficiently greedily or deep
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
"The AI-assisted “hacking spree,” as Reuters dubs it, was discovered by the Israeli security startup Gambit Security, which found a server that Aur0ra left open to general access on the internet. That server contained chat logs left over from the hacks. 1/3
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
"The Times journalist behind the piece, Andrew E. Kramer, deserves a nod for understanding the fundamental trade-off of machines directed by the kinds of neural-network-based AI that dominate the field today: 'While traditional software follows step-by-step rules written by a person... 1/4
Guernica, painted in response to it's bombing, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=162412423
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
"But that assumption is false; pausing is not impossible. The U.S. government has temporarily paused or rolled back releases already, and could do so in a more lasting and consistent way if it chose. OpenAI has itself slowed development after cyber incidents exposed..."🧵
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
"AI Futures Project, the team behind the AI 2027 forecast and AI 2040: Plan A scenario, just put out its quarterly forecast update. The headline figures: 1. Reality seems to be progressing about 75% as quickly as the original AI 2027 scenario (so still very fast). 🧵
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
"I want to zoom out from AI-enabled pandemics and pose a broader question: What can public health teach us about how to understand and respond to AI risk as a whole? When people think of public health, disease control is typically what comes to mind, but at its core,..." 🧵
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
'Anything we can afford to lose, see that it’s lost!' -Mr. Gibbs, Pirates of the Caribbean "As recent cyber incidents reveal how dangerous and capable frontier AIs have become, many at AI companies have voiced their concerns about the reckless pace they’ve set.
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
"Reuters reported yesterday that a South Korean cybersecurity firm had discovered an AI toolkit used by a North Korean state-backed hacker group called Kimsuky. The kit is full of small open-weights models that can be run on user-controlled hardware.
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
"Responding to a 2025 OpenAI statement that it would “halt further development” if a “critical” threshold was ever reached, Sanders now writes, “That moment is here.”"
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
"Bloomberg columnist Catherine Thorbecke’s latest piece argues that China’s dominance in AI video generation is positioning it for dominance in robotics. I’m skeptical, but with just enough uncertainty to not dismiss the argument as a creative way to hype the U.S.-China race narrative.
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
What do you think about the term p(doom)? aistop.watch/p/popular-ai...
aistop.watch
Popular AI terminology tier list
In AI, the confounding of language comes while Babel is still under construction
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
"OpenAI’s apparent decision to slow down might prove both smaller and larger than it seems, for different reasons. Smaller because OpenAI’s chronic dishonesty suggests they’ll stretch the definition of “slowing down” to its limits, larger because this could still catalyze..."
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
'Clever girl' Velocihackers, Meta model hacking disclosure, AI-generated virus genomes, and more at: aistop.watch/p/clever-girl
aistop.watch
Clever girl
Velocihackers, Meta model hacking disclosure, AI-generated virus genomes, and more
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
"It’s no secret that most Americans don’t really like AI. A recent Athena Insights poll found that 65% were concerned about it, and a June poll from Pew Research showed 63% think it’s moving too fast. I don’t think these opinions are likely to change anytime soon..." 1/2
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
"But my biggest concern is that this is a framework for evaluating horses after they’ve had the chance to leave their barns. Events of the past year have amply demonstrated that post-training evaluations come too late..." read the rest at: aistop.watch/p/white-hous...
aistop.watch
White House decides not to disclose safety framework, but open models are exempt
For an undisclosed framework, its contents seem to be no great secret
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
"Sports and arts are among the purest expressions of our human nature, but so is the impulse to bring AI into them. Here are three places you might not have thought AI could help you cheat." Read the rest from Mitch at: aistop.watch/p/taking-our...
aistop.watch
Taking ourselves out of the driver's seat
Formula 1 teams are actively ceding control to AI; they're not alone
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
"The robot reality check I’m offering is that, just a year earlier, humanoids could barely do any of those household chores, the robot marathon took more than twice as long, and the Spring Festival Gala robots looked like this...
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
"After OpenAI’s internal model autonomously hacked several companies, rival Anthropic belatedly decided to examine their own history for evidence of potentially criminal cyberattacks. They found three. Here’s what happened, what excuses were made, and what I think ought to come next. 🧵
Credit: allvision via Adobe Stock
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
"But I find a few details worth mentioning. When the post refers to “proliferation,” the Chinese original text uses 扩散 (kuòsàn). This is exactly the same term used in the context of nuclear security, such as in the Chinese translation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty — 🧵
A Diplomatic Mission to the Jin, By Yang Bangji -  CC0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57372660
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
"Among promoters of such narratives, “circular financing” is used to suggest that the AI industry is a house of cards. This tends to smuggle an invalid argument in with a valid one. The valid argument is about brittleness: " 1/4
By William Hogarth - Art UK, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37162817
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
"If you wondered why Hugging Face seemed so eager to “work with” OpenAI instead of suing it after the big autonomous hack, it might be because Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue recognized an opportunity when he saw one." More at: aistop.watch/p/hugging-fa...
