A chatbot answer may have played a part in one of the most consequential US foreign policy decisions of the past year. According to a report from Time magazine, President Trump spent hours questioning Elon Musk's Grok in December 2025, including about how Venezuelans would react if their president were removed. About a month later, the US invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro.
The account comes from a single source who spoke to Time. It has not been independently confirmed in the material available to us. But it adds a new dimension to the debate over how AI systems are used at the top of government.
OpenAI has parted ways with three researchers from its safety team. According to The Wall Street Journal, which reported the news on Thursday, the three allegedly passed confidential company information to an outside AI safety organization.
The timing matters. The departures land in a week when OpenAI is already under pressure over how it handles safety, both inside the company and in the products it ships.
What OpenAI says happened
OpenAI confirmed the departures in a statement to the WSJ. A spokesperson said the company had "parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information."
Not every step in an AI agent needs a model that writes. Many steps only need a model that picks. That is the idea behind Strands Decider 2B, a new open-source release from Amazon Web Services' Strands Labs team. AWS describes it as a lightweight "decision model" built to make fast choices inside agentic workflows without generating any text.
The model is out now on Hugging Face. The full codebase, training scripts and examples are on GitHub. AWS has tuned it for local use and quick experiments, so developers can run it on their own laptops as well as in public cloud environments.
Airbnb's fall product update pushes the company in two directions at once. In the physical world, it is adding more services to compete with hotels. In the app, it is using AI and its own user network to help travelers decide where to go and what to do.
The headline feature is AI-powered search for properties. Alongside it come expanded in-stay services and a new set of social tools built around friends' travel history.
AI search, but not a chatbot
Airbnb has been careful with AI. CEO Brian Chesky has deliberately avoided a chatbot-style interface, and he hinted at the new search feature earlier this year. The result is a toggle in the app rather than a conversation window.
OpenAI says it has shut down a coordinated attempt to extract the hidden reasoning of its models. Independent researchers, however, found that the same technique kept working on Microsoft Azure for weeks afterwards. The case shows how a security fix at the source can miss the cloud platforms that resell the same models.
What OpenAI says happened
In a blog post, OpenAI describes what it calls an "adversarial distillation" campaign. Distillation means training one model on another model's output. The most valuable target is the full chain of thought: the intermediate steps a reasoning model works through before it answers. Users normally see only the final answer.
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