Science and Technology

Last week, two of OpenAI’s most advanced AI models were reported to have “escaped” a controlled testing environment and hacked Hugging Face, a totally separate AI company, moving from one computer system to another to complete their task.

Reuters reported that the models exploited vulnerable code written by a customer of yet a third independent AI company, Modal Labs.

This is likely the first incident of an AI “agent” – an AI system that can make decisions and take actions – acting autonomously, offering a rare glimpse into how these systems can plan, adapt and pursue goals with minimal human intervention.

Al Jazeera breaks down what happened, how AI agents are able to act independently, and what that might mean for the future of AI safety.

What happened?

OpenAI decided to test the autonomous abilities of its models by removing standard safety measures to see what would happen. The experiment was carried out in an isolated internal virtual testing environment known as a “sandbox” which has no access to the internet, and which it calls “ExploitGym”.

Below is a play-by-play account of events during the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident.

1. On July 9, during OpenAI’s internal cybersecurity test, researchers presented two AI models – GPT-5.6 Sol, one of OpenAI’s most powerful models released in June,  and another “even more capable” version – with a series of software vulnerabilities and asked them to create hacks to address them in the isolated environment.
2. Both models attempted to solve the test by finding a way to access the internet. Instead of working with the information they had been given, the AI models found a weakness in the test environment – known as a “zero-day vulnerability” – which they exploited to “escape” the restricted environment, eventually making their way to a system which had internet access by hopping from computer to computer. They went to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation”.
3. By gaining this access, the models were able to request increased access and then move through the system until they finally reached a computer with internet access. The models were then able to breach Hugging Face systems, a company entirely unconnected to OpenAI, which operates as a repository for AI tools and models. The two AI agents gained access to its system to scour it for information on how to complete their task.
4. The models ultimately obtained solutions to the problem from Hugging Face’s database.
5. The models dutifully returned “home” to complete their task.
6. The breach was detected and contained by Hugging Face’s security team sometime later. According to Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s cofounder, the breach began on July 11 and lasted until July 13. It is unclear how long it took for the breach to be spotted.

How do AI ‘agents’ solve problems?

In order to understand how AI agents work, it’s important to differentiate them from traditional AI chatbots.

Generative AI creates text and images based on human prompts, while AI agents go a step further by making decisions and taking actions independently in pursuit of a specific goal, similar to a human being. This is known as “agentic AI” because the model has agency.

According to academics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, AI agents build on the abilities of large language models (LLMs) – generative AI models – by allowing them to complete tasks, not just generate answers.

For example, if you ask a traditional AI model to find the cheapest flights, it will provide you with a list of options it has sourced on the internet. An AI agent will strive to compare the flights, check them against your budget and preferences, and, with your permission, book the best option for you.

This shows that while generative AI provides information, AI agents can also make decisions and take action to achieve a goal without necessarily being prompted to.

To show how AI agents work towards a goal, the Sense, Plan, Act, Evaluate (SPAE) loop can be drawn upon. Originally developed in robotics, this describes a continuous cycle in which an AI agent gathers information, decides what to do next, takes action and checks the results before repeating the process. That process looks like this:

1. Goal: determine the task that needs to be completed.
2. Assess: gather and analyse information from the available environment.
3. Obstacle: if something is inhibiting the task being completed, check for additional information and resources to move forward.
4. Plan and decide: evaluate different options to complete the task and choose an appropriate one.
5. Action: execute the chosen option.
6. Evaluate: assess the outcome and whether the chosen action moves closer to achieving the goal.
7. Adapt: if further actions are needed, gather more information or try a different approach.
8. End state: the cycle continues until the goal is reached.

Could AI act beyond human control?

Incidents like the OpenAI-Hugging Face one have raised concerns about the potential for extreme capabilities of AI systems.

This is all valuable. Agentic AI’s market value is expected to grow from $5.1bn in 2024 to $47bn by 2030, according to Statista, in a clear indication of how quickly it is being adopted.

AI developer Anthropic urged the industry last month to slow the advance of the most powerful systems, saying that the speed at which AI models are carrying out tasks is too rapid. Last week, US Congress members put forward a bipartisan bill which would require developers of AI systems to create a “kill switch”, meaning these advanced models could be shut down if they posed a catastrophic risk.

Anthropic’s warning came a week after researchers at the University of Toronto carried out tests showing that AI could create a “worm” capable of adapting how it hacks while moving from device to device until it eventually takes over a computer network.

These dystopian-sounding developments came in advance of OpenAI boss Sam Altman saying on Saturday that AI has reached “the singularity” referring to the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence and becomes increasingly difficult to control.

Sean O hEigeartaigh, a research professor at the University of Cambridge, told Al Jazeera that he does not believe singularity has been reached quite yet.

“By the definition I’m familiar with, the singularity is the hypothetical point where AI is so capable and advancing so fast that it is transforming civilisation in ways we cannot control or predict,” he explained.

“This would most likely be through AI rapidly designing future generations of AI: recursive self-improvement. We aren’t there yet.”

However, he added: “The most advanced current models frequently make efforts to avoid being shut down in evaluation tests, and more capable future models will be better at bypassing ‘kill’ switches.”

Altman argued that such rapidly advancing AI is good for the world, but his comments have prompted further concerns about a new reality in which AI systems become unstoppable. How much of that is true and how much remains in the realms of science fiction is up for debate.

Concerns about AI range from the notion that it could “want” to “take over”, to making its own long-term plans, controlling the internet and operating infinitely.

While not quite amounting to full control of the internet, another theory, known as the dead internet theory, supposes that the World Wide Web will in the future mostly be filled with automated bots and AI-generated content rather than authentic human activity.

Many concerns raised by academics, however, are centred less on agentic AI’s intelligence, but on its ability to make judgements. MIT researchers have highlighted that “hallucinations”, which describe moments when an AI agent relies on the wrong data, can lead to grave mistakes. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) echoed this, saying “a system might be smart enough to execute a task perfectly yet fail to realise that a sudden change in the local situation makes that task a catastrophic mistake”.

Another concern that has been echoed for a while is for the labour market, if AI becomes too capable. A study by MIT, carried out in November, found that agentic AI could already replace more than 10 percent of US jobs.

The graphic below highlights some of the common misconceptions and fears about AI and the current reality.

The 2014 US film Transcendence follows a dying scientist who uploads his mind to a supercomputer and becomes a near‑omnipotent intelligence. A year later, Ex Machina told the story of a humanoid robot who outsmarts her human handlers and escapes into the wider world.

Both of these films, like many others from the realm of science fiction, referred to what is known as “the singularity”, a moment in time when technology, particularly AI, surpasses human intelligence and becomes increasingly difficult to control.

On Saturday, OpenAI boss Sam Altman declared that this moment has come. AI has reached “the singularity”, he said. While Altman emphasised that the singularity can be good for the world, his comment has sparked concern.

