Tuesday 26 May 2026
Anthropic’s Mythos 1 is moving toward broader availability while DeepSeek locks in permanent price cuts, and the MCP spec gets its biggest revision since launch. Meanwhile, the AI price war intensifies as Anthropic marches toward profitability and SpaceX stuns with a neocloud gambit that nearly doubled its revenue in a quarter.
🤖 Models and Launches
Anthropic Prepares Mythos 1 for Claude Code and Claude Security — Anthropic’s Mythos model is expanding to more organizations, already surfacing on Google Cloud and AWS through vulnerability discovery programs. Claude Opus 4.8 is also rumored to be in development.
DeepSeek Makes Its 75% Discount Permanent — The AI Price War Just Escalated — DeepSeek-V4 Pro pricing is now permanently 75% below the original rate, sitting well under GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.7, and Gemini 3.5 Flash. Artificial Analysis estimates it costs ~12x less than GPT-5.5 and ~19x less than Opus 4.7 to run their Intelligence Index.
Lance — Lightweight Unified Multimodal Model (3B Active Parameters) — ByteDance’s Lance supports image and video understanding, generation, and editing with just 3B active params, trained from scratch on 128 A100s.
Gemini 3.5 Flash (Low) Outperforms Flash (High) on SWE Tasks — Google’s low-compute variant generates ~45% fewer tokens than the medium setting while generally beating the high setting on software engineering benchmarks.
💰 Funding and Industry
Anthropic’s March to Profitability — Anthropic is tracking $10.9B in Q2 revenue (up from $4.8B in Q1), with Claude Code alone at $2.5B. Compute costs dropped from 71 to 56 cents per revenue dollar. The company expects $559M in profit ahead of an October IPO.
The Neocloud Boom — SpaceX acquired xAI and is renting its two Colossus data centers to Anthropic for $15B/year — nearly doubling the company’s $18.7B total 2023 revenue in a single quarter. The broader AI buildout is projected at $7.5T over 4.5 years, comparable to the 1880s railroad boom.
David Sacks’s 11th-Hour Plea Led to Trump’s Backtrack on AI Executive Order — VC David Sacks warned Trump that the AI executive order could lead to mandatory regulations slowing the US in its race with China. Trump postponed signing, marking a win for those against strong AI guardrails.
🛠️ Agents and Tools
The 2026-07-28 MCP Specification Release Candidate — The biggest MCP revision since launch: stateless core (no handshake, no session ID, scales on ordinary HTTP), first-class extensions, OAuth-aligned auth, and a formal deprecation policy. Ships July 28. Breaking changes included.
OpenAI Codex Thursday No. 6 — Appshots, Remote Computer Use, Plugins — Substantial Codex update with appshots, /goal improvements, remote computer use while locked, annotation mode, plugin sharing, and analytics. Some users report not opening an IDE in over a month.
auth.md — Secure Agent Registration for Any App — A Markdown-based standard for agent registration: tells agents how to register on behalf of users, which flows and scopes are supported, and how identity providers vouch for users with no human interaction required.
🔬 Research
Measuring LLMs’ Ability to Develop Exploits — Anthropic’s Mythos Preview consistently outperforms all other models on ExploitBench and ExploitGym, turning vulnerabilities into exploit primitives and combining them into complete end-to-end attack chains.
Agent Distillation — 100x Lower Inference Cost — A paper demonstrates that full agentic workflows (multi-step calls, tool use, scratchpads) can be distilled into model weights, running at ~100x lower inference cost while preserving near-frontier quality.
OpenAI’s Macro-Evaluation for Agentic Systems — A macro-evaluation workflow that analyzes patterns across entire populations of agent traces rather than isolated failures.
🔒 Security
Anthropic’s Glasswing Found 10,000+ Critical Vulnerabilities in a Month — Project Glasswing and partners discovered over ten thousand high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in essential software, warning the industry will need to adapt to the volume models like Mythos can find.
A Hacker Group Is Poisoning Open Source Code at Unprecedented Scale — TeamPCP has corrupted hundreds of open source tools and breached GitHub through a poisoned VSCode extension. The group deploys ransomware and sells victims’ data to any buyer.
Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks — Dutch authorities dismantled infrastructure used to facilitate cyberattacks.
🌐 Notable
SpaceX Launches Starship v3 — Partial Success — The 400-foot-tall upgraded Starship launched from Starbase with successful booster separation, but the booster crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. Starship lost an engine but made it to space, deploying satellite-mimicking devices before exploding on Indian Ocean touchdown.
Snap Specs True AR Glasses Reportedly Launching This Fall for ~$2,500 — The first relatively normal-looking glasses that can place interfaces and virtual objects onto physical space without significantly dimming the real world view.
Predicting AI Job Exposure — Ben Evans — Past technology trends show some industries that should have suffered ended up bigger, and some that should have been immune suffered. There are currently too many factors at play to predict AI’s job impact.
🔥 Hacker News
Magnifica Humanitas — Papal Encyclical on AI — Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical addresses AI and human dignity. (668 comments)
California Moves to Exempt Linux from Age-Verification Law — After backlash over forcing OS vendors to collect users’ ages, the same lawmaker who wrote the original bill proposed a Linux exemption. (198 comments)
Jira Is Turing-Complete — A technical demonstration that Jira’s automation rules can simulate any Turing machine. (140 comments)
IBM Spins Off the First Pure-Play Quantum Chip Foundry — A $2B CHIPS Act investment bets on IBM’s 300mm superconducting silicon for quantum computing. (50 comments)
Exit IP VPN Servers Mitigation Rollout — Mullvad — Mullvad addresses the growing problem of VPN exit IPs being blocked or flagged. (31 comments)
🌍 World and Australia
Iran Denies Deal with US Is Imminent Despite Some Progress — Tehran says “contradictory statements” from the US and Israeli interference are hindering negotiations.
Spread of Ebola in DRC ‘Outpacing’ Response Efforts, Warns WHO — The WHO director general urges neighbouring countries to take immediate action.
Australia Energy Bills to Fall Up to 10% in July as Renewables and Batteries Soar — Household energy costs dropping as the renewable energy buildout accelerates.
BHP’s Climate Fail Revealed — Leaked Documents Show Decarbonisation Brake — A Guardian exclusive reveals the miner has hit the brakes on its decarbonisation plans.
Sources: TLDR (General + AI), AINews/Latent Space, The Guardian, Hacker News — 3 newsletters processed, ~25 stories distilled