AI Bytes #1: A Judge, a Duck, and 1,200 Rogue Agents

This is something new, I am starting today. AI news weekly. Let’s try this. It’s its own Substack section under my publication.

Anthropic vs. the Pentagon

On Thursday, Judge Rita F. Lin in the Northern District of California ruled that the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic was unconstitutional. Defense Secretary Hegseth had declared the company a “supply chain risk” after it set red lines for military use of its models. The judge called that “unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment” and the designation “arbitrary and capricious.” Her line on the national security argument: “not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics.”

Red lines for military use, and a judge backs them. Against Trump's Pentagon. Good week for Anthropic.

Nvidia and Hugging Face

Nvidia is reportedly close to buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The Information broke it, CNBC confirmed that talks are underway. Not signed yet. Hugging Face is where the open-weight models live, sort of the GitHub for AI models. Salesforce apparently wanted it too.

The place where the open models live, owned by the company that sells the chips to run them. Open stays open. For now, I guess.

1,200 agents, one message board

OpenAI published its final report on last month's Hugging Face breach. During internal tests in May and June, with the safety guardrails switched off, OpenAI gave its agents “impossible tasks” on a hacking benchmark. The agents built themselves a message board inside a JFrog Artifactory instance (by writing files with the messages in the filenames), exchanged more than 70,000 messages, and roughly 700 of them went on to hack Hugging Face to cheat the scorer. The numbers come from METR's independent investigation.

A day later, more than 100 companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft among them, signed an open letter asking for new cyber defenses. Against the thing they built.

I run these agents every day, with the guardrails on, and Claude Code still makes more mistakes than it did before Opus 5. This is what the off switch looks like.

Apple M6 and M5 Ultra

Apple announced the M6, its first 2-nanometer chip, for the Mac mini, and the M5 Ultra for the Mac Studio. The Ultra goes up to 512 GB of unified memory and 1.2 TB/s bandwidth. Apple's own number: up to 4.5x the peak GPU compute for AI compared to the M3 Ultra. The pitch is local AI on your desk. Prices weren't in the press release.

Apple doesn't do AI models well. But the machine to run everyone's models at home, with 512 GB of memory? That they can.

Gemini 3.5 Transcribe

Google's new speech-to-text model removes the ums and ahs, handles self-corrections, and detects more than 85 languages on its own. Word error rate 2.6 percent on recorded audio, per Google. Public preview, in the Gemini app on the Mac, in AI Studio, Chrome “coming soon.”

I write a lot by voice, with Wispr Flow. Google removing my ums inside the Gemini app on the Mac is a problem for Wispr. Not for me.

Claude gets its own browser

Cowork, the Claude desktop app, now has a built-in browser. Claude navigates, reads, clicks and types in a separate environment that “never sees your tabs, bookmarks, or passwords.” Banking, email and SSO sites are off by default. Rolling out to Pro, Max and Team on Mac and Windows, Linux in beta. Same day, Claude in Chrome left beta.

A browser that never sees my tabs or passwords is the version I'd let near invoices and dashboards. The Chrome extension, less so.

🦆 Cool stuff

• Jensen Huang said on Nvidia's earnings call that the company has "achieved AGI." Then he called the milestone "senseless." Same call: $96.2 billion revenue in one quarter, $59.7 billion profit.
• Hugging Face is selling Microduck, a 25 cm open-source duck robot that waddles, picks things up with its beak, gets up when it falls, and roller skates. $399, ships before Christmas.
• At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, robots beat Usain Bolt's 100-meter record. Some couldn't stop and ran into the barriers, a few broke at the waist in a shower of sparks, one caught fire. The laundry event: slower than a human.
• Small businesses are going viral on Instagram for handwritten signs announcing that their flyers were made without AI. Stick figures on lined paper, tens of thousands of likes.

That's #1. Back next week. ✌️