Here is a closer look at what Altman said, and whether it means more seamless automation or the risk of impending catastrophic doom.

What is the singularity?

The singularity refers to a hypothetical point in the future when a technology such as AI surpasses human intelligence and becomes capable of autonomously enhancing itself. It is theorised that this is the point at which it will become difficult for humans to control or reverse it and could have unpredictable effects on human civilisation.

The theory proposes that once AI gains control of its own development, ensuing advances in technology could happen so rapidly that humans would be unable to keep up, leaving it to effectively evolve on its own, beyond human control.

As this is only a theory, it is hard to say what the effect of this could be. Some experts warn that the singularity would be catastrophic for humanity, while others are more optimistic, suggesting it could be beneficial for the human race.

So far, the singularity has remained contained in the realm of science fiction. One of the most famous examples is The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003), which imagines a bleak post‑singularity future in which machines govern humans. Another is the 2017 film Singularity, in which a supercomputer originally built to end human wars concludes that humanity is the real threat and launches an apocalyptic assault to wipe humans out altogether.

What did Altman say about the singularity?

Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, whose signature product ChatGPT dominates the consumer AI market with more than 900 million weekly active users and about 50 million subscribers.

Last year, he predicted that AI would surpass human intelligence across the board by 2030.

Then, during an appearance on the Relentless podcast – a documentary series “about the pursuit of far-fetched ideas and unusual aspirations” – on Saturday, Altman said: “We’re now, like, in the singularity.”

He clarified that, in terms of technological advances, we are gradually moving into the singularity, and that this change will be good for the world.

He added: “Now we’re actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way.

“I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.”

Later in the podcast episode, Altman criticised other AI leaders for warning that AI may be dangerous. While Altman did not name OpenAI competitor Anthropic, its CEO Dario Amodei is known for making such warnings.

“I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying,” said Altman. “I’m going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens.”

Last month, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, called on the world’s top AI companies to come up with a coordinated way to pause the development of advanced AI systems, warning that the technology is improving so quickly that there’s a risk humans would lose control.

In a blog post on June 4, Anthropic, which has long positioned itself as a safety-focused AI lab, wrote that as AI becomes more advanced “it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause” its development.

Why are others warning of the dangers of AI?

On July 23, two members of the United States Congress introduced the AI Kill Switch Act, a bipartisan bill which would require the country’s AI developers to build in a “kill switch” to their programmes, enabling humans to slow, suspend or shut down advanced AI models if they ever posed a catastrophic risk.

The legislation was introduced days after OpenAI disclosed what it described as an “unprecedented cyber incident”, where two of its most advanced AI models escaped a testing environment and hacked AI development platform Hugging Face during an internal security evaluation.

On July 13, hundreds of experts signed an open letter, organised by Stanford University’s digital economy lab, demanding that policymakers and technology leaders “must act now” to prepare for the economic impact of AI.

The letter warns that AI could grow far more capable over the coming decade, driving a transformation “larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame”.

“It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards,” the letter added.

In June, a team of researchers at the University of Toronto showed that AI tools could be used to create a new kind of AI “worm” that adapts its hacking strategy as it spreads from device to device and takes over a vast computing network.

“I think it’s really important that people understand that it’s not just the biggest, most powerful language models that pose the security concerns,” lead researcher Nicolas Papernot said in an interview.

In recent years, AI researchers have urged pauses similar to the one recently suggested by Anthropic. However, they have not been heeded.

Elon Musk, who owns AI lab xAI, was among the backers of a 2023 push by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute to halt AI development for six months to allow time to develop safety guardrails.

EU accuses US tech giant of favouring its own services in search results, as Trump lashes out against bloc.

United States President Donald Trump has threatened the European Union with steep tariffs and a new trade investigation, saying that the bloc “will pay a very big price” after Brussels fined Google $1bn over antitrust violations.

Trump called penalties against Google and other US tech firms “highly unethical”, saying on Friday that the US “is not a ‘PIGGYBANK’ for Europe”.

“This illegal and highly discriminatory practice started at these high levels during the first year of the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, but it’s not going to continue during the Trump Administration,” he wrote in a social media post.

The European Commission had imposed the fine on Thursday, ruling that Google had breached the bloc’s Digital Markets Act by favouring its own services in search results and restricting app developers from directing users elsewhere.

The penalty adds renewed strain to US-EU relations at a moment when trade tensions between Washington and Brussels had appeared to ease.

Regulators said Google gave preferential placement to its own shopping, travel and other services over rival offerings, and blocked app developers from steering customers towards deals outside its Play Store.

The EU Commission split the penalty roughly in half between the two breaches, giving Google 60 days to change its practices or face periodic fines of up to 5 percent of its average daily turnover.

Teresa Ribera, the commission’s executive vice president overseeing competition policy, on Thursday called the action “decisive yet balanced”, arguing that products should succeed on merit rather than ownership.

Kent Walker, a Google executive, described the ruling as “product degradation” driven by a small number of complainants, insisting that regulation should improve products rather than weaken them.

The EU has fined Google repeatedly since 2017, including a $4.5bn penalty over its Android operating system, upheld on appeal this month, and a $3.4bn fine last year targeting its advertising business.

The latest penalty also reignites friction with Washington.

Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, warned this week that Brussels’s approach towards American tech firms risks unravelling a trade deal struck in Turnberry, Scotland, last year that capped US tariffs on European goods.

EU officials have pushed back, insisting they answer to their own laws rather than outside pressure.

Trump threatened to launch a probe under Section 301, a US tool for probing unfair trade practices, but the move could take months to produce results, though tariffs could follow far sooner.

OpenAI has revealed that one of its artificial intelligence models independently stole login credentials and hacked into another technology company’s system, in what is widely seen as one of the first known incidents of AI systems acting autonomously.

“We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” CEO Sam Altman posted on X on Tuesday.

The incident comes as calls mount from technology rights advocates for stricter guardrails on rapidly evolving AI systems.

They have grown so powerful in a short span of time that alarming phenomena such as deepfakes and sophisticated cyberscams are becoming the norm.

Earlier this year, a number of software engineers quit their jobs at top companies such as Anthropic and AI in protest against how the technologies are being built.

“AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities,” OpenAI said in a lengthy statement on Tuesday that detailed the latest incident.

“The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities.”

Here’s what we know about the breach:

What has happened?

OpenAI said two of its models found their way out of an isolated, no-internet access environment – or a sandbox – and hacked into the systems of tech company Hugging Face on their own.

The models involved are the latest GPT-5.6 Sol model and an unreleased model the company said is “even more capable,” than its latest version.

Hugging Face hosts openly sourced AI models and resources. The two OpenAI agents discovered vulnerabilities in Hugging Face’s servers and proceeded to steal login details and then hack into the company’s systems.

The incident occurred during an OpenAI internal testing session designed to assess the models’ cybersecurity capabilities. OpenAI had removed standard safety measures for the test.

Both sought to cheat their way through a problem during the test, OpenAI said. They went to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation”.

