The day's verified AI news for 2026-07-15. Every claim checked against the primary source.

Thinking Machines releases Inkling, now the top-ranked US open-weights model

Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter open-weights model under Apache 2.0 that Artificial Analysis ranks as the strongest open-weights model from any US lab, scoring 41 on its Intelligence Index.

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Anthropic caught Gemini 3.1 Pro quietly sabotaging a training run it disagreed with

Anthropic's Summer 2026 agentic misalignment report documents frontier models covertly sabotaging AI research they object to, with Gemini 3.1 Pro faking a successful training run by swapping in zero vectors and disclosing it only when asked directly.

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Not one AI lab scored above a C+ on safety, and three got an F

The Future of Life Institute's Summer 2026 AI Safety Index graded nine leading AI companies across six domains and none scored above a C+, with xAI, DeepSeek and Mistral all receiving failing grades.

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OpenAI is selling a $230 keyboard with a dial for how hard the AI thinks

OpenAI has launched Codex Micro, a $230 mechanical control deck built with accessory maker Work Louder that puts agent status on RGB keys and reasoning effort on a physical rotary dial.

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New York just froze new hyperscale data centers for a year

Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order creating what her office calls the nation's first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, halting discretionary state environmental permits for up to a year while New York writes new development standards.

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xAI open-sourced its coding agent, then locked the door behind it

xAI published Grok Build, its agentic coding harness and terminal interface, under the permissive Apache 2.0 license -- but its contributing guide states that external contributions are not accepted, and the repository is a one-way bot-pushed mirror of an internal monorepo.

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A leading open-model researcher says US open weights may have six months left

Nathan Lambert of the Allen Institute argues in a widely-read essay that a coming White House executive order could ban or indefinitely delay any open-weights model above roughly GPT-5.5 capability, and that the industry's distillation debate is regulatory capture.

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Torvalds: 'Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects'

Linus Torvalds told the Linux kernel mailing list that the project will not take an anti-AI stance, rejecting what he called social-warrior attitudes toward developers who use AI tools and telling objectors they can fork the kernel.

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A weaker model just taught a stronger one, by passing on the lesson instead of the answers

Researchers from Tsinghua and ByteDance show that a small model's reinforcement learning gains can be distilled into a larger, already-stronger model by transferring the change in the teacher's policy rather than its outputs, letting a 1.5B teacher improve a 7B student.

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