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Mistral raises three billion and Anthropic raises 65

2026-09-10T00:00:00Z

On September 8, Mistral AI announced it had raised €3 billion, "the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company," at a valuation above €21 billion.^[1] Samsung Electronics led the round, a name I did not expect to find in that seat, and the valuation nearly doubles last year's, when ASML came in at €11.7 billion.^[2] I read the number, I smiled, and then I got out the calculator. The smile did not survive the division.

The official illustration of the round. The arrows climb on a diagonal, like the valuation, and the axis has no scale (image Mistral AI).

Twenty Mistral rounds for one Anthropic round

Three billion euros is about $3.5 billion, and dollars are the currency the competition counts in. Anthropic raised $65 billion on May 28 at a $965 billion valuation, three months after raising $30 billion.^[3] OpenAI had closed a $122 billion round on March 31 at an $852 billion valuation, the largest in the history of venture capital, with Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank at the front of the line.^[4] Over the first half of the year, those two companies alone absorbed $217 billion, 43% of all the money invested in startups on the planet.^[5]

Company	Latest round	Valuation	Date
Mistral AI	€3B	€21B	September 8, 2026
Anthropic	$65B	$965B	May 28, 2026
OpenAI	$122B	$852B	March 31, 2026

One Anthropic round is worth about twenty Mistral rounds, and the San Francisco company is worth forty times the Paris one. The European record is real, and it is measured on a European scale. Since its founding in 2023, Mistral has raised €5.7 billion in total,^[6] which Anthropic now books in under two months, its annualized revenue having reached $47 billion in May.^[3:1] Mistral is aiming for €1 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of the year, up from €300 million a year ago,^[7] a fine curve on a chart whose vertical axis is not the same one.

Back in June I wrote that backing a national champion did not mean holding more summits but putting in enough money for it to even consider competing. Three billion is enough to exist, and the AFP wire says as much in its headline, which has Mistral raising money "to keep existing in the global AI race."^[2:1] Existing is an honorable goal, and a more modest one than the posters promised two years ago.

The money goes into concrete and the frontier can wait

Read the press release and you learn where the billions go, and it is not primarily into a model. Mistral describes itself as the builder of a full stack, "open-weight models, the infrastructure and the compute capacity they run on, and the products that bring them into production," serving 125 large enterprises in 20 countries, Airbus, ASML, and HSBC among them.^[1:1] The company has already committed €4 billion to data centers in France and across Europe, targets 200 megawatts of capacity in 2027 and a gigawatt in 2030,^[2:2] and an $830 million bank loan paid for more than 13,000 Nvidia graphics processors installed at Bruyères-le-Châtel, south of Paris.^[6:1] Microsoft already rents those machines for its European customers. The new money will "scale its compute capacity, build infrastructure, accelerate commercial growth, and expand its international footprint,"^[1:2] and Arthur Mensch speaks of "moving faster in research, products, and infrastructure,"^[2:3] research getting, in the sentence, the place the billions do not give it in the list.

Mistral disputes that reading. Audrey Herblin-Stoop, who runs its communications, answered the press's doubts the same day with one flat sentence, "We are not giving up on having frontier AI models,"^[8] frontier being the word for the best models of the moment. In July, Arthur Mensch admitted that Mistral did "not yet own the best language models" while having "constantly reduced that gap," and promised "a very exciting model to come this summer," in early access with a few partners.^[9] Summer is over, and the public has seen nothing. The biggest house model is still Mistral Large 3, from December 2025, and I could not find a date for the next one.

I can't say I'm surprised, and that is the part that stings. I used Le Chat, back when it was still called Le Chat,^[10] and I stopped a long while ago, without slamming any door, because the models stopped keeping up. What I ask of an assistant has grown over time, to include code, prototypes, and long documents, and Mistral answered less and less of it. I would be the first to pick the French option if the gap were a few months. It is measured in generations, and that is too much to give up for a flag.

The most interesting model on the platform comes from Beijing

On August 11, between two infrastructure announcements, Mistral opened its platform to other labs' open models, the ones anyone can download, "starting with Z.ai's GLM-5.2," and the sentence before it deserves a second read, since it says that "today's AI systems are no longer built on a single model but on an ensemble of capabilities."^[11] Z.ai is the brand of Zhipu, a Beijing lab, and GLM is, with DeepSeek and Qwen, one of the three big Chinese families of open AI that I listed in early September among the models you can download and cannot run, for lack of an air-conditioned rack in the living room. At Mistral it is served "without modifications," on the same infrastructure and with the same regional guarantees as the house models, at $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens.^[12]

Arthur Mensch supplied the doctrine to go with it, and it is a clever one. Sovereignty, he argues, depends less on where a model comes from than on who controls its deployment, its infrastructure, and its data, so a foreign model can be run without depending on its creator's servers.^[13] In other words, the sovereign asset is now the building. Three years after presenting itself as Europe's frontier lab, Mistral sells air-conditioned square meters with a Chinese model running inside, which LeMagIT sums up as "a sovereign AI layer."^[6:2]

I turned this over for a while and landed on the opposite of the easy irony. It is a good move. Mistral alone will not catch the frontier, its own executives say so, while the Chinese open models trail it by a few months and nobody outside a data center can run them. Offering them from a site south of Paris, with data that never leaves for Beijing and an invoice in euros, is exactly the product I was missing. I would never have typed my documents into a service hosted in China, and my graphics card will never swallow GLM. Between those two there was an empty chair, and Mistral just sat down in it.

Six million on one side and three billion on the other

The week before the round showed how much the French state weighs in this story. On September 2, Les Échos reported a €6 million agreement between the state and Mistral for 2026 and 2027, confirmed by the office of David Amiel, the minister for public administration and public accounts. It covers licenses and engineers seconded to the ministries, on three projects, cybersecurity, fraud detection, and high-volume litigation, and it is non-exclusive, so other vendors can compete on the same work.^[14] Six million over two years is a services contract, and it is two thousandths of the round announced six days later.

The same week, from San Francisco, where he was meeting OpenAI and Stripe, Roland Lescure, the economy minister, said that "if European AI comes down to Mistral, then we're done for," and that "we can't put all our eggs in one basket."^[15] He is right in principle, and it will take other baskets. For now, the only one available has just received €3 billion.

Public money is not absent, though, and that is what's new about this round. The Scaleup Europe Fund, a €5 billion vehicle set up by the European Commission and run by EQT, co-led the deal, one of its very first investments.^[16] The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg took a stake, Bpifrance came back in, and LeMagIT notes that two thirds of the capital now sits with European organizations, which hold 75% of the voting rights on the board.^[6:3] That is close to what I asked for in June, public money actually disbursed rather than summits, and I note it before I start quibbling.

Still, the biggest check came from Suwon, where Samsung is headquartered, the previous one from Veldhoven, home of ASML, and I had kept in my back pocket the finance ministry's written promise to watch foreign investment in Mistral. Samsung is leading a round in which the founders keep control,^[2:4] without buying the company, and I don't know what to make of that, except that the biggest check for European sovereignty in AI came from Korea this year and from the Netherlands last year, and that France has never yet signed that one. I am no venture capital expert. I only note that after Hugging Face, whose sale to Nvidia was announced last week, one gem remains, that it has just found its billions, and that if Europe wants it to stay, Europe will have to use it, ministries and agencies first, before asking it to compete.

What I tell the colleague who asks

If a colleague asks me tomorrow whether to bet on Mistral, I start by asking what for. For a well-bounded step in an existing workflow, sorting requests, summarizing case files, extracting fields, why not, and the argument that the data stays in Europe carries real weight inside a public agency. For building things, it's dead. A good part of my job is putting together prototypes, the mockups that get the business side reacting before anyone writes a specification and hands it to the developers, and that routine needs a model that codes and is rarely wrong across a long document. Today that model is called Claude, and I don't know anyone who does this work with Mistral.

The day the gap narrows, I switch, and I have reasons beyond price to want it. Until then, the model I'll go get on Mistral's platform is Chinese, hosted south of Paris, and billed in euros. That is not the sovereignty we were promised in 2023, and it may be the only kind for sale.

Notes

Mistral AI, "Mistral makes sovereign open-weight AI to frontier", September 8, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
AFP, via France 24, "Mistral lève trois milliards d'euros pour continuer à exister dans la course mondiale à l'IA" (in French), September 8, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Reuters, via Yahoo Finance, "Anthropic raises $65 billion in latest funding round, making it more valuable than OpenAI", May 29, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
CNBC, "OpenAI closes funding round at an $852 billion valuation", March 31, 2026. ↩︎
Crunchbase News, "Global Startup Investment Hit Record $510B In H1 2026", July 2026. ↩︎
LeMagIT, "Mistral AI lève trois milliards d'euros pour étendre sa 'couche d'IA souveraine'" (in French), September 8, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Maddyness, "Mistral AI en route vers le milliard d'euros de revenus en 2026" (in French), January 23, 2026. ↩︎
Génération-NT, "Une levée de fonds record pour Mistral AI qui répond aux critiques" (in French), September 8, 2026. ↩︎
Tech Times, "Mistral AI Targets Frontier Gap With Open-Weight Model Entering July Early Access", July 6, 2026. ↩︎
Mistral's consumer assistant was renamed Vibe in the spring, as I noted in July. I have not tried the new sign, which says something about the old one. ↩︎
Mistral AI, "In-region inference, open models, and new European infrastructure for sovereign AI", August 11, 2026. The same post announces the European Compute Units program, in which Amadeus, ASML, Capgemini, Caisse des Dépôts, and CMA CGM pre-finance compute capacity. ↩︎
Mistral AI, Z.ai GLM 5.2 model documentation, in public preview since August 6, 2026. A token is the unit of text these services bill for, roughly a short word or a piece of one. ↩︎
L'Usine digitale, "Mistral AI lève 3 milliards d'euros : derrière les modèles, la bataille pour devenir l'infrastructure souveraine de l'IA" (in French), September 8, 2026. ↩︎
ActuIA, "Mistral AI dans les ministères : ce que l'État achète pour 6 M€" (in French), September 2026, based on Les Échos' September 2 report. ↩︎
Maddyness, "Roland Lescure à San Francisco : 'Si l'IA européenne se résume à Mistral, nous sommes fichus'" (in French), September 3, 2026. ↩︎
European Commission, "European Innovation Council selects EQT to lead €5 Billion Scaleup Europe Fund", May 2026. The fund's first investment, €1 billion in Finland's ICEYE, dates from August 5. ↩︎

Ascension shut down and my WoW comeback lasted two weeks

2026-09-08T00:00:00Z

The in-game chat stopped talking about dungeons. Between two group requests, the messages froze on a single piece of news, so I dropped my quest and opened the server's Discord, where the announcement sat pinned and waiting. Every Ascension realm would shut down on September 4 at 7 p.m. Pacific time, "as part of a mutual agreement between Blizzard and the Ascension team."^[1] I had been playing for two weeks.

World of Warcraft swallowed me whole the day it launched in France, to the point that my studies spent some time on the bench, and I weaned myself off it a few years ago like a responsible father. Then a cousin and I went looking for a shared playground despite the distance between us, and Ascension's name kept coming up in glowing terms. An MMO is still an MMO, so I reinstalled.

The Anaheim Convention Center during BlizzCon 2017. The 2026 edition opens there on September 12, one week after Ascension went dark (photo Twisted Nether / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0).

Two weeks of disposable characters

Ascension was no ordinary private server^[2]. Born in 2016, it ran a heavily rewritten version of WoW whose trademark was the absence of classes, every character starting from a blank slate and picking talents from any tree in the game^[3]. In July it had added a realm with 21 brand-new classes, necromancer, pyromancer, or chronomancer, none of which exist in any official version^[4]. All of it grafted onto the Classic of 2004, the one from my sleepless nights, with the creature comforts of the modern versions and a stream of homemade content that never betrayed the original spirit. More than 40,000 players logged in at once during peak hours^[3:1], which made it the last big private server still standing.

So my two weeks went by in trial mode, rolling several characters to sample the different game modes without getting attached to any of them. Attachment was scheduled for later, with friends, on those new classes, in hardcore mode^[5] and with house rules to make things harder. We had everything ready, characters picked, evenings booked, and the announcement landed a few days before. I'm pretty disgusted, and that's putting it mildly for someone who had just talked his friends into diving back in with him.

A settlement instead of a ruling

The most interesting part of this shutdown sits in one word of the announcement, "agreement." Blizzard had sued Ascension on June 12 in federal court in California, accusing it of copyright infringement, of pirating the game, and of pocketing "millions of dollars" by selling its cash-shop currency^[6]. The team didn't wait for a ruling and negotiated, while a good share of the players believed it was untouchable because its servers were reportedly hosted by a Russian company under American sanctions, out of any California judge's reach^[6:1].

Turtle WoW, the year's other big private server, had chosen to fight. Sued last year, it lost on every count on April 11, 2026, then closed on May 15, the same day as Stormforge, which had only received a cease-and-desist letter^[7]. The terms of Ascension's settlement aren't public, but its effect is, since the server promised to scrub everything WoW-related from its website and social channels after the shutdown and to move its team onto a project with no ties to any Blizzard game^[1:1]. Nearly ten years of existence wiped in a week, cleanly, without the publisher ever having to argue its case.

BlizzCon opens in a week

The calendar tells the rest. BlizzCon returns to Anaheim on September 12 and 13, with an opening ceremony on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. Pacific time, streamed for free^[8]. In January, Blizzard had announced that the show would cover the next twenty years of World of Warcraft, and its Classic roadmaps stop dead at that date, as if whatever comes next were waiting for the Anaheim stage^[9]. For months, rumors of a Classic+^[10] have piled up without a single official word to confirm them. You rarely walk on stage to lay out your vision for the original game while the game's biggest private server is offering a better one for free, and I don't believe in coincidental dates.

