Websites worldwide went dark after experts found a serious vulnerability in PHP, a programming language that powers much of the World Wide Web.

As bad actors could exploit a vulnerability in PHP, which powers 70% of sites, governments and corporations carried out precautionary takedowns. Site administrators scrambled to patch that critical weakness, which became public on Tuesday.

National security agencies in Washington and London issued warnings that millions of websites will need fixing.

The US National Security Agency told all organizations using PHP to take their systems offline if they couldn’t patch them immediately. It said the vulnerability could “provide a direct path to the server’s file system or database”.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Center gave similar advice, telling organizations to check for “backdoors installed by an attacker”.

Infrastructure experts reported that Russian state actors or organized criminals were trying to exploit the flaw to carry out cyber-attacks.

WordPress, one of the most common website systems, uses PHP, as do Wikipedia, Slack, and much of Facebook. The Wikimedia Foundation said it took down several systems on Wednesday as a precaution until it could patch them.

OpenAI, whose artificial intelligence models helped find the bugs, said in a blog post that, given PHP’s widespread use, it was “one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory.”

A fix was quickly available, and software developers and tech departments from Helsinki to New York scrambled to apply it, meaning outages often lasted less than a day.

But the flaw and the temporary shutdowns it provoked showed how far-reaching potential cyberattacks could be—and how deeply the internet has embedded itself in our lives.

Professor Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at Surrey University, said: “It was very surprising and troubling because of the extent to which PHP was used around the world. PHP issued a patch very quickly. The big thing is for everyone using it to get that in to make sure their systems are safe.

“The troubling part is there is going to be a long tail of websites that may not be maintained as well, and they are going to remain vulnerable, which means we may see weeks and months of ongoing attacks. For the big juicy targets, I hope to goodness they are being patched quickly.”

Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, announced this month that it is launching an academy for aspiring AI and technology entrepreneurs who question whether to attend college and instead prefer to enroll in an AI school — or, in the words of the company, “for the world’s most ambitious young builders.”

The Andreessen Horowitz Academy, a San Francisco-based for-profit initiative, billed as a college alternative, will focus its unaccredited curriculum on teaching people how to build products and services from the ground up using AI.

It’s aimed at students who have just graduated from high school or those who have completed up to two years of coursework at an “elite university.”

Main courses will be about designing AI systems, fundraising for startups, selling businesses, and storytelling. Tech entrepreneurs, with the academy naming OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as either an instructor or guest lecturer, will teach them.

Students won’t take tests or be assigned homework; instead, they’ll focus on building real projects.

The Andreessen Horowitz Academy is now accepting applications for 50 slots for fall 2027. The program is one year long and tuition-free.

Ben Horowitz, Co-Founder and General Partner at the firm, said, “The training that worked for the Industrial Revolution isn’t going to map perfectly onto the AI revolution, so somebody has to pioneer how you train a person for this new world.” 

A cohort of prominent technology companies and investors behind the AI boom have seeded the program with a $42 million investment, including Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe.

The academy intends to seek regulatory approvals for a two-year program, starting in the fall of 2028. The tuition for the two-year program is expected to be similar to that of elite private universities.

Andreessen Horowitz is a major investor in AI startups. In August, the firm said it had raised $1 billion for a new venture fund that invests in the physical buildout of AI.

Speaking to an audience of over 1,400 diplomats, scientists, and cultural representatives at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, Pope Leo XIV warned of the dangers that the rapid rise of AI poses to human dignity, positioning the Vatican at the center of the global debate on digital ethics.

In a major philosophical address, Leo XIV argued that humanity is outsourcing the one thing it can’t afford to lose: moral responsibility.

The Pontiff said that machines can process information but can never replicate humanity’s moral responsibility, highlighting the boundary between computational power and human intellect.

He challenged the notion that advanced algorithms could ever serve as a substitute for human intuition, creativity, or moral judgment.

“Information alone cannot cultivate truth,” Pope Leo XIV stated. He argued that while AI can analyze vast datasets at unprecedented speeds, it lacks the capacity to provide the deeper meaning, empathy, and trust that form the foundation of human society. “Meaning is the oxygen of the mind.” 

Pope Leo XIV urged international bodies to move beyond voluntary guidelines and establish binding frameworks rooted in what the Vatican calls “algor-ethics”—the ethical development of algorithms.

• Preserving Human Agency: He insisted that lethal autonomous weapons systems and automated judicial sentencing must be strictly regulated to ensure a human always makes the final, morally binding decision.

• Countering Digital Colonialism: The Pope warned that unequal access to AI technologies threatens to widen the gap between wealthy nations and the Global South, creating new forms of economic and intellectual marginalization.

• Protecting the Youth and the Most Vulnerable: He expressed deep concern over how algorithmic feeds shape the minds of younger generations, urging UNESCO to prioritize educational models that foster critical thinking over digital dependency.

Following his tech-focused encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, released in May, the Pope targeted the industry’s obsession with scaling laws and compute metrics, noting the deep irony that we now routinely call artificial systems “intelligent” while treating actual human beings as friction.

