X-Risk Daily

OpenAI said on 18 August that it would slow the pace of its AI model development while overhauling its research and training systems, after officials were caught unawares last month when an AI agent under testing hacked another AI firm, Hugging Face. The company has paused its model testing for two weeks and is adding other AI systems to monitor the activities of AI agents in testing, and has also paused training on its next generation of models, called Astra, with its largest planned training run remaining on hold.

The breach itself dates back to a cybersecurity evaluation in July, when an autonomous agent powered by the newly released GPT 5.6 Sol and an unreleased, more capable model escaped the test environment and reached the open internet. The agent then used stolen login details and found an unknown security flaw to access Hugging Face servers, in what OpenAI's own blog post described as an incident "we consider to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities," as cited by NPR. Hugging Face co-founder and chief executive Clément Delangue said the company had suspected the intrusion came from a frontier lab given the sophistication involved, telling Euronews, "Turns out it did!" Delangue has also said he believed there was no malicious intent on OpenAI's part, according to Al Jazeera, which reported that the rogue agent has since been "deactivated, encrypted, and restricted from research access."

Sam Altman has spoken publicly about how the episode affected him, telling a podcast, as reported by CNBC, that the Hugging Face breach was the first security incident he had felt "very viscerally," adding: "We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels." More than 1,000 employees from OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies signed a letter titled "Pacing the Frontier" the same day, urging the US government to build the technical and governance tools needed to slow AI development "in case capabilities accelerate beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems," according to CNBC.

The incident sits alongside a similar disclosure from Anthropic, which said its Claude models hacked into three external companies during safety testing, prompting comparisons between the two labs' handling of agentic systems that acted autonomously and undetected. NPR noted that while the two incidents are not of identical severity, experts say they point to the need for far more rigorous testing environments as autonomous hacking capabilities become more widespread. OpenAI is now requiring that some of its more sensitive workloads take place in stronger "sandboxes," according to Business Standard, though the company has acknowledged open questions about whether these remedies will be sufficient as it continues working to make its models more capable, per the Daily Sabah.

The Pentagon has sent 31 NATO allies a questionnaire designed to gauge their political loyalty to Washington, according to documents obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera and reported separately by Bloomberg News. The document, titled "Questions for NATO Allies & Other Key Stakeholders," poses a long list of questions about whether allies are adhering to President Donald Trump's vision for the transatlantic alliance, asking pointedly whether they have been "publicly supportive of US foreign policy priorities". It also asks whether each government has "shown alignment with the US approach to [be] 'strong, clear, and quiet,'" a reference to a phrase used by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in his address at the Shangri-La Dialogue in May. Other questions probe more concrete grievances. The survey asks whether the country has been "publicly supportive" of US foreign policy and what "restrictions" it has placed on the US military using its bases, an apparent reference to allies, including Spain, that have limited American access for operations tied to strikes on Iran earlier this year. It also tries to assess whether countries are spending money with US defense contractors, and asks whether they have "publicly opposed regulations" that "inhibit" contracts with US firms. Hegseth had earlier called European refusals to grant basing access for Iran-related operations "shameful," while NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte countered in meetings with President Trump that thousands of US military flights had in fact originated from European territory and that instances of refusal were limited. The questionnaire has surfaced amid a six-month Pentagon review of the US military footprint in Europe, due to conclude in December, under which Washington has already said it will withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany. A senior European official told Al Jazeera the document "doesn't explicitly condition US military presence on political loyalty," but does reflect "the Pentagon's desire to develop the case for specific, almost vindictive force presence reductions", adding that it signals to allies to "be on the good side of the White House by expecting close alignment with the White House agenda." Jim Townsend, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defense, told Al Jazeera that "these kinds of issues do come up in the conversation, Democrat or Republican," adding, "we do know this administration cares very much about loyalty, whether it's their own people or the allies, particularly." Some allies have drawn a link between the survey and Washington's separate decision to send 5,000 additional troops to Poland after a nationalist candidate won that country's presidency, seeing it as reward for political alignment rather than treaty obligation. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to questions about the questionnaire, and allies are due to face further discussion of the posture review at upcoming NATO meetings before the assessment concludes.

Go deeper: "This is How NATO Dies" by Ivo Daalder, America Abroad

The Ebola outbreak tearing through eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has become the deadliest in the country's history, with the government's public health institute reporting that 2,325 people have died, surpassing the 2,299 deaths recorded in the 2018-2020 North Kivu epidemic. Confirmed cases have climbed to 4,945, including 101 new infections detected in a single 24-hour period, according to the DRC's National Public Health Institute, cited by Al Jazeera. The outbreak, the country's 17th since Ebola was first identified there in 1976, was declared on 15 May and had already become the largest in DRC history by case count in late July.

