12th Breakthrough Prize Ceremony - Arrivals

(Taylor Hill/FilmMagic)

Altman: We do “weird” things like building massive data centers so there will be “universal prosperity”

OpenAI’s CEO spelled out the company’s principles for AGI in a blog post.

4/27/26 3:31PM

Fresh off a revised agreement with Microsoft that makes significant changes to the terms of the contentious $13 billion partnership between the two companies, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered an update on the principles that guide the company as it inches toward artificial general intelligence.

The memo lays out a familiar assortment of rosy predictions couched with dire warnings: AGI will lead to things “we’ve only let ourselves dream about in sci-fi,” but it also could lead to “catastrophic harm” and “potential corrosive societal effects.”

One interpretation of the memo could be that OpenAI is defending its choice to monetize its products with advertising. The argument is that competitors like Anthropic offer skimpy free offerings, and hide the empowering, life-changing AI tools behind paid accounts. OpenAI has emphasized its goal of democratizing AI — making AI as accessible to as many people as possible — which can only really happen if the product is supported by ads.

Altman seemed to acknowledge the public’s growing unease with the AI industry’s insatiable thirst for building larger and larger data centers around the world. This massive outlay of capital is all about “universal prosperity”:

“A lot of the things that we do that look weird — buying huge amounts of compute while our revenue is relatively small, vertically integrating to lower costs and make our technology easier to use, pushing to build datacenters all around the world, and much more — are driven by our fundamental belief in a future of universal prosperity.”

Altman said the company will have to be resilient in how it responds to new risks created by this fast-evolving technology, which will require partnering with competitors and governments to responsibly develop new tools, like how the company opted to let partners assess its advanced cybersecurity tool before wider release.

The memo also aims to give OpenAI the right to revisit these principles as the technology evolves:

“We are heading into a very impactful phase as the technology continues to improve. It’s very fair to critique us on every decision; we deserve an enormous amount of scrutiny given the weight of what we are doing. We will not get everything right, but we will learn quickly and course-correct.”

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5