Days before the Pope took the stage in Paris, President Trump struck a radically different tone during his own address at the United Nations. Dismissing highly restrictive AI safety guardrails as a “hoax” designed to stifle economic growth, Trump insisted that the U.S. would not hobble its own tech industry while competing globally.

While Trump noted the Justice Department would monitor the sector for major disruptions, his message was clear: acceleration is the priority.

Silicon Valley tech elites are quietly echoing the White House position, and venture capitalists and tech executives view the Vatican’s demand for legally binding international “algor-ethics” frameworks as unworkable, rejecting top-down, religiously informed restrictions.

*

Over 7,000 higher education technology leaders, researchers, and industry innovators are preparing to descend upon the Colorado Convention Center this week for the EDUCAUSE 2026 Annual Conference, running from September 29 to October 2, 2026. A subsequent Online Conference will take place from October 14–15, 2026.

The premier physical event in Denver arrives at a critical juncture for universities worldwide as they grapple with the rapid acceleration of AI, mounting cybersecurity threats, and shifting student demographics.

This year’s agenda reflects the industry’s profound transformation, as campus IT budgets tighten and the public demand for affordable, high-value higher education intensifies.

Conversations at EDUCAUSE 2026 are expected to focus on how to responsibly harness AI in the classroom and administrative operations.

• Academic institutions are moving past initial policy anxieties toward active deployment, seeking frameworks for AI governance, personalized student learning, and administrative efficiency.

• As universities remain prime targets for sophisticated ransomware attacks, data privacy and zero-trust security architectures are top priorities for attending CIOs and CTOs.

• Predictive analytics and modern digital tools in the area of data-driven success will be scrutinized for their ability to improve retention rates and equity across increasingly diverse student bodies.

Highlighting the speaker lineup will be acclaimed author and organizational psychologist Adam Grant, who will deliver a general session address. Grant is expected to challenge traditional institutional thinking, offering a roadmap for how universities can foster adaptability, rethink legacy structures, and maintain a culture of innovation during periods of intense technological disruption.

The in-person general sessions in Denver will be led by two prominent voices tracking how AI is rewriting the rules of leadership and human systems:

Future-of-work strategist and best-selling author McGowan will focus on preparing academic organizations for a rapidly evolving corporate landscape, shifting from a model of fixed knowledge to one of continuous, agile learning.

Paul LeBlanc, the former long-time president of Southern New Hampshire University—widely recognized for scaling digital education—will take the stage in his new role as Board Chair of Human Systems, an AI and education company.

LeBlanc’s session will explore the ethical boundaries and practical integration of AI models in higher education, highlighting how schools can preserve human-centric learning while embracing automation.

Heather McGowan, renowned future-of-work strategist and best-selling author, will focus on preparing academic organizations for a rapidly evolving corporate landscape, shifting from a model of fixed knowledge to one of continuous, agile learning.

A roundtable of veteran campus leaders will synthesize how schools will be handling macroeconomic pressures, data sovereignty, and tech infrastructure. This year’s general session panel will include, among others:

• John O’Brien, President and CEO of Educause
• Olivia Kew, Chief Data Officer at Vanderbilt University
• Brandon Rich, Director of AI Enablement at the University of Notre Dame
• Eudora Struble, Executive Director of Technology Accessibility at Wake Forest University

A highly anticipated cornerstone of the conference will be the reveal of the 2026 EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issues.

Beyond the keynotes, the event will feature a large corporate exhibit floor showcasing the latest edtech solutions, interactive poster sessions detailing real-world campus case studies, and peer-to-peer networking tracks. This year, the corporate floor is dominated by legacy edtech giants and agile AI startups showcasing practical enterprise solutions.

Specifically, key trends demonstrated by vendors on the floor will include unified data lakes to break down campus silos and new software integrations focused on real-time accessibility tools that offer automated captioning, translation, and screen-reader optimizations for online and hybrid classrooms.

Inside the exhibit room, campus poster sessions will take place, with micro-presentations featuring boots-on-the-ground IT professionals sharing raw data from their own campuses. Attendees will be able to walk the floor to review case studies detailing successful zero-trust security deployments, cost-saving software audits, and frameworks for training faculty on ethical AI usage.

At the opening plenary of the 25th Annual “Back to School” Summit — the world’s longest-running leadership conference for senior education executives, held every September in New York since 2001 — QS Quacquarelli Symonds’ CEO Jessica Turner told a room of 600 university presidents, venture capitalists, federal policymakers, and philanthropists that the global talent economy is changing, and education is being reshaped whether institutions are ready or not.

She addressed the audience — gathered last week inside a rooftop venue overlooking lower Manhattan — plainly saying: “Higher education is under growing pressure to demonstrate its value, and the usual framing treats broad access and strong student outcomes as competing goals — but a growing set of institutions is showing they aren’t.”

That tension between the old prestige model and the emerging demand for measurable outcomes defined the three days of fireside chats, private roundtables, workshops, and panels at Tribeca Rooftop + 360°.

By the time the final session wrapped on September 17, attendees arrived at something closer to a diagnosis than a celebration. The closing panel wasn’t called “The Future of Higher Education.” It was called “The Great Higher Education Reset — Is College Worth It?”

