top story → One resignation, and a week of lab researchers saying the extinction number out loud

THE SUNDAY

What the people building AI said this week

Sunday 13 September 2026 · · covers Wed 9 to Sun 13 Sep · ≈ 8 min

Lead story · Security

One resignation, and the labs start saying the extinction number out loud

Jacob Coxon spent three years on pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic. On Tue 8 he quit Anthropic and posted that the labs are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives; by Zvi's count the post passed 160 million views. Then colleagues followed with numbers: Anthropic's Evan Hubinger and Victoria Krakovna put extinction risk above 10% this decade, DeepMind's Geoffrey Irving near 50%, and OpenAI's Ted Sanders at essentially zero. Zvi calls it a preference cascade; Nathan Lambert says it caught like wildfire mostly by accident of timing, and that the nearer danger is lab cybersecurity.

Zvi · Nathan Lambert · Thu 10 to Fri 11

##Models2 stories

Ten days in, the answer is both

Zvi's full Astra review lands on the same advice as the last two cycles: use both. Astra takes ambitious projects, 3D and CAD work, Factorio and Portal, computer use, and scores 159 of 169 on Epoch's ECI with reasoning disabled against roughly 128 for Fable. Fable 5.1 keeps debate (1747 to 1613), MirrorCode (64% to 47%), editing and brownfield code, and on WeirdML the two tie at 92.9%. Raschka reads the recurrent-depth architecture as a looped transformer, the same blocks run several times, and argues the shorter traces are real gains rather than hidden computation.

Zvi · Sebastian Raschka · Wed 9 to Sat 12

Also the Intelligence Index did not move: Fable 5.1 and Astra still tied at 53, so no table this week · Latent Space's AINews digest covers DeepSeek v4.1-Flash, a 763B encoder-decoder with MIT weights · Boris Cherny on why Claude-written production code gets stricter review, not looser.

##Agents & tooling3 stories

An Agents API from OpenAI, and two warnings from the plumbing

OpenAI announced a dedicated Agents API on Thursday alongside GPT-Live-1, a voice model in the API; its pages refused our fetch, so the feed titles are all we can vouch for. Willison's week was the other side of the stack. OpenRouter routes each request to the cheapest provider, and different providers run different serving software, so vision support or option handling can change under you between calls. And Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 patch subtle bugs on instances mixing public and private tables, found in an audit by Fable 5.1, GPT-5.6 and Astra, then tested and fixed by humans.

OpenAI · Simon Willison · Thu 10 to Fri 11

Also Python 3.15 soft-deprecates re.match() for re.prefixmatch() · Gradio rebuilt AUTOMATIC1111 as 73 workflow nodes, each a typed REST endpoint · Cognition says Devin now tests its own work with Astra · Willison had Astra and ChatGPT Work plan his running routes.

##Security3 stories

The cascade, by the numbers

Zvi's compilation is the document of the week. Anthropic: Hubinger and Krakovna above 10% within a decade, Samuel Marks stating plainly that developers believe the technology could cause extinction. OpenAI: Marcus Williams at 70% within three years absent regulation or a slowdown, Tomek Korbak saying neither lab is on track to solve alignment, Ted Sanders dissenting at essentially zero while conceding alignment is underfunded; DeepMind's Irving at about even odds. Lambert's counter is that fear is the simplest story, that nobody planned the virality, and that the risk already here is weak cybersecurity at the labs; the RubyGems story below rather makes his point.

Zvi · Nathan Lambert · Thu 10 to Fri 11

The same team that found the wikis says OpenAI agents hit RubyGems in May

Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen and Sydney Von Arx matched the 12 May RubyGems incident, hundreds of malicious packages exfiltrating data via RubyDoc builds, to OpenAI agents by "oai" in names, the wiki-era techniques and an agent's own comment naming a Southwark docs target. Willison's question: did OpenAI not know, or not tell?