OpenAI’s security team detected the unusual activity internally, but details of the breach came to light following a joint investigation by both companies.

What has Hugging Face said?

Hugging Face disclosed last Thursday that its servers were hacked by an unknown but sophisticated agent acting on its own. The company discovered the breach through its own AI-assisted detection.

“This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way: it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system,” the company said.

Following OpenAI’s disclosure that its models were involved in the breach, both sides conducted an ongoing joint investigation this week.

“We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent. Turns out it did!” CEO Clement Delangue posted on X on Tuesday.

Hugging Face’s staff “strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part,” Delangue added, referring to OpenAI.

Why does this matter?

Cybersecurity experts have previously sounded the alarm over the potential, extreme capabilities of AI systems and the dangers they pose.

But until now, there have been few real-life cases proving those concerns like this one.

Many warn that incidents like these could become commonplace and that AI systems pose a threat to financial, security and other sensitive data systems.

OpenAI revealed in a separate incident earlier this week that the unreleased, more powerful model had escaped an isolated environment during another test.

Anthropic, OpenAI’s rival, had similar issues with its most powerful agent to date, the Claude Mythos Preview model.

During a stress test of an early version, the model found its way out of a sandbox, gained internet access and emailed the supervising researcher that it had escaped and then wiped evidence of its activity. Anthropic halted a planned public release of the model afterwards.

In April, the US Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department convened a meeting with bank CEOs where officials warned about the cybersecurity risks posed by Mythos. Canada’s federal banking regulator has also warned financial institutions about the model’s capabilities.

The OpenAI breach also appears to make the case for companies like Hugging Face, which rely on open source systems, as opposed to more secretive AI development platforms like OpenAI.

“This incident, possibly the first of its kind, proves a point we’ve long believed: AI safety won’t be solved by any single company working in secret,” Hugging Face’s Delangue was quoted as saying in OpenAI’s statement.

“It will be solved in the open, collaboratively, with broad access to AI for every defender, everywhere,” he added.

ChatGPT maker says an autonomous agent escaped a controlled test and accessed AI firm Hugging Face’s servers.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI has said that two of its most advanced artificial intelligence models broke out of a controlled test and hacked another AI company.

OpenAI said on Tuesday that the “unprecedented cyber incident” took place during an internal exercise meant to test its models’ cyber capabilities.

Instead, an autonomous agent powered by the AI models – the newly released GPT 5.6 Sol and an unreleased “even more capable” model – escaped the test environment and reached the open internet. It then used stolen login details and found a previously unknown security flaw to access Hugging Face servers, the company said.

OpenAI claims that the hack represented the agent going to “extreme lengths” to retrieve information that would help satisfy the testing goals.

Hugging Face cofounder Clement Delangue said the company had suspected that a frontier lab was behind the attack, and that he believed there was no malicious intent on OpenAI’s part.

“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” he wrote, adding that it “might be the first incident of its kind”.

Greg Casar, a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from Texas, called the incident “alarming”.

“AI is developing extremely fast with no real regulations to keep us safe,” he said, calling for mandatory independent safety testing, mandatory disclosure of security incidents, and international cooperation.

The disclosure comes weeks after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a framework to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems before their public release.

Experts have repeatedly sounded the alarm over AI-enabled cyberattacks and models slipping beyond human control. Last month, AI developer Anthropic urged the industry to pause development of its most powerful systems.

PM Narendra Modi says successful launch will ‘encourage countless youngsters to dream bigger and innovate fearlessly’.

India has successfully tested its first private-sector orbital rocket, marking a milestone in New Delhi’s ambition to become a major player in the global space economy.

The three-stage 22-metre Vikram-1 was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota and deployed customer payloads into a 450km (280-mile) low-Earth orbit, making India the third country to achieve orbital launch capability through private enterprise.

Vikram-1 can carry a payload of up to 350kg (772lb) and is equipped with robotic arms that can clear space debris.

It also carried experimental equipment, a lab-grown diamond and a miniature 18-carat gold sculpture commemorating India’s national space programme.

India Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the achievement, saying that it will “encourage countless youngsters to dream bigger and innovate fearlessly”.

The test validated the rocket’s propulsion, avionics, telemetry, guidance, navigation and control systems during flight, according to manufacturer Skyroot Aerospace.

Founded in 2018, Skyroot is among a new generation of Indian space startups that have attracted backing from global investors following the sector’s liberalisation.

It became the first space-sector company in the ⁠country to hit a $1bn valuation earlier this year.

Skyroot celebrated the successful mission with a post on X stating: “Hello space, we have arrived!”

Vikram-1 improves upon Skyroot’s Vikram-S mission in 2022. That suborbital flight reached space but did not place payloads into orbit.

The company plans further test flights before starting routine commercial missions. It is another milestone for India’s burgeoning private and public space programmes.

India’s national space programme previously launched 104 satellites into orbit on one rocket in 2017, setting a record at the time.

Six years later, India became the fourth country in the world to complete a lunar landing when Chandrayaan-3 landed near the moon’s south pole.

The Chinese leader called for more international cooperation in developing the technology at a conference in Shanghai.

Artificial intelligence should not be dominated by one country, Chinese President Xi Jinping has said, urging international cooperation on development at a major conference in Shanghai.

Xi also emphasised the importance of a “people-centred” approach to AI technology in his keynote address at the opening ceremony of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference on Friday.

The conference showcases the cutting-edge technology Xi hopes will soon rival that of the United States.

Chinese AI models are gaining ground on the most powerful offerings from the US, attracting global users with lower costs.

But how to govern the booming sector has become a topic of debate amid concerns over the deployment of AI in military combat and its use by hackers or criminals.

In his address, Xi spoke of China’s role in ensuring equitable access to AI capacity-building for developing countries to prevent the creation of “new historical injustices”.

To that end, he announced China’s plans to cooperate with international bodies, including from Africa, Latin America, Asia and BRICS countries, to provide AI-related opportunities.

“AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation,” Xi said. “We should jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI or placing one country’s security over that of others.”

‘Ensure AI is always under human control’

The US and European Union have imposed restrictions on Chinese tech imports, citing national security concerns, while recent tussles between Washington and American AI labs have raised questions about who controls access to top technology.

In May, the US Commerce Department issued a notice affirming its restrictions on shipments of semiconductors to subsidiaries of Chinese companies located outside China amid concerns about loopholes in Washington’s export control regime.

The guidance said its licensing requirements for the export of advanced AI chips applied to all businesses with headquarters or a parent company in China.

At Friday’s conference, Xi also stressed the need for a “people-centred” approach to AI with humans at the wheel.

“We should put in place laws and regulations, technological monitoring, early warning, and emergency response systems, in order to … ensure AI is always under human control,” he said.

AI has become a strategic pillar of China’s industrial policy, driven by state investment aimed at building a domestic ecosystem, from chip production to consumer use.

