GOVERNANCE

AI’s containment problem is getting urgent

Some of AI's most prominent figures are urging the industry to rein in the tech's most pressing risks. 

On Tuesday, a coalition of more than 400 researchers, including AI godfathers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, published an open letter calling for AI and security researchers to collaborate on improving alignment and containment approaches, and aiming to protect critical infrastructure before more incidents of "high-profile security failures" come to fruition. 

The letter claims that these incidents both serve as evidence of the importance of AI alignment and could have been preventable with stronger sandboxes, representing an "irresponsible lapse in standard cybersecurity practices." Though it didn't name any one company specifically, the letter comes in the wake of OpenAI's July breach of Hugging Face and the waterfall of incidents that have come to light since involving several major AI labs. 

"Without immediate changes in AI development and deployment practices, such incidents will continue to occur, and future incidents will be far more damaging to our exposed critical infrastructure," the letter reads. 

The letter makes three recommendations for addressing these risks: 

• Organizations that are developing and deploying "cyber-capable" AI models should immediately implement "high-assurance containment systems," as well as initially default to "airgapping" these models, or isolating them from unsecured external networks. 

• It suggests the creation of an international standards body that includes governments and a wide range of AI and security experts to create best practices for alignment and containment that "allow for greater access outside the sandbox." This organization should also track all containment failures, the letter notes. 

• Finally, all security incidents involving AI containment failures must be reported to this standards body and made public, allowing the industry to learn from its mistakes. "This transparency is required for both learning and accountability purposes," the letter said.

This letter adds to a growing number of AI industry researchers and leaders calling for increased safety guardrails. And the calls are coming from inside the Big Tech house: Microsoft's Satya Nadella, former DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic's Dario Amodei have been among the industry leaders in recent months urging for stronger security standards.  

However, despite the calls for transparency, AI labs might be getting fickle on what they tell the public: A report from Reuters published on Tuesday claims that Anthropic and OpenAI are seeking influence over what these evaluators can publish. Though the report notes that this aims to prevent intellectual property exposure, this could also limit the transparency and utility of third-party evaluations.

Though many in the industry have voiced their concern about humans losing control of AI, this letter argues that many of the incidents of rogue AI thus far have been a result of weak sandboxes, and could have been prevented with stronger security measures from the jump. However, these calls for containment come amid increased discussion around the possibility of recursive self-improvement, or RSI, as labs race toward AI that can improve upon itself. Jack Clark, a cofounder of Anthropic, wrote in a Substack newsletter on Monday "full RSI" will become possible in 2027, rather than 2028 like he had previously predicted. If these models' self-improving capabilities are truly around the corner, then strengthening our ability to control them before we get there is more important than ever. 

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CULTURE

Publishers seek leverage in the AI copyright fight

Most large language models are built on human content, and newsrooms are paying the price: many readers now turn to AI for answers drawn from journalism that was never properly licensed.

As a result, the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights, or SPUR, coalition was formed in February 2026 to combat unauthorized AI content scraping. While it was first started by the UK-based publications, on Tuesday, the coalition welcomed more than 40 new members, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Observer, and The Economist, bringing the total up to 80 members and more than 20 countries globally. 

Ultimately, the goal of SPUR is to bring the publishers together to set standards and rules for how AI systems can use publishers' copyrighted media, with licensing as the default way to do so. A key part of succeeding is showing a unified front, David Buttle, spokesperson at SPUR, told The Deep View.

"Over recent years, media publishers have been fighting the battle in silos for scant reward," said Buttle."That’s why the time is so ripe for this coalition. We now know this isn’t a battle that can be won with a fragmented front."

SPUR recently published the Content Telemetry Standard which is meant to create a standardized process in which AI labs can record which media is used to train their models and how they report that information to the publishers. It also says it is actively working with industry partners to make sure the framework is implemented effectively, and is developing tooling that makes it easy to do so. 

