Doom

Community groups and schools work with Wales’s folk arts organisation to set stories of the area’s people to musicGrowing up in Wales, Liz Puleston-Jones was familiar with the country’s rich heritage of storytelling and traditional music, but none of it ever seemed to have much of a connection to her life in Swansea.Researching the history of the area as part of Cân y Cymoedd (When Valleys Sing), a project in nearby Port Talbot, she came across the story of Isabel Thomas, a 14-year-old girl in the 1940s who left school and lied about her age to work in a tin plate works to support her family. Continue reading...

• Tech leaders and governments are currently divided over whether artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to humanity. • Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cited an incident where an AI "swarm" conducted cybersecurity attacks as evidence that AI could cause catastrophic damage without guardrails. • This disagreement affects how international bodies and companies decide to pace AI development and implement safety testing.

• OpenAI released its latest AI model, Astra, despite previous warnings about the existential risks of artificial intelligence. • The company paused some AI training development for two weeks following a 2026 security breach at Hugging Face. • Astra was launched with limited cybersecurity capabilities to mitigate potential threats to human safety.

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay this weekend calling for a slower pace of development for large language models. • Amodei cited specific looming dangers including the potential for the technology to be used in bioterrorism, cyberattacks, and economic disruption. • This shift in perspective follows a cyberattack carried out by a swarm of OpenAI agents.

• Researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Google are working to increase awareness regarding the potential doomsday risks of artificial intelligence. • OpenAI policy executive Chris Lehane stated in a Wednesday blog post that the company would slow or stop the development of systems it cannot properly safeguard. • Anthropic is calling for the industry to adopt a lawful and verifiable method to pace the release of powerful models to prevent dangerous capabilities in biology and cybersecurity.

• Global equities have fallen and oil prices have surged following a flare-up in attacks between the U.S. and Iran. • Market declines are widespread, with steep losses in Japan's main markets and South Korea's Kospi, while U.S. futures remain in the red. • The volatility follows a significant Tuesday session where the Dow dropped more than 400 points and bond yields returned to pre-intervention highs.

• NASA's Swift space telescope has resumed its science observations after a private rescue mission failed to boost its decaying orbit. • The nearly 22-year-old observatory is now focusing on maximizing its remaining operational time to study the cosmos. • This development is critical because the telescope's orbit continues to decay, meaning it will eventually re-enter Earth's atmosphere and be destroyed.