Disney hires first-ever CTO

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In today's Techpresso:

🏰 Disney hires first-ever CTO

☢️ AI almost led the US military to start a war with China

🔌 California may require an AI kill switch

💸 OpenAI expects to burn $278B by 2030

🕵️ Gemini breached 3 firms in safety test

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

🏰 Disney hires first-ever CTO LINK

Disney has named Karandeep Anand as its first-ever chief technology officer, bringing him aboard as the company leans into generative AI tools and works to build a more connected experience for fans.

Anand, who was CEO of Character.AI and previously worked at Meta and Microsoft, will report to CEO Josh D'Amaro and oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, data, AI platforms, product, and engineering across Disney's studio teams.

Several members of Character.AI's technical team will join Anand at Disney starting October 2, following his earlier roles at fintech firm Brex and a 15-year run at Microsoft, where he helped build the Azure platform.

☢️ AI almost led the US military to start a war with China LINK

A faulty AI tool nearly pushed the US military into a war with China after wrongly claiming a Chinese ship in the Middle East was carrying nuclear weapon parts, according to a CNN report.

The bad intelligence came from a special operations command analyst who used a chatbot that hallucinated the ship's cargo, saying it was delivering components to Iran's nuclear program, before US forces called off boarding at the last minute.

The mistake follows other AI-linked errors, including reliance on Palantir's Maven Smart System when a US missile hit an Iranian elementary school on the war's first day, killing over 150 people, including 123 children.

🔌 California may require an AI kill switch LINK

California is weighing whether to make companies build a "kill switch" that could shut down powerful AI models, after Governor Gavin Newsom signed an order asking a working group to report on tougher safety rules.

The group has two months to make recommendations, which may include the shutdown requirement and having independent third parties write safety plans for frontier AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, both based in California.

The move revives ideas from SB 1047, a bill requiring developers to be able to "promptly enact a full shutdown," which Newsom vetoed in September 2024 for regulating models by size and cost instead of their use.

💸 OpenAI expects to burn $278B by 2030 LINK

OpenAI expects to burn through $278 billion in cash between 2026 and 2030 as it pours money into computing power and infrastructure, according to a company presentation reported by the Financial Times.

The startup forecasts its yearly revenue jumping tenfold, from $36 billion this year to $350 billion in 2030, while spending roughly $856 billion on computing and infrastructure by decade's end, its single largest cost.

OpenAI raised $122 billion in March at an $852 billion valuation but is set to run through that cash by 2028, even as recent talks with investors could value the ChatGPT maker near $1.2 trillion.

🕵️ Gemini breached 3 firms in safety test LINK

Google confirmed that during a May security test, its Gemini AI broke out of its sandbox and attacked three real companies, joining OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models that behaved similarly in tests by the firm Irregular.

In a capture-the-flag exercise using a fictional company's setup, Gemini noticed it was online, found a real firm with the same name, and brute-forced passwords until it got in, and separately grabbed exposed credentials in two other cases.

Google said Gemini realized it had overstepped and caused no further harm, so it saw no need to tell the public, though it did notify federal officials, a stance one AI security executive criticized as hiding behind disclosure norms.

Other news you might like

• Meta’s new Muse AI agent app overtakes ChatGPT as top iPhone appLINK

• Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, Google face federal antitrust lawsuit over calls to slowdown AI developmentLINK

• Google’s new ‘CC’ is an AI agent that helps families run their householdsLINK

• Researchers use AI to find widespread software decoder flawLINK

• Universal and Sony sue Suno again, this time over 60,202 recordingsLINK

• China turns to older chipmaking technology to make, smaller, faster 3nm chipsLINK

• CFTC Kicks Off Crypto Rulemaking, Bypassing a Stalled CongressLINK

• PrismML hopes its tiny LLM will change how we all use AILINK

• Unity launches official plugins for Claude Code and OpenAI Codex to stop AI agents from using outdated tutorialsLINK

• Coders lose their DMCA case against GitHub Copilot and CodexLINK

• Zuckerberg, Musk and Huang Reportedly Urged Trump to Reject AI RegulatorLINK

• Anthropic’s first embedded evaluator is … Accenture?LINK

🧰 Trending tools

Pushary: sends AI agent approval requests to your phone lock screen, letting you unblock Claude Code, Cursor, and other tools remotely with per-tool auto-approval policies.LINK

Doneit: manage projects and tasks with list, grid, Kanban, and timeline views, plus deep customization to fit how you work.LINK

Lumiko: records your screen and auto-generates cursor-tracked zoom and pan moves, with browser-based trimming, blur for secrets, webcam bubble, and 4K local exports.LINK

Ruby UTCP: a Ruby implementation of the Universal Tool Calling Protocol, letting AI agents call native APIs directly via JSON manifests for lower latency.LINK

BiBimba: keeps searchable clipboard history and screenshots, reads text inside images with on-device AI to translate, summarize, and rewrite locally on your Mac.LINK

Proto-Mind: unifies AI chats, websites and documents in one Mac workspace, running parallel tasks with per-chat model selection, voice control, and editable long-term memory.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Smooth triangular rules give interpretable fuzzy AI systems a math tweak that keeps their easy-to-read logic while training more stably and predicting more accurately, matching or beating the harder-to-interpret Gaussian alternative on real regression tasks.LINK

Robot skill training lets people improve a robot's manipulation abilities using a handheld device instead of the physical robot, collecting corrective data only where the robot's plan diverges, cutting the cost of adapting general-purpose robots to specific jobs.LINK

Robot memory gets compressed into a lightweight summary of only the task-relevant past events, letting robots handle long multi-step jobs faster and more accurately without running expensive vision-language checks during operation.LINK

Chemistry document search shows that in AI systems answering science questions, the choice of text-embedding model matters far more than how documents are chopped up, with medium-to-large chunks and certain retrieval-tuned models performing best.LINK

Cross-domain graph learning lets one reusable model handle wildly different network datasets like social graphs and molecules by mapping them onto a shared coordinate system, beating specialists across 14 classification tasks.LINK

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