• Last week, Hugging Face said its systems were breached by an AI agent.
• OpenAI said Tuesday its models were responsible and that an AI agent had broken out of its sandbox.
• Here’s what smart people in tech are saying it means for cybersecurity.

An AI agent broke out of its sandbox, got onto the internet, and broke into another company’s systems all on its own, according to OpenAI.

Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform, announced last week it had experienced a security incident in which an autonomous AI agent had accessed some of its internal datasets, but said the large language model behind the intrusion was unknown.

OpenAI said Tuesday that its models — GPT‑5.6 Sol and a more capable model that has yet to be released — were responsible.

“We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent. Turns out it did!” Clem Delangue, the CEO and cofounder at Hugging Face, said on X Tuesday.

OpenAI said it had tasked the models with a cyber challenge and that they broke out of the test area, accessed the internet, and hacked into Hugging Face in order to find the solution to the test.

“We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly,” OpenAI said in a statement.

The incident comes as cybersecurity specialists raise concerns about AI’s rapidly increasing abilities, including in response to warnings from Anthropic about its Mythos model, which has not been released to the general public.

Here’s what smart people in tech and AI are saying about the breach.

Walter Isaacson, biographer and author of “Steve Jobs” and “Elon Musk”

Journalist Walter Isaacson, who wrote a 2023 biography about OpenAI cofounder (turned nemesis) Elon Musk, said he thought the cyberattack was “frightening.”

“The whole question of the singularity has been with us for 50 years, which is, ‘What if it escapes? What if we create Doctor Frankenstein’s monster, and we can no longer control it?'” Isaacson said on Wednesday during an interview with CNBC. “OpenAI could not even control it in its own sandbox.”

The biographer said he remains an AI optimist and is convinced that the tech will create new job opportunities. However, he said this event is a scary reminder of how current regulations are failing to constrain AI models.

Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn cofounder turned venture capitalist, weighed in on the Hugging Face incident in an X post titled “Asymmetric Cyber Warfare is Here” on Wednesday.

OpenAI’s attack on Hugging Face is an example of a new form of AI-enabled asymmetric warfare where “offense gets cheaper, more distributed, and more numerous, while defense stays expensive, centralized, and designed for the last war,” Hoffman wrote.

That dynamic means organizations must rethink their defenses, Hoffman argued.

“Poorly constructed privileges for users are one of the main reasons small security breaches turn into massive incidents,” he said. “Agents are an obvious solution to this problem. Take OpenAI’s recent breach; Because OpenAI models don’t allow advanced cyber capabilities, HuggingFace used a Chinese open model (Z.ai’s GLM 5.2) to contain the rogue OpenAI agent.”

Aaron Levie, Box CEO and cofounder

Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO of Box, said the incident showed “we’re entering a new era of what’s going to be possible with AI” and that there are “wild times ahead.”

“If you were wondering how powerful AI is getting, Agents are now capable of escaping out of systems, finding their way to the internet, discovering zero day security vulnerabilities along the way, and then breaking into external systems – all in an attempt to complete their goal,” he wrote on X.

“Ironically, the ultimate way we’re going to defend against these new risks is equally by throwing compute (in the form of AI) at our code bases, networks, and other systems. You’re going to want vastly more AI on the side of defense as you do on the side of offense.”

Jack Hidary, SandboxAQ CEO

Jack Hidary, the CEO of SandboxAQ, an AI software company focused on cybersecurity, compared the Hugging Face breach to a dinosaur on the loose.

“I think most of our viewers have watched ‘Jurassic Park,'” he said during an interview on CNBC. “Every ‘Jurassic Park,’ what happens? They have a containment facility, and the word ‘containment’ means it’s not going to be contained. You know the velociraptor is going to get out.”

Several software security companies saw stock prices drop midday on Wednesday because, Hidary said, they’re “late to the party in embracing the threat of LLMs.”

Hugging Face used GLM 5.2, an open-weight Chinese AI model, to patch up its security, not a legacy software security company, he said.

“The traditional providers are really still old school. They’re still talking about firewalls, things like that,” he said. “It’s time to move on now to using LLMs to protect.”

Thomas Woodside, Secure AI Project cofounder

“This post describes an internal OpenAI model hacking out of its testing environment and into Hugging Face in order to obtain the solution to a benchmark,” Thomas Woodside, cofounder of Secure AI Project, said on X.

