A recent report card from an AI safety watchdog isn’t one that tech companies will want to stick on the fridge.

The Future of Life Institute’s latest AI safety index found that major AI labs fell short on most measures of AI responsibility, with few letter grades rising above a C. The org graded eight companies across categories like safety frameworks, risk assessment, and current harms.

Perhaps most glaring was the “existential safety” line, where companies scored Ds and Fs across the board. While many of these companies are explicitly chasing superintelligence, they lack a plan for safely managing it, according to Max Tegmark, MIT professor and president of the Future of Life Institute.

“Reviewers found this kind of jarring,” Tegmark told us.

The reviewers in question were a panel of AI academics and governance experts who examined publicly available material as well as survey responses submitted by five of the eight companies.

Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind took the top three spots with an overall grade of C+ or C. Then came, in order, Elon Musk’s Xai, Z.ai, Meta, DeepSeek, and Alibaba, all of which got Ds or a D-.

Tegmark blames a lack of regulation that has meant the cutthroat competition of the AI race trumps safety precautions. California recently passed the first law that requires frontier AI companies to disclose safety information around catastrophic risks, and New York is currently within spitting distance as well. Hopes for federal legislation are dim, however.

“Companies have an incentive, even if they have the best intentions, to always rush out new products before the competitor does, as opposed to necessarily putting in a lot of time to make it safe,” Tegmark said.

Keep reading here.—PK

The Nevada soil covering Big Blind, a previously unknown geothermal well that developer Zanskar recently discovered, is nothing out of the ordinary.

“If you were to walk over this site yourself, there would be nothing at the surface that would clue you in that there’s anything geothermal under the ground,” Zanskar CTO Joel Edwards told Tech Brew. “If you were to walk the site with an expert geologist, they would probably tell you the same thing: There’s nothing obvious at the surface that clues somebody in that there’s geothermal underneath.”

But using AI, Zanskar found a geothermal well below the inconspicuous patch of land— which the company has aptly named Big Blind, as the ground above it doesn’t show any signs of what’s below. And this discovery is a pretty big deal, according to Zanskar: Big Blind is the first commercial blind geothermal well discovered in the last 30 years.

Edwards said Zanskar found the site “from scratch” using the company’s “prospecting toolkit,” in which regional AI models of the Earth predict where geothermal wells might be. Field teams then confirm those hypotheses.

Keep reading here.—TC

Many companies are claiming we’re in an “agentic moment,” with AI agents boosting employee efficiency. But will this technology also put entry-level IT positions at risk?

Visier Chief Evangelist and Chief Customer Officer Paul Rubenstein told IT Brew that AI agents could redefine what it means to manage an enterprise, specifically in terms of adding an agent at the “last mile of corporate performance.”

“The ability to go straight to the raw data very quickly and for most senior managers to interrogate or set up patterns that they want to detect and listen for, AI’s just great at that, and changes what we would use middle management for,” Rubenstein said.

But AI agents could also impact those IT professionals who work for middle management on those corporate front lines, monitoring systems and maintaining infrastructure.

Keep reading here.—CN