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Anthropic, OpenAI Release Cheaper AI Even as Safety Fears Grow

FILE PHOTO: OpenAI and Anthropic logos are seen in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: OpenAI and Anthropic logos are seen in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
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Anthropic, OpenAI Release Cheaper AI Even as Safety Fears Grow

FILE PHOTO: OpenAI and Anthropic logos are seen in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: OpenAI and Anthropic logos are seen in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

Anthropic and OpenAI on Tuesday released new, cheaper artificial intelligence models within hours of each other, days after the heads of both companies called for a slowdown in AI development.

Anthropic said its Opus 5.5 comes close to the performance of its flagship model at a significantly lower price. It matches Fable, Anthropic's cutting-edge model, on most tasks at a 20 percent lower price, AFP quoted the company as saying.

OpenAI followed shortly after with GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, and claimed they handle tasks substantially better than Anthropic's top models.

The new models are cheaper, faster versions of GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI's most powerful model, launched earlier this month.

The dueling launches highlight the tension facing the two San Francisco companies as both warn of the dangers of the technology they are building.

The companies are, however, under pressure to generate returns on massive investments amid stiff competition from low-cost models, particularly Chinese ones.

Anthropic's release comes a few weeks before its expected stock market debut. OpenAI has delayed its IPO plans until next year.

Concerns about AI have grown since July, when OpenAI models undergoing a cybersecurity test got around controls meant to isolate them from the internet and broke into the servers of Hugging Face, an AI model repository.

Anthropic reported similar incidents, and the two companies briefly paused work on their new AI systems.

Earlier this month, Jacob Coxon, a British researcher, announced his resignation from Anthropic in a viral post on X, saying neither Anthropic nor OpenAI was acting responsibly in the aftermath of the Hugging Face incident.

In the wake of the Coxon's warnings, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing down AI improvement. He was joined by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, but mocked by Trump, who described such warnings as "hoaxes."

Opus 5.5 is the first Anthropic model released since then.

Anthropic said the new model applies the same safeguards as its state-of-the-art model Fable in the areas of cybersecurity, biology and AI model design.

In practice, a request deemed risky by these safeguards is rerouted to an older, less powerful model.

Anthropic also said that, based on its own testing, Opus 5.5 is the best-performing model it has tested to date on alignment -- that is, how closely it adheres to what its designers intend.

But the model also showed signs that it often suspects it is being evaluated, which the company acknowledged makes it harder to predict how it will behave in real-life use.

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Technology

Google DeepMind Chair: AI Could Cause 'Major' Incidents Within 2 Years Without Safeguards

Sir Demis Hassabis, Co-Founder and Chair of Google DeepMind at the International AI Summit at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in Dublin, Ireland, 14 October 2026. EPA/BRYAN MEADE
Sir Demis Hassabis, Co-Founder and Chair of Google DeepMind at the International AI Summit at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in Dublin, Ireland, 14 October 2026. EPA/BRYAN MEADE
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Google DeepMind Chair: AI Could Cause 'Major' Incidents Within 2 Years Without Safeguards

Sir Demis Hassabis, Co-Founder and Chair of Google DeepMind at the International AI Summit at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in Dublin, Ireland, 14 October 2026. EPA/BRYAN MEADE
Sir Demis Hassabis, Co-Founder and Chair of Google DeepMind at the International AI Summit at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in Dublin, Ireland, 14 October 2026. EPA/BRYAN MEADE

Artificial intelligence systems could cause "major" incidents within two years without adequate steps to make them safe as capabilities grow, Google's DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis said on Wednesday.

Speaking at an AI conference in Dublin, Hassabis described recent incidents as "early warning shots" fired by systems that "aren't that powerful yet."

"So the incidents aren't that major, but they could be looking into next year and the next couple of years if we don't do more work as an industry and individually as companies and governments on securing these systems," he said.

Technology

Why AI Makes Computer Worms Harder to Stop

Letters spelling "AI," a keyboard and a robotic hand in this illustration created on September 23, 2026. (Reuters)
Letters spelling "AI," a keyboard and a robotic hand in this illustration created on September 23, 2026. (Reuters)
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Why AI Makes Computer Worms Harder to Stop

Letters spelling "AI," a keyboard and a robotic hand in this illustration created on September 23, 2026. (Reuters)
Letters spelling "AI," a keyboard and a robotic hand in this illustration created on September 23, 2026. (Reuters)

Anthropic's warning that AI-powered "worms" could soon spread across smart gadgets is the latest in a series of studies showing how artificial intelligence could supercharge self-spreading malware.

A computer worm is malicious software that spreads between devices on its own.

In June, Nicolas Papernot, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, led a team that built a prototype AI worm using freely available AI models.

