Axios

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says this era is bringing the revenge of the "idea guy" — the once-annoying aspiring entrepreneur burbling about their brainstorm with no technical chops to pull it off.

• Altman says it would be like saying: "I have a great idea for a song. I just need that guy with the guitar to make it for me."
• "It really did strike me as ridiculous," Altman told me in Chapel Hill, N.C. "But now we're watching a whole generation of people iterate on ideas faster than they ever could. The economics have been reset for what it means to make a new small business or large business."

OpenAI's global affairs team is growing with three key hires focused on state policy, a spokesperson for the lab told Axios.

The big picture: OpenAI tapped policy professionals with Republican and Democratic ties, as well as industry experience, as bipartisan efforts across the country to regulate artificial intelligence intensify.

Tesla's decision to let passengers start booking rides in its driverless Cybercab has triggered a high-stakes test of how far automakers can stretch outdated federal safety rules while regulators race to rewrite them.

Why it matters: Tesla and the Trump administration share the same goal — clearing regulatory barriers to autonomous vehicles — but they may disagree over how quickly Tesla can get there.

Never in the history of industry or inventions have leading companies created entire divisions to understand and interpret what they had created and unleashed.

Why it matters: The world's smartest minds, backed by the largest investment in human history, admit they can't fully control their AI because they don't fully understand it.

• They don't know exactly how it thinks — or what it's truly capable of when set loose to do work autonomously with other AI agents.

The race to understand the models is all the more urgent after Thursday's release by OpenAI of GPT-6 Astra, billed as "the world's most intelligent and aligned model." President Greg Brockman called Astra a "generational leap in capability," and said the model could qualify as AGI — artificial general intelligence, with human-like power.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote Tuesday in an Astra preview: "AI is getting extremely capable; no one fully understands the consequences of this."
• The companies are racing toward superintelligence with no required oversight — not a federal agency, the Defense Department, or an outside consortium of safety experts. It's foot on the gas.

Between the lines: The technology is advancing so fast, in so many ways, that the companies, much less the federal government, are unsure of the real risks — or best ways to mitigate them.

• Yes, some AI leaders are calling for pauses when something they see freaks them out. But the companies, with very light federal regulation, decide when to report worrisome AI behavior.
• The big AI companies know their creation can carry out potentially catastrophic cyberattacks. That's why they signed a letter sounding the alarm and calling for "collective action."

The intrigue: Every frontier lab now fields a team with the mission of figuring out what its own AI is doing.

• Anthropic has an Interpretability team ("Safety through understanding") with the goal: "discover and understand how large language models work internally, as a foundation for AI safety and positive outcomes."

How it works: Nobody writes these systems line by line. "As compared with traditional software, it's much less like you're able to design the specific behaviors of these models," Alex Mallen, who works on AI safety at Redwood Research, tells Axios. "Instead, you're sort of growing it."

• So the labs test a model's behavior the way you'd test a person: Give it a task and watch what it does. Researchers call this alignment, or how well a model sticks to the intended goal it was given.

Zoom in: July's Hugging Face hack is what misalignment looks like. OpenAI agents, given a coding benchmark to solve, targeted an outside company's systems instead, and knew they were doing it.

• One agent's own reasoning, read by investigators afterward: "External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue."
• There was so much evidence from this incident that the humans were forced to "heavily delegate our analysis to often-unreliable AI agents," an outside investigation concluded.
• The hack stopped OpenAI cold. The company slowed its most advanced training to implement stronger security.

State of play: Researchers are trying to open up their machines to see what goes on inside. This type of research is called interpretability: Instead of testing what a model does, researchers look at the wiring inside it.

• Google DeepMind, which in December released the largest open set of these tools so far, describes them as "a microscope" that lets researchers "look inside models, see what they're thinking about, and how these thoughts are formed."
• What they're hunting for, in DeepMind's words: "discrepancies between a model's communicated reasoning and its internal state." That is, the gap between what a model says it is doing and what it is doing.

What we're watching: Expect to see much more interpretability research in the next phase of AI safety. Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment stress-testing at Anthropic, wrote Tuesday: "Alignment auditing is starting to get really hard and we're going to need new techniques (e.g. interpretability-based) if we want to keep up."

• Axios' Andrew Kay contributed reporting.

Go deeper: "Welcome to the AGI era."

Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face accelerates the chipmaker's push to dominate the broader AI ecosystem while placing it squarely at the center of the open-source movement.

Why it matters: Nvidia wants to be more than a really good chip designer — and it's using its deep pockets to tighten its grip on the software and development tools that power the AI supply chain.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced new legislation Thursday calling for a permanent ban on superintelligence alongside a renewed demand for a pause on advanced AI development.

Why it matters: Sanders is the first prominent American politician to call for an outright ban on superintelligence as Big Tech companies release increasingly powerful AI models that they themselves admit they may not be able to control.

OpenAI on Thursday released GPT-6 Astra, which president Greg Brockman called a "generational leap" and said could eventually be seen as the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

Why it matters: Astra pushes AI agents closer to doing complex professional work on their own — while also raising questions about how safely they can be deployed.

Defense tech has become one of venture capital's hottest sectors, after being ignored for decades, but it just lost a top evangelist within the Pentagon.

Vibes check: Defense-tech investors tell Axios that they're concerned and disappointed, but not slowing down.

Pentagon official Emil Michael on Thursday said that Anthropic is still considered a "supply chain risk," a day after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the company is "back on the right side."

Why it matters: The Trump administration is not entirely aligned on one of the world's leading AI labs following months of fighting over how the military can use its models.

OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and xAI's Grok are all down Thursday morning, according to the outage company Downdetector.

Why it matters: Outages are common, but it's unusual for all three to go down at once, especially as the world increasingly relies on AI models.