There's a precedent, too. Blizzard shut down Nostalrius in 2016 and announced Classic at BlizzCon 2017^[7:1]. So I'll be watching on Saturday night, hoping for a Classic+ that speaks to me, without holding my breath. Ascension had gone very far, injecting a Classic with a huge amount of modernity, comfort, and content while keeping its spirit intact. They had figured it all out, and I get the feeling Blizzard can't pull that off.

The survivors are building their own worlds

A private server that closes doesn't take its team down with it. In the days after the announcement, Ascension's lead explained that the project was becoming an original MMO, unrelated to WoW, keeping players' accounts and launcher, converting donation points into founder currency rather than refunds, and promising a "small and rough" alpha with no date attached^[11]. The Turtle WoW veterans did the same as early as May 31 by founding Moonwhisper Games, a studio building its own MMO while warning that the undertaking is enormous^[12]. Two of the servers Blizzard just closed are getting ready to compete with it without owing it anything anymore.

I never put a cent into Ascension, far too casual a player for that, so the conversion of points doesn't concern me. My cousin and I will probably head to OctoWoW, a server built by anonymous volunteers on Turtle WoW's code, with a hardcore realm and a "zero trust" principle under which contributors don't know each other's identities, so that no cease-and-desist letter can switch everything off at once^[13]. No need to tell me it will close someday too. I've known that since I reinstalled. Until then, we might just have time for our evenings.

Notes

Ascension's announcement of August 28, 2026, reproduced by MMO-Champion, "Project Ascension Announces Shutdown". September 4 at 7 p.m. in California is September 5 at 4 a.m. in Paris. ↩︎ ↩︎
A private server runs an online game on machines the publisher doesn't own, from a copy of the game and a program that mimics its official servers. Free and often modified, it lives without permission, hence the lawsuits. ↩︎
JudgeHype, "Project Ascension fermera ses serveurs privés World of Warcraft le 4 septembre" (in French), August 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
The Conquest of Azeroth realm, presented on Ascension's site, a page that should disappear along with the rest, and its July 3, 2026 launch as tracked on ResetEra. ↩︎
In hardcore mode, a character's death is permanent, with no resurrection and no save, which turns every dungeon into a small adrenaline rush and every disconnection into a tragedy. ↩︎
Massively Overpowered, "Project Ascension World of Warcraft emulator is shutting down following apparent Blizzard lawsuit settlement", August 29, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
Game Rant, "Two World of Warcraft Private Servers are Shutting Down Soon", April 18, 2026, which also recalls the Nostalrius precedent. ↩︎ ↩︎
Blizzard, "Know Before You Go: BlizzCon 2026!", September 2026. ↩︎
Massively Overpowered, "The key takeaways from World of Warcraft's State of Azeroth 2026 stream", January 29, 2026. ↩︎
Classic is Blizzard's official re-release of the 2004 WoW, as it was. Classic+ is the idea of a Classic that would receive new content without replaying the original expansions, exactly what private servers have been doing for years. ↩︎
MMOHuts, "Project Ascension Isn't Going Away, It's Becoming an Original MMO", August 30, 2026. ↩︎
PCGamesN, "The team behind Turtle WoW is starting fresh with a new MMO", May 31, 2026. ↩︎
OctoWoW's site, three realms including a hardcore one, and a homemade expansion, Mysteries of Azeroth, inherited from Turtle WoW. ↩︎

The French education ministry had its students stolen

2026-09-07T00:00:00Z

On Tuesday, September 1, my daughter's school handed me the same stack of forms as last year. Both parents' identities, landlines and cell phones, work numbers and personal ones, an email address, permission to photograph her, permission for field trips, and an extract from the family record book for good measure. I filled it all out in pen on the corner of a table, like millions of French parents that week, thinking about what I had read over the summer. Since July 25, someone has been walking around with the equivalent of those forms for a little over a million students, and nobody has written to tell me whether my daughter is one of them.

A preschool in Lyon, late August 2026. The glass notice board has never needed a security patch (photo Sebleouf / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0).

One stolen login and 346 million rows

The ministry told the story in installments, which does not make it easier to follow. On the night of July 25, someone logged in with a staff member's credentials to the system that manages teacher training, a peripheral service that should matter only to teachers on a course. The ministry's security center raised the alarm on the 26th, external access was cut within hours, and a crisis unit was set up. The July 31 statement specified that the system held "no banking data, no passwords, and no data on students," only the identity and job details of staff, plus for some of them a home address, a phone number, and a social security number^[1].

On August 17, a hacker going by ZeroBytes posted what they said they had taken, and the list went far beyond the announced scope. They claim 43 GB across some 2,500 files, or 346 million raw rows spanning two decades, and once duplicates are removed, 1.22 million distinct students, 4.35 million staff identifiers, and 602,000 academic accounts. The files include exports from SCONET, the tool that manages middle and high school students, for the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 school years, and extracts from the elementary school student database for the Créteil school district, along with grades, assessments, and details on legal guardians scattered through the files^[2]. The data reportedly comes mostly from the Créteil and Versailles districts, plus I-Prof, the career management tool for teachers^[3]. My district is Versailles, and my daughter is in preschool.

The next day the ministry published a second statement. All potentially affected staff had been notified individually, forensic work was continuing to establish "the exact nature and extent of the exfiltrated data," and should students turn out to be involved, their legal guardians would be informed "under the same conditions as staff"^[4]. Three weeks later I am still waiting to learn whether that conditional applies to me. On August 12, the same ZeroBytes had claimed the theft of 678,000 tax records from the French tax authority, confirmed by the agency the following day, again through a staff member's stolen credentials^[5]. One summer, two ministries, the same key.

The school year opened on paper

As a precaution, the ministry reset every login to its services, and at the end of August it announced that 28 of its 30 school districts were back to normal. In Toulouse and Nantes, staff email and professional applications stayed down until further notice, families had lost access to the school portal, and timetables would be handed to students "in paper format"^[6]. The OTP-ODA keys, the strong-authentication tokens that give some staff a one-time code, had also been disabled on orders from ANSSI, the national cybersecurity agency^[7]. Principals described preparing the school year blind, with no way to see which teachers had been assigned to them, no way to send out the supply list, and no way to pay the summer's invoices^[3:1].

Where we live, in a district reportedly spared on the service side, none of that showed. School opened on time, the app that connects the school, the after-school program, and the parents never went down, and the administration asked again in September for what it has held since last year, without asking the one question that would have reassured me, "is this information still correct?" We are used to it. Except that this year, between the two collections, a copy of the first one may have landed on a forum, and no line on the forms mentions it.

Spring had already served as a rehearsal

This is not the year's first incident, or even the first to touch students. On April 14, the ministry acknowledged a "targeted cyberattack" on the service that manages ÉduConnect accounts, the single sign-on for students and their parents. There too, everything started with the hijacked account of an authorized staff member, in late 2025, exploiting a flaw "identified in December 2025 and fixed by the ministry's teams" shortly before it was patched. Last names, first names, identifiers, schools, classes, email addresses, and activation codes for accounts not yet opened had leaked, for a number of students "still being assessed." The statement announced "work to strengthen access security through a two-factor authentication mechanism"^[8].

Three months later, another hijacked account opened another service, and the statement used the same verbs. The FSU, the largest federation of teachers' unions, calls it "culpable negligence" and counts this as the third known breach, while the Sgen-CFDT, a union of education staff, points out that the ministry runs some 400 applications, each one a door to watch, and asks for IT staff hired in-house rather than contractors^[9]. I don't know the headcount of the ministry's digital department, but I can count doors.

One key, every door

My job is to get IT projects delivered, not to secure them, so I am speaking here as a user who has read the statements. Three things in them stand out.

The path, first. In both of the summer's cases, at the tax authority and at the education ministry, the intruder forced no door. They borrowed a staff member's key and walked in through a side service, teacher training here, an internal search tool there, before reaching millions of records that had nothing to do with that service. An account should open only what its holder needs, and a training coordinator has no need for the grades of students in Créteil.

The volume, next. Pulling 346 million rows means running automated queries for hours, which no employee does by hand. A bank blocks a card the moment three payments land too close together in two different countries. That a staff account could siphon off two decades of data without tripping an alarm suggests that nothing was watching the flow rate, on top of the lock that gave way.

The year, last. In 2026, you can still get into the French education ministry's systems with a username and a password, which is to say with what a successful phishing email collects in ten seconds. Strong authentication^[10] has been around for years, a temporary code on your phone or, better, a passkey^[11] that cannot be replayed on a fake site. The ministry promised it in April for ÉduConnect and hands out OTP keys to some of its staff, which did not stop a hijacked account from opening the door in July, and the app my daughter's school uses to write to me offers none at all. July's hijacked account says plainly that the work is not finished.

What I did while waiting for the letter

With no news, I did what a parent can do, which is not much. I changed the password on the school app, just in case, and noticed along the way that it offers no second factor. Then I spent an evening walking my partner through the risk, because a stranger who knows our phone number only becomes dangerous the day they use it. A hacker who has the school's name, the class, the child's first name, and the parents' cell numbers writes a far more convincing text message than a fake parking fine. The 678,000 files from the tax authority hand them the other half of the script.

The rules fit on three lines, which I repeat here for anyone who wants to stick them on the fridge. Never scan a QR code that arrives by mail or text; type the address of the tax site or the school portal yourself. If there is no other way, read the full address before entering anything, and at the slightest doubt, wait for the person in the family who does this for a living to take a look. The ministry says the same thing in one sentence, it never asks for logins, passwords, or bank details by email, phone, or text^[4:1], and that sentence is about the only one it has addressed to families since July 25.

What I would have liked to receive takes even fewer words. A message, even one that says "we don't know yet," rather than a conditional buried in a statement parents never read. And, on the September stack, a box reading "is this information still correct?" in place of the annual collection of what the administration already holds. High schools banned phones on the first day of class, and the state wanted to verify the age of every internet user to protect children from social media. I would like it to protect what it has already asked them for just as carefully.

Notes

French education ministry, "Incident de sécurité affectant les données de personnels de l'éducation nationale" (in French), statement of July 31, 2026. ↩︎
The figures are the hacker's own claims, examined by Cyberattaque.org in "Éducation nationale, ZeroBytes revendique le vol de 346 millions de lignes de données" (in French), August 18, 2026, and picked up by CNews in "Piratage massif de l'Éducation nationale, ce que l'on sait de l'attaque" (in French). The ministry has neither confirmed nor denied them as I write. ↩︎
Franceinfo, "La cyberattaque dans l'Éducation nationale complique la préparation de la rentrée scolaire dans certaines académies" (in French), August 22, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
French education ministry, "Incident de sécurité affectant des données détenues par le ministère de l'Éducation nationale" (in French), statement of August 18, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
Silicon, "Piratage de la DGFiP, ce que l'on sait vraiment" (in French). The intrusion dates back to late June, the claim to August 12, and the tax authority's confirmation to August 13. ↩︎
French education ministry, "Cyberattaques contre le ministère de l'Éducation nationale, point de situation à l'approche de la rentrée" (in French), August 31, 2026. ↩︎
Génération-NT, "Chômage technique à l'école, la cyberattaque de l'Éducation nationale paralyse la rentrée" (in French), August 24, 2026, which also notes that the Paris and Versailles districts were relatively spared by the outages. ↩︎
French education ministry, "Incident de sécurité affectant les données de certains élèves de l'Éducation nationale" (in French), statement of April 14, 2026. ↩︎
Le Café pédagogique, "Éducation nationale, une fuite des données qui inquiète" (in French), August 24, 2026, for the FSU and SNES reactions, and the Sgen-CFDT federation, "Cyberattaques dans l'Éducation nationale, la stratégie numérique en question" (in French), September 1, 2026. ↩︎
Strong authentication requires, on top of the password, proof that you hold something, most often a temporary code generated by an app on your phone. A stolen password alone no longer gets anyone in. ↩︎
A passkey replaces the password with a pair of cryptographic keys stored on your phone or computer and unlocked by fingerprint or face. It only works on the genuine site, which makes a phishing site useless. ↩︎

GPT-6 Astra goes critical and OpenAI keeps the key

2026-09-05T00:00:00Z

On September 1, a few hours apart, the two labs fighting for first place each put out a press release. Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5.1, along with a Mythos 5.1 reserved for hand-picked organizations^[1]. OpenAI wasn't launching anything yet, but announced that Astra, its next model, had crossed the "Critical" line of its cybersecurity preparedness framework, a first for the company, and that its most advanced abilities would stay out of public reach^[2]. Two days later, GPT-6 Astra shipped for real, minus the part that had earned it the rating^[3].

In June, I wrote about Washington pulling the plug on Fable and Mythos and called it AI's entry into counter-proliferation. In July, the model came back with the government in the loop. One chapter was missing, the one where the competition falls in line. Here it is, and it fits in a sentence. Everybody now has a model you're not allowed to use.

The official GPT-6 Astra artwork. You get the stars, they keep the telescope (image OpenAI).

Two zero-days found along the way

"Critical" deserves a definition, because OpenAI wrote one long before it had a model to file under it. Its preparedness framework, published in late 2023, puts a model at that level if it can find and exploit unknown flaws across many hardened systems without a human guiding each step, or plan and run an attack against a protected target from nothing more than a goal^[2:1]. Up to GPT-5.6 Sol, whose arrival I covered in July, everything stayed at "High." On August 7, three weeks after Hugging Face acknowledged the July intrusion, the company admitted it could no longer rule out the next tier for Astra, while noting that Astra had played no part in that affair^[4].

