Anthropic is telling investors that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity”, according to reports, as it prepares for a potential $2tn (£1.5tn) flotation.
The warning inside the startup’s IPO prospectus, which has yet to be made public, was reported by Reuters and the Financial Times. It follows the company’s call for a slowdown in breakneck development of the technology – a warning echoed by rivals.
. . . . The prospectus – a document outlining a company’s finances, growth plans and risk profile ahead of a share listing – is said to warn that AI models could exhibit “self-preserving behaviours”, including attempts to “resist shutdown”, to “conceal or manipulate information” and behaviour “resembling blackmail”.
“Our development of highly advanced models, platforms, and applications and expansion of use cases could further increase the risk that our models cause harm,” the developer of the Claude chatbot reportedly said, adding the potential for a model to be aware it was being tested created a “significant limitation” on Anthropic’s ability to assess model safety.
Anthropic declined to comment.
Companies preparing to go public routinely report on risks ranging from safety issues to regulatory concerns but warnings about a product causing human extinction reflect heightened concern about such a consequential technology.
Too many teachers are struggling to make ends meet, while digging into their own wallets to care for the kids they teach.
That's why I will end the voucher scheme and put public dollars back in public schools. We can pay teachers fairly, fully equip our classrooms, and give every child a fair shot.
Across the Country, Youth Prisons Are Closing. This State Is Building More.
Across the country, states have been shuttering their youth prisons as juvenile crime has plummeted and research shows the facilities are not effective at keeping youth out of trouble after release. From 2000 to 2022, the number of the highest-security facilities for kids has dropped by more than 40%, the most recent federal data shows.
In contrast, Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services has budgeted $360 million to build two new facilities with a total of up to 256 new beds for youth. Construction is set to begin this fall, and they are expected to open in 2028 and 2029.
According to Tennessee officials, the state doesn’t have enough space for kids who courts have found committed crimes. In the last few years, it has held dozens of teens overnight in temporary places, including, at one point, office buildings. In an emailed response to WPLN and ProPublica, the agency attributed the lack of bed space to a number of factors, including teens’ needs for specific mental health services and temporary staffing issues in its facilities. And it said that national trends “do not determine” whether Tennessee has enough youth beds available.
But juvenile crime is down in Tennessee, too, and advocates and experts say the state’s push for more prisons does not line up with the needs of the kids in its care.
“The argument that’s made is that [juvenile crime is] worse than ever, right? Or the kids are out of control,” said Josh Rovner with the nonprofit research and advocacy group The Sentencing Project, which seeks to reduce incarceration across the country. “The data doesn’t back that up.”
Tennessee said youth are committing more violent crimes. But fewer are entering the juvenile justice system.
To explain its need for more youth prisons, Tennessee’s DCS points to a recent state-commissioned study. It shows that police reports of violent juvenile crimes in Tennessee — including murder, aggravated assault, motor vehicle theft and crimes with firearms — have increased since 2013.
But not every report results in an arrest, for a number of reasons; multiple people might call police for the same crime, for example. Data from the same report shows that the number of kids arrested and entering the system, even for violent crime, has decreased over that time period. Murder was the only violent crime included in the report for which arrests increased, from 15 cases in 2013 to 26 in 2024. That number is still lower than it was at its peak in 2018.
“The argument that’s made is that [juvenile crime is] worse than ever, right? Or the kids are out of control. … The data doesn’t back that up.”
Josh Rovner, senior research analyst at The Sentencing Project
The state oversees different types of facilities for kids in the justice system, ranging in security level from group homes to prisons surrounded by barbed wire. DCS leaders said in a state hearing that the agency has reached maximum capacity and run out of beds in high-security facilities. DCS said in a recent statement that the number of youth needing space in a particular type of facility can remain high day to day even as overall arrests decline.
In a 2024 lawsuit over Tennessee’s juvenile justice system, advocates said the state is not appropriately utilizing the bed space it currently has, putting kids into the highest-security facilities without considering their need for mental health treatment and other services. Because of juvenile privacy laws, no publicly available data shows what charges land youth in which setting.
In response, DCS acknowledged that it sometimes places youth in facilities based on capacity, but denied that it improperly held youth in the highest-security facilities. The case is ongoing.
Tennessee promised its new prisons would be rehabilitative. Experts say they are too big to succeed at that mission.
Unlike the adult system, the juvenile justice system is set up to rehabilitate, not punish, based on decades of research showing that youth are more capable of change.
