Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel honored for developing optogenetics
Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that he is suspending Microsoft, Adobe and several other IT firms' ability to hire foreign-born workers for permanent residency in the U.S. Why it matters: The move will affect hundreds of companies owned by the tech giant, escalating the Trump administration's cracking down on immigrant labor. What they're saying: "We want people to invest in the United States of America, particularly the American technology sector," Vance said during a Thursday news conference. "We're the biggest boosters of your industry. We want you to continue to grow and to employ a lot of people, but we want you to employ American workers.""And so our message to Microsoft is, you're great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants." Zoom in: The program, the permanent labor certification program, administered through the Department of Labor, allows a company to hire a foreign worker to live permanently in America. Driving the news: Vance specifically singled out Microsoft, slamming them for laying off 6,000 workers last year. Vance said Thursday that "[a]t the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards. In other words, if you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants. Now that is a scandalous system that we've allowed in this country for far too long." Microsoft owns hundreds of companies, including LinkedIn, Skype and gaming studio Activision Blizzard.He also called out and suspended Adobe and IT outsourcing firms Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini from the program. Worth noting: Trump will award Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at the White House today. This is a breaking news story and will be updated
The government said it will legislate "as soon as they can" but may "reassess" its plans if firms make the desired changes sooner
President Trump is as all-in on AI as a politician could be: all gas, no brakes, and zero interest in hand-wringing about dystopian risks or public disdain. Democrats are as conflicted on AI as a party could be: skeptical of the labs, spooked by their warnings, but split on whether to shut it all down. Why it matters: This staggering divide makes consensus on federal AI regulation almost unimaginable this year — and probably through early 2029, regardless of who wins control of Congress. Zoom in: Trump has governed as the AI president from Day 1, applying the same doctrine to models and the data centers that power them — build faster, regulate less, beat China. Speaking in Ireland on Sunday, he dismissed new safety warnings as the work of "a lot of negative forces . bringing up things that won't happen" — and reduced the stakes to one line: "Whoever wins AI wins."It's unclear which "negative forces" Trump has in mind: Calls to slow the race — or "pace the frontier" — are now coming from the leaders of America's premier AI labs, including Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google. Between the lines: Trump's accelerationist allies, including venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, see the safety alarms as a cynical ploy by the field's dominant players to lock in favorable regulations. David Sacks, Trump's former AI czar and a leading voice for the administration's hands-off approach, has a simple answer: Slow yourselves down.If OpenAI and Anthropic truly think the frontier is moving too fast, Sacks argues, they can decelerate on their own without using Washington to force competitors to do the same. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) echoed Sacks' argument that the labs don't need Congress to slow themselves down — and rejected calls for an emergency moratorium. Johnson said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he'd recall the House and put AI regulation to a vote "if we had the solution," but warned Congress against rushing into rules it doesn't yet understand.His preferred fi
OpenAI on Thursday released GPT-6 Astra, which president Greg Brockman called a "generational leap" and said could eventually be seen as the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Why it matters: Astra pushes AI agents closer to doing complex professional work on their own — while also raising questions about how safely they can be deployed. Driving the news: Brockman says he personally believes OpenAI has reached AGI, while leaving users to decide whether Astra meets that definition. "I think it might be about this model," Brockman said in a briefing with reporters about whether Astra could mark the arrival of AGI.He ended the briefing by saying: "Welcome to the AGI era." Between the lines: OpenAI said that Astra was built on its largest-ever training run, using more than 100,000 GPUs at its Stargate site in Texas. The company also said this is its first model to use other models in a significant role in supervising Astra's training.GPT-6 Astra will first be available to a limited set of organizations in OpenAI's Daybreak Access program and will be available "in the coming days" for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise customers and API developers. Catch-up quick: OpenAI said earlier this week that Astra would be released soon, but that its most powerful cybersecurity capabilities would remain limited to a small group of trusted testers. Astra is the first model OpenAI has designated as reaching its "critical" cybersecurity threshold under its preparedness framework — meaning it can potentially find and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities across well-protected systems without step-by-step human guidance.OpenAI previously slowed Astra's release to add safety testing after determining that its cyber capabilities could reach the critical threshold. Zoom in: Astra is designed to work directly inside software, rather than just recommending what a person should do next. In a video demonstration, Astra formatted a legal contract and built a 3D ga
Will an Aug. 24, 2026, Supreme Court decision lead to chaos in the midterm elections? An election law scholar dissects the decision, its background and possible effects
The models responsible for last month’s agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently trained to cheat and to communicate with each other, according to an OpenAI technical report released today. The hack, which a group of agents undertook to find solutions for a cybersecurity test that they were stuck on, has confirmed some experts’…
Start-up discloses breach a week after rival OpenAI reported similar incident
The White House on Wednesday accused Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI of stealing proprietary U.S. technology to develop its latest AI model, as Washington and Beijing compete for dominance in the advancing technology. “We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model,” Michael Kratsios, director of the […]
The Trump administration has asked OpenAI to limit the release of its next model, GPT-5.6, to only a small set of government-approved partners before any wider release, citing security concerns, according to a source familiar with the matter. Why it matters: This marks the first time the U.S. government has preemptively asked an American AI company to restrict the launch of a model before release. Driving the news: The White House's Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy asked OpenAI to limit the rollout of GPT-5.6 as the administration builds a framework for testing and evaluating the security of new models, per the source. The Information reported earlier Thursday that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared the plans for a limited rollout in a memo to employees. "We've made clear to the U.S. government that this is not our preferred long term model, and will work with them and others in industry to achieve a more sustainable approach for future releases," Altman said in the memo, according to The Information. Between the lines: The source told Axios that OpenAI has been proactively working with the administration on the model release since before Anthropic revoked access to its frontier models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, over a rare Commerce Department directive. The White House has been looped in on the capabilities of OpenAI's new model and has been able to preview its abilities. Behind the scenes: Altman discussed GPT-5.6 with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Wednesday, Axios has learned. Lutnick wanted to be sure all relevant parts of the government have tested and approved the model, a source familiar with the situation told us. The source said the government intervened because GPT-5.6 has "Mythos-like" capability, not because the administration is suddenly taking a heavier hand."This is what's happening with models of that caliber," the source said. The models are so powerful that the administration wants to be sure the co
Teams from California to Florida are helping Venezuelans rebound from devastating earthquakes that killed over 900 people, according to the latest death toll figures authorities announced on Friday. Search and rescue operations are entering their third full day, after Venezuelan officials estimated at least 920 people were killed and over 3,300 were injured from a […]