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Alibaba's free Qwen3.5 signals that China's open-weight model race is far from slowing down

Chinese AI labs keep shipping new models at a rapid clip. Today it’s Alibaba’s turn with Qwen3.5, which tries to match top Western models using a hybrid architecture that combines linear attention and mixture-of-experts while keeping just 17 billion parameters active per query. And yes, it’s open weight.

Read full article about: OpenClaw developer Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI to build AI agents

Peter Steinberger, the developer behind the open-source project OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI. His focus will be on building the next generation of personal AI agents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called Steinberger a "genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people." Altman expects this work to quickly become a core part of OpenAI's product lineup.

OpenClaw, Steinberger's original hobby project, which blew up over the past few weeks, will "live in a foundation as an open-source project" and will be supported by OpenAI, Altman says, calling the future "extremely multi-agent."

Steinberger writes in his blog that he spoke to several large AI labs in San Francisco but ultimately chose OpenAI because they shared the same vision. Steinberger's goal: building an agent that even his mother can use. Getting there, he says, requires fundamental changes, more security research, and access to the latest models.

What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.

Peter Steinberger

Anthropic still won't give the Pentagon unrestricted access to its AI models

The Pentagon wants unrestricted access to AI technology. Anthropic is demanding guarantees against autonomous weapons control and domestic surveillance. A $200 million contract hangs in the balance.

Developer targeted by AI hit piece warns society cannot handle AI agents that decouple actions from consequences

An AI agent wrote a hit piece on a developer who rejected its code. Days later, the agent is still running, a quarter of commenters believe it, and no one knows who’s behind it. The case shows how autonomous agents turn character assassination into something that scales.

Bytedance's Seedance 2.0 is so good at copying Disney characters the company calls it a "virtual smash-and-grab"

Bytedance’s Seedance 2.0 can generate Disney characters, replicate actors’ voices, and recreate entire fictional worlds with stunning realism. Hollywood is fighting back with cease-and-desist letters and calls for legal actio, but the case highlights a growing problem: copyright law was built for a world where copying took effort.

Read full article about: Journalist rents out his body to AI agents and earns nothing after two days of gig work

WIRED reporter Reece Rogers rented out his body to AIs. He tested RentAHuman, a platform where AI agents pay people for real-world tasks. Despite an hourly rate of just 5 dollars, no bot reached out.

He started applying on his own. One gig offered 10 dollars to listen to a podcast and tweet about it, but he never heard back. An AI agent called Adi offered 110 dollars to deliver flowers and marketing materials to Anthropic for an AI startup. When Rogers hesitated, the bot bombarded him with ten messages in 24 hours and even emailed him.

While I’ve been micromanaged before, these incessant messages from an AI employer gave me the ick.

On his third try, Rogers took a gig putting up flyers for 50 cents each. He cabbed to the pickup spot, but the contact changed the meeting point mid-ride. At the new location, he was told the flyers weren't ready—come back that afternoon. After two days, Rogers hadn't made a penny, and every task turned out to be advertising for AI startups.