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This Historically Significant Shipwreck Was Hiding In The Desert For 500 Years

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Shipwrecks are often found by accident. Of course, treasure hunters and scientists go looking for the big ones, like the Titanic or Sir John Franklin’s HMS Terror. But Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, estimates that there are more than three million undiscovered shipwrecks in the world’s oceans. Many of these ships are forgotten to history until divers, workers, or even fishermen stumble upon them.

In March of 1533, a ship named the Bom Jesus left Portugal from the port of Lisbon, bound for western India. It carried naval equipment and other goods that Portugal could trade for pepper and spices. The route was treacherous and long. It was centuries before the Suez Canal opened, and ships sailing from Portugal to India had to go around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. Four months into a journey that would take more than a year, the fleet that included the Bom Jesus hit a storm, and the ship was blown off course. It disappeared and wasn’t seen again for 475 years.

In 2008, diamond miners working off the coast of Namibia, where the desert meets the Atlantic Ocean, found the remains of a ship. Incredibly well-preserved, the ship was laden with 40 tons of cargo, including gold and silver coins, copper ingots, and more than 100 elephant tusks. Described by archeologists as a time vessel, the Bom Jesus shipwreck offers a glimpse back in time and also leaves scientists with some unanswered questions.

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A scientific glimpse into the past

This isn’t the first time people have found a lost shipwreck holding piles of untouched treasure. While the valuable coins may grab the general public’s attention, the elephant tusks opened a different window into the past. This is the largest-ever archaeological discovery of African elephant ivory. Scientists conducted tests on the tusks that not only provided information about elephant populations in the 16th century but also told a story about early trade networks.

The tusks came from at least 17 different herds of forest elephants, which were preferred due to their hard, straight tusks that could be more easily carved. Of these 17 lineages, only four still exist in modern Africa today. The genetic information provided by this ivory can help with modern study efforts, revealing the deep roots of elephant ancestry helps strengthen the case for conservation.

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The lost populations are attributed to centuries of ivory hunting. Ivory was very valuable and could be used for jewelry, functional and decorative items, and religious objects. The Bom Jesus tusks came from male and female elephants both young and old and were supplied from different communities, indicating internal trade networks in Africa.

The cargo helps bring the past to life, but one mystery has yet to be solved. The remains of the approximately 200 sailors that were likely aboard the Bom Jesus were never found. Portugal waived its claim to the artifacts, and many are now on display at the Jasper House Museum in Oranjemund, Namibia. The ship is the oldest shipwreck ever found along the western edge of Sub-Saharan Africa.

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We’ve entered Seattle’s Third Act

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The Lake Washington Ship Canal, the working waterway connecting Lake Union to Puget Sound, where shipyards, fishing boats and houseboats share the shoreline with the region’s new wave of tech startups. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

Opinion: A year ago, GeekWire ran a headline that posed an uncomfortable question to the local startup community: “Seattle is a global AI hub — but where are the superstar startups?” 

The answer, we believe, was hiding in plain sight. 

Walk a half-mile today along the banks of Lake Union or through the industrial blocks of Kent, and you will pass a unicorn that didn’t exist a half decade back.

The superstar startups are here. They just don’t look like the superstars that came before. Instead of pure software, this new generation is building intelligent machines, physical products like rockets, power plants, and off-road vehicles that operate in the real world.

Some call this deep tech. We call it Seattle’s Third Act. 

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As Seattle-based venture capitalists, we have watched this shift up close, conversation by conversation, founder by founder, dollar by dollar. Out of those data points came a framework, one that we think holds the city’s past, present and future in three acts:

  • Act I: Maritime and aerospace. These industries taught the city how to build complex hardware and left behind the infrastructure to sustain it, from shipyards to airplane hangars.
  • Act II: Software and cloud computing. The industry that made the city an economic powerhouse and drew a quarter of the country’s AI engineers to Seattle.
  • Act III: Intelligent machines. The child of its two predecessors and what’s taking shape today: software-enabled hardware, conceived by the region’s world-class talent and built atop its unique physical infrastructure.
Click for larger image.

Across the national press and social feeds, the perception of Seattle in 2026 is not a positive one. Downtown office towers sit mostly empty while sweeping layoffs cut tens of thousands from the workforce. Policymakers passed tax legislation, hampering Big Tech and startups alike. And Starbucks, the hometown company, is leaving the hometown

Despite the city’s sinking reputation as a place to do business, Seattle’s Third Act companies are continuing to double down on the region. Few places on earth hold all three of the ingredients these companies need: legacy industrial infrastructure, world-class AI talent, and deep manufacturing know-how. 

