AI Frontiers

‍Two years ago, AI systems were still fumbling at basic reasoning. Today, they’re drafting legal briefs, solving advanced math problems, and diagnosing medical conditions at expert level. At this dizzying pace, it's difficult to imagine what the technology will be capable of just years from now, let alone decades. But in their new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nat...

‍AI agents are no longer a futuristic concept. They’re increasingly being embedded in the systems we rely on every day. These aren’t just new software features. They are independent digital actors, able to learn, adapt, and make decisions in ways we can’t always predict. Across the AI industry, a fierce race is underway to expand agents’ autonomous capabilities. Some can reset passwords, change pe...

OpenAI — once considered an oxymoron given its closed-source practices — recently released GPT-OSS, the company's first open language model in half a decade. The model fulfills an earlier pledge to again release “strong” open models that developers can freely modify and deploy. OpenAI approved GPT-OSS in part because the model sits behind the closed-source frontier, including its own GPT-5, which...

OpenAI's GPT-5 launched in early August, after extensive internal testing. But another OpenAI model — one with math skills advanced enough to achieve “gold medal-level performance” on the world's most prestigious math competition — will not be released for months. This isn’t unusual. Increasingly, AI systems with capabilities considerably ahead of what the public can access remain hidden inside co...

The race is on for AGI. Tech companies are in a global race to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI): autonomous systems that perform most tasks as well as a human expert. In early 2024, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta is going to build AGI and “open source” it. He is walking his talk. Meta has invested billions of dollars in the highest-power computational elements needed to b...

In an age of heightened political division, countering China's efforts to dominate AI has emerged as a rare point of alignment between US Democratic and Republican policymakers. While the two parties have approached the issue in different ways, they generally agree that the AI “arms race” is comparable to the US-Soviet strategic competition during the Cold War, which encompassed not just nuclear w...

Can we head off AI monopolies before they harden? As AI models become commoditized, incumbent Big Tech platforms are racing to rebuild their moats at the application layer, around context: the sticky user- and project-level data that makes AI applications genuinely useful. With the right context-aware AI applications, each additional user-chatbot conversation, file upload, or coding interaction im...

This post was cross-published on the author's Substack, Threading the Needle. Increasingly, the US-China AI race is taking center stage. To win this race, Washington and Beijing are rethinking a range of policies, from export controls and military procurement priorities to copyright and liability rules. This activity, under the vague banner of race victories, conceals a deeper lack of clarity on s...

Last week, the AI nonprofit METR published an in-depth study on human-AI collaboration that stunned experts. It found that software developers with access to AI tools took 19% longer to complete their tasks, despite believing they had finished 20% faster. The findings shed important light on our ability to predict how AI capabilities interact with human skills. Since 2020, we have been conducting...

The European Union just published the finalized Code of Practice for general-purpose AI models, transforming the AI Act's high-level requirements into concrete standards that will likely shift frontier AI companies' practices toward safer ones. Among the Code's three chapters (copyright, transparency, and safety & security), requirements outlined in the Safety and Security section mark particu...

For over half a decade, the United States has imposed significant semiconductor export controls on China, aiming to slow China's chip industry and to retain US leadership in the computing capabilities that undergird AI advances. Have these controls achieved their goals? Have the assumptions driving them been confirmed or undermined by the rapid evolution of the chip industry and AI capabilities? T...

The views in this article are those of the authors alone and do not represent those of the Department of Defense, its components, or any part of the US government. ‍ In a recent interview, Demis Hassabis — co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, a leading AI lab — was asked if he worried about ending up like Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who unleashed the atomic bomb and was later haunted by hi...

Since May, Congress has been debating an unprecedented proposal: a 10-year moratorium that would eliminate virtually all state and local AI policies across the nation. This provision, tucked into the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” would prohibit states from enacting or enforcing “any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision syst...

Since 2020, there have been nearly 40 copyright lawsuits filed against AI companies in the US. In this intensifying battle over AI-generated content, creators, AI companies, and policymakers are each pushing competing narratives. These arguments, however, tend to get so impassioned that they obscure three crucial questions that should be addressed separately — yet they rarely are. First, how does...

As AI's transformative potential and national security significance grow, so has the incentive for countries to develop AI capabilities that outcompete their adversaries. Leaders in both the US and Chinese governments have indicated that they see their countries in an arms race to harness the economic and strategic advantages of powerful AI. Yet as the benefits of AI come thick and fast, so might...

Edward Parker — June 13, 2025 This post originally appeared on RAND. --- When OpenAI released its newest AI models o3 and o4-mini in April, its president Greg Brockman made an intriguing claim: “These are the first models where top scientists tell us they produce legitimately good and useful novel ideas.” If AI can indeed make scientific discoveries, that would not only have practical impacts for...

The debate over AI governance has intensified following recent federal proposals for a ten-year moratorium on state AI regulations. This preemptive approach threatens to replace emerging accountability mechanisms with a regulatory vacuum. In his recent AI Frontiers article, Kevin Frazier argues in favor of a federal moratorium, seeing it as necessary to prevent fragmented state-level liability rul...

One morning in the near future, on far-flung servers many miles from Wall Street, a new type of organization begins buying and selling stock. Its mission: maximize return on investment. It uses a network of AI agents integrated into global trading platforms to buy and sell stock in milliseconds — fast, adaptive, and unburdened by human fatigue. This is much more sophisticated than today's algorith...

Over the course of 10 hours this April, a massive power outage swept across Spain and Portugal, causing extensive disruption. The most severe blackout in both countries’ history, it paralyzed entire transport networks and interrupted essential services throughout the Iberian Peninsula, causing estimated economic damages in the billions of euros — and at least eight fatalities. Weeks earlier, a fir...

A federal judge recently denied a motion to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit against Character. AI and Google, allowing the potentially pathbreaking litigation to proceed. This could be a harbinger of coming legal challenges for artificial intelligence developers. The suit was filed by Megan Garcia, whose 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, died by suicide in February 2024 after forming an intense...

Forming and maintaining friendships can be hard, particularly in an age where human interaction is increasingly digital. In a recent interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed that the average American has fewer than three friends. “There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them,” he said. “But the reality is that peo...

Since 2022, I have reported on Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, witnessing firsthand the rapid evolution of technology on the battlefield. Embedded with drone units, I have seen how technology has evolved, with each side turning once-improvised tools into cutting-edge systems that dictate life and death. In the early months of the war, Ukrainian soldiers relied on off-the-shelf drones for...

Much of the discussion around AI safety is motivated by concerns around existential risk: the idea that autonomous systems will grow smarter than humans and go on to eradicate our species, either deliberately or as an unintended consequence. The founders of the AI safety movement took these possibilities seriously when many people still brushed them off as science fiction. Nick Bostrom's 2014 book...

US export controls are meant to keep advanced AI chips out of rival hands — but tens of thousands slip through each year. A new bill aims to change that by checking where these chips end up. US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK) introduced the Chip Security Act on May 9, which, if enacted, will require “a location verification mechanism on export-controlled advanced chips.” A bipartisan House companion bil...

In March this year, Google DeepMind announced it was deprioritizing its work on mechanistic interpretability. The following month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay advocating for greater focus on “mechanistic interpretability” and expounding his optimism about achieving “MRI for AI” in the next 5-10 years. While policymakers and the public tend to assume interpretability would be a go...