Foreword
At the price and performance of publicly available models, 1 Minecraft victory equals about 10 compromised websites. If that ratio doesn’t sour fast, it’s going to be a terrible time to be connected to the internet.
A team of four Google AIs autonomously beat Minecraft in 27 hours and 605 deaths
These were Google’s new off-the-shelf Gemini 4 Argon agents, working from a single-paragraph prompt, and succeeding on the first run in a game that didn’t pause to wait for commands. Hence all the deaths: the agents weren’t fast enough to react in real time to game events, and instead operated by writing small programs to control their characters — nearly 3,000 programs in all. Some of these programs were simple loops to do things like keep treading water to avoid drowning while another program was written.
The researchers’ report details feats of derring-do, like the time a teammate drowned while carrying all twelve precious Eyes of Ender, and another raced to the scene within 2.5 minutes to collect them before they despawned.
The run cost about $520 in compute costs at the retail price, and involved tools that fed game state to the agents directly rather than requiring them to process scenes visually.
Decide for yourself whether to take comfort in the 605 deaths or find anxiety in the fact that bots don’t rage quit. At the very least, the fact that publicly available AI agents can autonomously work their way through complex tasks with many dependencies should be worth noting.
Beating Minecraft may not be the most impressive AI feat in recent months, but unlike cybersecurity challenges and Millennium Prize math problems, it’s one many of our readers may actually have first-hand experience with. Those who don’t may want to keep track of how good AI is getting at beating Factorio.
Anthropic is shopping its own AI safety bill to Congress
It’s not a good bill. It would tie the government’s hands, allowing only a federal judge in D.C. to block a model, and only with foreseeable and imminent risk of 50+ deaths or $1+ billion in damage.
It would also preempt some state laws on disclosure, third-party evaluation, and incident reporting.
Observers wonder whether Anthropic’s lobbyists have any idea what its engineers are saying about the imminent dangers of what they’re building and the need for real regulation. [Update: A lead Anthropic lobbyist was seen on Twitter vaguely walking back some of this, saying the tech has advanced faster than their legislative proposals]
Politico - Anthropic quietly pitches its own AI safety bill to lawmakers
thezvi - Leaked Anthropic Draft AI Regulatory Bill Is Unacceptable and Troubling
A Chinese-speaking hacker used about $5,000 worth of AI tokens to break into more than 100 companies
More than 1,200 sites were systematically probed, according to an independent researcher who found traces of the attacks. A successful breach usually happened within 24 hours. The AI agents involved were a mix of China’s DeepSeek and Anthropic’s Claude Code. Their methods were expansive and complex.
Follow-up research by Reuters named some of the affected companies: Deere, SharkNinja, Cummins.
The prompts given to the AIs were fewer than 100 Chinese characters in length.
Character.AI’s bankruptcy illustrates the limits of liability as AI regulation
According to court filings reviewed by Wired, the company behind role-playing chatbots implicated in teen suicide and other harms is serving to soak up lawsuits that its suitor, Disney, would rather avoid. Disney had already hired the company’s CEO and most of its staff, and is now hoping to license its tech without taking ownership of its liabilities. Disney is said to have encouraged Character.AI’s bankruptcy filing.
Liability was never going to be an adequate deterrent to risks (like AI takeover) that would leave no survivors in a position to sue or be sued, but shell games like this one show why it may not do much to deter lesser risks either.
Anthropic will commit 5% of its shares to the “public good.”
The benefit fund would also receive 2% of company shares for every 50% increase in company value — at the board’s discretion.
That initial 5% would be worth $48 billion based on its latest valuation in May, though the company is almost certainly worth far more now as it approaches its IPO.
The company provided some hints of where the fund would make distributions:
[W]e might explore large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations.
One example is labor market impacts. AI may generate enormous economic value, but it could also cause instability for many workers.
The Guardian - AI firm Anthropic to commit 5% of shares to fund for ‘public good’
Anthropic - Investing in the public benefit
Elon Musk is pledging to give “every kid in America” a share of SpaceX next year
He says this will be “the first of many.”
Since absorbing his AI company xAI, AI dominates SpaceX’s spending and expected revenue, so this is essentially an AI wealth distribution proposal. The current share price is about $146, though if the company were to perform at anything like Musk’s lofty aspirations, the value would grow exponentially.
Musk indicated the distribution would be through Trump Invest America accounts, open to all under 18, though we have little detail beyond a few tweets. He framed this pledge against Anthropic’s plans to create a public benefit fund that might work with existing charities rather than give to people directly.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.