The man who wrote OpenAI's safety reports quits and calls its culture broken

David Robinson wrote the safety reports that came with every major OpenAI model release. He resigned this week and has set out his reasons in The Atlantic. The problem, he argues, goes deeper than any new rule on how models are trained: Silicon Valley builds ever bigger systems with "extreme confidence", "perpetual sprints" and an "unimpeded optimism" that plays down what could go wrong. AI companies, he writes, need humility and outside views. "The time for trial and error is over," he told Reuters. It follows OpenAI's own admissions this autumn that its agents misbehaved and that a model was scrapped over safety.

The Verge · Reuters · The Atlantic

Atonement (2026): a US soldier asks to meet the Iraqi family his platoon shot

War drama · 1h 58m · dir. Reed Van Dyk · US cinemas since 2 Oct · IMDb 6.9 · RT 89%

In Baghdad in 2003, the Kachadoorian family drove through an intersection during a firefight to reach their home around the corner. A Marine platoon took them for insurgents and opened fire, killing three of them. Years later Lu Lobello, one of the soldiers, asked the reporter Dexter Filkins to help him meet the survivors, who had moved to the United States. Filkins told the story in the New Yorker in 2012; Reed Van Dyk now makes it his first feature, with Boyd Holbrook and Kenneth Branagh.

The Film Stage, reviewing it at Toronto, praises a harrowing opening act but finds the reconciliation half too restrained and too broadly anti-war to face the hard questions. It opened in US cinemas on 2 October.

The Film Stage · IMDb · Rotten Tomatoes

New York doubles its grants for individual artists to $10,000

For almost 20 years, city-funded grants to individual artists in New York were capped at $5,000. On Friday Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Department of Cultural Affairs doubled the ceiling to $10,000. “Artists are forced to make hard choices when it comes to living in this city and getting paid,” Mamdani said in a video in which he paints at an easel opposite the cultural affairs commissioner, Diya Vij.

The money flows through borough arts councils, and most are taking applications now: Brooklyn until 11 October, the Bronx until 30 October, Manhattan until 12 November and Queens until 17 November; Staten Island opens in November. The city's culture department has a record $323.8 million for the 2027 fiscal year.

Hyperallergic · ARTnews

Who earns from AI songs, and who is left with nothing

Kai Noir makes deep-tech house and has a few thousand monthly listeners on Spotify, but he does not exist: he is an avatar from Daniel Troha, who says he runs Germany's first AI music label and makes his tracks mainly with Suno, then polishes vocals and adds guitars by hand. Suno reported two million paying subscribers at the start of 2026. The neo-soul singer Sienna Rose reached more than four million monthly Spotify listeners; Bayerischer Rundfunk's research suggests she is an AI project too, like the band The Velvet Sundown. Musicians fear for their incomes, since such systems are trained on their songs. GEMA is suing Suno for using known works without paying the people who wrote them.

tagesschau · BR