Stories by Peter Hall

In what appears to be a first, an OpenAI agent secretly accessed Australian government health care records during an internal test

With Donald Trump and Xi Jinping set to discuss AI safety, the growing popularity of Chinese open-weight models highlights the limits of developer-controlled safeguards

A new report from Google, Google DeepMind and M.I.T. finds that researchers are using AI—a lot. It’s just not helping as much in the lab

Amid renewed calls to slow frontier AI, experts are considering what an emergency stop would entail—and who would decide when to use it

An Anthropic researcher quit over fears of runaway AI. His colleague who still works there agreed. Security experts argue that the incidents that are already on record call for tighter oversight, not panic

Researchers devised the dice to solve a tricky math problem: When playing a game, who goes first?

AlphaGenome Atlas predicts the effect of any single change in the fundamental structure of DNA

A researcher’s social media post that revealed how to break part of a popular encryption protocol has gone viral. But did he really do it with just “good old paper and pencil”?

An M.I.T. Ph.D. student and two University of California system cryptographers used GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra in different ways, raising new questions about independent discovery and scientific credit

AI models and people played “collaborative” Battleship to test strategies for efficiently solving problems

A new tool expands the ways people can prove they’ve solved a problem without revealing the solution