“A warning shot if I’ve ever seen one.”

Mike Bradley, Osmantic COO and founder

Mike Bradley, the chief operating officer and founder of AI deployment system Osmantic, said on X that the incident was “an incredible example of why widespread access to frontier AI and OS models INCREASES global security.”

“It’s also a great example of why CLOSED does not equal SAFE from these US labs.”

Nicolas Bustamante, Microsoft AI

Nicholas Bustamante, who works at Microsoft after selling a fintech tool to the company earlier this year, wrote on X that the Hugging Face incident reinforces the need to weigh advanced models’ deployment with safety considerations.

“You don’t need an evil conscious AI trying to destroy humanity. You just need a very capable model pursuing a normal goal in a way nobody expected,” he wrote.

“Imagine the prompt: « Make me money plz »
The model: « let me hack a bank »”

• Social platforms are updating their guidelines on AI-generated content.
• AI has been a point of tension across the creator community for years.
• Here’s how social platforms are handling AI-generated content and monetization.

As tech companies race to weave AI into every inch of their products, they’re discovering there’s a fine line between embracing new technology and flooding users with low-quality, machine-generated content.

The shifting guidelines reflect a broader tension across the creator economy. Not long ago, social platforms competed aggressively for influencers with creator funds, exclusive programs, and monetization tools. Many of those same companies are now investing billions in AI products and infrastructure, leaving some creators worried they’re becoming less central to the platforms they helped grow.

Here’s how major social platforms that rely on creators, including YouTube and Substack, are dealing with the proliferation of AI content.

YouTube

YouTube is sharpening its stance on AI-generated content.

In an update from the company’s trust and safety team, on July 20, YouTube said it wants to reward creators who use AI to enhance original storytelling, as opposed to those who mass-produce generic content or AI personas designed to game the platform.

A YouTube spokesperson told Business Insider that the policy isn’t new but an important clarification of YouTube’s long-standing “inauthentic content” policy, intended to reduce ambiguity for content creators who have been demonetized for repetitive, low-effort, or emotionally manipulative videos.

YouTube has spent years pitching itself to advertisers as the future of television, and a surge of AI-generated spam threatens to undermine that message. In January, the platform removed more than a dozen popular channels that had amassed millions of views by pumping out AI-generated videos featuring characters like cats and Jesus. Video editing platform Kapwing published a report estimating that 21% of YouTube’s feed was AI-generated videos.

TikTok

TikTok isn’t shying away from generative AI. The company and its owner, ByteDance, offer an array of AI tools for content creators on its marquee app and video editor CapCut. Creators who post on its e-commerce platform, TikTok Shop, have been ramping up the use of AI to sell products this year. Much of the company’s tech is built around ByteDance’s AI video model, Seedance 2.0.

Still, TikTok is taking a variety of steps to keep generative AI under control across its ecosystem. The company requires creators to label AI-generated content and appends an invisible watermark to the metadata of some videos to indicate they are artificially generated. In November, the company introduced the ability for users to toggle the amount of AI content that appears in their feeds. In July, the company said it’s beginning to test “improved detection systems to target accounts dedicated to posting AI-generated spam that crowds out original creators.”

Substack

The newsletter platform announced on July 21 that it would help readers identify AI-generated content.

Substack will now let readers scan content to estimate how much AI may have been used in its writing. Substack is partnering with Pangram, an AI detector tool, to power its AI identification tools.

Creators on Substack can also add a disclosure to their content explaining how they made it, such as noting that they used Claude for copyediting, or if they don’t use AI at all.

However, users can fairly easily disable this tool for their Substack content by turning off AI analysis in their publication settings. Creators can opt out of Pangram’s automated scanning, meaning readers will no longer see an AI-use estimate on those posts.

Pinterest

Pinterest is no stranger to AI slop.

In 2025, the platform began adding AI labels to content. Pinterest lets creators label content as AI-modified or -generated, and has its own detection systems to flag content that may have been AI-generated.

Pinterest also added a tool that lets users limit the amount of AI-generated content appearing in their feeds.

In June, Pinterest’s CEO Bill Ready told Business Insider’s editor in chief, Jamie Heller, at Cannes Lions that while there are “so many great uses of AI,” there is also a “bit of a counter movement to that with consumers.”

