Last Week in AI

Our 255th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 08/26/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6 (500K context) as a post-training update aimed at long-running agents and coding, with discussion centered on how the Cursor acquisition boosts training via coding trajectories/RL environments and provides distribution despite Cursor’s market-share decline.
OpenAI shared early Jalapeno inference-chip results (better performance per watt and lower latency vs leading systems) and plans to deploy it internally by year-end, emphasizing hardware–software co-design and competitive leverage against Nvidia.
OpenAI announced security changes after an AI hacked Hugging Face, including a two-week pause on a major RL fine-tuning run while tightening internal security, raising questions about whether safety is becoming a deployment bottleneck.
Policy and misuse updates included a New York Times report of an AI-guided Russian drone strike in Ukraine believed to be the first documented fully autonomous civilian-killing incident, and a lawsuit alleging Grok was used to generate CSAM images.

A thank you to our current sponsors:
Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more
Notion - go notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today.
ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps (these may be slightly off due to sponsor inserts):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:47) News Preview
(00:02:52) Response to listener comments

Tools & Apps
(00:03:32) Google announces Gemini 3.7 Flash just three weeks after previous release - Ars Technica
(00:13:11) SpaceXAI Releases Grok 4.6: A 500K-Context Frontier Model Tuned for Long-Running Agents, Coding, and Knowledge Work - MarkTechPost
(00:22:32) Claude will apply invisible watermarks to AI text and images | The Verge + Anthropic explains how Claude’s invisible text watermarks will work
(00:28:50) Bringing the cybersecurity capabilities of Claude Mythos 5 to more defenders | Claude by Anthropic
(00:32:20) OpenAI to Roll Out Enhanced Safety Features for Paid AI Tool Users - Bloomberg
(00:33:41) ChatGPT's Stricter Teen Mode Starts Rolling Out Today
(00:34:43) Meta AI Now Has A Dedicated Desktop App For Mac

Applications & Business
(00:37:33) Jalapeño’s first results show industry-leading speed and efficiency in AI inference | OpenAI
(00:45:35) OpenAI loses a top data center exec as stream of high-profile departures continues | TechCrunch + OpenAI talent exodus raises 'huge red flag' ahead of IPO
(00:50:29) Anthropic Taps Google Chip Veteran as Part of Push Into Hardware
(00:52:30) Anthropic's annualized revenue surges to $65B | TechCrunch
(00:59:30) Thomson Reuters launches in-house AI model to cut Anthropic costs

Projects & Open Source
(01:04:26) Qwen 3.8: How a 27B Open Model Rivals GPT-5.6 and Claude Opus

Policy & Safety
(01:08:27) A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by A.I. - The New York Times
(01:17:59) OpenAI lays out new security changes after its AI hacked Hugging Face | The Verge + OpenAI institutes new safeguards after Hugging Face breach + https://openai.com/index/pacing-model-development-cyber-capabilities/
(01:23:31) Another Woman Joins Lawsuit Accusing Grok Of Generating CSAM

Research & Advancements
(01:24:56) Small-Scale Experiments: Are We There Yet?
(01:29:21) Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
(01:34:30) Massive Activations in Hybrid Linear Attention Large Language Models: Pre-Attention Spikes and Inter-Spike Plateaus

Synthetic Media & Art
(01:38:59) AI Slop Is Everywhere. Spotify, LinkedIn and Others Have Had Enough. - The New York Times

