LessWrong posts by zvi

We, or at least ‘more than 100 American institutions,’ got Mythos back this week.

What we the people do not have is Fable or Sol.

While we wait for both Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6-Sol, today we instead got Claude Sonnet 5. As usual it will take a few days to get a handle on the new model. In this case, Anthropic is representing it as a cheaper and faster version of Opus 4.8, so even though the number says 5 this is a relatively minor development.

This post expands the Fable series to cover all further developments this week surrounding the Mythos Moment, and the various aspects of handling our new ad hoc licensing regime and figuring out policy going forward, and other aspects of policy as well.

This includes my notes on various rhetoric being pulled out, where I fear I end up saying similar things every so often, because we are doomed to repeat the cycle. I have accepted my role in that, but those are sections many of you can skip, and are marked in italics accordingly as per usual.

Table of Contents


You Should See The Other [...]
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Outline:
(01:12) You Should See The Other Guy
(01:54) DeepMind Coders Of The World, Unite
(02:45) Report Your Incidents
(03:04) Good Guy With An AI
(04:49) Free As In To Give It A Shot
(08:21) Everything Is Both Speech And Computer
(11:10) Lambs To The Slaughter
(15:43) A Sign Saying Beware Of The Leopard
(16:52) The Once And Present Mythos
(20:26) What Is To Be Done
(24:00) Distillation
(26:24) What Would Banning Open Source Even Mean
(27:20) Open Weight Models Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This
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First published:

June 30th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/phxgfwGNGbanumMMv/the-once-and-future-fable-5

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The Wall Street Journal printed an outright false headline and heavily misleading story claiming this, which of course was uncritically amplified by the usual suspects.

I post this now on its own so that we have a place to link to, to explain the situation.

Headline News

WSJ Headline (Obvious Nonsense): ​China Has Matched Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Resetting AI Race.

That. Did. Not. Happen.

The post even claims, explicitly, that Claude Opus 4.8 similarly ‘matches’ Claude Mythos, a claim which is even more obviously false.

Shame upon the Wall Street Journal. I fear Gell-Mann Amnesia. If they can get something as important as this so completely wrong, what about everything else?

I am skipping over the parts that involve accurate reporting, or minor quibbles.

It seems important to focus on clearly debunking the central false claims.

Alas, the mistakes made here very much rhyme with mistakes being made throughout all this by the White House, and that get latched onto by certain bad actors, who have played a large part in leaving us unprepared for the Mythos Moment.

For a full understanding of GLM-5.2, which is indeed an impressive [...]
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Outline:
(00:27) Headline News
(02:09) What Makes Mythos Special
(03:16) Going Over The Detailed Claims
(07:38) One Helpful Note
(08:18) The Overall Impression Is Extremely Wrong
(08:48) All Of This Has Happened Before And Will Happen Again
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First published:

June 29th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bpBYm5jiS4tpyzuDS/wsj-article-claiming-china-has-matched-anthropic-is-obvious

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While we wait for a general release, the system card is the best hint as to what is going on with the new candidate for America's Next Top Model, GPT-5.6.

This is only an OpenAI model card, so by my standards it's a light read. There's a lot of things that you get in an Anthropic card, that are missing in an OpenAI card.

Overall, the card gives a clear and consistent impression that GPT-5.6-Sol is a substantial improvement over GPT-5.5, but still short of Mythos.

OpenAI calls it a ‘step function better’ than GPT-5.5. That seems accurate.

OpenAI: Sol is our new flagship and a step function better than GPT-5.5.

Terra delivers performance competitive to GPT-5.5 at 2x lower cost.

Luna is our most cost-efficient model, delivering strong capability at our lowest cost.

Together, the GPT-5.6 family gives people and developers more choice in how they balance intelligence, speed, and cost.

Once available, pricing for GPT-5.6-Sol will be $5/$30, the same as GPT-5.5. Terra is $2.5/$15, Luna is $1/$6.

They claim it will be on Cerebras at 750 TPS, which is insanely fast. Capacity will be limited, at least at first. [...]

