How the Rubin Observatory will help us understand dark matter and dark energy

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How the Rubin Observatory will help us understand dark matter and dark energy

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%. That’s how much of what’s floating about in the cosmos is ordinary matter—planets and stars and galaxies and the dust and gas between them. The other 95% is dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities aptly named for our inability to shed light on their true nature. Cosmologists have cast dark matter as the hidden glue binding galaxies together. Dark energy plays an opposite role, ripping the fabric of space apart. Neither emits, absorbs, or reflects light, rendering them effectively invisible. So rather than directly observing either of them, astronomers must carefully trace the imprint they leave behind. Previous work has begun pulling apart these dueling forces, but dark matter and dark energy remain shrouded in a blanket of questions—critically, what exactly are they? Enter the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, one of our 10 breakthrough technologies for 2025. Boasting the largest digital camera ever created, Rubin is expected to study the cosmos in the highest resolution yet once it begins observations later this year. And with a better window on the cosmic battle between dark matter and dark energy, Rubin might narrow down existing theories on what they are made of. Here’s a look at how. Untangling dark matter’s web In the 1930s, the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky proposed the existence of an unseen force named dunkle Materie—in English, dark matter—after studying a group of galaxies called the Coma Cluster. Zwicky found that the galaxies were traveling too quickly to be contained by their joint gravity and decided there must be a missing, unobservable mass holding the cluster together. Zwicky’s theory was initially met with much skepticism. But in the 1970s an American astronomer, Vera Rubin, obtained evidence that significantly strengthened the idea. Rubin studied the rotation rates of 60 individual galaxies and found that if a galaxy had only the mass we’re able to observe, that wouldn’t be enough to contain its structure; its spinning motion would send it ripping apart and sailing into space. Rubin’s results helped sell the idea of dark matter to the scientific community, since an unseen force seemed to be the only explanation for these spiraling galaxies’ breakneck spin speeds. “It wasn’t necessarily a smoking-gun discovery,” says Marc Kamionkowski, a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University. “But she saw a need for dark matter. And other people began seeing it too.” Evidence for dark matter only grew stronger in the ensuing decades. But sorting out what might be behind its effects proved tricky. Various subatomic particles were proposed. Some scientists posited that the phenomena supposedly generated by dark matter could also be explained by modifications to our theory of gravity. But so far the hunt, which has employed telescopes, particle colliders, and underground detectors, has failed to identify the culprit. The Rubin observatory’s main tool for investigating dark matter will be gravitational lensing, an observational technique that’s been used since the late ’70s. As light from distant galaxies travels to Earth, intervening dark matter distorts its image—like a cosmic magnifying glass. By measuring how the light is bent, astronomers can reverse-engineer a map of dark matter’s distribution. Other observatories, like the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, have already begun stitching together this map from their images of galaxies. But Rubin plans to do so with exceptional precision and scale, analyzing the shapes of billions of galaxies rather than the hundreds of millions that current telescopes observe, according to Andrés Alejandro Plazas Malagón, Rubin operations scientist at SLAC National Laboratory. “We’re going to have the widest galaxy survey so far,” Plazas Malagón says. Capturing the cosmos in such high definition requires Rubin’s 3.2-billion-pixel Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The LSST boasts the largest focal plane ever built for astronomy, granting it access to large patches of the sky. The telescope is also designed to reorient its gaze every 34 seconds, meaning astronomers will be able to scan the entire sky every three nights. The LSST will revisit each galaxy about 800 times throughout its tenure, says Steven Ritz, a Rubin project scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The repeat exposures will let Rubin team members more precisely measure how the galaxies are distorted, refining their map of dark matter’s web. “We’re going to see these galaxies deeply and frequently,” Ritz says. “That’s the power of Rubin: the sheer grasp of being able to see the universe in detail and on repeat.” The ultimate goal is to overlay this map on different models of dark matter and examine the results. The leading idea, the cold dark matter model, suggests that dark matter moves slowly compared to the speed of light and interacts with ordinary matter only through gravity. Other models suggest different behavior. Each comes with its own picture of how dark matter should clump in halos surrounding galaxies. By plotting its chart of dark matter against what those models predict, Rubin might exclude some theories and favor others. A cosmic tug of war If dark matter lies on one side of a magnet, pulling matter together, then you’ll flip it over to find dark energy, pushing it apart. “You can think of it as a cosmic tug of war,” Plazas Malagón says. Dark energy was discovered in the late 1990s, when astronomers found that the universe was not only expanding, but doing so at an accelerating rate, with galaxies moving away from one another at higher and higher speeds. “The expectation was that the relative velocity between any two galaxies should have been decreasing,” Kamionkowski says. “This cosmological expansion requires something that acts like antigravity.” Astronomers quickly decided there must be another unseen factor inflating the fabric of space and pegged it as dark matter’s cosmic foil. So far, dark energy has been observed primarily through Type Ia supernovas, a special breed of explosion that occurs when a white dwarf star accumulates too much mass. Because these supernovas all tend to have the same peak in luminosity, astronomers can gauge how far away they are by measuring how bright they appear from Earth. Paired with a measure of how fast they are moving, this data clues astronomers in on the universe’s expansion rate. Rubin will continue studying dark energy with high-resolution glimpses of Type Ia supernovas. But it also plans to retell dark energy’s cosmic history through gravitational lensing. Because light doesn’t travel instantaneously, when we peer into distant galaxies, we’re really looking at relics from millions to billions of years ago—however long it takes for their light to make the lengthy trek to Earth. Astronomers can effectively use Rubin as a makeshift time machine to see how dark energy has carved out the shape of the universe. “These are the types of questions that we want to ask: Is dark energy a constant? If not, is it evolving with time? How is it changing the distribution of dark matter in the universe?” Plazas Malagón says. If dark energy was weaker in the past, astronomers expect to see galaxies grouped even more densely into galaxy clusters. “It’s like urban sprawl—these huge conglomerates of matter,” Ritz says. Meanwhile, if dark energy was stronger, it would have pushed galaxies away from one another, creating a more “rural” landscape. Researchers will be able to use Rubin’s maps of dark matter and the 3D distribution of galaxies to plot out how the structure of the universe changed over time, unveiling the role of dark energy and, they hope, helping scientists evaluate the different theories to account for its behavior. Of course, Rubin has a lengthier list of goals to check off. Some top items entail tracing the structure of the Milky Way, cataloguing cosmic explosions, and observing asteroids and comets. But since the observatory was first conceptualized in the early ’90s, its core goal has been to explore this hidden branch of the universe. After all, before a 2019 act of Congress dedicated the observatory to Vera Rubin, it was simply called the Dark Matter Telescope. Rubin isn’t alone in the hunt, though. In 2023, the European Space Agency launched the Euclid telescope into space to study how dark matter and dark energy have shaped the structure of the cosmos. And NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2027, has similar plans to measure the universe’s expansion rate and chart large-scale distributions of dark matter. Both also aim to tackle that looming question: What makes up this invisible empire? Rubin will test its systems throughout most of 2025 and plans to begin the LSST survey late this year or in early 2026. Twelve to 14 months later, the team expects to reveal its first data set. Then we might finally begin to know exactly how Rubin will light up the dark universe.

