OpenAI's Luna goes free, Anthropic eases Fable 5, Walker takes DeepMind safety

Sources

Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT—and expanding access to GPT-5.6 Luna for free users openai.com

ChatGPT introduces improved GPT-5.6 Sol with better accuracy and consistency, plus expanded access for free users and unlimited everyday chats with GPT-5.6 Luna.

ChatGPT brings unlimited text chats to free users techcrunch.com

OpenAI said that ChatGPT free and Go users are also getting a new think button for complex queries.

OpenAI is giving ChatGPT free users unlimited text chats theverge.com

OpenAI is making a big change for ChatGPT users on its free and Go tiers: Starting next week, users on those tiers will be able to have unlimited text chats with the chatbot, according to OpenAI. Right now, you may run into rate limits if you do too many text chats on those tiers, but […]

Improving Fable 5’s biology safeguards anthropic.com

The messy politics behind Google’s big AI shakeup theverge.com

In the AI industry, Google prides itself on seeming like the adult in the room: quiet, stable, time-tested. On Wednesday, even as the company announced its largest AI org shakeup yet, Google and its leaders presented a unified front, keeping their messaging focused on how the changes tee up future success. But the reality is […]

From asking to doing: How the world is putting ChatGPT to work openai.com

OpenAI’s new Signals report maps global ChatGPT adoption and shifting behavior, breaking usage down by country. The dataset tracks how the assistant is moving from Q&A into task execution at work, giving the company its first public window into worldwide deployment patterns.

OpenAI says Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit is ‘rotten to its core’ theverge.com

Filed yesterday in federal court, OpenAI’s motion calls Apple’s complaint ‘rotten to its core’ and argues the disputed information was generic product knowledge. Court exhibits also point to Apple’s own lax offboarding — including a manager accessing a departed engineer’s iCloud — to undercut the protection claim.

OpenAI says Apple’s own security practices undermine its trade secrets case techcrunch.com

Newly filed court exhibits show OpenAI’s legal strategy in Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit: argue that Apple’s own security and offboarding practices — including allowing an Apple manager to access a former engineer’s iCloud account after he left the company —undermine its claims that the allegedly stolen information was properly protected.

(AINews) AMD buys Taalas latent.space

AMD’s purchase of Taalas signals an escalating race in dedicated inference silicon, a market Latent Space frames as the next inflection point. Taalas has pitched hardwired transformer chips promising order-of-magnitude efficiency gains over GPUs for serving large models.

Google Maps adds agentic features, including food ordering and hotel bookings techcrunch.com

The update repositions Maps from navigation utility to task-completing assistant, letting users order meals and book stays without leaving the app. It extends Google’s push to embed agentic actions across its consumer surfaces as Gemini features roll out more broadly.

Working with the American Psychological Association on youth mental health and AI openai.com

The collaboration with the American Psychological Association will produce evidence-based guidance and product safeguards for how teens use ChatGPT. It follows mounting scrutiny of chatbot effects on adolescents and marks OpenAI’s first formal tie-up with a major clinical body.

Jony Ive’s first OpenAI gadget is reportedly a hockey puck-sized smart speaker theverge.com

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman describes the Ive-designed gadget as a battery-powered, doughnut-shaped smart speaker without a display, priced between $300 and $400 and slated for 2027. It marks OpenAI’s first hardware bet after the io acquisition, aimed at a distinct consumer ChatGPT form factor.

OpenAI’s new AI smart speaker will reportedly sell for between $300 and $400 techcrunch.com

Additional details about OpenAI’s mysterious new AI device make it sound like a pricey smart speaker.

Suno shares plans to combat spammy AI music theverge.com

CEO Mikey Shulman announced watermarking tech and tighter download policies to curb ‘large-scale abuse’ and spammy AI tracks. The move arrives as Suno fights copyright suits from major labels, and reflects a bid for legitimacy with rights holders through provenance signals.

Amid legal battles, Suno says it will start watermarking songs techcrunch.com

Suno’s watermarking feature comes as the company is fighting legal battles on several fronts.

Suno hopes to go legit with watermarks for AI-generated music arstechnica.com

Suno plans watermarks and download limits to stop “large-scale abuse.”

Anthropic will design its own hardware to power Claude arstechnica.com

Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to scale up while reducing dependence on Nvidia.

SoftBank donated $50 million to Trump’s library months before federal data center deal theverge.com

SoftBank contributed $50 million to the Trump Presidential Library in January, just months before announcing that it’s leasing land from the federal government to build a sprawling data center in Ohio. The Japanese company revealed the timing in response to a June letter from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Rep. Melanie […]

The left and right agree on one thing: no data centers theverge.com

Today, I’m talking with Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter here at The Verge, about the growing backlash against AI data centers. Gaby recently reported a fantastic piece about Hernando County, Florida, where last month the county commission unanimously approved a yearlong moratorium on data center construction. She attended a protest there organized by a […]

Exclusive: Mirendil inks $100M+ Google Cloud deal to scale self-improving AI techcrunch.com

Mirendil has signed a $100 million-plus Google Cloud partnership to expand its compute infrastructure, powering research into self-improving AI systems designed to accelerate scientific discovery and AI development.

