Alan Turing taught himself electronics from an RCA vacuum tube manual on a ship crossing the Atlantic in 1943. Within months he was in a Nissen hut in the English countryside, building a working voice encryption device that shrank a 50,000 kilogram Bell Labs room-filling machine down to three shoebox-sized units. Donald Bayley was a young electrical engineering graduate who arrived at Hanslope Park in 1944. He found Turing’s soldered circuits looking like a “spider’s nest” and promptly dragged him through breadboarding boot camp.

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TL;DR - The most powerful AI models from Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (GPT-5.5) are no longer clearly ahead. An open-weight challenger, Z.AI’s GLM 5.2, now matches the priciest flagships, beats Anthropic’s mainstream workhorse outright, and costs a fraction as much. At the same time the closed labs are quietly ending the all-you-can-eat deal on their heaviest models and moving to pay-per-use as they chase profit. If you pay for the top tier out of habit, now is the moment to check whether you still need to.

A quick orientation for anyone who does not live in this stuff. “Frontier” models are the biggest, most capable AI systems, the ones the headlines are about. Anthropic’s Claude Opus. OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. They are closed: you rent access, you cannot see inside them, and you cannot run them yourself.

“Open-weight” models are the opposite. The company releases the actual model so anyone can download it, run it on their own hardware or host it cheaply through a dozen competing providers. Z.AI’s GLM 5.2 is one of these.

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I read Austin Henley’s post Automating my job away on a Friday night and did the laziest possible thing with it.

Henley’s whole piece builds to one prompt. A friend who runs a startup tells his team don’t do anything three times - if a task comes round more than twice, automate it. Henley took that to its logical end and pointed his coding agent at its own history.

So I copied his idea, swapped “Copilot” for “Cowork”, and pasted this in:

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Tech companies are posting record profits while laying off tens of thousands of people and citing AI as the explanation. So far in 2026: 363 layoffs, nearly 150,000 people, 974 per day - 44% faster than last year, per TrueUp. May was the highest single month in two years. AI was the most cited layoff reason across every industry for the third month running.

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Rage is a product. Pauline Hanson has been selling it for thirty years, but she is no longer the only one running the operation. The buyers have got bigger, the money is flowing from further away, and the press is helping them do it.

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Many are saying it. Google Gemini is inside Apple’s iPhone AI. Apple has been gobbled by Google. The companies' phones are barely distinguishable now. None of that is right. The confusion is understandable. Google uses the word “Gemini” to mean at least two different things: their consumer AI assistant app and their family of underlying AI models. When people hear that “Gemini is powering Siri AI,” they picture the Google Gemini app somehow inside an iPhone.

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You have seen the move a thousand times. Someone lays out clear, well-researched evidence and the reply comes back: “that’s just your opinion.” Vaccine safety, climate data, the economics of a trade decision - the subject barely matters. The move puts a measured finding and a gut feeling on the same shelf, equally weighted, free to be picked up or put down depending on which one feels better that morning.

It looks like a debating trick. It is actually a worldview. And Brexit is the cleanest proof we have of what that worldview costs, because unlike most arguments about science and reason, this one came with a bill you can add up.

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I just tasked Claude Opus 4.8 to extend a chart, first drawn by Axios, to show the comparative performance of US presidents in their term up to the equivalent of the end of May in their second year, as we have just passed that point for Trump II. The longer I looked at it the more it bothered me.

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Anthropic launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5 last week. By the weekend, the US government had ordered both suspended for every foreign national on earth.

No advance notice. No specific public explanation. Just a directive citing national security, and Anthropic - with no practical choice - complied. Access to other Claude models remained unaffected. The concern, widely reported, centres on Mythos 5’s ability to detect software vulnerabilities. In the right hands it’s a security tool. In the wrong hands it becomes a cyberweapon. The US government has apparently decided it cannot control whose hands are whose.

This is what AI geopolitics looks like up close.

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Moments ago Anthropic wrote: Update June 12: We’ve suspended access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5. Please Use Opus 4.8 or another model. **Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 ** The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

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