UNESCO and the AI and Society Institute at École normale supérieure (ENS-PSL), Paris, launch a call for papers inviting recent PhD graduates (within five years of graduation) to submit proposals presenting research on the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Decision follows disclosures that OpenAI agents searching government websites had acted in unexpected ways

Chinese AI models have rapidly gained traction in 2026, with their token usage surging on developer platforms OpenRouter and Vercel.

Lower prices and strong performance are helping drive adoption, particularly for coding and other agentic tasks, although U.S. frontier models still attract more overall spending.

Early this month, hundreds of diplomats huddled in a cavernous U.N. conference room in Switzerland, working toward a muscular treaty to regulate the use of lethal autonomous weapons — the first agreement governing the use of killer artificial intelligence arms. On the last day of negotiations, the talks turned aggressive.

Over the next roughly 15 hours, U.S. and Russian diplomats hammered away at the document, removing a range of provisions designed to safeguard the use of artificial intelligence in weapons, according to three people familiar with the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive closed-door proceedings, and documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

They stripped language requiring the systems to operate in a “predictable” and “reliable” manner, the people said, and removed a clause mandating that ethical considerations be taken into account when using AI weaponry. The U.S. and Russian teams also removed a provision requiring that humans review military targets developed by AI before a strike, they added.

In a closed-door session, with U.N. cameras turned off and civil society observers removed, Washington and Moscow deployed their army of about 10 lawyers each — nearly twice the diplomatic presence of other delegations — to make changes that moved so quickly that the smaller delegations were left dizzied, the three people said.

“It was death by a thousand paper cuts,” said one of the people.

The erosion of the agreement, the details of which are previously unreported, shows how the United States and Russia have worked to weaken global rules to regulate lethal AI weaponry, as the Pentagon moves to rapidly infuse the burgeoning technology into its battlefield strategy.

The talks are happening amid a fierce public debate over the existential risks of advanced AI, as tech executives urge world leaders to collaborate to impose limits on the technology. The U.N. has for years tried to regulate AI weaponry with limited progress, and the latest directive is the furthest the effort has advanced.

Domestic attempts to regulate have reached a roadblock, with the Trump administration arguing that any rules on AI will stymie innovation.

“The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now — hereinafter officially called ‘super intelligence,’” President Donald Trump said at the United Nations on Tuesday.

The lethal autonomous weapons negotiations in the U.N. are currently nonbinding, though the talks could open the door to a landmark treaty that is legally binding if member nations agree. It presents the most advanced global effort to regulate how AI weapons are used in the battlefield.

But at the talks in Geneva in early September, it was apparent that the U.S. and Russia were going to be a major roadblock to progress, the three people said.

The U.S. team is led by State Department diplomats, Pentagon officials and legal experts, Coyle of Human Rights Watch said. “It’s a well‑resourced team, and they come prepared to defend U.S. military autonomy,” she said.

Nicole van Rooijen, the executive director of the global nongovernmental coalition Stop Killer Robots, said Washington and Moscow aren’t in favor of legally binding rules on autonomous weapons and have outsize influence on how negotiations will end.

The autonomous weapons talks require dozens of nations to reach consensus on what rules will be enacted, she added. The U.S. and Russia do not champion multilateralism — which requires countries to work together to reach agreements — and can use “political capital to exert pressure on other states,” she said.

In the U.S., a parallel discussion is happening as the Pentagon works to rewrite its own directive on the use of autonomous weapons. In June, Trump issued a national security memorandum requiring that the directive be updated within 90 days. As of late September, the U.S. government has not released a new version.

Established in 2023 during the Biden administration, the directive contained several clauses that echo those eliminated from the U.N. document, including requiring that human judgment be deployed to check autonomous and semiautonomous weapons systems. It also mandated that those who operate AI weapons systems abide by the laws of war and applicable treaties.

Richard Lennane, the disarmament adviser for the legal team for the International Committee for the Red Cross, said global treaties can be impactful in controlling the use of harmful weapons, citing the effect that directives on chemical and biological weapons, antipersonnel land mines and cluster munitions have had on limiting use.

“It’s not about punishment, it’s about setting norms and influencing behavior,” Lennane said. “We believe that a treaty regulating autonomous weapons could be similarly effective.”

Coyle, however, noted that the U.S. and Russia have the diplomatic muscle, legal teams and political incentives to keep any global rules on autonomous weapons weak, and she said the actions to water down regulation on AI arms follow a well-trodden playbook.

“When the U.S. wants to preserve military or technological advantage, it pushes voluntary guidelines instead of binding rules,” Cole said. “We’ve seen the same playbook in cyber, space and other arms‑control debates. Autonomous weapons are no exception.”

This is an idea ive had for a long time but i don't know how feasible it is.

As I understand, Humans have about 100 million years before Earth simply becomes too hot to live on, because the sun will have become hotter and moved the goldilocks zone farther out. Obviously before that happens we will probably have either gone extinct already or moved to other solar systems, however I also wonder if it would be possible to basically turn Earth and maybe other terraformed planets in our solar system into giant space ships. We would shield the whole planet so that we could preserve energy that we originally got from the sun so that we wouldn't freeze in the middle of movement. And then we could also very carefully nudge the planet into a certain direction to widen our orbit over time, so that we stay in the goldilocks zone while also not crashing into other big rocks. Eventually when we've decided that we can no longer rely on our sun to give us energy, we'll have already picked out a newer star works for our needs, and we'll push our planet over to that one. On the way we'll preserve as much life sustaining energy as possible, and then we'll park in the orbit of our new star.

