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September 4, 2026

OpenAI's Astra model sparks 'neuralese' safety scare

Also: Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.9bn‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

X-Risk Daily

Friday 04 September 2026

Transformative AI
OpenAI's Astra model sparks 'neuralese' safety scare
OpenAI's forthcoming Astra model has become the centre of an intense safety debate after The Information reported on 2 September that the system uses a "recurrent depth" architecture, also known as a looped transformer, that lets it process the same query multiple times internally rather than laying out its reasoning step by step in text.

Also in this issue

Transformative AI
Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.9bn
Fanatical & Malevolent Actors
Israeli minister sets out timetable for expelling all Gazans
Fanatical & Malevolent Actors
Far-right AfD poised for first state election win in Germany
Transformative AI
Startup builds business around stripping AI safety guardrails
Research
Study finds AI models often defend contradictory identities given in their own prompts
Research
Researchers link poor-quality RL training data to AI reward hacking

… and 33 more in the full briefing

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