Model Release Drama

US Regulation Leading to Adoption of Chinese Models?

Happy Monday. everyone! Are happy Mondays a thing? I hope they are for you. All right, let’s get right to it.

AI Humor

Inconceivable!

From Facebook:

The Power of Mythos!

Matthew Berman wrote:

> mythos is so good at cyber it can't be released

also

> mythos can't detect 20k fraudulent chinese accounts attacking it

Su-su-Sussudio… Sudo?

Also from Facebook:

Too Dangerous to release

Assam wrote:

Thank you for keeping us safe.

Posted as a Joke, but maybe it’s prophecy?

Rhys wrote:

the year is 2027

you're running unlicensed GLM 6.7 in the corgi cafe on your M6 MacBook Pro which mortgaged your house to buy
suddenly there's a knock on the door - it's the department of inference and intelligence

you're sentenced to 13 years for building a react app

Matt Banham commented on Rhys’ post:

Those Bash one-liners always get ya

himug-lamuh wrote:

House of Dragons

paji.eth wrote:

That’s mean…

Vas wrote:

BREAKING: US Government Bans Llama 4, citing concerns that it is “just really bad”

New Models, Gossip, and Updates

Grok Gets an Update?

Mark Kretschmann wrote:

Seem like the release of the Grok 1.5T / Cursor Composer 3 model is imminent, as the version number has been removed from the menus. This always happens shortly before a release from xAI.

Mythos Out of Jail?

Whale Insider wrote:

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 U.S. lifts ban on Anthropic’s powerful Claude Mythos 5 AI model, lets company distribute to over 100 U.S. institutions - Semafor.

GPT 5.6 released… kinda

OpenAI wrote:

Introducing a limited preview of GPT-5.6 Sol, our next generation frontier model, as well as GPT-5.6 Terra, a balanced model for efficient, everyday work, and GPT-5.6 Luna, a fast and affordable model for high-volume work.

Sam Altman wrote:

Good new first: Sol is a smart, efficient, and a significant step forward. It is the same price as GPT-5.5. Also launching in the GPT-5.6 family is Terra, with 5.5-level performance at half the price.

Bad news: at the request of the US government, it is launching today in limited preview instead of the open access launch we were planning on. We are working with the government to get to general availability as fast as we can.
I think it is quite reasonable to roll out models--especially as they reach significant new levels of capability--in this way. It fits with our long-held strategy of iterative deployment. But this isn't quite the process that we think is optimal.

Now we will with the government to attempt to get to a transparent, reliable process for early access, and to ensure that as long as our safeguards work as intended we can release widely. We want to be a reliable, dependable partner that works with all stakeholders, and we also want to live by our mission of benefiting all of humanity. I believe the government shares most of our goals, and that they are overall doing a good job in a very difficult situation.

We will work as quickly as we can to get this model in your hands and we hope you will love it.

Secret Fourth Model Withheld?

Beff(e/acc) wrote:

LEAK: there was actually a 4th model that spooked the admin and caused the panic ban. Here's the internal doc:

Model approvals imminent?

Andrew Curran wrote:

I think both Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 get approved for general release next week, and for use outside of the United States as well. But people should remember this moment and remember this feeling, because it is almost inevitable that we eventually reach a point where approval does not arrive.

Capitalism is going to tip the scales this time. I doubt they will approve one model and not the other, because doing so would be seen as incredibly anti-competitive. Fable and GPT-5.6 will probably receive the same clearance, probably on the same day. I also doubt they want to restrict sales outside the US, because that would be seen as anti-business and would trigger a major backlash against American closed-source AI. The rumblings of which you can already hear today. There is also a plan now taking shape on both the US left and right to create some version of an AI public wealth fund that pays a dividend directly to American citizens. That fund needs to be fed by the global sale of the big labs top models to people outside the US. So I think there will be no freeze on their use outside the United States this time.

The other reason is that allowing this will make people happy, and it will soften the fact that Mythos, as was announced yesterday, is available only to a vetted group of US agencies and companies. I do not think that this basic structure will change from here on out. Mythos may eventually be made available to certain allies, but only after the US government, its agencies, and then some chosen American companies have access to Mythos-2, Sol-2, or whatever the new uber-model turns out to be.

I do not think this gap ever closes again, not even for allies. And that means the US will increasingly possess an intelligence advantage that touches almost everything: voting, markets, corporations, academia, infrastructure, and the internal operations of foreign states. Having Mythos-n will always be trumped by whoever has Mythos-n+1. Anthropic themselves have said within nine months Mythos will look like a toy. That advantage, standing at the top of this tower, is too large to give up voluntarily. It also means that many things will become suspect. People will see shadows everywhere. Barring espionage, a deliberate leak, or the emergence of a non-US competitor at the top end of the scale, this structure will persist for some time. The public fight is about access to models. But the real fight is about access to the future. And from this point forward, whoever holds this power will also become increasingly capable of keeping it for themselves.