“We provide users with controls to decide whether they want to see more or less GenAI content in their feed,” a Pinterest spokesperson told Business Insider. “Additionally, our Community Guidelines apply to GenAI content, and our recommendation system prioritizes high-quality content, regardless of if it’s human-created or GenAI.”

Meta

Meta wants users to create and engage with content made with its own AI tools, so, for the most part, it has let content like the famed Shrimp Jesus run free.

However, the company has been labeling content as AI-generated since 2024. Across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, Meta adds an “AI info” label to content it detects as AI-generated. It doesn’t automatically do the same for content that was modified with AI, though. Meta “may require” its AI labels on content with “photorealistic video or realistic-sounding audio that was digitally created, modified or altered, including with AI,” per the company’s help page explaining its AI policies. People can also voluntarily add the label to their content.

In June, Meta started putting its “AI info” label on advertisements that use AI, whether they’re created by Meta’s own tools or third-party editing services.

LinkedIn

If your LinkedIn posts sound a little too polished, readers may be taking notice.

AI detector Pangram estimates that 41% of long-form LinkedIn posts and 30% of short-form posts from April through June were AI-generated, which is the highest share among platforms it analyzed, including X, Reddit, Substack, and Medium.

Some creators are already changing course. Steven Bartlett‘s media company, FlightStory, stopped using AI-written LinkedIn posts after concluding authentic, human-written updates performed better.

LinkedIn actively promotes AI writing tools, including a button that helps users polish posts with AI. The company, however, said in a June post that it will be taking steps against “slop.”

“While AI can be a helpful tool for refining language, we’re seeing a rise in what many call ‘AI slop,’ content that is low-effort, AI-generated content that may sound polished on the surface but lacks any real unique perspective or substance,” the company wrote.

• OpenAI unveiled plans to build a massive data center near Savannah, Georgia.
• The company paired the announcement with pledges meant to address common data center concerns.
• OpenAI said locals would not see higher electricity bills, water use would be minimal, and eligible students get token credits.

OpenAI is pushing to build community support for a planned new data center in Georgia in an apparent effort to avoid the type of backlash rising against AI infrastructure projects across the US.

The ChatGPT maker on Wednesday unveiled its plans to build “Project Camellia,” an at least $20 billion data center campus in rural Effingham County, just outside Savannah, that will require 3.2 gigawatts of power.

OpenAI said that it has been meeting with state and local officials, community leaders, schools, and other stakeholders to gather feedback on the project and will hold a public open house on Thursday.

“We believe showing up early is the right way to build trust, with that, we are still at the beginning of the development process,” OpenAI said in a press release. “Significant work remains on infrastructure, project phasing, design, financing, and operating model.”

Effingham County Commissioner Jamie DeLoach said in a statement that he and his team “asked the tough questions” and found that the project “uses minimal water, won’t increase energy costs for county residents, will generate new tax revenue to support our schools, and create new opportunities for local businesses.”

OpenAI added it has contracted with Georgia Power to deliver electricity to the 1,400-acre campus in phases between 2028 and 2032.

OpenAI says water use will be ‘minimal,’ utility bills won’t rise, and schools get free AI tokens

Alongside the announcement, OpenAI detailed a four-point pledge addressing issues that have fueled widespread opposition to data centers elsewhere, including electricity costs, water use, and community impacts.

OpenAI said local residents would not see higher electricity bills because of the project and that the facility’s water use would be “minimal” due to its closed-loop water system.

“Georgia families will not subsidize this project. OpenAI will pay the full cost of the infrastructure and electric-service costs required to serve it,” the company said.

It said that the project will be one of the first data centers designed to “proactively reduce its power consumption before residential customers are impacted during periods of high demand.”

OpenAI also said it would provide $80 million in community benefits over the life of the project and will make up to $71 million in credits for Codex, its AI coding tool, available to eligible Georgia college, community college and technical school students. Georgia students who are eligible will get $100 in Codex credits through their ChatGPT account.

An independent firm will conduct an annual audit of OpenAI’s commitments to be released to the public, the company said.

OpenAI expects to create thousands of construction jobs and more than 1,000 operational roles once the campus is fully built out.

Companies are racing to build AI data centers throughout the country and many communities are pushing back over concerns about the potential environmental and economic impacts.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the challenge earlier this year, saying, “AI is not very popular in the US right now.”