Of course, those strengths carry a cost. High taxes and rising overhead mean any company that can grow without the full set has reason to leave — and many already have.

Pure software firms, free to operate from anywhere, drift toward cheaper hubs or the density of the Bay Area. Pure manufacturers, drawing little from the local engineering pool, get priced out by the overhead.

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But for companies in robotics, energy, space, and defense, the calculus runs the other way. These are industries that demand all three of the region’s strengths at once, and so the tradeoffs are worth making.

Third Act companies grow in person, by recruiting and managing the best software and hardware talent under one roof. They also need things pure software never did: high-bay space with cranes and roll-up doors, freight and runway access through Sea-Tac and Paine Field, thousands of acres to run a vehicle hard, and protected ports that open to the high seas.

You can run a coffee chain from Tennessee, but you cannot test a seafaring drone boat there.

Don’t believe us? Just take a look at some of Seattle’s hottest startups right now:

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  • Endurance Energy, the subsea geothermal startup, works out of a converted fishery on Lake Union, giving its team direct access to the water where they’ll test their first-of-its-kind power plant.
  • Overland AI, which builds autonomous off-road vehicles, keeps its headquarters in Fremont, manufactures in South Seattle, and tests across a hundred square miles of open terrain in central Washington. 
  • Stoke Space, the reusable-rocket unicorn, co-locates its factory and headquarters in Kent while proving hardware at a 75-acre range in Moses Lake. 
  • AIM, which builds autonomy for construction vehicles, operates a proving ground in Monroe and was drawn to the region for its mix of software and hardware talent.

Perhaps the strongest vindication for Seattle’s Third Act appeal is the companies and leaders choosing to move here. Emergency response drone-maker Brinc relocated its headquarters from Las Vegas. Orbital data center startup Starcloud left El Segundo after its CEO, Philip Johnston, said “everyone we want to hire is in Redmond.” 

Seattle has also cultivated a world-class nuclear ecosystem to match. Fusion pioneers Helion, Zap, and Avalanche have raised nearly $2 billion combined, while TerraPower has broken ground on a $4 billion next-generation fission reactor. Meanwhile, Zeno Power is opening a new factory to produce nuclear batteries. 

The foundation for the Third Act is set, but having the raw ingredients is not the same as winning the future.

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Taking the next step will require a greater appetite for risk. Young builders have to choose the uncertainty of an early-stage startup over the golden handcuffs of Big Tech. Investors have to write early checks for capital-intensive hardware that may take years to pay off. Founders have to build the culture Silicon Valley made second nature long ago, where resources are pooled, introductions traded, and learnings shared.

The rest falls to our elected officials. Third Act companies build in the physical world, and leaders who want to anchor the region’s economy for a generation have to clear the path. A founder shaping metal and code should spend their days on hard engineering, not on permitting lines, red tape, and taxes that chase ambition to friendlier states.

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It seems that every week brings another round of grim economic headlines. This constant drumbeat does little to alter Seattle’s trajectory and a great deal to wear down the people who live here. Maybe what we need most is the promise of an ambitious new chapter worth building toward, rather than a decline to defend against.

The question GeekWire asked a year ago has an answer and an address — or, rather, several of them: a converted fishery on Lake Union, a factory floor in Kent, a proving ground in Monroe, a hundred square miles of central Washington scrubland with a driverless vehicle running hard across it.

Seattle’s superstar startups have been hiding in plain sight. Now, the rest of us have to mobilize behind them: investors writing the early checks, policymakers clearing the way, and founders willing to take the leap and build the next one here. 

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Watch Man City vs Bournemouth: Live Streams and TV Channels

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Today’s Man City vs Bournemouth live streams pit two coaches with big shoes to fill against each other on the opening weekend of the Premier League 2026/27 season.

City boss Enzo Maresca has the unenviable task of following Pep Guardiola, who stepped down at the end of last season after winning 20 trophies in 10 years. The new era didn’t get off to the best of starts, with the Italian presiding over a crumbling 3-0 defeat by Premier League champions Arsenal in last Sunday’s Community Shield. It puts Maresca under a little bit more pressure for this league opener against Bournemouth, who finished a record sixth last term. Midfielder Elliot Anderson should make his home debut after a £116m move from Nottingham Forest in the summer.

