AI #171: False Flag

This was the week of Claude Opus 4.8. I covered the model card, then model welfare concerns, and finally capabilities and reactions. It’s a good model, sir, an incremental but real improvement over Opus 4.7, and it is now my clear daily driver. The Trump Executive Order returned from being seemingly dead, officially putting us in the prior restraint era of frontier model releases, even if they do not call it that. There are some worrisome details, especially around putting too much responsibility on the NSA rather than CAISI and classifying the testing process, and things could go in very bad directions, but I am tentatively happy about this on net. OpenAI offered us a new policy blueprint. It seems remarkably good, and I want to hold off on my full coverage to give it the attention it deserves, likely in its own post. By contrast, their political operations are also engaged in some rather terrible activities, which I do cover here. Table of Contents Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. You put your doc in a box. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. All thinking is adaptive. Huh, Upgrades. Codex computer use on Windows, Claude Code /forks. On Your Marks. Opus 4.8 tops the Toloka Arena. Choose Your Fighter. DeepSeek v4 is now permanently cheap (for a reason). Get My Agent On The Line. Salesforce and their /goals. Cyber Lack of Security. Project Glasswing expands. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. A lot of new song uploads are AI. You Didn’t Write That. Pangram takes people to school. Copyright Confrontation. Hollywood learns to be okay with AI. They Took Our Jobs. AI is good enough, smart enough, but will people like it? They Taxed Our Jobs. Leicht and Ball try to fix AI job issues with the tax code. The Art of the Jailbreak. We use the term generously. RIP your Instagram account. Get Involved. I’m off to LessOnline for the weekend. Introducing. OpenAI’s Rosalind Biodefense initiative. In Other AI News. AISIs work together, Eve Online welcomes DeepMind. S