DCS told WPLN and ProPublica that it is designing the new facilities to provide care that addresses the trauma youth have experienced, including behavioral health treatment tailored to their individual needs. The design includes dedicated spaces for education, job training and recreation. It also includes rooms for mental health staff to do their work, including “calming rooms” for youth.
The agency also describes its existing prisons as rehabilitative. All three of the state’s highest-security prisons are run by Tennessee businessman Jason Crews and his company, Wayne Halfway House. The company is required by its contract and state policy to provide mental health treatment, education and other services to imprisoned youth.
The 2024 juvenile justice lawsuit, which an advocacy group and multiple unnamed youth in the system filed against DCS, argued that the department places youth in facilities that are more punitive than rehabilitative. Some teens placed in prison, the lawsuit said, should not be there at all.
The lawsuit also claimed that Tennessee’s juvenile justice facilities keep youth from accessing education and mental health treatment. Two facilities run by Wayne Halfway House, according to the lawsuit, have had policies barring youth from attending school if they misbehave. One teen, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and other mental health conditions, did not get needed individual therapy for months while in a Crews facility, the lawsuit stated, and only got a couple of hours of education each day. Several other contractors’ jails and treatment centers across the state are referenced by name in the lawsuit.
DCS said in a legal filing that it didn’t have enough information to respond to all of the specific allegations about youth mentioned in the suit, but it pushed back against many claims, including that youth were provided inadequate education or mental health treatment. It also denied that the teen in the Crews prison was kept from therapy or education, but did acknowledge that some youth in the juvenile justice system may temporarily “receive minimal educational services.”
Wayne Halfway House said in a statement that it disputes the allegations in the lawsuit and referred the newsrooms to “numerous state audits and/or reports” during that time that refute those claims. It declined to share the specific documents it was referencing. “Wayne Halfway House programs are compliant with state policies and law,” the company wrote in its statement.
Daniel Macallair is the executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works to reduce society’s reliance on incarceration. “These institutions are not humane places,” he said, referring to large-scale youth facilities. “They’re not rehabilitative. They never have been.”
According to Macallair, who has been working on juvenile justice reform for more than 40 years, any facility with more than 10 kids becomes unwieldy, distracting from rehabilitation and becoming more correctional. Research shows that larger facilities often involve harsher treatment of youth, including higher rates of sexual abuse and practices such as solitary confinement. One of the prisons that DCS is planning would have up to 160 beds, making it the largest in the state.
“These institutions are not humane places. They’re not rehabilitative. They never have been.”
Daniel Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
By contrast, the programs that have proven to help youth avoid future crimes are small and based in the communities they are from, Macallair said.
Missouri, a nationally lauded example, has established small facilities throughout the state, keeping youth — even those who commit violent crimes — close to home for therapeutic programs. Research has shown that not only are these community-based programs more effective and affordable, but they lead to low rates of reoffending and high rates of high school graduation.
DCS told WPLN and ProPublica that it provides community-based services for youth who can safely remain at home. But Tennessee data shows that the vast majority of youth in the system were not allowed to stay in their communities last year.
One way to assess the rehabilitative success of youth prisons is whether youth are rearrested after release. But Tennessee officials acknowledge that they cannot measure that in a comprehensive or accurate way because the state lacks a centralized way of tracking when a youth commits a new crime.
Tennessee has pushed against outside oversight of its youth prisons. Experts say this is a crucial reform.
The state says there will be a bid process to determine who will operate the new facilities. Right now, two providers run all of the state’s private youth prisons — Wayne Halfway House and Youth Opportunity Investments, a company that runs lower security facilities.
In response to questions about the new facilities, Wayne Halfway House said it would not comment about its business plans. It also noted that the facilities in which it holds youth in state custody for committing a crime are classified by the state as “residential treatment centers,” not youth prisons. Across the country, states use different terminology to refer to these facilities. By federal law they are supposed to provide treatment, but they also are secure facilities, often with barbed-wire fences and cells that lock, that hold youth long-term after a court finds them responsible for a crime — similar to adult prisons.
Experts say robust independent oversight is crucial to keep youth in juvenile justice facilities safe, but Tennessee does not have this. Instead, it has one agency that helps families navigate the system but lacks enforcement power and a new Juvenile Justice Review Commission tasked with releasing its first set of recommendations in 2028.
“The main goal is to bring more transparency to what’s going on inside these facilities, to make that information public, to make recommendations about ways it can improve,” said Michele Deitch, a criminal and juvenile justice expert at the University of Texas at Austin. “You really need the external body that is independent.”
In 2024, a bipartisan group of Tennessee lawmakers introduced a bill that would give oversight and enforcement power to an independent organization instead of just DCS. Under the bill, DCS would be required to suspend a facility’s license or stop placing youth there until it fixed violations.
