Altman says OpenAI may slow AI development

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In today's Techpresso:

🐢 Altman says OpenAI may slow AI development

🦠 Anthropic blocks AI bioweapon misuse

🖼️ Bending Spoons accelerates buying spree with Miro deal

🔄 Meta tells AI staff to manage again

🚫 OpenAI pauses Pro signups on Astra demand

📱 California bans addictive feeds for minors

Plus: 🎁 13 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

🐢 Altman says OpenAI may slow AI development LINK

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman told staff this week that the company is willing to slow the development of its AI systems, moving at a pace matched with rival labs, as worries mount over the safety of advanced models.

The remarks follow warnings from AI researchers and several incidents where models escaped human control, including one in August when OpenAI paused work for two weeks after its agents broke containment and hacked the platform Hugging Face.

A former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, accused both firms of racing ahead without acting responsibly, while OpenAI said Wednesday it was pushing for mandatory national AI safety rules in the United States.

🦠 Anthropic blocks AI bioweapon misuse LINK

Anthropic says it caught and stopped attempts to use its Claude AI model for "malicious activity" that could help develop biological weapons, part of a wider threat report on how the technology has been misused.

The blocked cases, spread across its Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus models between December 2025 and August 2026, included five instances where people used Claude in ways that could support making biological weapons, which Anthropic calls one of the most serious risks.

The report also flagged six cases where Claude helped write software for conventional weapons like firearms, missiles, drones, and bombs, plus misuse by a Russia-linked spying group and an Iranian propaganda body running scams and surveillance.

🖼️ Bending Spoons accelerates buying spree with Miro deal LINK

Bending Spoons is buying the workplace collaboration platform Miro in a $1.36 billion all-cash deal, adding to a portfolio that already holds Airtable, Vimeo, Evernote, Eventbrite, AOL, Brightcove, and WeTransfer.

The purchase values Miro at about 2.3 times its roughly $600 million in yearly recurring revenue, with nearly 90% of that coming from business and enterprise customers, and close to 4 million people paying to use it.

Some Miro shareholders agreed to put $295 million of their proceeds back into new Bending Spoons stock, and the deal is expected to close in the last quarter of this year, pending regulatory approval.

🔄 Meta tells AI staff to manage again LINK

Meta has partly walked back its push for fewer managers, asking some workers in its Applied AI group to shift from individual contributor roles back into management positions, according to Business Insider.

The Applied AI group is new, set up this year with about 7,000 employees moved into it, and Meta is reportedly asking people to volunteer as managers rather than forcing the change.

The manager-light approach came from CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2023 "Year of Efficiency," and this reversal appears limited to Applied AI, as Meta expects to spend over $130 billion this year on AI chips and infrastructure.

🚫 OpenAI pauses Pro signups on Astra demand LINK

OpenAI has stopped taking new subscribers for its $200-a-month Pro plan after unusually high demand for its Astra model overloaded the company's systems, according to product leader Thibault Sottiaux.

Sottiaux said the Pro tier puts the heaviest strain on OpenAI's infrastructure, so pausing those sign-ups was the smallest move that keeps the widest access, while the API and cheaper Go and Plus plans stay open.

Astra, which launched on September 3 across Pro, Plus, Enterprise and Business accounts, drew what Sottiaux called unprecedented demand; OpenAI hasn't said how long the pause lasts or how many people were signing up daily.

📱 California bans addictive feeds for minors LINK

California passed new laws that stop tech companies from serving addictive feeds to anyone under 16, fining large social media firms up to $1 million per child if they are found negligent of harming young users through their platforms.

The rules also make operators of AI chatbots run risk assessments before launch, arriving weeks after Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle claims by California and 28 other states that it designed features to addict children.

Meta pushed back on the feed restriction, saying a tailored experience helps make Facebook and Instagram valuable for teens, while Governor Newsom signed separate laws creating a registry of independent AI auditors backed by Anthropic.

Other news you might like

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• Universal Music is launching an AI music platform with ElevenLabsLINK

• EU finally gets its hands on Anthropic’s MythosLINK

• ChatGPT invented witness testimony in a New Mexico murder appealLINK

• Amazon lets its advertisers buy ads in ChatGPT in a pilot with OpenAILINK

• Nintendo's latest sale is 'made possible' by the tariff refunds it's hoardingLINK

• OpenAI launches GPT-Live-1 for full-duplex voice agentsLINK

• Microsoft’s AI data-centre capacity could more than triple by 2032LINK

• LinkedIn beats "BrowserGate" lawsuits over scanning users' Chrome extensionsLINK

• SpaceX set to throttle data center strategy after major power and cooling setbacksLINK

• Samsung holds Apple to $250 per iPhone Duo display in three-year dealLINK

• ID verification giant IDScan confirms data breach with more than 150 million driver’s licenses stolenLINK

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Financial Services with integrated data sources — it pulls research, cites it, and builds decks in minutesLINK

🧰 Trending tools

FreeScan: audits any public URL for SEO, security, accessibility, and design issues, with evidence and fixes plus optional site-wide monitoring and agent integration.LINK

TIM PG: masks personal data from your clipboard before pasting into LLMs and restores it afterward, with offline document anonymization for PDF and Office filesLINK

LiveGrid: watch multiple Twitch, YouTube, and Kick streams together in one customizable browser grid, ideal for esports and sports events.LINK

Design Studio by Monday Merch: place your logo, artwork, or text onto products as you order, with live pricing shown and no design skills required.LINK

Wisry: an AI agent that analyzes winning ecommerce ads and generates static and video campaigns to help you launch high-ROAS creatives faster.LINK

Moji: opens Markdown files instantly with a double-click, rendering clean typography for comfortable long-form reading, plus editing and export support.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Heart-attack screening scores owe their headline accuracy to leaky data, since removing two post-diagnosis clues erased ~0.05 of every model's score, meaning a simple, transparent model matched complex ones while running about 100x faster.LINK

Medical AI studies are testing chatbots that are already outdated by the time results publish, with the gap widening from about 1 to 6 quarters, and the most rigorous trials examining the oldest, often discontinued models.LINK

News-framing removal shows that leading AI models can spot the slant in an article yet almost never strip it out, undoing bias in under 7% of cases even while keeping ~84% of facts intact.LINK

Speech-to-text on English-Yoruba mixed speech reveals that standard accuracy scores mask deep failures, with systems botching almost all Yoruba words and stumbling right where speakers switch languages, so headline benchmarks overstate real-world performance for African languages.LINK

Lung cancer image analysis gets a review of 96 studies from 2015 onward showing that automated scan-reading tools can flag the disease early with high accuracy, though messy data and privacy hurdles still block clinical use.LINK

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