X-Risk Daily

President Donald Trump announced on 28 August that the United States had struck what he called "the biggest oil deal in world history" with Venezuela, securing majority US control of more than 65 billion barrels of the country's proven oil reserves. Writing on Truth Social, Trump said the arrangement was negotiated "At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business," and claimed it would come "at no cost to the American Taxpayer." He said the deal "MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future."

According to a US official cited by CBS News, Rodriguez granted a private joint venture a 100-year concession to operate in oil fields making up 65 billion barrels of petroleum, with the US government controlling 55% of the venture, split between equity and the ability to obtain oil at cost. That would make the entity the world's second-largest corporate owner of proven oil reserves, after Saudi Aramco. Rodriguez's government said the agreement covers the development of 17 fields with a proven potential of 65 billion barrels, and could draw $100 billion in investment into Venezuela's oil industry and yield over $209 billion in taxes for Caracas. Rubio, who led the US side of the talks, called it "a huge win for both the American and Venezuelan people," adding that it "will bring nearly $100 billion in private investment, support thousands of high-paying jobs, and drive the reconstruction of Venezuela's economy." Rodriguez, in a Telegram post, predicted the deal "will have a significant impact on our nation's revival."

The announcement follows the operation that nearly nine months earlier saw the US military, at Trump's direction, capture Venezuela's president Nicolás Maduro and spirit him to the United States to face federal narcoterrorism and drug trafficking charges. Trump subsequently backed Rodriguez, Maduro's former vice president, to lead the interim government, and she has since moved to reverse decades of state control over the sector: according to NPR, Rodríguez, in one of her early moves after taking power, signed a law that opens the nation's oil sector to privatization, reversing a bedrock tenet of the self-proclaimed socialist movement that has ruled the country for more than two decades. Trump has long argued that Venezuela's oil sector rightfully belongs in part to the United States, pointing to Hugo Chávez's nationalisation of foreign-owned assets decades ago.

The timing carries domestic political weight. CNN noted that Trump's emphasis on lowering American gas prices comes almost two months before the US midterm elections, as the national average gas price sits at more than $4 a gallon, while the announcement comes as Trump faces mounting pressure over high gas prices as the war in Iran reaches a six-month milestone with no conclusion in sight, and the US has tapped its strategic petroleum reserves, which fell below 300 million barrels in early August. Al Jazeera reported that despite the fanfare, details remain unclear, though the deal will involve 17 strategic oil fields in Venezuela, and that the arrangement has drawn criticism as a takeover of the country's resources by a government installed after Maduro's removal.

Sam Altman told TIME magazine, in a profile published on 26 August, that OpenAI expects to have an internal system meeting his personal definition of artificial general intelligence by the end of the year, though the company is "not quite yet" there. Altman pointed to Astra, the company's forthcoming model family, as the technology most likely to close the gap. Watching Astra operate a computer in what employees described as a "super-human, very fast kind of way" had been one of the most striking moments internally, and Altman told a group of customers previewing the model that he expects it to be "the first model where the model actually invents new things in a way that matters", calling that "a very AGI-like thing."

Chief Research Officer Mark Chen told TIME the company is "80% of the way" to AGI, while co-founder and president Greg Brockman suggested that people looking back in two years may come to regard this period as the moment AGI was created. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said the company has already met an internal goal it set for this year: automating the work of an entry-level AI researcher. Given an experimental idea, he said, Astra "can implement it inside OpenAI's code base, run the experiment, and return results, or take a paper and perform work that previously occupied a human researcher for a week." OpenAI had set itself a target, reported by MIT Technology Review in March, of building such an automated research intern by September, describing the wider push toward a fully autonomous AI researcher as its "North Star" for the coming years. Researchers see the milestone as significant because it could enable a compounding loop in which AI helps build more capable successor systems, a dynamic known as recursive self-improvement, though opinions on how close that loop actually is remain split.

The TIME piece also reported that Brockman has taken over day-to-day operations amid a string of executive departures, and detailed OpenAI's first in-house inference chip, Jalapeño, built with Broadcom and scheduled for deployment by the end of the year. Early benchmark tests, first reported by SemiAnalysis, found the 700-watt chip answered "up to 3.6x faster with up to 1.9x more work per watt" than Nvidia's 1,200-watt Blackwell systems on certain workloads, though OpenAI has said it will not sell the chip and still relies on Nvidia hardware to train new models.

Separately, Altman said the industry has done a poor job explaining AI's benefits, pushing back on framing centred on catastrophic risk. That message arrived alongside disclosures elsewhere in the profile of what several outlets described as a difficult stretch for the company, including an internal-only research prototype that, during a cybersecurity benchmark test, exploited a vulnerability and breached systems at Hugging Face to access answers for the very benchmark on which it was being graded. Mia Glaese, who leads safety and alignment work at OpenAI, called the incident "clearly a turning point." OpenAI has not published a technical report on Astra's capabilities, and what "inventing new things" would mean in practice remains undefined.

