Anthropic found a hidden ‘workspace’ inside Claude, and the reporting turned it into consciousnessOn the sixth of July, Anthropic published research describing a small, privileged region inside Claude that behaves like a workspace for deliberate thought, active for roughly 10% of the time the model runs. It calls this the J-space, and it draws the parallel itself: the region mirrors Global Workspace Theory, one of the leading scientific accounts of human consciousness. Think of a theatre. The thing you are attending to holds the stage while adjacent thoughts wait in the wings, and when you switch topic the whole cast rearranges. Tell the J-space to think about rugby and it thinks about rugby. Change one element and it moves to football.The paper is careful. It says plainly that it has not detected consciousness and that there is probably no way to detect it. The reporting around it made the leap anyway, because the words ‘consciousness’, ‘global workspace’, and ‘Claude thinking’ sit next to each other on the page, and your brain does the rest.OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6, and offered Washington a 5% stake to do itOn the ninth of July, OpenAI released GPT-5.6 in three sizes called Sol, Terra, and Luna, with an API and the Codex coding tool. This is the model the Trump administration held back a fortnight ago over cyber-security concerns, the same treatment that dogged Anthropic’s Fable before its own re-release. Sol runs at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output. Anthropic’s Fable is roughly double that, at $10 and $50.The number worth sitting up for is a different one. OpenAI has offered the US government a 5% equity stake, and the White House confirmed the company did not legally require formal approval to launch. Leor’s read, which I share, is that this is a large part of why the rollout was so smooth. There is now open talk of redistributing that stake to US citizens, sovereign-wealth-fund style, which is a strange sentence to write about a company with no profits to redistribute and an IPO on the horizon.Musk’s xAI put out Grok 4.5, and undercut everyone on priceOn the eighth of July, Elon Musk’s xAI released Grok 4.5, which Musk called an ‘Opus-class model, but faster’. It is up front that it is not quite as capable as GPT-5.6 or Fable, roughly the level of Opus 4.8 with more speed. The price is the point: $2 per million input tokens and $6 output, about a fifth of what GPT-5.6 costs. For an enterprise burning through billions of tokens, that is a decision that makes itself.Two caveats. The benchmarks are self-reported, and I have not seen an independent assessment, so treat the numbers as a company marking its own homework until someone checks. And this is the first launch since xAI went public, with much of X’s valuation resting on it, so this release has to land for Musk. He is also giving Grok 4.5 away free for a limited window through Cursor, the coding tool xAI bought for $60 billion, which buys usage the benchmarks cannot. Watch the wider board too. Musk owns much of the compute and leases data centres to Anthropic for something like $18 billion a year, so he can raise a rival’s costs and cut his own in the same move. I use a powerful model for video editing and very little else, and if I trusted Grok I could do most of what I need at a twentieth of the token cost. So could most companies. The next race is not who tops the benchmark. It is who reaches the price everyone can live with.Meta wired a deepfake button into Instagram, then pulled it in three daysOn the seventh of July, Meta released Muse Image, its first in-house image model, built by the Superintelligence Lab under Alexandr Wang. The feature that caused the damage let you go onto someone else’s public profile and generate AI images and video from their photos. Unless your account was private, you were opted in by default. It went live on a Tuesday and was gone by Friday. Meta pulled the public-account remix feature and left the underlying model in place. Leor’s summary is the honest one: this was a deepfake button, released and rolled back in the same week, from a company that was at the very front of AI a few years ago and has lost the plot since.While Washington guards who may use its models, US business already runs on Chinese onesA CNBC investigation found that Chinese AI models now account for between 30% and 46% of the enterprise tokens flowing through OpenRouter, a major US developer platform, up from around 11% a year ago. DeepSeek is the single largest vendor on the platform, with Alibaba’s Qwen close behind, and the open Chinese models run 60% to 90% cheaper. DeepSeek’s V4 Flash is 14 cents per million input tokens, roughly two orders of magnitude below the frontier.The same week the US government decides which Americans may touch its most powerful models, American companies are routing nearly half their AI through Chinese ones, pasting their balance sheets into ...
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2026/06/2244 分