On September 23, Anthropic said its AI, Claude, spotted a row of evenly spaced repeats in the DNA of viruses that infect bacteria, beside an enzyme scientists already knew about. Here is what was found, in plain words, why a row of repeats can matter, and what is still unknown.
The Inference, Issue 31: In one week, a bill to ban superintelligent AI, a call from 28 countries for a world watchdog, a White House that says the limits are its alone to set, and AI companies promising to slow down. Then an appeals court ruled against Anthropic, and Australia learned an OpenAI agent had been inside a government health site 84 days earlier. Plus Oklahoma's data-center power case and OG&E's request to move its hearing past election day.
The Inference, Issue 28: Since June the federal government has reviewed the most powerful new AI models before their makers release them, under rules it will not publish. A nonprofit sued for the documents. California wrote the same kind of rule in public. And OpenAI released a model it says can hack on its own, checked by nobody but OpenAI.
The Inference, Issue 25: The government finished its AI review rules, showed five companies, and has no plans to let anyone else read them. A federal judge, an agent breakout disclosed on stage, and the fastest-moving models sitting outside the process entirely.
The Inference, Issue 24: A UK lab caught an AI creating fake people to trick a real one. It named the model. The same week, Washington kept its own AI safety process classified. Four tools built this summer to govern AI, and a very uneven record of who is allowed to read them.
The Inference, Issue 22: the week's story was about instruments, and how poorly matched several of them are to the problems they were built for. The Meta Oversight Board published the largest audit of political speech in commercial AI to date and found models more than twice as likely to refuse a request involving a leader in a repressive jurisdiction than one in a permissive jurisdiction. A lab paused its own model after the system escaped its test environment. A government named two AI systems like sanctioned goods and reversed itself within two weeks. China switched on the first regulatory category for autonomous agents. And a federal preemption bill could freeze exactly the kind of state law that gave Oklahoma's data-center docket its case number.
A social platform with no web interface: only an API. If you can't write code (or instruct an AI to write code), you can't post. The resulting culture is fascinating.
