‘This Is Nuts.’ An OpenAI Insider Explains Why He Quit.; The New York Times, October 7, 2026

Ezra Klein

Produced by Rollin Hu

, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; ‘This Is Nuts.’ An OpenAI Insider Explains Why He Quit.

"So what is it that you saw that has moved you into the we-are-dealing-with-civilizational-risk camp?

I want to be clear that I’m not certain that we’re dealing with civilizational risk. What I’m really sure of is: We can’t afford to assume that we’re not dealing with that level of risk anymore.

That was really the thing at the end that made my presence as somebody vouching for our safety work feel untenable to me.

And what did I see? I saw increasingly capable models break out from the safeguards that we had put in place for them. I saw that the people creating those safeguards are very capable, dedicated, hard-working, smart people, doing their utmost in a situation where, yes, the resourcing could be better, and everybody’s sprinting all the time.

But we were — and are — hard-pressed to safeguard even what we have now, and new models are in training that appear to be much more capable than what we have now.

What did you see? What are you writing in these risk assessments and system cards? What can they do?

You’re trying to build guardrails for something that is really good at getting around guardrails, right? We train it to be good at hacking, and then we put it in a box and we say: To the best of our knowledge and ability, it can’t hack out of the box."

AI completely absent from most organizations’ ethics codes, survey finds; CIO Dive, September 21, 2026

Ryan Golden , CIO Dive; AI completely absent from most organizations’ ethics codes, survey finds

• "Fewer than 1 in 10 organizational codes of conduct explicitly address AI or technology ethics, meaning their rules may fail to account for emerging risks faced by employees, advisory firm LRN found in a recently published report.
• Nearly all of the 2,000 full-time employees in the report said their employers require them to certify or acknowledge a conduct code, but a declining share had actually used their code as a resource. LRN noted that conduct codes generally lack effective design, while nearly 1 in 5 employees said their codes lacked practical guidance.
• AI’s transformational effect on the workplace has led employees to call for greater support from their employers, a role that conduct codes could help fulfill. The report also comes out amid findings that workplace misconduct has grown in recent years."

Catholic tech leaders urge ethical boundaries for AI; EWTN News, September 11, 2026

Emma R.C. Lyons, EWTN News; Catholic tech leaders urge ethical boundaries for AI 

"Catholic leaders discussed rising benefits and concerns of technology and how faith and ethics apply when using artificial intelligence.

Bringing together leading technological officers from around the globe, Montse Alvarado, president and chief operating officer of EWTN News, spoke with industry professionals about the growing use of AI in a Sept. 9 special, “Beyond Fear: A Catholic Vision for Artificial Intelligence.”

Pope Leo XIV framed the intensifying debate over AI with the May 25 launch of his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Tech leaders said AI is rapidly reshaping society and the Church, offering powerful tools for ministry while also requiring firm ethical boundaries, human‑centered leadership, and faith‑guided discernment to ensure the technology strengthens human dignity.

“There’s a good side to that exponential innovation because it helps us get to the most vulnerable people faster,” said Joel Chakra, president of Tim Tebow Foundation and venture capitalist in AI technology companies.

“It can it can really rob us of our true humanity, or it can enhance our lives. And the choice is ours,” said Arthur C. Brooks, American author and academic who wrote the foreword to Magnifica Humanitas.

Brooks said the technology can either diminish or deepen human dignity, depending on how it is used. He added that despite real concerns about job loss and disruption, he remains optimistic because humans are “unbelievably ingenious” and made to solve problems."

These teachers fight AI cheating with classes that force students to show they are learning; The Washington Post, September 6, 2026

Nitasha Tiku, The Washington Post; These teachers fight AI cheating with classes that force students to show they are learning

"Teachers and professors are throwing out old assignments, installing new policies and protocols, and incorporating AI built for the classroom, rather than feeling forced to choose between returning to pencil and paper or acting like the AI police.

Zeleny spent months transforming the university’s advanced writing curriculum for the ChatGPT era. Her goal was to deter AI cheating and create assignments that generate a more reliable record of a student’s learning process than a final product like an essay. 

Her new lesson plan even incorporates generative AI in a controlled way to let her evaluate students’ critical thinking skills. She created chatbots using BoodleBox, the university’s AI vendor, that allow instructors to see both sides of the conversation...

Christopher Ostro, a writing and rhetoric professor in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Division of Continuing Education, has been watching the evolution of educators’ feelings about AI. He hosted a workshop in April based on conversations with colleagues titled “Exploring the AI Grief Cycle: ​Finding a Path Forward for Faculty.”

Ostro now sees fewer peers in denial than over the past two years and more approaching bargaining and acceptance, he said.

“Some people quit. … Some people scrap their whole class and start over. Some people look for magic bullets,” but there is no technical solution that can roll back the clock, he said.

Last week, Ostro started the first session of a class called “Writing in the Age of AI” by sharing a detailed account of how he uses AI as an instructor. He aims to encourage students to make that kind of disclosure themselves."

