Concerns about Chinese access to Mythos and a call from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly sent the administration into a panic last week after Anthropic publicly released its first Mythos-class model.
News from CNBC
Godfather of AI blasts Musk’s xAI as ‘failure,’ says labs are risking a ‘big bubble explosion’
June 18, 2026
Elon Musk’s xAI is a “failure” that will be unable to compete on the frontier of artificial intelligence, Yann LeCun, founder of AMI Labs, told CNBC, as he laid out his view on what could cause a “big bubble explosion” in the industry.
….“XAI is kind of a failure, frankly, because the founding team has” departed, LeCun said. “Elon is now in a position that is very, very difficult for him to kind of hire top people in AI, because he’s kind of, you know, not behaved in sort of very good ways toward the … previous team.”
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News from ars TECHNICA
“Dangerous” AI models are coming no matter what. AI models with advanced hacking capabilities will soon be the norm.
June 17, 2026
“It’s myopic in the extreme to think that no other competitors to Anthropic will develop similar capabilities to Mythos or even that they have not already done so,” says Tarah Wheeler, chief security officer of the specialized cybersecurity consulting firm TPO Group. “There are other companies hot on Anthropic’s heels who probably have the capabilities, too, and are holding them in reserve as they see how Anthropic is being treated in the current regulatory environment.”
….“It’s not one model; it’s the general trend of technology,” says Bruce Schneier, a researcher at Harvard University and the University of Toronto who has been analyzing the situation.
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News from CNBC
CEOs of Anthropic and Google DeepMind call for U.S.-led AI coalition in meeting at G7
June 17, 2026
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis called for a U.S.-led coalition to shape rules and standards around artificial intelligence at a meeting with tech leaders and heads of state, including President Donald Trump, CNBC has learned.
….In addition to Amodei and Hassabis, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended Wednesday’s meeting, which included about a dozen tech executives. Leaders of G7 countries were also involved.
….Anthropic remains locked in negotiations with the Trump administration after the export controls on its latest models went into effect late Friday.
Harvard University and the University of Toronto who has been analyzing the situation.
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News from The Deep View
How enterprise token panic is about to change AI
June 17, 2026
Make no mistake, enterprises are panicking about token costs.
At Databricks’ Data + AI Summit, I talked to executives at various enterprise organizations and …”Our CFO is going to lose it when inference costs come in,” and “The coding agents have run our token bills out of control,” and “Last year, the executives were letting every flower bloom; now they’re coming in with a lawnmower.”
At the event’s opening keynote, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi addressed the elephant in the room. “It’s completely unsustainable for the organizations out there,” he said.
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News from Axios
Jim VandeHei: Writing with AI
June 17, 2026
Few AI use cases elicit more outrage than writing: Using AI makes writing duller … dumber … robotic. It kills thinking … creativity … originality. It produces sameness and slop!
Why it matters: All that’s true — if you, as the teacher or writer, allow it to be true. Lazy AI outsourcing means lazy thinking and writing. Used with persistence and skill, AI can enhance both your thoughts and expression.
….Between the lines: As AI tools get more powerful, Axios will stay transparent with you about how we use them. (Our website includes a detailed explanation of how we use AI in our journalism.) This column captures my latest thinking on best practices.
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News from Futurism
OpenAI Is Taking the “Crack Cocaine” Approach to Pricing. “They’ve kind of taken the crack approach to AI. Give it to people for free, get them hooked, then jack up prices.”
June 16, 2026
OpenAI burned through a staggering amount of money in 2025. According to audited financial figures obtained by AI skeptic Ed Zitron, who shared them with The Financial Times, the net loss attributed to the ChatGPT maker soared from $5 billion in 2024 to a stunning $39 billion in 2025….OpenAI’s behavior sounds an awful lot like a drug dealer who floods the market with addictive drugs, then jacks up the prices once users are dependent on them…..The real costs behind AI subscriptions are staggering. According to a recent report by research company SemiAnalaysis, a $200 ChatGPT Pro subscription costs OpenAI as much as $14,000 if used to its maximum potential.
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News from Real Clear Science
Americans Strongly Support Regulations on AI
June 16, 2026
Most Americans, even those who most appreciate artificial intelligence, strongly support more regulation of it, a new survey by Johns Hopkins University researchers finds.
More than 70% of Americans want the right to interact with a human rather than an AI in medical, legal, educational, and government settings. This proposed regulation and others were endorsed across party lines and by both regular users of AI and novices.
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News from Axios
Fable backlash sparks fears for AI security work
June 16, 2026
AI researchers and cybersecurity leaders fear the U.S. government is setting a precedent that may discourage American AI companies from building tools that help defenders identify and fix vulnerabilities…. In trying to avert an AI hacking crisis, the Trump administration may end up making U.S. cyber defenses weaker, dozens of prominent security leaders warned yesterday.
….”They’ve set a precedent that American models can’t do defensive security research,” former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos tells Axios….Stamos organized an open letter, signed by nearly 150 security leaders, calling on the Trump administration to reverse its move to restrict access to Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
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News from Futurism
CEOs Now Being Forced to Reverse Course, Cut AI Spending. The age of “tokenmaxxing” didn’t last long.
June 15, 2026
. …at some point during their AI binge, the big wigs stopped to check their tab, and are now having second thoughts….
Bosses have been happy to slash their workforces and replace them with AI coding agents that can churn out mountains of code, encouraging their surviving employees to make use of AI help as much as possible… Amazon instituted a leaderboard ranking employees by the number of AI tokens they used, as if they were competing in a video game…. All of this has backfired in predictable fashion. At one business, a single employee spent over $150,000 a month on AI tokens.
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News from Defense of Democracies
NATO just received a glimpse of how a blackout can quickly become a crisis.
June 15, 2026
At a three-day exercise in Bydgoszcz, Poland, NATO tested its ability to respond to a multi-domain crisis that combined cyberattacks on critical infrastructure with AI-generated disinformation campaigns. The exercise highlighted how adversaries can use AI to turn critical infrastructure disruptions into crises that undermine public trust and complicate the alliance’s coordinated response.
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More about David Isenberg’s research activities here →
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