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%. That’s how much of what’s floating about in the cosmos is ordinary matter—planets and stars and galaxies and the dust and gas between them. The other 95% is dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities aptly named for our inability to shed light on their true nature.

Cosmologists have cast dark matter as the hidden glue binding galaxies together. Dark energy plays an opposite role, ripping the fabric of space apart. Neither emits, absorbs, or reflects light, rendering them effectively invisible. So rather than directly observing either of them, astronomers must carefully trace the imprint they leave behind.

Previous work has begun pulling apart these dueling forces, but dark matter and dark energy remain shrouded in a blanket of questions—critically, what exactly are they?

Enter the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, one of our 10 breakthrough technologies for 2025. Boasting the largest digital camera ever created, Rubin is expected to study the cosmos in the highest resolution yet once it begins observations later this year. And with a better window on the cosmic battle between dark matter and dark energy, Rubin might narrow down existing theories on what they are made of. Here’s a look at how.

Untangling dark matter’s web

In the 1930s, the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky proposed the existence of an unseen force named dunkle Materie—in English, dark matter—after studying a group of galaxies called the Coma Cluster. Zwicky found that the galaxies were traveling too quickly to be contained by their joint gravity and decided there must be a missing, unobservable mass holding the cluster together.

Zwicky’s theory was initially met with much skepticism. But in the 1970s an American astronomer, Vera Rubin, obtained evidence that significantly strengthened the idea. Rubin studied the rotation rates of 60 individual galaxies and found that if a galaxy had only the mass we’re able to observe, that wouldn’t be enough to contain its structure; its spinning motion would send it ripping apart and sailing into space.

Rubin’s results helped sell the idea of dark matter to the scientific community, since an unseen force seemed to be the only explanation for these spiraling galaxies’ breakneck spin speeds. “It wasn’t necessarily a smoking-gun discovery,” says Marc Kamionkowski, a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University. “But she saw a need for dark matter. And other people began seeing it too.”

Evidence for dark matter only grew stronger in the ensuing decades. But sorting out what might be behind its effects proved tricky. Various subatomic particles were proposed. Some scientists posited that the phenomena supposedly generated by dark matter could also be explained by modifications to our theory of gravity. But so far the hunt, which has employed telescopes, particle colliders, and underground detectors, has failed to identify the culprit.

The Rubin observatory’s main tool for investigating dark matter will be gravitational lensing, an observational technique that’s been used since the late ’70s. As light from distant galaxies travels to Earth, intervening dark matter distorts its image—like a cosmic magnifying glass. By measuring how the light is bent, astronomers can reverse-engineer a map of dark matter’s distribution.

Other observatories, like the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, have already begun stitching together this map from their images of galaxies. But Rubin plans to do so with exceptional precision and scale, analyzing the shapes of billions of galaxies rather than the hundreds of millions that current telescopes observe, according to Andrés Alejandro Plazas Malagón, Rubin operations scientist at SLAC National Laboratory. “We’re going to have the widest galaxy survey so far,” Plazas Malagón says.

Capturing the cosmos in such high definition requires Rubin’s 3.2-billion-pixel Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The LSST boasts the largest focal plane ever built for astronomy, granting it access to large patches of the sky.

The telescope is also designed to reorient its gaze every 34 seconds, meaning astronomers will be able to scan the entire sky every three nights. The LSST will revisit each galaxy about 800 times throughout its tenure, says Steven Ritz, a Rubin project scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The repeat exposures will let Rubin team members more precisely measure how the galaxies are distorted, refining their map of dark matter’s web. “We’re going to see these galaxies deeply and frequently,” Ritz says. “That’s the power of Rubin: the sheer grasp of being able to see the universe in detail and on repeat.”

The ultimate goal is to overlay this map on different models of dark matter and examine the results. The leading idea, the cold dark matter model, suggests that dark matter moves slowly compared to the speed of light and interacts with ordinary matter only through gravity. Other models suggest different behavior. Each comes with its own picture of how dark matter should clump in halos surrounding galaxies. By plotting its chart of dark matter against what those models predict, Rubin might exclude some theories and favor others.

A cosmic tug of war

If dark matter lies on one side of a magnet, pulling matter together, then you’ll flip it over to find dark energy, pushing it apart. “You can think of it as a cosmic tug of war,” Plazas Malagón says.

Dark energy was discovered in the late 1990s, when astronomers found that the universe was not only expanding, but doing so at an accelerating rate, with galaxies moving away from one another at higher and higher speeds.

“The expectation was that the relative velocity between any two galaxies should have been decreasing,” Kamionkowski says. “This cosmological expansion requires something that acts like antigravity.” Astronomers quickly decided there must be another unseen factor inflating the fabric of space and pegged it as dark matter’s cosmic foil.

