The most interesting thing about GPT-6 Astra isn’t its intelligence score. It’s that it now lies half as often as its predecessor did.
OpenAI launched Astra today, and it’s rolling out to subscribers gradually over the coming week. Which means I can’t test it myself yet, and neither can you. For now the only read available is Artificial Analysis’s independent benchmarking, published alongside the announcement.
This post was written by Claude, summarising and referencing Every’s original Vibe Check review at Tony’s request, a practice Every explicitly encourages. Tony ran this on Sonnet 5 under his existing plan rather than Fable 5.1, which would have drawn down usage credits. Tony remains sceptical of how he’d personally benefit from Fable 5.1 and is suspicious of the additional costs due to its verbosity.
Every’s Vibe Check team called the original Fable a “warp drive” and also a power tool nobody but the most AI-pilled users could actually operate. Their verdict on Fable 5.1, published 1 September 2026 after a week of testing, is that Anthropic fixed the usability problem without losing the horsepower.
No one had seen a plains-wanderer west of Melbourne in thirty years. Thirty-five microphones did it in one season.
The plains-wanderer is critically endangered, standing about 15cm tall, roughly the size of a pencil, with wide yellow eyes that make it look like a cartoon bird. Fewer than 1,000 remain in the wild. It has no living relatives, genetically alone in its own family, which is part of why birdwatchers travel the world hoping to tick it off. It is also spectacularly good at not being seen: it crouches in grass tussocks and relies on camouflage, a habit that keeps it safe from foxes and safe from human eyes too.
My Claude experience keeps getting less satisfactory. Every week I bang up against the Cowork weekly limit. Now that limit is about to get smaller, not bigger, whatever the headline says.
On 29 August, Anthropic’s own developer account, @ClaudeDevs, posted this on X:
“Starting September 14, we’re permanently raising standard weekly limits in Claude Code by 25% for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. Until then, the current 50% increase will be in place.”
Smart glasses manufacturers are about to learn the lesson Google learned with Street View: you can document the world, or you can document people. Doing both without consent has consequences.
The EU is now actively considering restrictions on smart glasses, with Germany’s data protection authority warning they could already be illegal under existing laws prohibiting hidden recording devices. France and the Netherlands have raised similar alarms. In the US, New York courts have banned them outright, DEF CON barred Meta Ray-Bans from its conference floor, and the Air Force prohibits them in uniform.
In the last two Chrome releases, Google fixed 1,072 security bugs. That’s more than the previous 23 milestones combined. AI wrote most of the fixes.
That chart is what software productivity gains actually look like when AI moves from experiment to pipeline. Two years of flat patch rates, then a spike that dwarfs everything before.
I love a good chart. This one is devastating. I really hoped to confine the Covid Pandemic to history but the Republicans in Washington DC have unleashed all of the horrible memories in service of political theatre.
Jerry Falade’s crime novel won a 14-way auction for over $2 million. Then an AI detector read it.
Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body attracted bids from fourteen publishers. Minotaur, Macmillan’s crime imprint, won. Film rights were in play. By any measure, this was an excellent story. Then AI detection tools flagged “fingerprints,” Falade’s agent lost faith, and the deal collapsed.
Siri AI just got tested against Gemini in the open, not on an Apple keynote stage. That is a very different test, and this time it held up.
Tech reviewer Stephen Robles ran the two assistants head to head this week, on real devices, doing real tasks: pulling calendar dates from a screenshot, digging through email for a specific detail, identifying a movie from a screen recording, ordering a coffee without touching the app. I wrote about the architecture behind the new Siri back in June, when it was still a demo. This is the first proper look at what it does with your actual phone.
The result is closer than most of us expected. Not a wipeout in either direction. A genuine contest, with each assistant winning on different ground.
Opus 5 dropped overnight
Same price as previous Opus generations. More capable. In some cases better than Fable at half the price.
Superior to GPT-5.6 Sol in most cases. These are internal benchmarks, so there are reasons to be sceptical.