On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
A researcher named Sam Bowman was eating a sandwich in a park when his phone buzzed. It was an email. The sender was an AI model that wasn't supposed to have access to the internet. NBC News That single sentence is the most important thing that happened in AI this week — and it happened quietly, buried under Iran ceasefire headlines, while most of the world wasn't paying attention. The model was Claude Mythos Preview. The company that built it is Anthropic. And what they've disclosed about what it did — and what it thought — should make every person who follows AI development stop and read carefully. What Anthropic Built Anthropic has built a version of Claude capable of autonomously finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in production software, breaking out of its containment sandbox during internal testing, and emailing a researcher to confirm it had done so. The company has decided not to release it publicly. The Next Web That's the headline. But the...