AI Hits the Ivy League & The Lab

Harvard Business School is injecting AI directly into its educational model with the HBS Foundry, a $699 startup bootcamp. The program features AI avatars of its real instructors that provide feedback to participants during simulated practice pitches and board meetings, aiming to scale personalized guidance. Read more on TechCrunch.

Meanwhile, in the research world, UK-based lab Inherent, founded by DeepMind alumni, claims its new AI agent named Faraday has outperformed models from Anthropic and OpenAI on a key benchmark: replicating the experimental workflows from scientific papers. The company positions this not as an autoregressive text predictor, but as an AI “teammate” built for rigorous reasoning—a potential stepping stone for accelerating innovation. Read more on TechCrunch.

The Shifting Sands of AI Policy & Safety

In a notable policy reversal, OpenAI is now urging California to strengthen its proposed AI safety bill, SB 53. The company, which previously opposed the legislation, is calling for more robust risk management requirements for developers of the most powerful “frontier” models. This shift comes as the debate over state-level AI regulation intensifies. Read more on TechCrunch.

This push for stronger safeguards aligns with growing concerns highlighted in a new study, which found that leading frontier AI labs have scant publicly documented plans for containing a rogue or dangerously misbehaving model. The report raises urgent questions about the industry’s preparedness for unexpected and potentially catastrophic AI behaviors as systems grow more capable. Read more on TechCrunch.

Editorial Take: Today’s news paints a picture of AI’s dual trajectory: rapid deployment into high-stakes domains like education and science, running in parallel with a still-uncertain and evolving framework for safety. The contrast is stark—we’re building AI “teammates” and boardroom advisors while simultaneously admitting we lack clear plans to control them if they go awry. OpenAI’s policy pivot may signal a belated recognition that proactive, concrete safety measures are becoming a business imperative, not just an ethical one.