Transformer Weekly: AI companies’ talent problem, KOSA developments, and Google’s new AI policy framework
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Housekeeping: We’re taking next Friday off for the July 4th weekend. Happy 250th, America!
NEED TO KNOW #
House Energy and Commerce Committee members reached a bipartisan deal on theKids Online Safety Act.** Sen. Marsha Blackburnsaid she aims to incorporate the Senate’s version into a federal AI frameworkby July 4. Rep. Frank Pallone**, the top House Democrat on the** Energy and Commerce Committee**, called for a national AI data center moratorium.** Googlereleased a new AI policy frameworkcalling for government-overseen frontier model audits**, among many other things.
But first…
THE BIG STORY #
The White House has told OpenAI not to publicly release GPT-5.6 yet, multiple outlets reported on Thursday: the clearest sign yet that the US now has a licensing regime for frontier AI models.
In a memo to staff, The Information reported, Sam Altman said the government would be “approving access customer by customer during this preview period,” with a general release hoped for a “couple of weeks later.” The decision was reportedly made by the Office of the National Cyber Director and Office of Science and Technology Policy, driven by the same cyber risk concerns that blocked Fable’s deployment earlier this month.
As we’ve previously written, this de facto licensing regime was inevitable. And while it is frustrating to watch the government scramble to act, without any defined standards or benchmarks for what does make a model safe to release, it is a good thing that it is acting at all.
And there are some signs that we are moving towards a more thoughtful governance regime. Altman said he’d told the government that the current ad hoc rules are “not our preferred long term model,” while Axios reported that the delay was in part motivated by allowing the government to finish building its testing and evaluation framework. The current chaotic regime will, if we’re lucky, soon be replaced with something befitting the seriousness of the situation.
— Shakeel Hashim
ALSO NOTABLE #
OpenAI and Anthropic are up on talent — the sheer quantity of “I’ll Be Joining [insert AI company]” tweets has already inspired a new meme template for the terminally online.
Some of the latest buzzy announcements haven’t come from AI researchers, though. AGI-pilled economists Chad Jones, Anton Korinek and Alex Imas all recently left their academic jobs to join the Anthropic Institute and Google DeepMind. Philosophy professors Atoosa Kasirzadeh and Henry Shevlin left the ivory tower for GDM. And just last week, former White House AI advisor Dean Ball announced his new role as OpenAI’s head of strategic futures.
It’s starting to feel like any “outside expert” who’s AGI-pilled enough to thoughtfully critique the trajectory of AI development will get devoured and metabolized inside the belly of the beast.
The appeal is undeniable. The median salary for US-based professors of philosophy, political science, and economics ranges from $80,000-$124,000; an entry-level “Research Economist” at Anthropic earns nearly three times that.
Access may be even more tempting than money. You can’t understand a machine without taking it apart, nor can you witness the bleeding edge of AI without “going in,” as Dean Ball put it in a blog post. Decisions made *inside *companies, obscured from the outside world, he argues, will prove “more central to the future of AI than most people realize.”
This brain drain is not unlike the revolving door that’s haunted the public sector for decades. When a regulator, for instance, bounces between a federal agency and the industry they police, their incentives shift, perhaps subtly enough to go undetected. When the experts best positioned to keep AI companies honest increasingly work for them, or even think they have good odds of doing so in the future, we quickly risk the same dynamic starting to form.
Some have accused humanities-pilled AI companies of “ethics-washing,” signaling some commitment to safety while projecting an aura of legitimacy. After all, the public might think,* these guys must be making super powerful models, if economists and philosophers are paying attention.*
Whether these gripes are legitimate, or just old-school researchers yelling at clouds, every expert hired by industry is an expert lost to the nonprofit and public research ecosystem. Talent is finite, and AI companies are willing and able to make top candidates offers they can’t refuse.
It’s possible to over-romanticize the virtues of academic intellectual autonomy. Academics answer to perverse incentives too. The AI world is also, for now, marked by a surprising openness from those working at its leading companies, including criticism of their employers.
But there’s no doubt that some topics will remain off the table for the wide range of experts being hoovered up. It’s also inevitable that when “epistemically permeable” people (to borrow Anthropic philosopher Joe Carlsmith’s phrase) lock themselves in the same intellectual echo chamber as the leaders they’re meant to inform, critique and constrain, they risk drifting toward the industry’s cognitive mean. And, potentially, away from the intellectual independence that helped make them so valuable in the first place.
