Here are three things I found interesting in the world of AI in the last week. Anthropic's best model is also its most restricted Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5 on Tuesday. It's essentially Mythos (the model which found all the security vulnerabilities) with some extra safeguards. If you ask it anything about cyber security or biology it will restrict access and automatically downgrade to Opus. I've been using it non stop since launch and it's the best model available by a long way....
3 months ago • 4 min read
Here are three things I found interesting in the world of AI in the last week. Opus 4.8 finally admits when it isn't sure. Maybe. Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 this week. I reckon it's a rushed response to problems in the 4.7 release, but they've also tried to fix Claude's most annoying habit. I know a lot of devs who started switching to codex after the 4.7 release. Despite strong benchmarks it felt lazier. It wouldn't follow instructions properly, it would skip over steps in workflows...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Here are three things I found interesting in the world of AI in the last week: 1. Anthropic just had a shocking month - The Next Web / Anthropic postmortem The month runs roughly like this. On April 4, Anthropic blocked OpenClaw users from using their Claude Pro and Max subscriptions inside the open-source fork. On April 10, they accidentally suspended OpenClaw's creator Peter Steinberger's account entirely. Steinberger's reply was the line of the week: "One welcomed me, one sent legal...
4 months ago • 4 min read
Here are three things I found interesting in the world of AI in the last week: 1. Anthropic built a Claude so strong they couldn't release it - System card Anthropic published the Claude Mythos Preview system card last Tuesday, and the headline is not the benchmarks. It's the conclusion. Anthropic finished a model that sits a full tier above Opus, looked at what it could do, and decided they could not ship it to the public right now. The one stat worth staring at is Firefox 147 shell...
5 months ago • 6 min read
Here are three things I found interesting in the world of AI in the last week: 1. AI-generated commits are the new supply chain attack vector - Aikido Security / The Hacker News Between March 3 and March 9, a threat actor called Glassworm injected malicious code into 151 GitHub repositories, 88 npm packages, and 72 VS Code extensions. The payloads were encoded using Unicode variation selectors that render as nothing. Not obfuscated. Invisible. Your editor, your terminal, your code review...
5 months ago • 3 min read
Here are three things I found interesting in the world of AI in the last week: 1. Grammarly turned expert identity into a product - Nieman Lab / TechCrunch Grammarly launched a paid feature that gave users feedback "from" named experts like Julia Angwin, Casey Newton, Kara Swisher and Stephen King. The experts had not agreed to this. The feedback was AI-generated, the product was charging for it, and the disclaimer saying it was not actually endorsed by those people was buried in the fine...
6 months ago • 4 min read
Here are three things I found interesting in the world of AI in the last week: 1. The "best AI model" era is over - Every.to / Digital Applied comparison OpenAI launched GPT-5.4 on March 5 to the usual amount of noise. Self-described Claude loyalists are excited. Augment Code made it their default model, calling it "a reliable orchestrator" that uses 18-20% fewer tokens on complex tasks. The headline number: 75% on OSWorld, the first frontier model to beat human experts (72.4%) at autonomous...
6 months ago • 3 min read
Instead of a newsletter this week I thought I'd experiment with a longer form email on an idea that I think is worth sharing. Let me know what you think and if you want more / less of this format. In my head I've been calling this the 'single good idea'. One of my favourite questions to ask people is "what is a new thing you've recently done with AI", often followed up by a "what do you want to be able to do next". It's a pretty quick way to find out where their learning edge is. "I have a...
6 months ago • 2 min read
Here are three things I found interesting in the world of AI in the last week: 1. China's robots did kung fu on the biggest TV show on Earth - CNN China's Spring Festival Gala is the most-watched broadcast in the world. 677 million viewers across platforms. This year's star wasn't a singer or a comedian. It was a dozen Unitree G1 humanoid robots doing drunken boxing, nunchucks, and backflips off trampolines three metres in the air. A larger H2 model appeared in Monkey King armour wielding a...
6 months ago • 4 min read