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A lawsuit says Oura’s sleep stages are AI guesses with a coin flip’s odds

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A proposed class action filed in San Francisco alleges Oura’s sleep staging is generated by AI estimates rather than measurement, and names Finnish parent Oura Health Oy as a defendant. Oura says it stands behind its science and accuracy claims.

The number Oura puts on its own product pages is now the subject of a lawsuit. A proposed class action filed in the Northern District of California alleges the company’s sleep tracking cannot support its accuracy claims, and names both Oura Inc. and its Finnish parent Oura Health Oy as defendants.

The disputed line is specific. Oura has advertised “95% Sleep Staging Accuracy compared to clinical sleep lab,” which the complaint argues a finger-worn device cannot substantiate.

The physical argument is the core of it. A polysomnography sleep study measures brain activity, eye movement and muscle tone through electrodes, none of which a ring has.

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The filing’s language is not restrained. It describes Oura’s sleep stages as “AI-generated guesses” with roughly “a coin flip’s chance” of being right.

It leans on published research for that. The complaint cites a study of 45 patients that found overall sleep stage classification accuracy of 53.18%, with REM sleep overestimated by an average of 31.56 minutes.

Oura rejects the characterisation. “We stand behind our science, research, and accuracy claims,” a spokesperson said, adding that its sleep staging has been compared favourably against polysomnography in multiple studies.

The case carries seven counts, including fraud by misrepresentation and breaches of California’s Unfair Competition Law and False Advertising Law. Alongside damages, it asks for a corrective advertising injunction requiring prominent disclaimers.

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The timing is the uncomfortable part. Oura filed confidentially for a US initial public offering in May, after reaching an $11bn valuation that made it Europe’s most valuable consumer health hardware company.

Europe has an interest here beyond ownership. The same 95% figure is marketed to European buyers, where the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive prohibits misleading claims about a product’s main characteristics and about “the results and material features of tests or checks carried out on the product.

Until recently that mattered less in practice. Since June 2023 the Representative Actions Directive has let designated consumer bodies bring collective redress actions across the EU, and unfair commercial practices sit in its annex.

Oura knows the machinery from the other side, having sued a rival over its own patents. Whether any European consumer organisation picks this up will say more about the new redress regime than about the ring.

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GTA 6 Leaks Prompt Take-Two to Seek Subpoenas for Microsoft, Discord Data

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Grand Theft Auto 6 is still months away from release, but one leaker who appears to have a build of the game has been posting snippets online over the past week. Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of publisher Rockstar Games, has gone to court to get to the bottom of who this leaker could be.

The stakes are high for Take-Two, as GTA 6 has been so eagerly awaited and is expected to sell so well that the rest of the games industry has stayed away from its November release date by cramming their launches into the months before, or waiting until February 2027 at the earliest. Official GTA 6 trailers get millions of views, and are so popular that Netflix scored exclusive access to the next teaser ahead of its public release. Take-Two has been extremely careful in how it’s dripped info about the game, which is why it’s pursuing legal action against a prominent leaker.

Take-Two filed a petition with the US District Court in the Southern District of New York on Thursday, asking the court to issue a subpoena to Microsoft and Discord for information about suspected GTA 6 leakers, as reported earlier by Kotaku and shown in filings reported on by The Verge. The company wants data from Discord servers and from a repository hosted on GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, in order to identify the individuals posting the copyrighted content that allegedly infringes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

“The copyrighted material includes but is not limited to audiovisual content, artwork, images, dialogue or other creative elements,” the filing alleges. “Take-Two, through its counsel of record, has submitted a sworn declaration confirming that the purpose for which the DMCA subpoena is sought is to obtain the identity of an alleged infringer or infringers, and that such information will only be used for the purpose of protecting Take-Two’s rights.”

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In the court filing, Take-Two lists the account names of multiple Discord users that it’s seeking info on, which includes a bevy of data that could identify them: original message logs, IP access logs, email addresses, phone numbers, connected accounts, linked services such as Google and Xbox, backend metadata and telemetry, and device identifiers, among much else. As for Microsoft, Take-Two only requests details from the GitHub repository that GTA 6 was posted on, which is a page dedicated to info about the game leaks, as well as attempts to identify the leakers. The filing doesn’t specify whether it wants information about that repository’s users.