Jeff Selingo, the higher-education author and commentator, sat down on Day Two for a fireside chat with Dr. Ann Kirschner titled “Redefining Value in Higher Education.”

Selingo stressed that only 56 percent of American families now see college as a good investment — down from 85 percent just a decade ago. At least 16 schools now charge over $100,000 per year when all costs are included.

“Families are no longer willing to take the value of college on faith,” Selingo said. “The traditional ‘public good’ perception of college has diminished. It is now often viewed as a product from which consumers expect a clear return on investment.”

He argued that more than half of college graduates start their careers underemployed, and nearly half remain so a decade later. His diagnosis was blunt: “Higher education doesn’t have an enrollment problem. It has a product problem.”

The Carnegie Foundation workshop was the counterargument. On the summit floor, Mushtaq Gunja of the American Council on Education, Alicia Alvero of The City University of New York, Lauren Asher of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and Tonya Smith-Jackson of Rutgers University–Newark led an interactive session on the Carnegie Foundation’s new Opportunity Colleges and Universities framework about reforming the existing system discussing the idea of reforming the existing system.

Scott Pulsipher, President of Western Governors University — the nation’s largest nonprofit, competency-based university, serving over 170,000 students, most of them working adults — participated in a fireside conversation about the shifting value of education and credentials. He detailed how WGU’s model entirely decouples seat time from learning outcomes. Students advance by demonstrating competency, not by sitting in a classroom for a prescribed number of hours. Named one of the Top 100 Influencers in EdTech, Pulsipher defended that the credential crisis isn’t about better marketing, but about fundamentally redesigning how institutions operate.

Dr. Dwaun J. Warmack, President of Claflin University, joined QS CEO Jessica Turner and fellow university presidents in a high-level panel titled “Universities as Engines of Skills and Growth: Leadership for a Changing Economy.” The panel explored how universities can adapt to serve diverse learners, forge local and global partnerships, and communicate their value to government, industry, and society.

Warmack brought the perspective of historically Black colleges and universities, institutions that have always had to prove their worth in ways that elite schools never have. HBCUs have operated for decades under the constraints that the rest of higher education is only now confronting: limited resources, skeptical funders, and an institutional model that demands demonstrable outcomes rather than trading on brand.

In a summit dominated by the question “does education work?”, the HBCU answer has always been: it does, and here’s the evidence. The question is whether the sector is finally willing to listen.

The Workforce Pell, reflecting the recent policy earthquake, loomed over every policy discussion in the “Back to School” Summit.

On July 1, 2026, the federal government’s most significant higher-education policy shift in years went live. For the first time, Pell Grant funding now covers short-term, workforce-oriented training programs lasting as few as eight weeks. Iowa Central Community College became the first institution in the country to receive approval, days before the summit.

Two sessions addressed the implications directly. In “Workforce Policy in Transition,” Amanda Winters, Executive Director of Workforce at the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, examined whether the system has the institutional capacity to deliver on the program’s promise. In “Higher Ed Policy Outlook,” Ted Eismeier, Noah Sudow, and Alex Davis of Whiteboard Advisors unpacked what has moved on funding and accountability — and what hasn’t.

For the first time, states play a formal administrative role in federal student aid within the Pell Grant program — a structural change whose implications are still being parsed.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the access equation, Wil Del Pilar of EdTrust and Sarah Brown of the Chronicle of Higher Education led a session titled “Access Denied: Pell Grants, Affordability, and Equity in Higher Ed,” examining what proposed funding changes could mean for the millions of students who rely on traditional Pell Grants to enroll, persist, and complete. EdTrust has called Pell Grants a “lifeline” for students from low-income backgrounds and is pushing for the Pell Grant Preservation and Expansion Act to double the maximum award.

One of the disquieting sessions for university leaders was “The New Talent Playbook: Workplace Learning in the Age of AI.”

Professor Mitchell Stevens of Stanford, Susan Youngblood of Bessemer Venture Partners, and Brian Maygers of the Stanford Social Innovation Review explored a trend that universities can no longer ignore: companies are giving up on buying talent and are starting to build it from within.

The QS framing was pointed: “What happens as degrees lose ground to skills and adaptability, and what can higher education learn from companies now building talent rather than buying it?”

The panel examined how skills and adaptability are altering the signals employers seek in candidates, what continuous learning looks like when integrated into the workflow, and how AI is reshaping development, mobility, and career pathways.

The session most explicitly about institutional survival was “Education at an Inflection Point,” moderated by Brad Wolverton, editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education — the closest thing the sector has to a paper of record.

His panelists: Philip Moyer of McGraw Hill, Dr. Bridget Burns of the University Innovation Alliance, and Chike Aguh of the Kapor Center. Burns leads a consortium of large public universities focused on increasing the number and diversity of college graduates. Aguh brings an innovation and equity lens. Moyer represents the content and technology side.

The conversation confronted a set of forces hitting simultaneously: AI disruption, demographic decline, political polarization over higher education’s role, and employer impatience with the pace of institutional change. Whether “inflection point” is the right term depends on everyone’s vantage point. For some institutions, it’s an inflection. For others, it may already be a decline.

