Meta’s Trump hire, the never-ending Grok scandals, and so much more. Here's our weekly newsletter, which covers everything you could possibly need to know about AI through the last seven days, all in one very convenient and very readable location. www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-midterm...

Last year, the US unemployment rate was under 5%. The Great Depression is the only time in history that the unemployment rate in America lingered above 10% for an extended period. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, believes AI-induced unemployment will reach 20% by 2030.

Just in case you wanted some ammo to get into an argument with a great deal of people online: ChatGPT simply isn't using anywhere near as much water as people think (the idea just won't go away, even though data relentlessly shows that it, you know, simply doesn't hold any water).

If you're ever struggling to discern the signal from the noise, just know we've always got all the best bits of the AI discourse up on our weekly newsletter right over here: www.transformernews.ai/p/why-hasnt-...

People building AI think it will eliminate many millions of jobs. People who study labor markets think it won’t. At least one of these groups is badly wrong — and the stakes couldn't be higher. Here's why no one agrees on what AI will do to jobs. www.transformernews.ai/p/why-no-one...

An Alibaba AI tool has helped detect 14 early-stage cancers since November 2024! Which is great! A RAND analysis concluded that governments are unprepared to stop a rogue AI in a catastrophic loss-of-control incident! Which is bad! More mixed news here: www.transformernews.ai/p/why-hasnt-...

"Deepfake porn emerged in 2017. Policymakers had eight years to prepare. They didn’t. Lawsuits and fines come after the harm is done — and when you are dealing with the world’s richest man, they carry little weight." So why hasn't anyone stopped Grok? www.transformernews.ai/p/why-hasnt-...

"If this is how we handle the easy cases, we should be terrified about what’s coming next." Read @shakeelhashim.com on Grok, plus China’s H200 plans, the plot to oust Ro Khanna, and research turmoil at OpenAI in today's Transformer Weekly. www.transformernews.ai/p/why-hasnt-...

"The rate of progress in AI remains both impressive and terrifying. But that doesn’t mean the current financial trajectory is an uninterrupted path to the moon." Will AI to capsize the world economy in 2026? This and other predictions from Transformer: www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-predict...

The sheer capacity of Claude Code with Opus 4.5 has shaken the AI world (even if the world at large — including the huge proportion of casual LLM users — haven't quite cottoned on). It doesn't just code, but can use it to accomplish tasks. Just how transformative is it?

The big news in AI right now — even if people aren't quite waking up to it just yet — is just how staggeringly capable Claude Code is at coding. This really does seem to be a world-changing technology (except for that the world doesn't realise what it is)

When we talk about AI nowadays, we're almost always talking about LLMs. But what if 2026 is the year where different AIs altogether step to centre stage? Could 'world models' bypass the limitations of purely statistical models? Could robotics end up overhauling the world economy?

Could AI cause the end of copyright altogether? James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School speculates that "what comes after copyright could be as different from copyright as copyright was from patronage.”

Have you ever been so angry about a vague subtweet that you immediately threatened to sue someone? Catch up with all the weirdest and funniest and most terrible takes in AI from 2025 over here: www.transformernews.ai/p/worst-funn...

"The benefits of AI — economic, medical, and scientific — must not be monopolized by a narrow elite but must serve the common good. We must protect the disenfranchised, ensuring that these tools bridge the gap of inequality rather than widening it." www.transformernews.ai/p/paolo-bena...

"It is a moral imperative that artificial intelligence remains a tool and never becomes a master" — Vatican AI advisor and professor of moral philosophy Paolo Benanti Read more:

Pope Leo XIV is preparing a landmark AI encyclical modeled after Pope Leo XIII's 1891 "Rerum Novarum," which helped inspire child labor laws and workers' rights during industrialization. AI safety advocates hope the Church can provide similar moral leadership for AI.

Today in AI discourse: Bernie Sanders wants a pause on the AI infrastructure buildout. Alexander Berger thinks that's "such a bad idea". Pause AI, however, thinks it would actually be a good idea to pause AI. All this and more in our weekly newsletter. www.transformernews.ai/p/the-unseen...

AI models are rapidly improving at potentially dangerous biological and chemical tasks, and also showing fast increases in self-replication capabilities, according to a new report from the UK’s AI Security Institute. www.transformernews.ai/p/aisi-ai-se...

Here's a startling sci-fi conceit: what if AIs misbehave because they're trained on all our stories about misbehaving AI? What if articles on the threat of misaligned AI are teaching AI to become misaligned? And what if this becomes a severe problem for all of us pretty soon?

"As crunch time for AI approaches, those at the wheel seem perfectly happy driving a clown car." @shakeelhashim.com the dumbest timeline for AI, plus GPT 5.2, OpenAI's Disney deal and more in this week's Transformer Weekly. www.transformernews.ai/p/were-in-th...

EXCLUSIVE: New York’s governor is trying to turn the RAISE Act into an SB 53 copycat. Gov. Kathy Hochul is proposing to strike the entire text of the RAISE Act, replacing it with verbatim language from SB 53, sources tell Transformer. Read more: www.transformernews.ai/p/new-york-g...

It would be sad, if almost amusingly ironic, if the ways we express our fears about AI were the very thing that ended up making them come true.

