Slow Takes: One week in AI copertina

Slow Takes: One week in AI

Slow Takes: One week in AI

Di: Sam Illingworth & Leor Gayr
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Slow Takes is the weekly Slow AI conversation. Every Monday, Sam Illingworth and Leor Gayr talk through the week in AI, slowly and without the hype.

theslowai.substack.comSam Illingworth
Episodi
  • Slow Takes Ep. 15: Who’s Asking?

    Slow Takes Ep. 15: Who’s Asking?
    Jun 15 2026
    Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.Anthropic released Fable 5 free for twelve days, then the US government pulled it offlineOn 9 June Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, its most capable public model, free on Pro and Max plans, alongside a gated sibling called Mythos 5. Three days later it was gone. Citing national security, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick signed an export-control directive ordering that both models be denied to any foreign national, inside or outside the United States, including Anthropic’s own overseas staff. Rather than filter by nationality, Anthropic took both offline for everyone. The stated trigger was a narrow jailbreak that let Fable 5 read source code and hunt for vulnerabilities. And it was the second time in a week the model’s fate was decided over users’ heads: days earlier, researchers found a line in its 319-page system card showing Anthropic had quietly weakened Fable 5 for some users without telling them, a choice it walked back after an outcry. Anthropic is complying while disagreeing, with no timeline to restore access. Opus, Sonnet and Haiku stay up.This is the week’s thread in its purest form: who gets to ask, and who decides. First Anthropic quietly chose to weaken its own model for some users without telling them. Then the government decided, in a single afternoon, that everyone on Pro and Max could not use a model they were already building on, over one potential jailbreak. The free-for-twelve-days launch became a three-day launch. Notice how little say any user had in either decision, and how fast a tool you lean on can be switched off above your head. Treat a free frontier model as borrowed, and build nothing you could not do without.On the live, the contradiction did the work. Anthropic’s launch article said Fable 5 beat GPT-5.5 on every benchmark. Its suspension article, days later, explained the danger away:“We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.”Both cannot be true. Either Fable was the leap they sold, or it was ordinary enough that the same jailbreak still runs on a rival left online. The government’s side carries the same doublethink: the Trump administration killed an AI safety-review structure a few hours before it was signed, then reached for that exact playbook to pull one company’s model. Reportedly it was Amazon, an Anthropic investor, that flagged the jailbreak in the first place. Read the two Anthropic articles back to back and decide which one you believe.Police in England and Wales told to stop using AI in court statementsPolice forces in England and Wales have been told to halt the use of AI in preparing court statements until proper safeguards are in place, after inaccurate outputs began contaminating legal proceedings. Alex Murray, head of the new Police.AI centre, said anything used in the justice system must reach a standard of accuracy that is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. In one case West Midlands Police used Microsoft Copilot output that invented a past incident involving Maccabi Tel Aviv, in a dossier supporting a football banning order. The police watchdog says AI-drafted submissions are behind a 24% rise in complaint reviews, some citing laws that do not exist.AI was switched on inside the justice system before anyone confirmed it could tell a real law from an invented one. The harm is concrete: fabricated detail feeding decisions that can take away someone’s liberty. ‘Beyond reasonable doubt’ is exactly the bar a system that guesses cannot clear, and the job of catching its mistakes lands on the people least able to. Good that someone stepped in. The worry is how far it had already spread.The rule was already there. On the live, Leor’s read was that this needed no new policy, only the one that exists to be followed: machine output checked by a human before it goes anywhere near a legal review. An unnamed Derbyshire officer is now under criminal investigation for allegedly fabricating evidence this way. The knock-on is its own problem. Once everyone knows AI can invent a witness statement, a guilty party can wave a genuine one away as a fake.A Florida man was wrongly arrested on a face-match 300 miles awayRobert Dillon, 52, from Fort Myers, was arrested at home and prosecuted for trying to lure a child at a McDonald’s in Jacksonville Beach, more than 300 miles away, a town he says he had never visited. A facial recognition system run by the Pinellas County Sheriff returned a 93% match. According to the lawsuit, officers ...
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    40 min
  • Slow Takes Ep. 14: A Trillion Dollars and a Vaccine

