1. He had a few days left to use Claude Fable. He spent $149.25 shipping sqlite-utils 4.0 Simon Willison started the review from his iPhone. The prompt went into Claude Code for web: a final pass before shipping a stable 4.

2. AI Is Cutting Jobs at Both Ends of the Ladder It Built On Microsoft cut roughly 4,800 roles on Monday, about 2.1% of its global workforce, with Xbox and commercial sales absorbing the heaviest losses, according to TechCrunch.

3. Anthropic sells itself as anti-surveillance. It's now accused of secretly tracking Chinese users. Anthropic markets Claude as the safety-first option, an AI lab that opposes surveillance and helps institutions close security holes rather than open them.

In Brief

• OpenAI adds GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra to Codex OpenAI will bring GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra to Codex, its coding agent, according to a post from OpenAI's Thomas Sottiaux. The company shared no benchmarks or release date.

• Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs at start of fiscal year Microsoft laid off roughly 4,800 employees, about 2.1 percent of its workforce, concentrated in commercial sales and Xbox. The cuts follow last year's reduction of around 9,100 roles.

• Google now stores your files and recordings to train its models Google changed its privacy settings to retain more user data, including images, files, and audio and video recordings, to improve its AI models. TechCrunch documented the steps to opt out.

• UK financial regulator seeks more powers over AI An FCA official warned of an arms race to track AI use in financial services and argued for greater authority for the watchdog. Millions of Britons now use the technology for personal finance decisions.

• Reddit deploys LLMs to catch LLM-generated spam Reddit is using large language models to detect and remove spam that other models produced at scale. The platform frames automated detection as its only option against automated content.

• Apple lets users tune Siri's pace and expressivity The latest iOS 27 beta adds controls for Siri's speaking speed and expressiveness. Apple is rebuilding the assistant around generative AI.

• Station F opens new AI accelerator cohort Paris startup hub Station F, founded by Xavier Niel, is preparing a new edition of its F/ai accelerator program. The hub aims to position itself as an early-stage stop for European AI startups.

• Wealthy families hire AI tutors over traditional schools Some affluent Americans are enrolling their children with AI-driven education companies like Forge Prep and Alpha instead of conventional schools. Public trust in AI remains low across most surveys.

• Embodied.cpp offers one runtime for robot AI models across chips Researchers proposed Embodied.cpp, a portable inference runtime for vision-language-action and world-action models on heterogeneous robots. It targets closed-loop control needs like multi-rate execution and low-latency batch-1 inference that request-response servers miss.

• Google ad casts founding fathers using Gemini A new Google Workspace commercial imagines the founding fathers drafting the Declaration of Independence with Gemini and Google's collaboration tools. Ben Franklin texts Thomas Jefferson in the clip.

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