Journalism Training and Teenage Research

OpenAI announced two initiatives aimed at young people on 8 September: a new journalism training programme for university students and a $5 million research fund into how generative AI affects teenagers.

On the journalism side, OpenAI is providing more than 400 ChatGPT Edu subscriptions to graduate students and faculty at CUNY's Newmark J-School and Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism for the 2026-2027 academic year. The subscriptions are being delivered through collaborations with the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures and Medill's Knight Lab. Gina Chua, Executive Director of the Tow-Knight Center, said generative AI would "remake the information landscape" and that the Newmark community needed to be "immersed in this technology". Jeremy Gilbert of the Knight Lab said the support removed cost as a barrier for students wanting to use the latest AI tools. The move builds on existing OpenAI journalism partnerships, including with the American Journalism Project, the Lenfest Institute's AI Collaborative and Fellowship programme, WAN-IFRA's Newsroom AI Catalyst accelerator, which has worked with more than 165 newsrooms globally, and INMA. Tom Rubin, OpenAI's Chief of Intellectual Property and Content, said the company wanted human expertise to remain "front and center" as newsrooms adopt AI tools.

Separately, OpenAI said it would fund independent research into the effects of generative AI on 13 to 17-year-olds, with a particular focus on social and emotional development. Individual grants of up to $1 million will be available, with total funding capped at $5 million and up to 10% of each grant allowed to cover overhead costs. OpenAI said it welcomes interdisciplinary proposals spanning fields such as psychology, public health, sociology and AI safety, and will prioritise research from countries with significant AI adoption, as well as work involving ChatGPT, underrepresented populations, or studies capable of informing near-term policy decisions. Applications proposing research involving minors must address informed consent, safeguarding and data privacy. Applications opened on 8 September and close on 6 October 2026, with a panel of internal experts and advisers notifying successful applicants by 13 November.

Swiss Cheese Defences- Identity fraud goes industrial and off-the-shelf

Ofer distinguishes between two current attack patterns: highly sophisticated, professionally coordinated deepfake and injection attacks designed to beat detection outright, and a much larger volume of lower-effort, high-scale attempts that rely on bombarding systems rather than disguising themselves well. He argues the real story right now is industrialisation of scale rather than uniform improvement in quality, though both are accelerating in parallel. The conversation covers why agentic AI is opening a new front in identity fraud, particularly the unresolved problem of tying an AI agent’s identity back to the human who deployed it and the permissions it holds. Ofer is candid about the current state of agent defences, describing them as underdeveloped and easy to hijack or poison, comparing the current state of play to Swiss cheese. He also discusses cross-industry fraud detection, including how signals, rather than raw data, are now being shared across platforms including AU10TIX and Reality Defender to surface fraud rings invisible to any single organisation. The conversation also covers explainability as one of AI’s most underdeveloped capabilities, with Ofer arguing that flagging a session as fraudulent without a credible, defensible reason will increasingly run into regulatory and practical limits. Elsewhere, the discussion covers credential laundering and the manufactured construction of fake digital histories and footprints, and the shift toward digital ID wallets that Ofer believes will make physical document fraud increasingly rare. He closes on what he calls “agentic avatars,” AI systems capable of holding a full visual and verbal conversation on someone’s behalf, and why he expects identity verification to have to become genuinely immersive across every form of media as a result.

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