So far, dark energy has been observed primarily through Type Ia supernovas, a special breed of explosion that occurs when a white dwarf star accumulates too much mass. Because these supernovas all tend to have the same peak in luminosity, astronomers can gauge how far away they are by measuring how bright they appear from Earth. Paired with a measure of how fast they are moving, this data clues astronomers in on the universe’s expansion rate.

Rubin will continue studying dark energy with high-resolution glimpses of Type Ia supernovas. But it also plans to retell dark energy’s cosmic history through gravitational lensing. Because light doesn’t travel instantaneously, when we peer into distant galaxies, we’re really looking at relics from millions to billions of years ago—however long it takes for their light to make the lengthy trek to Earth. Astronomers can effectively use Rubin as a makeshift time machine to see how dark energy has carved out the shape of the universe.

“These are the types of questions that we want to ask: Is dark energy a constant? If not, is it evolving with time? How is it changing the distribution of dark matter in the universe?” Plazas Malagón says.

If dark energy was weaker in the past, astronomers expect to see galaxies grouped even more densely into galaxy clusters. “It’s like urban sprawl—these huge conglomerates of matter,” Ritz says. Meanwhile, if dark energy was stronger, it would have pushed galaxies away from one another, creating a more “rural” landscape.

Researchers will be able to use Rubin’s maps of dark matter and the 3D distribution of galaxies to plot out how the structure of the universe changed over time, unveiling the role of dark energy and, they hope, helping scientists evaluate the different theories to account for its behavior.

Of course, Rubin has a lengthier list of goals to check off. Some top items entail tracing the structure of the Milky Way, cataloguing cosmic explosions, and observing asteroids and comets. But since the observatory was first conceptualized in the early ’90s, its core goal has been to explore this hidden branch of the universe. After all, before a 2019 act of Congress dedicated the observatory to Vera Rubin, it was simply called the Dark Matter Telescope.

Rubin isn’t alone in the hunt, though. In 2023, the European Space Agency launched the Euclid telescope into space to study how dark matter and dark energy have shaped the structure of the cosmos. And NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2027, has similar plans to measure the universe’s expansion rate and chart large-scale distributions of dark matter. Both also aim to tackle that looming question: What makes up this invisible empire?

Rubin will test its systems throughout most of 2025 and plans to begin the LSST survey late this year or in early 2026. Twelve to 14 months later, the team expects to reveal its first data set. Then we might finally begin to know exactly how Rubin will light up the dark universe.

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Each month Data Center Frontier, in partnership with Pkaza, posts some of the hottest data center career opportunities in the market. Here’s a look at some of the latest data center jobs posted on the Data Center Frontier jobs board, powered by Pkaza Critical Facilities Recruiting. Data Center Facility Engineer (Night Shift Available) Ashburn, VAThis position is also available in: Tacoma, WA (Nights), Days/Nights: Needham, MA and New York City, NY. This opportunity is working directly with a leading mission-critical data center developer / wholesaler / colo provider. This firm provides data center solutions custom-fit to the requirements of their client’s mission-critical operational facilities. They provide reliability of mission-critical facilities for many of the world’s largest organizations facilities supporting enterprise clients and hyperscale companies. This opportunity provides a career-growth minded role with exciting projects with leading-edge technology and innovation as well as competitive salaries and benefits. Electrical Commissioning Engineer New Albany, OHThis traveling position is also available in: Somerset, NJ; Boydton, VA; Richmond, VA; Ashburn, VA; Charlotte, NC; Atlanta, GA; Hampton, GA; Fayetteville, GA; Des Moines, IA; San Jose, CA; Portland, OR; St Louis, MO; Phoenix, AZ; Dallas, TX; Chicago, IL; or Toronto, ON. *** ALSO looking for a LEAD EE and ME CxA agents.*** Our client is an engineering design and commissioning company that has a national footprint and specializes in MEP critical facilities design. They provide design, commissioning, consulting and management expertise in the critical facilities space. They have a mindset to provide reliability, energy efficiency, sustainable design and LEED expertise when providing these consulting services for enterprise, colocation and hyperscale companies. This career-growth minded opportunity offers exciting projects with leading-edge technology and innovation as well as competitive salaries and benefits. Switchgear Field Service Technician – Critical Facilities Nationwide TravelThis position is also available in: Charlotte, NC; Atlanta, GA; Dallas,