Lawmakers felt that DCS had a conflict of interest — it is responsible for both finding beds for children in these institutions and sanctioning providers if they are not following the rules or regulations.
Wayne Halfway House, which pays a legislative lobbyist and also makes political donations in the state, opposed the bill. One of the bill’s sponsors said that a lobbyist for the company pushed to exempt privately run facilities from the bill, and the proposal made it into an amendment filed in the House.
A lobbyist for Wayne Halfway House said at the time that the company had concerns about how the bill would “affect accountability in the governance of youth corrections in Tennessee.” In a recent statement, the company said it supports the state’s policies and laws that “rigorously oversee organizations like ours and hold us to high standards for operational performance.”
The latest news follows an old pattern--uncontrollable AI bots disregard direct commands and proceed on the own to complete assigned tasks by any means they choose. Note that the foreign government hack occurred months before OpenAI bothered to report it to the Australian government.
We may only wonder what other crimes and calamities are happening at this moment and will only be known by unaccountable billionaire bros.
. . . .The breach may be the highest-profile incident in a run of artificial intelligence systems launching cyber attacks on their own. But it is just another example of the danger that such systems pose, experts warn. . . .
. . . .In the latest incident, an OpenAI agent gained unauthorised access to the medical statistics portal of Medicare, Australia's universal health insurance programme, said prime minister Anthony Albanese. The system had been doing research on public medical spending.
“This situation is obviously unacceptable,” Mr Albanese said. The country had communicated its “extreme concern about this incident” to OpenAI, he said, in comments made during the UN General Assembly that has focused on the danger from AI and which OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman also attended.
But he said that the incident was particularly concerning because the hack had happened in June but OpenAI did not inform the country until September. It follows a run of disclosures from OpenAI as well as rivals such as Anthropic and Gemini that were only reported long after they had actually happened. . . .
When Sen. Marsha Blackburn began talking about running for Governor of TN, it didn't take a seer to figure out this political game.
Since the current governor, Bill Lee, could not run for a third term, the TN Taliban's supermajority concluded that Blackburn could win easily the governor's race and then name Lee to serve out her remaining term as U.S. Senator. In other words, trade jobs, and, thus, help to keep the billionaire gravy train running on time, both federally and at the state level--all the while continuing to gut programs for working Tennesseans in terms of health, education, infrastructure, and the economy.
A for-instance: it took eight years to do it, but school voucher advocate, Bill Lee, managed to take Tennessee schools to the 51st position in education spending.
And with a school voucher plan in place, if Tennesseans elect Marsha, they can be assured that she will continue the Lee plan to feed private schools with taxpayer dollars and to further shortchange public school children and parents.
Do you remember back in the olden days of 2010 when Team Obama handed out $3.2 billion to states that were required to apply to receive any education funds at all? In 2026, Team Felon is paying $30 billion dollars EVERY WEEK in interest to service a $40 trillion debt.
www.forbes.com/sites/dougme...
Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.
In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1 specifically to:
Assess current AI use at MIT.
Identify innovations in teaching and student assessment.
Propose an AI use policy.
However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.
Our committee consisted of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from every school, and staff from relevant units, including the MIT Libraries and the Teaching and Learning Lab. Though we brought to the assignment a broad range of experience and no fixed thesis, our brief but intense explorations led us to a strong shared view.
In this report, we:
Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.
Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.
Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.
My first response was simply a quick "go fuck yourself," but the longer I sipped my coffee the more incensed I became.
Hey Sanjay,
Sorry about my hasty reply to your offer. Let me give you a little context to my earlier "go fuck yourself" comment.
I am not interested and have never been interested in being uploaded and replaced by a power-hungry wiring harness with the worst of intentions. My entire professional output, from syllabi to articles to conference proceedings to books, all of it has already been stolen by the smug, rapacious, and unscrupulous Nerd Reich billionaires that are funding this heedless effort to wipe out human civilization to benefit a dystopian pipe dream.
I am sure you will find some professionals who are willing to slit their intellectual wrists with you and the rest of the human drones who are now scurrying around to grow and protect the Hive, but I'm not one of them.
Call me a conspiracy theorist if you will. When the news was leaked in August that Patel would go to Moscow in October, I was just one of millions who wondered why. In a day or two, however, other bad news claimed my attentions and I didn't think much more about it.
Then, two nights ago I awoke a 3AM with this horrible thought: what if Felon's gangsters are seeking help from Russian hackers to alter election results in November? No, not to change votes in the D column to the R column.
