Heave to, me hearties
Race updates, legalized corporate cyber offense, AI use in Congress, and more
In this issue:
When the race to the bottom bottoms out - AI companies jettison caution to compete at the frontier
Administration to issue letters of cyber-marque? - Isn’t privateering predicated on profit?
AI use in Congressional offices - There are no widely-known guidelines
Aiko is happy - Companies are creating AI influencers, and they might succeed
Dispatch from Joe
When the race to the bottom bottoms out
AI companies jettison caution to compete at the frontier
Anything we can afford to lose, see that it’s lost!
-Mr. Gibbs, Pirates of the Carribbean
As recent cyber incidents reveal how dangerous and capable frontier AIs have become, many at AI companies have voiced their concerns about the reckless pace they’ve set. But bitter rivalry still pressures developers to strip away anything that threatens to slow them down, like sailors who jettison provisions and lifeboats to lighten a straining ship.
The emptiest ship wins?
Take Google DeepMind, for instance. In early 2026, its flagship model Gemini was nearly on par with the work of OpenAI and Anthropic. DeepMind was relatively independent and captained by one of the most vocally concerned leaders in the AI race, Demis Hassabis.
During the summer, the Wall Street Journal reports, Hassabis voiced deep reservations about the AI race to the Trump administration, and proposed the creation of an independent standards body for AI. He drew parallels to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) that regulates brokers, and elsewhere to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that verifies nuclear agreements. He would later write up his proposal on X (formerly Twitter). It didn’t go far enough, and hasn’t yet been adopted, but it was a step towards coordination.
Meanwhile, Reuters tells us, Google cofounder Sergey Brin was pushing to cut the chaff and focus the company’s AI efforts on recursive self-improvement, seeking to build AI that develops itself without needing human input.
As of August, the new Gemini model had been delayed at least two months, allegedly because it didn’t match the capabilities of DeepMind’s rivals. Corporate Google, it seems, wasn’t happy.
In early August, there was a shift. Non-technical teams were pulled out of DeepMind, leaders departed, and Hassabis turned over his duties to a deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu. Hassabis will stay on as Chief Scientist of Google and Chair of DeepMind, purportedly to focus on “actively shaping the future of AGI.”
But these roles seem largely advisory, and it sounds to me like DeepMind’s business of building dangerously capable AI has been turned over to someone less distracted with petty concerns like catastrophic risk. Reuters characterized the move as stripping down DeepMind’s team in an effort to focus on “model supremacy.”
Meanwhile, rival labs SpaceX and Meta have been pushing even harder to catch up to the frontier, Axios reports. Meta’s open-weight Muse Glimmer model aims for the “cheap and efficient” niche, being small enough to run on a laptop. Its release was timed with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto about “personal superintelligence for everyone,” covered earlier this week.
And SpaceX, after swallowing xAI earlier this year, released Grok 4.6 alongside a modestly impressive benchmark performance and three whole sentences of safety info. Contrast this with Anthropic’s system cards, which routinely run hundreds of pages long. I suppose it’s easy to see what SpaceX is willing to toss overboard.
The view from the front is warped as well
Voluntary lab efforts are not enough. They were never going to be, but the bitter rivalries don’t help matters. What the AI labs see as a straight race to superintelligence is, in reality, a tightening spiral over a bleak abyss.
OpenAI and Anthropic may have the most powerful models, but don’t mistake their narrow success for the competence of a serious industry. For months, OpenAI failed to catch its own models hacking it from within, Anthropic’s concessions to safety haven’t prevented Mythos from eagerly launching multiple criminal cyberattacks, and both companies have even-more-capable internal models in development.
Humanity’s future shouldn’t be up to the companies in the first place. This week, in op-eds for The Hill and the New York Times, MIRI President Nate Soares argues that the situation is dire but it’s not too late: Our governments are letting this happen, and we don’t have to stand for it. We need international agreements to stop the AI race, and the standards and verification technology to back them up.
Increasingly more of our lawmakers are beginning to realize this, pushing for government intervention or a global pause. We can join our voices to theirs, or watch everything we value tossed overboard to buy a few transient inches in the world’s most lethal race.
Dispatch from Mitch
Administration to issue letters of cyber-marque?
Isn’t privateering predicated on profit?
I’ve been seeing commentary that a presidential memorandum released yesterday is a new spin on the “letter of marque.” If your history is a little rusty, a letter of marque is a government-issued license to commit piracy against the shipping of a designated adversary.
The presidential memo tells the National Coordination Center to set up a program to authorize US companies to go on the cyber-offensive against foreign criminal organizations. This sounds like a cool idea that makes you go “Yar!” until you stop and ask why companies would want to do this. In the Age of Sail, a would-be privateer would be in it for their share of the captured booty. But in the age of AI-assisted hacking sprees, what are companies supposed to confiscate from cybercriminals? Wouldn’t anything captured probably be itself stolen goods that should be returned to their rightful owners?
The answer seems to be “nothing.” I thought maybe there would be a provision entitling participants to receive a portion of any reclaimed cryptocurrencies or something, but no. There’s no mention of booty to be captured at all, nor of any bounties for successfully disrupting criminal operations — not even compensation for resources spent doing this work. In fact, participating companies are to put up a $1 million bond they might have to forfeit if they break the program’s rules.