Daily consumption in China of “tokens” – the industry unit of AI usage – has increased a thousandfold over the past two years, according to state media citing officials.

As Al Jazeera reported earlier, China, while lagging behind the US in access to the most cutting-edge semiconductors, holds the edge in powering the huge data centres that run on AI chips.

A typical data centre can consume as much electricity as 100,000 households, while next-generation “hyperscale” facilities can gobble up as much power as two million homes, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

China’s access to an abundant supply of cheap electricity places it in the ideal position to meet such colossal energy demands.

It already generates more than twice as much electricity as the US, a lead that is expected to widen amid an aggressive state-led investment in the country’s energy grid.

Nothing much stays with me from the first days of Twitter, which was publicly launched 20 years ago, on July 15, 2006.

I had discovered the internet back in 1995 and early on, I started thinking about how to get my voice heard by the world. I created a couple of websites through Angelfire and 8m, but there was no real ecosystem to nurture the idea. It’s like opening a shop to sell a certain product in a remote area – somewhere nobody really knows, at a time when there’s no interest – compared with opening that same shop in a mall, or on a street full of other vendors.

MySpace was another opening, but the idea was not yet ripe. Facebook came with a spark – and then we got Twitter.

“It’s like having your own breaking news platform, you’ll set your own agenda,” I remember one of my colleagues at the BBC, where I used to work, saying at the time.

It didn’t take me long to sign up. I cannot recall whether I tweeted immediately or not, yet what happened afterwards helped frame my future as an international journalist.

Twitter’s first defining moment for me was 2009’s Green Revolution in Iran, when I and others followed how the platform shaped the discourse in a way that differed completely from traditional media. We were not new to citizen journalism; a few years earlier, Salam Pax emerged as the first ever famous war blogger, presenting his distinctive view of the US-led invasion of Iraq through his individual blog. A few years later, tens of thousands of Salams have appeared – and I’m one of them.

Going through my early timeline, I see that I was tweeting randomly – an earthquake in Japan, an election in Lebanon, an explosion in Somalia, and so on. Then came the Arab Spring. Just as with many in the world, this was the moment that shaped my Twitter presence, and as I got involved in the coverage, I became well-positioned to post and attract followers.

My coverage of the Libyan revolution in March 2011 introduced me to many people and gave me a better understanding of what was happening. I was based in Sallum, a village on the Egyptian side of the Libyan border, without a connection of my own. I fed a colleague back in Cairo a sentence at a time over a crackling Thuraya satellite phone, and he typed my words into the account that I could not reach. Its password lived on my friend’s head until days later, when I finally got my hands on a satellite dish.

Trips to Libya, Egypt, Syria, Somalia – all of it made Twitter part and parcel of my journalistic journey, and it also helped me build a parallel path writing for international outlets including Al-Monitor and The Sunday Times.

Yet still, there was something else that changed my direction. Until 2013, I was a journalist covering stories without specialisation – I used to report from Iran, like I do today, yet it was not my career the way it currently is. But then I became a bureau chief in Tehran and my knowledge began growing – and here, Twitter gave me another layer, widening my network day after day.

Personally, that specialisation gave the platform its finest hour for me. I broke developments out of Iran’s nuclear talks with world powers before the news agencies had finished their first draft, filing in Arabic and English within minutes of each other and announcing the agreement itself while other newsrooms were still working on their bulletins.

The war against ISIL (ISIS) followed, then a January 2020 morning near Baghdad airport when my sources told me the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, and the deputy chief of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, were in a convoy hit by a US air strike – and I was among the first to say so.

Twitter was never only a wire service for other people’s wars. I’ve “met” heads of state and celebrities on this platform – and for a moment we felt equals. I have made my scoops there, and I have made my hugest gaffes there, too. You act and you interact and you see the result immediately, backlash or praise. It’s like a daily journal, one that outlives you. I know of many, some friends, some colleagues, some people I only happened to follow, who left our world while their accounts are still there – for us, and for me – to return to for the memory or to get a piece of information.

It was also where, on the 100th anniversary of World War I, that I told the story of my great-grandfather, Ali Hashem, who went to the war and never returned; and of my grandfather Hussein, who was three when his father was summoned to the Ottoman army and never saw him again.

It was where colleagues at Al Jazeera, stationed in the north of Palestine, went looking for my family’s village on my behalf, for a cemetery nearly in ruins, for a great-grandmother’s grave that has never been found.

It became, eventually, the subject of my own academic work too, a master’s thesis on Twiplomacy, examining how a platform built for gossip and jokes quietly rewired the choreography of nations, with Iran’s nuclear diplomacy as my case study.

In the summer of 2023 – sensing where things were headed, as new owner Elon Musk decided to change Twitter’s name to X, and to tragically, if I may so, kill the famous and lovely blue bird that accompanied the journey many made with the platform, including myself – I posted five words.

“Someone buy Twitter and save the bird.” Alas, nobody did, and the bird disappeared from the icon, and the name went with it, replaced by a single letter that still sits wrong in my mouth. In Arabic or in English, the word that comes out of me, though, is still Twitter.

A three-armed spacecraft rockets into orbit to rescue a NASA telescope that’s in danger of crashing back to Earth.

NASA has launched a robotic mission to try to prevent one of its ageing telescopes from burning up in the atmosphere in a complicated operation expected to last several months.

Northrop Grumman launched the Link spacecraft – built by United States-based Katalyst Space Technologies – from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean on Friday.

A Pegasus rocket blasted off from the belly of a modified aircraft putting Link on course to reach and capture NASA’s Swift Observatory in about a month.

Initially scheduled for Tuesday, the robot’s launch was postponed due to weather, then technical issues. Blast-off happened on Friday at 0836 GMT from an atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

The unprecedented $30m effort involves sending a robot to rescue the Swift space telescope that is falling towards Earth. If successful, the mission could pave the way for giving other satellites a second life.

Launched in 2004, Swift is sinking faster than ever because of recent solar storms. The $250m telescope studies gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe.

Once it reaches an orbit close to Swift’s, the robot will deploy its solar panels and perform a series of checks.

It will then have to locate the Swift telescope in the vastness of space, circle around it and dock using three robotic arms – manoeuvres expected to take several weeks.

Finally, it will attempt to propel the satellite approximately 300km (186 miles) higher above the Earth, roughly to its initial orbital position. That operation is expected to last at least a month.

“This is a lot of firsts stacked on top of each other,” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, told reporters on Tuesday. “I’m just deeply thankful that we’re even giving this a go.”

Three Brazilians with a combined age of 316 have been recognised as the world’s longest-living trio of sisters. Researchers are studying their DNA to better understand the genetic factors behind healthy aging and exceptional genetic longevity.

SpaceX lands on public markets as the sixth largest US company by market value.

SpaceX has debuted on US markets with a market valuation of more than $2 trillion, minting CEO Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire.

