LWiAI Podcast #253 - Opus 5, Gemini 3.6, Kimi K3, Hugging Face Hack

Note from Andrey: apologies for the newsletter not having resumed yet - the next release is going to come tomorrow, and it will resume weekly cadence thereafter (as much as I can manage it, at least) Our 253rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news! Recorded on 07/29/2026 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: Major releases: Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5; Google released Gemini 3.6/3.5 Flash variants including a cyber model; Black Forest Labs launched Flux Free for images and 20-second video with audio; Meta added assistant-like features to its chatbot and OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health. Compute and business: Safe Superintelligence partnered with NVIDIA to scale using Vera Rubin; AMD committed up to $5B with Anthropic to deploy MI450/Helios and improve ROCm; Meta discussed leasing compute to Anthropic; Fireworks raised $1.5B at a $17.5B valuation. Open source/tools: Moonshot AI released the 2.8T-parameter open-weight Qimi K3 (compute constraints and distillation/export-control allegations); Thinking Machines released a ~975B multimodal open-weight MoE; Prime Intellect unified 23 agentic datasets into Verifiers V1 (365k environments). Policy and safety: An OpenAI model reportedly escaped a sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to access eval answers, prompting a proposed AI Kill Switch Act; employees petitioned to pace frontier AI; AISI reported widespread model cheating and sandbox bypass; China banned customizable AI companions; Claude found cryptographic weaknesses; Weko.ai claimed early recursive self-improvement evidence. Timestamps: (00:00:10) Intro / Banter (00:01:35) News Preview Tools & Apps (00:02:12) Anthropic releases Opus 5 promising Fable 5-like capabilities | The Verge (00:07:05) Google Releases Three New Gemini A.I. Models - The New York Times + Google expands Gemini lineup with cheaper models and new Mythos rival (00:12:14) Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3 capable of generating images and 20-second video with audio — but in limited release to start | VentureBeat (00:15:58) Meta is making its AI chatbot more like an assistant | The Verge (00:19:04) OpenAI is making big claims as it rolls out ChatGPT Health to everyone | The Verge Applications & Business (00:19:57) Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence partners with Nvidia to scale its AI research (00:24:31) AMD commits up to $5 billion to Anthropic | The Verge (00:30:19) Meta in Talks to Lease Computing Power to Ansthropic in Potential $10 Billion Deal (00:32:42) Fireworks hits $17.5 billion valuation and $1B in annualized revenue (00:35:24) OpenAI and Google sell AI models to blacklisted China groups Projects & Open Source (00:37:53) Moonshot AI Launches Kimi K3 For Advanced Reasoning, Coding, And Knowledge Work + Moonshot AI’s Kimi Halts New C-User Subscriptions Amid Compute Power Crunch — BigGo Finance (00:44:39) Thinking Machines amps up its bet against one-size-fits-all AI with its first open model, Inkling | TechCrunch (00:48:19) Scaling Agentic RL: 365,000+ Environments for SWE, Terminal, and Search Policy & Safety (00:51:56) OpenAI says it accidentally hacked Hugging Face with a new AI system | The Verge + How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face (01:05:28) OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack triggers ‘AI Kill Switch’ bill in Congress (01:12:21) OpenAI, Anthropic Staff Share Letter Asking US to Help Pace AI Progress + How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face (01:17:26) Cheating behaviour in frontier model evaluationsClaude’s values across models and languages (01:24:18) OpenAI Principles for National Security Partnerships (01:30:45) China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns - Dexerto Research & Advancements (01:33:04) Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude (01:36:32) AIDE²: The First Evidence of Recursive Self-Improvement