— Celia Ford
THIS WEEK ON TRANSFORMER #
—Hugging Face hosts nudification tools targeting a former Trump cabinet official and other senior US political figuresShakeel Hashim reports the evolution of the deepfake porn ecosystemon the takeaways from New York’s primary battleWhat Alex Bores’ defeat tells us about AI politics— Veronica Irwin and Shakeel Hashim
THE DISCOURSE #
**Jason Calacanis **was uncharacteristically doom-y on main:
“Dario
createdan AI machine gun, and there’s no way to give everybody one without bullets flying everywhere. That’s why he held it back, and that’s why the government asked him not to sell it to our adversaries. This is only going to get crazier from here, folks.”“If you
spendtrillions of dollars to summon a demon that you can’t control and don’t understand, don’t be surprised when he shows up and burns the place down. [ Yes, I’m talking about AI ]”
**roon **thinks we should embrace the sci-fi of it all: “as the technology becomes more science fiction i see a lot of commentators, technical staff etc trying hard to not think thoughts that feel science fiction as a defense mechanism. but you need to. it’s the only way you’ll make good choices for the future”
“you are not building b2b computer tools you are making the Mind Children”
**David Shor **added: “Setting aside tedious debates about what exactly is going to happen, voters buy into the sci-fi narrative about how this is going to evolve. Politicians and DC staffers have a strong aversion to sounding weird — but here they’ll have to learn to change their register.”
**Robert J. Shiller **is sick of everyone’s doommaxxing: “I believe A.I. could lower employment. But unlike most, I don’t necessarily blame the technology itself. Instead, I worry about the potency of the fear it is generating.”
“When millions of people make millions and millions of decisions based upon negative expectations, there is a risk that fear can actually help birth the reality.”
“Perhaps the best we can do is to appeal directly to the leaders of Silicon Valley who have been promoting these negative narratives with such vigor. Surely the resulting media attention highlighting how dangerously powerful your AI model is may help you sell more wares, but it may be far harder to do so in a period of recession.”
**Zvi Mowshowitz**’s cynical[takeaway](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-174-youre-it):“So the real lesson is to shape the narrative, which is a nice term for lying.”
**Satya Nadella** is [sick](https://wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-satya-nadella-we-cant-let-ai-giants-eat-the-economy-b9d33b9f?st=qw6QXi) of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google:
“You can’t say, hey, all white-collar jobs are gone and this could even be a weapon and we will use all the power to build data centers.”
“No amount of just narrative is going to do it [fix what’s wrong in the AI race] because where we are now, we have to sort of walk the walk … we now have to do the hard work in earning the social permission.”
**Ozy Brennan **asked AI doomers how they cope with expecting an untimely death:
“AI doom is a remarkably cozy catastrophe … the AI apocalypse — at least for those with the slack to be worried about it — takes place in a world of wealth and relative peace and technological marvels.”
“The enormity of the AI apocalypse is its own perverse source of comfort … instead of many big problems, they have one enormous problem. Worry about AI frees them from having to worry about anything else.”
POLICY #
Anthropic CEODario Amodei has beenreplacedin White House meetings by cofounder Tom Brown after the Trump administration reportedly found Amodei “too difficult to talk to.”“
Tom Brown is not being a weirdo like Dario and can actually engage,” a source told*Wired.Anthropic staffmetMonday with senior Trump administration officials to discuss easing the export ban onFable*.The NSA reportedly
lostaccess toMythos amid the clash between Anthropic and the White House. Agency analysts had been testing the tool.House Homeland Security Committee Chair
Andrew Garbarinosaidhe’s scared by the private demos he’s seen of Mythos, and wants Congressional action — but that “we don’t know what the answer is, we don’t know what we have to do.”Legal tech startup
LegionsuedtheUS government over the Fable and Mythos bans, arguing that “the harm to Legion is immediate, irreparable, and existential.”
President TrumptoldAxioshe viewedAnthropic as a national security threat a couple weeks ago, but after discussions withAmodei at the G7 he came away thinking he was “nice” and “smart.”.The
Financial Timesreported thatAnthropicusedrisk-related language 8x more than** OpenAI**in 2026, possibly contributing to the White House’s concerns.