Sam Altman has declared a "code red" over at OpenAI. And The Future of Life Institute has refused to give any lab a mark higher than "C+" on their latest AI Safety Index. There's all this, and much more, in our latest weekly briefing.

In today's Transformer Weekly: Why the apparent lack of safety testing on DeepSeek's latest model speaks to bigger problems, plus preemption’s out of the NDAA, OpenAI’s ‘code red,’ Anthropic’s IPO prep and more: www.transformernews.ai/p/the-proble...

By building their own intellectual ecosystem, researchers worried about existential AI risk shed academia's baggage — and, perhaps, some of its strengths

Well, the mission to get federal preemption of state AI laws has failed yet again. And the debate around it has shown that a policy of little-to-no AI regulation is a political nonstarter: anyone who's pushed for it has triggered uproar from across the political spectrum.

"The faster China diffuses AI, the faster a range of risks could materialize." Beijing's plan to embed AI across society within a year could backfire spectacularly, writes @carnegieendowment.org's Scott Singer

Anthropic is set to publish its whistleblowing policy for employees imminently — likely as soon as this week — making it the second major AI company to publicly reveal how it will handle internal whistleblowing. www.transformernews.ai/can-ai-embra...

AI safety might just find its future as a mass political movement. Indeed, Cathy Rogers from Social Change Lab tells us that it could even take inspiration from the climate movement — both are, after all, concerned with “things which are too terrifying to contemplate.”

A survey of frontier lab employees has found that 100% (!) of respondents are either “Not Confident At All” or “Not Very Confident” that their concerns would be “understood and acted upon by the government.” Which isn't really good for AI safety, Abra Ganz and Karl Koch argue.

The AI safety movement has historically worked mostly behind the scenes. But in the past two years, some have begun to adopt strategies more similar to those favored by other causes, such as climate advocacy: attempting to build a mass movement.

"The ability to report risks should not depend on charity and individuals choosing to risk losing their jobs and livelihoods." SB 53 protects AI whistleblowers, but places the greatest burden employees, not labs write @abra_ganz and @AIWI_Official's Karl Koch www.transformernews.ai/p/sb-53-prot...

Google’s much-anticipated Gemini 3 Pro finally appeared last week — it immediately became the world’s most powerful AI model. It currently ranks #1 on LMArena, where it outperformed Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and GPT-5.1 at 19 math, science, multimodal, and agentic benchmarks.

The quest for federal AI preemption – allowing the US government to overwrite state AI laws – is back.

Focusing on AI child safety is vital — we shouldn't even need to say why — but it could also be a fulcrum point for focussing on AI safety more generally, since the risks children face simultaneously threaten us all.

Advocates for federal preemption of state AI laws have redoubled their efforts. But this time, @shakeelhashim.com argues, their desperation is palpable. Read more in today's Transformer Weekly: www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-preempt...

In certain parts of Silicon Valley, “safety” has become a dirty word, on par with “regulation” itself. Either you want to accelerate AI as quickly and carelessly as possible, or you're a an enemy of progress. But what if AI safety could be made profitable?

A leaked Trump executive order would create an "AI Litigation Task Force" to fight state AI regulations. Read the full EO here:

Child safety in AI has overwhelming public support and is driving legislative action. These measures could establish broader transparency and auditing requirements that address frontier risks for everyone. Read more:

Interest in AI safety has waxed and waned dramatically. Earlier this year JD Vance told the AI Action Summit: “I’m not here to talk about AI safety.” So how do we do a good job of AI safety policy in a world that’s just not that excited about it? www.transformernews.ai/p/doing-ai-s...

"How do we do a good job of AI safety policy in a world that’s just not that excited about AI safety policy?" asks the Centre for Long Term Resilience's Jess Whittlestone. www.transformernews.ai/p/doing-ai-s...

Discussions of AI safety often get too wrapped up in debates about whether "AGI" is imminent. But that focus can lead people to ignore a fundamental issue: AI doesn’t need to be general to be dangerous.

"How we choose to act now will determine whether our shared basis for reality — what we see and hear — remains trustworthy." Witness's @samgregory.bsky.social on Sora's threat to visual truth:

AI-driven unemployment threatens to drastically reduce the taxes government is able to levy on workers to pay for public services. Economists, policy makers and even AI companies are looking for innovative, and fair, ways to replace them. www.transformernews.ai/p/why-we-nee...

Japan's new AI legislation has no penalties for non-compliance, relying on social pressure and voluntary guidelines instead. It could provide a blueprint for other nations seeking to govern AI without stifling innovation.

OpenAI claims its restructure creates "the strongest representation of mission-focused governance in the industry." But questions remain about safety governance and whether the deal is a fair one for its nonprofit arm.

Two recently announced runs for Congress will be a test of whether campaigning for AI safety is a way to get crushed by tech company money. That, plus new bosses at AISI and NIST, why AI cyber-risk may be overhyped and more in Transformer's weekly newsletter:

Exclusive: Former GCHQ AI chief Adam Beaumont is the new interim director of UK's AI Security Institute.

“I think it was the first time in recent memory I’ve seen the tech industry suffer a defeat like that.” Read @nickywoolf.bsky.social's dive into how MAGA's embrace of AI Safety is causing trouble for Trump's newly cosy relationship with Big Tech. www.transformernews.ai/p/how-maga-l...