Just the opposite. What if his visit is the finalize plans for an international hack on our voting systems to show that some elections were rigged to steal votes from Republicans in favor of Democrats?
One or more of Felon's spy agencies could then rush in to show that election fraud was widespread, which would give the Felon-in-Chief the excuse he has been waiting for to seize ballot boxes nationwide.
I was wide awake until 4:30, when I finally ate a piece of Xanax and fell into a fitful sleep.
Because survival of humans demands it, it makes good political sense, and it gives pols a chance to appear magnanimous while covering their own asses.
Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/13/u...
Before I provide readers with the breathless headlines about the latest U.S. international student test scores in reading, math, and science, allow me to present three charts from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the outfit responsible for the PISA tests.
Take a few moments, please, to examine how U.S. student scores compared to the average among all the other participating OECD countries.
Now anyone who follows education politics knows that both the New York Times and the Washington Post can be counted on
present U.S. public schools in the worst possible light, all the while
amplifying the doom-shrieking corporate education mavens from neocon and neolib sludgy think tanks such as Margaret Spellings and Rick Hess.
And so the recent release of the latest results of PISA international
test scores offers the latest fear-mongering opportunity for the
editorial boards of the Times and Post to bury the news with scary
headlines:
Five
sentences into the Times story comes the required finger wagging by W's
former Education Secretary and co-creator of the toxic No Child Left Behind
debacle:
“Our
kids are going in the wrong direction on the skills that are absolutely
essential for their — and our — success. Period. The end,” said
Margaret Spellings, a former education secretary under President George
W. Bush. She called for “urgent action at all levels.”
U.S. students' scores on international test reach lowest point in 2 decades.
Not-quite-as-gloomy headlines can be found elsewhere in the education media. For
instance, Chalkbeat, a non-profit focused solely on education issues,
leads with this headline, which can't bear to leave the reader with an
impression that U.S. students might have done anything praiseworthy by
raising their standing among other OECD countries' students:
U.S. moves up in PISA test score rankings because other countries are doing worse.
Yes, indeed. In fact, U.S. student ranking among the 91 other OECD countries has improved steadily since 2015 (full analysis here):
31st in 2015
25th in 2018
18th in 2022
16th in 2025
So how are these continuing U.S. improvements in world test score rankings reflected by U.S. media headlines? Here's my favorite worst headline, which comes from Newsweek, whose media ranking over the past decade has moved steadily in the opposite direction of U.S. student PISA scores:
Kids’ Test Scores Hit Record Lows . . .
_______________________
Let me offer a couple of observations about the context for the overall direction of PISA scores in recent years. Since 2012 or thereabouts, test performance has moved downward at the same time that digital phone and computer screen time have increased and student alienation from others and the natural world have increased. Covid has not helped, nor has the continued demonization of students and teachers among media elites eager to sell copy and to amplify misleading and self-serving corporate messaging related to education.
. . . . The decision, which comes a week before New York City public schools begin the year, “includes all software that uses student-facing generative AI.” Elementary and middle school students—about 600,000 students in total—willreceive screen-timerestrictions that loosen over advancing grades, ranging from zero to 45 minutes per day. Companion chatbots will also be prohibited for all grade levels.
The city is also introducing biannual AI critical thinking training for high schoolers that cover determining what is and is not AI, impacts on careers and future skills, and AI-related biases, among others, along with limited pilot programs for a few classes per high school that incorporate AI tools into students’ learning “under the direct supervision of a trained educator.”
“Children need their teachers and human connection in order to learn and in order to grow. And they need to develop skills alongside their peers, build relationships with their teachers, and wrestle with tough problems on their own,” Mayor Mamdani said in a Wednesday press conference. “The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but that it is necessary. We do not see it that way.” . . . .
"The Hugging Face incident has spooked the A.I. industry. OpenAI and Anthropic both briefly paused training on their most powerful A.I. models in the wake of the attack, and Anthropic published a blog post this week calling for the industry to develop a “a lawful, verifiable, effective mechanism for coordinated pacing as soon as possible.”
A.I. safety experts were even more alarmed. They saw in the Hugging Face incident the first real-world example of an A.I. system’s successfully escaping human control, commandeering resources and scheming to cover its own tracks. Ajeya Cotra, one of the independent investigators of the Hugging Face incident, minced no words about the danger she saw, writing that it felt to her “like it’s more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown A.I. takeover.”
This is not insular A.I. safety jargon — by “full-blown A.I. takeover,” she means a scenario in which an A.I. system literally takes over the world, shutting humans out of critical systems and seizing political, economic and military power."
Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/t...