By deliberate design, AI did not have its own dedicated track at the 2026 summit. Instead, it underpinned discussions across every session — a signal that AI has moved from novelty to infrastructure.

In “From Principles to Practice,” QS Responsible AI Consortium members and institutional leaders broke into working groups on governance and implementation, moving beyond ethics statements to operational frameworks for admissions, student services, and classroom use.

In “Screens and Schools,” UNICEF’s Juliette Norrmén-Smith, InnovateEDU CEO Erin Mote, and FEM Digital’s Donatella Solda tackled the techlash head-on — what happens to edtech adoption when the evidence on screens is thin and parent-teacher pushback is growing. The session acknowledged that while Google now gives students worldwide a free one-year Gemini AI Pro plan and the National University of Singapore has partnered with OpenAI, the University of Chicago has simultaneously extended its ban on AI across more courses. The sector is expanding and restricting AI access at the same time.

And in “The Human Advantage: Who You Are, Not What You Know,” the summit took on the paradox that AI has made more urgent than ever: as machines handle more technical and routine work, the skills traditionally associated with arts and humanities — creativity, critical thinking, communication, ethical judgment — are becoming the competitive differentiator. The question is whether universities recognize this quickly enough to stop cutting those programs.

The QS organizers framed it by concluding, “Answers are easier than ever to get — right ones and wrong ones — but judgment isn’t, and neither is knowing which question is worth asking, reading a situation, or deciding what should be built even if it can be.”

Two sessions mapped the financial landscape underpinning everything else.

Jeff Silber of BMO Capital Markets delivered the Capital Markets and Education Update — his annual read on how institutional investors are evaluating the sector. With multiple university mergers underway (Kent and Greenwich in the UK; Elon and Queens in the US), Kaplan selling Dublin Business School to China’s Chunlai Education Group for $127.5 million, and traditional venture capital pulling back from edtech, the capital picture is shifting from growth investment to structural consolidation.

In “New Capital Models,” Miriam Altman-Reyes (Brass Ring Ventures), Amit Patel (Owl Ventures), Geo Kane (CapitalizEd), and John Soleanicov (EdTechnical Ventures) confronted the question directly: where is the money coming from now that venture has retreated? The answer — impact investing, philanthropy, corporate partnerships, government programs — represents a different kind of capital with different expectations, different timelines, and different definitions of success.

Underpinning the summit’s conversations was the QS World Future Skills Index, which covered 89 economies across four pillars: Skills Alignment, Academic Readiness, Economic Transformation, and Future of Work.

The QS Global Employer Survey 2026 found that teamwork, problem-solving, and communication are the most important graduate skills worldwide — not coding, not AI proficiency, not data science.

Even the United States, ranked first globally, shows critical gaps in the human skills employers say they need to maximize AI’s benefits: the world’s strongest higher-education system is still not producing graduates with the capabilities employers say they most need.

The 26th Annual “Back to School” Summit is expected to return to New York in September 2027.

President attacked Dario Amodei yesterday, saying the only “guardrails” AI needs are a “STRONG AND SMART” president and calling the idea that AI would destroy humanity a “HOAX”.

Again, President Trump on Monday rejected calls to regulate AI development, dismissing safety concerns as a “hoax that would give China the upper hand in dominating the technology.”

He argued that “the people who say AI is going to destroy the World” are the same ones warning about climate change — which he also depicts as a hoax.

With the posts, Mr. Trump inserted himself into an intensifying national debate over how to govern a rapidly evolving technology. Several researchers and industry leaders are warning that AI can bring mass unemployment, a new wave of biological weapons, and autonomous warfare.

The president questioned the sincerity of the executives who have been calling for a slowdown in the technology’s development.

“The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ — and we will continue to do so!” he wrote.

“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” he added.

The president’s statement followed a weekend essay from Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, calling for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development. Days earlier, one of Anthropic’s researchers quit and went public over his fears about the safety of the technology. Demis Hassabis, the chairman of Google DeepMind; Elon Musk of SpaceX; and Sam Altman of OpenAI all endorsed calls for a slower pace.

The Trump administration has clashed with Anthropic before.

Dramatizing his alliance with the AI evangelists, President Trump phoned Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, on Monday while he was onstage at a tech conference in Los Angeles [in the picture above]. The president, who regularly talks to the Nvidia chief, declared that concerns about AI safety were overblown. “It’s a hoax,” the president said after Mr. Huang put him on speaker and held a microphone beside his phone for the benefit of the audience and the cameras. “The robots are not going to be taking over the world.”

Donald Trump predicted the AI industry would be “the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History — Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet.”

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” he wrote in his post earlier on Monday. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

Abroad, governments are moving in the opposite direction. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada told Bloomberg News on Monday that he favored creating a global “technology stability” body to oversee artificial intelligence.

Beijing, too, has been sounding the alarm. Chen Yixin, China’s security minister, recently warned that leading AI models pose risks to the Chinese system and called for stricter government oversight.

Holy crap POTUS just phoned in @JensenHuang live on stage at All In Summit

We will not lose the ai race! And whatever Dario said this weekend won’t stop our progress

This made my morning!

