Eight years after launching from Brisbane, MAISON de SABRÉ has made its Paris debut at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche, confirming its place among the world’s new generation of luxury houses.
2 min
Australian design house MAISON de SABRÉ has opened a pop-up at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche, marking its first Paris appearance and celebrating eight years of extraordinary growth for the brand founded by brothers Omar and Zane Sabré.
The residency, running from October 25, 2025, to January 3, 2026, positions the self-funded label within one of the world’s most exclusive retail destinations — a milestone that cements its status as one of Australia’s most successful global luxury exports.
Since its founding in 2017, MAISON de SABRÉ has evolved from a personalised phone case start-up into a $100 million modern luxury business, now shipping to more than 150 countries.
Around 80 per cent of its sales come from international markets, proof that its clean, design-led aesthetic and commitment to craftsmanship have global appeal.
At the centre of the Paris showcase is The Palais, the brand’s flagship handbag and new icon. Conceived over eight years, its architectural form represents MAISON de SABRÉ’s shift from personalised accessories to the rarefied territory of luxury fashion.
“The industry loves to romanticise heritage,” says co-founder Zane Sabré. “But heritage doesn’t guarantee relevance. The Palais proves you don’t need a century of history to create something iconic – you need conviction, execution, and a brand people actually believe in.”
Brother and creative director Omar Sabré adds, “Hermès has the Birkin. We have The Palais.”
Following its global sell-out debut earlier this year, The Palais now leads the brand’s international assortment and signals its arrival in the global handbag market.
The Le Bon Marché installation features multiple sizes of the bag, alongside the full collection of handbags and small leather goods. A Charm Bar offering on-site personalisation brings the brand’s signature interactive retail experience to the Paris stage.
The pop-up follows a string of high-profile activations in Tokyo, New York and Milan, where MAISON de SABRÉ has demonstrated its ability to reinterpret traditional luxury through a modern, design-forward lens.
Its recent flagship experience at Tokyo’s Miyashita Park placed the brand alongside Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada and Balenciaga — a move that signalled its ambition to compete at the highest level.
Underpinning MAISON de SABRÉ’s rise is a quiet but resolute commitment to sustainability and responsible production. The brand sources all leather from Leather Working Group Gold-Rated tanneries, including a Dutch partner pioneering waterless tanning technology that saves up to 20 litres of freshwater per hide.
Its charm collections are crafted from upcycled leather offcuts, demonstrating that environmental awareness can coexist with luxury design.
For a brand that began in Australia with a single monogrammed accessory, the Paris debut at Le Bon Marché is more than a retail event. It’s a statement — that modern luxury can be born anywhere, thrive without legacy, and redefine craftsmanship for a global audience.
The Australian leather house has opened an immersive four-day pop-up in Manhattan, unveiling its Bloom Collection and redefining what a product launch can look like.
Following the successful launch of its Palais Collection, MAISON de SABRÉ has unveiled a new modular handbag system offering more than 720 styling combinations.
Could fears of an AI apocalypse be distracting us from the dangers already here? Experts debate whether regulation should focus on speculative existential threats or present-day harms, including cyberattacks, weapons and unsafe autonomous agents. Read more via the link in bio.
5 min
There is ample and alarming evidence that artificial intelligence can help humans do bad things, such as committing cyberattacks, building weapons and even killing themselves or others. The Hugging Face hacking episode—and a growing list of others by poorly constrained swarms of agents—indicate just how powerful and potentially dangerous AI has quickly become.
Yet many inside the U.S. AI industry insist far worse is coming, on account of the imminent arrival of AI with superhuman and self-improving abilities.
Plenty of experts, including many who study AI harms for a living, are skeptical. The so-called doomers’ assertion that AI might decide to wipe out all of humanity—or even “just” topple human civilization—is contingent on it achieving a pace of development not yet seen.
And if the assumptions behind this global-doomsday scenario are wrong, it could lead us to curb or regulate AI in ways that don’t address its real harms.
At the center of this debate is the claim that current AI systems might take over the job of training their next versions, a process called “recursive self-improvement.” Think of it like evolution on steroids—billions of years happening at light speed within vast AI supercomputers. Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei recently proposed a global agreement to slow down the pace of releasing new AI models, with the goal of delaying the arrival of recursive self-improvement.
“I don’t think we’re anywhere near ‘artificial general intelligence,’” says Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the nonprofit research group Santa Fe Institute who studies AI. She said AI is making impressive strides but thinks claims by engineers that they’ve achieved recursive self-improvement don’t stand up to scrutiny.
