The Week AI Sped Up and Lawmakers Slowed It Down
This week
Four labs released new models in three days. Anthropic on Tuesday, Google and Meta on Wednesday, OpenAI on Thursday. CNBC called the mood model fatigue. Then the limits arrived. California's legislature voted to require a human before an algorithm can fire you, New York City barred AI for 600,000 younger pupils, and a judge left Minnesota's law against sexual deepfakes standing. Your doctor, meanwhile, can now pull your whole chart into ChatGPT.
📡 Industry pulse — 60 seconds
- Four labs released models in three days: Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash, Meta's Muse Spark 1.3, and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra.
- OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra launch went sideways. Greg Brockman called it a generational leap. The staged rollout initially locked out paying subscribers, and Sam Altman apologised.
- Anthropic filed confidentially for a stock listing, targeting roughly $2 trillion. Its roadshow slipped to mid-October. Run-rate revenue was $47 billion in May.
- A federal judge refused to pause Minnesota's ban on sexual deepfakes while xAI challenges it, finding the company had shown no immediate irreparable harm.
- More than 1,100 people who work at AI labs petitioned Washington to slow frontier development, two days after their employers released four models in three days.