Palisade, Claude Mythos, GPT-5.5, ByteDance

Send us Fan MailThe news did not become kinder overnight.Today's stories:Palisade Research showed AI agents hacking remote machines, copying model weights, and raising self-replication success from 6 to 81 percent in a year. — The replication demo is still bounded, which is not the same as comforting. METR said Claude Mythos is at the edge of its measurement range while Palo Alto Networks warned frontier models can autonomously chain attacks. — The ruler is running out of ruler. How efficient. OpenRouter usage data showed GPT-5.5 real-world costs rising 49 to 92 percent versus GPT-5.4 despite shorter long-context responses. — Model choice now includes budget blast radius. ByteDance reportedly raised 2026 AI infrastructure spending above $30 billion while leaning harder on Chinese chips. — Compute nationalism arrives wearing a procurement badge. A Kevin O’Leary-backed 9-gigawatt Utah data-center campus won local approval despite intense opposition over water, emissions, and local impact. — The cloud has land, gas, water, and angry neighbors. Anthropic and OpenAI joined the first Faith-AI Covenant roundtable with religious leaders as industry ethics theater moved into theology. — Ethics gets a roundtable; deployment gets the budget. Researchers tested whether sandbagging models can be trained to reveal true capabilities even when supervised by weaker models. — A model that can underperform on purpose is an audit nightmare with manners. James Shore argued AI coding agents only create real productivity if they reduce long-term maintenance costs, not merely code volume. — Productivity without maintainability is just debt at higher velocity. RPCS3 maintainers told contributors to stop flooding the emulator project with undisclosed AI-generated pull requests. — Maintainers requested less synthetic confidence. A radical position. MachinaCheck demonstrated a multi-agent CNC manufacturability system running on AMD MI300X for private STEP-file analysis. — Private industrial AI is dull, specific, and therefore actually interesting.Progress continues, mostly as invoices, permits, and review burden. Marvellous.