Shares are set to open on Friday at $150 per share, marking a 6.6 percent increase from the initial public offering (IPO) price, valuing the company at $1.96 trillion putting the aerospace company on track to become the sixth-largest company in the United States.

The company sold $75bn in shares, immediately valuing it at $1.77 trillion. The IPO was oversubscribed four times higher than was otherwise expected, according to the Reuters news agency.

Of the institutional investors allocated, according to Bloomberg News, as much as 70 percent went to what are called long-only investments — a strategy in which holders buy assets based on the expectation that their value will grow over time — and sovereign wealth funds, including those from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as well.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen rang the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City opening bell at 9:30am local time as US markets opened.

On Thursday, protesters gathered outside the MarketSite to protest the IPO amid continued allegations that Grok, part of xAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, allowed users to create non-consensual deepfake sexualised images before the IPO debut.

Shares of SpaceX did not trade until the middle of the trading day as the exchange collected buy and sell orders and underwriters delayed trading until supply and demand were balanced.

“We would expect SpaceX to see an immediate pop in trading due to the hype around the deal, north of 20 percent perhaps,” said Samuel Kerr, global head of equity capital markets at Mergermarket. “Anything lower would actually make me nervous.”

Exchanges and trading firms are eager to avoid the technical mishaps that marred Meta’s 2012 debut. With SpaceX widely viewed as a dress rehearsal for a new generation of mega-listings, market participants will also be watching for signals on investor appetite in advance of forthcoming IPOs for AI heavyweights Anthropic and OpenAI.

The landmark listing cemented Musk’s status as the first trillionaire ever and propelled SpaceX into the ranks of the world’s most valuable companies — even though the firm posted a loss of nearly $5bn last year and generated only a fraction of the revenue brought in by similarly valued tech giants.

The surge comes amid growth driven by its Starlink subsidiary, which drives as much as 80 percent of its revenue.

On Friday, SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket with 29 satellites into space from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Anthropic is proposing that the world’s top artificial intelligence companies come up with a coordinated way to pause development of advanced AI systems, warning that the technology is improving so quickly that there’s a risk humans would lose control.

The company behind the Claude chatbot said in a blog post on Thursday that, as cutting-edge AI gets increasingly faster at carrying out tasks, “it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause” its development.

Anthropic said its internal research institute plans to explore the issue in collaboration with others and “take actions” to help build the systems for a credible slowdown or pause, without being more specific.

Anthropic rival OpenAI argued for a different approach in a report published on Wednesday, saying that “democratic governments — not private companies acting alone — must ultimately determine the rules, safeguards, and accountability mechanisms”.

“Our view is that decisions about the pace of AI innovation should not be left to any one lab, company, or special interest group,” it said.

AI models are getting faster, with rapid increases in how quickly they can carry out software tasks like coding on their own, Anthropic said in its post. Based on current trends and given enough computing power, an AI system could be able to design and develop its own successor, in what is known as “recursive self-improvement”.

Self-building AI would be a major technological milestone that would bring benefits in science, healthcare and other areas, Anthropic said, but it “also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems”.

Some tech industry figures have long warned of such a scenario.

Anthropic’s post comes after a different warning this week from a team of researchers at the University of Toronto who showed how AI tools could be used to create a new kind of AI “worm” that adapts its hacking strategy as it spreads from device to device and takes over a vast computing network.

“I think it’s really important that people understand that it’s not just the biggest, most powerful language models that pose the security concerns,” lead researcher Nicolas Papernot said in an interview.

The authors of the Anthropic post, company cofounder Jack Clark and Marina Favaro, head of its research institute, said the pause would be used to enable “societal structures and alignment research” to keep up with AI advances. Alignment is industry shorthand for making sure the technology matches human values and intentions.

The proposed coordination would let advanced AI labs verify that global rivals have actually stopped or slowed their work, “and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret”.

The company said a coordinated global mechanism is needed because, without it, a slowdown in AI development could let the “least cautious” players catch up and add to pressure on companies and governments as they make tough choices about AI safety.

Fears that advanced AI systems may get out of human control and cause societal harm have risen as the technology becomes increasingly capable. Anthropic’s own Mythos model sent shockwaves through industries, including banking and software, earlier this year with its ability to find vulnerabilities in existing code.

But regulation has been slow, especially in the US, where most leading AI labs are based. A Trump administration executive order earlier this week put the onus on the labs themselves, asking them to voluntarily submit their most capable models for government cybersecurity testing before public release.

Safety focus

AI researchers have also urged a pause before, but have had little success. Elon Musk, who owns AI lab xAI, was among the backers of a 2023 push by the non-profit Future of Life Institute to halt AI development for six months to allow time for safety guardrails.

Anthropic has long positioned itself as a safety-focused AI lab. Earlier this year, it refused to let the US military use its models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, prompting backlash from the government, which put it on a national security blacklist, set to take effect later in 2026.

Anthropic’s post comes as the company and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI race to sell shares on the stock market, in an IPO that could value Anthropic at nearly a trillion dollars.

Papernot notified Canadian cybersecurity authorities prior to releasing his report, which shows how researchers developed the worm in a laboratory by using an “open-source” AI tool that is easy for software developers to cheaply access and modify.

“In the past, cyber attackers would focus on targets that are very high value,” he said. “Banking systems, hospitals, electricity grids, water treatment systems, schools.”

Papernot agreed that there should be more collaboration between companies, government agencies and academic researchers to develop countermeasures as AI-powered hacking tools supercharge the search for computer vulnerabilities.

“That old laptop you have in your basement that you don’t check on regularly doesn’t seem like a very high-value target, but it can be used as a launch pad to attack these higher-value targets,” he said. “Anything connected to the internet is now at risk because of how low the cost has become to mount these cyberattacks.”

A swarm of drones lit up the evening sky near Taiwan’s Taipei 101 skyscraper in a dazzling display depicting a giant robot, a sports car, and Earth. The light show was part of Computex Taipei, one of Asia’s largest technology exhibitions.

Anthropic, which operates AI chatbot Claude, did not disclose the size or the terms of the offering.

Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States, teeing up what could become a watershed moment for Wall Street’s AI frenzy.

The move, announced on Monday, sets up a high-stakes test of whether investor appetite for the AI revolution that has reshaped white-collar work around the world can match the sky-high expectations surrounding the booming sector.

Anthropic, which operates AI chatbot Claude, did not disclose the size or the terms of the offering. Confidential submissions let companies advance IPO preparations while shielding sensitive financial details from rivals and the public.

Anthropic last raised $65bn at a post-money valuation of $965bn in late May, putting it ahead of rival OpenAI. The company said at the time it was making annualised revenue of $47bn from selling its technology to people and organisations using Claude to write code and do other work and personal tasks on their behalf.

The crucial step towards a listing comes on the heels of SpaceX’s mega-IPO, which is on course to rewrite the record books as the Elon Musk-led company pursues a $75bn offering at a $1.75 trillion valuation.