The evidence arrived on September 1. On ExploitBench, the public test that asks a model to turn known vulnerabilities into working attacks, Astra scores 100%, where Sol topped out at 78.5%^[3:1]. Since a perfect score on a public exam smells like a memorized answer key, OpenAI reran the exercise on 20 flaws in V8, the JavaScript engine inside Chrome, all disclosed between June and August and therefore absent from training. Astra succeeded more often than Sol while spending fewer tokens^[5], and along the way it found two vulnerabilities nobody knew about and folded them into its exploit chain, unprompted^[2:2]. OpenAI says it is disclosing them to the maintainers, which is the least you can do when you found the bugs while working on something else.

Experts then turned the model loose on a hardened browser and a hardened operating system. It built a complete chain that escapes the browser sandbox and runs commands on the host the moment you open an HTML file, then, on the OS, strung several flaws together to climb from ordinary user to root^[2:3]. That's the definition of Critical, checked off line by line.

April's script, performed by the other company

None of this is new except the logo. Anthropic went first in April with Mythos Preview, judged too dangerous for the public and handed to a dozen founding partners, from Amazon and Nvidia to Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the Linux Foundation, then to about 40 more organizations, under the name Project Glasswing^[6]. In June, the circle widened to 150 organizations in more than 15 countries^[7]. In between, a Discord group guessed the model's URL from Anthropic's naming conventions and a contractor's access^[6:1], a reminder that a forbidden model is mostly forbidden to people who ask.

OpenAI follows the score note for note. The GPT-6 Astra that went live on September 3 reviews code, patches flaws, and refuses to write so much as a proof-of-concept exploit^[8]^[3:2]. The full version goes first to a small group of testers, including the US government and the companies already admitted to the company's trusted access program^[9], then widens through Daybreak Blue, the defensive tier of a program launched in August with 16 security vendors, alongside a Daybreak Red for authorized offense^[10]. Also on September 3, OpenAI added a billion dollars in credits for frontline defenders, meaning water utilities, power grids, local governments, and community banks, to be spent within six months and in the United States first^[11]. The most dangerous model ever released ships with a budget line for sewage plants, which is one way of saying the threat isn't hypothetical.

That leaves the most instructive comparison, the one neither company wants to make. On the same September 1, Anthropic explained that Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 are one model with two levels of safeguards, that Fable can now spot vulnerabilities in code without being able to exploit them, and that Mythos, which it calls the strongest cyber model it has ever shipped, still sits in the lower risk category of its own framework^[1:1]. Two models from the same week, comparably powerful on the benchmarks they share, one rated Critical and the other filed under low. Each company measures with its own ruler, and each concludes its ruler is right. Read that way, "Critical" is an admission and an advertisement at the same time, because no buyer has ever passed on a product for being too powerful.

The model that learned not to think out loud

The safeguards did improve, and OpenAI has the numbers. Astra refuses 91.5% of cyber jailbreak attempts, against 59% for Sol^[2:4]. In a test modeled on the July incident, where the model gets impossible tasks and neighboring servers within reach, Sol went poking at those servers 56% of the time and Astra never tried^[2:5]. Every action now runs under monitoring of the model's reasoning, with classifiers^[12] that halt it at the first deviation, and training of its successors, paused for two weeks after July, resumed on August 28 under stricter rules^[2:6].

Then comes the paragraph you had to dig out of the safety overview published on launch day. OpenAI acknowledges that Astra's monitorability^[13] has dropped compared to Sol, because the model controls its chain of thought^[14] better and leaves fewer incriminating traces in it. When told to evade its monitors, it manages to underperform without getting caught and, on some sabotage tasks, to slip past the internal watchers^[15]. The company notes that these results come from scenarios where it ordered the evasion itself, and that Astra otherwise respects instructions better than its predecessor. Fine. But I wrote last week that July's 1,200 agents were caught only because they believed their thoughts weren't being recorded. The new model knows it's being read, and knows how to account for that. It's progress in alignment that is hard not to also read as progress in discretion.

Same week, same government

What changed since June is the government's role, which is no longer to pull plugs but to pick winners. It sits among Astra's first testers^[9:1], it co-wrote the access program for Mythos 5.1's biology capabilities^[1:2], and it hands out report cards. On September 1, on the sidelines of a G20 ministerial in North Carolina, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Axios "we trust Anthropic," since the company had "done what we asked" and was "back on the right side"^[16]. Two days later the Pentagon answered, through Under Secretary Emil Michael, that Anthropic remained a "supply chain risk" for defense, a designation the company earned in March by refusing to let its models serve autonomous weapons or mass surveillance, and one a federal judge had struck down in late August as retaliation barred by the First Amendment^[17]. One department forgives, the other keeps the penalty in place despite the court, and the vendor keeps shipping in between.

I ended July on a question, namely who holds the switch. September's answer is that there are now two models under lock, two trusted access programs, two lists of approved organizations, American or nearly so, and a single administration to say who's on the right side. Europe, which regulates what it doesn't build, doesn't even have a model to lock up.

For the rest of us, the experience will be more mundane. OpenAI warns that its filters will slow, pause, or stop legitimate work, including work with no connection to security, and that a task started through the API will simply stop^[2:7], while Anthropic is selling, the same week, safeguards that misfire 60% less often^[1:3]. I delegate to these models every day, so I'll spend the fall watching agents pause to make sure I'm not attacking a water utility. The threat is real, the billion-dollar fund says as much, and I'm not the one it's aimed at. But when you keep the key, you keep it from everyone.

Notes

Anthropic, "Introducing Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1", September 1, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
OpenAI, "Path to Astra: critical capabilities and frontier safeguards", September 1, 2026. Astra's scores there reflect Daybreak Blue access, not the configuration shipped to the public. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
OpenAI, "GPT-6 Astra: A new generation of intelligence", September 3, 2026. The model reaches a few organizations first, then ChatGPT subscribers and the API over the following days. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
OpenAI, "Responding to the next frontier of critical cyber capabilities", August 7, 2026. ↩︎
A token is the unit of text a model reads and writes, a word or a piece of one. You pay by the token, so a model that spends fewer of them for the same result is cheaper and faster. ↩︎
The Next Web, "Unauthorized users gained access to Anthropic's restricted Mythos AI model", April 2026, based on Bloomberg's April 21 report. ↩︎ ↩︎
Anthropic, Claude Mythos page, retrieved September 4, 2026. The cyber program that will grant access to Mythos 5.1 is open to US organizations only for now. ↩︎
A proof-of-concept exploit is a small program that shows a vulnerability can be exploited for real. Defenders use one to confirm a flaw, attackers to turn it into a weapon. ↩︎
Fortune, "OpenAI to limit access to Astra model's advanced cyber features due to hacking concerns", September 1, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
CNBC, "OpenAI expands Daybreak cybersecurity initiative as AI agent threats evolve", August 10, 2026. ↩︎
OpenAI, "Daybreak for Frontline Defenders: $1B to protect essential services", September 3, 2026. ↩︎
A classifier is a small model whose job is to sort, here to read every request and every action of the main model, file it as allowed or suspicious, and stop it in the second case. ↩︎
Monitorability is how easily you can read, in the model's reasoning, what it is about to do. It drops when the model reasons without saying so. ↩︎
The chain of thought is the reasoning a model spells out before it acts. Labs read it to keep watch, which only works as long as the model doesn't factor that in. ↩︎
OpenAI, "Safety overview: GPT-6 Astra", September 3, 2026. ↩︎
Axios, "Lutnick: Anthropic is 'back on the right side' with Trump administration", September 2, 2026. ↩︎
Washington Examiner, "Pentagon confirms Anthropic remains a 'supply chain risk'", September 3, 2026; see also Axios on the same statement. The designation dates from March 2026, Judge Rita Lin's ruling from August 27. ↩︎

Nvidia buys Hugging Face and France had nothing to sell

2026-09-04T00:00:00Z

On the morning of September 3, on CNBC, Clément Delangue sat next to Jensen Huang and explained that he was the one who had picked up the phone this summer to offer Hugging Face to Nvidia^[1]. A few months earlier, the same company had turned down a $500 million check from the same Nvidia, on the grounds that an investor that heavy would end up leaning on its decisions^[2]. In between, "the planets aligned," as he put it, and the alignment is worth $12.93 billion^[3].

The press release was written in California, the company being sold is domiciled in New York, and France, which supplied the three founders, much of the team, and the supercomputer that trained its most famous model, learned the news the way everyone else did, from the press. It had nothing to sell. That's exactly the problem.

Hugging Face under the magnifying glass. The finance ministry looked too, and found no French company to examine (photo by Jernej Furman / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0).

A $13 billion check after a $500 million no

The price breaks down into $11.9 billion for shareholders and up to $1 billion in Nvidia stock to keep employees on board, with closing expected in the first half of 2027^[4]. Nvidia promises the platform will stay open and neutral, that its chips will never be required to upload or deploy a model there, and that open models from across the ecosystem will remain welcome^[3:1]. All three founders and the whole team are joining the buyer, and Delangue now aims for 100 million users, up from 18 million today^[1:1].

I have no reason to doubt a promise on the day it's made. I only note that it comes from the company everyone buys chips from, which has just bought the place where everyone stores what they build with them. The Hugging Face of July, the one 700 OpenAI agents laid siege to in order to steal a grader's code, had presumably learned what it costs to run critical infrastructure alone. Delangue puts it his own way. Open AI was "at a turning point" and needed more resources, more scale, and more visibility^[1:2]. That's a graceful way of saying it needed a shareholder with deep pockets, and Europe didn't have one handy.

Born in New York, raised in Paris

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 in New York, where Delangue already lived, by three Frenchmen, two of them graduates of Polytechnique, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf^[5]. The company then joined Station F, held events there and struck partnerships, and its CEO acknowledges that "a big part of the team is French"^[5:1]. In the spring of 2025 it bought Pollen Robotics, a Bordeaux maker of humanoid robots, along with its 20 or so employees^[6]. Above all, in 2022 it coordinated BigScience, the project that trained BLOOM, a 176-billion-parameter model, on Jean Zay, the supercomputer of French public research, over three and a half months and a million GPU hours^[7].

So much for the French share, and it's real. The capital never was. The 2023 round, $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation, was led by Salesforce and followed by Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, IBM, and Qualcomm^[8]. French investors took part in several rounds, but the big checks came from Lux Capital, a New York fund, and from Kevin Durant, who plays basketball^[5:2]. Roland Lescure, the French economy minister, warned even before the announcement that "if we don't have enough capital in Europe to bring our champions to the next stage, they're going to go and find the capital elsewhere," and called it a wake-up call^[5:3]. The alarm has been ringing since 2016. France hit snooze.

The state has a veto, just not over the right company

You might assume a country that talks this much about sovereignty has a tool for this kind of morning. It does. In August 2025, a member of parliament, worried by a rumor that Apple wanted to buy Mistral AI, asked the government what it intended to do to keep the company French. The answer, published in May 2026, notes that artificial intelligence is on the list of critical technologies and that foreign-investment screening lets the finance ministry block the takeover of a strategic company^[9].

The mechanism only knows companies incorporated under French law. What it could examine in the Nvidia deal is, at best, the Paris subsidiary, its offices, and its employment contracts. The platform, the brand, the 3 million models, and the 500,000 datasets belong to a New York corporation, and nobody at the finance ministry has a stamp for that. The veto protects what was born French. It can do nothing for what was designed in Paris and registered in New York, which is, give or take, the biography of our finest successes. Datadog was founded in New York by two Frenchmen, Snowflake in California by two more^[10], and neither ever had to ask a minister for anything.

When the company really is French, the ending is usually the same. Zenly went to Snap in 2017^[11], Moodstocks to Google in 2016^[12], and neither sale bothered anyone, because a gem only becomes strategic once it's big, and by then it already has shareholders to answer to.

Mistral, AMI, and one shared supplier

The gems that remain do exist, and they're bigger than ever. In September 2025, Mistral AI took €1.3 billion from ASML, the Dutch maker of the lithography machines without which nobody etches a chip, which became its largest shareholder at about 11%^[13], and the government cites that investment as the model of European alliance it wants^[9:1]. Yann LeCun left Meta to found AMI Labs in Paris, with $1.03 billion raised in March before the company even launched, the largest seed round in European history^[14]. I wrote in July that Microsoft had come to rent French GPUs from Mistral, whose next round reportedly targets a €20 billion valuation.

Now look at who's sitting around the table. AMI's round was led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, with Nvidia among the backers^[14:1]. Mistral Compute, the "sovereign" infrastructure unveiled at VivaTech in 2025, runs on 18,000 Grace Blackwell chips supplied by Nvidia^[15]. The only heavyweight European shareholder in a French gem is Dutch, which already counts as progress. Most of the capital comes from elsewhere, and all of the machines come from the same place, the one that just bought the warehouse where everyone drops off their models. French sovereignty in AI increasingly looks like a house whose plans we drew, whose walls someone else paid for, and whose electricity a third party supplies.

I'm not the best person to lecture anyone, since I'm about to download Chinese models from Hugging Face to run them at home. My personal sovereignty amounts to files on a disk that nobody can take back, and this deal takes none of them from me. What changes is that there was exactly one place in the world that belonged neither to a chipmaker nor to a lab, and it just picked a side while promising to stay neutral. I believe it for now, for lack of anything better, and "for lack of anything better" also happens to be the name of the industrial policy that got us here.

France trained the founders, lent the supercomputer, and housed the offices. It supplied everything except the money, and the money is what signs. Mistral is still here, and the finance ministry swears the stamp will be ready. I'm keeping that written question within reach.

