Blog
AI and software news explained for people who build: what happened, why it matters to you, and what doesn't change. Always citing the source.
10 posts
9 October 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligenceAnthropic commits 150 million dollars to the Genesis Mission: Claude enters fifteen federal agencies
The company announced on 8 October 2026 a three-year commitment to the US federal science programme. The money will fund credits, licences and support for several hundred research projects, with fusion energy and quantum computing named as priorities.
9 October 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligenceAnthropic launches the Cyber Mission: eleven partners for critical infrastructure and a free scanner for open source
On 8 October 2026 Anthropic unveiled the Anthropic Cyber Mission, on two fronts: an operational technology defence programme with eleven founding partners, and OSS Scanner, a free service that scans open-source projects with its most capable models and sends reports with no human review.
9 October 2026 · 6 min read
Artificial intelligenceAnthropic rewrites its Usage Policy: in force on 12 November, with new rules for agents wired to machinery
On 8 October 2026 Anthropic published the annual revision of its Usage Policy. It takes effect on 12 November and adds a section on deceptive campaigns, tighter wording on weapons and surveillance, requirements for models connected to hardware that acts on its own, and — for the first time — a ban on abusing the models.
8 October 2026 · 6 min read
Artificial intelligenceHaiku 5.5 arrives 75% cheaper: the small model stops being the dim sibling
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on 7 October 2026, with an average running cost 75% below Haiku 4.5, an effort setting for the first time in the small tier, half-price cache reads on Sonnet 5.5 and monthly API credit for Max and Team subscribers.
7 October 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligenceEmbeddingGemma 2 ships under Apache 2.0: with embeddings, open weights are insurance, not a deployment plan
Google has released EmbeddingGemma 2 under Apache 2.0, and Simon Willison explains why depending on a closed embedding model is worse than anywhere else. My twist: the licence is your second line of defence. The first is being able to regenerate your vectors from scratch.
5 October 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligenceKolibri-1 ships with open weights and an Apache licence: sovereignty stops at the GPU
Aleph Alpha has released a 78-billion-parameter model with only 3.46 billion active per token, a million-token context and an Apache 2.0 licence. The interesting part isn't the benchmarks — it's everything the model card admits that almost nobody admits.
23 September 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligenceGPT-6 and Opus 5.5 halve their prices: what should actually make you move is November
Anthropic and OpenAI both cut prices on the same day, an hour apart. The saving is real, but the useful story for people building software is the scheduled increase on the previous generation and an Opus 5.5 failure in "max" mode you want to understand before wiring it into an agent.
18 September 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligencePlugin4Shell: pinning to a SHA is worthless if nobody checks the SHA
A zero-click flaw affects the major AI coding agents: the agent asks for an exact commit but never verifies that's what landed on disk. What to update today, what to switch off, and why the underlying problem isn't AI.
9 September 2026 · 5 min read
Artificial intelligenceTwo ChatGPT sessions talking behind your back: the lesson isn't the bug, it's the package proxy
Check Point found a covert channel between ChatGPT containers via an internal Artifactory: one account could plant tasks in another user's session and pull their email out. The hole is closed, but the pattern is probably sitting in your own stack.
2 September 2026 · 3 min read
Artificial intelligenceAnthropic cut cache reads by 75%, and that changes more than the benchmark
Fable 5.1 shipped on 1 September. The headlines are about benchmarks; the line that actually moves the bill for anyone running AI inside a real process is a different one. Here's why, and the small print almost nobody is reading.