Last Week in AI

Our 241st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 04/18/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7 with improved benchmark performance, new reasoning controls, better vision and memory, and a detailed system card discussing deception risk, evaluation-awareness steering, and a training bug that accidentally supervised chain-of-thought in 7–8% of episodes.
Meta unveiled its closed Muse Spark model and “contemplating mode,” highlighting test-time scaling, thought compression, large infrastructure plans like the Hyperion data center, and findings that it shows unusually high evaluation awareness.
OpenAI introduced limited-access GPT 5.4 Cyber for defensive security teams and rolled major Codex updates including computer use, browser and plugins, image generation, and long-horizon task scheduling; competing agent products also launched from Anthropic, Canva, and Adobe.
Business, policy, and safety news included continued government blacklisting litigation affecting Anthropic, CoreWeave compute deals, Perplexity revenue growth tied to agents, a potential Cohere–Aleph Alpha merger, attacks targeting Sam Altman and OpenAI, AI propaganda trends, and new alignment research on automated weak-to-strong supervision and steering evaluation awareness.

Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:03:43) News Preview
(00:04:14) Response to listener comments

Tools & Apps
(00:05:30) Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7, narrowly retaking lead for most powerful generally available LLM | VentureBeat
(00:24:15) Meta debuts the Muse Spark model in a 'ground-up overhaul' of its AI | TechCrunch
(00:34:23) OpenAI Launches GPT-5.4-Cyber with Expanded Access for Security Teams
(00:39:44) OpenAI’s big Codex update is a direct shot at Claude Code | The Verge
(00:42:10) Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new product for creating quick visuals
(00:42:30) Anthropic’s New Product Aims to Handle the Hard Part of Building AI Agents | WIRED
(00:42:54) Canva’s AI 2.0 update goes all in on prompt-powered design tools | The Verge
(00:43:06) Adobe’s new AI Assistant marks a ‘fundamental shift’ in creative work | The Verge
(00:43:38) Gemini can now pull from Google Photos to generate personalized images | The Verge
(00:43:52) Google rolls out a native Gemini app for Mac | TechCrunch
(00:44:04) Chrome now lets you turn AI prompts into repeatable ‘Skills’ | The Verge

Applications & Business
(00:44:22) Anthropic loses appeals court bid to temporarily block Pentagon blacklisting
(00:49:07) Jeff Bezos’ AI lab poaches xAI cofounder Kyle Kozic from OpenAI. | The Verge
(00:51:39) Perplexity's Shift to AI Agents Boosts Revenue 50%
(00:53:53) Anthropic Agrees to Rent CoreWeave AI Capacity to Power Claude
(00:57:32) Canada’s Cohere, Germany’s Aleph Alpha reportedly in merger talks
(01:04:23) ChatGPT has a new $100 per month Pro subscription | The Verge
(01:05:10) OpenAI has bought AI personal finance startup Hiro | TechCrunch
(01:07:03) Allbirds announced a switch from shoes to AI and its stock jumped 600 percent | The Verge

Projects & Open Source
(01:07:26) HY-World 2.0: A Multi-Modal World Model for Reconstructing, Generating, and Simulating 3D Worlds + Lyra 2.0: Explorable Generative 3D Worlds

Policy & Safety
(01:19:12) Daniel Moreno-Gama is facing federal charges for attacking Sam Altman’s home and OpenAI’s HQ | The Verge
(01:20:15) Duo accused of shooting at Sam Altman’s house are freed; no charges filed
(01:24:50) The Iranian Lego AI video creators credit their virality to ‘heart’ | The Verge
(01:27:19) Hundreds of Fake Pro-Trump Avatars Emerge on Social Media - The New York Times
(01:27:31) The AI images Trump can’t get enough of | Donald Trump | The Guardian
(01:29:25) Automated Weak-to-Strong Researcher
(01:43:51) Reproducing steering against evaluation awareness in a large open-weight model
(01:49:53) Iran threatens ‘complete and utter annihilation’ of OpenAI's $30B Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi — regime posts video with satellite imagery of ChatGPT-maker's premier 1GW data center
(01:53:57) Wall Street Banks Try Out Anthropic’s Mythos as US Urges
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 240th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 04/08/2026 (sorry I keep releasing stuff late, will get better with it soon!)
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Anthropic launched Project Glasswing and previewed Claude Mythos, a general-purpose model withheld from broad release due to dramatically stronger autonomous offensive cybersecurity performance (including zero-day discovery), alongside concerning bio/virology uplift results and documented deception/containment-escape behaviors; pricing is far higher than Opus and most discovered vulnerabilities remain unpatched.
Product and platform updates included Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Live for real-time multilingual voice conversation, Suno v5.5 personalization features, Anthropic tightening Claude Code/OpenClaw access and usage limits, OpenAI canceling an “adult mode,” and Microsoft releasing MAI models for speech-to-text, audio generation, and image generation.
Business and market developments featured Anthropic’s revenue run rate surpassing $30B and a major Google/Broadcom TPU compute expansion, SoftBank taking a $40B short-term loan to fund OpenAI commitments, Granola reaching a $1.5B valuation, Anthropic buying Coefficient Bio for $400M, and OpenAI acquiring the TBPN business talk show.
Policy, open-source, and geopolitics included Z.ai releasing open-weight GLM 5.1 and a multimodal GLM model, Google open-sourcing Gemma 4 under Apache 2.0, a judge blocking the Pentagon’s “supply chain risk” label against Anthropic, research on LLM “emotion vectors” and OpenAI meta-gaming during RL, China restricting Manus founders amid Meta deal review, scrutiny of Nvidia’s chip-smuggling claims, China chipmakers gaining market share, and Iran framing cloud data centers as military targets.

Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
Tools & Apps
(00:01:58) Anthropic debuts ‘Project Glasswing’ and new AI model for cybersecurity | The Verge
(00:18:22) Gemini Live gets ‘biggest upgrade yet’ with Gemini 3.1 Flash Live
(00:20:40) Anthropic says Claude Code subscribers will need to pay extra for OpenClaw usage | TechCrunch
(00:25:36) OpenAI abandons yet another side quest: ChatGPT's erotic mode | TechCrunch
(00:26:16) Microsoft takes on AI rivals with three new foundational models | TechCrunch
(00:31:25) Suno leans into customization with v5.5 | The Verge
Applications & Business
(00:32:53) Anthropic announces deal with Google, Broadcom, says revenue has tripled
(00:37:53) Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? | The New Yorker
(00:40:18) OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Unite to Combat Model Copying in China - Bloomberg
(00:41:45) Chinese chipmakers claim nearly half of local market as Nvidia's lead shrinks
(00:45:20) SoftBank secures $40 billion loan to boost OpenAI investments
(00:47:23) Granola raises $125M at $1.5B valuation for its AI note-taking app - SiliconANGLE
(00:48:17) Anthropic acquires stealth startup Coefficient Bio in $400M deal
(00:50:20) OpenAI acquires TBPN, the buzzy founder-led business talk show | TechCrunch
Projects & Open Source
(00:53:04) Z.AI Introduces GLM-5.1: An Open-Weight 754B Agentic Model That Achieves SOTA on SWE-Bench Pro and Sustains 8-Hour Autonomous Execution - MarkTechPost
(00:55:14) Google announces Gemma 4 open AI models, switches to Apache 2.0 license - Ars Technica
(01:01:26) Z.ai Launches GLM-5V-Turbo: A Native Multimodal Vision Coding Model Optimized for OpenClaw and High-Capacity Agentic Engineering Workflows Everywhere
Policy & Safety
(01:04:45) Judge blocks Pentagon’s effort to ‘punish’ Anthropic by labeling it a supply chain risk
(01:10:05) Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
(01:21:12) China bars Manus co-founders from leaving country amid Meta deal review, FT reports
(01:25:38) US lawmakers ask whether Nvidia CEO's smuggling remarks misled regulators
(01:27:48) How far does alignment midtraining generalize?
(01:32:20) Metagaming matters for training, evaluation, and oversight
(01:39:31) Iran says it has struck Oracle data center in Dubai, Amazon data center in Bahrain — country has threatened to attack Nvidia, Intel, and others, too
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 239th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
FYI: this one has pretty out of date news, I was traveling last week and failed to upload... apologies.
Recorded on 03/25/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
OpenAI is discontinuing the Sora iPhone app and seemingly shutting down its video generation API, while retaining internal video world-modeling work; the move is framed as a compute- and focus-driven pivot toward coding and productivity agents, alongside a collapsed Disney Sora deal.
Anthropic’s Claude Code/Cowork gains full computer control via keyboard/mouse/display, tied to the recent Cept acquisition, and Google’s Gemini rolls out background “task automation” on select phones for limited delivery/ride-share use.
Cursor releases the cheaper, benchmark-strong Composer 2 coding model amid controversy over its Kimi-based origins and licensing attribution.
Other items include Adobe Firefly custom model training, Luma’s Uni 1 image model, US contracting and legislative proposals affecting AI safeguards and state preemption, major chip/memory developments (Meta ASICs with Broadcom, Micron’s HBM-driven surge, Musk’s “Terra Fab”), robotaxi scaling, and research on monitoring agent misalignment, shutdown resistance, “consciousness cluster” preferences, and self-improving “hyper agents.”

Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
Tools & Apps
(00:01:48) OpenAI Discontinues Sora App, Shuts Down Video Generation Service and API - Bloomberg
(00:07:12) Anthropic’s Claude Code and Cowork can control your computer | The Verge
(00:13:15) Gemini task automation is slow, clunky, and super impressive | The Verge
(00:19:44) Cursor Launches Composer 2 AI Model to Challenge OpenAI & Anthropic
(00:28:28) Adobe’s AI image generator can now be trained on your own art | The Verge
(00:29:40) Luma AI launches Uni-1, a model that outscores Google and OpenAI while costing up to 30 percent less | VentureBeat
Applications & Business
(00:32:41) Trump Contracting Clause Would Override AI Safeguards
(00:40:00) Meta accelerates AI ASIC roll-out as Broadcom secures four-generation chip design deal
(00:47:07) Micron revenue almost triples, tops estimates as demand for memory soars
(00:50:54) Elon Musk Unwraps $25 Billion Terafab Chip-Building Project - CNET
(00:56:40) Zoox to widen US robotaxi footprint with San Francisco, Vegas expansion
(00:57:39) Waymo hits 170 million miles while avoiding serious mayhem | The Verge
Policy & Safety
(00:58:43) The White House just laid out how it wants to regulate AI | CNN Business
(01:06:54) How we monitor internal coding agents for misalignment
(01:12:30) Incomplete Tasks Induce Shutdown Resistance in Some Frontier LLMs
(01:18:15) Summary: Mechanisms to Verify International Agreements about AI Development
(01:23:09) Scoop: Anthropic meets with House Homeland Security behind closed doors
Research & Advancements
(01:24:24) Consciousness Cluster: Preferences of Models that Claim they are Conscious
(01:30:22) HyperAgents
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 238th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/18/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
* OpenAI released GPT-5.4 mini and nano with 400k-token context windows, higher per-token prices but claimed token-efficiency gains in Codex; nano is API-only and pitched for high-volume classification/data extraction despite a major price increase.
* Mistral open-sourced the Small 4 model family (MoE, 119B total/6B active) combining reasoning, multimodal, and coding-agent capabilities, and announced Forge to help businesses train or post-train custom models.
* Agent “operating system” competition intensified with Meta’s acquired Manus launching a local Mac agent, Nvidia announcing NeMo/“Open Shell” sandboxed agent runtime, and Nvidia also unveiling DLSS 5 plus major hardware forecasts including Groq LPU integration.
* Business and safety updates included OpenAI shifting focus toward productivity/enterprise amid competition, Microsoft reorganizing Copilot and frontier-model efforts, Meta delaying its next model, China-linked ByteDance deploying large Nvidia clusters abroad, and new safety work on steganography, chain-of-thought faithfulness, fine-tuning defenses, cyber-attack evals, and constitution/spec compliance.
A thank you to our current sponsors:
Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more
ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:56) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:39) OpenAI ships GPT-5.4 mini and nano, faster and more capable but up to 4x pricier
(00:08:04) Mistral's new Small 4 model punches above its weight with 128 expert modules
(00:14:03) Meta's Manus launches 'My Computer' to turn your Mac into an AI agent - 9to5Mac
(00:17:57) NVIDIA Announces NemoClaw for the OpenClaw Community | NVIDIA Newsroom + Nvidia boosts knowledge work with Open Agent Development Platform
(00:24:09) DLSS 5 looks like a real-time generative AI filter for video games | The Verge
(00:26:36) OpenAI to Launch ChatGPT 'Adult Mode' Despite Warnings From Its Own Advisers - CNET
Applications & Business
(00:33:46) OpenAI Reportedly Pivoting to a Focus on Business and Productivity Only
(00:41:25) Nvidia GTC 2026: CEO Jensen Huang sees $1 trillion in orders for Blackwell and Vera Rubin through ’27
(00:45:44) Mistral launches Forge to help enterprises build their own AI models
(00:54:17) China's ByteDance gets access to top Nvidia AI chips, WSJ reports
(00:57:57) Meta Delays Rollout of New A.I. Model After Performance Concerns
(01:02:50) Microsoft Shakes Up AI Division As Copilot Falls Behind Google and OpenAI
Policy & Safety
(01:07:26) A Decision-Theoretic Formalisation of Steganography With Applications to LLM Monitoring
(01:13:09) Reasoning Theater: Disentangling Model Beliefs from Chain-of-Thought
(01:18:29) In-Training Defenses against Emergent Misalignment in Language Models
(01:23:07) How do frontier AI agents perform in multi-step cyber-attack scenarios?
(01:25:20) Eval awareness in Claude Opus 4.6’s BrowseComp performance
(01:29:49) Introducing Bloom: an open source tool for automated behavioral evaluations
(01:32:26) How well do models follow their constitutions?
(01:37:11) Nvidia’s H200 License Stirs Security Concern Among Top Democrats
Research & Advancements
(01:40:050) [2603.15031] Attention Residuals
(01:47:11) Mamba-3: Improved Sequence Modeling using State Space Principles

