← The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
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Today on the AI Weekly Brief. Meet your ad hoc AI licensing regime. AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright friends, we are back with another five minute AI Weekly Brief. Use this episode to catch up on what you missed or to forward along to someone who needs to know what's going on but isn't quite at the daily episode stage yet. Quick note before we get into the show. After recording and editing this episode, we got some big news updates on Friday afternoon and evening. What you're about to hear is the episode that happened before that news came out and stick around at the end for a few thoughts on the latest on Mythos and GPT 5.6 this was a week where the hallmark was there was at no point any one huge story in AI, but instead every single part of AI, from politics to markets to models, had something happen that inched us along towards a future that in many cases not everyone is loving. Certainly the big background noise continues to be the Fable 5 story. Last weekend people started chattering about a quote from Senator Mark Warner, who reported that the NSA had told him that Mythos had been able to break into their classified systems. Now, many people took this as Mythos literally breaking into NSA's classified systems. When of course what it actually was was that during a red teaming exercise, in other words, a controlled experiment to figure out just how dangerous Mythos could be, the NSA saw much more significant capabilities than they had seen before. And this really set the tone for the week when it came to Fable and Mythos, in that everyone wanted to latch onto any small rumor or comment as an indicator of when we were actually going to get this thing back. One big whipsaw throughout the week was in the prediction markets, which started very bleary but then had a single day where the likelihood of Fable 5 returning by July 1st jumped all the way up above 60%. Now it appears that the source for that were reports that the White House was having a better time interacting with Anthropic co founder Tom Brown after CEO Dario Amade had been sidelined in the conversations. And yet, the week closed on the most important and most substantive news in all of this, which is that yes, indeed, this is not just a personality clash between the White House and Anthropic, but a new ad hoc, informal, unaccountable, and seemingly not particularly technically competent licensing regime. The newest news is that GPT 5.6 is indeed being delayed by the Trump administration as well. In a Wednesday company Q and A, Sam Altman told OpenAI that GPT 5.6 would not be coming to the public, but would instead be released in a limited preview to a small group of partners. The reason was that the government had asked OpenAI to do it like that. Now in a memo on Thursday, Altman added that the government would be, quote, approving access customer by customer during this preview period. Now Altman did say in the Thursday memo, we've made clear to the U.S. government that this is not our preferred long term model and we'll work with them and others in industry to achieve a more sustainable approach for future releases. But here we are. Now if you are sensing a bit of snark, vitriol, acrimony in my tone, you are indeed picking up on that correctly. The best I can tell from the outside is that while Anthropic didn't handle themselves particularly well with regard to the government, mostly this whole thing started by the US Government not really having paid attention until a different company, Amazon, Twitter, told them that Mythos could do a thing that Anthropic had been clear that Mythos could do. And now we have the worst possible outcome, which is, as Neil Chilson put it, arbitrary, unknown, non transparent license requirements are far worse than red tape. Said the new AI policy is that the White House decides ad hoc for whatever reasons it likes, who does and does not get access to frontier intelligence. This seems rather maximally terrible. And Andrew Curran reminds for the people saying this is a pause or a victory for safety, it is not. This does not slow development in any way. It only slows the rate at which the labs can release the models, not how fast they can train them. The gap between what is available to the public and what the labs have internally will steadily widen from this day forward. This actually makes no one happy. And it's not just that it makes no one happy, it is good for no one. I very, very much hope that the White House can get its act together and or that Congress can step in and, you know, do its job so that we're not left with this incredibly capricious scenario that makes literally everyone worse off. Meanwhile, other people and other companies are doing what they do that is adapting. Throughout the week, organizations, especially smaller organizations and startups, continue to experiment with Z AI's new GLM 5.2 model. And all of the positive buzz that we've seen before seems to be continuing now a little bit closer to home in the US. Google also reported that Gemma 4 had just hit 200 million downloads, providing more evidence that people really are looking for lower cost alternative model architectures we also got a reminder this week that when it comes to AI advancements, it's not just a model question anymore. The harnesses through which we use AI and the UI UX patterns that become normalized have a big impact on the value we get from AI as well. The most interesting example of this this week was Claude tag. Claude tag is basically a native integration of Claude into Slack, where you can tag CLAUDE from any channel or conversation and have it initiate work in the background. But it's not just calling upon claude, it's actually calling upon a full instance of CLAUDE code, which has the potential to dramatically lower the barrier to people on the team who aren't technical using CLAUDE code in ways that both the technical team and more early adopter knowledge workers have been getting value from it for the last six months or more. What's more, by embedding CLAUDE tag directly into the context