Are Chinese Models Catching Up?

Ricardo wrote:

This is the moment Chinese AI beat American AI.

One of the largest public crypto companies in the world just DUMPED OpenAI and Anthropic.

Coinbase switched to open-weight Chinese models from Zhipu and DeepSeek, and shaved nearly 50% off the company's internal AI spending.

The numbers are absolutely ridiculous:

Running the same enterprise workload through Anthropic's Claude costs $4,811. Running it through Zhipu's GLM 5.2 costs $544. That's a 9x price difference for equivalent output.

OpenAI's GPT-5.5 sits in the middle at $3,357. DeepSeek's V4 lands at $1,071. Moonshot's Kimi at $948.

On the actual benchmarks: Zhipu's GLM 5.2 scored 62.1 on SWE-bench Pro, the gold standard for coding. OpenAI's GPT-5.5 scored 58.6.

One AI researcher called GLM 5.2 "at least as good as Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5." Another called it "the first open model that can really compete with closed-source systems."

The Chinese models are not just cheaper but they are now also beating American models on the benchmarks American companies pay $4,811 per workload for.

Coinbase did the math first and reacted - more companies will certainly follow.

Now watch what happens to the IPO timeline:

Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO targeting October at a $965 billion valuation. OpenAI followed days later with its own confidential filing.

Both companies built their financial models on the assumption that they could keep charging enterprise prices that are 9 to 33x what Chinese competitors charge for the same task.

Brian Armstrong publicly proved customers WILL leave.

45% of companies are now spending over $100,000 per month on AI, up from 20% last year. Every one of those customers is one quarterly budget review away from dumping American AI.

OpenAI has reportedly already started preparing major token price cuts.

Anthropic is expected to follow.

And here's the thing...

The export controls were supposed to CRUSH Chinese AI.

The US government banned American AI chips, restricted model weights, blacklisted Alibaba and Baidu as Chinese military companies, and just banned Anthropic's flagship model from every foreign national on the planet. The entire premise of the American AI valuation bubble is that Washington can keep China two generations behind.

But Chinese labs responded by building cheaper, more efficient models on inferior hardware and pricing them at one ninth the cost of the American alternative.

And now American companies are voting with their checkbooks.

The dominant American labs are valued at nearly $2 trillion combined on the assumption that their pricing power is durable. Coinbase proved it is not, and every customer doing a year-end budget review will be looking at the same math.

For investors, the question here is what happens to the Anthropic IPO at $965 billion when the company is being forced to cut prices to defend share against open-weight Chinese models that score higher on the benchmarks.

For everyone else, the bigger question is what happens when Washington spent four years and billions of dollars trying to contain Chinese AI, and the only thing that actually shifted in the end was American customers.

CNBC analyst video in the source link.

Adoption of Chinese Models on the Rise

Zerohedge wrote:

"the share of tokens used for US models on OpenRouter has collapsed": Bloomberg

The Rise of Ambient AI?

Andrej Karpathy wrote:

Andrej reshared this link from Claude that is devoted to talking about a new feature where you can tag Claude from within Slack and have it respond. For a while everyone was criticizing Karpathy for being a sellout, but I think he is actually pointing to something that may become more meaningful as it develops: ambient AI.

This points to a future where we may soon have easy and ubiquitous access to AI models in the same way that members of the Enterprise could simply query, “Computer…” at any moment during the episode and get a meaningful response. At least, that’s my take on why Andrej feels this is a big deal. Here’s what he had to say:

This is a new paradigm for interacting with Claude that is significantly more "inline" with all the other human activity org-wide. Once you do all of the under the hood engineering work to make this "just work" (e.g. across tools, integrations, compute environments, memory, security, etc.), Claude basically joins the team in a seamless way - you can talk to it as you would talk to a person and it can help with a very large variety of workloads.

Imo this is the 3rd major redesign of LLM UIUX. The first paradigm was that the LLM is a website you go to, the second was that it is an app you download to your computer. This third one is that it is a self-contained, persistent, asynchronous entity with org-wide tools and context, working alongside teams of humans. It really takes a while to wrap your head around it, but it works and it is awesome.

Thank you for reading. If you know of other people who would be interested in these articles, please share it with them. If you have any questions or want to say hi, you can reply to this email or comment directly on the post.

Thanks again for being a subscriber. and have a great day!