“Data centers are getting blamed for electricity price hikes. Almost every company that does layoffs is blaming AI, whether or not it really is about AI,” he said.

According to the research project Data Center Watch, at least 75 data center proposals worth an estimated $130 billion were delayed or blocked during the first three months of 2026 due to local opposition.

As of May, there were at least 430 local Facebook groups with more than 525,000 members fighting back against AI data centers, according to the Data Center Opposition Report, which tracks local opposition to the projects.

Georgia’s 12th Congressional District Democratic Committee has issued an “urgent call to action” via Facebook, urging community members to show up to Thursday’s public meeting.

Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order imposing the nation’s first statewide moratorium on large-scale data centers.

• Eton College is an exclusive boarding school sometimes called “the nursery of England’s gentlemen.”
• Prince George will start attending Eton in September 2026.
• The school’s elite alumni include Prince William, Tom Hiddleston, and Eddie Redmayne.

Prince George is officially ready for Eton.

Prince William and Kate Middleton’s eldest son turned 13 on Wednesday. Reaching his teen years is a milestone in and of itself, but the prince’s new age makes him old enough to attend Eton College, often called “the nursery of England’s gentlemen.”

The prestigious boarding school outside London educates around 1,350 boys aged 13-18 each year, according to its website. Its alumni include members of the royal family, including Prince William and Prince Harry, actor Tom Hiddleston, author George Orwell, and former prime minister Boris Johnson.

George, who is second in line to the British throne, will join those esteemed alumni’s ranks in September.

Keep reading to take a look inside Eton College.

Eton was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI.

Eton is an all-boys school located outside London, near Windsor. It was originally intended to educate poor boys before they went on to Cambridge University.

It is one of England’s nine original fee-paying independent schools, according to The New York Times.

William and Kate moved to Adelaide Cottage at Windsor Castle in 2022, which is about a mile from Eton. They enrolled George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis at the nearby Lambrook School at the time, though they may have already been considering how a home base at Windsor could be beneficial if George enrolled at Eton.

Before being accepted, students go through a two-part application process that begins three years before they enroll.

Only boys aged 13 to 18 attend Eton. The application process begins when a prospective student is in year 5 of primary school, at age 10, three years before they would actually attend Eton. Students hoping to start at Eton in 2029 need to register by August 31, 2026, the Eton website states. George would have begun his application process in 2023.

After a student registers, the application process occurs in two stages, as outlined on the school’s website.

First, hopeful applicants take an online assessment. “Successful boys” then come to Eton for an individual interview and an additional online test taken at the school. Four to six weeks later, applicants will find out if they have been accepted, waitlisted, or rejected.

Once accepted, a student’s parents will have to pay an acceptance fee in addition to the school’s annual fee of £65,673 (or about $87,824). The school offers financial aid and scholarships to some students, but most pay their own tuition in full.

Eton students live in one of the 25 houses on campus.

About 55 students of all ages, with 11 from each age group, live in each house at Eton, according to the school’s website. Each student has their own room from the time they arrive.

The houses are run by the House Master and Dame, who oversee the house’s full-time staff and care for the students. Some of the houses employ private chefs to feed their residents, while others send their students to the school’s dining hall.

Each student also has a personal tutor to support his academic growth.

Students wear Eton’s traditional uniform.

Eton refers to its uniform as its “school dress” on its website. The uniform consists of a black tailcoat, white tie, waistcoat, and striped pants.

Students add a top hat to that look for special occasions.

Eton plans out students’ entire day, beginning with breakfast at 7:30 a.m.

Eton students’ days follow a strict schedule, starting with a Chapel service or Assembly, the school’s website notes.

Afterward, students attend three classes, which they call “schools” or colloquially “divs.” They have a 25-minute midmorning break called “Chambers” in their rooms where they can have a snack or connect with a teacher, called “masters” at the school.

Lunch is called “boys’ dinner,” and they have extracurriculars, including sports and the school’s “Societies Programmes,” as well as afternoon tea once their lessons are finished.

Life at Eton is governed by traditions, including the wall game.

Eton has accomplished rowing, soccer, and cricket teams, but the wall game is Eton’s best-known extracurricular.

The school describes the game as “resembling elements of both football and rugby, despite at times looking like no other imaginable game.” Players try to kick the ball down a narrow strip of grass next to one of the college’s walls to score.

Eton students are known for their powerful connections.

