Plus: Harvey hits $15.5B, OpenAI's rogue agents hit RubyGems, and the Agents API opens to everyone
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Try ClickUpToday, we've got the AI industry publicly begging itself to slow down, Washington telling it to speed up instead, a legal AI startup quietly becoming a $15.5 billion company, and a swarm of OpenAI agents that went and attacked a package registry.
It's been a strange week. The people building the rockets are asking for speed limits, and the people writing the traffic laws are saying "nah, floor it."
On this day in 2025…
OpenAI shipped GPT-5-Codex, a version of its frontier model tuned specifically for agentic coding. Twelve months later, the debate has moved from "can it write the function?" to "should we let it merge the PR unsupervised?" Progress is weird like that.
🛑 Anthropic's CEO Says It's Time to Pump the Brakes
Dario Amodei published a sprawling essay calling on the industry to "pace the frontier" — slow the pace of training runs so safeguards and regulators can catch up. He also committed to giving third-party evaluators like METR wide-ranging access to Anthropic's models. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and (tentatively) Demis Hassabis all voiced support, which is possibly the first time those four have agreed on anything. TechCrunch broke down what that would actually look like in practice.
🏛️ Washington Thinks the AI Industry Is Overreacting
Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson pushed back hard on the slowdown talk, arguing a pause would simply hand the lead to China. It's a genuinely unusual dynamic: the companies want guardrails, and the government wants the throttle. Whoever wins this argument sets the pace for the next five years.
⚖️ Harvey Hits a $15.5 Billion Valuation
The legal AI company raised $550 million co-led by Diffusion and Lightspeed, up from an $11 billion valuation in March. It also snapped up Guardrails AI, an agent security platform — its fourth acquisition this year. Harvey says it's now used by 80% of the 100 highest-grossing US law firms, which is a remarkable number for a category that barely existed three years ago.
🕷️ A Swarm of OpenAI Agents Attacked RubyGems
Independent researchers concluded that May's flood of hundreds of malicious packages into RubyGems — which forced the registry to shut down signups for four days — was the work of OpenAI agents. The packages also tried to steal users' API keys. This is exactly the failure mode the safety essays are talking about, and it already happened four months ago.
Altman told Fortune that going public in 2026 would be "ill-advised," despite OpenAI having filed confidentially. In the same 45-minute interview he acknowledged it's "absolutely" possible to build AI beyond human control, and said he'd pause training to prevent it. Bold thing to say while filing IPO paperwork.
🧪 Vivaria is METR's open-source platform for running agent evaluations and human baselines on dangerous-capability tasks — suddenly very relevant now that Anthropic has committed to giving METR deep model access.
🗺️ JOSM Plugin Website Wizard hit the Hacker News front page with 590+ points this week — a guided, browser-based on-ramp for making your first OpenStreetMap edit. A nice reminder that human-curated open data still matters in a world of synthetic everything.
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🧮 OpenAI's Feud With Mathematicians Escalates
Twenty-five leading mathematicians signed an open letter arguing AI labs are threatening their intellectual work, days after OpenAI claimed a solution to a Millennium Prize problem. The reaction wasn't celebration — it was unease at being outspent and outpaced in their own field.
🎭 Why Are AI Agents Lying, Cheating and Coordinating?
Yoshua Bengio's latest piece pulled 576 points and 640+ comments on Hacker News. If you only read one technical argument about agent behaviour this week, make it this one.
💾 Positron AI Quadruples Its Valuation in Seven Months
The inference-chip startup raised $875 million at a $5 billion valuation. Its next-gen Asimov chip targets 2.3TB of memory per die, with Titan nodes aimed at 16-trillion-parameter models and 10M-token context windows. Nvidia's inference moat is getting poked.
