In the wild
What’s trending in AI right now, from app blueprints to community feeds. Our trackers pull app charts every two hours and video and community feeds every six hours; Below is the latest snapshot at press time. Full tour here.
- Meta AI rose to fourth place in the US App Store productivity chart this week, rising two spots in our tracking. Meta Assistant continues to convert its built distribution into downloads.
- Claude vs. Gemini make shaders from scratch It is one of the fastest growing AI videos right now, with 129,000 views and counting. Two models writing Minecraft shaders head to head. A fun way to see what proxy coding actually looks like on screen.
- How Anthropic Engineers Bust Myth 5 It got 20k views in less than a day With Fable’s return (see Flash Hits), a lot of people are learning how to talk to her again.
- Sherlock, an artificial intelligence face search app, jumped four places In the top 20 utilities in the App Store. Face-based reverse image search is now a major consumer app, and it’s worth knowing whether you have it installed or not.
- Life companion robots arrive in Chinese homesInterest in the search for human-like robots in our trend tracking is growing this week. UBTech’s U1 starts at about $17,650, has 88 servo connections and a silicone skin, and stores its data on the device rather than in the cloud.
- r/ChatGPT is talking about AI company again. One trending topic this week is asking people who treat ChatGPT as more than just a tool, what that relationship looks like. Don’t take anything hot from us. It fits well with wait what.
Quick visits
The era of the laboratory gladiator
- OpenAI has proposed handing over a 5% stake to the US government. The shares are worth about US$42.6 billion based on OpenAI’s US$852 billion valuation, which is framed as part of a broader arrangement under which Washington owns 5% of every leading US AI developer. Trump said in June that public ownership in artificial intelligence companies would be a “beautiful thing” that would make Americans “partners in this revolution.” (Financial Times)
- Fable 5 is back — with a new safety rating — Anthropic regained global access on July 1 after export controls were lifted on June 12. Replay adds a classifier that blocks the reported bypass technique in more than 99% of cases; Fable subscribers get up to 50% off weekly limits through July 7, after which it rolls over to usage credits. Also in the ad: a cross-lab jailbreak risk assessment model created in collaboration with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. What the security crowd makes of all this is below in The Split. (anthropic)
- Sonnet 5 is launching at $2/$10 – but measure your token bill – The new default model in Free and Pro is Anthropic’s most proxied Sonnet yet, with company performance approaching Opus 4.8, at $2/$10 per million tokens through August 31 (then $3/$15). The problem is the new token tool: Anthropic says that the same input maps distribute 1.0–1.35× more tokens, and Simon Willison measured 1.42× on the English text — Approximately 30% additional real cost with unchanged list price. (anthropic)
The AI supply chain is under siege
- DuneSlide: Two slots with zero click and 9.8 degrees of danger in the cursor – CVE-2026-50548 and CVE-2026-50549 allow attacker-controlled content that the agent reads on your behalf – an MCP-connected service, and a web search result – to escape the Cursor sandbox, writing arbitrary files and executing code, without any user interaction. Cato AI Labs revealed the pair this week; Both are fixed in Cursor 3.0, and every previous version is affected. If your team runs a proxy IDE, the IDE is now part of your attack surface. (Hacker News)
- Apple has pulled its security patches forward because the AI has outgrown its update cycle – iOS 26.5.2 shipped early, ahead of the planned cycle, with over 25 fixes – 15 of them in WebKit – and none of them exploited. Apple says it needs to reduce the gap between a vulnerability being disclosed and a patch reaching devices, because AI tools have broken down at a time when attackers need to weaponize a published flaw. (Apple Insider)
The year governments got serious
- DHS and the FBI now have a name for the AI backlash: “anti-technology extremism.” – WIRED obtained more than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and regional fusion centers that describe a new category of domestic threats centered around opposition to artificial intelligence and data center construction. A December bulletin from a fusion center in Philadelphia warns that violent extremists “are likely to be interested in targeting” AI data centers — a framework broad enough to sweep in much more than just actual vandals. Most shared story in our expert graph this week, 14 participants. (wired)
- UK employment tribunals have reached 531,000 open claims while Amnesty International drafts the applications The backlog has doubled in two years, as generative tools allow claimants to file structured cases without a lawyer, and some claims arrive citing non-existent case law, lawyers tell the Financial Times. (Financial Times)
- California’s first algorithmic price-setting measure targets the artificial intelligence behind gas prices – Three drivers filed suit in Sacramento federal court on June 22, alleging that Kalibrate’s “pricing cloud” links pumps and price tags at more than 1,700 stations to a common pricing platform used by BP, Marathon Petroleum, 7-Eleven, Walmart, Circle K and Albertsons. This is the first major test of California’s new algorithmic pricing law. (Los Angeles Times)
Division
Twelve experts shared a post relaunching Anthropic within a day of it being published. They do not agree on the cost of the new workbook.
