ThursdAI - Approaching singularity, Dario says NO, 700K ARR Agent startup, METR goes bonkers

Quick Overview

The weekly AI news show "ThursdAI" covered the accelerating pace of AI development, framing the current moment as "approaching singularity," highlighted by Anthropic facing an ultimatum from the Pentagon regarding Claude's restrictions on autonomous weaponry and surveillance, while simultaneously, benchmarks like M-EVAL and RKGI are being saturated by advanced models like Opus and a new open-source model from Confin Labs achieving 97.9% on RKGI2.

Key Points: Anthropic received an ultimatum from the Pentagon (Axios reported) to remove restrictions on Claude regarding autonomous weaponry or mass surveillance by Friday, or face being declared a supply chain risk or nationalization via the Defense Production Act. OpenAI released GPT 5.3 Codex via API, which Ryan Carson noted is excellent for writing code but lacks the human-like conversational quality of Opus, making it unsuitable for tools like OpenClaw. The M-EVAL benchmark, measuring long-time horizon autonomous task completion, shows Opus achieving 14.5 hours, with the doubling time for this metric dropping to 49 days, signaling extreme acceleration towards agentic capabilities. Confin Labs released an open-source model achieving 97.9% on the notoriously difficult RKGI benchmark, completely saturating the test which Gemini 3.1 Pro scored 77% on. Anthropic detected and publicly named Deepseek, Minimax, and ZI for alleged large-scale distillation attacks using Claude outputs, although the hosts noted Anthropic also settled a large lawsuit regarding using copyrighted books for training. Pulsia, a single-founder AI company, achieved over $650,000 in yearly run rate revenue since December, building an AI company that autonomously runs other companies. Weights & Biases Inference service launched support for multi-modal models Kimik K2.5 and Minimax 2.5, with Kimik K2.5 showing strong medical benchmarking scores, sometimes better than Opus, at significantly lower inference costs.

Context: The broadcast is 'ThursdAI,' a weekly AI news show hosted by Alex Walov from Weights & Biases, joined by co-hosts Yan Pelleg, Wolf from Raven Wolf, Ryan Carson, and LDJ, who discuss the rapid acceleration of AI capabilities felt since December 2026. The show features interviews with Ben (Pulsia), Nater Dabbit (Cognition/Devin), and Philip Keely (author of Inference Engineering), while focusing heavily on recent major developments in model capabilities, geopolitical tensions involving AI companies, and the saturation of traditional AI benchmarks.