Ward’s Words
We are in the lull before the storm. OpenAI has their DevDay next week where they are expected to announce several updates. In addition to that, there are rumors that they will be updating the main chat client for ChatGPT tomorrow. Currently ChatGPT runs off of Sol 5.6. Rumors are that they will be updating it to Sol 6 (which some people are saying is an optimized version of Astra). It’s supposed to be smarter and cheaper for them to serve.
Anthropic has an updated version of Opus that is expected to drop today or tomorrow. This new model is rumored to be their answer to Sol 5.6 which was released weeks ago, but we won’t know for sure until it actually goes live.
All that to say that as of this moment things are a bit slow on the news side as everyone seems to be waiting for the next guy to go first.
Is This the Real Reason for the Slow Down?
International Cyber Digest wrote:
BREAKING: Jensen Huang says Dario Amodei and Sam Altman are lying by asking for more laws. Read between the lines, he said. They're asking to be released from the laws we already have. "I think that's a problem."
Here’s the full interview:
Chief Nerd wrote:
Well this is interesting. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggest AI firms could be seeking liability protections for harms their products may cause.
“Go and read between the lines. They're actually not asking for more laws. They're asking to be relieved of the laws we do have, and I I think that that's a problem.”
There’s a video clip of the exchange at the link.
If you prefer text over video, CBS News has a good write up of the interview here:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jensen-huang-nvidia-rejects-ai-extinction-warnings/
From the article:
"You have all kinds of liabilities associated with cybersecurity" and damage liability laws, Huang said. "Apply that first — don't let this doomsday narrative allow someone to relieve them of the laws that currently exist."
No Liabiilty Shield
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promises that these AI companies will not receive a liability shield for the harm that their models cause. The video below is time stamped to the moment when Secretary Bessent begins discussing the Hugging Face incident.
The relevant quote from Secretary Bessent is:
“One employee came out and said there’s a 10% chance of an extinction level event but then the labs also said, ‘Take the liability off of our hands.’ and we will not do that.”
Why does this matter? In addition to the well-publicized Hugging Face incident we also have this quote from Dario Amodei:
“It’s my worry that in 6–12 months [an agent] swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.”
They want to make sure that they will not be held accountable for these types of actions, but they should be. You want AI safety? Make sure that you only release models for which you are willing to assume financial responsibility for. Start holding these companies accountable for the model’s bad actions and they will figure this stuff out or they will voluntarily slow down release cycles on their own without requiring government intervention.
AI Humor
If you want to see how ridiculous the AI safety debate can be, here’s an exaggerated portrayal that is an extrapolation of various claims these companies have made:
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Big Tech Alert wrote:
529 days can change a man
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Worth Reading
Some of All Fears by Andrew Sharp
Great article that provides a nice voice of sanity about the AI safety debate and does a great job at examining the history of the movement as well as highlighting the risks around how these incidents are reported. I particularly like this quote from the piece:
But beyond the obvious conflicted interests at play, I just think it’s useful for our mental framework to step back and recognize that the people driving AI progress are the same ones auditing its risks to humanity, and they are all basically arriving at their conclusions by talking to one another, working with one another, and drawing on prophecies from 20 years ago as they frame their conclusions. This week’s Time Magazine cover story about AI doom was written by two effective altruists, and when Axios warned us in April (with a giant, blood red computer) that AI havoc was imminent, they were of course citing Anthropic’s own warnings about a model that was released weeks later without the world even noticing. Elsewhere, one EA-funded security firm is at the center of every agent hacking incident this year, while Bernie Sanders’ post announcing that he’d like to ban frontier AI development cites an independent investigator named Ajeya Cotra, who said of the Hugging Face incident, “This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I continue to expect extremely rapid advances in capabilities over the next six months. I am not sure that we will get another warning shot before it’s too late.”
All in all I found this to be a great piece in that he highlights that there are many steps that these AI alarmists are skipping to arrive at these doomsday scenarios. They never seem to consider that humanity may respond to the bad actions a model takes, that there are real world physical safeguards that require an actual human body to overcome, and several other similar weaknesses that they just handwave away.
You can read the article here:
https://sharptext.net/2026/some-of-all-fears/
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I found this useful. Thanks Jw!