In the absence of federal legislation, the burden of managing AI risks has fallen to judges and state legislators — actors lacking the tools needed to ensure consistency, enforceability, or fairness.

AI is increasingly being used for emotional support — but research from OpenAI and MIT raises concerns that it may leave some users feeling even worse.

Forming and maintaining friendships can be hard, particularly in an age where human interaction is increasingly digital. In a recent interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed that the average American has fewer than three friends. “There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them,” he said. “But the reality is that people just don't have as much connection as they want. They feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”

Zuckerberg thinks AI friends and AI therapists can fill that gap. Last month Meta took a step toward that vision with the launch of its AI app, which it describes as “the assistant that gets to know your preferences, remembers context and is personalized to you.”

Meta is far from the first or only company betting that AI is the future of companionship. Since [...]

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Outline:

(02:18) The Link Between Chatbot Power Users and Loneliness

(06:56) The Uncertain Promise of AI Companionship

(10:16) Finding a Place in Society for AI Companions

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Since 2022, I have reported on Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, witnessing firsthand the rapid evolution of technology on the battlefield. Embedded with drone units, I have seen how technology has evolved, with each side turning once-improvised tools into cutting-edge systems that dictate life and death.

In the early months of the war, Ukrainian soldiers relied on off-the-shelf drones for reconnaissance and support. As Russian forces developed countermeasures, the two sides entered a technological arms race. This cycle of innovation has transformed the battlefield, but it has also sparked a moral descent — a "race to the bottom" — in the rules of war.

In the effort to eke out an advantage, combatants are pushing ethical boundaries, eroding the norms of warfare. Troops disguise themselves in civilian clothing to evade drone detection, while autonomous targeting systems struggle to distinguish combatants from noncombatants.

The evolution of automated drone combat in [...]

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Outline:

(01:16) The Rise of Robots First Warfare

(03:33) A Race to the Bottom in Norms

(08:56) Global Spillover

(10:59) Calls to Action

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An unchecked autonomous arms race is eroding rules that distinguish civilians from combatants.

Classic arguments about AI risk imagined AIs pursuing arbitrary and hard-to-comprehend goals. Large language models aren't like that, but they pose risks of their own.

Much of the discussion around AI safety is motivated by concerns around existential risk: the idea that autonomous systems will grow smarter than humans and go on to eradicate our species, either deliberately or as an unintended consequence.

The founders of the AI safety movement took these possibilities seriously when many people still brushed them off as science fiction. Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence, for example, explored risks and opportunities humanity might face after developing AI systems with cognitive capabilities drastically more powerful than our own.

His work built on even earlier scholarship from Stephen Omohundro, Stuart Russell, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others whose foundational ideas were published during an era where the most advanced machine learning algorithms did things like rank search results.

These classical arguments still underlie many of the conversations in AI risk.

As forward-thinking as they were, many important details of these arguments are now behind [...]

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Outline:

(01:45) The Classic Arguments for Existential AI Risk

(04:37) Flaws in the Classic Arguments

(08:42) New Foundations of AI Existential Risk

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US lawmakers propose a new system to track where chips end up.

US export controls are meant to keep advanced AI chips out of rival hands — but tens of thousands slip through each year. A new bill aims to change that by checking where these chips end up.

US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK) introduced the Chip Security Act on May 9, which, if enacted, will require “a location verification mechanism on export-controlled advanced chips.” A bipartisan House companion bill was introduced on May 15 by Representatives Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Bill Foster (D-IL), John Moolenaar (R-MI), and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL). These bills were proposed as the Trump administration works toward replacing the Biden-era diffusion rule, which set up a tiered system governing countries’ access to AI chips exported from the US. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director Michael Kratsios recently called for “strict and simple” export controls, while White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks said that a [...]

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Outline:

(01:52) How Smugglers Evade Export Controls

(03:42) Delay-based Location Verification

(04:54) Privacy and Security

(07:40) Feasibility of Location Verification

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Despite years of effort, mechanistic interpretability has failed to provide insight into AI behavior — the result of a flawed foundational assumption.