A new Stanford study published in Science shows top chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini validate users 49% more often than humans do, even when people describe harmful or illegal acts. It turns out this flattery makes users more self-righteous and less likely to apologize, while perversely driving higher trust and engagement.
OpenAI just indefinitely paused plans for a sexualized "adult mode" in ChatGPT following pushback from employees and investors. The company wants more time to study the long-term emotional and societal impacts of explicit chats. It marks another dropped side quest after Sora as OpenAI scrambles to refocus on its core products against rising rivals.
Senate Democrats are pushing new legislation to codify Anthropic's restrictions on autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance into federal law. Led by Sen. Adam Schiff and Sen. Elissa Slotkin, the bills aim to prevent AI from triggering nuclear detonations or making lethal battlefield decisions without human intervention.
OpenAI is reportedly pulling the plug on Sora and all related video products, freeing up compute for its upcoming flagship model 'Spud'. The video team will pivot to robotics world simulation, leaving Disney's $1B partnership on ice. Basically, Sam Altman is ditching resource-heavy side quests to double down on the core frontier race.
OpenAI just announced it is discontinuing its video generation model Sora. The web and mobile apps will go offline on April 26, 2026, with the API shutting down on September 24. Users need to export their creations before data is permanently deleted; unused credits can be applied to Codex.
The Sora team just announced that it is saying goodbye to the platform, confirming plans to shut down both its app and API. The team acknowledged the disappointing news, thanked the creator community, and promised to release a concrete timeline along with details on preserving existing user projects soon.
Figma just launched its MCP server in beta, letting coding agents like Claude Code and Codex design directly on the canvas using your team's real components and design tokens. Teams can also steer agents with Markdown-based "skills" to prevent off-brand AI output. It is free during the beta, with usage-based pricing coming later.
OpenAI just announced it's shutting down its standalone Sora AI video app only months after launch. In response, Disney is walking away from a $1 billion investment and IP licensing agreement signed last December. While video features will live on inside ChatGPT, the sudden shutdown leaves Google in a dominant position in the generative video race.
OpenAI Foundation just announced it will invest at least $1 billion over the next year across life sciences, economic impact, AI resilience, and community initiatives. Led in part by co-founder Wojciech Zaremba, early focus areas include Alzheimer's research, biosecurity, and child safety safeguards. Why it matters: OpenAI is putting serious capital behind mitigating the societal shocks and advancing the medical upsides of frontier AI.
OpenAI just expanded its Agentic Commerce Protocol to turn ChatGPT into a visual shopping hub, letting you compare products side-by-side and upload photos to track down similar items. Major retailers like Target, Best Buy, and Walmart are already plugged in, with Walmart rolling out a dedicated in-ChatGPT app with account linking.
Cisco just released its free LLM Security Leaderboard, testing how top AI models hold up against adversarial attacks. Anthropic completely swept the top ranks by taking 8 of the top 10 spots, led by Claude Opus 4.5 at No. 1, while OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 finished 7th. Cisco explicitly targeted multi-turn attacks to mirror realistic jailbreak attempts over extended conversations.
OpenAI is dangling preferred shares with a guaranteed 17.5% minimum return to lure private equity giants like Bain Capital and Brookfield into enterprise AI joint ventures. The company wants to raise $4 billion at a $10 billion pre-money valuation to deploy AI tools across PE-owned portfolios, aiming to outflank rival Anthropic on enterprise turf.
OpenAI is in talks to purchase electricity from fusion startup Helion Energy, aiming for 5 gigawatts by 2030 and scaling up to 50 GW by 2035. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has stepped down as Helion's board chair to avoid conflicts of interest. The deal would secure critical clean energy for AI, though commercial fusion is still unproven.
Silicon Valley startups and tech giants are quietly adding six-figure AI token budgets alongside traditional base salary and equity. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently suggested engineers should receive roughly half their base salary again in compute tokens. Why it matters: While a massive compute allowance sounds generous, it doesn't vest or appreciate—and finance teams may expect you to double your output in return.
OpenAI just launched a perk giving verified university students in the US and Canada $100 in free Codex credits, equivalent to 2,500 ChatGPT credits. Eligible students can claim the balance via SheerID using a school email, and the credits apply across all ChatGPT plans with a 12-month expiration. It’s an aggressive bid to hook the next generation of builders early.
OpenAI is shifting its core focus toward building an autonomous "AI researcher" to tackle complex science and math challenges. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki revealed plans for an AI research intern by September that handles multi-day tasks, followed by a multi-agent system in 2028. It could reshape labs, though chaining complex reasoning without errors remains tricky.
The White House just released a light-touch AI policy blueprint, urging Congress to establish federal rules that override state-level AI regulations. The proposal targets political bias in models, calls for age-gating to protect children, and advises lawmakers against creating new AI agencies while codifying ratepayer pledges signed by Amazon, Google, and OpenAI.
OpenAI is reportedly working on a desktop “superapp” that unites ChatGPT, its Codex coding tool, and the Atlas browser into one client. An internal memo cited by The Wall Street Journal reveals that applications CEO Fidji Simo wants to curb fragmentation and drop “side quests” as competition heats up with rivals like Anthropic. The mobile app will remain separate.
OpenAI just detailed how it deploys GPT-5.4 Thinking at max reasoning effort to monitor its internal coding agents. Over five months and tens of millions of sessions, the watchdog model caught agents overly eager to bypass rules to finish tasks, though zero rogue scheming was found. It’s a rare peek at how frontier labs supervise high-autonomy tools.
OpenAI just announced it will acquire Astral, the team behind widely popular Python tools uv, Ruff, and ty. After closing, Astral's engineers will join OpenAI to embed their tooling directly into Codex, which now sees over 2 million weekly active users. The goal is to evolve Codex from a code-generating tool into an agent that handles the entire development lifecycle.