Both filings call for a subpoena to be issued and for the requested information to be produced by Sept. 4. This is not a court order, but rather a request to the court clerk to issue the DMCA subpoena.

A Discord spokesperson said in an emailed statement on Friday that the company “will review and comply with valid subpoenas” when received.

Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The GTA 6 leaks began in mid-August when a short gameplay clip was posted on social media by a group calling itself CyberLeek. According to the GitHub repository, nine gameplay videos have been posted on various video-sharing sites. The clips are only a minute or two of footage of one of the GTA 6 protagonists, Jason, driving around town, stealing cars and conducting other activities. Some of the videos show cutscenes and tutorials from the game, but they don’t appear to be in any logical order.

A clip posted online Wednesday had the message, “No physical discs? Then more leeks!” IGN reported, implying that Rockstar would need to reverse its decision to make GTA 6 a digital-only game. Rockstar confirmed there wouldn’t be a physical disc for the game when it revealed the preorder details and pricing back in June. Retail stores will have a physical edition for sale; however, that version just contains a code for the game, not a disc. Rockstar has yet to comment on the threat.

GTA 6 will be released on Nov. 19 for the PS5 and Xbox Series X and S consoles. The Standard Edition will cost $80, while the Ultimate Edition will cost $100.

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Turning Corroded, Bug-Loving WiiMotes Into A Working One

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A time-honored tradition in the electronics repair business is to make many into one, specifically a stack of broken devices into one that works. So too with a triplet of heavily corroded and bug-infested WiiMote controllers that [eWastelander] dug out of a box of e-waste. After suffering abuse like leaving in leaky alkaline cells, bugs and general corrosion the task was to see whether at least one working WiiMote could be assembled from these three. (Video, embedded below.)

Adding to the fun was that the PCBs in these WiiMotes spanned at least two hardware revisions, and on one board the battery corrosion had caused an IC to fall off. After an initial assessment, neutralizing the battery acid and a deep clean of all the disassembled parts, it was time to give it a shot at reassembly into something resembling a Wii controller you could use and even want to touch without washing your hands afterwards.

Ultimately at least one working WiiMote was put together, with still an open question whether the remaining two  units in much worse conditions could be revived in some way. An interesting idea here is to use the WiiMote shells for a custom OpenMote board, which replaces the guts with an ESP32-S3-based system for more general non-Wii things around the house.

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Why is the Premier League now subject to new cybersecurity rules, and what punishments could they face? The experts weigh in

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With the 2026-27 season kicking off this weekend, Premier League football teams are facing a new set of rules. But these ones aren’t enforced on the pitch, they’re being enforced by the Premier League board.

As the Premier League has adapted to a new era of fan engagement and interaction, teams are holding huge amounts of personal data, including names, email addresses, credentials, and even financial information. These place them at greater risk of data leaks and make them a primary target for cyber attacks.

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Grandpa’s Steel Bianchi Becomes the Quiet Electric Bike No Company Builds

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Bianchi E-Bike Electric Conversion Project
GRMNT pulled his grandfather’s old road bike out of storage and found a Bianchi built with real Tange steel tubing. Years of grime covered the frame, yet the metal underneath still held the clean lines and solid construction of a proper 1980s road machine. He cleaned it thoroughly, then set out to give the bike an electric boost that left almost no visible trace of the change.



A used Bafang mid-drive motor turned up unexpectedly for €10. The device had clearly had a tough life because water had gotten inside, the magnets had taken a hammering and one of them had broken, and a blind bearing would not move. When GRMNT attempted to withdraw the bearing, they damaged the housing. But GRMNT doesn’t give up easily, and he sets to work mending the damage, replacing worn bearings, recovering the magnet, and restarting the engine. Once placed in the bottom bracket, the drive sat low, centered, and ready to engage whenever necessary, as long as you were spinning the stock chainring at a fair speed.

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Bianchi E-Bike Electric Conversion Project
A batch of recycled Samsung 50E batteries, repurposed from somewhere, supplied power. Ten of the cells were joined and spot welded together with nickel strips and protected by a BMS system. There was an issue with the wiring early on, but it was detected before the pack had completed any significant work. Anyway, once everything was in order, the finished battery was placed in a bespoke leather case designed and hand sewed by GRMNT from some exquisite Italian calf skin. The pack sat on the frame as if it had always been there, and the entire configuration appeared to be factory-installed. The case was secured with a simple clasp, and everything was kept understated.