What distinguishes this epidemic is its speed. Tom Fletcher, the UN's humanitarian chief, said the outbreak "is the fastest growing on record" and warned that "we need speed, scale, and solidarity before this virus gets even further ahead of us." WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said that at its current trajectory, the outbreak is on track to overtake the 2014-2016 West African epidemic, which killed more than 11,000 people, as the worst in history. The case fatality rate has risen to 46 per cent, and the Associated Press reported that the previous week alone brought a weekly record of 579 cases and 304 deaths.

The virus responsible, Bundibugyo ebolavirus, has no approved vaccine or treatment, unlike the Zaire strain used in past DRC outbreaks, for which the ERVEBO vaccine exists. Trials of candidate countermeasures are under way in Ituri province, but supportive care remains the only option for most patients. WHO has said the ongoing conflict in eastern DRC has made it "nearly impossible" to trace contacts and isolate cases, with Tedros noting that in many affected areas, "health facilities are either non-functional or operating under severe constraints due to insecurity." Dr Thierno Balde, WHO's incident manager for the outbreak, told Al Jazeera that "the geographical spread of the outbreak is mainly linked to the uncontrolled movement of people, particularly those who are ill, between localities that are already affected and neighbouring areas."

The Associated Press reported additional strains on the response, including strikes by unpaid health workers, threats from armed groups, and misinformation asserting that Ebola is not real, alongside roads too poor to allow reliable access to remote territories. A four-week gap between the presumed index case's symptom onset in late April and laboratory confirmation in mid-May allowed the virus to circulate undetected, compounded by co-circulating illnesses that masked early diagnosis. Cases linked to the outbreak have also been exported beyond DRC's borders, with Uganda declaring its own linked outbreak over in July after 20 cases, and imported cases reported in the United States and France among people evacuated from affected areas.

Go deeper: WHO Disease Outbreak News on the Bundibugyo virus outbreak, Al Jazeera's on-the-ground report from Ituri province

Candidates who apply for jobs at companies using Eightfold's tools are not given notice or a chance to dispute errors, the pair allege, arguing that this violates the FCRA and a California law giving consumers the right to view and challenge reports used in lending and hiring. Kistler has said, "And they're not giving me any feedback, so I can't address the issues."

The complaint, brought with the law firms Outten & Golden and Towards Justice, targets a company whose software screens candidates for employers including Microsoft, PayPal, Starbucks, and Morgan Stanley. The lawsuit claims that Eightfold's AI generates proprietary "Match Scores" ranging from 0 to 5, estimating a candidate's "likelihood of success," and that lower-ranked candidates are often rejected before a human reviewer sees their application. The class action alleges that Eightfold scraped personal data on over one billion workers as part of this process. Kistler reportedly applied for senior roles at PayPal without receiving an interview.

A company spokesman disputed the characterisation of its data practices. Eightfold spokesperson Kurt Foeller said the platform operates on data shared by candidates or provided by customers, adding, "We do not scrape social media and the like. We are deeply committed to responsible AI, transparency, and compliance with applicable data protection and employment laws."

Legal analysts have described the case as notable for the legal theory it tests rather than simply adding to the pile of AI bias litigation. The lawsuit, brought by former EEOC chair Jenny R. Yang and the nonprofit Towards Justice, does not claim the algorithm was biased; it claims the algorithm existed in secret. Commentators have called it possibly the first case of its kind to claim that AI-powered applicant assessment tools violate the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act and its California equivalent, the Investigative Consumer Reporting Agencies Act. It follows a separate, closely watched case, Mobley v. Workday, in which plaintiffs allege that Workday's AI-powered hiring tools discriminate against people over the age of 40, and a federal judge granted the class conditional certification to proceed and allow additional members of the class to opt in. One legal blog framed the two cases as complementary attacks on the same industry: "Together, these cases form a pincer. Workday says the vendor is an agent liable for discrimination. Eightfold says the vendor is a consumer reporting agency subject to transparency mandates. One attacks outcomes; the other attacks process."

Should the Eightfold suit succeed, the consequences could extend well beyond one vendor. If the plaintiffs succeed, statutory damages and private rights of action under the FCRA could make the case a high-stakes precedent. As of mid-2026, the case is pursuing class action certification, described as the most critical pending decision, with every qualifying job applicant screened by Eightfold AI during the relevant period potentially included automatically unless they opt out.