Welcome to the Pure Intelligence daily executive briefing for Wednesday 9 September. Here are the top macro trends from the last 24 hours. Executive Summary OpenAI's Astra Raises AI Safety Concerns California's Data Deletion Program Faces Resistance Australia Introduces 'My Feed, My Way' Social Media Controls Electric Vehicles Outsell Petrol Cars in Australia for the First Time Retailers Need Actionable AI, Not Just Analytics Today's briefing highlights critical shifts in AI governance, consumer data privacy, and Australian digital regulation. OpenAI's new model raises safety concerns over opaque reasoning, while California faces challenges in enforcing data deletion. Australia introduces new laws granting users control over social media algorithms and enhancing protections for minors, alongside a landmark shift in local vehicle sales where electric vehicles have outsold petrol cars for the first time. OpenAI's forthcoming Astra model, utilising a technique called \recurrent depth,\ is sparking significant debate among AI safety researchers. This architecture allows the model to cycle through internal computational layers without producing readable intermediate output, making its reasoning less transparent than previous models. This development is particularly concerning as Astra is classified by OpenAI as potentially capable of autonomously discovering and exploiting unknown security vulnerabilities. The shift, driven by performance and cost incentives (a 14x cost difference for agentic coding workloads), creates a structural governance blind spot for enterprises, as existing security tools are not designed to monitor such configuration changes. OpenAI's chief scientist concedes that chain-of-thought monitoring, a critical safety tool, is \fragile\ and \trending in a negative direction,\ underscoring the growing challenge in auditing advanced AI systems. California's new \DROP\ program, designed to enable residents to have their personal information deleted by data brokers, is encountering resistance and potential non-compliance from companies. New research from Stanford University suggests that over 600 data brokers registered with the state have a history of failing to follow existing privacy laws. This initiative, part of the 2023 Delete Act, highlights the ongoing challenge of enforcing consumer data rights against entities that profit from collecting and selling personal data, including sensitive location information. The friction underscores the need for robust compliance frameworks and places increased burden on businesses to manage customer data effectively to avoid regulatory scrutiny and reputational damage. Additional market movements are updated live on the platform. That wraps up today's briefing. To read the full reports and access all source links, visit pureintel.com.au. Thank you for listening.