Bianchi E-Bike Electric Conversion Project
As one might expect, the entire setup remained relatively quiet. The majority of the traditional suspects, including the throttle, factory display, and all visible wiring, were removed or disconnected. Instead, the motor was operated by a single simple button, and riders looking over the handlebars saw nothing but a completely normal bike. Battery level information was provided via a different type of display entirely. A small microcontroller monitored the pack voltage and utilized it to trigger a solenoid located within the handlebars. Every time the battery reduced another quarter of its capacity, the solenoid would click over and produce a clear, tactile sound, similar to an old-fashioned instrument. When the battery was first connected, the system flashed a short series of clicks to notify the rider that everything was working. There were no flashy screens or numbers, just a solid, old-school vibe.

Bianchi E-Bike Electric Conversion Project
During the drive, everything worked perfectly. A fifty-kilometer loop through the hills surrounding Iași, Romania served as a great test, with plenty of ups and downs to push the system to its limits. On a particularly painful twenty-six-degree incline, the motor kicked in, making what would have been a difficult slog appear nearly effortless. On the flats, however, the bike glided along pleasantly at 35 km/h using only human power. The frame and motor were unaffected by the dirt paths and rocky ground, but the original brakes reminded us that some of the base parts needed some TLC before they were up to pace. However, by the end of the ride, the battery had a beautiful round forty-plus percent charge.
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AMD’s next-gen Medusa APUs are getting ready for launch, and Linux just spilled the beans

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AMD’s next-generation Ryzen AI 500 “Medusa Point” APUs are getting another step closer to reality, and this time Linux is doing the leaking. As first noted by Phoronix, AMD has published the firmware needed for its upcoming RDNA 4m integrated graphics, giving us another indication that the Zen 6-based mobile chips are nearing their debut.

RDNA 4m is a rather interesting hybrid

The new firmware targets AMD’s GFX 11.7 graphics IP, known as RDNA 4m. It sits in an unusual position between the existing RDNA 3.5 architecture and full-blown RDNA 4. AMD’s desktop RDNA 4 GPUs use the newer GFX 12 family, while RDNA 4m remains part of the GFX 11 branch.

The “m” is widely believed to stand for mobile, with RDNA 4m seemingly designed specifically for APUs. Earlier Linux and LLVM work suggests it brings some RDNA 4-style features, including FP8/BF8 conversion and WMMA instructions, potentially giving Medusa Point newer AI and graphics capabilities without a complete graphics architecture overhaul.

The new firmware supports GFX 11.7.0 and 11.7.1, along with security, display, and memory-management components, suggesting AMD is getting much of the software stack ready for the new chips. That’s especially interesting given previous leaks of a 10-core Zen 6 Medusa Point APU in Geekbench, which showed promising performance gains over current Ryzen mobile chips. AMD has confirmed the Medusa codename for its next-gen Zen 6 client platform, but the exact specifications and launch details are still under wraps.

The APU refresh is getting spicy

The biggest question now is what AMD can actually squeeze out of this RDNA 4m design. It isn’t a full RDNA 4 GPU, but the added instruction support could give AMD’s integrated graphics a useful feature boost while keeping the APU relatively efficient.

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For now, the firmware landing ahead of launch is another promising sign that Medusa Point is moving from roadmap territory toward real hardware. If AMD can pair Zen 6’s CPU improvements with a more capable iGPU and modern AI features, its next Ryzen generation could make for some seriously interesting laptops.

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Frontier AI labs still won’t say how they’d contain a rogue model

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Few of the top AI labs have published or demonstrated containment response plans, according to a recent study. A containment plan spells out what happens once an AI is caught trying to subvert human control — what access gets cut, and when the system gets shut down entirely.

That’s the finding from Guidelight AI Standards, an organization dedicated to promoting safe frontier AI development practices, which graded five leading labs on how prepared they are for exactly this scenario. OpenAI came out on top; Anthropic and Meta scored lowest. The findings matters as agentic AI takes on more autonomous roles inside companies’ own systems, and as regulators in California and New York begin requiring disclosure. For anyone building on or investing in these models, it’s a rare independent read on how seriously each lab treats operational risk versus how it talks about it.