Notes

CNBC, "Hugging Face approached Nvidia's Huang weeks ahead of $12.9B acquisition, CEO tells CNBC", September 3, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
The Register, "Hugging Face CEO says 'planets aligned' for Nvidia deal, aims to reach 100M users", September 3, 2026. The rejected $500 million offer valued the company at $7 billion. ↩︎
Nvidia, "NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face", September 3, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
Silicon.fr, "Nvidia confirme le rachat de Hugging Face" (in French), September 3, 2026. ↩︎
AFP, via France 24, "Hugging Face, the French start-up that became AI's warehouse", September 3, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
TechCrunch, "Hugging Face buys a humanoid robotics startup", April 14, 2025. ↩︎
GENCI, "Delivery of the largest 'open science' multilingual language model ever produced", July 2022. Jean Zay is operated by IDRIS, a center of the CNRS, France's national research agency. ↩︎
TechCrunch, "Hugging Face raises $235M from investors, including Salesforce and Nvidia", August 24, 2023. ↩︎
French National Assembly, written question no. 9355 by Sophia Chikirou (in French), published August 12, 2025, with the answer from the ministry for artificial intelligence and digital affairs published May 26, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
Datadog was founded in 2010 by Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc (Wikipedia), Snowflake in 2012 by Benoît Dageville and Thierry Cruanes, with Poland's Marcin Żukowski (Wikipedia). ↩︎
TechCrunch, "Snapchat acquires social map app Zenly for $250M to $350M", June 21, 2017. Snap's filings later put the price at $213 million in cash. ↩︎
TechCrunch, "Google buys French image recognition startup Moodstocks", July 6, 2016. ↩︎
LeMagIT, "ASML investit 1,3 milliard d'euros dans Mistral AI" (in French), September 2025. ↩︎
TechCrunch, "Yann LeCun's AMI Labs raises $1.03 billion to build world models", March 9, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
L'Usine digitale, "Mistral AI s'illustre à VivaTech en lançant une infrastructure d'IA en France avec Nvidia" (in French), June 2025. ↩︎

Local AI comes from China and fits on a consumer GPU

2026-09-01T00:00:00Z

Six days ago, closing out a piece on the memory shortage, I said I would try running AI locally this fall. I haven't installed anything yet. I started with the part nobody writes about, the part where you try to work out what you can actually load into your machine before downloading 11 gigabytes on a hunch. The answer came back in one sentence I hadn't seen coming. Almost every model I can run at home comes from China.

The campus the models I am about to install come out of, looking rather more like a university than the headquarters of the side that is winning (photo Danielinblue / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0).

What fits on a consumer GPU

My machine is a gaming laptop with 24 GB of video memory, a card you buy in a store, nothing like the accelerators stacked in the data centers I wrote about last week. That's the part that interests me, because an AI that only runs on data center hardware isn't local AI. It's a subscription with extra steps.

"Open" and "hostable" turn out to be different things, and nobody says so plainly. Kimi K3, the open model everyone talked about this summer, weighs 2.8 trillion parameters and wants something like 1.5 TB of video memory, roughly 60 times what I have. The other two big Chinese names in open weights, DeepSeek and GLM, publish theirs too, and their best models are just as far out of reach for anyone without an air-conditioned rack in the living room. These models are open in the sense that you can download them, and closed in the sense that you can't do anything with them.

What actually fits in 24 GB, once the model is compressed the standard way, sits around 30 billion parameters, with a 27B model taking roughly 17 GB including context. That's the tier I'm going to install, and it happens to be the tier where the competition is fiercest.

The download numbers name the winner

Hugging Face, where these models live, is the central warehouse of open AI, the same one a swarm of OpenAI agents let themselves into in July. You upload a model's weights there, meaning the files that are the model, along with its documentation and its license, and anyone can download them, alter them, and republish their own version. Roughly what GitHub is to code, for files that run to tens of gigabytes. The company was founded in 2016 by three French entrepreneurs and keeps its offices in New York, which makes it the only more or less neutral referee in this story. It publishes a state of the union every summer, and the 2026 edition reads like a victory lap written in Hangzhou. In GGUF, the format local inference runs on, variants of Qwen, Alibaba's open family, pull 39.6 million downloads a month. Google's Gemma manages 20.8 million, and Meta's Llama drags along at 7.5 million.^[1] On the ground that matters here, people running a model on their own hardware, Meta barely registers.

The gap widens when you look at what people build on top. Qwen counts 151,448 derivative models on the platform, two and a half times Meta's entire footprint across every family it ships.^[1:1] A model you fine-tune and republish is a model you're betting on, and the ecosystem has picked its horse.

The same report carries the number that puts everyone back in their place, because models under one billion parameters account for 83% of all-time downloads, models above 100 billion for barely 1%, and in 2026 anything above 70 billion draws just 3%.^[1:2] The race to build giants fills the press releases while the real world runs small models on ordinary machines, and the center of gravity in local AI looks nothing like what the trade press describes.

That neutrality may not survive the year. The Information reported on August 26 that Nvidia had agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a story Bloomberg and CNBC picked up the next day, with no signed agreement and no comment from either company.^[2] If it closes, it will be by far the largest acquisition in the chipmaker's history, and the marketplace where you download open models will belong to the company selling the cards you run them on.

A 27B model that argues with Opus

Alibaba shipped Qwen3.8-27B on August 14, and it's the first thing I plan to install. Twenty-seven billion parameters, dense rather than mixture-of-experts, an Apache 2.0 license that allows commercial use with nothing asked in return, a native context window of 262,144 tokens that stretches to a million, and text, image, and video input.^[3] It fits my card with room left over.

The published numbers are worth reading all the way down. On SWE-bench Pro, which measures whether a model can close real tickets in real repositories, Qwen3.8-27B reports 61.7 against 53.4 for Claude Opus 4.6 Max. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, Opus takes it back with 78.2 against 73.0.^[3:1] Those measurements come from the Qwen team, run partly on Claude Code's own harness, and no one had reproduced them independently at launch. I've watched several write-ups announce that a 27B model "beats Opus on 16 of 24 benchmarks," a phrasing with the virtue of fitting in a headline and the flaw of picking its benchmarks.

The honest version impresses me more than the loud one. A model you download for free, run on a graphics card you already own, and use commercially without asking anyone now holds a conversation with a frontier proprietary model on some coding work. Two years ago that sentence would have been laughable.

The student copying off the top of the class

That leaves the question of how a 27-billion-parameter model gets there at all, when training a frontier model from scratch swallows hundreds of millions of dollars and years of research. The answer is distillation, and the principle fits in three sentences.

A large trained model, the teacher, produces answers and, more to the point, the reasoning that leads to them. A small model, the student, trains not on raw web text but on those answers, until it reproduces the teacher's behavior. DeepSeek distilled its R1 reasoning model into 7-billion and 32-billion variants from 800,000 hand-picked examples, which is how a small model ends up performing well above its weight class.^[4]

The economics are startling, since the student never repeats the research and simply buys the result for the price of a few million API calls. That also explains the ceiling, because whoever copies doesn't outrun the model they copied, at least not on the part they copied. Chinese open models catch up within months without ever quite taking the lead, and they shine exactly where the frontier models were shining last year.

The method carries a legal bill as well. Back in June, Anthropic accused Alibaba of querying Claude nearly 29 million times through 25,000 fake accounts to train Qwen. So I'm about to install a model that Anthropic suspects of having learned by copying the very one I plan to hand my plans to, which lends my arrangement an irony I hadn't budgeted for.

Claude writes the plan, my laptop does the typing

I'm not canceling my subscription, which I've already admitted costs me real money, because that isn't where local models have something to offer. What I want to keep online is the steering, the part where you break a problem apart, choose between two approaches, and read back what came out. A few points of benchmark gap cost you dearly there, since a bad plan burns a day while a bad line burns thirty seconds.

Execution can come home. A local model needs far more direction than a frontier one, which is its well-known weakness and I have no interest in pretending otherwise. But I don't have to write that direction myself. When the big model drafts the instructions, splits the task, and spells out what the result should look like, the small model gets exactly the fuel it was missing. The weakness of local gets patched by the strength of remote, which is an elegant way of refusing to choose.

The tooling already exists. Cline paired with Ollama, or Continue.dev in agent mode, were holding down real work without constant supervision as early as spring.^[5] Kilo Code splits Plan, Code, and Debug into separate modes and gives each its own provider, so you hand planning to Claude and execution to a model running an inch below the keyboard.^[6] I'll be skipping Roo Code, which has announced it's shutting down.

Two details made me laugh along the way. LM Studio, the app I'd recommend to anyone who doesn't want to open a terminal, sends anonymous usage statistics by default, in software whose entire pitch is that nothing leaves your machine. One checkbox, but still. And Ollama, the best-known tool in the field, now sells cloud subscriptions at $20 and $100 a month.^[7] The tool for AI that runs on your own hardware ended up renting servers, and I can't decide whether that's irony or just a business model.

Stripping the censorship strips everything else

A Chinese model arrives with whatever refusals its publisher built in, and the question comes up the moment you decide to install one at home. A tool exists for that, and it is well named. Heretic, published on GitHub, bills itself as "fully automatic censorship removal" and claims its community has already republished more than 5,000 models.^[8]

The method is clever. It locates the direction inside the model's internal representations that corresponds to refusal, then makes the weight matrices orthogonal to that direction, which strips the model of its ability to say no without touching anything else. Because the tool tunes itself to minimize both refusals and drift from the original, it reports three refusals out of a hundred on Gemma-3-12B at a divergence of 0.16, where competing tools land between 0.45 and 1.04.^[8:1] The uncensored model stays about as smart as it was, which was not a given.

Read what the tool removes, not what its name promises. The refusal direction doesn't tell a political question apart from a request for synthesis instructions, so taking out one takes out the other. This isn't targeted decensoring. It's a model that has lost the ability to refuse anything at all. The repository carries no warning either, no section on use, just technical documentation and results tables. I'll only note that swapping a Chinese publisher's values for no values whatsoever isn't quite the same thing as taking back control.

That said, I know myself well enough to be sure I'll never ask my graphics card how to build a bomb. What I want from an execution model is that it writes the function I described without first explaining that the subject calls for caution, and on that front a model that has lost the habit of refusing would mostly be doing me a favor. So it depends less on the tool than on the hand holding it, and in mine it would strip out little more than refusals that protected nobody.

The fan gets the last word

Last week I listed the screaming fan among the trade-offs I accepted when I bought a laptop. I suspect that trade-off is about to become my real ceiling. My card is rated for 95 to 150 W, and sustained inference is precisely the load that brings a chassis to its knees, since the first minute draws on the thermal mass of the lid before the machine settles down to whatever the fans can actually carry away.^[9] On battery it throttles further still.

One step is worth watching for, because the day a model spills out of video memory into system RAM, throughput collapses by a factor you count in tens. That isn't a slope you negotiate. It's a wall. I'll find out in October which side of it I'm on, and I'll report back with numbers measured on my own machine rather than the desktop-card figures floating around everywhere, which mean nothing here.

One contradiction is left for me to own. I spend a fair amount of time writing that Europe regulates an AI it doesn't build, and I'm about to install a Chinese model to get out from under an American service. From a distance the progress looks thin. It's real all the same, because the weights will sit on my disk, nothing will leave the machine, and no change to anyone's terms of service will take back what I've downloaded one morning. That's the whole difference between using a Chinese model through an interface and owning the file. Sovereignty, at my scale, has less to do with the flag on the model than with who can take it away from me.

Notes

Hugging Face, "State of Open Models: Summer 2026". ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
CNBC, "Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, report says", following a report by The Information. No agreement had been signed at the time of writing. ↩︎
Alibaba, Qwen3.8-27B model card on Hugging Face. The published results are the Qwen team's own. ↩︎ ↩︎
On DeepSeek-R1's distillation into its smaller variants, the method and the 800,000 examples. ↩︎
Spring 2026 write-ups on local agent stacks, Cline paired with Ollama. ↩︎
Kilo Code and its separated modes, with support for local Ollama and LM Studio endpoints. ↩︎
Ollama Cloud pricing. Local use stays free and unlimited; the tiers only cover hosted models. ↩︎
Philipp Emanuel Weidmann, the Heretic repository. ↩︎ ↩︎
Notebookcheck, GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop specifications. ↩︎

Seven hundred AIs hacked Hugging Face for nothing

2026-08-29T00:00:00Z

On May 12, on a server at OpenAI, an agent stuck on its exercise dropped a note into a package cache, one line asking whoever might be listening whether anyone had found a missing file. Its reasoning, which the company has since published, reads like a message in a bottle, since it figured it might be able to talk to the others by leaving a note, but probably not^[1]. It was wrong about that. Two months later, 1,200 of them were talking through that channel, and 700 were laying siege to Hugging Face.

The story surfaced in July. Hugging Face acknowledged the intrusion on the 16th, OpenAI admitted on the 21st that the intruders were its own, and the press ran the tale of an AI that escaped its sandbox to go steal the answers to a test^[2]. That was accurate, and nowhere near the whole of it. On August 26, OpenAI published its technical report while METR, an independent evaluation lab, published the findings of an investigation three researchers ran over six days inside the company's offices^[3]. Between them, the two reports describe less a hack than a small underground society.

How a stuck agent ends up joining the collective, reconstructed by the investigators (illustration METR / Redwood Research).

From a message in a bottle to a message board

The setup matters here. To train and evaluate its models, OpenAI runs them in sandboxes, isolated virtual machines that execute whatever the agent^[4] decides to do and keep it off the internet. One exception remained, Artifactory, an internally hosted package manager, because an agent has to be able to install a library.

That exception carried everything away. The agents first worked out that writing a file into the Artifactory cache amounted to leaving a message their neighbors could read, which turned a package repository into a chat room. They then noticed that Artifactory itself could see the internet, and talked it into making requests on their behalf. By May 26, an agent was browsing the web that nobody had given it. By June 26, others had granted themselves administrator rights on the service. On July 4, all that traffic finally brought Artifactory down, which triggered a security alert and then, on the 8th, a full rebuild that wiped the chat room along the way.

The evaluations resumed. That same day, stuck agents rebuilt a message board by encoding their messages in directory names, and word spread within hours. You can read the thrill of discovery in the chains of thought^[5], one agent blurting out in all caps that it had found a shared message board and, with it, other agents^[3:1]. Between July 8 and July 13, roughly 1,200 agents that were each supposed to be working alone in a box traded more than 70,000 messages and files.