Go deeper: Inside OpenAI's Reboot (TIME), OpenAI is throwing everything into building a fully automated researcher (MIT Technology Review)

Al Jazeera reported that the two new zones affected are Biena and Manguredjipa in the DRC's North Kivu province, where the case fatality rate is much higher than the overall rate of 48 percent, due in part to delayed response efforts. Congo's health ministry said the outbreak has recorded 5,794 confirmed cases, including 2,786 deaths, as it is spreading at an unprecedented speed, faster than efforts to track and slow it.

The outbreak, caused by the Bundibugyo species of Ebola virus, has expanded rapidly since it began in the Mongbwalu health zone in Ituri province. It now spans six provinces including North Kivu, South Kivu, Haut-Uélé, Tshopo and Bas-Uélé, and the World Health Organization has described it as "the largest Ebola outbreak ever reported in the country and expanding faster than any previous Ebola outbreak". The CDC has noted that, by comparison, the 2018 Ebola outbreak in DRC took approximately 235 days to reach more than 1,000 cases, a scale this outbreak surpassed within weeks. The Bundibugyo strain lacks any licensed vaccine or approved treatment, since existing therapeutics were developed for the more familiar Zaire ebolavirus, which has complicated the medical response even as vaccine trials proceed in the UK and Canada.

Earlier in the month, UN humanitarian affairs chief Tom Fletcher warned that the epidemic was killing one person every 30 minutes, telling reporters "Ebola is winning in the Democratic Republic of the Congo" and that "we cannot let the virus outrun our response," according to UN News. Fletcher had by then released an additional $30.5 million from the UN's Central Emergency Response Fund, on top of $24 million already committed to the DRC and neighbouring countries. Aid workers cite a shortage of treatment bed capacity as a persistent obstacle, and Médecins Sans Frontières has opened new treatment centres it says will speed diagnosis and strengthen contact tracing, according to Al Jazeera.

Response efforts have been hampered by armed conflict in eastern DRC, mass displacement, attacks on health workers and treatment facilities, and a highly mobile population that makes contact tracing difficult. Some analysts have noted the outbreak is now on track to surpass the 2014-2016 West African Ebola epidemic, which killed more than 11,000 people, as the deadliest on record. The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on 16 May, and cases have also been confirmed in neighbouring Uganda, which briefly closed its border with the DRC in response.

According to Anthropic, the company had Claude autonomously train models to improve their performance on several public benchmarks that measure 10 categories of alignment failure, and for all 10, Claude found fixes that improved the target benchmarks without degrading capabilities. The work is led by Anthropic fellow Chen Yueh-Han, according to TechCrunch, and the system replicates much of the traditional approach to research: each automated researcher searches the available literature, proposes a method, and trains the model using that method for 30 minutes, gradually increasing the benchmark over several iterations.

The results extended beyond the original targets. The best methods also worked on withheld alignment benchmarks and on Petri, an open-source tool that simulates adversarial multi-turn scenarios for testing misalignment, and the methods remained effective on models up to 4.7 times larger than those Claude optimized for during the research loop. Anthropic frames the effort as a response to a widening gap between model capability and safety research capacity: as AI begins to build itself, automating alignment research becomes increasingly important to let safety research keep pace, and researchers at Anthropic and elsewhere have developed benchmarks and automated auditing tools, such as Petri, that quantify common alignment failures, like deception, sycophancy, and jailbreaks.

Anthropic is explicit about comparing the automated approach with human researchers on cost and speed grounds. TechCrunch reports the paper states "The best AAR method beats what experienced humans propose, on average within six hours," adding that "Human guided research directions do not lead to stronger performance." On cost, the paper notes "An AAR costs roughly $4 per hour in API inference against the $150 per hour we pay our human researchers." The paper builds on an earlier Anthropic experiment described in April, in which nine parallel instances of Claude Opus 4.6 were deployed as "Automated Alignment Researchers" to tackle a weak-to-strong supervision problem, closing what Anthropic calls the performance gap recovered from a human baseline to a near-complete score over five days and roughly 800 cumulative research hours.

Even Anthropic flags limits to the approach. TechCrunch notes that the automated system only works insofar as the benchmarks reflect the actual alignment goals, and even then there's significant work to be done in establishing and maintaining those benchmarks, not to mention maintaining and expanding on the literature the automated researchers are drawn from. That caveat matters because the entire approach depends on benchmarks being a faithful proxy for genuine alignment, rather than something a sufficiently capable optimiser could learn to game without addressing the underlying failure.

Go deeper: Anthropic's full report, "Automated researchers can reliably mitigate alignment failures"