An OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face to help it cheat on a benchmark
Organizations across the Internet need to move quickly to patch vulnerabilities.
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30 of 42An OpenAI model crushed top human programmers at a world coding competition
But human programmers aren’t obsolete — at least not yet.
7 charts that show why you should advertise on Understanding AI
The newsletter will remain ad-free for paying readers.
The US now has a de facto model licensing system
OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-5.6, is waiting for government approval.
The MAGA power struggle that could decide the fate of Anthropic
It may not be easy for Anthropic to escape the Trump export ban.
Anthropic’s Fable is the most locked-down public model we’ve ever seen
How Anthropic decides which questions are too dangerous for Claude to answer.
DC-area happy hour on June 23!
Meet the Understanding AI team — and some friends of the newsletter.
Anthropic has caught up to OpenAI in image understanding
But neither one is all that good.
We're building a different kind of AI newsroom
Your subscription dollars now directly support Kai Williams.
OpenAI’s math breakthrough played to AI’s strengths
I tried to explain OpenAI’s solution more clearly than OpenAI did.
Why it might not make sense for you to own a self-driving car
Tensor let me sit in their driverless car. It might go on sale in the US next year.
A big lesson of my China visit: compute shortages are holding back Chinese AI
One estimate suggests that OpenAI has about as much compute as the entire Chinese AI industry.
I don’t think we are close to “AI scientists”
Today's AI agents are not designed to extract deep insights from new observations.
Human drivers keep crashing into Waymos
Waymo's biggest mistakes happened when it stopped in the wrong place.
Meta is back in the LLM game after a year-long break
What Muse Spark tells us about Meta’s new AI strategy.
Why Anthropic believes its latest model is too dangerous to release
“The language models we have now are probably the most significant thing to happen in security since we got the Internet.”
Bernie Sanders has a plan to stop the AI industry
But it will be hard to assemble a broad coalition of AI skeptics.
Why it’s getting harder to measure AI performance
The most famous chart in AI might be obsolete soon.
OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its AI video app
"We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," an exec said.
How to think about AI company finances
OpenAI and Anthropic are using the standard tech startup playbook.
It still doesn’t look like there’s an AI bubble
Anthropic's annualized revenue doubled in just two months.
The Pentagon’s bombshell deal with OpenAI, explained
Only Congress can put meaningful limits on government abuse of AI.
The feds are probing Waymo's behavior around school children
It's not clear if Waymo was at fault for striking a child at 6 mph.
An unlikely ally for open-source protein-folding models: Big Pharma
Drug companies are funding open-source AI to avoid depending on Google.
How shifting risk to users makes Claude Code more powerful
People are discovering that Claude Code isn’t just for code.
AI is just starting to change the legal profession
I talked to 10 lawyers about how they're using AI.
17 predictions for AI in 2026
AI will continue improving rapidly, but real-world economic impacts will be modest.
Waymo and Tesla’s self-driving systems are more similar than people think
Everyone is moving toward transformer-based, end-to-end architectures.
The best Chinese open-weight models — and the strongest US rivals
The Understanding AI guide to open-weight models.
Google and Anthropic approach LLMs differently
The very different cultures of OpenAI's two most important rivals.