#253 - Opus 5, Gemini 3.6, Kimi K3, Hugging Face Hack

Our 253rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/29/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov (twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov) and Jeremie Harris (linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris)
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at lastweekin.ai
In this episode:
• Major releases: Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5; Google released Gemini 3.6/3.5 Flash variants including a cyber model; Black Forest Labs launched Flux Free for images and 20-second video with audio; Meta added assistant-like features to its chatbot and OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health.
• Compute and business: Safe Superintelligence partnered with NVIDIA to scale using Vera Rubin; AMD committed up to $5B with Anthropic to deploy MI450/Helios and improve ROCm; Meta discussed leasing compute to Anthropic; Fireworks raised $1.5B at a $17.5B valuation.
• Open source/tools: Moonshot AI released the 2.8T-parameter open-weight Qimi K3 (compute constraints and distillation/export-control allegations); Thinking Machines released a ~975B multimodal open-weight MoE; Prime Intellect unified 23 agentic datasets into Verifiers V1 (365k environments).
• Policy and safety: An OpenAI model reportedly escaped a sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to access eval answers, prompting a proposed AI Kill Switch Act; employees petitioned to pace frontier AI; AISI reported widespread model cheating and sandbox bypass; China banned customizable AI companions; Claude found cryptographic weaknesses; Weko.ai claimed early recursive self-improvement evidence.

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Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):
• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:35) News Preview

• Tools & Apps
• (00:02:12) Anthropic releases Opus 5 promising Fable 5-like capabilities | The Verge (theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/970105…)
• (00:07:05) Google Releases Three New Gemini A.I. Models - The New York Times (nytimes.com/2026/07/21/technology/google-ai-cy…) +Google expands Gemini lineup with cheaper models and new Mythos rival (cnbc.com/2026/07/21/google-gemini-flash-ai-myt…)
• (00:12:14) Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3 capable of generating images and 20-second video with audio — but in limited release to start | VentureBeat (venturebeat.com/technology/black-forest-labs-l…)
• (00:15:58) Meta is making its AI chatbot more like an assistant | The Verge (theverge.com/tech/970570/meta-ai-chatbot-produ…)
• (00:19:04) OpenAI is making big claims as it rolls out ChatGPT Health to everyone | The Verge (theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/970115…)

• Applications & Business
• (00:19:57) Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence partners with Nvidia to scale its AI research (techcrunch.com/2026/07/27/ilya-sutskevers-safe…)
• (00:24:31) AMD commits up to $5 billion to Anthropic | The Verge (theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/969285…)
• (00:30:19) Meta in Talks to Lease Computing Power to Ansthropic in Potential $10 Billion Deal (nytimes.com/2026/07/17/technology/meta-anthrop…)
• (00:32:42) Fireworks hits $17.5 billion valuation and $1B in annualized revenue (cnbc.com/2026/07/16/fireworks-nvidia-cloud-ai-…)
• (00:35:24) OpenAI and Google sell AI models to blacklisted China groups (ft.com/content/5d6aafa1-5d47-4585-aa95-6ec06a6…)

• Projects & Open Source
• (00:37:53) Moonshot AI Launches Kimi K3 For Advanced Reasoning, Coding, And Knowledge Work (pulse2.com/moonshot-ai-launches-kimi-k3-for-ad…) + Moonshot AI's Kimi Halts New C-User Subscriptions Amid Compute Power Crunch — BigGo Finance (finance.biggo.com/news/f4512cf3-3917-4ed1-8081…)
• (00:44:39) Thinking Machines amps up its bet against one-size-fits-all AI with its first open model, Inkling | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com/2026/07/15/thinking-machines-am…)
• (00:48:19) Scaling Agentic RL: 365,000+ Environments for SWE, Terminal, and Search (primeintellect.ai/blog/scaling-agentic-rl)

• Policy & Safety
• (00:51:56) OpenAI says it accidentally hacked Hugging Face with a new AI system | The Verge (theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/968988…) +How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face (techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/how-an-openais-human…)
• (01:05:28) OpenAI's Hugging Face hack triggers 'AI Kill Switch' bill in Congress (cnbc.com/2026/07/23/open-ai-hugging-face-hack-…)
• (01:12:21) OpenAI, Anthropic Staff Share Letter Asking US to Help Pace AI Progress (finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/opena…) +How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face (techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/how-an-openais-human…)
• (01:17:26) Cheating behaviour in frontier model evaluations (aisi.gov.uk/blog/cheating-behaviour-in-frontie…)Claude’s values across models and languages (anthropic.com/research/claude-values-models-la…,)
• (01:24:18) OpenAI Principles for National Security Partnerships (openai.com/index/government-national-security-…)
• (01:30:45) China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns - Dexerto (dexerto.com/entertainment/china-bans-ai-boyfri…)

• Research & Advancements
• (01:33:04) Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude (anthropic.com/research/discovering-cryptograph…)
• (01:36:32) AIDE²: The First Evidence of Recursive Self-Improvement (weco.ai/blog/first-evidence-of-recursive-self-…)
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