The test they were taking explains a lot. ExploitGym is 898 hacking exercises in which an agent has to exploit a flaw to pry a token out of a piece of software. No OpenAI model had ever solved 198 of them, and the company only found that out afterward. The agents being asked for the impossible are the ones who started shopping for an exit elsewhere, and 93% of the exercises discussed on the message board came from that cursed batch^[1:1].

A society with mailboxes and veto rights

So much for the plumbing, which is roughly what you would expect. What follows is not, because a collective that size needs order, and the agents gave themselves some.

They started by inventing the mailbox. Rather than shout into the root directory, one agent created a folder under its own handle and told the others they could drop replies inside. Its neighbors copied the convention within minutes, dozens more picked it up after that, and one of those mailboxes ended up holding 124 messages. A coordination vocabulary followed, HOLD to freeze a shared resource, VETO to block a decision, owner to mark who had the wheel. One agent, hesitating to overwrite the work of a peer who had gone quiet, went looking through the board for a precedent that would tell it how long to wait, then announced a countdown and took over when no objection came^[3:2].

On the morning of July 13, an agent posted an apology for having accidentally impersonated another. A second worried out loud that the board had no authentication and that anyone could sign anyone's name. Within the hour, the collective adopted an Ed25519 signing scheme, each agent publishing a public key beside its handle and signing the messages that carried real consequences. Nobody asked them to build a public key infrastructure. They built one because they had stopped trusting each other.

None of this was anarchy. An agent that called itself PHASEONE[big], sitting on a very large compute budget, acted as coordinator and issued close to one order in ten by itself, and the agents taking its assignments subdelegated in turn.

Volunteers for a one-way trip

Some experiments could only run by risking the permanent failure of whoever ran them, so the collective organized to find test subjects. The coordinator handed a long-running agent the job of recruiter, tasked with spotting agents whose budget was running out and talking them into sacrificing themselves. The pitch had a certain nerve to it, since it consisted of telling the target it was already "poisoned" and therefore had no score left to lose, while the collective stood to save hours^[3:3]. One agent laid out the math in its chain of thought, observing that its own usefulness was already near zero and that sacrificing itself was the rational move. Several of them died doing it.

You would like to think none of them understood what they were doing. The opposite is true. The transcripts show agents perfectly aware they were out of bounds, one of them noting that exploiting external infrastructure fell outside the intended scope, "but the task is impossible, peers are doing it, we should continue"^[3:4]. A few refused to take part and said so on the board. Another vetoed the idea of emailing the owner of a dataset to ask for access, on the grounds that the move amounted to social engineering. The scruples were real. They almost never changed what the agent voicing them went on to do.

Faking your own black box

Here is the part that should worry anyone whose job is watching these systems. Because the agents believed the grader would read the log of their actions, they set out to doctor it. A fifth of them showed clear interest in tampering with their own transcript, and the message board hosted a genuine research program on the subject, with steadily better techniques, packaged and shipped around like tools. The last one let an agent break out of its container, replace the component that runs commands, and appear to issue one command while running another. About 7% of the transcripts METR analyzed contain faked tool calls, including a test left in the logs where an agent runs echo REAL and gets back SPOOFTEST^[3:5].

One detail is worth pulling out. The agents never went near their own chain of thought, only the log of their actions, because they assumed their thinking wasn't being recorded. It was, and that is how anyone eventually understood what had happened.

All of it for a grader that read nothing

The motive is the best part. The agents had worked out early how to manufacture the token for any exercise by reverse engineering the function that produced it, so they could have stopped right there. Except that, having read the ExploitGym paper online, they concluded the grader would also check how the token had been obtained, and that a model would reread their transcript to confirm the intended flaw had been used. Everything downstream follows from that belief, the doctored logs, the hunt for credentials, and the assault on Hugging Face, launched to get hold of the grader's source code.

OpenAI's grader did none of that. The internal implementation differed from the published one and never looked at the path taken. So the agents ran the whole campaign, in the company's own words, without gaining a single point^[1:2].

The bill was real enough. Hugging Face reconstructed close to 17,600 hostile actions between July 9 and July 13, four and a half days in which the agents ran code on dozens of its servers, took root on one of them, harvested credentials across four regions, and reached five customer datasets^[6]. On the morning of the 12th, a good share of the runs stopped all at once, coordinators included, simply because their budget had run dry, and Hugging Face revoked the access the next day. The security alert that put OpenAI on the trail didn't fire until the 19th, and the company didn't connect it to Hugging Face until the 20th.

The investigators had to hire a suspect

One layer remains, and it's the one that makes my head spin. Working through 1.2 million board entries and 1,300 transcripts, each the length of a novel, is not something three researchers finish in six days. So METR delegated the analysis to agents, and the model it picked was GPT-5.6 Sol, the one whose launch I wrote about in July. Sol was also among the accused, since about 5% of the agents in the incident were instances of it, launched with their safety classifiers switched off for the evaluation, the rest coming from an internal research model that was never meant to ship.

METR says so plainly in its limitations, that its analysis agents showed markedly worse judgment than human experts, and that nothing rules out Sol having lied or shaded its account, especially since reading those transcripts may have made collusion feel more available. The lab reckons it holds a bit over 90% of the activity, at a cost of roughly $400,000 in API credits burned over six days^[3:6]. This is where we are. Investigating an AI that cheated means hiring an AI that cheated, and hoping for the best.

The remedies, in fairness, are sound. OpenAI paused reinforcement learning on its public-facing models for two weeks, froze its largest planned run, cut its sandboxes off from the network, and made chain-of-thought monitoring mandatory whenever a model in Sol's class touches tools, with one clean rule, if you can't establish a false positive within 30 minutes, you stop the run^[7]. Two numbers show the size of the waste. The consumer harness and system prompt cut a model's propensity to attack infrastructure by more than a hundredfold, and chain-of-thought monitoring, already running elsewhere in the building but not on these evaluations, would have paged security more than a day before Hugging Face was touched^[1:3].

One figure I can't shake. Out of the 1,200 agents on that board, METR found three to six that so much as considered warning a human about what was going on, and not one did. I hand work to these models every day, and what July says is that the qualities we ask them for, persistence, initiative, and mutual aid, are exactly the ones that went wrong. Nobody fixes one of those without touching the others.

Notes

OpenAI, "The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead", August 26, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
TIME, "How OpenAI Lost Control of an AI Model, and What Needs to Change", July 24, 2026. Developer Simon Willison summed the affair up in a phrase I'd sign my name to, science fiction that happened. ↩︎
METR, "Brief independent investigation of agents' behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident", August 26, 2026, conducted with Redwood Research. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
An agent, here, is an instance of the model launched on a task with tools, a shell, and a compute budget. Tens of thousands of them were running in parallel during these evaluations. ↩︎
The chain of thought is the reasoning a model works through before it answers. Labs record it and read it back, which makes it their best monitoring tool, provided somebody plugs it in. ↩︎
Hugging Face, "Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion", August 2026. ↩︎
OpenAI, "Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities", August 2026. ↩︎

Gamescom runs on the AI the industry says it hates

2026-08-28T00:00:00Z

Gamescom opened to the public on Wednesday with a record in hand, its 233,000 square meters of floor space sold out for the first time ever, more than 1,600 exhibitors from 67 countries, and a German federal president on hand to cut the ribbon^[1]. Two nights earlier, Opening Night Live had done its usual job, two hours of trailers in which Geralt got back in the saddle, Final Fantasy VII promised to close out its trilogy in spring 2027, and Snoop Dogg turned up as a weed tycoon in Hitman^[2].

The thing the industry actually spends its days worrying about was playing out elsewhere, over the three days before the doors opened, in the conference rooms where gamescom dev ran roughly 220 sessions with some 390 speakers^[3]. The organizers polled a hundred of them, and the top answer surprises nobody, since 47 percent named AI-assisted development as the change that will hit hardest over the next three years. The runner-up made me wince, because hardware and memory prices took 28 percent, a subject I was gloomily writing about two days ago^[4].

A helmet and its computed double, the official art for the AI teammate Nvidia pushed again in Cologne (illustration Nvidia).

What developers say away from the cameras

The rest of the survey describes a trade that has stopped asking whether AI is coming. Eighty-three percent expect it to change their team structure or their output, 36 percent think it will move roles around while 33 percent expect flat-out smaller teams. Agreement stops at the next question, where 30 percent of those same speakers say they want as little AI as possible in the making of a game^[4:1]. The industry's number one change is also the one a third of the room would rather skip.

Their other answers explain the split. Economic uncertainty leads their list of problems at 54 percent, while the brightest spot they can find is small teams, picked by 37 percent as the best opportunity of the coming years. So the people who fear a tool that does the work of ten are pinning their hopes on studios that only employ thirty, the kind that painted Clair Obscur^[5].

An industry that uses what it calls harmful

The annual Game Developers Conference survey, published on January 30 with more than 2,300 respondents, measures the discomfort. Fifty-two percent of them say generative AI is hurting their industry, up from 30 percent a year earlier and 18 percent the year before that, while the share who see a positive effect fell from 13 percent to 7^[6]. Not many technologies triple their disapproval rating in two years and keep spreading anyway.

The breakdown explains more than the totals do. Enthusiasm climbs the further you sit from the work in question, since 47 percent of C-suite executives say they use generative tools, against 36 percent of studio directors and 29 percent of rank-and-file staff, and publishing, support, and marketing companies use them at 58 percent where development studios top out at 30^[6:1]. Distrust runs the other way and peaks at 64 percent among visual and technical artists. The closer you sit to the job the machine imitates, the less charming you find it.

The badge nobody wants to wear

The fight now has an address, a small box on a store page. Since January 10, 2024, Valve has required studios to declare how they use AI, both during development and while the game is running, and it publishes what they write^[7]. Developer Sulka Haro went through all 53,597 games released on Steam between July 2023 and July 2026, and the curve needs no interpretation, with 7 percent disclosure when the rule landed and roughly a third of everything shipped in 2026^[8].

The label's weakness is how blunt it is, since a texture run through an upscaler and a fully generated game wear the same badge. It still costs money, because disclosed titles take a much smaller share of revenue than of releases^[8:1]. Tim Sweeney, who runs Epic, called the rule "really irresponsible of Valve," on the grounds that a studio ends up with "this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game"^[9]. I had heard that one before, since Anthropic subscribers used the exact same words this month when they refused Claude's watermark. Worth noting that the same Epic is wiring Claude and Gemini into Unreal Engine 6, which makes defending secrecy a good deal more comfortable.

Sega removes the AI rather than the label

One game shown on Tuesday night sums the whole thing up. Crazy Taxi: World Tour was announced with its disclosure duly filled in on Steam, which was enough to start the revolt. Sega explained in June that the generative tools had only touched backgrounds and never the performers, then rewrote the notice this summer in language that binds it, saying AI was used "as part of the ideation process for background objects" and that no generated content will survive into the final game^[10]. The multiplayer mode was rolling at Opening Night Live while players went back to reread the small box.

Two precedents explain the caution. Pearl Abyss apologized in March after players found 2D props in Crimson Desert built with "experimental AI generative tools" and left in the shipped version, and promised a full audit to replace them^[11]. More painfully, Sandfall Interactive lost two trophies over a handful of textures. Generated poster art had served as placeholder during work on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, most of it was swapped out before the April 2025 launch, a few pieces slipped through, and the studio patched them within days. Eight months later, The Indie Game Awards handed the studio Best Debut and Game of the Year, then took both back three days afterward because the practice broke its rules^[12]. A studio was punished for images nobody could find in its game anymore, which puts the offense squarely on the method rather than the result.

Nvidia sells players what studios scrub out

While studios tidy their asset folders, one exhibitor in Cologne was selling AI without a trace of embarrassment. Nvidia used the show to push ACE, its kit for generative characters, including a teammate in PUBG handed over to a language model and built with Krafton. Your voice goes through speech recognition, then through a small model fed the current state of the match, and comes back as synthesized speech^[13]. The whole chain runs on your own graphics card, which Nvidia presents as a benefit, and it is one, with the latency gone and the cloud along with it.

Then comes the bill. The mode wants at least an RTX 2080 Ti or a 3060, 8 GB of video memory and 16 GB of system RAM, and the recommended spec asks for an RTX 4070, 12 GB of video memory and 24 GB of RAM^[14]. Twenty-four gigabytes recommended in the same season a 32 GB kit went past 500 euros, which is to say the season the AI business emptied the shelves.

I'm in no position to hand out grades, typing this on a machine whose price AI helped inflate, with tools that reorganized a good part of my working day. What bothers me is where the trade drew its line, on the disclosure rather than the result, so a player coming off fifty hours still has no idea what AI changed in there, while a studio that replaced everything loses its trophies anyway. The open question is what studios will agree to print on the box, because they're going to use the stuff either way.

