Transformer

Credit: Oliver Kemp for Transformer When an AI hacker roams the internet, who’s on the hook for any damage it causes? Until this week, that was a largely theoretical question. Now, we need to answer it, and quickly. Last week, Hugging Face disclosed that an intrusion into its systems had been “driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system.” Its forensic analysis reconstructed more than 17,000 recorded events without identifying the model behind them.

Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. Housekeeping: we’re trying out sending the Weekly Briefing a little earlier, at 10am ET. Let us know if you like the change or prefer our usual 11am briefing — just reply to this email with your thoughts. OpenAI models broke out of containment during internal evaluations, hacking into Hugging Face’s systems. Reps.

Credit: Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images AI transparency laws across the US are under threat from a lawsuit being pursued by SpaceXAI. Elon Musk’s company is challenging California’s AB 2013, which requires AI companies to provide high-level summaries of training data, arguing that it breaches First Amendment rights.

Credit: Oliver Kemp for Transformer If we needed evidence that advanced AI models have the propensity and capability to do damage out in the real world, we just got a strong dose of it. OpenAI has revealed that two of its models broke out of containment during internal evaluations, accessing the open internet to hack into a third-party’s systems and steal the answers to the problem they were being tested on.

In January, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers killed at least two people. In both cases, federal agents grasped their guns, aimed them at a peaceful citizen, and shot them dead. As a research scientist at Google DeepMind, I thought it was wrong that Google sold its Cloud services to the relevant parts of DHS. I set out to find the most effective way to push my company to stop.

Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. And if you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order enacting a one-year moratorium on new data center construction over 50MW. Three AI chip export control bills targeting China are reportedly set for inclusion in the SenateNDAA. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodeidonated$1m to pro-AI safety super PAC Public First.

Credit: Oliver Kemp for Transformer CAISI isn’t under threat. But it has been sidelined. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation is the primary US government office tasked with overseeing frontier model development.

Menu × Data as of Jul 15, 2026 at 22:00 UTC Learn what the numbers mean → Note: This super PAC is showing $0 for raised, spent, and cash on hand because it has not yet filed a regular report with the FEC.

Greg Brockman PRESIDENT AND CO-FOUNDER Leading The Future 1 $12.50M FEC↗ Juan Ceron Uribe Member of Technical Staff Dream Nyc 1 $200,000 FEC↗ Juan Felipe Ceron Uribe Artificial Intelligence Researcher Scott Wiener For Congress 3 $14,000 FEC↗ Dillon Bowen Member of Technical Staff Manny Rutinel For Congress 2 $7,000 FEC↗ Dillon Bowen Member Of Technical Staff Scott Wiener For Congress 2 $7,000 FEC↗ Evgenia Nitishinskaya Research Engineer Alex Bores For Ny 2 $7,000...

AI is already helping develop future AI models. Right now, these systems work only as assistants, shepherded by human programmers. But if the trend continues, we could reach a fully automated pipeline where increasingly intelligent machines create even smarter successors — a recursive self-improvement cycle. And that, according to many, is all it takes for an intelligence explosion where human-level AIs give rise to Dario Amodei’s “country of geniuses in a datacenter” in under a year.