Amid Shifting Regional Data Center Policies, Iron Mountain and DC Blox Both Expand in Virginia’s Henrico County

The dynamic landscape of data center developments in Maryland and Virginia exemplify the intricate balance between fostering technological growth and addressing community and environmental concerns. Data center developers in this region find themselves both in the crosshairs of groups worried about the environment and other groups looking to drive economic growth. In some cases, the groups are different components of the same organizations, such as local governments. For data center development, meeting the needs of these competing interests often means walking a none-too-stable tightrope. Rapid Government Action Encourages Growth In May 2024, Maryland demonstrated its commitment to attracting data center investments by enacting the Critical Infrastructure Streamlining Act. This legislation provides a clear framework for the use of emergency backup power generation, addressing previous regulatory challenges that a few months earlier had hindered projects like Aligned Data Centers’ proposed 264-megawatt campus in Frederick County, causing Aligned to pull out of the project. However, just days after the Act was signed by the governor, Aligned reiterated its plans to move forward with development in Maryland. With the Quantum Loop and the related data center development making Frederick County a focal point for a balanced approach, the industry is paying careful attention to the pace of development and the relations between developers, communities and the government. In September of 2024, Frederick County Executive Jessica Fitzwater revealed draft legislation that would potentially restrict where in the county data centers could be built. The legislation was based on information found in the Frederick County Data Centers Workgroup’s final report. Those bills would update existing regulations and create a floating zone for Critical Digital Infrastructure and place specific requirements on siting data centers. Statewide, a cautious approach to environmental and community impacts statewide has been deemed important. In January 2025, legislators introduced SB116, a bill

New Reports Show How AI, Power, and Investment Trends Are Reshaping the Data Center Landscape

Today we provide a comprehensive roundup of the latest industry analyst reports from CBRE, PwC, and Synergy Research, offering a data-driven perspective on the state of the North American data center market. To wit, CBRE’s latest findings highlight record-breaking growth in supply, soaring colocation pricing, and mounting power constraints shaping site selection. For its part, PwC’s analysis underscores the sector’s broader economic impact, quantifying its trillion-dollar contribution to GDP, rapid job growth, and surging tax revenues. Meanwhile, the latest industry analysis from Synergy Research details the acceleration of cloud spending, AI’s role in fueling infrastructure demand, and an unprecedented surge in data center mergers and acquisitions. Together, these reports paint a picture of an industry at an inflection point—balancing explosive expansion with evolving challenges in power availability, cost pressures, and infrastructure investment. Let’s examine them. CBRE: Surging Demand Fuels Record Data Center Expansion CBRE says the North American data center sector is scaling at an unprecedented pace, driven by unrelenting demand from artificial intelligence (AI), hyperscale, and cloud service providers. The latest North America Data Center Trends H2 2024 report from CBRE reveals that total supply across primary markets surged by 34% year-over-year to 6,922.6 megawatts (MW), outpacing the 26% growth recorded in 2023. This accelerating expansion has triggered record-breaking construction activity and intensified competition for available capacity. Market Momentum: Scaling Amid Power Constraints According to CBRE, data center construction activity reached historic levels, with 6,350 MW under development at the close of 2024—more than doubling the 3,077.8 MW recorded a year prior. Yet, the report finds the surge in development is being met with significant hurdles, including power constraints and supply chain challenges affecting critical electrical infrastructure. As a result, the vacancy rate across primary markets has plummeted to an all-time low of 1.9%, with only a handful of sites

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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