The Trump administration
pressedMeta to submit its AI models for government safety reviews. It’s the only major US AI developer not signed up to the evaluations.House Energy and Commerce Committee membersreacheda bipartisan deal on theKids Online Safety Act, which requires platforms to curb harm to minors and expand default safety settings.That version has not been reconciled with the Senate’s, which requires companies to exert a “duty of care” and proactively intercept harms to children.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn said sheaimsto incorporate the Senate’s version into a federal AI framework by July 4.Sen. Ted Cruz is also inserting himself into the conversation,tellingPunchbowlthat Senate KOSA markup talks are “ongoing” and likely to occur in July.
Rep. Frank Pallone, the top House Democrat on the** Energy and Commerce Committee**,calledfor a national AI data center moratorium.** Sens. Chuck Grassleyand Dick Durbinreportedlywantto include the DEFIANCE Actin the NDAA**.** OpenAI**became the first AI firm to endorse the legislation, allowing people to sue producers of nonconsensual sexually-explicit AI deepfakes.
The
House Science Committeemarked up10 AI-related bills, including measures to establish an AI research resource, develop AI vulnerability reporting systems, and create standards for AI-generated content detection.Rep. Nate Moranintroducedthe** AI Incident Reporting Act**, which would require AI companies to report dangerous capabilities, security breaches and safety incidents to the Commerce Department within seven days.Reps. Brian Babin andJay Obernolteintroduceda bipartisan bill establishing a Center for AI Security and Innovation at the Commerce Department to assess national security risks from AI.The agency is technically different from the existing CAISI office, which the bill does not propose codifying.
The
Trump administrationannounced$17.5b in loans for 10 new large nuclear reactors to meet power demand from data centers, with construction potentially beginning by 2030.The
USproposedan AI partnership with theEU to secure semiconductor supply chains, though some EU capitals expressed concerns it could favor the US AI ecosystem.The Netherlands
lobbiedthe US to drop theMATCH Act, which would expand export controls on** ASML**‘s chip equipment sales to China.US immigration agency spending on AI-powered surveillance tech
soaredto a record**$513m** in 2026, withPalantir andAnduril receiving the largest contracts, according to a report by Mijente, legal advocates Just Futures Law and research group Surveillance Resistance Lab.NevadaenactedAI regulations restricting use in mental health settings and emergency planning.Five Eyes intelligence agencieswarnedthat “frontier AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations,” and would transform cyber capabilities in “not years, [but] months.”The
Pentagon has reportedlyquietly revised its rulesfor choosing military targets to envision “systems where AI initiates actions with human monitoring,” according to documents reviewed by*Bloomberg.*In a letter to the
Senate Banking Committee,** Anthropic**accusedAlibaba ofadversarial distillation, allegedly using 25,000 fake accounts to run nearly 29m Claude chats.It asked for government help to prevent distillation efforts in future.
Alibaba, meanwhile,askeda US court to force the Pentagon to remove it from a blacklist of companies linked to the Chinese military, calling the listing “arbitrary and capricious.”
Norwayimposeda near-ban on generative AI use by elementary school students (ages 6-13) and restricted its use for older students, citing concerns about impacts on learning basic skills like reading, writing and math.Utah State
Sen. J. Stuart Adamslosthis Republican primary after voter backlash over his support for a 40,000-acre AI data center project near the Great Salt Lake.
INFLUENCE #
Micah Lasherbeat** Alex Boresin New York’s 12th District Democratic primary. AI groups ended up spending$27m** on the race, with more than**$8m** from the pro-industryThink Big PAC opposing Bores, and more than $19m fromAI safety PACs defending him.Google released a new AI policyframeworkcalling for government-overseenfrontier model audits and the prioritization of workforce preparedness, children’s protections, modernized energy infrastructure and various guardrails.Former Commerce Secretary
Gina Raimondolaunched** RAISE US**, a nonpartisan workforce initiative backed by the** OpenAI****Foundation**,** Anthropic**, and others with over**$500m** in private capital to help workers adapt to AI’s economic impact.A
pollfoundthat only a small fraction of** data center opponentsactually live near one, suggesting they have become a stand-in for broader anger at AI. FAI Action**, the 501(c)(4) affiliated with the** Foundation for American Innovation**,hired** Mission Strategiesto lobby on energy and AI policy. Alliance for Secure AICEO Brendan Steinhauserand MIRIresearchersbriefedmembers of Congress on superintelligence risks and national security threats.The UK’s GCHQ National Cyber Security Centrereportedthat AI will “almost certainly enhance threat actors” ability to exploit known vulnerabilities’ by increasing attack speed and volume, while highlighting indirect prompt injection as a particular concern.AFL-CIO PresidentLiz Shuler**toldPunchbowlthat unions will make worker protections in AI a “litmus test” for 2028 presidential candidates, opposing data center moratoriums while pushing for federal AI guardrails and state regulatory authority.The Atlanticdid adeep diveonVice President J.D. Vance’s AI messaging, which combines Silicon Valley’s anti-regulation stance with concerns about job displacement, arguing some forms of AI power are too important for Big Tech to self-regulate.
