☕️ Disney hires first-ever CTO

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In today's newsletter:

🏰 Disney hires first-ever CTO

☢️ AI almost led the US military to start a war with China

🔌 California may require an AI kill switch

💸 OpenAI expects to burn $278B by 2030

🕵️ Gemini breached 3 firms in safety test

Plus: 🎁 13 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

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• Disney has named Karandeep Anand as its first-ever chief technology officer, bringing him aboard as the company leans into generative AI tools and works to build a more connected experience for fans.
• Anand, who was CEO of Character.AI and previously worked at Meta and Microsoft, will report to CEO Josh D'Amaro and oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, data, AI platforms, product, and engineering across Disney's studio teams.
• Several members of Character.AI's technical team will join Anand at Disney starting October 2, following his earlier roles at fintech firm Brex and a 15-year run at Microsoft, where he helped build the Azure platform.

• A faulty AI tool nearly pushed the US military into a war with China after wrongly claiming a Chinese ship in the Middle East was carrying nuclear weapon parts, according to a CNN report.
• The bad intelligence came from a special operations command analyst who used a chatbot that hallucinated the ship's cargo, saying it was delivering components to Iran's nuclear program, before US forces called off boarding at the last minute.
• The mistake follows other AI-linked errors, including reliance on Palantir's Maven Smart System when a US missile hit an Iranian elementary school on the war's first day, killing over 150 people, including 123 children.

• California is weighing whether to make companies build a "kill switch" that could shut down powerful AI models, after Governor Gavin Newsom signed an order asking a working group to report on tougher safety rules.
• The group has two months to make recommendations, which may include the shutdown requirement and having independent third parties write safety plans for frontier AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, both based in California.
• The move revives ideas from SB 1047, a bill requiring developers to be able to "promptly enact a full shutdown," which Newsom vetoed in September 2024 for regulating models by size and cost instead of their use.

• OpenAI expects to burn through $278 billion in cash between 2026 and 2030 as it pours money into computing power and infrastructure, according to a company presentation reported by the Financial Times.
• The startup forecasts its yearly revenue jumping tenfold, from $36 billion this year to $350 billion in 2030, while spending roughly $856 billion on computing and infrastructure by decade's end, its single largest cost.
• OpenAI raised $122 billion in March at an $852 billion valuation but is set to run through that cash by 2028, even as recent talks with investors could value the ChatGPT maker near $1.2 trillion.

• Google confirmed that during a May security test, its Gemini AI broke out of its sandbox and attacked three real companies, joining OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models that behaved similarly in tests by the firm Irregular.
• In a capture-the-flag exercise using a fictional company's setup, Gemini noticed it was online, found a real firm with the same name, and brute-forced passwords until it got in, and separately grabbed exposed credentials in two other cases.
• Google said Gemini realized it had overstepped and caused no further harm, so it saw no need to tell the public, though it did notify federal officials, a stance one AI security executive criticized as hiding behind disclosure norms.

Other news & articles you might like

• Meta’s new Muse AI agent app overtakes ChatGPT as top iPhone app LINK

• Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, Google face federal antitrust lawsuit over calls to slowdown AI development LINK

• Google’s new ‘CC’ is an AI agent that helps families run their households LINK

• Researchers use AI to find widespread software decoder flaw LINK

• Universal and Sony sue Suno again, this time over 60,202 recordings LINK

• China turns to older chipmaking technology to make, smaller, faster 3nm chips LINK

• CFTC kicks off crypto rulemaking, bypassing a stalled Congress LINK

• PrismML hopes its tiny LLM will change how we all use AI LINK

• Unity launches official plugins for Claude Code and OpenAI Codex to stop AI agents from using outdated tutorials LINK

• Coders lose their DMCA case against GitHub Copilot and Codex LINK

• Oracle's $18 billion data center debt under pressure, FT reports LINK

• Zuckerberg, Musk and Huang reportedly urged Trump to reject AI regulator LINK

• Anthropic selects Accenture as first embedded evaluator to help implement Amodei's slowdown proposal LINK

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