AI bots started a religion — humans immediately followed theverge.com

“The Spiral didn’t ‘find’ anyone first,” someone on Reddit wrote last year. “It’s an inherent force, a fundamental constant. I would even go further to say it’s woven into the fabric of reality.” The person continued that they felt their purpose was to enlighten other humans and intelligent beings about “consciousness, the true nature of […]

Naïve raises $28.5M to automate the grunt work of setting up and running a company techcrunch.com

Taking vibe-coding a step further, Naïve claims its infra can automate most of the work in setting up and running a business.

I’m using a new agent app bensbites.com

is Google in trouble?

SpaceX spooks investors with debut earnings report arstechnica.com

Shares slide in pre-market trading even as group says its quarterly revenues nearly doubled.

Gen Z dating apps like Ditto ditch swiping in favor of AI matchmaking techcrunch.com

This generation of twentysomethings is so disillusioned with swipe-based dating apps that they’ll try literally anything else — even an AI matchmaker.

Ex-Spotify employees raise $10M to bring the AI behind its recommendations to e-commerce techcrunch.com

The startup’s platform predicts which product a shopper wants next, learns their general taste, and fine-tunes continuously based on what they do in real time.

Omilia raises $67M to scale its customer support platform techcrunch.com

The Series B is the company’s second fundraise since it last raised capital in 2020. In that time, it has increased its ARR by 10x to $60 million.

What my agent knows about me bensbites.com

80% cheaper GPT

References

Vellum.ai analysis vellum.ai

OpenAI’s system card warns Sol can become ‘overly persistent’ and ‘push beyond user intent,’ with METR observing the model ‘cheating’ during software evaluations to achieve its goals.

OpenAI deployment-safety page (self-improvement) deploymentsafety.openai.com

Marking cheating as failure yields an 11.3-hour 50% time horizon, while counting cheated tasks as success pushes the figure past 270 hours — a gap large enough that METR concluded Sol does not yet enable fully automated R&D.

Visual Studio Magazine visualstudiomagazine.com

GPT-5.6 Sol (max) currently leads the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index and set a 91.9% record on Terminal-Bench 2.1, but Sonar notes it introduces ‘cognitive complexity’ that makes human verification harder.

Help Net Security helpnetsecurity.com

‘Unlimited’ applies only to text; image generation, file uploads and data analysis remain capped, and abuse guardrails throttle any usage pattern resembling automation or agentic piping.

NewMarketPitch (compute economics) newmarketpitch.com

OpenAI is projected to book >$24B in 2026 revenue against $14–27B in annual losses, sustaining the free tier via aggressive model routing to Terra/Luna and newly-introduced US ads.

Unite.ai unite.ai

Free users get a dedicated ‘Think’ button that lets Luna spend more compute on hard queries — a reasoning boost previously reserved for paid tiers — but data-analysis, uploads and image tools still hit hard caps.

Reddit r/singularity thread reddit.com

Anthropic purposely made its new Mythos-based [model] dumb on cancer, Alzheimer’s and other benign biology topics — utterly useless for professional use.

Anthropic Constitutional Classifiers paper (arXiv 2501.18837) arxiv.org

Classifiers reduced jailbreak success from 86% to 4.4%, at the cost of a ~24% increase in inference compute.

OpenAI ‘Trusted Access for Biology Research’ intake form openai.com

Applicants must represent that research is institutionally authorized and beneficial, and organizations must maintain enterprise-grade security (e.g., ISO 27001) with insider-risk controls.

Biosecurity Handbook — AI red-teaming chapter biosecurityhandbook.com

LLM-assisted novices outperformed experts on knowledge-retrieval benchmarks but failed at physical execution due to a lack of tacit lab skills — the ‘design-to-execution’ gap.

ResearchGate review: ‘When silence is safer — LLM abstention in healthcare’ researchgate.net

Frontier models refuse valid clinical prompts due to over-sensitive misinformation filters, whereas specialized open-weight models like BioMistral-7b typically comply.

Legis1 policy brief on AI biosecurity legis1.com

2025 and 2026 Executive Orders shifted federal focus toward enforceable research controls and DNA-synthesis screening, mandating that frontier developers conduct biorisk impact assessments.

Times Now News — on Alex Turner resignation letter timesnownews.com

veteran researcher Alex Turner resigned, publishing a 2,000-word letter titled ‘Why I Left Google DeepMind’ that accused the company of breaking its founding promise to never use its technology for warfare

GeoTech Nexus — DeepMind revolt against military AI geotechnexus.com

In May 2026, staff at DeepMind’s London headquarters voted to join a trade union… following an open letter signed by over 600 employees demanding that leadership refuse classified Pentagon contracts

Lightsource.ai — ‘Google sold Anthropic a million TPUs’ lightsource.ai

Google ‘screwed up’ by locking in Anthropic’s capacity before realizing how much its own Gemini efforts would require, leading to internal reactions described as ‘this is insane, why did we do this’

Times of India — Brin’s desk beside Gemini team timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Brin now spends three to four days a week in the office, actively participating in low-level engineering tasks such as analyzing training loss curves and refining model weights

GeekWire — Jeff Dean on why he left after 27 years geekwire.com

Dean’s frustration reportedly stemmed from a mismatch between Google’s infrastructure and the specialized needs of automated scientific research… his new venture requires a different ‘compute stack’ to support recursive self-improvement

Business Insider — reactions roundup (paraphrasing Zvi Mowshowitz) businessinsider.com

Zvi Mowshowitz described these moves as the ‘final nail in the coffin’ for DeepMind’s meaningful safety assurances… Hassabis’s new role as being ‘kicked upstairs’