Barely Possible

[Barely Possible 2026-06-15] Today's episode: • Beijing ordered Meta to unwind its $2B Manus deal despite the Singapore red-chip workaround, and barred founders from leaving China. • StepFun already dismantled its offshore structure ahead of a Hong Kong IPO; Moonshot and Kling reportedly eyeing the same. • Satya Nadella's "loops as IP" pitch: own the learning loop where human capital and token cap...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-14] Today's episode: • Commerce ordered Anthropic to pull Fable 5 & Mythos 5 worldwide Friday at 5:21pm ET over a single alleged jailbreak. • TechCrunch ties the security finding to Amazon's own researchers — an Anthropic investor whose testing lit the fuse. • The "national security threat" was reportedly asking the model to fix code-base flaws, a thing GPT-5.5 does da...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-13] Today's episode: • Google sued "Outsider Enterprise," a Chinese network that used Gemini to code scam sites and blast 2.5M texts in two weeks. • India's Avataar AI prices its distilled, locally-tuned video model at half a cent per second of generation. • SemiAnalysis found OpenAI's $200 Pro plan delivers up to $14K in monthly API-equivalent value; Anthropic's Max aroun...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-12] Today's episode: • SpaceX priced its IPO at $135/share, the largest debut ever, but stacked SPV holders won't know their true stakes until lock-ups lift. • India's government got cold feet on Starlink right before the IPO, cracking the growth story public investors are buying. • Simon Willison built most of Datasette 1.0a33 with Claude Fable 5—and reframes OpenAI's rum...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-11] Today's episode: • A German court ruled against Google AI Overviews, saying AI isn't necessary to search—a precedent that could gut the AI search business. • A Florida man is suing police after a facial recognition "93% match" led to his arrest, with contradicting evidence ignored. • The most AI-pilled firms now spend ~$7,500 per employee per month on AI tooling, per R...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-10] Today's episode: • Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5, the safety-wrapped public version of its internal frontier engine, Mythos. • On Cognition's FrontierCode Diamond set, Opus 4.8 hit just 13.4% and GPT-5.5 6.3% on "would a maintainer merge this?" • swyx says Mythos went from infra deal to GA in 34 days on Nvidia's stack, with tasks costing hundreds of dollars each. He...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-09] Today's episode: • 73 Microsoft-linked packages carry a self-replicating credential stealer that fires when an AI coding agent opens them—not a human. • The worm rides your agent's GitHub tokens to spread; Microsoft pulled dozens of Azure and AI tool repos after the hack. • Apple's new "Siri AI" runs on a two-tiered, Google-powered model overhaul—frontier capability is...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-08] Today's episode: • A school shooting survivor is suing an AI gun-detection firm after the computer vision system failed to spot the weapon (via Ars... • The accuracy your sales team advertises becomes the accuracy you're liable for when the missed 4% walks through the door. • Anthony Ha's "Tokenpocalypse" piece ties coming price hikes to AI labs cleaning up unit econom...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-07] Today's episode: • Bernhard Hauser gave an autonomous AI agent its own computer—and argues the seat-based SaaS model dies when the user is a machine. • Trump says the administration might take an equity stake in OpenAI; Bernie Sanders floated government owning half of major AI labs. • Reid Hoffman is leaving Microsoft's board to go "founder mode" with Manus, and Sriram...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-06] Today's episode: • Google is paying SpaceX $920M/month for compute, calling it "unexpected demand" from its newly launched AI products (Sean O'Kane... • The S&P 500 rejected SpaceX over its profitability rule, slamming the same on-ramp shut for OpenAI and Anthropic (Jeremy Hsu, Ars Technica). • Labs pulled $200/month flat plans from enterprises like Uber and Brex—n...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-05] Today's episode: • A San Francisco burglar used a Waymo robotaxi as a getaway car for a lululemon heist—and the footage didn't get him caught. • Columbia admits its breach hit people with no connection to the school, exposing SSNs of total strangers. • AT&T and Verizon lost 8–1 at the Supreme Court over FCC fines for selling customer location data. Hear the full br...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-04] Today's episode: • Uber caps coding agents at $1,500/month per employee per tool — $18k/year per seat that Simon Willison reads as a value tell. • Anthropic launched a Services Track and Partner Hub to formalize the integrators wiring Claude into big enterprises. • Anthropic mapped a year of AI-enabled cyber threats onto MITRE ATT&CK, the defender's standard attack...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-03] Today's episode: • swyx: Mustafa Suleyman built a "neolab" inside Microsoft in 2 years, all models near-SOTA, controlled chip to model to harness. • Anthropic expands Project Glasswing days after its confidential S-1 and $65B Series H near a $1T valuation. • Meta open-sourced RCCLX to make AMD GPUs talk better—a quiet bet against Nvidia owning the data center. Hear the...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-02] Today's episode: • Anthropic confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC, days after closing its $65B Series H at a ~$965B valuation. • KPMG, with 276,000+ employees, is integrating Claude across its core business as Anthropic opens offices in Milan and Seoul. • Google's AI Mode is reshaping U.S. search, answering longer queries directly and squeezing the traffic bui...

