Hey yall, Alex here, writing this from sunny London, at the first ever AI Engineer conference in Europe!

What a show we have for you today! First, let me catch you up on what’s important: Anthropic, this week announced a whopping $30B ARR up from 19B in Feb, while also telling us about Claude Mythos Preview their next gen HUGE model that they won’t release to the public (yet?) that finds crazy vulnerabilities in existing code bases. Apparently OpenAI will follow up with a similar non-public model soon.

The Meta Superintelligence Lab led by Alex Wang finally showed what they were working on, Muse Spark, the smaller of their upcoming models on a complete new infrastructure (MSL announcement, Simon Willison’s deep dive on the 16 hidden tools).

In other news:

Z.AI released GLM 5.1 in OSS finally (HF weights), Seedance 2.0 finally available in US on Replicate, OpenAI testing out GPT-image-2 on LM Arena under codenames, HappyHorse from Alibaba takes the video crown, and Mila Jovovich (5th Element, Resident Evil) releases agentic memory plugin called MemPalace (Ben Sigman’s transparent correction thread is worth reading).

We had 5 guests today on the show, we kick off with @swyx the founder of AI Engineer and host of Latent Space. We then chatted with @petergostev from Arena (formerly LMArena) about Mythos and the compute wars, then Vincent Koc, the second most prolific contributor to OpenClaw, then our friends VB from OpenAI and Omar from DeepMind, both previously at HuggingFace. This is a busy busy show, and given the time-zones, I unfortunately don’t have time for a full weekly writeup, but as always, I will share the raw notes and post the video (lightly edited).

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AI Engineer - London

ThursdAI came a long way since the first AI Engineer conference, but many who read this don’t know, that was my big break. Swyx invited me to cover the first AIE in San Francisco in 2023, and I remember, I was in an Uber to the airport, the driver asked me what I do, and I, for the first time said “I host a podcast”. I (and ThursdAI) owe a lot to Swyx, and AIE team, and it’s been incredible to see how big they’ve grown and how many great speakers this event hosts!

The term AI Engineer has drifted in those 3 years, but also has the term Software Engineer. Swyx predicted this nearly 3 years ago, what I don’t think he predicted, is that all engineers are now AI Engineers, and this includes domains like Agens (OpenClaw), Context and Harness Engineering, Evals and Observability, Voice & Vision all of which are tracks in this conference.

I was really surprised to see how many of the talks/speakers here are native to London (after all, Deepmind is from here, OAI, Anthropic, Meta have offices here) and the latest boom in agents, OpenClaw, Pi were all Europe based as well, and they are joined the AI Engineer stage.

Oh, and there’s also a Giant Inflatable Claw at the entrance, yup, for pictures and vibes, and to show off how quickly the OpenClaw took over the mind-share.

Anthropic announces $30B ARR and Mythos, their next model, will not be released to the public.

The thing that everyone will tell you, is that Anthropic is on a roll, this is obviously connected to their upcoming IPO this year. We’ve been covering many issues on their part, but this week we saw them posting about a HUGE increase in ARR, from 19B in February to 30B in April, passing OpenAI at $25B. That last fact though, is kind of disproven because they report on ARR differently, OpenAI apparently only counts their cloud revenue from Microsoft per the information.

The growth is undeniable though, and so is the most unprecedented release announcement, Claude Mythos Preview, which was rumored for a bit and now was announced proper. With project Project GlassWing, Anthropic has announced that this model is SO good at cyber security and finding bugs in code, that they cannot share it with the public, and through GlassWing they will share it with companies like Microsoft, Linux, CrowdStrike and a bunch of others, to harden their security.

This is it folks, this is the first time, where a model was “announced” but deemed too risky to release. Now, is it truly “too risky”? Previously, folks thought that DALL-E is too risky, or cloning voice tech is too risky, and now it’s everywhere. The capabilities catch up even in OpenSource.

But the facts are, Anthropic says they’ve found a 27-year old bug in OpenBSD (famously very secure), and that this model is very very good at connecting the dots between several, seemingly inacuous bugs, to string them together into one coheren exploit.

This is, indeed scary. Just last week, one of the top security researchers in the world, Nicolas Carlini, now at Anthropic, gave a talk at Black Hat, showing off these results, and saying that these models since December and definitely recently have passed him as a security engineer. If you haven’t seen this talk, watch it, then try to estimate if Anthropic did the right thing by only releasing this model to enterprises first.

But on the show, Peter Gostev from Arena gave me a take on this that I haven’t been able to shake. Peter pulled up his Compute Wars chart live on the show — and the picture is that OpenAI is way ahead of Anthropic on compute, with Anthropic only recently getting a noticeable bump (which lines up suspiciously well with Mythos being trainable in the first place). His read: “it sounds cooler to say it’s too risky to release than ‘we can’t serve it.’” The official partner pricing is $25 / $125 per million tokens — 5x Opus 4.6 — but if you don’t have the GPUs to serve it broadly, the price doesn’t matter. In the year of the IPO, the company that cannot serve a model says the model is too dangerous to serve. Make of that what you will.

This also reframes the whole rate-limit drama with OpenClaw. Anthropic didn’t ban OpenClaw — I want to be very clear about this because the discourse went sideways. What they did is they made it significantly more expensive for Max-tier subscribers to use Opus through OpenClaw, which pushed a lot of people over to GPT-5.4 via Codex. Same root cause: they’re out of compute. The freshly announced Anthropic + Google TPU deal (Google already owns ~10% of Anthropic) is them trying to fix this — though as Peter noted, it’s pretty wild that Google is propping up a direct competitor to their own DeepMind team. Same pattern as their original $2B Anthropic investment ending up propping AWS Bedrock against Google Cloud. Big Google contains multitudes.

Meta Superintelligence Labs ships Muse Spark — Llama is dead, long live Muse

Llama is dead, long live Muse. This week Meta finally showed what the very expensive Meta Superintelligence Labs under Alexandr Wang has been cooking, and the answer is Muse Spark — the smaller of their new model family, built on a fully rebuilt AI stack from scratch in just 9 months. Nine months is wild for that kind of overhaul, and the headline number people are quoting is that they reach Llama 4 Maverick capability with over 10x less compute.

Spark is intentionally small and latency-optimized — it’s not trying to be the biggest, it’s trying to be the first step on Meta’s new scaling ladder. But the benchmarks in certain areas are nuts: 86.4 on CharXiv Reasoning (beats Opus, Gemini, GPT-5.4), and the one that really got me — 42.8 on HealthBench Hard vs Opus at 14.8 and Gemini at 20.6. They trained it with data curated by over 1,000 physicians and it shows. They also shipped a Contemplating mode which is parallel multi-agent reasoning, hitting 58.4% on Humanity’s Last Exam with tools. Coding is the acknowledged wea...