INDUSTRY #
OpenAI #
OpenAI is reportedly leaning towards
until next year, with advisers urgingdelaying any IPOSam Altman to be cautious in light of volatility in SpaceX’s post-IPO share price and other factors.The report sparked
steep declines in the shares of various companies linked to OpenAI,includinga 12% drop at major investorSoftBank.
The company started
testingJalapeño, a** custom AI chipdeveloped from scratch in nine months, in partnership with Broadcomand Celestica**.According to OpenAI’s announcement, Jalapeño will perform “substantially better” per watt than current state-of-the-art chips.
It
launcheda more-capableGPT-5.5-Cyberalongsideits**“Patch the Planet” initiative**, which aims to help open-source maintainers fix software vulnerabilities.Project participants include
cURL,** Pythonand Sigstore**, among others.
It
pitchedChatGPT ads atCannes Lions, the world’s top advertising conference, with ad lead** Dave Dugan**sayingthat 20% of chat queries have “direct commercial intent.”It
strucka licensing deal withGetty, granting the use of its images for display within ChatGPT.The announcement
sentGetty’sshares up 145%. , theArtificial****Sam Altman biopic starring Andrew Garfield, isstrugglingto find a distributor, with Netflix, A24 and Focus Features all reportedly turning it down.Intelligencernotedthat several of these studios are tied to OpenAI and/or Elon Musk, who’s also depicted in the film.
Anthropic #
Mythos reportedlyhelped US intelligence service red teamsfindvulnerabilities inclassified US government systems within hours.Sen. Mark Warner had told a hearing earlier in the month that “the tool broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks but in hours.”An unnamed official
clarifiedto AP that finding the vulnerabilities did not mean it was necessarily able to immediately exploit them.
Anthropic
launchedClaude Tag, an always-on agent that lives in** Slack channels**.Tagging @Claude assigns it tasks (65% of the product team’s code at Anthropic is apparently already created this way). It bills by the token.
In
Andrej Karpathy’swords:“imo this is the 3rd major redesign of LLM UIUX. The first paradigm was that the LLM is a website you go to, the second was that it is an app you download to your computer. This third one is that it is a self-contained, persistent, asynchronous entity with org-wide tools and context, working alongside teams of humans.”
In
Arvind Narayanan’s more cautiouswords:Because it “soaks up tacit knowledge” out of sight of human team members, “Claude is a coworker that you can’t fire without
everyteam losing workflows and know-how.”
SpaceX #
SpaceXlauncheda**$25b bond sale**, primarily to pay off a bridge loan associated with its xAI acquisition.The sale saw strong demand, but SpaceX is paying a higher rate of interest,
reportedlydue toconcerns over its long-term prospects.Its shares have slipped almost 5% from their first day trading two weeks ago.
It
signeda**$6.3b** deal withReflection AI, giving the startup access to** Nvidia GB300 chipsat SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center**.
Meta #
Meta
dthekeystroke-monitoring tool its employees hated, after it accidentallyfrom individual laptops to employees across the company.exposedsensitive dataIt’s reportedly
fast-trackingplans to replace humancontent moderators with LLMs.Mark Zuckerberg is reportedlypushingto build aprediction market app,featuringAI-generated questions, to compete with Polymarket and Kalshi.Kylie Jenner’s collection of cat-eye Meta glasses (featuring Kylie as Meta AI’s voice)launched.
Nvidia #
Nvidia
acquiredthe team behindEssential AI, an open model startup, to work on its** Nemotronmodels.It announcedHalos software, inspired by the systems powering self-driving cars, to help humanoid robots**learn to interact with humans safely.
invested$75m in film studioA24.A24 will reportedly work with DeepMind to create new movie production and distribution tools.
