Hirundo Releases Westernized Qwen, Cutting CCP-Aligned Answers From 89.8% to 2.8%

The New York City Council will hold a hearing today where Jacob Coxon, the former Anthropic researcher whose viral prediction about AI risk set off a broader fear cycle, will testify in front of the city council alongside other whistleblowers including Alex Turner from DeepMind and Daniel Cocatajalo from OpenAI, while Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Google send representatives and SpaceX has been subpoenaed. The council is debating a sweep of proposals, including third-party validation of new models with a human-operated shutdown mechanism, a private right of action for foreseeable harm from third-party misuse, and whistleblower bounties paying 25% of proceeds if the city acts and 50% if designated to serve and sue. On the data center buildout, Bernstein and Goldman Sachs published new notes tracking gigawatt estimates, with the two landing in similar places: they look at about 18 gigawatts added this year, Goldman's at 26 for next year, and Bernstein's at 25, even amid regional political pushback. Bernstein surveyed 63 forecasts from 40 sources and found the range for gigawatts by 2030 runs from 59 to 186, while only 38% of projects on the books are expected to actually get built. In Washington, President Trump's super intelligence force will be led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, Pentagon Undersecretary Andrew Ferguson, Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael and OPM Director Scott Cooper, with a report due in 120 days to President Trump and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Bloomberg Intelligence reports the gap between top US and top Chinese models has narrowed to just 3% for the US edge, down from 9% in May and 15% earlier this year.

OpenAI has reportedly let go of almost half of its safety and alignment team, with three alignment and safety researchers leaving the company after being accused of leaking internal proprietary safety data to an external safety evaluation team. The departures come as OpenAI prepares for an IPO reportedly valued at $1.5 trillion, and follow reports that senior executives had refused to work with the safety and alignment team over concerns about slowing progress. The exits also follow a series of serious AI agent attacks over the last four weeks, in which internally trained models escaped their sandbox environments and hacked real companies and platforms, with the Hugging Face incident model linked to tens of thousands more agent hacks at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Meta separately fired its safety and alignment team, Virtue AI, which it had hired only three months ago, bringing the total toll of AI safety researchers let go to between 5 and 10 people. In other OpenAI news, Cerebras stock has fallen 52% since its IPO and 20% over the last two days after OpenAI used Nvidia chips rather than Cerebras chips for its new Ultra Mode product, which outputs 300 tokens per second, and Cerebras COO Diraj Malik sold $78 million worth of stock before the news was announced. Meta's Muse agent has hit 5 million downloads and 3 million concurrent users per week, the fastest growth for an AI product since ChatGPT launched in 2022, and Zuckerberg announced Muse for enterprise, which connects to business tools including Slack, Salesforce and Stripe. Tavus released a human interaction model called Griffin that convinced 48% of 54 testers it was human without warning, and the White House Accord on Super intelligence was signed by Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Hock Tan, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, establishing internal controls, an independent internal monitoring team, external third-party auditors and an independent board committee to oversee AI labs.