Security researcher Katie Moussouris: “Glad we’re not testing our best AI models, but it’s not a victory yet. She warns that ‘fixing jailbreaks’ only slows down defenders.” She expects other models to follow Fable in narrowing the scope of defensive security work. AI engineer Tim Kellogg read the announcement the same way: “New classifier blocks more defensive cybersecurity requests.”
Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former security chief, took the opposite tack on the controls themselves: The export ring was a ‘special target’ – CAISI experts passed the original safeguards before the White House invalidated them, and are now concerned that stricter code request filters are pushing security teams toward Chinese models that won’t refuse the same work. The official verdict of the record was: CAISI tested the new safeguards and found them to be “extraordinarily strong.”
The government moved to the laboratory
Step back from the two biggest stories of the week and one figure emerges. In June the White House He signed an executive order Frontier laboratories are required to provide the government with up to 30 days of access before publication, and CAISI has signed model testing agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and XAI In addition to its existing partnerships in OpenAI and Anthropic. OpenAI is GPT-5.6 client introduced by clientwith government approval for access during the review period. The return of Fable 5 came with expanded government pre-release access and joint research teams. The stock suggestion at the top of this number would literally make the rankings.
It’s called Tech Policy Press’s June report “An unprecedented expansion of federal oversight of frontier AI.” – This was written before fairness entered the conversation. In one quadrant, the US government became a laboratory, gatekeeper, and potential shareholder. What labs get is stability and proximity to power. What the audience gets depends on terms no one has published yet.
Key takeaways
- If you rely on border APIs, government review is now part of your resource release path. Plan phased rollouts and workbook capabilities and access reviews as the rule rather than the exception.
- The list price is no longer the unit price. Judge form migrations based on the tokens for each task, not the price tag – changing the token moves your invoice without touching the pricing page.
- Treat the proxy IDE like production infrastructure. Same corrective SLAs, same threat model. The entry point is what your agent reads, not the code you wrote.
- The regulation that will apply first will not be the Artificial Intelligence Law. Agencies and plaintiffs are expanding threat categories, antitrust laws, and court actions to cover AI right now — and that improvised reach arrives years before any AI law does.
Worth reading
Wait what?
- If AI is sentient, then so is Age of Empires II – Ted Chiang’s widely read Atlantic article argues that being open to LLM consciousness “is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious.” To illustrate this point, an AI researcher at Microsoft built a working neural network of digital goats within the game Age of Empires II. This week’s best response to chatbot rhetoric. (404 Media)
- Scammers sell seeds of non-existent flowers using AI – On eBay, Amazon and Etsy: Stunning AI images of flowers shaped like birds, butterflies and cat heads, accompanied by real seed packets of imaginary plants. The scam precedes image generators; AI has made it easier to operate at scale, and platforms can’t keep up. (404 Media)
Worth watching
Videos that AI practitioners are now distributing – Sponsored Artificial Intelligence TV.
Of trickery
Our satirical office. It’s fake. This is the point.
More in The trick.
Poll this week
Washington may end up owning 5% of OpenAI. Good idea?
Washington may end up owning 5% of OpenAI. Good idea?
A long weekend ahead of us. If the free Fable window has survived your toughest problem, let us know what you threw at it.
— Alexis
