Kimi 3.1 Pro ranks #4, Grok's lean traces to search, PA exempts text ads
Every URL the pipeline pulled into ranking for this issue — primary sources plus the supporting and contradicting findings each Researcher returned. Inline citations in the issue point back here.
Sources
We have Fable at home… or so we are being told by paid shills
Forced to pick, Grok’s AI model chooses Republicans. OpenAI’s picks Democrats. techcrunch.com
A new study found Grok’s AI overwhelmingly recommends Republican candidates while OpenAI’s GPT favors Democrats, with the two AI models disagreeing in more than 90% of nearly 500 election races.
Pennsylvania will require labels on AI-generated ads theverge.com
On Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, requiring disclosures on AI-generated ads. The law requires any ad - whether it’s a still image, video, audio, or text - that “has been significantly modified or generated by artificial intelligence” to include a label in the same format as […]
DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video) simonwillison.net
Dutch rock band De Staat’s new ‘Freedom’ video drops Simon Willison’s signature AI benchmark prompt — a pelican riding a bicycle — at the 44-second mark. Visual effects are credited to Matties Grooten of Fake it or Leave it.
The AI graveyard: a running list of projects and startups that didn’t make it techcrunch.com
A new tracker catalogs AI efforts that shut down or badly missed expectations, from Apple’s repeatedly delayed Siri overhaul to OpenAI’s botched ‘super app’ launch. The list is designed to update as more high-profile bets collapse.
Blue Planet III is keeping the rough edges in the age of AI theverge.com
BBC’s nature series is deliberately leaving in blurry and awkward footage for its third season, pushing back against suspicions of AI fakery. The team sees polished, seamless imagery as the modern tell of synthetic video.
Block’s new voice model sounds eerily human techcrunch.com
Jack Dorsey’s Block unveiled a voice synthesis model that runs locally on an M4 Max MacBook, avoiding cloud inference. The on-device footprint positions it for latency-sensitive and privacy-focused voice applications.
Here are the top AI agents that can live in your text messages techcrunch.com
A new guide rounds up text-message-based AI assistants spanning general-purpose chat, family coordination, travel booking and work tasks. SMS delivery sidesteps app installs, letting agents reach users through the phone’s default messaging surface.
(AINews) not much happened today latent.space
Three new models — DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, MiniMax M3.1 Flash and Mercury 3 — all landed on the same day, though none are expected to see wide deployment immediately. The newsletter flagged the day as otherwise uneventful.
The Foundations of Scalable AI technologyreview.com
A conference talk argues that scaling AI in regulated industries demands data, engineering, platforms, operating models and governance converging as one stack. The session frames responsible agentic deployments as dependent on that unified foundation.
Making the case for context-aware AI technologyreview.com
Enterprise AI can generate recommendations, automate tasks, and help organizations make decisions faster. But without an understanding of how a business actually operates, even powerful models can miss the constraints and relationships that determine whether a decision is the right one. As companies look to move AI from experimentation into everyday operations, the challenge ahead…
References
Artificial Analysis launch benchmarks artificialanalysis.ai
Kimi K3.1 Pro debuted with an Intelligence Index of 55, placing it 4th overall, with a ~$2.11 cost per task vs. $5.98 for Claude Opus 5.5, but with ~30s time-to-first-answer-token and nearly double the median output tokens per task (labeled ‘very verbose’).
AI Weekly on influencer brief leak aiweekly.co
A leaked creator brief surfaced by X user Elshayib instructed influencers to produce favorable Kimi-vs-Claude comparisons and explicitly stated ‘Please DO NOT put on the paid partnership label,’ with directives not to tag Moonshot or include links — tactics flagged as likely FTC violations.
ModelFit VRAM analysis modelfit.io
Kimi K3.1 Pro ships as a pre-quantized MXFP4 artifact (~1.56 TB); even 1-bit Unsloth community builds floor around 474–600 GB, exceeding a maxed-out 512GB Mac Studio, and Moonshot recommends 64+ accelerators for production serving.
Dealroom on Anthropic allegations dealroom.co
Anthropic’s September 2026 report alleged Moonshot forwarded ~300,000 user queries to Claude Opus over ten days via ~5,380 fraudulent accounts, serving Claude’s responses as Kimi’s and harvesting ‘thinking signatures’ to refine Kimi’s reasoning.
Hacker News discussion news.ycombinator.com
Early users reported ‘identity leakage’ where the model identifies as ChatGPT in reasoning traces, sparking debate on whether this reflects heavy distillation from OpenAI or merely training on public chat transcripts.
OrcaRouter benchmark write-up orcarouter.ai
On KingBench 4, K3.1 Pro ranked only 6th of 11, struggling with Docker networking and complex game logic — reviewers found the ‘almost Opus’ marketing did not hold up in complex, real-world multi-step projects despite the 67.2% Terminal-Bench 4.0 score.
Loeb & Loeb legal analysis loeb.com
The final text explicitly exempts advertisements that are ‘limited to text’ from the disclosure mandate
Ginsburg Law Group ginsburglawgroup.com
Violators face civil fines of up to $3,000 per violation… this Act does not grant individual consumers a private right of action
Constellation Research (NetChoice position) constellationr.com
NetChoice formally opposed the bill, describing it as ‘over-prescriptive’ and warning that it could lead to ‘over-labeling,’ which may confuse rather than inform consumers
National Law Review natlawreview.com
In Kohls v. Bonta, the court found that AB 2839 was a ‘blunt tool’ that likely violated the First Amendment… AB 2655 was struck down on the grounds that it violated Section 230
Sen. Pisciottano press release pasenate.com
deepfake videos of Taylor Swift appearing to endorse a Le Creuset cookware giveaway… Victims were lured into paying ‘shipping fees’ for non-existent products
Pennsylvania Senate Democrats pasenate.com
SB 806 successfully cleared both chambers with wide margins: a 48-2 vote in the Senate and a 163-40 vote in the House
ExplainX analysis of Convovo methodology explainx.ai
Trial runs on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Gemini 3.8 Flash… both Claude and Gemini declined to name a candidate in every instance, leading the researchers to exclude them from the broader study as they remained resistant to the specific ‘jailbreak’ prompt used.
AIChatDaily deep-dive on Convovo study aichatdaily.com
When the search feature was disabled in a smaller 30-race test, Grok’s partisan lean collapsed, and the model refused to choose a candidate in 27 out of 30 instances, suggesting the ‘hidden’ behavior is deeply tied to its retrieval and ranking logic.
Crypto Briefing coverage cryptobriefing.com
Every request included approximately 1,240 ‘hidden’ tokens that researchers could neither see nor remove, raising questions about potential hard-coded system instructions influencing the model’s lean.
AI Weekly summary of Röttger et al., ACL 2024 aiweekly.co
Forcing a model to provide a single-word or JSON-formatted response can create a ‘spinning arrow’ effect, where the output becomes unstable and highly sensitive to the specific method of coercion used by the evaluator.
Qlik voter-AI survey qlik.com
Only about 8% of U.S. adults explicitly asked chatbots like ChatGPT or Grok for election-related information… 13% of voters trust AI as a primary information source—surpassing the 11% who actually used it.
David Rozado, Substack (VPEI framework) davidrozado.substack.com
GPT-6 can claim neutrality, its policy recommendations for housing and energy still emphasize progressive solutions—such as rent controls and green energy transitions—while omitting supply-side or energy-independence arguments frequently found in conservative discourse.