[Barely Possible 2026-06-01] Today's episode: • Sam Altman launched OpenAI Robotics, led by DALL-E co-creator Aditya Ramesh, hiring full-stack hardware, ops, and ML engineers to... • OpenAI's near-term target is robots for skilled trades building its own data-center infrastructure, not Tesla-style kitchen humanoids. • Altman pitched OpenAI into biodefense the same afternoon, with a stated goal to...

[Barely Possible 2026-05-31] Today's episode: • Bernhard Hauser's May 30 piece argues productized services are back, with AI cutting back-of-house costs so fixed-scope work hits... • Simon Willison calls token-maxing leaderboards "a stupid idea," worse on enterprise Anthropic/OpenAI plans billed at full API price... • Granite-4.1-30b lands in the shadow of Qwen3.6 and Gemma4, raising the question...

[Barely Possible 2026-05-30] Today's episode: • Claude Opus 4.8 ships: SWE-bench Pro 64.3→69.2, Terminal-Bench 66.1→74.6, but GPT-5.5 still leads Terminal-Bench at 78.2. • Anthropic's Series H closes at $965B, more than doubling February's $380B, passing OpenAI on paper with $47B run-rate revenue. • Bun's Jared Sumner ported Zig to Rust in 11 days via Claude Code sub-agents: 750K lines, 99.8% test...

[Barely Possible 2026-05-29] Today's episode: • A r/artificial user claims an 8-day zero-dollar agent on AWS t3.micro + Oracle credits, with a 9-provider fallback chain from owl-alpha... • Stealth model owl-alpha allegedly survived 70M tokens before its first rate limit; big-pickle rumored to be DeepSeek v4 on OpenRouter. • An indie builder admits their product's entire knowledge layer is rented a...

[Barely Possible 2026-05-28] Today's episode: • Swyx calls Cognition the largest independent agent lab, citing 200% utilization, IOI gold medalists, and Peter Thiel's biggest AI bet. • Anthropic disclosed a red-team phish that exfiltrated AWS credentials 24 out of 25 times, with only egress controls able to stop it. • Cowork's allowlist let Claude upload user files to an attacker's Anthropic accou...

[Barely Possible 2026-05-27] Today's episode: • A builder's Memory Curator Agent bars worker agents from writing to durable memory, routing events through four scopes mapped to... • Demis Hassabis told Axios AGI could arrive by 2029, a sharper timeline than usual from DeepMind's strictest definitional hawk. • EngineAI is shipping a humanoid robot every fifteen minutes as MiMo and DeepSeek open a p...

[Barely Possible 2026-05-26] Today's episode: • Wix cut ~1,000 employees (20% of workforce) while revenue grew 14% YoY in Q1 2026 — paying for Base44, Wix Harmony, and proprietary... • Ramp's May 2026 AI Index shows Anthropic's Claude overtaking OpenAI in business spend — though a competing podcast disputed the... • One of the original *Attention Is All You Need* authors publicly argued at Pathway...

[Barely Possible 2026-05-25] Today's episode: • Nine cyber researchers who tested Claude Mythos in controlled settings called it capable of producing "a SolarWinds every quarter" —... • Google DeepMind's agent cracked 9 of 353 open Erdős math problems for a few hundred dollars each, with downstream implications for... • Multi-agent loop failures trace to org-design, not prompts — agents with no st...

[Barely Possible 2026-05-24] Today's episode: • A 1.2B-parameter model ran 100 poker tournaments with 6 personas: "Shark" won 45; "Grinder" won zero and never lost either. • A dev mass-refactored a 120-file FastAPI service in 400 steps, 2M tokens, $3—and the model confidently added an async deadlock. • OpenAI is advertising a $445K researcher role requiring candidates to be "tasteful and strategic...

[Barely Possible 2026-05-23] Today's episode: • Microsoft reportedly canceled internal Anthropic licenses after token-based billing burned through annual budgets in months. • DeepSeek made its 75% price cut permanent — but frontier models like Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 cost more than ever due to test-time compute. • An MIT study of 300 real AI implementations found only 5% of pilots reached full produc...

[Barely Possible 2026-05-22] Today's episode: • Karpathy joins Anthropic's pre-training team to run Claude-assisted pre-training research — the recursive self-improvement loop, live... • Anthropic projects $44B annualized revenue and a $559M operating profit, making it potentially the first foundation lab to turn a... • Nvidia hit $81.6B in quarterly revenue, up 92% YoY in data centers, while Anth...