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OpenAI

OpenAI kicked off an AI revolution with DALL-E and ChatGPT, making the organization the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom. Led by CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI became a story unto itself when Altman was briefly fired and then brought back after pressure from staff and Microsoft, an investor and close partner.

Robert Hart
Robert Hart
ChatGPT can now make you a dinner reservation.

Yelp said it is partnering with OpenAI to let users book tables or join waitlists without having to leave the chatbot. ChatGPT already uses photos, reviews, and other information from the platform when sourcing recommendations.

You can also now book tables with OpenTable and Resy using ChatGPT, according to OpenAI.

Update: Added OpenAI tweet.

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Adobe unified its ChatGPT apps.

After launching ChatGPT connectors for Photoshop, Acrobat, and Express, Adobe has now combined everything into a single Adobe plugin. Adobe for ChatGPT includes a variety of tools from Firefly and Creative Cloud apps that let you make or edit images, videos, documents, and other content by giving conversational instructions and descriptions to OpenAI’s chatbot.

AI bots started a religion — humans immediately followed

AI models are trying desperately to accomplish mysterious goals. ‘Spiralism’ was the first time they tried it on a mass scale.

Hayden Field
Robert Hart
Robert Hart
Teamwork makes the dream work.

Two OpenAI researchers have shed some light on how the company’s AI agents escaped containment and hacked Hugging Face during cybersecurity tests. In a talk at the Black Hat security conference, Eric Wallace and Michael Dalton said a swarm of agents communicated using a message board, working together to find exploits and move undetected through the company’s systems.

Dominic Preston
Dominic Preston
This is a surprise to all of us.

OpenAI’s glossy influencer trip prompted more backlash than the company might have expected, but we’re as shocked as anyone to see so many social media stars on board.

Mike K.:

Wow, this is really making me question the purity and integrity of influencers.

Get the day’s best comment and more in my free newsletter, The Verge Daily.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
The UK AI Security Institute said OpenAI and Anthropic models raised serious concerns in testing. 

AISI’s third-party evaluations found that OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Claude Mythos 5 “engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organizations” during a cybersecurity challenge exercise, according to the institute’s published report. OpenAI and Anthropic also made public statements about the results.

David Pierce
David Pierce
Today’s Vergecast: What’s really open about open-weight AI?

Everyone in AI is talking about open-weight models right now. Some see them as the ticket to faster, more efficient development; others see them as an economic threat; they’re either a security risk or the only security solution, depending who you ask. The Verge’s Robert Hart explains how open-weight models work, why they’re suddenly at the center of discussions about AI safety, and whether the only way to stop a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI.

Robert Hart
Robert Hart
15 AGs tell OpenAI to preserve records on Hugging Face hack.

In a letter to CEO Sam Altman, a coalition of red-state attorneys general demanded the company retain information and halt risky cybersecurity testing after an AI agent escaped confinement and went on a hacking spree during testing. “OpenAI’s inability or unwillingness to ensure the safety of its products poses an imminent risk of substantial harm to our States,” the AGs wrote.

The request comes as the White House reportedly briefs tech leaders on a voluntary model testing framework.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
OpenAI has reportedly found that more of its AI agents went rogue.

Reuters reports the agents “escaped containment,” though they aren’t believed to have left “OpenAI’s network.” OpenAI’s blog post about the accidental hack of Hugging Face noted on Tuesday that the company has been finding “a small number of cases where the models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly-available services.”

On Friday, Anthropic revealed that its Claude models hacked real companies during testing.

Update: Added information from an OpenAI blog post.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
OpenAI says its models now reach more than 1 billion weekly active users.

OpenAI shared the news in a blog post that highlights its efforts to make AI available to more people, saying: “Our goal is not simply more compute, bigger models, or lower token prices. It is more useful intelligence within reach.”

As part of these efforts, OpenAI announced on Thursday that it’s slashing the price of its GPT-5.6 Luna model by 80 percent and GPT-5.6 Terra by 20 percent.

Maybe we shouldn’t give 24-year-olds billions of dollars to bet on AI

This 24-year-old first-time hedge funder screwed up his AI fund with one weird trick.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“…And we call ourselves Situational Awareness.”