flow, it has the potential to change just how much context it has available. Anthropic says that 65% of their code now originates by people talking about what needs to happen or what they need to build in Slack, which is just a massive behavior pattern shift. I think we're going to see a lot more experimentation and discussion around the idea of AI as moving to multiplayer in the coming weeks. But interestingly, the Fable 5 background context, along with the token efficiency considerations and cost concerns that had been growing even before that, have made people a little bit less willing to just jump into the latest feature from one of the big labs. As Will Brown from Prime Intellect summed up, something has definitely shifted in the past few weeks, seeing a huge uptick in large enterprises wanting to secure, compute and post train their own models in house frequently. On top of GLM 5.2, everyone is starting to understand how open source wins. Now this I think actually might dovetail with our most interesting stat of the week, which comes from KPMG's Global AI Pulse Survey for quarter two that found that CEO led AI efforts were 3x more likely to produce ROI than efforts where the CEO was less involved. Always going with whatever the state of the art model is from the closed source labs is sort of the default option these days. More complex, open source, integrated or even post trained. The sort of novel architectures that can provide more data sovereignty and cost efficiencies are the types of things that I think organizations with CEO led AI efforts are going to be a lot more capable of implementing. Lastly, today, if you're looking for any strong clear signals from markets, I apologize in advance beginning of the week looked like the AI bubble was popping and in fact that was a popular narrative. But then Micron absolutely destroyed its earnings and what's more, reinforced with their projections that the structural supply chain shortage for every single aspect of the AI supply chain wasn't going away anytime soon, which got everyone back on board. OpenAI, it is now reported, is starting to lean towards waiting until next year for ipo. And honestly, with everything going on, who can blame them? In terms of what to watch for next week, it remains the Fable 5 Return Watch. But I think we saw this week that the stakes are getting even higher. The situation that we're in now, the ad hoc text messages between Howard Lutnick and Sam Altman type of licensing regime is, I will repeat, bad for everyone. And I hope that this has changed as soon as humanly possible. All right, so two things happened after the recording of that episode. The first is that news outlets started reporting that while we were not getting Fable 5 back, the US had lifted its block on Mythos. For a handful of selected partners. The reporting was that it was about 100 institutions, including major U.S. companies and government agencies that would now have access. As Andrew Kern wrote, the vibe shift was nightmarish. Around this, writer Justin Murphy captured the sentiment, saying, if they really start to gatekeep who gets to use the best models, that is a declaration of war. This prospect fills me with the most sincere bodily cypherpunk will to power that I've ever felt, at least since I was a teenager. If they really go down this route, I would go all in on building the most psychotic swarms of open source models and fine tunes possible, all geared toward a chaotic good jamming of the entire institutional public sphere. If we didn't do that, all of political life in the marketplace of ideas would be over before we know it. And yet that wasn't the only news. We also did finally start to get a little bit more information about GPT 5.6 and exactly as the reporting had suggested. It is going to be rate limited at first by the US Government. Sam Altman summed it up this way on Twitter Good news first. SOL is a smart, efficient and significant step forward. It is the same price as GPT 5.5. Also launching in the GPT 5.6 family is Terra, with 5.5 level performance at half the price. Bad news. At the request of the US government, it is launching today in limited preview instead of the open access launch we were planning on. We are working with the government to get general availability as fast as we can. I think it is quite reasonable to roll out models, especially as they reach significant new levels of capability. In this way it fits with our long held strategy of iterative deployment, but this isn't quite the process that we think is optimal. Now we will get with the government to attempt to get a transparent, reliable process for early access and to ensure that as long as our safeguards work as intended, we can release widely. We will work as quickly as we can to get this model in your hands and we hope you will love it. Now obviously there is going to be a lot more to discuss about this at the beginning of next week, but maybe to try to end on a note of some optimism, we turn to Rune from OpenAI who writes today it's popular to say the unofficial AI licensing regime is slowing down innovation or whatever, but people are not looking at the big picture of how quickly this enormously consequential technology is moving. The particular circumstances around Mythos may have accelerated all this slightly, but it was inevitable and earlier is better than too late. Any good choice will look early inside the exponential. I think it's a positive development that the Feds understand the gravity of this technology. Models being publicly delayed by a week here or there is really not the end of the world. Procedurally this is not the right way to do it, but they'll figure it out. One very sad outcome will be if non Americans are just left behind from the frontier forever. The pax technologica of the free world and frankly later on, the unfree world should be maintained. We'll leave it there for now, but please do come back on Monday. We are going to have a lot more to talk about then. For now, that is going to do it. For today's AI Weekly Brief, if you want to help the show, send this to someone who you think needs to know what's going on with AI. And until next time, peace.