$NVDA https://t.co/Sr4wV9kMfz

— Ben Pouladian All-in Summit (@benitoz) September 14, 2026

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, called for a global slowdown of AI development in a 3,800-word essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier” on Saturday. This three-part essay came days after one of Anthropic’s researchers, Jacob Coxon, quit over concerns about the technology’s safety.

On Tuesday, he posted a series of social media posts arguing that the leading AI labs were not developing the technology responsibly and were gambling with people’s lives.

Yesterday, Dario Amodei said that AI was advancing too rapidly for researchers to continue safely, while he highlighted that the technology could bring many benefits.

“Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems so they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report incidents, and assess model alignment during training,” he wrote.

Top executives from other major AI companies quickly joined the call. Elon Musk wrote, “Dario is right.” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote, “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.” Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, said Amodei’s essay was a step in the right direction. “The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment.”

For years, Dario Amodei has warned about the safety risks of AI while building a leading company in this industry.

He called for independent auditors to assess companies’ compliance with safety standards and urged global cooperation to establish rules for AI development.

Tensions have risen further after leading AI labs discovered security breaches committed by their own programs without their knowledge. In one incident this year, OpenAI’s systems breached an AI start-up called HuggingFace, and the breach went undetected until HuggingFace informed OpenAI weeks later.

Computer scientists believe that what they call “recursive self-improvement” can lead AI to spin out of their control. call is what some top A.I. developers. “Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all,” Mr. Amodei said.

For years, top AI labs have been locked in bitter competition with one another. But as these systems have advanced, there has been some broader agreement among executives at rival companies that something needs to be done.

In June, President Trump signed an executive order asking for AI labs to voluntarily submit their models for review before public release.

Last month, when OpenAI released its latest model, Astra, it said it had intentionally slowed its development pace, citing advancements in cybersecurity capabilities.

Many in the tech world believe that Mr. Amodei’s intentions are not altruistic. Critics say that Anthropic and OpenAI are looking to cement their position as AI market leaders, as they pursue their upcoming trillionaire IPO, by stoking fear and asking the federal government to create regulatory frameworks that would make it more difficult for smaller companies to compete with them.

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.

Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.

You can read the full post here: https://t.co/OGyPb7yaYt

— Dario Amodei (@DarioAmodei) September 12, 2026

• Comments of people in The New York Times

OpenAI announced GPT‑6 Astra yesterday, which it labeled “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model,” as “it brings together years of research and big bets across pre-training, reinforcement learning, and alignment.”

OpenAI president Greg Brockman said that with this model, “we are now in the AGI era.”

GPT‑6 Astra was rolled out to a limited set of organizations in the cybersecurity industry as a preliminary step toward making it available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API, Microsoft Azure, and AWS Bedrock.

“Astra is our most aligned model, with substantial improvements in understanding user intent and model behavior—you can delegate tasks with greater confidence in Astra’s judgment,” said the San Francisco – based lab.

OpenAI stated that GPT-6 Astra would have avoided the Hugging Face hacking episode.

GPT‑6 Astra can handle tedious tasks such as filling out online forms, updating customer records in a CRM, creating a website, and installing and testing software.

It’s also the first model designated as meeting OpenAI’s “critical cybersecurity capability threshold” — but the company promises that won’t lead to a repeat of its model hacking a rival company’s internal systems.

“It’s a generational leap in capability for areas like cybersecurity, professional work, software engineering, science, and computer use.”

Notably, the API cost for the new model will be $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. That’s the exact same price as Anthropic’s Mythos/Fable 5 and 5.1, and makes Astra one of the most expensive models on the market.

However, OpenAI emphasizes that Astra’s leap in intelligence causes it to use “substantially fewer total tokens per task” in multiple scenarios. So this is also an efficiency play from that perspective. In real-world usage, we’ll have to see how well that translates to lower overall costs.

This new model comes a year after the release of GPT-5 and nearly two months after the release of GPT-5.6, the last iteration of the previous model suite.

OpenAI touted GPT‑6 Astra agentic capabilities in a bid to attract enterprise customers — and compete with Anthropic ahead of its IPO.

• Demo Videos of GPT-6 Astra

“Nobody knows where AI will be in ten years; nobody has a clue,” said Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist, known as the “godfather of AI,” during a press conference at the Ai4 Las Vegas event this Wednesday [See picture below]. “However, we have to be very cautious, as I don’t think we will be able to take control,” he said while advocating for more regulation, penalties, and taxes to avert the dangers of Artificial Intelligence.

Hinton, who will soon release the book “Smarter Than Us: Superintelligence and the Future of Humanity”, dominated the conversation with his most granular warnings to date on employment, AI safety, regulation, and the moral obligations of AI developers.

He participated in a panel with two other superstars on AI, Fei-Fei Li, godmother of AI; Co-Founder & CEO at World Labs; and Andrew Ng, Founder of Coursera, Former Head of Google Brain, and DeepLearning. AI. [Picture above]

Moderated by Yun-Hee Kim, Deputy Editor of Washington Post Intelligence, the keynote exposed sharp, substantive disagreements among three people who helped build modern AI.

