Google is reorganizing its AI coding strike team as it tries to close the gap with Anthropic in one of the most lucrative parts of the AI market.
According to The Information, the months-old team is being expanded into a more formal "midtraining" group, sitting between pretraining and post-training. The goal is to improve Gemini’s coding abilities and extend those capabilities into broader business tasks like creating presentations.
The move comes after two major departures: Noam Shazeer reportedly left for OpenAI after changes to his compute access, while Nobel Prize winner John Jumper is heading to Anthropic after recently being moved to the coding strike team.
That is the uncomfortable part for Google.
It has world-class researchers, TPUs, Gemini, Cloud, Search, YouTube, and enormous distribution. But coding has become the clearest monetization layer in AI, and Anthropic has turned that advantage into massive revenue momentum.
Google now seems to be admitting that strong base models alone are not enough. Coding needs specialized training, dedicated compute, and a much sharper product loop.
We’ve designed and built our first AI chip: Jalapeño.
Designed from the ground up by OpenAI and brought to production with @Broadcom, Jalapeño is purpose-built for the LLM workloads powering ChatGPT, Codex, the API, and future agentic products.
Chips are foundational to the AI economy. Building our own expands our full-stack platform from products to models to infrastructure, and will help us scale intelligence, serve more people, and expand access to AI.
It looks like we’re getting a whole range of new GPT models this Thursday:
GPT-5.6,
5.6 Pro,
and a new bidirectional voice model.
Initial tests of the voice model were outstanding, this is exactly what I had hoped for two years ago!
Holy Sh*t: that changes the whole Fable 5 story completely:
On June 11, the very same day Amazon reportedly uncovered the jailbreak, “Mythos” allegedly breached almost all classified systems belonging to the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, not over the course of weeks, but within hours.
"On June 11th Mark Warner, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that General Joshua Rudd, who leads the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, had told him that Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours”."
Via Economist
After 4 months of daily use, here is where I landed with my AI cluster, “BOB”. - my digital brain
BOB is made from three computers. Everything runs on LM Studio.
The idea: three independent entities that can multitask, share outputs, and work together when needed.
1) Sam: A 2019 Mac Mini for simple and fast questions where security is not an issue. Running on OpenClaw.
2) BOB: A Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM. The main powerhouse, running qwen3.5-397b-a17b-mlx, modified and checked by our BottleCap AI team for biases we found during testing. Running on Hermes.
3) Jensen: An Nvidia Spark DGX running smaller models, currently Qwen 3.5 24B. It handles faster and simpler reasoning tasks (also checked & tweaked).
What Bob actually does every day:
Bob has processed a huge amount of private and public information about me: All podcasts, articles, old emails, documents, business history, decisions, projects, and communication patterns.
The goal is not to create a chatbot.
The goal is to have something that reasons like me, understands reasoning behind my past decisions, and has context for what I am solving today.
It understands how I think, what I care about, which mistakes I made, which opportunities paid off, and which ones were distractions dressed as opportunities.
I would never put this context into a random cloud system. It is too personal, too sensitive, and too strategically useful.
The killer feature:
Bob is trained to disagree with me from a hardcore first-principles angle.
It attacks weak assumptions, points out when something is not grounded, and compares new ideas against old decisions mistakes, with historical context.
Examples:
Bob found useful patterns in old Beat Saber music pack release strategy when we were starting and had very limited resources. It suggested better strategy straight up. Good lesson.
Yesterday, Bob suggested dropping an investment-related opportunity because it found a similar pattern in my 2020 history in different field. Back then, I had done something similar, with basically no meaningful benefit without remembering it.
Bob helps also with emails, but I do not let it reply automatically. I experienced few moments when somebody asked me why I rejected something and I had no idea what they're talking about. Now I send everything myself.
Bottom line:
For my use case, local models are the only relatively secure way where I feel comfortable going down this path and I use them daily.
They are still not in frontier cloud territory, but they are improving extremely fast.
For private reasoning over your own data, they are already good enough to become a real operating system. They just need to be checked.
Recent Anthropic restrictions on frontier cloud models showed how easily you can get cut off from tools your products or infrastructure might depend on.
That does not happen with local models sitting in your server or desk.
I strongly believe local models are a big part of the future, and a big opportunity for Europe btw...
Two years ago, reasoning models did not exist. GPT-4o and Sonnet 3.5 were SOTA.
One year ago, the best publicly available model was o3, and 99% of those who used it (i.e., 99% of 7% of OpenAI customers) were using it as a chatbot.
Today (i.e., right now as I type this), I have Codex building several pieces of personalized software and doing a large-scale data management project for me. The data management project has been running autonomously for nearly 4 days. I have multiple working apps on my phone that I use daily and which were built entirely by Codex.
Projecting this trend to June 2027 is absolutely mind-boggling. The world will change.
