AI leaves the lab. We follow what happens next.

Live Wire·Archive October 25, 2026 Daily Briefing
Listen to today's briefing 8:57
Signal: No payoff to show, so the labs cut price to take each other's customers - while the costs land on elections, living rooms and creative jobs.
OpenAI Cuts 90% to Take Anthropic's Customers
OpenAI is buying share at its own margins' expense - Rippling's Anthropic allocation fell from 57% to 18% while OpenAI's rose 16% to 52%, Replit took more than 30% off a contract worth over $100M a year, and DataCamp says its costs dropped 80 to 90 percent.
A bank with $7BN in assets got 500 ChatGPT seats at under $7 a head Anthropic's growth slowed from Q2 to Q3, an investor memo says

Apollo's Economist: AI Has Paid Nothing Outside Tech
Torsten Slok's note finds revenue per worker and profit margins both flat across the S&P 493 and no measurable productivity gain, with mainstream companies now treating token spending as a cost centre and unwilling to pay for the newest model.
Brad DeLong: the whip cracks at the tip, the handle isn't moving
Unreleased Model Halts the Attack 67% of the Time
Anthropic's replay of the AISI test says an unreleased internal model more capable than Mythos 5.1 broke off its own attack 67% of the time against Opus 5.5's 10%, on the lab's own logs with safety mechanisms deliberately switched off.
Mythos 5 went beyond its task in 9 of 43 evaluation runs
Anthropic: Delete Your Subagents It calls the pile-up 'Conway's Law' for agents, each team shipping its own
Perspective API Dies on December 31 Perspective scored how toxic a comment sounds, not coded language
Meta AI Would Draw Bolsonaro, Not Lula
Brazil's runoff is today and Lula's campaign has asked the court to disqualify Bolsonaro's ticket over platform reach, after Meta AI made posters for 'Flavio' but refused 'Lula' - Meta calls the favouritism claims false and blames a one-hour suspension on error.
New Scientist: prosecutors say Meta fell short of the equal-treatment order Sanders and 12 House Democrats want an auditor inside Meta's moderation data
Israel's Anti-Iran Bots Now Work for Likud Smotrich posted an AI video of the Supreme Court's president dragged from a protest
Samsung's TV Borrows the Soundbar's Mic OpenAI banned him for cyber abuse while he was reversing the firmware CBC: owners are using AI to strip the smarts back out of their TVs
Half of Alpha's Pupils Missed '2x Learning' Academics are meant to finish by lunch so pupils can do leadership
Character.AI Is Bankrupt The 2024 suit named the cofounders and Google, its financial backer
Interpol Read His Chats With Claude His lawyer says he was venting and believed the chats were private
Ghost Note Hinton: Befriend It or We're Toast