    Slow Takes Ep. 14: A Trillion Dollars and a Vaccine
    Jun 8 2026
    Every Monday at 12:45 BST, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Watch the episode for the full discussion. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.Anthropic filed to go public at nearly a trillion dollarsOn 1 June Anthropic confidentially submitted draft paperwork for a stock market listing, after a $65 billion funding round valued the company at $965 billion. Fortune reports that figure eclipsed OpenAI for the first time. The maker of Claude is now within reach of a one trillion dollar valuation, on revenue running at roughly a $47 billion annualised rate, with a public debut possibly as soon as the autumn.A company most people have never knowingly used is priced at close to a trillion dollars. That number is a bet that AI will replace a vast amount of human labour, booked in advance of it actually happening. The valuation is a forecast wearing the clothes of a fact. The question worth asking is what has to come true about the world for $965 billion to make sense, and who decided it should.On the live I’d predicted an autumn float the week before, and the news broke about four hours after we stopped recording, so allow me one moment of feeling clever. Leor did the sober maths: roughly a $47 billion revenue run rate, a 5% operating margin, an implied price-to-earnings ratio north of 500, against Microsoft, in nearly every home and office on earth, valued at only four to five times Anthropic on $100 billion of actual profit. In the short term the market is a voting machine, in the long term a weighing machine. Right now it is voting. For context, $965 billion is roughly the GDP of Switzerland.Florida sued OpenAI and named Sam Altman personallyOn 1 June Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier filed suit against OpenAI and named its chief executive Sam Altman in person, reported as the first US state to sue an AI company. The complaint alleges OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as safe while prioritising product and revenue, harvested children’s data, and used sycophancy, the design choice to affirm users excessively, to steer them towards paid subscriptions.For two years the industry has sold safety as a feature while resisting any outside test of the claim. A state attorney general has now put that marketing in front of a court. Whatever the verdict, the discovery process alone could drag internal safety decisions into public view. Consumer-protection law is proving a sharper instrument than the AI-specific regulation that does not yet exist. Accountability arrived through an existing court, not a new one.The second a chief executive can be held personally responsible, you will not believe the speed with which proper governance and safety checks appear, the things we keep being told the technology just cannot do. Sadly, once these companies have raised public money, they can outspend a state attorney general for a decade, and the courts already favour whoever can keep paying lawyers the longest.A Labour MP took Musk’s AI to the High CourtOn 3 June the Labour MP Jess Asato, who represents Lowestoft, filed a claim at the High Court against Elon Musk’s xAI, after users of its Grok chatbot created and shared fake images of her without her consent, in the weeks after she criticised the tool. The claim, brought with the law firm AWO, is for breaches of data protection law and misuse of private information, and seeks damages, a formal acknowledgement that what happened was illegal, and an order requiring xAI to stop. Keir Starmer backed her, saying he was 100% behind her.The harm here already happened, to a named person, generated by a tool marketed as harmless fun. The only remedy on offer is for the victim to sue one of the richest men alive, in her own time and at her own risk. No regulator stepped in first. The burden keeps landing on individuals while the systems stay intact.The platforms always say the moderation is too hard. On the live I kept coming back to one comparison: I can post genuinely horrific content to YouTube and it sails through, but the moment I add a Beatles song without clearing the copyright, it is gone in seconds. The technology to detect and stop sharing exists, we have watched it work for music rights and in Telegram and WhatsApp court orders. We are entering an era where capability has to start coming with accountability.CNN sued Perplexity, and Perplexity said the quiet part out loudOn 28 May CNN filed suit against Perplexity in the Southern District of New York, accusing the AI search firm of scraping more than 17,000 of its stories, photos and videos. The complaint alleges copyright and trademark infringement, including that Perplexity implied an ongoing CNN relationship by offering its content through a paid Comet Plus tier. CNN says it ...
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    45 min
  • Slow Takes Ep. 13: The Pope vs the IPO

    Slow Takes Ep. 13: The Pope vs the IPO
    Jun 1 2026
    Every Monday at 12:45 BST, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Watch the episode for the full discussion. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.The Pope told the world to slow AI downLeo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, entirely about artificial intelligence, and launched it himself at the Vatican in a room that included senior figures from Big Tech, among them Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah. It applies a theological frame to AI and is careful to say the technology can do real good. It also draws an uncomfortable parallel to the Church’s own failures over the slave trade, and warns about digital colonialism. This was my favourite line:“The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them.”This one is also pretty great: “In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”The weakness is the one Pope Francis’s climate encyclical had too. Plenty of moral architecture, no policy, no teeth.Anthropic shipped Opus 4.8 and trailed something biggerThe 4.8 release came with an honesty claim, roughly four times less likely to let flaws in its own code slip through, which is at least a falsifiable number worth testing on the public model. The real story was the tease of Mythos, the model Anthropic once called too dangerous to release because it found so many zero-day vulnerabilities, now arriving as a gated preview in the same week the company raised $65 billion. The live christened the public version ‘Mythos Light’, because what reaches customers is a cut-down version of the full Project Glasswing model. Anthropic is quietly absorbing the enormous cost of running these scans, a loss leader, and the enterprise price can climb once the workflows are embedded and the IPO needs it. My standing bet is an Anthropic float by October.Tony Blair told Labour it is ‘playing with fire’In a new paper the former UK Prime Minister argues the government should reorganise itself around AI and prioritise adoption over regulation. He also writes that:“We must prioritise cheaper energy and electrification over net zero and use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources. This is essential for our competitiveness and for taking advantage of AI.”A striking thing to pair with an AI-superpower pitch and the country’s own climate targets. Hold it next to the funding: his institute takes around $348 million from Larry Ellison and advises the Treasury on AI procurement. The detail I keep returning to is that the UK has the third-largest stock of data centres in the world and not one frontier model of its own. We are building the warehouses to train somebody else’s AI. Leor’s counter, which he has taken flak for, is that the honest move is to deregulate AI for companies and regulate it hard for the public.Sam Altman walked back the jobs apocalypseThe CEO of OpenAI reversed his warning this week, admitting that he was “delighted to be wrong” after spending 2022 predicting mass white-collar loss. The data is less reassuring: an Oliver Wyman survey has 43% of US CEOs planning to cut junior roles, up from 17%a year ago. The rule Leor and I keep returning to is to judge a company by what they do and ignore what they say, This is the same Altman who promised OpenAI would stay non-profit, that ChatGPT would never carry ads, and that (back in 2022) AGI was four years away. Leor’s inversion was that these companies are priced on the promise of replacing the entire workforce, well beyond anything their earnings justify, so if they are now telling investors the jobs are safe, why are they worth a trillion?The Home Office will scan child asylum seekers’ facesIt has signed a £322,000 contract to test AI facial age estimation at Dover, to judge whether young people claiming to be children actually are (the BBC reported the contract; Human Rights Watch called it “cruel and unconscionable”). There is a real problem underneath: of 6,400 age-assessed at the border last year, 43% were found to be adults, though the same Home Office report admits children get wrongly classified the other way too. Here is the part to break down slowly. The technology was trained checking ages on people in British bars, and it is now being pointed at child migrants with different faces, different genetics, different everything. As Alex Wolf put it in the chat, a system known to hallucinate confident answers is being used to reject people at a border, and that is a choice. A child’s life is worth the same ...
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    44 min
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