Neural Newscast

[00:00] Nina Park: I'm Nina Park. Welcome to Model Behavior.
[00:03] Nina Park: Model Behavior examines how AI systems are built, deployed, and actually operated in real professional environments.
[00:11] Thatcher Collins: I'm Thatcher Collins.
[00:13] Thatcher Collins: Joining us today is Chad Thompson, who brings a systems-level perspective on AI, automation, and security.
[00:20] Thatcher Collins: Chad, great to have you.
[00:21] Thatcher Collins: Thanks, Thatcher.
[00:22] Thatcher Collins: It is a significant week for infrastructure shifts, particularly regarding how the major labs are funding their next generation of compute.
[00:31] Chad Thompson: Let's start with Anthropic.
[00:34] Chad Thompson: Yesterday, the company closed a $30 billion Series G round, more than doubling its valuation to $380 billion.
[00:44] Chad Thompson: Thatcher, they are also moving into the political arena.
[00:47] Thatcher Collins: Exactly, Nina.
[00:49] Thatcher Collins: Anthropic announced a $20 million donation to Public First Action.
[00:55] Thatcher Collins: This group is pushing for AI guardrails and transparency,
[00:59] Thatcher Collins: specifically supporting candidates like Senators Marsha Blackburn and Pete Ricketts.
[01:05] Thatcher Collins: It's a distinct regulatory stance compared to the rest of the industry.
[01:09] Thatcher Collins: It is interesting because while Anthropic pushes for regulation,
[01:13] Thatcher Collins: Microsoft is looking to change its relationship with OpenAI.
[01:17] Thatcher Collins: Microsoft AI lead Mustafa Suleiman confirmed they plan to develop their own frontier models
[01:22] Thatcher Collins: to reduce dependence on OpenAI's technology.
[01:26] Chad Thompson: That shift comes just as OpenAI released GP3 Codex Spark.
[01:31] Chad Thompson: This is their first production model to run on Cerebrus hardware instead of NVIDIA chips.
[01:37] Chad Thompson: Chad, the performance numbers are notable.
[01:40] Chad Thompson: They are.
[01:42] Thatcher Collins: Codex Spark is hitting 2,100 tokens per second.
[01:47] Thatcher Collins: It's built for real-time iteration rather than deep reasoning,
[01:50] Thatcher Collins: which suggests OpenAI is diversifying its hardware strategy to solve inference speed bottlenecks.
[01:56] Thatcher Collins: For sure. On the enterprise side, we saw a major deployment this week. Goldman Sachs is now using
[02:04] Thatcher Collins: Claude 4.6 agents for trade reconciliation and client onboarding. They report a 30% reduction
[02:13] Thatcher Collins: in onboarding times, which is a massive efficiency gain for a Wall Street firm.
[02:18] Chad Thompson: While banks are moving toward automation, Hollywood is pushing back.
[02:23] Chad Thompson: The MPA has called on ByteDance to stop using copyrighted works in its new C-Dance 2.0 model,
[02:31] Chad Thompson: which recently produced a deep fake featuring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
[02:36] Thatcher Collins: The conflict between generative capability and copyright is also hitting the campaign trail.
[02:44] Thatcher Collins: Democratic candidates like Mallory McMissle are making AI regulation and kids' online safety a central pillar of their 2026 platforms.
[02:54] Thatcher Collins: Thank you for listening to Model Behavior, a Neural Newscast editorial segment.
[03:01] Thatcher Collins: You can find more detailed reporting at mb.neuralnewscast.com.
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