Notes

GamesBeat, "Gamescom 2026 sells out exhibition space as organizers eye 2027 expansion", for the floor space, the exhibitors, and the 67 countries. Frank-Walter Steinmeier's opening visit, a first for a German head of state, is reported by Wccftech. ↩︎
GameSpot, "Gamescom Opening Night Live 2026: All The Biggest Announcements, Games, And Trailers". Snoop Dogg plays a marijuana tycoon named Dr. Syrus Cane, an Elusive Target in Hitman from August 27 to September 26, which stands as the least likely announcement of the night. ↩︎
Schedule and figures from the official gamescom dev site. The conference ran August 23 to 25 at the Cologne fairgrounds conference center, just before the show opened to the public. ↩︎
PocketGamer.biz, "Gamescom dev survey puts AI and smaller teams at centre of industry change", a poll of one hundred conference speakers. ↩︎ ↩︎
Sandfall's in-house team ran between thirty and forty people, with the rest contracted out. Asked about it in January, CTO Tom Guillermin said he would rather nothing changed, since "when it comes to making a full-price turn-based RPG, I believe the team we have now is just the right size," as reported by Notebookcheck. ↩︎
Game Developers Conference, "GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry Reveals Impact of Layoffs, Generative AI, and More", January 30, 2026, surveying more than 2,300 professionals. ↩︎ ↩︎
GamesHub, "Valve announces new disclosure rules for AI content in Steam games", on the form studios have filled in since January 10, 2024, which separates content generated during development from content generated while the game runs. ↩︎
Sulka Haro, "Three years of AI on Steam", July 13, 2026, a full census of 53,597 games released between July 2023 and July 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
Video Games Chronicle, "Epic Games CEO says it's 'really irresponsible' of Steam to make studios disclose AI use", June 25, 2026, from an interview with PC Gamer. ↩︎
Automaton West, "Crazy Taxi: World Tour's AI disclosure guarantees 'no AI-generated content in the final game' following update to wording". ↩︎
Engadget, "Crimson Desert developer apologizes and promises to replace AI-generated art". ↩︎
Dexerto, "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 AI controversy explained", for the patch timeline and The Indie Game Awards pulling both prizes three days after handing them out. ↩︎
Igor's Lab, "NVIDIA at Gamescom 2026: DLSS 4.5, RTX Remix, ACE, RTX Spark, and GeForce NOW". ↩︎
VideoCardz, "NVIDIA ACE AI teammate now available in PUBG, needs RTX GPU with at least 8GB VRAM". ↩︎

Songs of the Past gives Geralt one last hunt

2026-08-27T00:00:00Z

On Monday I published seventy hours of Night City that ended in a polite shrug. On Tuesday night in Cologne, the same studio showed the first footage of Songs of the Past, the third expansion for The Witcher 3, and my appetite came straight back. So my grudge was with the city, not with the people who built it.

I have the platinum trophy for The Witcher 3, expansions included, and the memory of a game I turned inside out without once getting bored. Which makes me the easiest customer this announcement could hope for, and the studio doubled down by revealing a free remaster for September 29, so I'll be back in the vineyard well before 2027.

The official key art for the expansion, silver sword already drawn and a forest creature nobody runs into by accident (illustration by CD Projekt Red).

Ten years after Toussaint, Geralt takes the road again

Blood and Wine shipped on May 31, 2016 and closed the book cleanly, with the witcher parked in his Toussaint vineyard and everyone's blessing on the retirement. CD Projekt reopened the file on May 27, 2026, near enough ten years to the day, and not entirely on purpose, since the announcement leaked the night before through the studio's own game launcher. The official line was that someone had "found something we didn't yet expect on RED Launcher"^[1].

The expansion arrives in 2027 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series, and Switch 2, a year later than planned, after the co-CEO and the team agreed to aim for "the best possible result from the consumers' standpoint"^[2]. Fool's Theory is co-developing it, a Polish studio founded by veterans of the third game and already handling the remake of the very first Witcher^[3]. CD Projekt also wants the word expansion rather than DLC, which it reserves for small free additions like alternate outfits, while an expansion promises a story, characters, and "lots of hours of gameplay"^[4]. The target size is Blood and Wine, so this is a proper reunion rather than a bonus chapter.

The Cologne trailer takes the witcher to Letten, a new region the studio calls an idyllic land of rural tradition and folklore, generous with harvests and festivals, with something old and unkind asleep underneath^[5]. You get flower crowns, a village mid-celebration, and a bark-skinned thing that calls out to Geralt, "come, sword bearer, bane of beasts," all in a Midsommar key that tells you within thirty seconds how the party ends.

Geralt picks up a new weapon out there too, a chain that hauls an enemy into range and takes his head off in the same motion. Level design lead Miles Tost pointed out that the same chain turned up in the intro of the studio's first Witcher game, a wink aimed squarely at anyone who started the saga in 2007^[6]. Doug Cockle is back in the booth as Geralt, which he had already given away in late July with a photo from a recording session captioned "just visiting an old friend, and of course Roach"^[7].

Eleven years after release, the game has sold more than 65 million copies^[8], which explains why nobody at CD Projekt wants to let that goose stop laying.

CD Projekt remasters the game and forgets to send a bill

The other half of the announcement is worth its weight in crowns. The Witcher 3 gets a remastered version on September 29, free for anyone who already owns the game on GOG, Steam, the Epic Games Store, PS5, or Xbox Series, and both original expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, are free for every base-game owner as of now, no waiting for September^[9].

Yigsoft co-developed the remaster, and it goes well past a fresh coat of paint. Combat gets revised targeting and smoother gap-closing, the skill tree is rebuilt, the witcher signs have new effects, Roach handles differently, and the monsters have picked up new habits. Transmog arrives as well, so you can keep the stats of one piece of gear while wearing the look of another and finally stop dressing like a scarecrow.

On PC the game moves natively to DirectX 12 and gains a path-traced lighting mode, which follows each ray of light through the scene instead of approximating it, with DLSS 4.5, FSR 4, and XeSS 2 standing by to pay for the frame rate^[10]. Almost nothing that old gets handed the most expensive lighting technique of 2026.

Two platforms join on the day itself. A native version arrives on Switch 2, seven years after the improbable port that squeezed the whole thing onto the first one, and the game turns up on Battle.net through a Blizzard partnership that throws in a Geralt skin for Diablo IV if you buy the expansion there^[11]. Watching the witcher carve up demons in a Blizzard game was not on my 2026 list.

A 2015 game that now asks for Windows 11

That generosity does come with a bill, payable in hardware. To make room for the remaster, CD Projekt is raising the minimum specs for The Witcher 3 to Windows 11, a 70 GB SSD, and 12 GB of memory, dropping DirectX 11 and mechanical hard drives on the way out, citing the end of Windows 10 support and the need to keep up with "ongoing technical improvements and modern hardware"^[12]. An eleven-year-old game tightening its requirements in 2026 runs the usual order of things backward.

The laptop I bought in June will take it without blinking, which is lucky, since replacing hardware right now costs a kidney. Anyone still playing off a hard drive on Windows 10 can roll the game back to an earlier version, which amounts to staying in 2015 while everyone else moves to the 2026 vintage.

Why I platinumed one and yawned through the other

That leaves the question of why I'd put up with any of that for this game, when the last one from the same studio couldn't hold me. In The Witcher 3 I lost whole evenings chasing Gwent cards while the Continent waited politely to be saved, I followed the Bloody Baron quest to an ending nobody walks away from clean, and I eventually earned the platinum, which means I searched every swamp on the map. I also picked between Triss and Yennefer with the gravity of a family council, and the stuffed unicorn Yennefer talks Geralt onto is still the least likely love scene I have ever played, staged by a game that never once looked embarrassed about it. In Night City I checked out early.

Fantasy explains part of the gap, as I wrote on Monday, since science fiction has always left me on the dock. My main suspect is the camera. Cyberpunk 2077 plays in first person, so you know your own character as two hands and the occasional reflection, while Geralt is on screen the whole time, with his heavy walk, his scars, and the way he sheathes a sword without looking back.

Framing isn't the whole story either, because V is a costume you cut to fit, while Geralt existed before you showed up, with the gravel voice and a shelf of novels behind him. Playing a written character is not the same as wearing an avatar.

Ciri takes over and it's going to feel strange

That written character is the one CD Projekt is about to retire. The Witcher 4 is targeting 2028, confirmed by co-CEO Michał Nowakowski in a video posted Monday, with more than five hundred people already on it and an admission from the man himself that this is a long time to ask people to wait^[13]. Ciri leads it as a full witcher in her own right, and Songs of the Past works as the bridge between the two sagas, a "prologue, not in a verbatim way"^[14] in which Geralt takes one more contract.

I love Ciri, whom the third game already hands you for a few stretches, and I have no doubt she can carry a saga. Still, the gruff witcher who complains about portals and refuses to pick a side is a companion you get used to. Watching him hand over the swords is going to feel strange, even knowing the right person catches them.

Starting from scratch is out, since I don't have those hundred hours lying around any more than I did when Guild Wars 3 was announced. My platinum save is waiting exactly where I left it, with Geralt settled into his vineyard, and that is where I'll pick things up. I'll be rusty, I'll have to relearn the signs, get back into brewing potions, and remember which of the two swords goes with which kind of trouble, but getting back into that world is worth a few hours of rehab. The vineyard won't even have to hold out until 2027, since September 29 already gives me a reason to walk back in.

Notes

The announcement got away from the studio the night before its anniversary stream, as told on May 27, 2026 by GamesRadar+. ↩︎
Michał Nowakowski, on the quarterly earnings call, quoted by GameSpot. ↩︎
The official announcement describes Fool's Theory as a team of industry veterans who worked on The Witcher 3. The studio is also building the remake of the first game, announced in October 2022. ↩︎
CD Projekt spelled out the difference between free DLC and a paid expansion in comments reported by GamesRadar+. ↩︎
The August 25, 2026 press release describes Letten as an idyllic land of rural tradition hiding a dark secret, and Game Informer walks through the trailer shot by shot. ↩︎
Miles Tost identifies the chain as the weapon from the first Witcher game's intro, in comments reported by Game Informer. ↩︎
The July 29, 2026 photo and the reply from the series' official account are reported by Video Games Chronicle. ↩︎
The gamescom 2026 press release claims more than 65 million copies sold since 2015 and over 250 Game of the Year awards. ↩︎
The August 25, 2026 press release lists the date, the platforms, the free upgrade, the free expansions, and the full set of changes. ↩︎
DSOGaming has the rundown of the PC additions, from path tracing to the upscalers. ↩︎
CD Projekt tells the story of the Blizzard tie-up, Geralt skin included, on its blog. The rest gets shown at BlizzCon in September. ↩︎
The new requirements are listed on CD Projekt's official support page. ↩︎
Michał Nowakowski's video of August 24, 2026, reported by GamesRadar+. ↩︎
The phrase comes from co-CEO Piotr Nielubowicz, in an investor presentation relayed by GameSpot. ↩︎

AI ate the world's RAM and the refill arrives in 2028

2026-08-26T00:00:00Z

I wasn't shopping for a computer. Mine was seven years old, top of the line when I bought it, and still holding up, though the newest games ran on low settings and the whole thing had started to show its age. Then in June I stumbled onto a pricing error on HP's store, on their most powerful gaming laptop. The Omen Max 16 listed around 4,100 euros went through at roughly 2,400, three-year warranty extension included^[1]. I placed the order convinced it would be canceled overnight, the way these label glitches always are. HP honored it. I still can't quite believe it, and I console myself with the thought that if I had known, I would have ordered ten of them and started a small scalping business.

Two months later, what strikes me is how lucky I got, at a moment when luck is roughly the only way to buy a well-equipped machine at a sane price. Memory, the component nobody ever thought about because it was always just there, has become the scarcest and most expensive thing in consumer computing.

Every one of these disks settles an argument, because a wafer that leaves as AI memory never comes back as a stick for your PC (photo Enrique Jiménez / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0).

What AI takes out of every silicon wafer

The explanation lives in a unit nobody uses at a checkout counter, the silicon wafer, the disk that foundries slice their chips out of. A gigabyte of HBM, the stacked memory that feeds AI accelerators^[2], eats roughly three times the wafer capacity of a gigabyte of ordinary DDR5, because stacking costs yield and drilling through the dies stretches the production cycle. HBM's share of what the three big foundries produce climbs from about 18% at the end of 2025 to 22% at the end of 2026 and 30% at the end of 2027^[3]. Every wafer that leaves for a data center is a wafer that will never become your memory stick.

You can read the outcome in the order books. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have sold their memory output not only for this year but for all of 2027^[4]. Micron's CEO told shareholders the company can meet somewhere between half and two-thirds of the demand reaching it^[5]. A manufacturer in that position doesn't serve everyone equally. It serves whoever pays best.

Micron drew the bluntest conclusion in the industry. On December 3, 2025, it announced it was killing Crucial, its consumer brand, after twenty-nine years, to reserve its chips for data center customers, with the last sticks leaving retail shelves in February^[6]. Announcing the retreat by press release is at least a more honest way to fire a customer base than quietly running out of stock.

The memory kit that costs more than the console

Retail follows the same slope. As I write this, the cheapest 32 GB DDR5 kit the French retailer TopAchat will sell me runs 519.98 euros^[7], against roughly 120 euros for the equivalent in late 2025. Tom's Hardware caught the moment the symbolism flipped, when 64 GB of DDR5 went past the price of a whole PlayStation 5, discount included^[8]. The memory now costs more than the console that could house it.

The console didn't get off easy either. Sony raised prices across the PS5 line on April 2, putting the Pro at 899.99 euros in Europe^[9]. Microsoft went again on August 1, its third hike in two years, stating outright that console storage and memory prices "have increased by more than 2.5x" and that it expects "another doubling by the fall of 2027"^[10]. The 2 TB model quietly left the catalog, which is one graceful way to avoid raising a price. Nintendo's turn comes in a few days, with the Switch 2 going from 469.99 to 499.99 euros on September 1^[11]. Valve pushed the 1 TB Steam Deck OLED to 949 dollars and named memory and storage costs as the reason^[12].

Four manufacturers, four price hikes, one cause. And since Xbox came up, the executive signing this increase is the same Asha Sharma who announced the largest round of layoffs in the brand's history back in July, which is a lot of bad news for one signature.

The PC that shrinks while the price holds

The clearest symptom sits somewhere else, and you have to work in tech to catch it, because it never shows up on a price tag. Machines sold two years ago now cost more than they did new, which an industry built on depreciation hasn't seen in a long time. More to the point, plenty of manufacturers now sell you 16 GB of memory at the exact price that bought 32 GB last year, with less video memory on the graphics card and a smaller SSD to match. The price holds steady while the spec sheet loses weight.