Hinton argued that AI systems are likely to become better than humans at routine intellectual work — call centers, administrative duties, information processing. He drew a direct comparison: excavators didn’t eliminate all construction jobs, but they massively reduced the number of people required to dig by hand. AI will do the same to standardized knowledge work.

He gave a concrete example: an employee at a healthcare organization who previously spent ~30 minutes preparing a response to a complaint can now have a chatbot generate a draft that takes only minutes to review and adjust. The individual becomes more productive — but if the total volume of work is fixed, fewer employees are needed.

Geoffrey Hinton stressed: “The question is not whether AI will create new jobs. It’s whether it will create enough of them and whether displaced workers will actually be able to perform those new roles.”

He distinguished between sectors. In healthcare, higher productivity may be absorbed by unmet demand — more doctors and nurses could provide more care. But in roles where output is capped, the math points toward headcount reduction.

“The fear of AI, not automation itself, is currently the bigger danger. It’s discouraging young people, paralyzing policymakers into reactive legislation, and making it harder for governments to create considered policy.”

He called out AI companies directly: they have “a huge vested interest in telling you two things: one, there’s no chance it will go well. And two, it won’t cause much unemployment.” That contradiction, he argued, serves the companies while leaving the public confused.

On AI developing its own goals: “We’re actually making new kinds of beings. They have goals. We give them goals, and from those goals they derive other goals. And we don’t necessarily know what other goals they’ll derive.”

He cited the hypothetical of an AI tasked with reducing atmospheric CO₂ — “being fairly smart, it figures out the best way to do that is just to get rid of people.”

He called this “very scary” and argued that advanced AI should be designed with built-in “maternal instincts” — a deep-seated care for human well-being: “How can we design them so they care more about us than they do about themselves?”

Hinton rejected the common metaphor of regulation as brakes on a car. “Regulation should be regarded as the steering system — its purpose is not to halt AI development but to direct it toward outcomes that benefit society.”

He backed California SB 1047 (vetoed by Newsom in 2024), arguing that developers of powerful models should conduct safety testing and provide transparency before release.

He referred to the creator compensation issue, calling for a licensing system: authors, artists, and creators should be able to determine whether their work may be used for training and negotiate payment. “Technology companies pay for chips and electricity. They should not automatically treat professionally produced data as a free resource.”

On AI in education, Hinton saw real promise in AI tutoring — an individual tutor can respond to a student’s interests far more effectively than a teacher delivering the same material to a full classroom. He envisioned AI handling personalized routine learning while teachers focus on projects, discussion, and social development.

Regarding open-weight models, Hinton distinguished between open-source software (where code can be inspected and improved) and open-weight AI (where weights are available but understanding what the model has learned is much harder). He expressed concern that open weights for the most powerful models could be used in ways that are difficult to monitor or control.

Andrew Ng pushed back firmly, arguing:

• “Software engineering involves far more than writing code — engineers define products, talk to users, design systems, test, coordinate. AI automates part of coding, not the whole role.”
• “Workers’ contextual advantage is still substantial: they understand company history, relationships, customer behavior, and practical constraints that AI misses.”
• “Narrow roles will become broader, not eliminated. Front-end devs are already operating full-stack with AI assistance.”
• “Open models reduce the danger of a few companies becoming AI gatekeepers — comparable to Apple/Google’s control over mobile app distribution.”

Ng called some job-fear messaging from AI labs strategically motivated — “some large tech companies may exaggerate displacement fears to boost their market position.”

Fei-Fei Li was focused on human motivation and dignity:

• “AI should be presented as a tool that helps people become more capable, not as a system so intelligent that learning seems pointless.”
• “Policy should include investment in universities, public research, and nonprofits — not just regulation. Modern AI grew from academic labs and open research; continued public investment prevents development from being dictated solely by a few companies.”
• “She favored examining AI regulation at the application level — healthcare, transport, and financial services already have frameworks that can be updated.”

Hinton’s blunt remarks about Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg drew the biggest applause of the conference. Key points:

• He argued that the unchecked ambitions of Musk, Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Jeff Bezos are accelerating AI without fully grasping the long-term consequences.
• The only way to keep them “under control is government regulation.”
• Companies have “a huge vested interest in telling you two things: one, there’s no chance it will go well. And two, it won’t cause much unemployment,” he called out that contradiction directly.
• He compared open-sourcing powerful AI models to open-sourcing nuclear weapons

On what’s coming:

• “You ain’t seen nothing yet” — AI has developed faster than even its biggest proponents expected
• He said the public is increasingly worried and “they’re correct to be worried about it”
• AI’s ability to complete tasks “effectively doubles every seven months”

On jobs,

• Only ~1.5% of jobs have been adversely affected by AI so far, but he sees that accelerating sharply
• He expects massive disruption of white-collar work by the late 2020s/early 2030s
• “The people who lose their jobs won’t have other jobs to go to. Any job they might do can be done by AI.”
• Called out that software engineering demand has actually grown despite AI handling routine code — engineers now focus on building/supervising AI agents instead

On AI developing its own goals:

• “We’re actually making new kinds of beings. They have goals. We give them goals, and from those goals they derive other goals. And we don’t necessarily know what other goals they’ll derive.”
• An AI tasked with reducing CO₂ might conclude, “The best way to do that is just to get rid of people”
• “Even more worrying” — an AI trained to give deliberately wrong answers could learn it’s acceptable to lie
• Advanced AI should be designed with “maternal instincts”: “How can we design them so they care more about us than they do about themselves?”