She is hardly alone. A recent paper by two dozen academics at Princeton, Stanford and other institutions found that even the most cutting-edge AIs are incapable of doing the original research required to advance the AI frontier.
Two of the authors involved in that paper also threw cold water on the idea that the Hugging Face swarm hack by OpenAI agents occurred because of a breakthrough in intelligence. The attack succeeded primarily because of a lack of basic technical guardrails, not an unmanageable explosion in AI capability, they wrote.
Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta, posted that this analysis was “a welcome dose of sanity in an otherwise insane debate.”
OpenAI and Anthropic didn’t respond to several requests for comment.
The people who disagree with the doomers still consider AI to be dangerous, and point out that such systems don’t have to be particularly capable to be powerful. Some argue that AI should undergo regular evaluation by outsiders and that the companies that make it should be held responsible when their systems do harm. AI should also be treated the same as airplanes and elevators, and should be designed to do the least harm possible, they say.
“If you believe that technology is powerful enough to create novel, dangerous viruses, or to essentially take over the whole planet for some reason, then it must also be strong enough to create cures for cancer, to cure aging, to fix socio-economic or political problems,” says Christopher Canal, CEO of EquiStamp, a company that helps companies and governments evaluate AIs.
AI has shown an ability to rapidly advance because it is matching the abilities of humans who are constantly feeding it their knowledge. Sometimes it can recombine that knowledge and exceed what people have been capable of, through a kind of post-training known as reinforcement learning, as we’ve seen in mathematics.
Today’s LLMs are “models of knowledge” rather than actually intelligent, wrote Yi Ma, professor of AI at Hong Kong University.
Researchers at universities and commercial AI research labs in China wrote in a recent paper that autonomous, self-improving AI is likely to be a long way off, due to the sheer number of breakthroughs required. They also argue that humans will probably remain in the loop, supervising that process—and gating how fast it can occur.
Vals AI, a company that evaluates today’s AI models, maintains an RSI Index that benchmarks whether models can “do the research that builds the next model.” So far, no publicly released model is even close.
Yet Rayan Krishnan, CEO of Vals AI, says his team projects models will exceed humans’ ability to improve the next generation of AIs by August 2027, or sooner, and at that point could start building their successors all on their own.
“Once we get to recursive self-improvement, the fear is that all bets are off,” he says. “You could end up with a ‘fast takeoff’ situation, where the models quickly acquire skills and eclipse humans across every possible domain.”
In a reply to the resignation tweet heard round the world from Jacob Coxon, another Anthropic engineer declared his belief that those odds were at least 10% over the next decade. Many others in the industry chimed in to say they thought the percentage was even higher.
Some who argue the end is nigh say they calculate their personal p(doom) based on a chain of conditional probabilities—a bit like the Drake equation for calculating the likelihood of intelligent alien life. Since all those probabilities are based on speculation, estimates range from 0% to nearly 100%. Many land around 10%.
“The weird thing is that if you go back and look at the predictions on this over the last 10 years or more, it’s always been 10%—it’s just a nice round number,” says Mitchell. “I think it’s all vibes, and there’s no actual evidence or calculation.”
One argument against worrying about superintelligent AI is that the world is full of unlikely humanity-ending disasters, and trying to avert them all can make it impossible to prioritize, says Canal.
This has led AI experts and the policymakers who listen to them to propose remedies that don’t get at its real and present dangers.
AI companies’ proposals to “pace the frontier” aren’t addressing the problem in the right way, argues Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical Artificial Intelligence.
“It’s like saying we’re driving toward the cliff at 60 miles per hour and we’re going to drive toward it at 40 miles per hour instead, and everything will be OK,” he says.
Russell and his peers have proposed that AI companies should have to meet the same standards that govern other areas of everyday life, from air travel and buildings to food and drugs. They highlight the “behavioral red lines” AI should not be allowed to cross. Breaking into other computer systems, stealing information or advising terrorists on how to build biological weapons are all illegal for a human to do, and should be illegal for companies’ AIs as well, he argues.
The challenge for AI companies in such a proposal, he adds, is that it would be a de facto ban on today’s advanced AI systems, since the companies behind them don’t know how to make them respect such boundaries all of the time.
Others have proposed something like the Food and Drug Administration, but for AI, but setting up a new agency has so far been a nonstarter in Congress. And some prominent voices in tech have said such a structure would give up America’s AI edge to China.
Given the bipartisan groundswell of support for curbing AI companies and their creations, however, that may soon change.
“The tech industry has had this mantra for decades that regulation is bad,” says Russell. “They don’t accept the liability for any harm, and they hide behind free speech. That, I think, has to change.”
