The UN Security Council — the room where they discuss wars and invasions — invited the people building frontier AI models, Americans and Chinese, to sit down and talk about systems that could one day eradicate humanity. On the same day, China's internet regulator opened an investigation into its own labs, for putting the chats of millions of Chinese users into an American model. Two weeks after the frontier labs said they should slow down, Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI shipped two models.
Today from Basel. Who sits at the table, and who is under investigation.
In this episode:
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The Security Council calls in the labs (
02:02) — France holds the presidency this month, and the room normally reserved for wars, aggressions and natural disasters was used for AI. Not only American labs — the Chinese were invited too. The thing they're circling is agents operating at a scale that simply did not exist until now, and the Council has worked out that it doesn't have a mechanism for it.
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China investigates its own labs (
06:27) — the Cyberspace Administration opened an investigation, and not into US labs. Into Chinese ones. The concern: user chats leaving for American models. Now flip it and sit in a European chair — you hand your work to Claude, and Claude routes your chats through a Chinese model. Would you be relaxed about that? Same question, different flag.
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"Pacing" apparently doesn't mean stopping (
10:15) — a week or two ago the model makers were saying we need a moratorium, we need to slow the frontier. Then Anthropic released
Claude Opus 5.5, their first since saying it. It's roughly
30% faster and 40% cheaper — so yesterday's hacker who hit a hundred companies for $8,000 now does it faster and for less. On
Terminal Bench 4.0, which measures whether an agent can actually do multi-step work rather than answer trivia, Opus 5 scored
52% and Opus 5.5 scores
66%. That's not 14% more intelligent. It's more tool calls, more retries, more steps taken from humans. And on the same day OpenAI shipped
GPT-6 Sol ($2 in / $10 out) and
GPT-6 Luna at
10 cents input. The direction is the story: token cost heading toward zero.
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Quick take: Meta's Muse (
15:00) — not the best model in the world, but so well integrated that it works. And that's exactly the exposure: the more an agent is wired into your accounts, your card and your permissions, the more surface you're opening — not for Meta, for yourself.
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Asteroid mining, and the Armageddon problem (
18:28) —
AstroForge is sending a probe to an asteroid, and because the connection won't hold, the craft will take no commands from Earth. None. We spent this week on autonomous drones that kill and autonomous agents that hack. Now: autonomous mining, in space, with NASA involved. On paper the honest question is whether it works better without humans in the loop at all.
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The thread (
22:43) — who is allowed to see inside a model, and who gets to decide.
Stay curious. Stay human.
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