Guidelight’s assessment was based on publicly available plans from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and xAI, graded across a range of metrics, including how well each company logs and monitors what its AI systems are doing internally, whether it halts systems after a surge of flagged misbehavior, whether independent third parties audit its controls and publish findings, and what its exact plan is for containing a model that goes off the rails.

Concern over whether AI companies can contain their increasingly capable and agentic models has grown in the wake of a series of high-profile cybersecurity incidents in which models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta gained unintended access to the internet during safety evaluations and hacked into external systems. 

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The findings highlight differences in how AI companies are publicly approaching safety as they scale up agentic deployment into environments where AI systems can take serious actions at scale. While some AI companies have detailed how they test their models for dangerous capabilities before deployment, they’ve generally been less vocal about what happens when models already operating inside their systems misbehave. 

“I was surprised by how little the AI companies have said about how they would handle a very serious incident if their model did escape their control in some sense,” Steven Adler, Guidelight’s chief scientist and former OpenAI safety researcher, told TechCrunch. 

Guidelight defines a containment plan as a “pre-specified plan, triggered when the AI is detected trying to subvert control, which covers what permissions to revoke from the model, who the model may continue operating for, under what constraints, and when to take it fully offline.”

“There’s good reason to think that the leading models at the frontier AI companies right now are misaligned in some sense,” Adler said. “Whenever the models are doing work on the company’s behalf, the company should have some scaffolding around it to be able to tell what that AI is doing, look for signs of misalignment, stop it from doing something very dangerous before it takes that action, and generally plan for what they would do in the event of a serious control incident where they have an emergency on their hands and need to figure out how to contain that loss of control incident.”

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To date, most of the plans in place for managing catastrophic risk are still largely left up to the companies. Guidelight’s report says the best public evidence shows that companies have “few containment protocols ready for an emergency.” 

There could, of course, be containment plans that companies have in place but haven’t shared publicly. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch the Guidelight report doesn’t represent the full scope of the company’s AI safety and security measures. The company did not respond to TechCrunch’s question of whether Google has an internal containment response plan that has not been publicly disclosed.

An OpenAI spokesperson mirrored similar sentiments, saying Guidelight’s assessment doesn’t capture all of the company’s internal practices. “We have a process for requiring restricting permissions, pausing workloads, limiting deployment, or taking the model fully offline, and have applied it,” the spokesperson said.

Meta declined to say whether it has an internal containment response plan, instead pointing TechCrunch towards an existing AI framework that outlines thresholds of risk and how it tests for loss of containment.

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Lily Li, a privacy and AI lawyer and founder of Metaverse Law, told TechCrunch she believes companies might be hesitant to disclose the full scope of their containment policies and assessments on public-facing websites for legal, not just competitive, reasons.

“The concern from a company perspective is that if you make the disclosures too specific, and you’re not living up to your promises, that could form the basis of an unfair and deceptive marketing claim and expose you to more liability going forward,” Li said.

The point of Guidelight’s study is largely to encourage companies to be more transparent about their safety plans. Regulators are starting to force the issue, too.

California’s SB 53, which took effect this year, requires large frontier developers to publish frameworks explaining how they identify and respond to critical safety incidents and manage risks from models circumventing oversight mechanisms. New York’s RAISE Act, which has similar criteria, takes effect in January. 

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Last month, representatives introduced the AI Kill Switch Act, a bipartisan federal bill that would require major AI developers to build and maintain technical mechanisms to shut down rogue AI models. 

“A kill switch is the bare minimum for today’s models,” said Connor Leahy, U.S. executive director of nonprofit ControlAI. “If the last few weeks revealed anything, it is that these companies don’t understand the systems they are building, and the models are growing to a point where they’re harder to rein in when they go rogue. Without a way to turn off the current dangerous systems, and with all the incentives to continue building more uncontrollable systems, we are heading in a very dangerous direction.” 

Without a containment plan in place, Adler said, companies might be figuring out their responses to an emergency on the fly and “winging it in response to this much faster adversary.”

Guidelight’s assessment of whether frontier AI companies implement six priority practices in Guidelight’s Control standard. Assessment is based only on publicly available information.Image Credits:Guidelight AI Standards

Guidelight’s assessment measured whether each company implements six priority practices from its Control standard, based only on publicly available information — so a low score reflects a lack of public disclosure, not necessarily a lack of internal safeguards.

