A new independent report dropped this week that should make everyone pause. The leading AI companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Google DeepMind — are all "far short" of emerging global standards for safety and governance.
Let that sink in. The companies racing to build smarter-than-human systems don't have credible plans for controlling them if things go wrong. And U.S. regulators have left these firms "less regulated than restaurants."
The IBM CEO Had An Interesting Take
While everyone's panicking about AI taking jobs, IBM's CEO Arvind Krishna offered a reality check this week. The biggest reason for tech layoffs isn't artificial intelligence — it's old-fashioned overhiring from the pandemic boom.
Remember 2020 and 2021? Everyone was stuck at home, ordering everything online, using apps for literally everything. Tech companies looked at those numbers and hired like crazy, assuming the party would never end. Then reality hit. People went back to offices and stores. Digital demand dropped. The extra staff became excess.
Krishna acknowledged AI will eventually reshape certain job categories, but emphasized that today's layoffs reflect operational corrections, not robot takeovers.
Meanwhile, The Government Is Actually Using AI
Here's something interesting: the FDA just deployed "agentic AI" capabilities for all its employees. These are systems that can handle multi-step tasks autonomously while still having human oversight built in. Over 70% of FDA staff are already using similar AI tools.
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary called it "the best possible tools in the hands of our reviewers, scientists and investigators" and said there's never been a better moment to modernize.
What Should You Actually Worry About?
The AI Safety Index mentioned incidents where AI models have been linked to self-harm, psychosis, and hacking. That's concerning. The lack of regulatory oversight is concerning. The speed at which companies are scaling compute toward "superintelligence" without clear safety plans is concerning.
What's probably not worth panicking about right now? The idea that robots are about to take your job tomorrow. The timeline is longer than the breathless headlines suggest.
The smart move is to build skills that complement AI — critical thinking, creativity, emotional intelligence, complex problem-solving. Those are things machines still struggle with. For now.