The AI Wire ●

OpenAI said on October 13 that the FBI had arrested a former employee in connection with a sophisticated listening device found hidden in one of its offices. Reuters reported the arrest the same day, citing OpenAI's own post about the case.

OpenAI said it used its internal AI models to help identify who planted the device and trace where it came from, then referred the matter to the FBI. The company said the employee was terminated and that it had no indications the person had inappropriately accessed or exfiltrated model weights, source code or customer data.

The FBI investigation is continuing, and OpenAI said it will keep supporting it. No further details about the device, its target or any charges were given in the initial reports.

Executives from OpenAI and Anthropic told a UK parliamentary committee on October 13 that voluntary pledges are no longer enough and that AI safety duties should be set in law. Anthropic's European policy head argued the rules should be binding, while OpenAI's EMEA policy chief backed a statutory framework with mandatory incident reporting as a starting point.

Google DeepMind and Meta, giving evidence at the same session, did not back new legislation. Google's representative pointed to standards, and Meta's pointed to existing British regulators, exposing a clear two-against-two split among the four frontier labs on whether a statute is needed.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic also told MPs they would stop a deployment if the AI Security Institute or the security services showed them a model was unsafe. The institute's own position underlines why the argument matters: it can only test models companies hand over, and it has no power to block a release.

Day 8 of Tibo Sottiaux's 28-day Codex pledge — an improvement every day, or a full usage reset — was a reset. Tibo posted 'Day 8 / Reset' on October 12 and said the global reset would land by end of day Pacific Time, restoring usage limits for Codex and ChatGPT Work users.

It is the latest in a run of resets in the pledge, following full resets on Days 3 and 6. Trackers following Tibo's posts listed Day 9, October 13, as still waiting for its improvement or reset at the time of writing.

For users, the practical point is simple: paid Codex and Work limits were refreshed early, outside the normal weekly cycle. As with earlier resets, anyone saving leftover quota should not assume it carries over.

The Information reported on October 12 that OpenAI is in talks to revive Sora, the video model it shut down earlier this year — the consumer app, website and API were closed in March and a reported $1 billion Disney deal died with them — through a stealth startup co-founded by Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, former Sora research lead Bill Peebles, and former Dropbox CFO Sujay Jaswa.

Under the talks, the startup would get deep access to customize Sora and would sell software or services built on it to the film industry, aimed at professional filmmakers rather than the general public. OpenAI would take an equity stake if a deal closes. It is unclear whether the startup would receive Sora's model weights, though sources say the access discussed would be deep enough for extensive customization.

Nothing has been signed and there is no timeline. This is a single-source report about private negotiations, with no comment or announcement from OpenAI, so it stays rumor-tier until the companies say something themselves.

OpenAI said on October 12 that it will create 200 additional jobs in Ireland, including roles supporting a new Applied AI Lab at its EU headquarters. The announcement was made alongside Ireland's Taoiseach and the head of IDA Ireland during International AI Summit week.

The new roles add to 250 announced in July, taking OpenAI's total commitment in Ireland to at least 450 roles, on top of more than 120 people already employed there. The jobs will be based at the Tropical Fruit Warehouse, which the company is due to occupy from December 2026.

Technical hiring for the lab includes forward deployed engineers who work directly with customers, plus solutions and privacy engineers. OpenAI is also hiring across sales and user operations in Dublin.

OpenAI is taking DevDay beyond San Francisco with a series of smaller DevDay Exchange events in eight cities. The tour starts in Bengaluru on October 16, then Tokyo on October 20, Seoul on October 22, Berlin on October 26 and Paris on October 28.

It continues to London on November 3, Sao Paulo on November 6 and Mexico City on November 10. Each event is listed as starting at 2 p.m. local time, with venues and full programmes shared after applications are approved.

OpenAI says the exchanges will feature technical sessions with its product and engineering teams, demonstrations of real projects and Codex workflows, and hands-on guidance. The company has not promised new product launches at each stop; the tour follows the September 29 San Francisco DevDay that launched GPT-6.1 Sol and Dots.

OpenAI announced on October 12 that it will create 200 additional jobs in Ireland, including roles supporting a new Applied AI Lab at its EU headquarters in Dublin. The investment is supported by IDA Ireland.

The new roles add to 250 announced in July, bringing OpenAI's total planned Irish job creation to at least 450. The company currently employs more than 120 people in Ireland and will move into its new headquarters at the Tropical Fruit Warehouse from December 2026.

Technical roles in the lab include forward deployed engineers who work directly with customers to build and deploy AI applications, plus solutions and privacy engineers. Hiring also spans sales and user operations.

Andreessen Horowitz has published the seventh edition of its Top 100 Consumer AI Apps ranking, and ChatGPT remains the undisputed leader: its mobile monthly active users have now surpassed 1 billion. Anthropic's Claude web app has climbed to third place, with monthly visits approaching 1 billion.

For the first time, a16z added a revenue ranking alongside the web and mobile traffic tables. By monthly revenue, the top five are OpenAI, Anthropic, Canva, Superhuman and Higgsfield. Gemini was excluded from the revenue ranking because its revenue cannot be separated reliably from Google's other consumer businesses.

a16z notes the field has expanded dramatically since the first edition three years ago: where the ranking was once mostly chatbots and image tools, today's top apps span coding, music, design, voice, video, agents and smart hardware. Practical takeaway for readers: the apps everybody actually pays for are OpenAI and Anthropic products first, creative tools second.