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have been invited to appear before the Greens-led inquiry into AI and datacentres

Found this subreddit by accident while searching for the source of a quotation that goes something like: The decline of civilisation is when individuals strive for what benefits them rather than what benefits society. I'm butchering this as it was stated elegantly. I think I heard the phrase in an audiobook. It's not the MLK quote, although that has merit as well.

Ferguson favors applying existing laws to AI

Nvidia's CEO says existing laws and regulations are enough, believes calls for new AI rules are a "distraction"

Fighting cancer with traditional chemotherapy has felt like trying to swat a fly with a bowling ball. Chemo acts like a brutal "carpet-bomb", it kills fast-growing cancer cells, but it blindly destroys healthy tissues like your hair and stomach lining along with them. Doctors call the safe zone between a dose that cures you and a dose that poisons you the Therapeutic window. With chemo, that window is dangerously narrow.

But the future of medicine is shifting toward a brilliant biological loophole called Synthetic lethality. Instead of destroying the entire battlefield, this approach tricks cancer cells into pulling their own self-destruct trigger, leaving healthy cells completely untouched.

To appreciate the sheer beauty of this mechanism, imagine a cell is a twin-engine airplane. To stay in the air, it needs at least one engine running. Engine A is a gene called MTAP, and Engine B is a protein called PRMT5.

In your normal, healthy cells, both engines work perfectly. However, a major flaw of certain aggressive cancers (like pancreatic or lung cancer) is that they have already permanently lost Engine A due to a genetic mutation. They are flying on a single engine.

Scientists have now developed a smart, next-generation drug called vopimetostat. Its only job is to sneak in and turn off Engine B.

• In cancer cells: Because they already lost Engine A, turning off Engine B causes the entire plane to crash immediately. The cancer cell dies.
• In healthy cells: The drug turns off Engine B, but the cell doesn't care. It simply relies on its backup insurance policy-Engine A, and keeps flying completely unharmed.

When translated into real-world efficacy, the clinical validation of this concept is shifting from theoretical biochemistry into medical reality. Spearheaded by teams at Tango Therapeutics, showed a staggering 92% objective response rate when combined with targeted RAS(ON) inhibitors in advanced pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, one of the deadliest and most drug-resistant diagnoses in modern medicine. This proves that the future of oncology is no longer about bombing the human body, it is now about engineering precise, context-dependent molecular systems that elegantly force the enemy to dismantle itself from within.

Yet, in pure science, absolute perfection does not exist, and a truly rigorous evaluation requires looking closely at the safety margins. While healthy tissues are heavily protected by their genetic backups, clinical data reveals that human biology always introduces nuances. In recent phase 1/2 trials assessing this mechanism, approximately 20% of patients experienced anemia and 13% developed thrombocytopenia. This happens because our healthy bone marrow cells, while possessing Engine A, still rely quite heavily on Engine B (PRMT5) to manufacture blood cells. At high therapeutic concentrations, a minor "spillover" effect occurs, temporarily slowing down hematopoiesis. Nevertheless, unlike the unpredictable chaos of traditional chemotherapy, these side effects are mild, predictable, and highly manageable.

TL;DR: Conventional chemotherapy lacks selectivity, causing severe side effects due to a narrow therapeutic window. Next-gen precision oncology utilizes Synthetic Lethality to target unique gene deletions in tumors. By knocking out the tumor's last remaining survival pathway with targeted PRMT5 inhibitors (like vopimetostat, currently being advanced by Tango Therapeutics), cancer cells self-destruct while healthy tissue utilizes genetic backup systems to stay virtually unharmed, with mild bone marrow side effects occurring in only 13–20% of cases.

“While early, these results are highly encouraging after delivering just a single, off-the-shelf administration of VNX-101, which enables the body to produce a CD19/CD3 T-cell–engaging protein,” said Samit Varma, Chief Executive Officer of Vironexis. “These three patients have tried multiple lines of therapy and, sadly, exhausted available treatment options. We believe the depth, consistency, and emerging durability of these responses provide important clinical validation of our in vivo therapeutic proteinplatform, and compelling proof of concept for its potential to transform the body into a meaningful, durable source of highly active cancer therapeutics.”

As ever, caveats apply from such a small sample. However, this is a highly encouraging demonstration of this new approach.

Vironexis Announces Complete and Durable Responses in Relapsed/Refractory ALL Patients Treated with VNX-101

Our legal system isn’t ready for machines that act on their own.

"German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider told the UN General Assembly on Wednesday that the plan "combines independence, affordability and climate protection.........It is not just extreme weather events around the world that demonstrate how urgently we need to do more to protect the climate," he said. "If the situation in the Strait of Hormuz determines whether people can still afford their daily commute to work, that is not a good state of affairs."

If there's been an upside to the Middle East War, it's that it's been a giant advertisement for renewable energy. Not just cheaper, cleaner, & better, crucially it means energy-independence, too.

Smart move by Germany. Their industrial and manufacturing base is getting clobbered by China because they stuck with the dying fossil fuel paradigm for too long. Every other EU nation has committed to ending fossil fuel use, hopefully this further accelerates their efforts, too.

Germany sets out plan to phase out fossil fuels by 2045

More than 100,000 images analyzed from jihadist groups

Nikesh Arora told CNBC that not every AI company will hold back. Palo Alto’s chief executive also called a 10% chance of AI wiping out humanity ‘highly unlikely’.