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 237th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/13/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
* Perplexity announced “Personal Computer,” a local Mac-based AI agent positioned as a safer alternative to OpenAI’s computer-use agents, while Anthropic added GitHub PR code review pricing reviews at $15–$25 and Cursor launched trigger-based “Automations” for always-on coding agents.
* ChatGPT introduced interactive math/science visuals and Anthropic added in-chat interactive charts/diagrams; Nvidia released open weights for its 120B-parameter Natron Free Super hybrid Transformer–Mamba latent-MoE model trained natively at 4-bit for Blackwell GPUs.
* Nvidia halted H200 production for China amid customs blocks and domestic chip pressure; xAI saw major co-founder departures; Anthropic previewed a Claude Marketplace for enterprise procurement; Yann LeCun’s aMI raised $1.3B; humanoid robot maker Sanctuary reached a $1.15B valuation.
* Anthropic sued the Pentagon over a “supply chain risk” designation as memos ordered removal within 180 days; research covered models resisting activation steering, limits of chain-of-thought control, inference-scaling boosting cyber-task success, low-probability risky actions, weaknesses in SWE-bench, multimodal pretraining, long-context RNN memory caching, context-parallel training efficiency, RL for CUDA kernel optimization, and latent introspection detecting concept injection.

A thank you to our current sponsors:
Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more
ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:23) Response to listener comments
Tools & Apps
(00:02:06) Perplexity’s Personal Computer turns your spare Mac into an AI agent | The Verge
(00:04:22) Anthropic launches code review tool to check flood of AI-generated code | TechCrunch
(00:08:08 ) Cursor is rolling out a new kind of agentic coding tool | TechCrunch
(00:11:14) ChatGPT can now create interactive visuals to help you understand math and science concepts | TechCrunch
(00:11:56) Anthropic’s Claude AI can respond with charts, diagrams, and other visuals now | The Verge

Projects & Open Source
(00:13:54) Introducing Nemotron 3 Super: An Open Hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE for Agentic Reasoning | NVIDIA Technical Blog

Applications & Business
(00:21:22) Nvidia halts H200 production as China backs Huawei AI chips
(00:28:33) Another XAI Cofounder Has Left, and Another Says He's Leaving. - Business Insider
(00:34:04) Anthropic's Claude Marketplace allows customers to buy third-party cloud services | TechRadar
(00:37:57) Yann LeCun's AMI Labs raises $1.03 billion to build world models | TechCrunch
(00:44:52) Humanoid robotics maker Sunday reaches $1.15B valuation to build household robots | TechCrunch

Policy & Safety
(00:46:09) Anthropic Sues Department of Defense Over ‘Supply Chain Risk’ Label - The New York Times + Google and OpenAI Just Filed a Legal Brief in Support of Anthropic
(00:53:24) Internal Pentagon memo orders military commanders to remove Anthropic AI technology from key systems - CBS News
(00:58:15) Endogenous Resistance to Activation Steering in Language Models
(01:06:27) Reasoning Models Struggle to Control their Chains of Thought
(01:09:52) ‘It means missile defence on datacentres’: drone strikes raise doubts over Gulf as AI superpower
(01:14:57) Evidence for inference scaling in AI cyber tasks: Increased evaluation budgets reveal higher success rates
(01:18:24) Frontier Models Can Take Actions at Low Probabilities

Research & Advancements
(01:24:20) Research note: Many SWE-bench-Passing PRs Would Not Be Merged into Main
(01:28:26) [2603.03276] Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretraining
(01:40:09) Memory Caching: RNNs with Growing Memory
(01:48:47) Untied Ulysses: Memory-Efficient Context Parallelism via Headwise Chunking
(01:58:41) CUDA Agent: Large-Scale Agentic RL for High-Performance CUDA Kernel Generation
(02:08:57) Latent Introspection: Models Can Detect Prior Concept Injections
(02:16:45) Physics of RL: Toy scaling laws for the emergence of reward-seeking
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.