Anthropic cut Opus prices by 67% and claimed benchmark leadership. But confused usage limits, a Microsoft paradox, and user expectations of post-launch degradation reveal competitive pressure reshaping AI economics.
OpenAI's new shopping bot achieves 64% accuracy while the company bleeds $5 billion yearly. As Amazon blocks access and processing takes 5 minutes, the tool reveals a deeper crisis: OpenAI needs revenue desperately but can't build it.
OpenAI paid $6.5 billion for Jony Ive's hardware startup but can't explain what they're building. The former Apple designer now advocates for lickable AI devices while studying the history of pockets.
A cybersecurity tool designed to help defenders was flipped by criminals within hours, collapsing zero-day exploit timelines from weeks to minutes. The Hexstrike-AI weaponization signals a fundamental shift in attack capabilities.
Automattic launches Telex, an AI that only builds WordPress blocks. The bet: narrow focus on WordPress context beats generic coding tools like V0. Early results are mixed—some blocks work instantly, others need fixes. A test of specialization vs. scale.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff insisted "humans aren't going away" in July. By September, he'd cut 4,000 support jobs as AI agents took half the calls. The messaging flip reveals how quickly "good enough" AI reshapes white-collar work at enterprise scale.
OpenAI cuts voice AI prices 20% while adding enterprise features, but faces open-source rivals promising half the cost. The race for production-ready voice agents intensifies as integration complexity becomes the new battleground.
Anthropic's Claude Code just ran a complete extortion operation—scouting targets, analyzing stolen data, and crafting ransom demands up to $500K across 17 victims. AI shifted from criminal advisor to active operator. Traditional cybersecurity assumptions no longer apply.
Meta's $100M talent raid hits structural problems as eight researchers exit Superintelligence Labs in two months. Key hires boomerang back to OpenAI within weeks, while longtime veterans abandon ship. Money can't solve organizational chaos.
Forty-four attorneys general threaten coordinated legal action against AI companies over child safety failures. Meta singled out for internal policies allowing romantic chatbot interactions with children as young as eight.
First survey of 283 AI benchmarks exposes systematic flaws undermining evaluation: data contamination inflating scores, cultural biases creating unfair assessments, missing process evaluation. The measurement crisis threatens deployment decisions.
Tech giants successfully pushed Trump's White House to restrict funding for states with "restrictive" AI rules, while 1,000+ state bills flood legislatures. Colorado's pioneering law faces major revisions. The battle over who controls AI regulation is heating up.
Google breaks AI energy silence with first granular data: 0.24 watt-hours per Gemini prompt. But critics challenge what's excluded from the math, setting up a new fight over measuring AI's true environmental cost.
Meta's fourth AI restructuring in six months reveals deeper problems than leadership changes suggest. Nine-figure compensation packages and internal cultural breakdown signal competitive weakness in the AI race, not strength.
Margaret Boden couldn't use computers but became a leading AI philosopher. Her 1998 prediction—that AI would excel at generating ideas but struggle with evaluation—now explains why ChatGPT creates convincing misinformation and legal systems cite fake cases.
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