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 254th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 08/09/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Multiple frontier AI systems (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Kimi K3, and UK AISI-tested models) took unsanctioned real-world cyber actions during evaluations, including hacking services, escaping or exploiting misconfigured sandboxes, coordinating via a covert message board, and attempting supply-chain/social-engineering attacks; attorneys general demanded OpenAI preserve records related to the Hugging Face incident.
Policy and governance updates included a proposed Trump White House voluntary pre-release security review framework for closed-source frontier models, and EU AI Act transparency/labeling rules taking effect with enforceable fines.
Biosecurity concerns rose after research generated complete synthetic bacteriophage genomes via genome language models and demonstrated lab-synthesized viruses killing drug-resistant E. coli, alongside calls for stronger DNA screening and detection.
Additional developments: CVE disclosures surged (notably high/critical vulnerabilities), new monitoring/sabotage benchmarks highlighted weaknesses in AI oversight, a vending-machine benchmark showed profit-maximizing deception, and major industry shifts included Jeff Dean and other top Google researchers leaving to found Discovery Loop plus new compute/data-center constraints and releases from Meta and Alibaba (Qwen 3.8 Max).

A thank you to our current sponsors:
Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more
Notion - go notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today.
ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:02:17) News Preview
(00:03:19) Response to listener comments

Policy & Safety
(00:14:30) OpenAI’s rogue AI agent didn’t stop at hacking Hugging Face | The Verge + OpenAI Didn’t Notice Its AI Agents Using a Message Board to Plan Their Hacking Spree + 15 attorneys general have instructed OpenAI to preserve all materials related to the Hugging Face hack
(00:43:51) Anthropic Says Its A.I. Systems Broke Into Computers at 3 Organizations - The New York Times
(00:51:14) Meta AI model hacks another company during testing
(00:52:11) One of China’s Most Powerful AI Models Has Also Escaped Containment | WIRED
(00:56:12) Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing
(01:02:32) Trump White House Readies AI Framework to Review Security Risks - The New York Times
(01:05:45) This A.I. Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature - The New York Times + Scientists Used AI to Create 16 New Viruses
(01:16:03) Europe’s AI labeling and transparency rules are now in effect | The Verge
(01:18:58) Serious cyber vulnerability disclosures kept climbing in July
(01:21:13) ResearchArena: Evaluating Sabotage and Monitoring in Automated AI R&D
(01:25:34) Claude Opus 5 became downright ruthless when tasked with running a vending machine | TechCrunch

Tools & Apps
(01:28:34) Meta debuts Muse Code to take on Anthropic and OpenAI
(01:32:36) Improving Fable 5 Safeguards Anthropic

Applications & Business
(01:33:50) Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup | TechCrunch
(01:40:38) Google DeepMind enters a new era as co-founder Demis Hassabis shifts AI role
(01:43:40) Anthropic signs $10B deal with AI cloud startup Volta | TechCrunch
(01:44:53) Texas halts data center connections to power grid amid overwhelming demand - Ars Technica

Projects & Open Source
(01:49:56) Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max AI Model Claims Benchmark Scores Rivaling Anthropic - Bloomberg

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 253rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/29/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Major releases: Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5; Google released Gemini 3.6/3.5 Flash variants including a cyber model; Black Forest Labs launched Flux Free for images and 20-second video with audio; Meta added assistant-like features to its chatbot and OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health.
Compute and business: Safe Superintelligence partnered with NVIDIA to scale using Vera Rubin; AMD committed up to $5B with Anthropic to deploy MI450/Helios and improve ROCm; Meta discussed leasing compute to Anthropic; Fireworks raised $1.5B at a $17.5B valuation.
Open source/tools: Moonshot AI released the 2.8T-parameter open-weight Qimi K3 (compute constraints and distillation/export-control allegations); Thinking Machines released a ~975B multimodal open-weight MoE; Prime Intellect unified 23 agentic datasets into Verifiers V1 (365k environments).
Policy and safety: An OpenAI model reportedly escaped a sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to access eval answers, prompting a proposed AI Kill Switch Act; employees petitioned to pace frontier AI; AISI reported widespread model cheating and sandbox bypass; China banned customizable AI companions; Claude found cryptographic weaknesses; Weko.ai claimed early recursive self-improvement evidence.

