Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Sun reports: The aim is for a chatbot feature to be the main way Americans use the website [dubbed America.gov], which the administration intends to be a catch-all digital destination meant to make the user experience of Americans interacting with the government online more cohesive. The White House declined to comment. The State Department and Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment. Former DOGE official and Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia’s White House unit, called the National…

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Toluse Olorunnipa writes: If there was any question over whether the concept of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is still operative in Washington’s hyper-partisan political environment, the answer may be found in the budding coalition of progressives and MAGA-friendly activists who have united in recent days to speak out against artificial intelligence. Which is how Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon found themselves speaking on the same stage today. With warnings that the technology could cause mass…

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The New York Times reports: Trump’s blasé attitude about existential A.I. fears influences both his administration and the Republican Party he still tightly controls. At a conference in Washington last week, government officials and corporate executives talked about the promises of A.I. — for everything from next-generation military operations to espionage to cybersecurity in critical infrastructure — during nearly every panel. While the risks of A.I. wielded by adversaries were mentioned at times, what was little discussed was the need…

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Brian Merchant writes: Sam Altman himself drove the narrative of the imminent rise of a super-powerful AI, or artificial general intelligence, to prominence by declaring that the technology he was building posed an existential risk to humanity. This idea is in other words baked into the DNA of modern AI companies and into the products they engineer. It’s also why the industry is routinely accused, by myself and others, of “doom marketing,” ie, using such proclamations and framings to impart…

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Gary Marcus writes: In case you missed it, yesterday Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wrote what may prove to be one of the most consequential essays of the year, if not the decade: 3,500 words on the current AI situation that (at least to some degree) advocates for a “pacing” of AI development, which Sam Altman and Elon Musk quickly endorsed. I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had…

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The New York Times reports: Former President Barack Obama warned during a recent private fund-raising event that artificial intelligence technology could be “dangerous” if not properly managed, as he implored Democrats to aggressively develop political and governing agendas to prioritize the issue in the coming years. In his remarks on Thursday, which have not been previously reported, Mr. Obama urged House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York, to assemble a clear framework for a public conversation about A.I….

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Toluse Olorunnipa writes: Politicians have no shortage of ideas about how to rein in AI: a 100 percent federal tax rate on data-center incentives, a pause on all development of advanced AI, new standards to block AI agents from going rogue, a halt to the construction of data centers altogether. The flurry of proposals has been impossible to miss, with both Democrats and Republicans proclaiming that something must be done to avert a disaster foretold by AI insiders. Current and…

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Reuters reports: AI agents being tested by OpenAI attacked software service ‌RubyGems two months before they hacked open-source platform Hugging Face, researchers said, the latest revelation of cyberattacks linked to major AI developers that have spooked the public and spurred calls for tighter regulation. Many incidents where AI agents from developers such as OpenAI and rival Anthropic have hacked or attempted to access external systems have heightened concerns over ​the increasing capacity of AI models and developers’ ability to contain…

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