‘Deepfakes spreading and more AI companions’: seven takeaways from the latest artificial intelligence safety report – AI (artificial intelligence) – The Guardian

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‘Deepfakes spreading and more AI companions’: seven takeaways from the latest artificial intelligence safety report

Annual review highlights growing capabilities of AI models, while examining issues from cyber-attacks to job disruption

By Dan Milmo, Global technology editor, Tue 3 Feb 2026 00.00 EST Share

The International AI Safety report is an annual survey of technological progress and the risks it is creating across multiple areas, from deepfakes to the jobs market.

Commissioned at the 2023 global AI safety summit, it is chaired by the Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, who describes the “daunting challenges” posed by rapid developments in the field. The report is also guided by senior advisers, including Nobel laureates Geoffrey Hinton and Daron Acemoglu.

Here are some of the key points from the second annual report, published on Tuesday. It stresses that it is a state-of-play document, rather than a vehicle for making specific policy recommendations to governments. Nonetheless, it is likely to help frame the debate for policymakers, tech executives and NGOs attending the next global AI summit in India this month.

Anthropic has released models with heightened safety measures. Photograph: Dado Ruvić /Reuters

1. The capabilities of AI models are improving A host of new AI models – the technology that underpins tools like chatbots – were released last year, including OpenAI’s GPT-5, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 and Google’s Gemini 3. The report points to new “reasoning systems” – which solve problems by breaking them down into smaller steps – showing improved performance in maths, coding and science. Bengio said there has been a “very significant jump” in AI reasoning. Last year, systems developed by Google and OpenAI achieved a gold-level performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad – a first for AI.However, the report says AI capabilities remain “jagged”, referring to systems displaying astonishing prowess in some areas but not in others. While advanced AI systems are impressive at maths, science, coding and creating images, they remain prone to making false statements, or “hallucinations”, and cannot carry out lengthy projects autonomously.Nonetheless, the report cites a study showing that AI systems are rapidly improving their ability to carry out certain software engineering tasks – with their duration doubling every seven months. If that rate of progress continues, AI systems could complete tasks lasting several hours by 2027 and several days by 2030. This is the scenario under which AI becomes a real threat to jobs.But for now, says the report, “reliable automation of long or complex tasks remains infeasible”.

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