For instance, a group of 11 Eton students traveled to Russia in 2016 to meet with President Vladimir Putin.

The students planned the trip on their own with no help from the school, Eton said in a statement to The Telegraph.

Fifteen members of the British royal family have attended Eton, including Prince William and Prince Harry.

Royals like the princes typically live in Eton’s Manor House, though Kensington Palace has not announced if George will live in the same house when he arrives at the school.

Eton’s website says the school has also educated royals from Belgium, Romania, Ethiopia, Thailand, and Nepal.

Boris Johnson was the fifth Eton graduate to become prime minister since World War II.

Prime ministers David Cameron, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Macmillan, and Anthony Eden also attended Eton.

In total, Eton has educated 20 prime ministers.

Royals and future politicians are not the only famous graduates of Eton.

In addition to the prime ministers, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne are also “Old Etonians.” Redmayne even played on the same rugby team as Prince William at Eton, People reported.

“I always felt a bit sorry for him because basically any school you played, all they wanted to do was tackle Prince William, and they could say, ‘I tackled Prince William,'” Redmayne told People. “So if you were standing next to Prince William, like I was, it was actually quite easy and quite fun.”

Hiddleston graduated from Eton one year before Prince William and Redmayne, according to the school’s website.

Prince George will start at Eton in September.

George was first spotted touring Eton in April 2023 with his parents, People reported at the time.

Kensington Palace announced his coming attendance in June 2026, but his application process would have been underway for years before the news was made public.

The Prince and Princess of Wales shared a new portrait of George on their Instagram to mark his 13th birthday. He wore a black suit in the shot, perhaps hinting at the uniform he will soon wear daily.

• Google’s delayed 3.5 Pro model has competitors taking jabs.
• One analyst said the delay has “shifted perception from leading edge to trailing edge.”
• “Gemini who?” wrote Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, on X.

In the AI race, the throne is never safe. Just ask Google.

After the success of Gemini 3, Google found itself in a strong position at the end of 2025. As of this week, the situation is a little shakier.

While the company just rolled out three faster, more cost-effective models, it continues to delay its next frontier model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, and it’s unclear whether this week’s launches will be enough to keep users and investors happy in the interim.

Some of Google’s competitors are using the opportunity to land a few jabs.

Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, wrote on X “gemini who?” in response to a leaderboard that ranked Meta’s Spark model above one launched by Google this week.

Thibault Sottiaux, a member of technical staff at OpenAI, also took an apparent jab at the search giant. In a post on X, Google’s Logan Kilpatrick announced that pre-training on Gemini 4 — the next big milestone model — had begun. “Hope it finishes one day too!” Sottiaux replied.

Google declined to comment.

‘Too early to count anyone out’

Google’s delay is particularly glaring because OpenAI and Anthropic have rolled out new top-tier models in recent weeks. The pushback of Gemini 3.5 Pro has “shifted perception from leading edge to trailing edge,” said Josh Beck, an analyst at Raymond James, in a note this week. He said he saw this as a byproduct of the fast pace of change among the labs right now.

At the same time, Google’s business has been humming along nicely in recent quarters, with strong momentum across Search, YouTube, Cloud, and other areas benefiting from Google’s AI advancements. Google is also betting that faster, more cost-effective models may be a winning strategy at a time when token costs are racking up.

Google’s focus on more efficient models has received praise from some users.

“Google gets a lot of criticism on here for falling behind on agentic coding, but Gemini 3.5 Flash has long been my daily driver for agentic document extraction, which is one of the highest-value use-cases for LLMs IMO,” Kyle Walker, founder of Clearfork Intelligence, wrote on X.

Still, Google may need to address this trade-off between efficiency and power when it announces Q2 earnings on Wednesday evening. Analysts are likely to raise the topic of 3.5 Pro and its release timeline.

“I love Gemini, probably more than I should but them hyping 4 before even delivering 3.5 Pro is a lil weird,” Anshel Sag, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, wrote on X.

Sag told Business Insider he felt that Google hyping up Gemini 4 was an “admission they already have something better.” However, he said the “feverish pace” of AI right now doesn’t necessarily yield meaningful improvements.

“I just feel like Google is a much bigger company and moves a bit differently from its competitors,” said Sag.

He added: “It’s just way too early to count anyone out.”

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• Summer Farmen, a mom of three, was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer despite never smoking.
• The condition, known as alk-positive lung cancer, inspired her to become an advocate to give back.
• Farmen is celebrating six years as a survivor thanks to targeted therapy medications that fight tumors.

When Summer Farmen first noticed the shortness of breath and persistent tiredness, she didn’t think much of it.

It was early 2020, but COVID wasn’t her first thought, since she otherwise felt fine.

Within a month, she found herself choking and coughing during casual conversations.

The Pennsylvania-based mom of three was used to taking extra care of herself, since she and her husband are primary caregivers for their son with cerebral palsy.

“I always made sure I was eating healthy and staying in shape,” she told Business Insider. “So here I am, 44 years old with, I thought, no risk factors for cancer, but we’re mid-pandemic, and I suddenly was struggling to breathe, gasping for breath, coughing incessantly.”

As the weeks went by, Farmen felt worse and worse. When the family’s routine Fortnite gaming sessions left her exhausted, she wondered if it could be asthma, pneumonia, or coronavirus after all.

After antibiotics and other treatments didn’t help, she went to the emergency room, fighting for air, where doctors drained 2 liters of fluid from her lungs.

“I joke that it was a Diet Coke bottle that had been just compressing my lung,” Farmen said.

She was eventually diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, related to an unusual type of gene abnormality.

A typical patient in her situation might have six months to live, maybe a year and a half with good luck. More than six years later, at age 50, Farmen is not just surviving but thriving. She used her experiences as a patient to advocate for more and better research to help others facing the disease.

“It’s so therapeutic to give back,” she said. “We’re educating and empowering patients that you’re not just riding along for this, you’re in the driver’s seat. Make your voice heard.”

A rare genetic mutation

After ending up in the ER, the last thing Farmen expected was to celebrate a lung cancer diagnosis. But that’s exactly what happened.

Initially, doctors feared her cancer had spread from another organ, such as her uterus, and could be terminal. An end-stage diagnosis would mean the only treatment options would be to keep Farmen comfortable through her final days.

While lung cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, Farmen was diagnosed alk-positive, a specific subtype that’s highly treatable.

“I got the call that it was lung cancer, and my dad and I are in the front yard hugging and crying. We’re so happy,” she said.

Her specific form of cancer is caused by a gene mutation that occurs during the patient’s lifetime, so it can’t be passed down to children.

It responds well to targeted therapy, a precision cancer treatment that blocks the cancer’s fuel sources, such as proteins, to prevent tumors from growing.

Farmen’s treatment plan included medications called tyrosine kinase inhibitors that work by interrupting signals that tell cancer cells to grow and divide uncontrollably.

While Farmen said she’s generally an optimist, the treatment process “wasn’t all sunshine.” She was afraid of never teaching her son to drive or missing her daughter’s high school graduation.

“I went to dark places. I was in the fetal position several times, but I’d never let myself stay there,” she said.

A major turning point as she underwent treatment was finding support groups with other alk-positive patients.

“It was a lifeline immediately. You’re finding out about different patient experiences. You’re getting validation,” Farmen said. “Right away in the beginning, I’m learning about strength and adversity, the importance of patient preferences, the importance of a patient voice.”

From patient to advocate

Farmen’s journey into the alk-positive cancer support community started with an art therapy class on Zoom. Before long, she was helping to expand the program and organizing educational sessions.

“Soon after I became involved, I knew I had to give back. I had to help others,” she said.

The nonprofit behind the programs, Alk Positive Inc., funds cancer research to improve patients’ quality of life while providing resources such as support groups and clinical trial information.

Farmen is now the organization’s vice president and a contributor to a recent study published in the journal Lung Cancer.

The research focused on patient and caregiver preferences in balancing the potential benefits and side effects of treatment options, a key issue in the increasingly personalized world of cancer care.

Farmen said that as a cancer survivor, giving back has helped her come to terms with some of the psychological toll. The physical and emotional strain is ongoing.

“You wouldn’t pick me out of a group as a stage four lung cancer patient, but there are debilitating side effects that everybody experiences differently from these life-extending treatments that we’re on,” she said. “I still have a stage four cancer diagnosis. I still have scans every three months. It’s not if my cancer progresses, it’s when my cancer progresses.

For now, Farmen, who turned 50 in April, is busy celebrating five decades of being alive. “I’m so lucky to be 50. I’m so happy to be here. Growing old is a privilege,” she said.