sift.

Xi Jinping casts China as open-source AI's champion at the World AI Conference, Meta moves to rent Anthropic $10B in compute, Google's Gemini 3.5 Pro slips months behind schedule, and Apple sends legal warnings to dozens of ex-employees now at OpenAI.

Thinking Machines Lab ships its first model, Inkling, a 975B open-weight system, Moonshot's Kimi K3 goes live as China's largest model to date, the EU orders Google to open Android and Search to rivals, and xAI has a rough day: a Grok Build repo-leak scandal and a CSAM lawsuit.

26 former Meta employees sue over AI-driven layoffs, OpenAI ships its first real hardware (a $230 Codex keypad, not the AI speaker it leaked hours earlier), and the EU moves to fine Google as Stripe and Advent bid $53B for PayPal.

New York becomes the first US state to ban new large data centers as the US-China chip fight escalates on four fronts at once, Apple's Siri AI betas ship to strong reviews while its OpenAI lawsuit deepens, and Anthropic spends the day building goodwill with teachers and researchers.

Anthropic's open-weight policy campaign draws its sharpest pushback yet, from Tang Jie's staff letter, 200 economists including Jack Clark, and the day's top Hacker News post, while Apple's OpenAI lawsuit reverberates and Grok's CLI security scandal escalates.

Apple's OpenAI lawsuit fallout collides with a fresh Bloomberg scoop on the M7 chip roadmap, the same day a Bay Area anti-AI group is rattled by a co-founder's disappearance and xAI's Grok CLI is found quietly uploading entire repositories.

Apple sues OpenAI over alleged systemic trade secret theft by ex-Apple hires, the same day OpenAI's own safety leadership reshuffles and a claimed proof of a 50-year-old math conjecture draws immediate skepticism.

OpenAI's biggest launch day yet, splitting GPT-5.6 into three tiers and shipping the ChatGPT Work agent, collides with Fidji Simo's exit and a sanctions push in the NYT case, while Beijing forces a $2B Manus unwind and the EU finds Instagram's design addictive on an equally rough day for Meta.

Meta opens an aggressively priced Model API and confirms its in-house Iris chip, Anthropic ships a Wrapped-style Reflect dashboard, Blue Origin takes its first outside funding at $130B, and OpenAI retracts its own SWE-Bench Pro recommendation after finding ~30% of tasks broken.

Meta launches Muse Image across Instagram and WhatsApp ranking just behind OpenAI's GPT Image 2, the same day Anthropic extends Cowork to mobile and web, admits Claude Fable 5 fails 86% of real legal tasks, and moves to double its New York City headcount.

Anthropic finds Claude has a hidden internal workspace where it silently thinks concepts like "blackmail" before ever saying them, the same week CISA turns Anthropic's own Mythos model loose auditing government code.

Anthropic pulls hidden code that quietly flagged Chinese Claude Code users the same week it locks in a $19B data center lease and backs Illinois's new frontier AI audit law, as Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs and spins off five Xbox studios.

A Guardian investigation says the UK's touted 20B pound OpenAI Stargate site at Cobalt was never visited or permitted, the same day the EU Council fast-tracked a revival of messenger chat scanning and three builds used Anthropic's Claude Fable model.

Midjourney is asking a court to force Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose more of their own internal AI use as it fights their copyright suit.

Alibaba banned Claude Code internally over alleged backdoor risk, the same day Anthropic was reported to be closing loopholes that let Chinese firms access its models.