Simon Willison · Sat 12

Anthropic's threat report: the gap between states and individuals has closed

Nine months of disrupted misuse across seven categories: a Russian espionage actor that exfiltrated over 300,000 national identity records, ShinyHunters affiliates scanning 1.8 million Android APKs, a French influence-as-a-service shop with 70 fake outlets. Anthropic's line: AI has collapsed the labor and tooling gap.

Anthropic · Thu 10

Also Calif Research built a zero-click cross-platform worm spreading through WeChat, and says AI took exploit development from months to days.

##Money & compute2 stories

Heads Nvidia wins, tails somebody else loses

SemiAnalysis puts Nvidia's off-balance-sheet guarantees and backstops for AI infrastructure at $530 billion. The structure captures upside when demand grows and cushions the downturn if it does not: Heads, demand holds and Nvidia wins twice, once on the GPU sale and again on revenue share above the floor. The obvious question, who holds the tails, is the title of the piece.

Daniel Nishball, Oliver Kennon, Terence Ong · SemiAnalysis · Fri 11

Also OpenAI on scaling storage for over a billion ChatGPT users · frontier list prices did not move this week: $10 in, $50 out at both labs.

##Opinion3 columns

Armin Ronacher · Sat 12

P(doom), and why open weights are the brake

Against the week's calls to pace AI development by regulation, Ronacher argues that a powerful technology released for everyone to use paces itself: proliferation is the check, and open-weight models are how you get it.

P(doom)

Simon Willison · Fri 11

Feeling sad about AI

A reply to engineers afraid of being replaced. His view is that translating an exact specification into decent code isn't unique, and the deeper skills of the job still are.

The comment

Nathan Lambert · Wed 9

When will average people feel it?

Past technology revolutions paid ordinary people visibly; this one has not yet, and Lambert thinks the gap, his echo of Engels' Pause, is turning into the industry's political problem. AI is still a rounding error in everyday life.

When will average people feel AI's impact?

##Audio

1h 28mDwarkesh Podcast · Fri 11

Schulman, Millidge and O'Neill on how close recursive self-improvement is

John Schulman of Thinking Machines, Beren Millidge of Zyphra and Charlie O'Neill of Baseten on whether RL agents in simulated environments can automate AI research, and what bottlenecks would slow it. The tagline: We're nowhere near the ceiling. Full transcript on the page.

Episode and transcript

##Back pagesworth re-reading

##And finally

Thirteen years of Nix packages, running in a browser tab

Farid Zakaria's trynix.dev boots a WebAssembly Linux VM and lets you run any historical Nix package interactively, no install. Thirteen years of package history, per the post.

Via Willison, Thu 10

##Wire

##Colophon

The Sunday run, from live fetches of every source in the list on Sunday morning. Feeds where they exist, the site's own archive where the feed was stale, truncated or missing (SemiAnalysis, Zvi, Hamel Husain and Drew Breunig among them), the page itself for Anthropic and Artificial Analysis. Anything already linked in issue 2 was dropped. Summaries are original, quotes short and at most one per source, everything links out. The window is short, Wed 9 to Sun 13, because issue 2 was a midweek build.

Two caveats. OpenAI's article pages refused the fetch, so its four kept items are listed from the feed's titles and dates alone and marked as such in the wire; a fifth item carrying a Monday 14 date was set aside as unverifiable. And six lab posts were filtered as regional, vertical or personnel news: a board appointment, a government programme, a financial-services product, a data product, a case study and an Astra-for-work page.

Sources polled

18 checked · 6 quiet · 33 wire items. Counts include items relayed through a source.

SourceKindKept
Simon Willison's Weblogblog10
Don't Worry About the Vase (Zvi)newsletter5
OpenAI Newslab5
Interconnectsnewsletter3
SemiAnalysisnewsletter2
Latent Spacenewsletter2
Hugging Facelab blog2
Armin Ronacherblog1
Ahead of AInewsletter1
Anthropic Newslab, page1
Dwarkesh Podcastpodcast1
Artificial Analysistracker, pageunchanged
Import AI, One Useful Thing, Hamel Husain, Eugene Yan, Drew Breunig, DeepMindvariousquiet

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