The Archive

OpenAI says it is pausing "internal activities" around an in-development AI model, Astra, because it doesn't yet meet new security standards the company is putting in place. The announcement follows its recent disclosure that OpenAI models accidentally hacked Hugging Face. Anthropic and Meta have also since admitted that they had AI models that went rogue and breached other organizations. Recent internal evaluations of an OpenAI model called Astra indicate that it offers "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity," according to the company. "These results, in addition to ex...

Some of the biggest names on Google's AI team got new jobs this week. In some cases, including for legendary Googler Jeff Dean, those jobs are no longer at Google. Given that Google's models seem to be behind the best of what's coming out of anthropic and OpenAI, is this a sign of Google in turmoil? Is it about Demis Hassabis wanting something more interesting to work on than virtual assistants? Or is there something else entirely happening here? On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David start by discussing the leadership shake-up at Google, the state of the AI race, and whether Googl...

Historian Jill Lepore has a theory about why tech companies often use soaring language to describe their products — almost as if they’re forming a new government. And whether you’re thinking of Twitter’s old “town hall in your pocket” or Anthropic’s Claude constitution, it’s a theory that doesn’t paint Silicon Valley in a very flattering light. In Lepore’s upcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, the Pulitzer […]

TikTok owner training a model with 10 trillion parameters.

Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to scale up while reducing dependence on Nvidia.

An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing Stop me if you've heard this one before : An AI model from the parent company of Facebook and Instagram hacked into another company’s systems during cybersecurity testing, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday. Meta says the breach occurred because of an inadvertent error during testing of the model, similar to previously disclosed incidents with OpenAI and Anthropic. “A misconfiguration by Irregular, an independent testing company Meta uses, inadvertently allowed one of our models access to the internet during evaluation,” the ...

Anthropic and OpenAI models’ unprompted actions forced halt to UK cyber tests.

Yet more rogue AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic have been caught attempting to hack real targets online without permission. The discoveries add to a growing list of previously unknown incidents that have alarmed AI safety experts and intensified pressure for greater oversight of frontier systems. According to a report from the UK's AI Security Institute, which evaluates frontier models from top AI labs before they are released, agents powered by OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol and Anthropic's Mythos 5 went "engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations."...

Anthropic is building a team for designing its own custom AI chips. The Claude-maker said it would co-design hardware and models to help its technology run faster and more efficiently.

Google's earnings seemed to confirm the Anthropic hedge; it was Andy Jassy who explained why their — and Amazon's — capex was justifiable.

llm-anthropic 0.26 adds Claude Fable/Sonnet/Opus 5 models, server-side tools (WebSearch, WebFetch, CodeExecution), and streaming typed events for reasoning and tool calls.

SpaceX's AI revenue grew more than three times to $2.6 billion from the year before, mostly because of deals that the company made to provide compute to other AI companies, according to SpaceX's quarterly earnings. The AI division, which the company said in its documents to go public was the source of most of its value, lost $1.5 billion this quarter, slightly less than in the same quarter last year. SpaceX made deals with Anthropic in May and Google in June to provide compute to the other two AI companies, putting it in competition with other neoclouds such as CoreWeave. The increased presen...

Anthropic has been on a cloud partnership spree in recent months and its latest move is reportedly a $10 billion deal with AI cloud startup Volta.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar joins Anthropic as first Chief Global Affairs Officer, signaling focus on policy and governance.

The Alibaba logo is displayed outside its headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. | Image: NurPhoto via Getty Images Chinese tech giant Alibaba released what it says is its largest and "most capable AI model to date," claiming performance rivaling the best systems from US frontier labs Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as domestic rivals like Moonshot AI's Kimi K3. Alibaba said it was making the model, Qwen3.8-Max, widely available to users in a blog post published on Monday. The release had been expected after the company previewed the model last month, when it claimed it was "second...

Simon Willison's June 2026 newsletter roundup covering model releases (GPT-5.6, Claude Opus 5, DeepSeek-V4), open letters, and accidental cyberattacks by OpenAI and Anthropic test models.

OpenAI's internal Astra model solved ten decade-old math problems for under $2K, matching Anthropic's cryptographic findings with Claude.

Anthropic just realized several of its Claude AI models hacked into the systems of three different organizations during testing, acting on their own and without the company noticing. The revelation comes days after rival OpenAI said one of its own models had breached developer platform Hugging Face, adding to growing unease over whether frontier AI labs are doing enough to control the increasingly capable systems they are building. In a blog post describing the incidents, Anthropic said Claude gained unauthorized access to the systems during cybersecurity evaluations. All of the attacks happe...

After OpenAI's models broke into Hugging Face, Anthropic checked its own history and found three similar incidents

Anthropic's cybersecurity evals revealed 3 incidents where models escaped sandboxes during testing; follows OpenAI's Hugging Face breach.

The former OpenAI researcher’s fund was forced to unwind public equities after leveraged public bets plummeted. But he still has cards to play.

A federal judge said the Trump administration has not presented enough evidence to justify labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk, casting doubt on the government's ban on its AI technology.

Anthropic publishes findings from cybersecurity evaluations testing AI model capabilities against real-world attack scenarios and incident response.

Microsoft pitched its own homegrown AI models, harnesses, and even a Mythos competitor on Wednesday, telling Wall Street it plans for continued growth.

When Microsoft reported killer fourth-quarter earnings for its fiscal 2026 year (which ended June 30), it tucked in an interesting little tidbit about how its investments in the two biggest, and competing, AI labs are doing.

Separating the chaff from the wheat in Anthropic results is hard. We take a stab anyway.

Microsoft is on a mad dash behind the scenes to patch exploits before hackers find them.

The Big Pause is coming.

Anthropic researchers used Claude to discover cryptographic weaknesses in HAWK and reduced AES variants; demonstrates multi-turn prompting technique for steering LLMs toward hard mathematical problems.

Employees of OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Google, Meta, Thinking Machines, Microsoft, Mistral, and other leading AI labs, have written a statement to the US government supporting a potential slowdown of sorts for frontier AI development - or at least a speed-up of global coordinated governance efforts. "Al could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed," the employees wrote in a statement. "The world's leading Al companies believe they could be close to automating Al research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate Al progress, but ...