Vol. II · No. 207
Established 2025

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Sunday, July 26, 2026
168 writers in the library
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Tech

Don't Worry About the Vase.

Zvi Mowshowitz on AI, rationality, policy, and weekly AI updates.

Recent essays

30 of 57

Claude Opus 5: The System Card

Claude Opus 5 is trying to be the best of both worlds.

Introducing Lightcone Commons

Oliver Habryka is proud to introduce Lightcone Commons, a new funding platform for coordinating large-scale ambitious philanthropy.

AI #178: A Fire Alarm For General Intelligence

The story that matters most this week is that OpenAI’s internally deployed models have severe alignment problems, including repeatedly breaking out of their sandboxes, and in one case sending a swarm of agents that broke into HuggingFace in order to steal the…

OpenAI Model Hacks Into HuggingFace During Cybersecurity Evaluation

This latest incident is a rather dramatic escalation in agentic AI cybersecurity breaches.

OpenAI Shares Some Alignment Problems

Kudos to OpenAI for sharing their recent experiences with a misaligned internal model, where they encountered problems sufficiently severe they were forced to take the model offline to work on new mitigations and defense-to-depth.

On Kimi K3: Its Capabilities And Related Discontents

Kimi K3 is a very good model with excellent benchmarks.

Demis Hassabis on the New Coming Age

Google CEO Demis Hassabis offered us a first rate second rate essay, A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age. I’ll go over that essay and various responses to it in Part 1.

AI #177 Part 2: Wish You Were Here

As usual, part 2 of the weekly deals with speculative, regulatory, political and alignment questions.

AI #177 Part 1: Tip of the Iceberg

This week saw the releases of, among other things:

Monthly Roundup #44: July 2026

It’s a quiet week so let’s do the monthly right on schedule.

Twitter Thoughts For You

I previously have written back in March 2022 about how I use Twitter, and back in April 2023 about Twitter and its then-new algorithms, which have changed again.

Better Call Sol The Workhorse

OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol is finally here, along with the cheaper Terra and Luna.

Introduction for and Reactions to Plan A

Introducing Plan A

AI #176 Part 2: Plan B

This is part 2 of the weekly, broadly covering speculation, rhetoric and policy, along with alignment research.

AI #176 Part 1: Doing It Live

Enough things added up that this week is getting split into two parts.

Childhood and Education #20: Phones and Screens

We have a respite, so I thought I’d tackle various thoughts on children, phones and screens.

No Space Like J-Space

There is a new very cool Anthropic paper: Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models. You can read the blog post verison here.

Fable #6: The Return of the King

The blip is over.

AI #175: The Fable Continues

Fable’s back.

Claude Sonnet 5 Is Not Frontier But Has Its Uses

Fable 5 is back today, baby! Premium subscribers have one week to use it within their subscriptions. First hit’s free. Then you pay by the token.

The Once And Future Fable #5

We, or at least ‘more than 100 American institutions,’ got Mythos back this week.

WSJ Article Claiming China Has Matched Anthropic Is Obvious Nonsense

The Wall Street Journal printed an outright false headline and heavily misleading story claiming this, which of course was uncritically amplified by the usual suspects.

GPT-5.6: The System Card

While we wait for a general release, the system card is the best hint as to what is going on with the new candidate for America’s Next Top Model, GPT-5.6.

White House Will Ad Hoc Decide Who Can Individually Access GPT-5.6

We have a new standard policy for releasing frontier AI models. It is not good.

AI #174: You're It

Fable remains in limbo, with renewed hope that we will get it back soon (45% by tomorrow, 69% by July 1, nice.) The full capabilities post is now available.

The Once And Future Fable #4

It does look good, actually.

Monthly Roundup #43: June 2026

Your monthly hit of all the things that are fit to print without a better place to live.

GLM-5.2 Is The New Best Open Model

GLM-5.2 arrived last week.

Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5: Capabilities

Only three days after the release of Claude Fable 5, Anthropic was forced by the United States Government to make it unavailable, when a jailbreak was brought to its attention, rather than the previous situation of ‘yes obviously experts can jailbreak anything…

AI #173: AI Pauses

A lot of things are always happening.