So why would companies risk losing a million bucks and drawing the ire of criminal organizations? The best answer I could find is that they are already doing so. Not many. But Microsoft, for example, has long gone on the offensive against criminal operations creating botnets out of Windows machines, attempting to disrupt command and control of those networks and close the vulnerabilities to protect customers and the Microsoft brand. This has historically been done through a less formal set of understandings with government agencies. So I think the new memorandum is really just a kind gesture to some of the White House’s allies in big tech: a safer corridor for legally tricky operations. If so, it might not even have anything to do with AI.
But given the nature of the times, I’m going to guess that it does.
If the administration were on friendlier terms with Anthropic, I would wonder if maybe the AI company had complained about its inability to legally disrupt the organizations reselling stolen Claude credentials, which then get used to distill Anthropic’s models and undercut its lead. But with the latest ChatGPT and Grok models now at or near frontier, it might make sense for OpenAI and SpaceX to get similarly worried about distillation. Perhaps it is these White House allies who had letters of marque on their wish list. Or perhaps the White House wants to invite the AI companies to “voluntarily” use their models to strike at foreign thorns in the administration’s side. Politico’s analysis arguably points in this direction, and offers a readable account of the rules of engagement.
We may never learn any specifics about how these permits get used. One of their stipulations is that operations are to be carried out “with the intent to remain undetected.”
Dispatches from Alana
AI use in Congressional offices
There are no widely-known guidelines
A nice zinger from the Washington Post today: “AI is spreading through Congress faster than the rules governing its use.”
The article the zinger opens, which covers AI use among Congressional staffers, explains there are no clear guidelines for Congress’s use of AI. A set of rules exists, but according to interviews with staffers, most don’t know about it. And there are no examples of any enforcement efforts:
The few House and Senate rules that exist are poorly understood and seldom enforced. In practice, AI use is left up to the hundreds of individual congressional offices to settle for themselves. It’s not clear how many offices have internal written policies on AI.
Meanwhile, staffers are using AI for research, to help draft legislation, come up with questions for hearings, find reporter contacts, and respond to constituents.
What’s officially prohibited? As reported by the Post:
putting sensitive material such as constituent information into a chatbot, generating deepfakes, making personnel decisions and finalizing legislation.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I can see a clear use case for embracing AI tools in Congressional staffing offices. It could help speed up the lengthy process of drafting and proposing legislation, allowing change to happen more quickly. The Congressional body as a whole acts as a decent check on legislation quality, and could probably spot and correct any LLM-induced issues.
That said, if AI is wholeheartedly embraced from the get-go with no widely-known guidelines, there could be issues with where to draw boundaries. I hope we never live in a world where calling your reps means talking to an AI impersonating a staffer, or worse, an AI impersonating your actual rep! Despite any charitable interpretation of this world — perhaps the synthetic rep could hear more constituent concerns! — I would guess it would still feel antagonistic to the “government of the people, by the people, for the people” spirit of democracy, adding a non-human barrier between human constituents and the people supposed to represent them. Not having a standardized set of guidelines could also put some Congressional offices behind others, similar to issues with AI use in campaign ads.
So I broadly support more formalized guidelines on Congressional AI use. But first, government should focus its efforts on some much-needed federal and international regulation.
Aiko is happy
Companies are creating AI influencers, and they might succeed
In episode four of the comedy show Mythic Quest, the creators of a hit video game try to find a replacement for the 14-year-old streamer who stops endorsing their game. One solution? Aiko, a 3-D model who “never ages or gets a better offer.” Brad, who is in charge of monetization for Mythic Quest, is behind the suggestion. He calls Aiko “the future of the streaming hustle.” No need to find the perfect person; the model can be whoever he wants her to be. “Aiko is happy!” the obviously computerized model cries out in a canned, fake voice.
The episode aired in 2020. The 3-D model suggestion was part of the comedy. But now, in 2026, it’s become a reality. As covered in the New York Times: from podcasts to fashion marketing, creative studios are embracing AI superstars. Andreea Petrescu, co-founder of the London-based AI marketing agency Seraphinne Vallora, sounds remarkably similar to Brad when she describes the appeal of AI models for high-profile apparel brands:
With real models, the problem is they are the face of so many different brands, and anything that they do can affect your brand ... With A.I., it’s like a clean slate: You can design it the way you want, she can be as gorgeous as you want, and she’s all yours.
And unlike in the 2020s world of Mythic Quest Season 1, there are no canned voices or computerized giveaways. Scrolling through the images of AI personas from the company Inception Point AI, I’m struck by how genuine they look. The company did their work well: each of these people seems approachable, charismatic, and appealing. My brain knows they are AIs, but my nervous system doesn’t. It’s genuinely unsettling.
Inception Point makes AI content creators designed to fill specific niches. Those automated creators then produce tons of niche media. The company “made headlines last fall for its flood-the-zone podcast strategy, which involved maintaining more than 5,000 active shows and posting thousands of predominantly A.I.-generated episodes per week.” According to the company’s chief executive, Jeanine Wright, the costs are so low that an episode will be profitable as long as it gets at least twenty listeners.
Even factoring in some AI backlash, that seems easy to accomplish. There are certainly people who find AI personalities entertaining, as is evidenced by the success of AI music stars and other AI personas. Wright also seems to think the niche content they are able to produce is key, saying “As long as people like the content, we think they’ll accept that it comes from A.I.”
Much as I’d like to disagree, I think she may have a point. I could easily imagine being told:
“I found this new podcast on heirloom tomatoes. It’s actually an AI, which is kind of weird, but I found it really helpful for gardening...”
And seeing as the company has likely designed the persona to be just the right fit for its target market, I can also imagine that new listener coming back for more.
Note: It seems Inception Point has now become Liquify AI.
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.