The New York Times is a fitting partner for the coalition, as it has been one of the most outspoken publications regarding the misuse of AI using its content, suing OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 on the basis of copyright infringement for using its content without consent to train its chatbots. 

"High quality journalism is crucial to healthy democracies and to the functioning of AI products and experiences," Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, SVP of strategic partnerships and executive operations for The New York Times, said in the announcement. "We are proud to work with SPUR to develop robust standards and protections for copyrighted content that are not unilaterally set by tech platforms."

It’s really interesting how much the conversation around AI in newsrooms has shifted. Early on, many argued that the clearest way to protect journalism was to keep AI out of newsrooms entirely. Now, respected legacy outlets like Bloomberg and Reuters are using AI to improve reader experiences, such as summaries at the top of articles. This fits well with a line from the New York Times’ release: “Intellectual property protection and technological advancement can and must co-exist.” Ideally, newsrooms should be free to take advantage of AI, and even to decide whether to let AI companies use their content, if they find it beneficial. The real problem right now is that newsrooms often don’t have a say in those decisions at all. 

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CONSUMER

Meta's Audio glasses make a context trade-off

Mark Zuckerberg has long promised that the future of wearable AI rests on a pair of glasses. The Ray-Ban Meta Audio gave me the most convincing look at that future yet.

The Ray-Ban Meta Audio are its first AI glasses with open-ear audio only, ditching the camera capabilities that the device has become known for. While forgoing the camera system may sound like a step backwards, the change gives it much more of an upgrade than you may think. 

Everything else about the experience is mostly the same as previous generations, including two open-ear speakers and a 6-mic array for crisp listening and phone call experiences, touch and voice controls, and the Meta AI assistant. However, since the glasses don't have to make room for cameras, they are lighter and much more compact, weighing about eight to nine grams less than the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 and clocking in as the lightest pair in Meta's smart glasses lineup. As far as wearability, they felt no different than the prescription glasses I wear every day. 

Sacrificing the camera comes with several other perks, including a retail price $100 lower than the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 at $349, and a longer battery life, with Meta claiming 12 hours from one charge (and an additional 48 from the charging case). In my testing, I couldn't kill the battery after wearing them for an entire day, with the biggest use case being playing audio while working or on walks.  

However, I found the biggest perk to be not having the cameras in the frames during social interactions. Meta has faced backlash as a result of people feeling uncomfortable with Meta Ray-Bans wearers potentially recording or photographing them without their consent. Without the cameras, I feel much more emboldened to walk around, shedding the subconscious fear that I am making people uneasy. 

For an average user who isn't a content creator, I don't think the lack of cameras will face pushback as users lean into the audio and voice features of these glasses. The collaboration also nailed the frames, Burbank and Clubmaster, the former resembling previous generations of Meta glasses, and the latter having the more unique and retro style.

Compared to previous iterations, these glasses feel the most wearable in social situations and in terms of overall comfort and practicality. However, the reason I have shared Zuckerberg's viewpoint is that the future of AI wearables lies in smart glasses because they can give AI the context of the world around you from your exact point of view. By removing the cameras, that benefit vanishes. While there are still significant benefits to getting rid of the cameras, the best of both worlds would be cameras that serve as sensors to feed context to the glasses, such as the Brilliant Labs Halo Glasses, which don't capture content, but rather use the visual feed as cues. Of course, the privacy problem would still exist, as users would  have to trust Meta with feeds of their everyday life, but given how much information users are willing to give Meta Muse, I suspect it would be less of an issue. 

LINKS

• Facebook expands LLM-powered "Your Algorithm" feature

• Anthropic said it cut effectiveness of distillation attacks by up to 99%

• Agent firm Decagon in talks to be acquired by ServiceNow

• OpenAI employee arrested by FBI after secretly recording in office

• Applied Intuition fields investment offers at $30 billion valuation

• IMF lifts 2026 GDP growth forecasts, citing AI boom

• Gemini 4 Argon: Google rolls it out globally via Gemini API and Google AI Pro subs

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