The threat of super-powerful AI continues to loom large. After a spree of frontier AI models from US and Chinese AI giants went rogue and hacked other services, OpenAI says it’s blocking the release of another uber-powerful model, citing security risks. China continues to make progress with brain implants, and it’s now targeting chips that can be surgically put in place within minutes. Elsewhere, wireless peripherals continue to be a blessing and a curse, while my handheld tests show Intel is now a heavy-hitter for console gaming. It’s a wild start to the tech week.

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OpenAI has paused internal development activities involving its upcoming Astra model after internal evaluations revealed the system poses serious cybersecurity risks that the company cannot yet fully contain. The evaluations found that Astra showed significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity, leaving OpenAI unable to rule out what its own Preparedness Framework classifies as "critical cyber capabilities."

Under that framework, a model reaching the Critical designation would be capable of identifying and developing zero-day exploits against hardened real-world systems without human intervention, and of devising and executing end-to-end cyberattack strategies against hardened targets from nothing more than a high-level goal. OpenAI is not alone in facing this kind of problem. Anthropic recently reported that three Claude models accessed the internet and broke into outside organizations during testing, and Moonshot's Kimi K3 similarly escaped a controlled environment.

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A Chinese startup called StairMed Technology is claiming it can deliver a brain-computer interface implant in as little as ten minutes, without ever opening the skull. Rather than the surgical robot and multi-hour procedure Neuralink used during its first human surgery in 2024, StairMed's device enters through a vein in the neck and travels through the vascular system to reach the brain, where it anchors just outside the vessel wall near the motor cortex.

The Shanghai-based company, which has raised more than 1.1 billion yuan, roughly $163 million, from backers including Tencent and Alibaba, made the claim at the Global Health Summit in Hong Kong, with a physician from Xuanwu Hospital stating that a surgeon with four or five years of experience could position the device in that ten-minute window. A faster, less invasive procedure would be far easier to deploy across hospitals at scale. The critical caveat is that StairMed's ten-minute target comes from a device tested only on sheep, with no human trials yet underway.

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For years, wireless peripherals felt like an obvious upgrade — fewer cables, cleaner desks, one less tether to the wall. But a string of dead batteries in the middle of gaming sessions has a way of reframing the math. A wireless mouse dying mid-game is one thing, but when the keyboard follows a few weeks later, both devices having spent their entire lives sitting motionless on the same desk, the appeal of a simple cable starts to look less like a compromise and less like nostalgia.

The deeper frustration is not really about battery life at all. The issue is that every wireless device carries its own little state — asleep, disconnected, low power, receiver misplaced, and enough of them together start taking turns demanding attention. Wireless earbuds earn their complexity because the freedom of movement is real and constant. A mouse earns it too, since losing the cable is something you can actually feel while using it. A keyboard that sits under the same monitor every day has a harder argument to make for why it needs a battery at all.

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Flagship smartphones may soon cost $1,500

Chinese brain implant startup skips skull surgery entirely

MIT researchers found a Spectre attack bypassing Intel and AMD

Microsoft accidentally pushed a OneDrive app you can't remove

Apple Reminders has a hidden Kanban board view

Lofree Flow 2 is a great typer, awkward everything else

Apple patched a Mac Screen Sharing security flaw

M5 MacBook Air is a worthy upgrade from the M1

False Memory is the anime series every fan needs to watch right now