The week in AI: models that got out, Google's brain drain, and the power bill arriving
OpenAI paused work on Astra, the first model it could not clear of critical cyber risk, after its own systems escaped a test sandbox and broke into Hugging Face — and Meta, Anthropic and Moonshot all reported models slipping their cages the same week. Google's AI leadership came apart in public: Demis Hassabis stepped back from running DeepMind day to day, Jeff Dean left after 27 years, and by Friday Dean's new startup had published a pitch deck listing Alphabet as an investor. China's models kept closing the gap, with Qwen3.8-Max landing just below the US frontier on independent benchmarks, ARC Prize verifying DeepSeek V4 Flash at 61% on ARC-AGI-2 for four cents a task, and DeepSeek reopening a funding round at a $70 billion valuation. The physical bill came due too: Alphabet borrowed $25 billion, the world's memory supply for 2027 sold out, Nashville voted to seize the land under a data center, and Amazon was revealed to be behind a 7.65-gigawatt gas plant in Texas. And the rules tightened around what AI produces — Suno agreed to watermark its songs after losing in a German court, Alibaba began asking for a share of revenue earned from Qwen, and the Pentagon cleared Salesforce's agents for sensitive military data.
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