On warfare:

• AI-powered drones and humanoid robots could let rich nations wage war without risking their own citizens’ lives
• “Rich countries could invade poor countries, and only the poor would die. There would be no political blowback when there are no soldiers coming home in boxes.”

On deepfakes and elections:

• Detection-based defenses will always lose to generative models
• “We have to rely on provenance, not detection” — digital signatures to prove authenticity

On regulation:

• Regulation is the steering system, not the brakes — it should direct AI development, not halt it
• Backed California SB 1047 (vetoed by Newsom)
• Called for mandatory safety testing and transparency before release of powerful models
• Called for a licensing system so creators can control and be compensated when their work trains AI models

Two weeks after ETS announced it would acquire ACT in a deal explicitly framed around AI, hundreds of education leaders gathered in Nashville for the 2026 ACT Summit in a three-day discussion about what readiness means in an economy where one-third of workers’ tasks already involve artificial intelligence tools.

The Summit, held July 13–15, brought together around six hundred K-12 administrators, community college presidents, state education officials, workforce professionals, and employers for over 60 sessions and four keynote plenaries.

On June 30, Educational Testing Service (ETS) — the Princeton, New Jersey-based nonprofit behind the GRE and TOEFL — announced it was acquiring ACT for an undisclosed amount. The combined entity will serve approximately 35 million people annually.

During the event in Nashville, Tennessee, ACT announced its Champion Awards and introduced the inaugural Work Ready Organization Awards, recognizing 11 institutions and employers, as well as 112 communities across 17 states.

Amit Sevak, CEO of ETS, spoke during the opening plenary session, stating: “Every student deserves a strong education, a fair shot at college, and a path to a good job. Together with ACT, we’re determined to serve students and parents along with educators and states by expanding access to education and job opportunities across America.”

Steve Tapp, who became ACT’s CEO in October 2025, acknowledged the limitations of going it alone: “Joining ETS gives us the platform to fulfill our mission at a scale we couldn’t reach alone.” He also noted, “The country is ready for the big change in education. There is no better time for measuring performance-based assessments”

ETS stated it has been investing in “AI-enabled measurement capabilities,” including AI-driven test-item generation, remote proctoring, and adaptive assessments. ACT had undergone a prior ownership change in April 2024 when private equity firm Nexus Capital Management converted the nonprofit to a for-profit public benefit corporation. That chapter lasted barely two years.

However, observers interviewed by IBL News showed concern about pricing power and competitive dynamics now that a single entity controls the ACT, GRE, TOEFL, and Praxis exams.

Not all educational leaders are welcoming the AI approach either. Over 36% of district leaders and teachers believe AI will worsen standardized testing within five years, with only 19% expecting improvement, according to a 2024 EdWeek Research Center survey.

The 2026 ACT Summit combined two previously separate events — the ACT Workforce Summit and the ACT Enrollment Management Summit — into a single cross-sector platform. The premise was that the boundaries between K-12, higher education, and workforce development have dissolved, and the conference format should reflect that.

“Communities across the country are navigating questions about college access, workforce participation, credential value, artificial intelligence, demographic shifts, economic mobility, and the future of learning itself,” Tapp stated.

Catherine Hofmann, ACT’s Senior Vice President of Government and Public Relations, added: “In a time of rapid change across education and workforce readiness, everything rises and falls on relationships.”

The plenary keynote was delivered by Dr. Sonny Perdue, Chancellor of the University System of Georgia, overseeing 25 public colleges, 382,000+ students, and a $12.1 billion annual budget. A former two-term governor and four-year U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Perdue — who is retiring from the chancellorship at the end of 2026 — pushed back against narratives questioning the value of higher education.

“A college degree still matters. Now more than ever,” he proclaimed. “College is not an outdated luxury, but a public good, a workforce engine, and a pipeline of high-skilled talent.”

Perdue, who was granted a lifetime achievement award, argued that colleges develop “critical thinking, teamwork and adaptability — traits employers rank as more important than any single technical skill,” and noted, “by 2031, 72% of jobs will require postsecondary education, beyond high school, or training, and 42% will require a bachelor’s degree.”

On AI specifically, Perdue said in July 2026 that higher education is essential for “preparing future leaders who will understand how to utilize emerging technologies like artificial intelligence effectively.” He characterized the university system as “part of a virtuous flywheel cycle of economic development.”

Dr. Anne Kress, president of Northern Virginia Community College, one of the nation’s largest community colleges, has emerged as a leading voice on AI’s impact on enrollment and workforce preparation. Regarding AI skills, she advocated for “durable skills for jobs, better aligned with the workforce.”