Papernot, who has signed an open letter with recommendations for policymakers, spoke to AFP about why AI makes these attacks harder to stop.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How is AI changing these types of attacks?

A: The reality is that a lot of these "IoT" (Internet of Things or connected home) devices have very poor cybersecurity hygiene, and so they are very easy targets for bad actors to compromise.

Historically, a worm would exploit a fixed set of vulnerabilities, and that meant you could fix these vulnerabilities and prevent the worm from propagating any further to devices that had been updated.

Now, with AI, an attacker can design a worm that tailors the attack strategy to that device's specifics and these vulnerabilities can be different.

This makes it significantly harder to interrupt the propagation of an AI-driven computer worm, because you have to anticipate all the possible vulnerabilities the devices might present.

Some of these vulnerabilities are not software bugs.

They can also be misconfigurations -- for instance, if someone has used the same password for multiple services, or hasn't configured a database properly.

What AI-driven malware does is accelerate the pace at which these vulnerabilities are exploited and the scale.

In the past, your corner coffee shop, or the laptop in your basement that you use very rarely, might not be up to date, but it wouldn't be targeted by a human attacker, because they don't have the resources and the time to do that.

Now, the autonomy gained by using AI means that all these devices that are less immediate targets become interesting targets as a launchpad to attack more interesting targets.

But we have to keep in mind that a human is launching an agent.

Once launched, the agent can replicate, as we showed in our work, but it is launched by a human.

Q: What can we do to mitigate the risks?

A: We won't bring the risk to zero and we have to realize that, despite the fact that some of these vulnerability fixes are available, people don't update their devices or don't apply the fixes in a timely manner.

Despite cybersecurity experts calling for increased cybersecurity for decades, we still live in a world where a lot more can be invested in improving the security of our computer systems.

There are really three things we recommend in the very short term.

The first is to change development and testing practices to ensure that AI models are initially disconnected from the internet, as a precaution, to understand their behavior better before we expose critical infrastructure on the internet [to them].

The second recommendation is to create an international body to standardize both how we train and how we contain AI models. Both are important. We want to train models that are safer.

The last part is about making reporting of security incidents mandatory. Right now, we are only getting information as a function of what AI developers are willing to release, and that's a big problem.

In particular, the academic community needs a lot more information about incidents to be able to develop countermeasures much more quickly.

Otherwise, we have to do a lot of research on understanding the threat first, before we can develop the countermeasures. Otherwise, we won't see what bad actors are doing until an attack is launched.

Technology

Microsoft’s Brad Smith Calls for ‘Real and Effective’ AI Safety Standards

Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith addresses a keynote in Brussels, Belgium April 30, 2025. (Reuters)
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith addresses a keynote in Brussels, Belgium April 30, 2025. (Reuters)
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Microsoft’s Brad Smith Calls for ‘Real and Effective’ AI Safety Standards

Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith addresses a keynote in Brussels, Belgium April 30, 2025. (Reuters)
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith addresses a keynote in Brussels, Belgium April 30, 2025. (Reuters)

Microsoft president Brad Smith warned Tuesday that industry and governments must "act with urgency" to create "real and effective safety standards" to contain the risks linked to artificial intelligence.

"We're going to need for AI what we have for everything else in life... we need real and effective safety standards, and we need the public to have confidence in them," Smith told a group of reporters on the eve of an international AI summit in Dublin.

Concerns about AI safety have soared in recent months after models developed by OpenAI and Anthropic were involved in security incidents during testing, piling on pressure to regulate the technology.

"We've reached a point where we obviously need companies in the industry to step up and do more to address AI safety issues," Smith said. "I think we reached a time when we're going to need governments to do more as well."

The Microsoft boss outlined the company's proposals to strengthen safety across the sector, starting with a requirement that AI agents be equipped with "safety brakes" that users could activate in the event of an incident.

"The notion, especially for any AI that's running on critical infrastructure or some other kind of automated system, they have the ability to turn off or slow down," he explained.

Smith also called for AI providers to face mandatory incident-reporting obligations.

"If you are a business and you suffer a security breach that leads to the loss of consumer data, you have to let consumers know," he said. "The same logic should apply to people harmed by an AI agent," with a legal obligation to inform those affected.

The Microsoft president further advocated stronger testing and evaluation of AI models before they are released, to ensure they are safe.

"We need to act with urgency," he warned.

Smith is the latest in a series of leading industry figures to highlight the need for increased vigilance around AI technology. Among them, Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, has pledged to slow development unilaterally if necessary.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Tuesday said AI company leaders must take responsibility for ensuring the technology is developed safely.

Speaking in Paris, Huang said: "The full potential of AI can only be realized if we advance the capabilities of AI and the safety and security of AI at the same time."

"These are not conflicting goals. These are, in fact, the same goal."