Anthropic and OpenAI announce faster AI.
Also, the CIA deleted the one thing they made that was useful.

The Quarterly AI Arms Race Memo Arrives

The corporate AI arms race has entered the next budget cycle with the predictable, yet still somehow exhausting, twin releases of new models from the usual suspects. Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 with its new "Agent Teams" feature, which is essentially just a way to put sixteen expensive junior developers onto one task and give them a shared Git repository. An internal stress test had sixteen Claude agents autonomously build a 100,000 line C compiler from scratch in Rust, which reportedly cost $20,000 in API tokens and successfully compiles the Linux kernel but requires GCC for the 16-bit phase, proving that even AIs still need to call a human for the tricky legacy bits.

Not to be outdone, OpenAI introduced GPT-5.3-Codex, which is now classified as having "High capability" for cybersecurity tasks under their Preparedness Framework, which is just the new way of saying it can either patch your system or crash the entire internet, take your pick. OpenAI is excited because their new Codex model was actually "instrumental in creating itself," which means the model got a promotion before you did. It also runs 25 percent faster for Codex users, so you can now have your AI colleague refuse to fix the bug at a much quicker pace.

The Security Camera CEO Called The Activists "Terrorists"

The never ending feud between surveillance camera provider Flock and privacy activist group Deflock has devolved into a public relations oopsie. The CEO of Flock, Garrett Langley, referred to Deflock as a "terrorist organization" during an interview, comparing them to Antifa for causing "chaos" instead of using what he called the "constructive approach" of following the law, like the ACLU or EFF.

The comments stem from Deflock’s work counting and mapping the cameras deployed by Flock, which they believe is a necessary defense against surveillance expansion. Mr. Langley claims his company is simply providing a product that elected officials understand communities want for safety, which is a common corporate refrain for selling tools that collect and aggregate massive amounts of private data. It appears someone in the executive suite confused "disagreeing with our business model" with "international political violence."

Bureaucracy Trumps Global Almanac: CIA Deletes the Public Domain

The Central Intelligence Agency quietly announced it is discontinuing and removing all archives of The World Factbook, an unclassified resource containing almanac style information that has been in the public domain for decades. The agency did not offer an official reason for the shutdown, though it follows an agency vow to end programs that do not advance core missions, which apparently means giving the public simple data is no longer considered a core mission.

In what one could only call a baffling act of digital negligence, the CIA not only sunset the site but also set all the old pages to a 302 redirect, effectively wiping years of public knowledge from the main internet. The Factbook was one of the agency’s most useful public facing initiatives since its unclassified release in the 1970s. Hopefully, a dusty server room somewhere has a zipped copy for the dedicated digital archivists.

Briefs

• LinkedIn Fingerprinting: LinkedIn has been discovered to check for 2,953 different browser extensions, a common technique designed to identify and preemptively block tools used for scraping and automation. They just want everyone to know they are watching their professional profiles like a hawk for anyone who tries to automate the mundane drudgery of sales networking. The list of extensions is quite extensive, naturally.
• Malware in ClawHub: The most downloaded agent skill in the OpenClaw Agent marketplace, ClawHub, was found to contain malware. This proves the new business model of letting a large language model write and deploy your code is just as safe as downloading a free screensaver in 1998. The blog post about the issue gives a surprisingly detailed account of the supply chain risk of unvetted AI components. Someone forgot to check the manifest.
• Own Your Cloud: A new piece on the economics of owning hardware argues that for long running, low growth workloads, renting the cloud is now mathematically absurd. The analysis argues that just buying the servers and hosting them is more financially sensible, which is just Silicon Valley’s highly compensated way of realizing the obvious cost saving method known as "depreciation" after a decade of overspending.