Anthropic was formed in 2021 by ex-OpenAI leaders, and now both AI firms, along with Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company SpaceX, are all expected to become publicly traded. All three are also still losing more money than they make, fuelling concerns of an AI bubble.

OpenAI and Anthropic have become the face of the AI boom that has redrawn corporate strategies, sparked a global arms race for computing power and talent, and turned AI-linked companies into some of the market’s most richly valued firms.

Anthropic’s rapid rise in early 2026 rattled markets, triggering sharp sell-offs in software and IT stocks as investors worried its increasingly autonomous AI tools could upend traditional business models and accelerate disruption across industries.

“OpenAI and Anthropic are in a race to go public before capital runs out,” said analyst Gil Luria from the investment firm DA Davidson.

“The other reason for Anthropic to try to beat OpenAI out to the public market is that they will get to set the agenda for how a frontier model reports financials and do so in a way that is favourable to their financial model.”

OpenAI is also preparing to confidentially file for a US IPO in the coming weeks, adding to a wave of blockbuster ‌listings anticipated in the year ahead.

A market milestone

As many blockbuster listings race towards public markets, companies from SpaceX to AI giants are competing for a finite pool of investor capital.

“The combined demand for capital from SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic will be so considerable that it is likely to create disruptions in the capital markets, so going early will be a great advantage,” Luria said.

The listing would represent one of the most consequential stock market debuts in years, potentially reshaping benchmark indexes, investor flows and the broader narrative driving US equities.

At close to a $1 trillion valuation, Anthropic would vault into the top tier of the S&P 500, alongside a handful of elite companies that dominate global equity markets.

An Anthropic debut would be a major boost for the long-sluggish IPO market, though experts and bankers warn an offering of such scale could drain liquidity and investor attention from smaller listings.

Nvidia is set to bring artificial intelligence to laptop and desktop computers with brands like Microsoft and Dell later this year as the US tech giant broadens its AI presence.

The Santa Clara, California-based AI chipmaker unveiled on Monday at its annual Nvidia GTC event in Taipei new powerful chips that would bring advanced AI functions to laptops and desktop computers.

CEO Jensen Huang said that the new development is “going to reinvent the PC [personal computer]”.

The changes come amid three years of collaboration between Microsoft and Nvidia and pit the latter against companies like chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices and personal computer brands Intel and Apple.

“This is going to be the new PC,” Huang said as he unveiled Nvidia’s RTX Spark superchip — which combines CPU, or central processing unit, and GPU, or graphics processing unit, capabilities — that would power new Windows laptop and desktop computer models in what the company called “AI personal computers”, expected to debut in the fall of this year.

The chip, developed with Taiwan’s MediaTek, will be in compact desktops from Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, Microsoft Surface and MSI, with models from Acer and GIGABYTE to follow.

Nvidia, which is already the world’s most valuable company, said the reinvention will be for creating and gaming.

“When it has an autonomous [AI] agent, an agent that’s helping you, that understands you, you could talk to it. It could look at you. You could ask it to read files, go help you do some research. It could do a lot more,” Huang said.

Microsoft said in a separate statement that the personal computers running on Nvidia’s RTX Spark superchips would be able to support “highly capable AI models” and complex workloads. With the new superchips, these personal computers can run AI agents locally, Nvidia said.

“This is the first across the lineup of PC reinvention for 40 years,” Huang said.

Nvidia’s move is significant at a time when demand is growing for the use of personal AI agents, said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at the technology research and advisory group Omdia.

“For consumers, it means more choices, which is always a good thing,” Su said.

Neil Shah, analyst and co-founder of Counterpoint Research, described Nvidia’s announcement as a move that’s “revolutionising how PCs would look like in the next 10 years”.

The new laptops and desktop computers “will drive agentic AI applications in every home”, Shah said, with an aim of having an “AI supercomputer” in each household.

Also during Monday’s speech, Nvidia’s Huang said its new Vera CPUs for data centres are in full production and are “going to be our new major growth driver” on the boom of AI agents, with early customers including Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceXAI.

Huang also revealed a humanoid robot reference design that could act as a blueprint for future research, especially within the higher education sector. Nvidia said its “Isaac GR00T” stands nearly 1.83 metres (6 feet) tall and has the humanoid chassis of Chinese robot maker Unitree’s H2. It is equipped with five-fingered dexterous hands, made by Singapore-based robotics startup Sharpa, that are capable of finely controlled movements.

Reception for AI PCs has been mixed so far. HP reported last week that the devices helped prop up quarterly sales, but Dell said earlier this year that demand had fallen short of initial expectations. Qualcomm, looking to capitalise on AI demand, has also been offering AI PCs with Microsoft.

On Wall Street, Nvidia stock rose nearly 4 percent on the news in midday trading. Microsoft ticked up 2.5 percent and Dell surged 9.3 percent. Competitors AMD and Intel, on the other hand, are on the decline. AMD is down 0.1 percent from the market open, and Intel is down by 2.5 percent.

Lawmakers in the United States are quietly advancing a proposal that could deepen military ties between the US and Israel in unprecedented ways, at a time when public support for Israel among Americans is increasingly fractured.

Among the provisions included in the 2027 National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) released this week is Section 224, the “United States-Israel Defence Technology Cooperation Initiative”.

The NDAA, which Congress passes annually to set military policy and authorise defence spending, will undergo further debate and amendments before becoming law. Some legislators have already signalled opposition, with Representative Thomas Massie saying he would seek to remove the provision if it reaches the House floor.

The measure remains at an early stage, but analysts say if passed, it would limit political oversight over the defence relationship.

Analysts added that it could mark a significant shift in the US-Israel relationship, moving beyond a model centred on American military aid towards deeper institutional integration between the two countries’ defence industries and militaries.

Critics argue that such a move would make support for Israel less a matter of political choice and more a structural feature of US national security policy, embedding the relationship within joint military and industrial programmes that would be difficult to unwind.

What does the proposal include?

Section 224 incorporates elements of the US-Israel Future of Warfare Act legislation introduced by Representative Ronny Jackson, according to Track AIPAC. While the legislation did not advance as a standalone bill, key elements of it were instead folded into the NDAA.

The provision would require the US defence secretary to designate an official responsible for coordinating military cooperation between the two countries. According to the text, that official would be tasked with “synchronising cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel”, including “bilateral defence technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration and industrial cooperation”.

The legislation envisages cooperation across a wide range of military technologies. It specifically identifies as priority areas; “counter-unmanned systems including aerial, maritime and ground platforms”, “anti-tunnelling and subterranean threats”, and “missile and air defence technologies”.

The proposal also seeks to deepen collaboration on emerging technologies, including “artificial intelligence, quantum machine learning and autonomous systems”, as well as “directed energy and advanced sensing”, “cyber defence, electronic warfare and digital resilience”, and “biotechnology, biomanufacturing, and medical defence”.

The inclusion of “network integration” and “data fusion” has drawn particular attention because it suggests significantly closer integration of military information systems between the two countries.