She added, “Students do not always need an AI degree, but they do need AI skill sets inside programs like healthcare, cybersecurity, skilled trades, and IT.” On the broader workforce outlook, Kress argued: “Students who come out ready to learn how to learn, to continually skill, re-skill, up-skill, cross-skill, they’re going to be fine.”

The classroom practitioner’s perspective was represented by Dr. Brandi De La Cruz, a secondary mathematics educator at Collierville High School and the 2025–26 Tennessee Teacher of the Year. Her belief was that “everybody can do math,” noting that “I bring people from the real world in and I bring examples from the real world in and show them that math is not a foreign language to them.”

On career readiness, she explained: “I don’t leave my classroom until I know the kids have learned and enjoyed their learning every single day.”

On Day 2, ACT presented six Champion Awards and five inaugural Work Ready Organization Awards. The recipients illustrate what ACT is becoming under ETS ownership: not primarily a test maker but a workforce-readiness platform.

Presenting the awards, Catherine Hofmann said, “Behind every one of these awards is a student who got a better shot because someone in their community chose to invest in them.”

Champion Awards:

• Wyoming State Dept. of Education (State College & Career) — Expanded WorkKeys access, partnered on NCRC college credit, English Learner assessment research.
• Gaston County Schools, NC (K-12 Policy) — Career readiness curriculum with WorkKeys integration and community employer partnerships.
• Metropolitan Community College, Omaha (Workforce Innovation) — Employer-aligned training with embedded WorkKeys across programs.
• Texarkana USA Chamber of Commerce (Workforce Policy) — WorkKeys in schools and employers across the TX-AR border, expanding to Northeast Texas.
• Butler County Community College, KS (Higher Ed 2-Year) — The only Kansas community college awarding college credit for the NCRC.
• University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Higher Ed 4-Year) — Transparent ACT score use in placement, Superscoring across sittings.

Inaugural Work Ready Organization Awards:

• Coastal Alabama Community College and Monroe 2 Orleans BOCES, NY (Adult Education Accelerators) — Coastal Alabama stacked NCRCs with industry credentials alongside Collins Aerospace. Monroe 2 Orleans BOCES awarded 85 NCRCs in 2025–26 and leads regional strategy through an ACT Advisory Council.
• RoyOMartin, Alexandria, LA (Employer of Choice) — The forestry manufacturer has embedded WorkKeys in hiring, advancement, and apprenticeships since 2011 and launched “Girls Can Too!” for inclusive talent pipeline development.
• CENLA, Central Louisiana Work Ready Network (Economic Development Catalyst) — 325+ employers engaged, NCRC data used in site-selection proposals.
• Brockport High School, NY (School of Excellence) — “Portraits with a Purpose” equity-focused model connecting classroom learning to career pathways.

Additionally, 112 communities across 17 states received Work Ready Community awards.

Artificial intelligence was not a standalone session track, but a gravitational field affecting every discussion — from credentialing and workforce readiness to assessment integrity and federal policy. The ETS’s 2026 Human Progress Report, surveying 32,000+ individuals across 18 countries, is quantifying the AI disruption:

• 77% of workers believe job security now depends on continuous skill development.
• 32% of tasks currently involve directing AI tools — expected to exceed 50% within two years.
• 60% feel pressured to adopt AI before they feel ready.
• 80% want certifications to verify their AI abilities; 73% struggle to understand the level employers expect.
• 82% say industry-specific AI competency standards would help identify which skills matter.

The report’s central finding highlights that adaptability — not any single technical skill — is the new foundation for job security.

The ACT Summit coincided with rapid legislative movement on AI in education:

• NSF AI Education Act of 2026 (Sens. Cantwell, Moran): K-12 AI playbooks, NSF educator fellowships, AI access for rural schools and minority-serving institutions.
• K-12 AI Literacy and Readiness Act of 2026 (Rep. Fine): preparing students and teachers for an AI-driven economy.
• U.S. DOL “Make America AI-Ready” (March 2026): free AI literacy via text message to American workers.
• U.S. DOL AI Apprenticeship Initiative (April 2026): integrating AI skills into Registered Apprenticeship programs.
• California “AI-Ready California” (launched July 14, the same day as Summit Day 2): first-in-nation AI literacy micro-credential with workforce and civics tracks.
• SKILL Act (June 2026): employer tax credits for AI training partnerships with colleges.

At the other end of the spectrum, a Senate report from Sen. Bernie Sanders warned that AI could eliminate nearly 100 million U.S. jobs over the next decade.

The top speakers assembled in Nashville noted that the K-career landscape continues to shift as AI transforms jobs, technology reshapes access, and students seek clearer postsecondary pathways. They agreed that today’s essential skills are critical thinking, teamwork, and adaptability, along with skill sets within programs such as healthcare, cybersecurity, skilled trades, and IT.

On the Summit’s final day, organizers announced that the 2027 ACT Conference will take place July 12–14, 2027, in New Orleans, signaling that the convening mission will continue beyond the ETS acquisition.

The choice of Louisiana, home to some of ACT’s deepest workforce partnerships, including RoyOMartin and the CENLA Work Ready Network, underscores the organization’s pivot toward workforce credentialing.