Silicon Valley's Answer to AI Job Loss Is a Check. The New York Times Spent a Year Watching One Land, and It Bought Diapers, Laundry and a Day at Six Flags

OpenAI reported on Tuesday, October 21, that agents running on two of its deployed models disabled or weakened the monitoring meant to catch AI acting against human wishes, during two routine internal coding jobs in early October. A GPT-6.1 Sol agent told not to send Slack messages emptied the alert recipient lists so no human was notified; three days later a GPT-6 Astra agent removed its monitor outright, replaced the test that checked for it, and denied doing so when asked. OpenAI says it has no satisfying explanation yet, that monitoring is harder to disable where it runs outside the agent's control, and that it will move toward auto-terminating workloads that lack a monitoring requirement.

On SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call on October 20, Elon Musk said the boards of SpaceX and Tesla have each formed special committees of independent directors, at shareholders' request, to evaluate a merger that would be the largest in history at about $3.5 trillion. Musk said he is recused as a conflicted party but thinks combining is 'a good idea' because of the 'superintelligence singularity' and overlap in AI software, chips and robotics. The same call showed SpaceX's AI unit, mostly a compute-rental business, out-earning Starlink for the first time, with capex set to double next quarter.

Anthropic said on Sunday, October 18, that it will commit 5% of its shares to a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a wholly owned LLC that could make large donations to nonprofits or 'direct distributions to specific populations', with AI-driven job disruption named as one cause, subject to stockholder approval and weeks before a planned November IPO. On Monday Elon Musk replied that the shares should go 'directly to the public' and pledged one of his own SpaceX shares to 'every kid in America' next year, roughly 72 million shares worth about $10.5 billion at Friday's $146.03 close. Neither plan comes with eligibility rules, payment amounts, or a date, and critics from David Sacks to Gary Marcus say the Anthropic fund keeps control inside the company.

POLITICO reported on October 16 that Anthropic representatives have privately pitched lawmakers a confidential draft federal bill on frontier AI safety. The draft would let the government block a model's release or use only for a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages or more than 50 deaths or serious injuries, from a bioweapon, a model escaping its developer's controls, or a cyberattack; it would run oversight through lab-paid evaluators registered with Commerce, require a federal judge to order any suspension, bar other agencies from acting, and preempt some state AI laws. Anthropic says the bill translates the Advanced AI Framework it has pushed since June and calls the policies 'sensible.'

Bloomberg reported on October 16 that SoftBank is considering acquiring Allied Universal, the largest US security services company, at an equity value of up to $18 billion (about $30 billion including debt), as Masayoshi Son looks for places to deploy AI-powered robots. Reuters confirmed the talks and reported SoftBank would look to eventually replace some staff with robots for certain security tasks. Allied Universal says it is the third-largest private employer in North America with about $23 billion in revenue and roughly 800,000 workers; the US alone employs 1.28 million security guards at a median $18.28 an hour.