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Outline:
(03:49) What's In A Name?
(04:26) Fix This Code
(07:08) Crossover Event Requested
(07:43) Disallowed Content (3)
(09:03) Avoiding Accidental Data-Destructive Actions (3.3)
(09:29) Are You Sure? (3.4)
(09:58) Jailbreaks (4.1)
(10:14) Prompt Injection (4.2)
(10:40) HealthBench (5.1)
(11:00) Dynamic Mental Health Adversarial User Simulations (5.2)
(12:21) Hallucinations (6)
(12:50) Isolated Misaligned Actions (7.1)
(13:10) Going Overboard (7.2)
(18:11) Chain of Thought Evaluations (7.3)
(19:18) Bias (8)
(19:27) Preparedness (9)
(20:15) Biological Risks (9.1.1)
(22:15) Cybersecurity (9.1.2)
(28:40) External Cyber Evaluation FrontierCyber from Irregular (9.1.2.5)
(30:32) Cyber Conclusions
(31:07) Recursive Self-Improvement (9.1.3)
(32:22) METR Warns Us (9.1.3.6)
(35:04) Everything Is Under Control
(37:44) Metagaming (7.4)
(40:17) Apollo Research and Sandbagging
(43:09) Safeguards (9.3)
(50:01) Better Not Call Sol Yet
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:

June 28th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JFjNmPTbH8kL6xtp6/gpt-5-6-the-system-card

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We have a new standard policy for releasing frontier AI models. It is not good.

We are now, it seems, going to have the White House individually, in an opaque ad hoc manner, deciding who can access which frontier AI models when.

One hopes we will at least transition this into a predictable and formal set of procedures for determining what to do. But we spent years not laying the groundwork for doing that, and now here we are.

Essentially everyone should read the first half of this post, to understand what happened, and my speculations on what it means going forward for AI and America.

Only those who care and find it relevant to their interests should proceed to the second half, which addresses the blame game about how we got here, and claims that things would be better if people stopped speaking truth.

Table of Contents


Part 1: A Maximally Terrible Policy.

What Does This Mean For Fable?

Solve For The Equilibrium.

The Once And Future Fable.

Part 2: The Blame Game.

A Parable.

What About the Recent Executive Order?

The Problem Is [...]
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Outline:
(01:01) Part 1: A Maximally Terrible Policy
(06:46) What Does This Mean For Fable?
(07:46) Solve For The Equilibrium
(11:45) The Once And Future Fable
(12:45) Part 2: The Blame Game
(16:02) A Parable
(18:10) What About the Recent Executive Order?
(22:13) The Problem Is Real
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First published:

June 26th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MkwL4AcbE44yePEQx/white-house-will-ad-hoc-decide-who-can-individually-access

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Fable remains in limbo, with renewed hope that we will get it back soon (45% by tomorrow, 69% by July 1, nice.) The full capabilities post is now available.

Alex Bores unfortunately lost narrowly in NY-12, and will not be heading to Congress.

There are also plenty of other stories to cover. Some highlights:


GLM-5.2 is the new best open model, although it is expensive for its class. It will have its uses, potentially for agents you need to run fully locally or privately, but often it won’t be the right fit.

Claude Tag is a new system for having Claude join your Slack, and if you @ him then he will spin up an instance to do the coding work.

Dean Ball is joining OpenAI to work on policy. We don’t see eye to eye on everything, but this is a huge upgrade over their existing alternatives.

The debate over the MidJourney scanner continues.

Table of Contents


Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. You know what it is for.

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Hiring French Qwants.

Huh, Upgrades. Claude Code supports artifacts.

[...]
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Outline:
(01:12) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:58) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(03:13) Huh, Upgrades
(03:38) On Your Marks
(04:36) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(11:20) Fun With Media Generation
(12:20) Cyber Lack of Security
(14:49) Overcoming Bias
(15:52) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
(18:14) They Took Our Jobs
(19:48) Get Involved
(21:54) Introducing
(22:12) Claude Tag
(31:46) In Other AI News
(33:20) More On GLM-5.2
(35:17) ChatGPT Health
(37:04) Middle Of The Journey
(51:04) New Medical Diagnostic Just Dropped
(54:05) Google on AI Control
(01:02:12) The Once And Future Fable
(01:04:17) Fable: The First Lawsuit
(01:05:12) Dean Ball Joins OpenAI
(01:09:03) Show Me the Money
(01:09:18) Quiet Speculations
(01:12:00) Alex Bores Loses In NY-12 By 4%
(01:22:28) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:24:49) Chip City
(01:28:33) The Week in Audio
(01:29:21) People Just Say Things
(01:30:19) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:36:32) There Are Two Pills
(01:37:55) Who Evals The Evals
(01:39:02) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:43:17) Cooperative Alignment
(01:44:22) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:45:59) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:48:08) The Lighter Side
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First published:

June 25th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MfdaizeH8z8civPHe/ai-174-you-re-it

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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