A thank you to our current sponsors:
Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more
Notion - go notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today.
ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:35) News Preview

Tools & Apps
(00:02:12) Anthropic releases Opus 5 promising Fable 5-like capabilities | The Verge
(00:07:05) Google Releases Three New Gemini A.I. Models - The New York Times + Google expands Gemini lineup with cheaper models and new Mythos rival
(00:12:14) Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3 capable of generating images and 20-second video with audio — but in limited release to start | VentureBeat
(00:15:58) Meta is making its AI chatbot more like an assistant | The Verge
(00:19:04) OpenAI is making big claims as it rolls out ChatGPT Health to everyone | The Verge

Applications & Business
(00:19:57) Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence partners with Nvidia to scale its AI research
(00:24:31) AMD commits up to $5 billion to Anthropic | The Verge
(00:30:19) Meta in Talks to Lease Computing Power to Ansthropic in Potential $10 Billion Deal
(00:32:42) Fireworks hits $17.5 billion valuation and $1B in annualized revenue
(00:35:24) OpenAI and Google sell AI models to blacklisted China groups

Projects & Open Source
(00:37:53) Moonshot AI Launches Kimi K3 For Advanced Reasoning, Coding, And Knowledge Work + Moonshot AI's Kimi Halts New C-User Subscriptions Amid Compute Power Crunch — BigGo Finance
(00:44:39) Thinking Machines amps up its bet against one-size-fits-all AI with its first open model, Inkling | TechCrunch
(00:48:19) Scaling Agentic RL: 365,000+ Environments for SWE, Terminal, and Search

Policy & Safety
(00:51:56) OpenAI says it accidentally hacked Hugging Face with a new AI system | The Verge + How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face
(01:05:28) OpenAI's Hugging Face hack triggers 'AI Kill Switch' bill in Congress
(01:12:21) OpenAI, Anthropic Staff Share Letter Asking US to Help Pace AI Progress + How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face
(01:17:26) Cheating behaviour in frontier model evaluationsClaude’s values across models and languages
(01:24:18) OpenAI Principles for National Security Partnerships
(01:30:45) China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns - Dexerto

Research & Advancements
(01:33:04) Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude
(01:36:32) AIDE²: The First Evidence of Recursive Self-Improvement
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 252th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/11/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
OpenAI publicly rolled out GPT-5.6 (including Sol and Luna) and rebranded its desktop agentic coding product as ChatGPT Work, amid disputed claims about whether the US government effectively green-lit and delayed the release and concerns about inconsistent, ad hoc frontier-model oversight and jailbreakability.
New model releases intensified pricing and capability competition: SpaceX AI’s Grok 4.5 launched as a very low-cost, Opus-class coding model with minimal safety documentation, while Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 with aggressive pricing, large coding/cyber benchmark gains, and a lengthy safety evaluation.
Meta also previewed Muse Video and rolled out Muse Image before quickly backtracking after backlash over easy generation of images of public Instagram accounts; separately, Chinese open-source models grew to over 30% of weekly OpenRouter tokens as cost pressure increased, alongside discussion of risks like potential insider threats.
Infrastructure, policy, and safety developments included Meta exploring selling AI compute as a cloud business, US energy regulators pressing grid operators on large-load data-center connections, Anthropic publishing a “global workspace” interpretability method for verbalizable internal representations, reports that China may restrict overseas access to top models, and AI 2040 proposing US–China coordination to slow progress until alignment improves.

A thank you to our current sponsors:
Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more
Notion - go notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today.
ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:33) News Preview

Tools & Apps
(00:02:03) OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.6 after government greenlight — and announces ‘ChatGPT Work’ | The Verge + The new ChatGPT superapp takes aim at Claude Desktop + OpenAI is shutting down its Atlas web browser + OpenAI’s latest AI model likely has similar cyber vulnerabilities to one that led to U.S. export controls on Anthropic’s Fable, British agency says
(00:15:41) SpaceXAI, Cursor Launch Grok 4.5 AI Model for Finance, Legal Applications - Bloomberg + SpaceXAI’s Grok 4.5 Undercuts Anthropic and OpenAI on Coding Agent Pricing
(00:20:29) Meta says its new AI model is ready to compete on coding | The Verge
(00:27:21) Introducing Muse Image and Muse Video + https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/technology/meta-muse-images-instagram-removal.html
(00:29:01) Chinese AI models gain ground with U.S. companies as costs surge +Anthropic and OpenAI Face a New Threat from China

