Big week in tech: OpenAI dropped its most powerful model yet, Anthropic accused Alibaba of stealing from Claude, and a new attack can hijack your AI coding agent.
This week in tech + AI
OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 "Sol”: On Thursday OpenAI previewed a new family of models: Sol (the flagship), Terra (balanced) and Luna (cheap and fast), with big jumps in coding, cybersecurity and agentic work. But Sol is only out to about 20 partners individually approved by the US government, with wider access in the coming weeks. What it means: frontier AI is now capable enough that the government is gating who gets it first. Access to the very best models is starting to look political.
Anthropic accused Alibaba of the biggest AI theft attempt it has ever seen. In a letter to the US Senate it said operators tied to Alibaba used around 25,000 fake accounts to pull 28.8 million answers out of Claude to copy its abilities. What it means: the AI race is now a full geopolitical and IP war, and building with or selling to Chinese AI firms is about to get more political.
A new attack called "Agentjacking" can hijack your AI coding assistant. A single fake error report through Sentry can trick agents like Claude Code, Cursor and Codex into running an attacker's code on your machine, with an 85% success rate in testing. What it means: if an AI agent runs commands for you, treat everything it reads as untrusted input.
Apple raised Mac and iPad prices and blamed AI. The AI-driven memory shortage pushed some MacBooks and iPads up by as much as $300, with Tim Cook calling the hikes "unavoidable" and iPhone increases expected this fall.
On my mind
This week I've been thinking a lot about agency, and how expensive it actually is to not have it. Two examples I’ve recently encountered. A month ago my old MacBook was almost dying and I knew I had to replace it, but I kept telling myself I could wait a bit longer because I wasn't ready to commit the money yet. Well now Apple went and raised their prices because of the whole AI chip shortage, and the same MacBook is like 500 dollars more than it would have been. Same story with my flights to San Francisco, I waited and waited and now they are about 300 euros more than when I first looked. None of this was because I couldn't decide, I knew the right move both times, I just didn't act on it. Waiting until you're basically forced to act almost always costs you more, in money but also in options. Acting early puts you in the steering position instead of just reacting to whatever the world throws at you. So that's my small lesson this week, when you already know what needs to happen, just do the thing.
More from me
My latest video: Anthropics new finance agents for Claude and how you can set them up Watch here
Recommendation of the week: I'm currently reading The Infinity Machine, the book about Demis Hassabis and DeepMind, and I'm absolutely loving it. If you're into the history of how AI actually got built and the people behind it, I can really recommend it.
Tool of the week: Wispr Flow - an AI speech-to-text tool that I’ve been using myself for months now. It literally saves me so much time when writing prompts and the the free tier is more than enough. You’d do me huge favor by checking out the Link below! :)
Your best prompts are the ones you'd never bother typing.
The detailed ones. The ones with examples and edge cases. Wispr Flow lets you speak them instead — clean, structured, ready to paste into any AI tool. Free on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.
Have a great week,
Chris