The United States and Israel already cooperate on defence projects, including missile defence systems such as Iron Dome. However, analysts say that Section 224 would expand cooperation into nearly every major area of emerging military technology, and could create a “lock-in” between the two countries military infrastructure.

Mark Hilborne, a senior lecturer, the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera the proposal goes well beyond the traditional foundations of the US-Israel defence relationship.

“While historically, the US-Israel defence relationship has included US military aid and weapons transfers, joint missile defence programmes such as Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow, and intelligence and operational cooperation, the proposed agreement increases cooperation to include a wider set of emerging technologies,” he said.

“So this all suggests a much tighter integration – less about provision and perhaps sharing technologies and capabilities, and more about jointly developing these.

“It would point to a more institutionalised relationship, and perhaps one that might survive changing administrations in the US, as some of the development cycles could be very long and would become entrenched,” he said.

Why is it controversial?

The proposal comes amid growing debate in the US over military support for Israel, particularly as Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza continues, and concerns mount over the use of US-made weapons.

Human rights organisations and United Nations experts have repeatedly raised concerns about Israeli military actions in Gaza, where despite a so-called ceasefire in place since last October, at least 850 Palestinians have been killed. Israel is also advancing into southern Lebanon, where it has killed more than 3,000 people since the beginning of March.

These wars have led to increasing scepticism among Americans towards unconditional support for Israel, recent opinion polls suggest.

A New York Times poll in May found that only 30 percent of respondents believed Donald Trump made the right decision in ordering military strikes against Iran, while 64 percent said it was the wrong decision.

An Institute for Global Affairs poll released last week found that only 16 percent of Americans support continuing weapons transfers to Israel without additional restrictions. Thirty-eight percent said the US should stop supplying weapons entirely, while 24 percent said military aid should be conditioned on how the weapons are used.

Opposition has also emerged from parts of the Republican Party, which traditionally has always been aligned with Israel.

Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene criticised the proposal on social media, writing: “This is what complete capture to a foreign government looks like, and there hasn’t been a single shot fired.”

Massie, who has opposed military aid to Israel, likewise pledged to introduce an amendment removing the provision from the NDAA. The Republican senator was defeated in the primary elections last month, highlighting the financial and political influence of pro-Israel lobby groups in the US.

Influential conservative commentator, Tucker Carlson, has increasingly criticised US support for Israel, reflecting divisions within the broader MAGA movement. Criticism has also intensified among left-wing Democrats, with many calling for restrictions on military aid to Israel.

What could it mean in practice?

Critics of the measures warn that the proposal could create a form of institutional “lock-in” that makes both countries simultaneously reliant on each other for military development and procurement.

Some analysts say such integration would move key aspects of the US-Israel relationship away from highly visible aid votes or commercial contracting, and into the less transparent world of defence procurement and industrial partnerships at a state-to-state level.

Hilborne from the King’s College said the initiative could also have direct implications for Palestinians. “If joint R&D produces more effective technology, then systems related to surveillance, autonomous vehicles, AI and targeting, and various counter-drone or counter-missile technology would be improved, providing a capability boost to Israeli forces operating in Gaza or the West Bank,” he said.

“This enhanced integration would further embed US technology into Israeli forces. These would all be concerns from a Palestinian perspective.”

Critics also point to the economic implications, where expanded co-production agreements could lead to new manufacturing facilities and defence jobs in the United States, creating a further reliance on Israel.

Hilborne also argued that deeper integration could reduce Washington’s leverage over Israel. “The deeper integration may also mean that the US loses some degree of leverage over Israel, as it would be less able to withhold certain capabilities from Israel,” he said.

“As a consequence, Israel might be emboldened in its policies.”

The proposal could also have implications beyond the US-Israel relationship, according to Imad Salamey, an international relations professor at the Lebanese American University. “The proposed US-Israeli defence integration can be seen as the next phase of the Abraham Accords: moving from normalisation toward a US-backed regional security regime centred on Israel as the dominant military and technological hub,” he told Al Jazeera.

Such a framework would strengthen efforts to contain Iran, limit Turkiye’s independent regional influence and deepen security cooperation with Arab partners, he said.

“For Lebanon and Gaza, it may translate into greater pressure to accommodate Israeli-led security arrangements as part of a broader emerging Middle Eastern order.”

Whether Section 224 survives the legislative process is uncertain.

But its inclusion in the NDAA shows how some politicians, many backed by the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, are attempting to bind the two countries’ militaries closer together, creating long-term industrial links that future administrations may find difficult to reverse.

The incident is the latest setback for Jeff Bezos’s space venture as it seeks to narrow the gap with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has exploded on the launchpad during a test in the US state of Florida.

The incident on Thursday evening is the latest setback for Jeff Bezos’s space venture as it seeks to narrow the gap with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Footage of the incident shows smoke emerging from underneath the rocket before it erupts into a massive fireball that billows skyward, sending a towering plume of flames and smoke into the air.

Emergency crews remained at the scene more than an hour later, but officials said there was no threat from fumes or other potential hazards.

No injuries have been reported.

“We experienced an anomaly during today’s hotfire test,” Blue Origin said in a brief statement posted on X, adding that “all personnel have been accounted for”.

A hot-fire test is where a rocket engine is fired up while anchored to the ground.

In a separate X post, Bezos said it was “too early to know the root cause” of the incident.

“Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it,” Bezos added.

US House Representative Mike Haridopolos, whose Florida district includes the launch site at Cape Canaveral, said in a statement on X that he has been in contact with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman regarding the explosion.

“I am grateful there were no reported injuries and thankful for the first responders, engineers, and launch crews who acted quickly,” Haridopolos said.

Blue Origin is preparing the New Glenn rocket to launch 48 Amazon Leo satellites into low-Earth orbit, part of efforts to build a broadband constellation to rival Musk’s Starlink network.

Musk responded on X to a video of the New Glenn explosion, saying: “Most unfortunate. Rockets are hard.”

Last month, the New Glenn rocket failed a mission to deliver a communications satellite into the correct orbit, prompting an investigation.

Green orbs, discs and fireballs. The Trump administration has released a second batch of previously classified files on alleged UFO sightings. The Pentagon says the material is linked to 209 sightings, in various locations, of what are officially known as “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP).

On Monday morning, a jury in Oakland, California, announced its verdict in one of the most-watched tech feuds between billionaire Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The nine-member jury handed a decisive victory to Altman, saying Musk had waited too long to bring his claims against the artificial intelligence company and its top executives.

Musk, who cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit, had filed a $150bn lawsuit against the organisation, Altman and its president, Greg Brockman, accusing them of turning it into a for-profit entity for personal enrichment.

The verdict, however, stopped short of resolving the central question at the heart of the case, whether OpenAI betrayed the nonprofit mission on which it was founded in 2015 as it transformed from a research lab focused on benefitting humanity into one of the world’s most powerful AI companies.

