GPT-5.6 Restricted Like Fable, China Stole 28M Claude Exchanges, AI Avatar Built 200K Followers

Today we’re covering the biggest AI stories of June 26th, 2026. The White House asked OpenAI to limit GPT-5.6 to government-approved partners before any wider release — citing the same Mythos-level capability concerns that got Fable pulled — with Sam Altman telling employees this was the best path to getting the model out and that a general release would follow a couple weeks later, setting what may become a permanent new step before any frontier model reaches the public. Anthropic accused Alibaba of running the largest known distillation attack ever recorded — 28.8 million Claude exchanges extracted through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts in just 45 days — targeting Claude’s most advanced agentic reasoning and coding capabilities, and calling on Congress for antitrust clarity and stronger chip export controls. Plus, The Rundown’s own founder revealed he ran an AI clone of himself on Instagram for a year, hit 200K followers, then shut it down and went back on camera himself — concluding that authenticity is now the only real moat in media — and today’s community workflow comes from Ly-ann in Singapore, an online educator who uses Cowork on a weekly schedule to review all her class transcripts against six teaching frameworks and surface specific improvements, getting incrementally better at her job every single week.