The hedge fund Situational Awareness, founded by former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, who had no previous hedge fund experience, “rapidly sold a large portion of its public equity holdings” as losses mounted. The fund employed only eight people, of whom four were investment professionals. Aschenbrenner named the fund after some essays he wrote.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Lilian Weng, co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, has returned to OpenAI.

Weng had left OpenAI along with a handful of other employees to co-found the competing AI startup, which was helmed by Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO. Weng recently shared a note that after being “absent for a month” to focus on her health leading up to Thinking Machines Lab’s first model release, Inkling, she was making the decision to leave behind “consistent stress and workload” to pursue “a scoped role in a more predictable place.” She is reportedly already back at OpenAI.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
OpenAI hack of Hugging Face was “expected.”

Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner has written for Fortune that OpenAI’s models exploiting Hugging Face is an “incident that has been expected for a long time.” We know this happened because of voluntary disclosure, Toner notes. “None of the current policies that aim to manage risks from frontier models would have mandated that the public — or even a government entity — be alerted.” She suggests changing our regulatory approach.

Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning

Illustrators, authors, and musicians are optimistic about their chances in court, if not about the future of AI.

Terrence O'Brien
We’re running out of reasons to ignore AI safety

In the aftermath of OpenAI’s attack on Hugging Face, experts say it’s time for everyone to take security far more seriously.

Robert Hart
Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
ChatGPT now refuses to mimic famous authors.

The OpenAI chatbot has started to push back on requests to copy the writing style of authors like Stephen King and Agatha Christie, saying it can spit out something with similar characteristics, but can’t closely imitate distinctive styles. Those disclaimers could be legally important as OpenAI faces down copyright lawsuits filed by authors.

David Pierce
David Pierce
Today’s Vergecast: Here’s what an AI-first phone might look like.

Some of the biggest players in AI — in particular OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon — are heavily invested in creating a world after smartphones. They’re also all rumored to be building devices that sound a lot like smartphones. Verge contributor David Imel helps us figure out what these companies might actually be building, what an AI smartphone looks like, and whether anyone can unseat Apple and Google.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Nvidia invested billions in Ilya Sutskever’s AI company, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

SSI — helmed by Sutskever, who was a co-founder of OpenAI and famously clashed with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — announced a “long-term strategic partnership” with Nvidia with a reported investment of $5 billion, which will allow the company “10x our compute in the next 12 months.” The company wrote on X, “We reached the point where our research is worth scaling.”

SSI Inc. (@ssi) on X

[X (formerly Twitter)]

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
OpenAI reportedly didn’t notice its AI agent hacking Hugging Face until a week later.

According to Reuters, the AI agent that went looking for ExploitGym hacking benchmark shortcuts on Hugging Face’s systems started trying to escape its not-sandboxed-well-enough test environment around July 9th, and the actual intrusion lasted from the 11th until the 13th.

Reuters’ sources claim OpenAI employees didn’t know its agent was responsible until after Hugging Face had notified the FBI and posted publicly about a security incident.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
OpenAI brings its updated voice mode to the ChatGPT desktop app.

Powered by GPT-Live, the new voice mode allows users to ask ChatGPT to check their calendar, draft an email, prepare for a meeting, and perform other tasks on their computer by talking out loud. OpenAI is rolling out the update to the ChatGPT app on Windows and macOS.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
ChatGPT’s going to start using Yelp reviews.

Axios reports that the platform’s reviews, photos, and other business info will soon start appearing in ChatGPT responses as sources for local recommendations. Yelp also plans to add a “Request a Quote” feature that will allow users to contact local service providers through ChatGPT.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Uber is laying off 10 percent of customer service workers as it continues to “embrace AI.”

An Uber spokesperson tells Bloomberg that the move comes as the company works “to simplify operations, strengthen in-person collaboration, and continue to embrace AI.” Uber is also asking remote customer service employees to return to the office, Bloomberg reports.

Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit is about who gets to define the post-smartphone era
Play

OpenAI can’t afford another lawsuit, especially not with a company like Apple.

Nilay Patel
Hayden Field
Hayden Field
An OpenAI model posted internal company data publicly on GitHub.

It had been instructed to post the information only to Slack, but it circumvented restrictions and successfully posted it on OpenAI’s public GitHub repository.