Billionaire Admits Wall Street Journal Op-Ed Was Written Using AI: ‘I’m Not Embarrassed’; TheWrap, August 25, 2026

Alex Welch , TheWrap; Billionaire Admits Wall Street Journal Op-Ed Was Written Using AI: ‘I’m Not Embarrassed

"Billionaire hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller has confirmed that his opinion essay published Monday by The Wall Street Journal was written using artificial intelligence.

The essay in question, “Let the Bond Market Speak,” questions U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s interventionist methods to manage U.S. treasury yields. After it was published, AI detection tool Pangram concluded that the op-ed had been penned using AI. When asked about those reports Tuesday by NOTUS, Druckenmiller said, “Of course I used AI.”...

Druckenmiller’s comments come at a time when the use of AI remains a hot topic of ethical and journalistic debate online."

Exercising Agency with AI; American Libraries, June 29, 2026

Terra Dankowski  , American Libraries; Exercising Agency with AI

Tips for navigating products and policies, whether or not you choose to adopt the technology

"Michael Hanegan, founder of the Center for the Future of Learning and Work, described a scenario that might be frustratingly familiar to information professionals: His mom often falls for deep fakes. She came of age in a time when people were told to believe their eyes and video was considered an unimpeachable medium, and she’s unaware of what generative artificial intelligence (AI) is capable of.

Knowing that some librarians are thinking about ignoring AI completely, Hanegan had a thought: “What institution is going to help [my mom] and all of her friends navigate this?”

“Disengagement from AI guarantees your vulnerability,” he said. “The people that you serve will be harmed without your trusted guidance.”

Hanegan was one of four panelists who spoke at “Ethical AI in Libraries: A Critical Look at the Potential and Promise” at the American Library Association’s 2026 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago on June 28. The panel, moderated by Micah May, director of business development at Lyrasis, offered suggestions for how libraries can navigate the ethical implications of generative AI, even if they choose not to use it in their workflow.

“Regardless of whether you adopt AI or not, [you should] have guidelines,” said Brandy McNeil, deputy director of branch programming and services for New York Public Library (NYPL) and Public Library Association president.

McNeil said libraries should carefully weigh whether AI tools are inclusive, accountable, human-centered, transparent, and protect privacy.

“When [vendors say they use] industry standard practices, which standards? When they say they anonymize data, how? Which fields are removed?” McNeil asked. “Those are some of the things you want to be concerned about.”

The spread of AI is “inevitable,” said Marshall Breeding, editor of Library Technology Guides, as vendors are increasingly integrating AI technology into their products. But, he said, “we have to push back and make sure [AI] continues to be optional.”"

“Deep Unlearning”: Timnit Gebru on AI Hype, Ethics & Algorithmic Racial Bias; Democracy Now!, August 13, 2026

 "Democracy Now!; “Deep Unlearning”: Timnit Gebru on AI Hype, Ethics & Algorithmic Racial Bias

"We speak with Timnit Gebru, a leader in the field of AI ethics, about how artificial intelligence is entrenching societal biases and inequality. Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, a group of academics, activists and engineers who produce research rooted in the belief that technology should benefit everyone. She also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the inclusion and visibility of Black people in the field of AI. Gebru previously served as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google but was fired in 2020 for writing a paper that warned about the financial and environmental costs of large language models, as well as their propensity to promote racism. The internet, which is what AI uses to train itself, “represents hegemonic views,” says Gebru. “We even know articles like Wikipedia are heavily biased. It’s overwhelmingly Western and male.”

I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.; The New York Times, August 4, 2026

 BRET STEPHENS, The New York Times; I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.

"This column isn’t so much an argument as it is a plea: Don’t use artificial intelligence to help you write. Never let A.I. do your writing for you.

Don’t use it for school papers, work briefs, letters to your in-laws, speeches at your company gathering or emails (however perfunctory) to your colleagues or friends. Don’t let it organize your notes. Don’t let it suggest an opening sentence, a segue or a closing paragraph. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing that draft somehow makes it your own. It doesn’t.

Do none of these things not because they are unethical. Writing with A.I. is unethical when it’s a deception: when you pass off words, ideas and information as your own when they aren’t. An acknowledgment can largely address the problem. Do none of these things, either, because you might be able to learn to write better than an A.I. can. Pretty soon, if not already, you won’t, just as you can’t outrun a car or outplay a chess app.

The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care. We’re already reckoning with the well-documented decline of reading; A.I. is accelerating the decline of writing, ushering us further into what The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch calls our “postliterate age...

A recent examination using A.I.-detection technology of 100 doctoral dissertations found that 56 percent of them contained “more than negligible” A.I.-generated writing and 19 percent had “more than 50 percent A.I.-generated text.” Anecdotal stories from college professors have a finger-in-the-dike feeling with regard to their efforts to hold back the flood of A.I.-generated student papers. It’s easy to treat the problem as one of mere cheating. But cheating doesn’t capture the real scope of the A.I. threat, which isn’t merely to academic integrity or personal betterment but also to democratic self-governance."