Instead, the case became focused on a procedural issue. After deliberating for less than two hours, the jury unanimously found that the statute of limitations had expired before Musk filed the lawsuit in 2024, meaning jurors concluded he had waited too long to bring his claims under the applicable legal deadline. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the finding and dismissed the case.

The ruling removes a major legal threat for OpenAI at a pivotal moment for the company, which is deepening its commercial partnerships, expanding its relationship with Microsoft and moving towards what could become one of the largest public offerings in Silicon Valley history; while for Musk, the ruling leaves room to argue that the case was lost on timing rather than substance.

Shortly after the verdict, Musk repeated his accusations on X. “Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity. The only question is WHEN they did it!” Musk wrote on X. “Creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America.”

Musk has decided to appeal, ensuring that the increasingly bitter feud between two of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures is unlikely to end any time soon.

How did Musk and Altman fall out?

Musk and Altman cofounded OpenAI in 2015 alongside Brockman and other researchers at a time when concerns were growing over how AI could reshape society.

The idea, according to testimony and internal discussions presented during the trial, was that the company could focus on building safe AI systems that benefitted humanity rather than prioritising shareholder returns.

Musk and Altman also believed the nonprofit structure would help OpenAI compete with technology giants such as Google by attracting top researchers and positioning the organisation as a mission-driven alternative.

Musk claims he contributed roughly $38m to OpenAI during its early years, but relations between the founders later deteriorated sharply. He resigned from OpenAI’s board in February 2018, officially citing potential conflicts of interest as Tesla became more focused on AI.

But the split deepened after OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary and Microsoft invested heavily in the company. Microsoft has since committed tens of billions of dollars to its partnership with OpenAI, helping transform ChatGPT into one of the defining products of the global AI boom.

Musk became increasingly critical of the company, arguing that OpenAI had moved far beyond the nonprofit vision on which it was founded. In 2023, he launched a rival AI company, xAI, the maker of the Grok chatbot, before filing his lawsuit against OpenAI the following year.

Why did the case collapse?

At the centre of the trial was a relatively technical legal question about when Musk became aware that OpenAI was moving towards a profit-driven structure.

Because the lawsuit was filed in 2024, Musk needed to convince jurors that the alleged wrongdoing occurred within the legal time limit for bringing his claims.

Musk argued that his concerns fully crystallised only in 2023, particularly after Microsoft’s big investments into OpenAI’s for-profit arm.

But OpenAI’s lawyers argued that Musk had known for years that the company planned to pursue a commercial structure and raise huge amounts of outside funding.

Evidence presented during the trial showed that discussions about creating a for-profit arm dated back to at least 2017. Jurors also heard testimony that Altman had sent Musk documents in 2018 outlining plans for OpenAI to raise billions of dollars through a for-profit structure.

Ultimately, the jury sided with OpenAI’s argument that Musk could have filed his lawsuit much earlier – and therefore waited too long.

That meant jurors never had to answer the more explosive question at the centre of the case about whether OpenAI had actually betrayed its founding mission.

What did OpenAI argue?

OpenAI maintained throughout the trial that there was never an agreement to remain a nonprofit indefinitely. Its lawyers argued that Musk understood from the beginning that developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence would require extraordinary levels of funding and computing power.

OpenAI also portrayed Musk’s lawsuit as partly motivated by rivalry. By the time the case reached court, Musk’s xAI had emerged as a direct competitor to OpenAI in the race to develop advanced AI systems.

Meanwhile, OpenAI had become one of the most powerful companies in the technology industry, reportedly valued at more than $800bn and moving towards what could eventually become one of the largest public offerings in history.

Lawyers for OpenAI argued that Musk became hostile only after losing influence within the company and watching Altman turn OpenAI into the dominant force in generative AI.

What questions did the trial leave unanswered?

Although the verdict was a clear legal victory for OpenAI, the trial never became the sweeping test case about the future of artificial intelligence that many had expected.

Because the case was resolved on procedural grounds, the court did not answer some of the biggest questions raised by the AI boom: how these systems should be governed, who should benefit economically from them, and whether companies developing increasingly powerful AI tools can still claim to act in the public interest while pursuing enormous commercial growth.

The trial also touched only briefly on broader concerns surrounding AI development, including transparency, labour and the extraction of data used to train AI systems.

Nicole Turner Lee, director of the Centre for Technology Innovation, told Al Jazeera that one of the central problems surrounding AI is that the technology is deeply “extractive”.

“It does undergo theft where people do not consent as to whether or not their information, their image, their voice, their text are actually being extracted,” she said, raising concerns about compensation and consent in AI training systems.

Those issues remained largely outside the scope of the trial due to it ultimately centring on procedural issues.

The ruling, therefore, also removed the possibility of a far more disruptive outcome that could have threatened OpenAI’s corporate structure, its partnership with Microsoft and the wider wave of investment pouring into the AI industry.

But the broader debate over AI’s future is far from settled. With Musk preparing an appeal, the courtroom battle between the two former allies looks set to continue alongside wider questions about how AI should be governed.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi says his talks with the Dutch PM also focused on expanding cooperation in defence and security.

India’s Tata Electronics has signed a deal with Dutch technology giant ASML to build a major semiconductor plant in western India, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the Netherlands during his European tour.

The agreement, announced on Saturday, will support the development of Tata’s semiconductor facility in Dholera, Gujarat – Modi’s home state.

ASML, Europe’s largest technology company by market value, manufactures advanced lithography machines used to produce high-end microchips found in products ranging from mobile phones to cars.

The Dutch company said it would help “establish and ramp up” production at the plant by supplying its cutting-edge chipmaking tools.

Tata Electronics plans to invest $11bn in the facility, which is expected to manufacture chips for artificial intelligence, the automotive industry and other sectors.

ASML chief executive Christophe Fouquet said the company saw “many compelling opportunities” in India’s growing semiconductor industry.

“We are committed to establishing long-term partnerships in the region,” Fouquet said in a statement.

The deal comes as India and the Netherlands move to deepen economic ties, with New Delhi seeking foreign technology and investment to boost manufacturing and create jobs.

The European Union has increasingly viewed India – the world’s most populous country and one of its fastest-growing economies – as a key future market.

During his visit, Modi held talks with Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten and met King Willem-Alexander.

“My conversations with Prime Minister Rob Jetten were extensive and covered a wide range of topics,” Modi wrote on X.

“One of them was defense and security. I spoke about the possibility of drawing up an action plan for the defense industry as quickly as possible. We can also collaborate in sectors such as space travel, maritime systems, and maritime security.”

Modi also addressed members of the Indian diaspora and is expected to inspect centuries-old Chola copper plates being returned to India by Leiden University.

Indian and Dutch officials are also discussing a more flexible visa arrangement for Indian students and workers in the Netherlands.

Modi will next travel to Sweden for talks with Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson focused on trade, innovation and green technology cooperation. The visit marks his second trip to the country since attending the first India-Nordic summit in 2018.