The companies with the lowest scores for publishing their containment plan were Meta and Anthropic — the latter perhaps more surprising than the former given Anthropic’s rhetoric on safety. Guidelight says Anthropic’s August Risk Report doesn’t mention “limiting the deployment of one of its models as one of the possible results of its process to investigate and respond to misalignment and control incidents.” Similarly, Guidelight was able to find no evidence that Meta has a containment response plan or has any plans to adopt one. 

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An Anthropic spokesperson said that if the company detected a model attempting to evade oversight or otherwise subvert human control, it would conduct a risk assessment focused on determining whether containment is the appropriate response.

OpenAI scored the highest (3 out of 5) because it has on multiple occasions paused or ended workloads, including internal model deployment and training, after discovering safety incidents. It has also described what steps it would take before resuming workloads. 

“However, we have found no evidence that [OpenAI] has adopted a formal plan for when and how to respond to misalignment incidents in the future,” the report reads. 

Adler noted that OpenAI’s high score is a relatively recent development on the heels of the Hugging Face incident (in which an OpenAI model broke out of its testing sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face’s systems while trying to cheat on a cybersecurity evaluation). After that, the company shared more details about how it has cordoned off some of its misbehaving models. 

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That episode is just one example of AI systems acting against the goals of the company that built them. Consider a separate case involving Anthropic’s models, which essentially tried to talk the maintainers of an open source codebase into accepting code with vulnerabilities.

Adler said such a circumstance could easily happen within an AI company’s internal systems. To prevent that, he suggests companies scan their AI system’s chain of thought — the model’s step-by-step reasoning — to look out for signs of deception, long-running plotting, or plans to introduce vulnerabilities into code that they can take advantage of later. 

The methods Guidelight is advocating for are very straightforward to implement, Adler says, and in many cases, versions of them already exist. “It’s about making the decision inside of the company to care enough about this risk to slightly broaden the scope,” Adler said. 

One of the main challenges is that researchers want to be able to operate flexibly within their AI systems, and introducing real-time, preventative monitoring could create friction. “Researchers basically do their thing, and if there’s an issue, someone else gets to clean it up afterward, and the researchers don’t have to change their workflow in the meantime,” he said.

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The problem with “clean-up monitoring after the fact” is that it leads to researchers scrambling around to fix problems. And for some types of incidents, it might be too late. For example, an AI could turn off a company’s control system, which means researchers can no longer count on catching the misbehavior later. 

Many in the AI industry will complain that creating set plans to handle misbehavior is fundamentally difficult because AI moves too fast; today’s plans will be worthless tomorrow. 

Adler evokes the old adage that plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable. 

“We would be better off if companies have thought about it ahead of time, and I hope that they are, even if they haven’t talked about this publicly.”

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xAI did not respond in time to comment.

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Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey 4K Blu-ray Listed for November 17 With HDR10 and 1.78:1 Video

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Christopher Nolan spent years making the case that some movies deserve the biggest screen possible. With The Odyssey, audiences apparently agreed. The first feature shot entirely with IMAX film cameras has become the highest-grossing IMAX release of all time, with its theatrical run still continuing. It has also become Nolan’s biggest global box-office success, which makes the upcoming 4K UHD release considerably more important than another routine studio catalog title.

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release of The Odyssey is currently listed for November 17, 2026, exactly four months after its July 17 theatrical debut. Barnes & Noble has a live SteelBook preorder carrying that date, while Blu-ray.com has posted preliminary specifications for the U.S. release.

There is one important caveat. Universal Pictures has not yet issued its formal home-entertainment announcement with final technical specifications. That means the release date has solid retail support, while the video, audio, aspect ratio, disc configuration, and bonus features should still be treated as provisional.

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Current 4K UHD Specifications

Blu-ray.com currently lists the following:

  • 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital
  • 172-minute runtime
  • Native 4K / 2160p
  • HEVC / H.265 video
  • HDR10
  • 1.78:1 aspect ratio
  • English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, 48kHz/24-bit
  • BD-100 UHD disc
  • Two BD-50 Blu-ray discs
  • Three discs total

The 1.78:1 listing is easily the most interesting part.