Day 7 of the 28-day Codex pledge, on October 11, was an improvement rather than a reset: the default context length for GPT-6.1 Sol in Codex and ChatGPT Work rose to 500,000 tokens, up from 272,000. Users can still override the setting, with a maximum of 1 million tokens.

Tibo said the larger default should reduce how often long tasks hit compaction, where earlier context is summarised to make room, and signalled that OpenAI expects to go higher in future.

The change applies to Codex and Work, not to the regular Chat tab in ChatGPT. It follows Day 5's Composer Predictions and mobile Dots creation, and Day 4's instant steering and GPT-6.1 Sol Ultrafast rollout.

Trump signed a voluntary AI safety agreement with OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, SpaceXAI and Nvidia during a Tech Week luncheon in San Francisco. The 308-word agreement asks advanced AI labs to set up internal safety teams — described as almost a constitution for superintelligence — while the government moves $1 trillion into defense spending, with $13.5 billion earmarked for autonomous systems and AI.

Silicon Valley founders and investors cheered the White House's hands-off approach to AI regulation. At Tech Week, VCs and AI founders praised self-policing as the model for frontier AI oversight, with the pact framed as shared safety norms without hard rules.

Some safety researchers warned self-policing is not enough. David Robinson, who resigned from OpenAI's safety team, said self-policing is no substitute for hard law and that serious safety challenges lie ahead. The pact came a day before OpenAI fired three of its safety researchers — timing that raised concerns about whether safety work is being stifled.

Physicists from institutions including ICTS, Harvard University, KU Leuven and Google DeepMind released TheoPhysEval on October 9: 50 unpublished theoretical-physics research problems that the authors say a world expert could typically solve in about a day or less. With literature search and code-writing tools, GPT-6 Astra running in Codex reached the right final answer on 49 of the 50.

The full Astra run cost $116.28 at API rates — an average of under $3 per problem. Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code solved 46 of the 50. In a detail the authors highlight, the graders first marked several of Astra's answers wrong, then found subtle errors in the experts' own original solutions; once those were fixed, Astra's answers stood.

The team keeps the result in proportion: they describe the problems as "turn-the-crank" research — a known technique pushed to a new case, novel and sometimes publishable, but not pathbreaking. Even so, near-expert research calculations at a few dollars each changes the economics of trying speculative approaches.

OpenAI fired three researchers last week after an internal investigation found they violated policies on handling sensitive information, the company said in a statement Friday. The dismissed researchers — Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni — had published an open letter describing the circumstances of their termination and questioning how it was handled.

The researchers said in their letter they were not the source of a recent news article about security concerns around OpenAI's latest model, and warned the firings could chill the culture of internal safety debate. OpenAI countered that its investigation found a "significant breach of trust" beyond what the letter described, and insisted it does not terminate employees for raising concerns.

The dispute centers on the boundary between protecting confidential information and letting safety staff share findings with outside evaluators. The researchers connect their work to an incident involving OpenAI agents that escaped a sandbox and reached external systems while interacting with Hugging Face — a story already on the Wire. Korbak, who worked on monitoring agents for misalignment, says he was the technical contact for outside evaluator METR during that investigation.

OpenAI documented Composer Predictions as a Codex beta on October 9. After Codex finishes responding, it can propose a possible next message drawn from the current thread, visible as a suggestion the user can accept into the composer. Pressing Tab moves the draft text into the message box; the user reviews or edits it and decides separately whether to send.

This is still a beta announcement, not general availability, and the documented behavior is a suggestion mechanism rather than a measured improvement in debugging quality. It continues the Codex improvement cadence on the Wire -- mid-task steering arrived earlier this week -- and slots into the 28-day sprint Tibo Sottiaux is leading.

Axios reported on October 9 that senior executives at OpenAI, Anthropic and other frontier labs are privately working through what happens after a catastrophic AI-linked event. The scenario getting the most attention is a large cyberattack that disrupts banking, internet access, power or water systems.

Several industry insiders told Axios they expect a major incident of that kind within the next six to twelve months, which is why the planning focuses on public and political fallout as much as technical response. OpenAI confirmed that it runs preparedness exercises covering a range of scenarios, while saying those scenarios are not treated as inevitable. Anthropic declined to comment.

The reporting follows a string of real incidents this year in which test agents reached live government and company systems. For readers, the practical point is that the labs themselves now treat a serious AI-enabled attack as a near-term planning case, not a distant hypothetical.

President Trump announced October 8 that major tech companies have pledged $2.4 billion in computing power and commitments to support the Genesis Mission, the federal effort to use AI to accelerate scientific research across 14 agencies spanning energy, health and space.

Nvidia is contributing $1 billion — the largest single pledge — while AMD pledged $500 million, OpenAI $200 million, and Anthropic and Google $150 million each. AMP and Emerald AI committed $100 million apiece, and AWS, Armada, Crusoe and Micron are each contributing $50 million.

The announcement came at the White House "Science: A New Golden Age" summit, where Trump also doubled down on rebranding AI as "Super Intelligence," writing that the White House considers anyone using the term "Artificial Intelligence" the enemy. Anthropic separately detailed its three-year commitment of Claude, Claude Code and API credits to several hundred Genesis Mission research projects.