Internal tests of OpenAI's new AI model Astra show cybersecurity capabilities so strong that the company can no longer rule out the highest risk level in its own safety framework. Parts of Astra's development have been paused. The move follows recently disclosed incidents in which autonomous AI agents infiltrated OpenAI's own infrastructure undetected for weeks.

A research team in California has used artificial intelligence to design working viruses that kill bacteria, in what they describe as the "first generative design of complete genomes." The project marks an early step toward AI-designed life forms, according to a report in MIT Technology Review.

AMD is buying Canadian startup Taalas, which hard-codes model weights directly into inference chips. That makes them extremely fast but locks each chip to a single model. A demo chip hit over 16,000 tokens per second per user running Llama 3.1-8B. Google is reportedly working on a similar approach for Gemini.

Bytedance is training an AI model with up to ten trillion parameters, according to the Financial Times. That's three times the size of Moonshot's Kimi K3, currently the largest Chinese model.

Anthropic has cut false positives in its biology safety filters for Fable 5 by about 85 percent. Previously, nearly all biology-related queries got blocked and rerouted to the less capable Opus 5. The restrictions stay in place for sensitive dual-use topics like virology and toxicology.