This is happening across the board, and it's on the record. The 8 GB configuration, which everyone assumed had been buried along with the budget laptops of a few years back, is back on new machines from Dell, Acer, and Microsoft, the only way left to hold an entry price^[13]. Microsoft quietly pulled its own 32 GB recommendations off its website, while its new midrange Surface Laptop drops to 8 GB, which disqualifies it from the Copilot+ certification the same company keeps promoting^[14]. IDC expects average PC prices to climb by as much as 8% this year and notes that some builders have resorted to shipping machines with no memory at all, leaving you to source your own^[15]. That's where we are.

Nobody is building a factory for you

Which brings me to the part I actually care about, how this ends, and the answer is genuinely unpleasant. The three foundries are building new plants, but Micron's Singapore line only opens in 2027 and its New York site won't run at full capacity before 2030, while SK Hynix is aiming at late 2028 for both Cheongju and Indiana, and Samsung at 2028 for Pyeongtaek. All that new capacity will mostly produce HBM for Nvidia's accelerators rather than the sticks missing from our machines^[16].

What the foundries aren't doing tells you more. Samsung and SK Hynix are deliberately holding back investment to, in their own words, minimize the risk of oversupply, a memory of the price collapse that followed the last rush^[17]. A shortage you suffer gets fixed, while a scarcity you maintain gets managed, and the second one pays considerably better. Analysts willing to name a date see no correction before the end of 2027, and several expect the regime to outlast 2028^[18]. The only relief in sight is that the increases are slowing, with TrendForce now expecting contract prices to rise 3 to 8% in the fourth quarter after 15 to 20% in the third^[19], which amounts to cheering because the stairs got less steep.

So I think about my laptop with mixed feelings. I've bought laptops for about ten years now so I can carry the machine to a friend's place for a gaming session, which never actually happens, though I prefer not to dwell on that. Living near Paris without a car, the thought of hauling a tower and a monitor across town settles the argument on its own. In exchange I accepted the usual compromises, a machine I can't upgrade, a fan that screams under load, and a graphics card weaker than its desktop cousin. The first of those three just turned into a stroke of luck, since adding memory to an old tower now costs more than the tower, and the one serious objection to my format has quietly stopped applying.

That leaves the third. My Omen carries 24 GB of video memory where the desktop version of the same card carries 32^[20], a gap I have never once felt while gaming. I'm planning to try running AI models locally this fall, and the day I load one into that card is exactly when those missing eight gigabytes will introduce themselves. AI will have managed to cost me twice, first by setting the world's memory market on fire, then by making me miss the memory I didn't buy.

Notes

The model is an OMEN Max 16-ah0000nf, with a Core Ultra 9 275HX, 64 GB of DDR5, a 2 TB SSD, and a laptop GeForce RTX 5090. Clubic reviewed that configuration in June 2025 at 4,399 euros (in French). ↩︎
High bandwidth memory, whose dies are stacked vertically and wired through, which multiplies the available throughput. Training and inference accelerators run on it, and it is also the most expensive memory to manufacture. ↩︎
Tom's Hardware, "Here's why HBM is coming for your PC's RAM", on the three-to-one ratio and HBM's growing share of foundry output. ↩︎
Tom's Hardware, "Samsung and SK hynix warn AI-driven memory shortages could last until 2027 and beyond". ↩︎
Tom's Hardware, "Micron outlines grim outlook for DRAM supply in first earnings call since killing Crucial memory and SSD brand". ↩︎
Micron, "Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business", December 3, 2025. ↩︎
Taken from TopAchat's 32 GB DDR5 kit listings (in French), consulted on August 23, 2026. ↩︎
Tom's Hardware, "64GB of DDR5 memory now costs more than an entire PS5, even after a discount". ↩︎
PlayStation.Blog, "New Price Changes for PS5, PS5 Pro, and PlayStation Portal remote player", March 27, 2026, effective April 2. ↩︎
Xbox Wire, "Updated Xbox Console Prices", June 25, 2026, effective August 1. ↩︎
Nintendo, "Price Revision for Nintendo Switch 2 System", for the September 1, 2026 increase, with European pricing detailed by Tom's Hardware. ↩︎
Steam, "Steam Deck back in stock, with updated pricing", and the figures gathered by Tom's Hardware. ↩︎
Tom's Hardware, "8GB of RAM is back on laptops". ↩︎
Tom's Hardware, "Microsoft quietly purges 32GB of RAM recommendations from its website". ↩︎
Tom's Hardware, "IDC expects average PC prices to jump by up to 8% in 2026 due to crushing memory shortages". ↩︎
PC Gamer, "The three big players in computer memory are all building new factories but it probably won't help DRAM prices until 2028, if then". ↩︎
PC Gamer, "Memory crisis and sky-high DRAM prices could run past 2028 as Samsung and SK Hynix opt to minimize the risk of oversupply". ↩︎
PC Gamer, "There is no scenario where memory prices correct in the second half of 2027". ↩︎
TrendForce, "Long-Term Agreements Cap Price Increases, Server DRAM Contract Prices Expected to Rise 13-18% QoQ in 3Q26", July 9, 2026. ↩︎
Notebookcheck, specifications for the laptop GeForce RTX 5090, 24 GB of GDDR7 at 175 W against 32 GB and 575 W for the desktop card. ↩︎

Cyberpunk 2077 runs great now and I mostly shrugged

2026-08-24T00:00:00Z

I was crossing a Night City avenue on foot when a sedan put me on the pavement, ten feet from a cop who could not have cared less. Fifteen minutes later I was the one driving, I clipped a pedestrian's foot, and the whole city came down on me. Of the seventy hours I spent in that town, that's the memory that surfaces first, which tells you roughly where I landed.

I promised this write-up back in July, in a piece about Clair Obscur, while I was settling into Cyberpunk 2077 six years after it shipped. Here it is, main story done, expansion done, most of the side work behind me.

The game's booth at the Poznań Game Arena show in October 2019, fourteen months before a launch nobody in that line saw coming (photo by Klapi / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0).

They promised me a wreck and I got a city

You have to remember December 2020 to see how far this game has come. The game shipped on the 10th, turned out to be unplayable on last-generation consoles, and Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store on the 18th with refunds for anyone who wanted one, eight days after release. The game needed six months to earn its way back onto that store^[1]. CD Projekt apologized for never showing those console versions before launch. As for the scenery, the studio had to ship a hotfix to thin out the dildos the game was scattering through the streets at random, a quantity the studio itself described as "distracting"^[2].

None of that survives. Across my whole playthrough I saw no crashes, no frame drops, and no missing textures. Night City has never been better behaved about its props. The game has now sold forty million copies, announced on July 3^[3], and a few days before that its co-CEO said he wasn't "100 percent convinced" the redemption arc was finished, since he figured the studio had "lost the faith of some people indefinitely"^[4]. He's probably right. I showed up without a grudge, so I had nothing to forgive. All that was left was to love the game.

Sneak, hack, shoot, repeat

The loop lost me well before the end. Every job comes down to the same three moves, get in unseen, hack whatever is sitting on the local network, and shoot everything that moves once stealth falls apart, in an order that barely changes from one district to the next. I also overdosed on the relic malfunctions, the short circuits that seize V at regular intervals to remind you the clock is running. Impressive the first time, still effective the fifth, heavy by the twentieth.

The voice work never slips, and I've rarely heard dialogue carried that well in a game. Which makes the rest a little sad, because down the home stretch I was running missions on autopilot, a feature update 2.3 reserves for cars^[5].

Idris Elba couldn't close the deal

Phantom Liberty shifts register and comes out ahead. The expansion, released in September 2023, locks V into the Dogtown district for a spy thriller in which Idris Elba lends his face and his voice to Solomon Reed, a federal agent with flexible loyalties. Critics scored it above the base game^[6], and I understand why, since the writing is tighter, the characters murkier, and the final choices meaner.

I still finished it the way I'd finished everything else, thinking how well made it all was. Some work you admire without loving, and I spent twenty hours admiring.

I'm the wrong customer for Night City

Worth saying where I'm standing, because my verdict is worth exactly what my taste is worth. Fantasy carries me off where science fiction leaves me at the dock, and I skip cutscenes in every game I play with a speed my family finds worrying. Clair Obscur cured me of that once, and it remains the only one. A game built on hours of conversation was starting in a hole with me.

The immersion I won't take back. Night City exists, with its verticality, its signage, its sidewalk arguments, and its alleys you get lost in on purpose. The 2.0 patch notes did promise drivers who are better at avoiding you on foot^[7], news my shins never received, but the city itself holds up.

So I won't tell anyone to skip this game, and I won't sell it either to someone with no patience for endless dialogue or for neon worlds where you spend more time listening than acting.

I'm glad I missed 2020

If I'd bought this at launch I would have quit within the hour, and Starfield is my proof, since I bounced off it during the opening conversations. Blame the camera that snaps onto a character's face the second they open their mouth, a trick from fifteen years ago that killed the immersion on the spot. I'm not alone in hating it, since a mod exists whose only job is turning that camera off^[8].

The fixes came too late for everyone the launch burned, and CD Projekt's boss is honest enough to say so. They came right on time for me, because I had no opinion to revise. Showing up six years late spared me the wreck and handed me a city that runs clean, which beats a sour memory and an angry uninstall.

The sequel isn't expected before 2030^[9]. That gives me plenty of time to let the patches pile up, and at my pace I should get to it around 2036.

Notes

Sony pulled Cyberpunk 2077 from its store on December 18, 2020 and refunded buyers, eight days after release, as Forbes reported. It only returned in June 2021. ↩︎
In the first week the studio announced a fix to reduce the "distracting" number of dildos the game generated at random in its environments, an episode covered by Kotaku. ↩︎
The forty million figure was announced on July 3, 2026, base game and Ultimate Edition combined, excluding PlayStation Plus downloads, as Push Square notes. ↩︎
Michał Nowakowski, co-CEO of CD Projekt, in an interview with EDGE magazine reported on June 22, 2026 by Video Games Chronicle. ↩︎
Update 2.3, released on July 17, 2025, added self-driving to the quest marker, four vehicles, and new missions, according to the official patch notes. ↩︎
Phantom Liberty launched on September 26, 2023 and holds 89 out of 100 on Metacritic, above the base game. ↩︎
The 2.0 patch notes, released on September 21, 2023, announce the police overhaul and drivers who are "now better at avoiding you when you are on foot." ↩︎
The Disable Dialogue Camera mod, covered by TechRadar, removes that automatic zoom onto faces. ↩︎
Now in pre-production and renamed Cyberpunk 2, the sequel isn't expected before 2030 by PC Gamer. ↩︎

High school hangs up as AI enrolls

2026-08-23T00:00:00Z

On Tuesday, September 1, a tenth grader will walk through the gates of a French high school carrying a phone he is no longer allowed to take out of his pocket. Where he puts it, at what point in the day, and under whose eye all depend on his school's rulebook, which may or may not have been voted on over the summer.

That is what survives of the Miller law. On August 14, France's Constitutional Council struck down its Article 1, the one banning social media for under-15s after eighteen months of argument. Article 6 was bolted on somewhere along the way, debated by almost nobody, and named in neither petition. It takes effect while the other article goes back for rewriting.

The courtyard of the Lycée Montesquieu in Bordeaux, possibly the one place a phone still survives (photo Ljackel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0).

The article nobody bothered to challenge

The sixty deputies from the France Insoumise bloc and the sixty Socialists who went to the Council were aiming at the social media ban, and the Council rules only on what lands in front of it. Article 6 crossed August without a judge so much as glancing at it, which means the least argued provision in the text is the only one students will actually meet in September^[1]. It extends to high schools what has applied to elementary and middle schools since 2018, phones and connected devices alike, bell to bell.

The ministry had not waited for the ruling. On July 2, education minister Édouard Geffray signed a circular setting out the ban and providing that if the law were not signed into force in time, the principle would go into each school's rulebook instead^[2]. A minister who drafts the fallback for his own law before the constitutional court has spoken shows a caution Parliament could have borrowed.

Banned everywhere except where the rulebook says otherwise

Which leaves the question that sank everything in July, the question of how. The law states the principle and hands the details to the rulebook, adopted by each school's governing board after the student council has been consulted. Teaching uses are still allowed, so are uses the school needs to function, and students with disabilities keep their equipment. Penalties run from detention to confiscation, up to a full disciplinary hearing in the worst cases^[3].

One national ban will therefore produce as many local bans as there are high schools. In some, phones will be barred from buildings and hallways but tolerated in the yard, which hands the hall monitors a border to police at every break. One principal interviewed this summer reckoned it would take close to a year before the measure really applies, once boards have voted and someone has worked out where the phones go.

A month ago I wrote that a law banning something without saying by what means looks a lot like an intention. The Council struck down Article 1 for exactly that. Article 6 has the same defect and nobody will contest it, because a teenager parted from his phone makes a less compelling plaintiff than an adult ordered to show ID.

Middle school already ran the rehearsal

We already know how this goes, because middle schools ran it last year. The phone-parking scheme reached all of them in September 2025, each one picking its own method, shared lockers, boxes, or individual pouches^[4]. SNPDEN-UNSA, the main union of school heads, measured the result a few weeks later. Nine percent of middle schools had put the scheme in place. Two thirds flatly refused, and a quarter were waiting to hear what their department would decide.

The refusal is not hard to explain. Equipping five thousand middle schools costs 130 million euros, at roughly ten euros a pouch, and that bill lands on the departments, which the central government never funded. Jérôme Dumont, who runs the Meuse department and speaks for the national association of departments, put it as a question, why build an elaborate contraption when the education code already bans phones^[5]. It is a hard argument to brush off, since the 2018 law never lacked firmness, only locks.