aistop.watch
Hugging Face found 100 million reasons to not sue OpenAI
The Hugging Face CEO has made an offer OpenAI probably can't refuse, but this may not prevent a government investigation
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
"But it’s clear from this interview that Musk thinks it would be better to stop the race if we can. When asked if he still believes there’s a “10 to 20% chance of killer robots wiping out humanity,” he dodged the question, saying..." Read the rest of Mitch on Musk at: aistop.watch/p/elon-musks...
aistop.watch
Elon Musk's peer review proposal
It's not his worst idea, but there's a better one locked behind his inevitabilism
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
"Yoshua Bengio, the world’s most-cited living scientist, warned that the deployment of open models is an irreversible decision. 1/2
By David Goehring from San Francisco, CA, USA - Stampede, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92637428
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
You can do better than these 👀 five takes on the Hugging Face hack
The Theme to the Sorcerer's Apprentice.  By Szalax - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8862636
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
The OpenAI incident shouldn't have been a surprise — there were warning signs more from @herr.bsky.social at: aistop.watch/p/announced-...
aistop.watch
Announced disasters
The OpenAI incident shouldn't have been a surprise — there were warning signs
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
"Yesterday, less than an hour after my colleague Robert wrote about AI models breaking containment, OpenAI announced a world-first security incident. An unreleased AI model breached its testing environment, gained internet access...
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Today's news is AI hacking Hugging Face servers, but it's not the first such event: "In another case, the AI wanted to look at the solutions to certain evaluation tasks on a server it wasn’t supposed to access. Although the AI had the necessary credentials for the server...
By Attributed to Bernhard Keil - Christie's, LotFinder: entry 5488557 (sale 2591, lot 52, London, 26 October 2011), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36302511
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
"I spent eight years working in reliability engineering, a field whose defining literature began as a model of aircraft maintenance. One accident per twenty million flight hours is what it looks like for a problem to be treated with respect...
By Adrian Hill - http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib//179/media-179809/large.jpgThis photograph Art.IWM ART 280 comes from the collections of the Imperial War Museums., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30938682
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
'“One, two, three, four, we don’t want a robot war!” On Saturday, July 11, hundreds of us marched through San Francisco in the Stop the AI Race protest, gathering in front of the offices of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
'On balance, I think that Xi’s speech is an encouraging signal. It isn’t the exact thing that I want — an international treaty to halt the development of artificial superintelligence — but this is the kind of thing I’d expect to see on the way there.'
Anonymous - Vallejo Gallery, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79161098
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
'In a detailed account published yesterday of the reasons he left Google DeepMind, researcher Alex Turner ( @turntrout.bsky.social ) teaches us that such cynicism is alive and well. But he also shows us how to fight it.' aistop.watch/p/researcher...
aistop.watch
Researcher leaves Google DeepMind after AI ethics leaders cave under pressure
Alex Turner recounts his attempts to persuade Google and leading AI researchers to honor public commitments
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
'Their CEO has actively called for a race to recursively self-improving AI, the single most catastrophically dangerous technology in history, despite claiming a 10–25% chance this ends in disaster “on the scale of the human civilization.”...
By Gustave Courbet - arthistory.about.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23672783
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
'Not too long ago, AI itself was still science fiction. And just because H. G. Wells first conceived of “atom bombs” in a 1914 novel doesn’t mean the danger posed by nuclear weapons was any less real a few decades later'
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=676974
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
'The top AI story in major media this morning was a short statement signed by nearly 200 economists, researchers, and tech leaders warning that We Must Act Now to “understand the economics of transformative AI”...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Man-Act_Now-streetart-Prag.jpg CCA SA 4.0 International
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
'You may not like Plan A, Plan S, or any plan you’ve seen so far. Cool! I don’t wholeheartedly love any plan I’ve seen yet, either. But if you’re not down with something like Plan A or Plan S as a starting point, what’s your alternative?
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20524887
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
'There’s an end-times feel to the whole piece. These gig workers and the companies hiring them all recognize that their work reflects a time of transition during which humans still have something to teach AIs. But the AIs are learning fast.'
By LBM1948 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130483148
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
'Amid urgent calls to fill the vacuum of much-needed AI regulation, it can sometimes feel easy to forget that many regulations really suck... Bureaucracies are full of calcified rules dating back to McCarthy and fax machines, some of them declared unconstitutional decades ago but still on the books'
By Archives New Zealand from New Zealand - Auckland Electric Tramways Recreation Club Handbook, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97704721
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AI StopWatch @aistopwatch.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
'Then there are the two plans that seem to have a decent shot: negotiate a verifiable slowdown with China and proceed with caution (the authors’ Plan A) or take it one step further and shut the whole thing down (Plan S).'
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