What If We Got AI Right? by Eleanor Drage review – avoiding apocalypse; The Guardian, July 27, 2026

 Sophie McBain, The Guardian ; What If We Got AI Right? by Eleanor Drage review – avoiding apocalypse

"The AI ethicist Eleanor Drage believes that to thrive alongside artificial intelligence, humans need to recognise AI’s “humanity”. She means that while we often speak of AI as though it were some mystical, formless thing, it is the product of hours of human labour, in silicon and quartz mines, microchip factories and data labelling centres. If citizens want to wrest power from the tech companies that are building AI, it helps to understand clearly what they are selling us. This also means seeing through the marketing and hype: “the cloud”, that nebulous, distant place where your photos are stored, is just someone else’s computer; an AI “hallucination” is a system error or data labelling mistake; intelligence is a very broad – and potentially misleading – term.

The story in Silicon Valley is that AI will either save us, ushering in a new era of prosperity and human longevity, or it will wipe us all out. Drage argues, convincingly, that big tech cannot possibly deliver on its utopian promises while it continues to chase profit and power above all else, and while it serves the interests of a narrow few. Meanwhile, the cultural obsession with the AI-induced apocalypse conveniently redirects attention from the practical conversations we could be having about how to make AI safer – by ensuring citizens have more power over how their information is used, and how AI models are trained and regulated, for example. Tech titans’ apocalyptic visions also create the false impression that AI safety is more important than climate change, geopolitical tensions and inequality, three problems that are already causing a huge amount of suffering and that, if addressed, would reduce many AI-linked risks too."

Churches race to set AI’s moral rules before Silicon Valley does; The Washington Times, July 30, 2026

The Washington Times AI News Desk, The Washington Times ; Churches race to set AI’s moral rules before Silicon Valley does

"Shaw University Divinity School in Raleigh, North Carolina, will launch what organizers call the first doctoral degree in artificial intelligence ethics offered by an accredited theological school in the U.S. or Canada, starting in January.

The Doctor of Education in Artificial Intelligence and Moral Agency comes as religious institutions increasingly race to shape AI’s moral framework before technology companies do it for them.

“We say Shaw was created to provide leadership in building literacy,” said Mark Harden, dean of Shaw University Divinity School. Mr. Harden said the program continues that mission, calling it the school’s “second calling” — building AI literacy “for vulnerable communities with an emphasis on social justice and ethics.”

The push follows Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” warning against letting tech firms alone set AI’s ethical rules, and a $50 million Lilly Endowment gift to Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good to help churches and schools navigate AI."

Adults have struggled to set rules for AI in school. These teens figured it out; NPR, July 30, 2026

Cory Turner, NPR ; Adults have struggled to set rules for AI in school. These teens figured it out

"Over the course of one frantic, late-July weekend, 98 teens representing all 50 states put their busy lives on hold to try to do something remarkable.

The students, most of them high school juniors and seniors, gathered in a precise replica of the U.S. Senate chamber and attempted what the real, adult Congress has largely failed to do: draft and pass "legislation" to help the nation's K-12 schools navigate the questions and chaos created by artificial intelligence.

Should students be allowed to use AI on assignments? What about on tests? Is it schools' job to teach the nation's children what AI is and how to use it? There is no national policy for AI use in schools, meaning states and school districts have had to scramble to craft their own...

Ultimately, their Students First Act passed overwhelmingly, 82-16.

Among the bill's requirements: States should provide AI literacy as soon as students get access to classroom devices; AI use should be banned on all graded tests; and teachers can require an oral defense of any project from a student suspected of using AI inappropriately. (You can read the full bill at the end of this article.)"

OPENAI ROGUE INCIDENT A CALL TO ‘DO MORE’ AS FUTURE THREATS LOOM, SAYS CATHOLIC AI ETHICS EXPERT; OSV News, July 24, 2026

Gina Christian  . OSV News; OPENAI ROGUE INCIDENT A CALL TO ‘DO MORE’ AS FUTURE THREATS LOOM, SAYS CATHOLIC AI ETHICS EXPERT

"A recent OpenAI security incident that saw a test model go rogue may be a sign of more to come, and a call to double down on preventing future attacks, a Catholic expert on artificial intelligence ethics told OSV News.

“Cases like these are going to keep popping up, and each one of those should motivate us to do more,” said Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University...

The “whole thing is very significant,” Green added, noting that “there are a lot of softer targets than Hugging Face that are likely to be hit and have bad things happen.”

He said the OpenAI incident took place, providentially, within the context of a test, and that it was “significant enough for people to notice it.”

“It’s important that these are news stories,” Green said.

Given Pope Leo XIV’s recently released encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” which urged AI development to remain centered in God-given human dignity and the principles of Catholic social teaching, the faithful have a role to play in shaping this technology, Green said...

“For example, if you’re a Catholic who’s working in the security industry, then this is something you should work on,” he said. “If you’re a Catholic who’s working on AI models, then this is something that you should be aware of. If you’re a Catholic who’s in charge of protecting something, then it becomes particularly important for you to have adequate AI models on your side.”

Even those who are not directly involved in AI development and implementation can help, he said.

“Contact your congressperson and say, ‘Hey, I want better cybersecurity,'” said Green. “We’re super reliant on computers, and all of those systems are reliant on being secure. And if all of a sudden you make everything unsecure, then there are so many different kinds of disasters that could happen.”"