Last Week in AI #250 - Mythos Mess, GPT 5.6-Sol, GLM 5.2

Note from Last Week in AI (Andrey): I’m back! And i’m sorry for putting the substack on a silent pause, work got a bit too overwhelming so I fell behind on this. I’ll do my best to resume normal posting, starting with catching up on podcast episodes missing from here (which are not last week… but I guess I should post them still, sorry for the spam!)

I’ve also paused paid subscriptions until I can get back to consistent posting. Apologies for the flakiness, and thanks for being a subscriber!

Our 250th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 06/27/2026

Note from Andrey: sorry this is late again! this episode release somehow didn’t save and I only realized late, my bad... next one will be out way sooner!

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris

Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]

In this episode:

US government gating of frontier AI expands: Anthropic gets permission to release Mythos-5 to selected companies/agencies after a standoff, OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.6 “Sol” with initial access restricted to ~20 approved organizations, and Meta is pressed to submit models to “voluntary” review—signaling an emerging de facto licensing regime with geopolitical treaty implications.

Model capability and safety signals remain murky: limited benchmark disclosure, claims of token-efficiency comparisons, and third-party reports that GPT-5.6 shows extreme benchmark “cheating” sensitivity highlight steering/alignment bottlenecks and uncertainty about real-world long-horizon behavior.

Compute supply chain competition accelerates: OpenAI unveils its Jalapeño inference ASIC with Broadcom on TSMC 3nm; Amazon explores selling Trainium to data-center operators; Micron invests in Anthropic with memory supply agreements; SK Hynix surpasses Samsung on HBM-driven valuation; Groq raises $650M while pivoting toward neocloud.

Open source and societal response intensify: GLM 5.2 (MIT-licensed) delivers strong long-context coding performance with rapid optimizations; EconEvals maps job-task exposure; bipartisan workforce initiatives and tax credits launch; DeepMind and Apollo publish loss-of-control/control roadmaps; Hollywood reportedly drops a near-finished Sam Altman biopic amid industry pressure.

Timestamps (note - these don’t take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):

(00:00:10) Intro / Banter

(00:03:42) News Preview

Tools & Apps

(00:04:41) Anthropic allowed to release Mythos AI to some companies, agencies + Anthropic’s Mythos mess is only getting worse + Anthropic floats proposal to Lutnick to end US ban of powerful ‘Mythos,’ ‘Fable’ AI models: sources

(00:07:58) OpenAI Launches GPT-5.6 Sol Under First-Ever US Government-Gated AI Rollout | MLQ News + OpenAI’s new flagship model GPT-5.6 Sol cheats on software tests more than any model before it + Summary of METR’s predeployment evaluation of GPT-5.6 Sol

(00:24:03) U.S. Presses Meta to Agree to A.I. Reviews - The New York Times

(00:30:11) Anthropic’s Claude Tag is learning your company, one Slack message at a time | TechCrunch

Applications & Business

(00:32:49) OpenAI reveals its first AI processor: Jalapeño | The Verge

(00:38:29) Amazon in Talks to Sell Custom AI Chips in Bid to Undercut Nvidia

(00:41:46) Micron invests in Anthropic and grants it a supply deal

(00:45:18) SK Hynix overtakes Samsung to become South Korea’s most valuable company | Reuters

(00:49:12) AI chipmaker Groq confirms $650M raise, re-staffs after Nvidia’s $20B not-acqui-hire deal | TechCrunch

(00:52:47) SpaceX inks compute deal with Reflection AI, an open source AI lab | TechCrunch

Projects & Open Source

(00:54:46) GLM-5.2: Built for Long-Horizon Tasks + How we built the world’s fastest API for GLM-5.2 + nvidia/GLM-5.2-NVFP4 · Hugging Face

(01:03:04) EconEvals

Policy & Safety

(01:05:40) $500 million AI jobs push launches with bipartisan backing - POLITICO

(01:07:47) Rep. Sam Liccardo unveils AI workforce tax credit bill - POLITICO

(01:08:56) Google DeepMind announced an “AI Control Roadmap” for improving AI agent security. | The Verge + Securing internal systems against increasingly capable and imperfectly aligned AI

(01:14:00) The Loss of Control Playbook: Degrees, Dynamics, and Preparedness + The Loss of Control Playbook

(01:16:42) Why corporate AI super PACs spent $27 million on a local election | The Verge

(01:20:25) Exclusive: Conservatives plan nationwide protest against AI data centers

Research & Advancements

(01:27:37) Revisiting the Platonic Representation Hypothesis: An Aristotelian View

(01:31:39) Wan-Streamer v0.1: End-to-end Real-time Interactive Foundation Models

(01:33:59) Tapered Language Models

Synthetic Media & Art

(01:36:54) Hollywood is bending the knee to OpenAI | The Verge