Axios reports that the industry is now worried White House export controls on Anthropic’s latest model could hurt the entire U.S. AI industry.
The problem is trust. And that was to be expected.
As Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid put it:
“You can’t rely on something that could be switched off.”
If companies fear future frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google can be restricted overnight, they’ll diversify faster.
And that could be a major advantage for open models.
“You have no idea whether the U.S. government is just going to shut off your access to any future models,” Martin Chorzempa told Axios.
“That’s a big advantage to open models.”
As I already said: this Anthropic / US Gov dispute was the biggest PR for open source.
Official now: SpaceX is officially buying Cursor in an all-stock deal valued at $60B.
The move gives Elon Musk’s AI empire a serious enterprise coding product overnight, and could help xAI close the gap with Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.
However, the truth is that it now seems that xAI is increasingly renting out its data centers and offering them as a hyperscaler rather than actually wanting to participate in the race for the SOTA model.
World-first: Scientists just treated the first human with a therapy designed to make old cells young again
For the first time, a person has received a gene therapy aimed at “partially reprogramming” aging cells, essentially nudging them back toward a younger state without turning them into stem cells.
The trial, run by Life Biosciences, targets glaucoma by trying to regenerate damaged optic nerve cells in the eye. The huge question now: can cellular rejuvenation work safely in humans?
It may be one of the most important first tests of whether the biology of aging can be therapeutically reversed.
Update on Fable5/Anthropic: Anthropic flew its top security people to DC. The export controls are still there. Via Wired
Anthropic and the Trump administration wrapped up talks on Monday with no resolution - the export controls on Claude Fable 5 are still in place. No end in sight.
The company has spent days arguing that Washington's concerns about the model are overblown, a line it repeated to government researchers at the Commerce Department.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick joined by phone from the G7 summit in Evian, France, while cyber director Sean Cairncross sat the meeting out.
On Anthropic's side, cofounder Tom Brown and external affairs head Sarah Heck led the discussions, with red-teaming chief Logan Graham and security researcher Nicholas Carlini flying to DC for the talks.
The core disagreement is whether Fable 5's guardrails can be stripped away to unlock the more powerful Mythos capabilities underneath, the NSA thinks yes, Anthropic thinks the risk is overstated.
For now there's no clear sense of what the next steps look like.
Indians are being paid to train robots to perform human work
They film their daily household tasks — cooking, cleaning, kitchen routines.
The pay is low — around $2–3 per hour — but there is one condition: everything must be recorded in first-person view.
These recordings are used as training data so AI systems can better recognize and replicate human movements.
🎥 DW
Wait what? Rio 3.5 Open 397B, developed by IT company of Rio de Janeiro's city government is now SOTA open source and even outperforming Qwen 3.7?
What is happening today.
Never heard of them before.
Some people are defending Anthropic despite everything that is happening, largely because Fable 5 is an amazing coding model. I can confirm this is true, and I do not think anyone would seriously argue against it. Even its high cost should not be an issue. We live under capitalism, and companies can charge what the market allows.
But, and this is a very big but, there is a much more important issue here.
What these people do not understand is that Fable will be the best coding model only for a short while. Others are very close behind. In fact, even better models will arrive soon, and coding itself is clearly on the path to being largely solved. Models will then become cheaper over time. If you do not get to build your amazing software a few months earlier, that probably will not change much in the world. At most, it may delay your personal ability to benefit from it for a while. It might even benefit you, by saving you from wasting money and time before better and cheaper versions arrive.
But a doctor cannot wait to treat patients. A scientist trying to cure cancer does not have the luxury of waiting months. Every day of delay in research and clinical applications costs lives, potentially thousands of them. Every day that scientists around the world are denied access to the best models is another day the world is delayed from becoming better.
And this is not only about model access. Anthropic has also advocated for pauses and regulatory capture. They are strongly against open models. In my view, this is not driven by some pure concern for humanity, but by the fact that such control would give them more money, more power, and more leverage over the future.
Therefore, I believe it is far more important to be principled and stand for humanity than to chase short-term personal benefit. That is the reason for my outrage against Anthropic. It is nothing personal against poor Fable 5, or against the great AI engineers at Anthropic who are building these models. I do not doubt that many of them are sincere, and I am grateful to all frontier AI engineers who are pushing this technology forward.
But I do hold those in charge of Anthropic responsible. Their founders and leadership should be held accountable for what I see as self-serving and deeply misanthropic actions. I also do not think they care. Not one of them has meaningfully responded to the outrage.
This is also a note to everyone who keeps claiming that AI itself is the threat to human existence.
No. It is not AI itself.
It is the humans who control AI who may become the real threat to humanity, as I have said repeatedly.
We have to resist this power capture at all costs, if we truly care about the rest of humanity.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ
This is so awesome!
OpenAI is now letting Codex users save their rate limit resets and use them later, starting with one free saved reset for Go, Plus, Pro, and Business users.