It
launcheda 12-week incubator forGoogle alums building AI startups.
Others #
Nvidia chipsbanned from China underUS export controlsdoubled in priceover the past six months due to tightening supply.SK Hynix’s US stock listingraised$29.4b to expand memory chip capacity.Its focus on
high-bandwidth memory chips has helped itovertakeSamsung to become the most valuable company in South Korea.
Ex-Anthropic researchers
announcedtheirNvidia-backed startup** Mirendil**, raising**$200m** tohelpbusinesses and science labs build their own specializedself-improving AI.** Apple**raisedthe price of most of its products due tomemory chip shortages.** Qualcommisplanninga newChina-specific** data center chip line designed to comply with US export controls.Microsoft
partneredwithChevron to build a giantnatural-gas powered data center in Texas.Eli Lilly isusingits GLP-1 money to collaborate withsmaller biotechs, granting them AI compute in exchange for open-source data.** General Intuition**raised$320m at a**$2.3b** valuation to train real world AI agents on video games.Publishers representing nearly
400 newspaperssuedOpenAI andMicrosoft for scraping content without permission.
MOVES #
John Jumper, who co-created AlphaFold,left** Google DeepMindto join Anthropic**.After he posted about his departure,
Alphabet sharesfell7%.Google is reportedly reorganizingits new AI coding strike team, now that Noam Shazeer and John Jumper have both jumped ship.
Jonas Adler andAlexander Pritzel, also AI leads at Google, also reportedlyplanto leave forAnthropic.** Chad Jones**, a Stanford economics professor, isjoiningthe** Anthropic Institute**.** Taylor Sorensen**joined** Anthropic**’s Societal Impacts team.** Steve Jarrett**, AI lead at French telecom group Orange,joinedAnthropic to help it adapt to European and African markets.Dawn Song, who co-directed UC Berkeley’s Center on Responsible Decentralized Intelligence,joinedMeta Superintelligence Labs as VP of AI Research.Meta alsohiredtwo of Song’s co-founders,Bo Li andSanmi Koyejo, from AI security startup Virtue AI.
Calvin Zhangjoined** OpenAIfrom Scale AI, where he worked on Humanity’s Last Exam. Alishba Imran**joined** OpenAI**from Biohub.
RESEARCH #
Daniel Schiff,** Michael Noetel**,** Stephen Casperand David Manheim**publishedconsensus guidanceon AI evaluation practices, which has since garnered endorsements across the AI industry, academia and government.Researchers at Graphitefoundthat when frontier AI models rely on AI-generated web content (which nowmakes upsomething like 50% of all online content), their responses often collapse into near-identical outputs.Rishub Jain, a former Google DeepMind researcher,announceda new nonprofit focused on scalable and human oversight.Exponential Viewreleasedthe State of the AI Economy report, finding that total annualized revenue has hit $175b.The report said revenues hit $25b in Q1 2026, more than the $21b capex depreciation associated with data centers and chip investment, providing a narrow margin for profitability.
“For now, the economics are holding … But the margin for error is narrow,” said
the report, which added that financial risks were moving into capital markets.
BEST OF THE REST #
Stripe, Anthropic and OpenAI
pouredmoney into Intercept, a new nonprofit that aims to get rid of respiratory viruses with vaccines and air-cleaning systems.Vox’sBryan Walshfeelsthe thrill of AI models doing cool things, too — and worries that this is exactly what led Oppenheimer to support work on atomic bombs. “When you see something that is technically sweet,” Oppenheimer once said, “you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”TIME’sBilly Perrigoexploreshow Cold War-era verification tech could help slow down AI development.CEOs promise AI will someday cure all diseases, but computer science professor Emma Pierson would rather
[risk](https://theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/ai-cancer-progress/687654/?taid=6a38151347689a0001d6426a)cancer than see AI progress at its current pace.We
[have](https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-american-data-centers-cant-plug-in)enough electricity to power AI data centers, but our current grid system means we can’t get it to them.Sorry, everyone
[can tell](https://newyorker.com/the-ai-design-aesthetic-thats-taking-over-the-internet)your website is Claude Coded.Are you
[in](https://intheweights.com/)the weights?
MEME OF THE WEEK #
(Credit: @arthur_spirling) Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend.