Politico Magazine asked 20 prominent figures working in and around AI the same question — what "AI safety" means to them — and found in a feature published Friday that the term has become a kind of Rorschach test, signaling everything from existential risk to child protection to mass job loss, alongside skeptics who treat "safety" as a pretext to block technological progress. The magazine reported the divide doesn't track partisan or ideological lines, with skeptics and boosters on both the left and right; respondents included Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), MIT physicist Max Tegmark, philosopher Nick Bostrom and Dean Ball, among others. AI Policy Network's Mark Beall defined AI safety as protecting U.S. national security from advanced AI threats like weaponization and loss of control, and building the technical capacity to keep such systems "under human stewardship."
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Transformer News on Thursday highlighted the need for legislating the Center for AI Standards and InnovationCAISIThe Center for AI Standards and Innovation, the US government's AI testing body inside NIST at the Commerce Department. Formerly the US AI Safety Institute, it evaluates frontier models with developers on a voluntary basis and works with the UK's AI Security Institute. (CAISI) out from under the National Institute of Standards and Technology and giving it dedicated funding and independent authority, citing two sources familiar with the agency's role. CAISI was "only peripherally involved" in decisions to impose export controls on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models and to delay then approve OpenAI's GPT 5.6, the essay said. Those calls were made instead by former AI czar David Sacks, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to a lesser extent. CAISI lead Chris Fall was briefed on Mythos and Fable's technical capabilities and his office tested the model days before it was taken offline, but those evaluations had little influence over what happened.
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Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a Democratic resolution to halt a Medicare pilot that uses AI to approve or deny physician-ordered care in original Medicare, per The Hill. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, sponsored the Congressional Review Act resolution (S.J.Res.198), which failed 46-50 along party lines, per Bloomberg Government. The pilot is run through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It would apply prior authorization, rarely allowed in traditional Medicare, to physician-ordered care. CRA resolutions require only a simple majority to pass, so Democrats cannot unwind the AI adjudication model without Republican defections.
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House China Committee Chair John Moolenaar and Rep. George Whitesides, D-Calif., urged the Trump administration to bar U.S. companies from buying memory chips from Chinese suppliers ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), per the Financial Times. The push targets Apple, which is lobbying Commerce for clearance to source DRAMDRAMThe working memory that phones, PCs, and AI servers use to hold data that a processor is actively handling. from CXMT for the Chinese market during a global memory chip shortage, per CryptoBriefing. In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the lawmakers said every purchase from the firms would subsidize the People's Liberation Army, noting both appear on the Pentagon's 1260H list of Chinese enterprises with military ties. The Trump administration in June 2026 postponed adding CXMT to the Commerce Entity List during trade negotiations with Beijing. CXMT is set to complete China's largest domestic IPO of 2026 on July 27.
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The Bureau of Industry and Security, the Commerce Department office that clears every advanced U.S. chip export license, is "paralyzed" under Jeff Kessler as approval decisions slow, NBC News reported. More than a dozen government and industry insiders described "slow decision-making, muddled policy decisions and close embrace of industry partners" at the bureau.
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President Xi Jinping on Friday delivered the keynote at the opening of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, his first in-person appearance at the summit since it launched in 2018, per SCMP. Xi said China would seize the "rare historic opportunity" of AI driven growth by "encouraging open source, openness, collaboration and sharing." He called for a people-centered approach that shares AI capacity with developing countries to prevent "new historical injustices." He paired the openness pitch with a call to keep the technology "secure and controllable," a formulation that recurs in Chinese AI governance drafts. Xi's personal appearance turns WAIC into a state level platform for Beijing to press its Global AI Governance Initiative and proposed World AI Cooperation Organization against Washington's export control agenda.
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