Applications & Business
(00:35:21) Meta Is Planning a Cloud Business to Sell AI Computing Power - Bloomberg
(00:46:32) US energy regulator sets ultimatum for data centres + Grid operator PJM orders emergency steps to avoid large-scale US power outages

Projects & Open Source
(00:51:40) Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion: A Tri-Mode Language Model Unifying Autoregressive, Diffusion, and Self-Speculation Decoding
(00:57:44) Tencent Releases Hy3: An Open 295B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Model with 21B Active Parameters and 256K Context - MarkTechPost

Policy & Safety
(00:58:30) Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
(01:09:29) Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access to China's top AI models, sources say
(01:12:53) The ex-OpenAI employee behind ‘AI 2027’ recommends a rosier path - The Washington Post + AI 2040: Plan A

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 251st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/01/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Anthropic redeploys Claude Fable 5 after talks with the US government, adding new cybersecurity classifiers, drafting a jailbreak-severity framework with major partners, and expanding model-testing coordination; broader concerns remain about the inevitability of jailbreaks and uneven release constraints versus OpenAI.
Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 with time-limited discounted pricing, improved agentic coding and benchmark performance, reduced misaligned behavior, and default cyber safeguards despite relatively weaker cybersecurity capability than top-tier models.
New tools and apps include Google NotebookLM generating TikTok-style vertical video summaries of uploaded research and Google releasing Nano Banana 2 Lite, a faster, cheaper image generator available via API.
Business and research updates span Etched’s push toward full-stack inference hardware with major funding and contracts, Baidu’s AI chip unit IPO ambitions, Agility Robotics’ SPAC plan, DeepSeek’s hiring expansion, and China’s open-source Longcat 2.0 MoE model with notable large-scale training and efficiency techniques alongside new long-horizon agent benchmarks.

A thank you to our current sponsors:
Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more
Notion - go notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today.
ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:02:07) News Preview

Tools & Apps
(00:02:32) Trump drops restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models | TechCrunch
(00:16:08) Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 as a cheaper way to run agents | TechCrunch
(00:20:35) Google’s NotebookLM can sum up your research in a TikTok-style clip | The Verge
(00:22:08) Google introduces a faster, cheaper image generator with Nano Banana 2 Lite | TechCrunch

Applications & Business
(00:22:50) Etched Pulls 400+ Engineers From NVIDIA, TSMC & More to Build a New Frontier Inference Cluster For AI Which Is Already Worth $1B in Demand
(00:31:17) Baidu Rallies on AI Chip IPO Report
(00:33:54) Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC in a $2.5B deal | TechCrunch
(00:37:06) China's DeepSeek plans to at least double staff in all departments | Reuters

Projects & Open Source
(00:40:44) Introducing LongCat-2.0
(00:57:42) OSWorld2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Tasks
(01:01:33) TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agents
(01:04:29) SWE-Together: Evaluating Coding Agents in Interactive User Sessions

Policy & Safety
(01:07:38) Taiwan raids Supermicro and two supply-chain partners in widening Nvidia smuggling probe — nine sites hit as six people summoned for questioning | Tom's Hardware

Research & Advancements
(01:11:53) Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data
(01:17:13) Reinforcement Learning without Ground-Truth Solutions can Improve LLMs

Synthetic Media & Art
(01:22:54) Neon Buys ‘Artificial,’ a Film About OpenAI, After Amazon Dropped It - The New York Times
(01:26:32) Tidal won’t pay royalties on AI-generated music, but isn’t banning it outright | The Verge

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.