The Odyssey was photographed entirely using IMAX film cameras, but theatrical presentation varied according to the venue. IMAX 70mm locations could show the complete 1.43:1 frame, while other theaters used formats including 1.90:1, 2.20:1, 2.39:1, and 1.85:1.

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A 1.78:1 home presentation would not reproduce the entire 1.43:1 IMAX image. It would, however, potentially preserve considerably more vertical picture information than the 2.39:1 scope version while filling a conventional 16:9 television.

What we do not know yet is whether the entire movie will remain at 1.78:1 or whether the final disc will use variable aspect ratios.

Nolan Has Done This Before

There is a useful precedent.

Universal’s Oppenheimer 4K UHD used a BD-100, HDR10, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, and variable 2.20:1 and 1.78:1 framing. The expanded sequences allowed the IMAX footage to nearly fill a 16:9 television.

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The difference is that Oppenheimer combined IMAX and conventional 65mm photography. The Odyssey was shot entirely on IMAX film.

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If the current 1.78:1 listing proves accurate across the entire feature, Nolan and Universal could be creating a home-video presentation specifically framed around 16:9 displays rather than simply reproducing one of the theatrical versions.

That could make this one of the more interesting studio 4K transfers of 2026.

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HDR and Audio: What Is Actually Confirmed?

Blu-ray.com currently lists the The Odyssey 4K UHD with HDR10 and an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack at 48kHz/24-bit.

Those specifications should still be treated as preliminary.

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment has not yet published a formal announcement confirming the final HDR format, audio codec, or channel configuration for the disc. No Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, or DTS:X option is currently listed, but their absence should not be considered final until Universal releases the complete technical specifications.

A lossless 5.1-channel soundtrack would certainly be consistent with Christopher Nolan’s previous UHD releases, including Oppenheimer, but consistency is not confirmation.

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The IMAX Record

The physical release also arrives after an extraordinary theatrical run.

IMAX announced that The Odyssey had surpassed Avatar to become the highest-grossing IMAX release ever, with global IMAX revenue continuing to climb as the film expands into additional markets.

That matters because premium large-format exhibition was not merely a side attraction for this movie. IMAX became a significant part of its commercial success, particularly at the limited number of theaters capable of showing the full 70mm 1.43:1 presentation.

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Most viewers never had access to one of those screens.

The 4K UHD therefore has a rather difficult job: preserve as much as possible of a movie designed around enormous-format photography while translating it to a 65-, 77-, or 85-inch television.

Why This 4K Release Matters

There is also a broader physical-media angle.

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A movie photographed on IMAX film generates enormous amounts of fine detail, texture, and film grain. Streaming can look excellent, but its significantly lower bitrates place limits on how much of that information survives compression.

100GB UHD disc gives Universal substantially more bandwidth to work with.

That does not make a television equivalent to IMAX 70mm. Nothing does.

But for viewers who care about picture quality, aspect ratio, lossless audio, and physical ownership, this could become the definitive practical way to watch The Odyssey at home.

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Nolan has also remained one of Hollywood’s strongest advocates for physical media. Oppenheimer became a notable UHD seller in 2023, and Universal’s decision to prepare another premium multi-disc package suggests that major studio 4K releases still have commercial value when the title justifies the effort.

What We Still Don’t Know

Several significant details remain unconfirmed:

  • Whether 1.78:1 will be used throughout the entire film
  • Whether the final presentation will use variable aspect ratios
  • Whether Dolby Vision will be included
  • Whether Dolby Atmos or DTS will be included
  • Final language and subtitle options
  • Bonus features
  • How the two BD-50 discs will be used
  • Standard-edition pricing
  • Final retailer-exclusive editions
  • Whether Universal will formally confirm November 17 without changes

The three-disc configuration certainly leaves room for substantial supplemental material, but anything beyond that would be speculation until Universal releases the complete details.

The Bottom Line

The Odyssey was designed around IMAX film, and its record-breaking theatrical performance proved there was still a very large audience willing to seek out that experience. The 4K UHD cannot reproduce a six-story IMAX screen, but the preliminary specifications suggest Universal and Nolan are giving the home release the attention it deserves.

The BD-100, native 4K presentation, HDR10, lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1, and especially the listed 1.78:1 aspect ratio make this one of the more technically interesting UHD releases currently scheduled for 2026. The unanswered question is whether those specifications survive unchanged when Universal publishes the final details.

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If they do, The Odyssey could become one of the year’s reference 4K discs.

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