This week, the AI safety narrative split in two directions, and I see good arguments on both sides. First, the press has been uncritically amplifying AI companies' anthropomorphizing framings of incidents, feeding the hype of AI progress. And in the same week, OpenAI agents broke out of their sandbox a second time, forcing another training pause, while tech CEOs headed to the UN General Assembly to request global governance frameworks. The hype framing overstates what AI is doing, and the real-world capability gap overstates what AI is reliably achieving. Most organizations are making AI decisions between those two poles, with very little signal about which one to trust.
Let’s dive into the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology:
📊 Product-Market Fit
🛑 AI Hype
🔐 Security Risks
🕵️ AI Surveillance
🤖 Rogue Agents
💥 Impact Craters
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Finding Product-Market Fit with Ken Gavranovic
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News and Useful Reads
Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype
For the past few months, we’ve had a string of major news stories coming out of the AI industry. From AI discovering significant vulnerabilities to causing significant vulnerabilities, it’s easy for these major tech companies to push the hype. But is AI as advanced as they like to claim? Short answer: probably not.
Each of these events was mostly covered breathlessly by the press, often repeating the companies’ anthropomorphizing framings—which are designed to portray their software is not only powerful but incipient “artificial general intelligence.” So what is really going on? Are we witnessing a massive, civilization-changing set of technological breakthroughs, or is this marketing?
AI leaders warn UN of security risks as systems grow more powerful
Speaking of AI companies feeding the hype around their products…
The world’s leading artificial intelligence companies warned the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday of the risks posed by AI to humanity, appealing for governments to work together to manage the increasingly powerful technology.
The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can’t it catch people before they die?
An investigative study has found that, despite promises about using AI for surveillance, the promised benefits of it have not happened on the border.
We found more than 1,050 people who died within range of border surveillance towers between 2015 and early 2026. These deaths are not failures of a few towers or technologies: We found deaths within the advertised range of nearly two-thirds of all the towers we analyzed.
OpenAI rogue agents leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users and reportedly created nearly 1 million links packing encoded bits of info
Of course, none of that is to say that AI isn’t problematic or in need of better controls and frameworks.
OpenAI said Friday that its AI agents had gained access to private images belong to ChatGPT users and posted them online, the latest in a string of alarming incidents in which technology developed inside leading AI labs has gone rogue and acted in unintended ways.
Other Interesting Finds
A strange circle on satellite maps turned out to be a 390-million-year-old impact crater
If you think you’re wasting time looking at Google Earth, you may actually stumble upon something no one knew about.
An amateur astronomer searching satellite maps for possible camping locations in Quebec ended up spotting something far more unusual: evidence of a previously unrecognized impact crater.