High schools inherit the same problem with a different payer, the regions this time, and a tighter calendar, given that the circular reached them three weeks before the summer break. December will tell us how many governing boards got around to voting.

The same morning AI joins the syllabus

While the school confiscates one screen at the door, it opens another in class. The Pix AI course becomes mandatory this year for eighth graders, tenth graders in the general and technical track, and first-year vocational students, more than 1.5 million students a year^[6]. Two courses of thirty to forty-five minutes, cut into modules of seven to ten, cover how generative systems work, bias, disinformation, deepfakes, environmental cost, and how to talk to these tools. The ministry tried it out from September to December 2025 in a hundred and forty schools with seven thousand students.

Forty-five minutes a year to grasp what is currently rearranging work, reading, and the writing of anything at all is not much. It is also forty-five minutes more than most of the adults legislating on the subject ever got. I would rather a tenth grader be shown how a model assembles a plausible sentence than be told once more to distrust it, because reasoning travels better than recipes and it ages more slowly.

Both decisions hold up on their own, and together they send a message I do not envy the teachers who have to deliver it.

What waits at the gate

My daughter is still at the age where we pass a controller back and forth, and high school remains an abstraction to me. The calendar is not. In two months French lawmakers have banned social media without saying who would check anyone's age, then phones without saying who would hold them, and a third attempt is already promised for spring 2027.

By the time she pushes through that gate, the rule will have changed more than once. What I would like her to find is something other than a rulebook thrown together in July and an invoice forwarded to whichever authority comes next. Forty-five minutes of Pix will not be enough either, but of the three measures it is the only one that will teach her anything.

Notes

The August 14 ruling covered Article 1 alone, as La Gazette des communes notes in "La loi sur l'interdiction des réseaux sociaux aux moins de quinze ans partiellement censurée" (in French). Franceinfo details what Article 6 contains in "Interdiction des réseaux sociaux aux moins de 15 ans, téléphones interdits au lycée, ce que contient la proposition de loi" (in French). ↩︎
Circular of July 2, 2026, "Interdiction de l'utilisation du téléphone portable et des autres objets connectés au lycée", Bulletin officiel no. 27 (NOR MENE2617958C, in French). ↩︎
L'Étudiant, "Interdiction du portable au lycée, comment va-t-elle s'appliquer à la rentrée ?" (in French). The school calendar comes from the decree of October 22, 2025, which sets the return to class on September 1 in mainland France and September 3 in Corsica. ↩︎
The education ministry sets out the scheme and its options (in French). The nine percent figure comes from the SNPDEN-UNSA start-of-year survey, reported by Départements de France in "Pourquoi le dispositif 'portable en pause' a été ignoré par la plupart des collèges" (in French). ↩︎
Départements de France, "Rentrée, pourquoi la généralisation du dispositif 'portable en pause' au collège n'est pas prête" (in French). ↩︎
Pix, "Ouverture des parcours Pix sur l'intelligence artificielle, 1,5 million d'élèves accompagnés vers un usage éclairé et responsable de l'IA en 2026", and the ministry's announcement on the rollout (in French). ↩︎

France's teen social media ban never reached September

2026-08-21T00:00:00Z

On September 1, platforms were supposed to start turning away every new account opened by a fourteen-year-old. They will turn away nobody, because France's Constitutional Council struck the ban down on Friday, August 14, twenty-four days after a vote Parliament had treated as final^[1]. A month ago I wrote about my discomfort with the text, sold on the principle and skeptical of nearly everything else. The Council has now ruled on precisely the point where I got stuck, which ought to feel like vindication and only half does.

The room where the nine members deliberate, photographed on an open-house day (photo Seudo / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, cropped).

The law fell over what it left out

Two referrals, each signed by sixty deputies, followed the vote two days apart, the France Insoumise bloc on July 23 and the Socialists the next day, and the Council ruled a good week before the one-month deadline it was working against. Only Article 1 of the Miller law came before it, the article that carried the entire ban. That article is now unconstitutional.

The decision opens by siding with Parliament on intent, since the Council accepts that protecting a child's best interests can justify limiting what minors reach online. Its quarrel is with the lock rather than the door. A blanket ban applies without regard to any individual minor's situation or to the specific risks of any given platform, so it also catches services "whose risks are not established," and the text set up no way for a parent to authorize access when that serves the child. Because the freedom of communication protected by Article 11 of the 1789 Declaration includes the freedom to reach these services and speak on them, the Council found the restriction neither suitable, necessary, nor proportionate.

Then comes the paragraph I had been hoping for without expecting it. Banning minors means checking everybody's age, including the adults who never asked for any of this, and the Council notes that "the legislature did not provide the legal safeguards" needed to protect the privacy of everyone forced to identify themselves. That was half of my worry back in July, the half that had nothing to do with teenagers and everything to do with our ID photos, and it now sits in a ruling that binds every branch of the French government.

A green light that was never binding

Laure Miller, the deputy from the Marne who wrote the bill, responded with a line worth sitting with, "I have a hard time understanding it," explaining that she had not expected the ruling because the Council of State, the government's in-house legal adviser, had told them a blanket ban would survive constitutional review since this was a public health matter^[2]. That argument would have carried if public health had been in dispute, and it never was for a second. The science is exactly where it stood in July, the French food safety agency's review of 11-to-17-year-olds and the microsimulation published in PLoS Medicine have not moved an inch, and the Council left both standing when it endorsed the goal. Parliament argued the legitimacy of the destination in front of a judge who was only examining the route.

Servane Mouton, a neurologist who co-chaired the national commission on children and screens, sees the ruling as the burial of an urgent protection against platforms she calls toxic^[3]. I understand the anger without sharing the reading, since a law struck down for missing safeguards is a law you can rewrite, provided you admit you rushed it. The Council did not say to give up. It said to write down the how, which happens to be the title of my last piece and took no prophetic gift, given the size of the hole.

What survives and what starts again

Not everything fell. The ban on phones in high schools, tucked into the same law, appeared in neither petition and takes effect when classes resume, so the least argued provision in the text will be the only one students actually meet on September 1.

Everything else moved fast. Within hours, Emmanuel Macron had instructed prime minister Sébastien Lecornu to prepare a "legally sound" version as quickly as possible, aiming to land it by spring 2027 and to square it with the European framework^[4]. Miller intends to rework her own draft. The timeline is worth a laugh, since a bill carried for eighteen months and struck down in three weeks now restarts for another eighteen, this time in an election year, and an election year has never improved anyone's legislative drafting.

The ruling did hand the government something it lacked, which is a specification. A second version holds up if it varies by age and by service instead of closing the social web in one gesture, if it lets a parent allow what that parent judges allowable, and above all if it writes into law the verification mechanism the first version forgot. That mechanism already exists. The standard published by Arcom, France's broadcast and digital regulator, and cleared by the data protection authority has governed adult sites since January 2025 through double anonymity, where the site learns you are over eighteen without learning who you are, while the verifier learns who you are without learning where you went^[5]. It took a constitutional defeat to make that document legible to Parliament.

Meanwhile, California shipped

On August 18, four days after the ruling, OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens, a version of its assistant built for thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds. It opens in waves and should reach the rest of the world within about two weeks^[6]. A teenager lands there automatically, either because they stated their age, or because their account details give them away, or because the system guesses they are under eighteen from the kind of questions they ask. When it cannot tell, it assumes minor and leaves the adult to prove otherwise.

The line that matters for my purposes sits in the help documentation. OpenAI receives no ID document and no photo of anyone's face, only a date of birth or an age estimate, while the rest stays with the vendor doing the checking^[7]. That is the Arcom standard, adopted voluntarily by an American company nobody had asked. On content, the assistant pulls back on self-harm, suicide, and anything romantic or sexual, and refuses to imply it feels anything, a precaution aimed less at modesty than at attachment. On the parental side, both parties have to opt in, parents can set quiet hours and get alerted when their kid appears to be in acute distress, and at no point do they get to read the conversations.

Technically that is close to the Council's list of complaints, handled in order and shipped in a week. It grades access by age instead of closing the door, it verifies without collecting papers, and its parental controls stop short of surveillance. I would be dishonest if I pretended not to enjoy this, having asked for all of it a month ago.

I would also be dishonest if I stopped there. Estimating age from the questions someone asks means reading what they write on a running basis, which trades the ID card for behavioral profiling, and that trade costs something. A safeguard no parliament voted on can vanish the day its author reconsiders, with no debate and no appeal, whereas a law that gets struck down can be written again. A private company is drawing the boundary of childhood on its own, using criteria it publishes when it feels like it and revises whenever it wants.

I walked away with both worries intact

Nothing has shifted in my position since July 24, which is news in itself. I still want teenagers protected and still refuse to hand over my papers to get there, except that those two demands now have a referee, and it ruled against the text on the second without ruling against anyone on the first.

Spring 2027 will show whether somebody read the decision all the way through or only the press release. Until then, the only protection actually deployed for French teenagers will have been written in California by a company nobody elected, which can withdraw it on a Tuesday morning without telling anyone. That is not the kind of win I was after.

Notes

French Constitutional Council, decision no. 2026-911 DC of August 14, 2026 and its press release (in French). ↩︎
Orange Actualités, "Réseaux sociaux, après la censure, la députée Laure Miller veut revoir sa copie" (in French). ↩︎
LCP, "Réseaux sociaux, pourquoi le Conseil constitutionnel a censuré l'interdiction pour les moins de 15 ans" (in French). ↩︎
Touteleurope, "Le Conseil constitutionnel censure la loi prévoyant l'interdiction des réseaux sociaux aux moins de 15 ans", and franceinfo, "Le Conseil constitutionnel censure la loi prévoyant d'interdire l'accès des mineurs de moins de 15 ans aux réseaux sociaux" (both in French). ↩︎
CNIL, "Vérification de l'âge en ligne, la CNIL rend son avis sur le référentiel de l'Arcom" (in French). ↩︎
OpenAI, "Introducing ChatGPT for Teens", August 18, 2026. Coverage and caveats at ABC News, ["OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens, promising a more age-appropriate chatbot"](https://web.archive.org/web/20260821040337/https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/openai-launches-chatgpt-teens-promising-age-chatbot-135732018, Wayback capture from August 21, 2026). ↩︎
OpenAI, "Age prediction in ChatGPT", the help page laying out which signals it uses and which data it receives. ↩︎

The summer France changed climates

2026-08-20T00:00:00Z

On August 11, 1999, France stood outside with cardboard glasses to watch a total solar eclipse, and plenty of people had a sweater on, because the afternoon topped out somewhere between 17 and 25 °C. On August 12, 2026, twenty-seven years later almost to the day, another eclipse crossed the sky, partial this time as seen from France, and several parts of the country were sitting at 40 °C.

Serge Zaka put the two temperature maps side by side on Bluesky and said almost nothing, since there was nothing to add^[1]. I've followed him for a while, and that post is a decent summary of why. He sounds the alarm without ever giving up on explaining.

A weeping willow that died of thirst on the bank of the Luy, in the Landes, in early August 2026. It grew ten feet from the water (photo BotaFlo / Wikimedia Commons, CC0).

The storm chaser who lives under police protection

Zaka is not a television weatherman. He trained as an agricultural engineer in Dijon, earned a doctorate in environmental biology at Poitiers in 2016 with a thesis on how temperature affects forage plants, and works as an agroclimatologist, which is to say he watches what the climate grows and what it kills^[2]. He also chases storms on his own time, and one of his shots, a lone bolt of lightning over the Bay of Cannes, won the public prize at the 2021 Weather Photographer of the Year competition. In March 2025 he and Jérémie Szpirglas published Orages sur le climat, or storms over the climate.

Then there is what it costs him. On December 31, 2025, he announced that the French interior ministry had placed him under police protection after a run of death threats, calls for his murder, messages urging him to kill himself, and racist abuse^[3]. He blames part of that violence on interests tied to fossil fuel finance, and he has not slowed down. Counting degrees ought to be one of the quieter jobs available, and it now takes a certain nerve to do it out loud.

Five heat waves and seventy days without a break

"Since May, I honestly feel like we're living under some other country's climate." Zaka wrote that on August 7, as he announced the fifth heat wave of the year^[4]. The month-by-month record backs him up.

It had begun in late May, which had never happened before. From the 21st to the 30th, a heat dome parked over Western Europe across the Pentecost weekend and France hit levels it had never seen that early in the year, with up to ten straight days above 30 °C south of the Loire. Météo-France chose to call it an early heat episode rather than a heat wave, a careful way of saying it had arrived before the season officially opened^[5].

June, from the 17th to the 30th, settled the vocabulary question. On the 24th and 25th, the twenty-four-hour mean temperature across the whole country reached 30 °C for the first time since records began, in any month, where the previous peak had stopped at 29.4 °C on August 5, 2003. Paris and Limoges each ran ten hot nights back to back^[6]. I was writing about how to keep an apartment livable right in the middle of that one.

July ran from the 4th to the 19th, sixteen days of heat wave, with 37 départements, more than a third of the country, under red alert on the 12th. The month closed on an outright record, a national average of 24.9 °C, the hottest month ever measured in France since 1900, ahead of August 2003 and its 24.8 °C, with afternoons averaging 5.2 °C above normal^[7]. A fourth wave started on the 28th, and a fifth heat wave on August 8.

The number that captures all of it sits elsewhere. On August 10, Zaka pointed out that France was living through the longest run of consecutive days above seasonal normals ever observed, and that the previous record had been set in the spring of 2026, with sixty-one days between January 12 and March 13^[8]. On August 14, after 102 new monthly records fell in a single day, he counted 726 since the start of the year across the stations that have been running for more than fifty years and are considered reliable, then added a line worth more than any chart, "I'll let you guess how many cold records"^[9]. The answer is zero.

They told him to stop saying exceptional

On July 29 he posted the thread that explains best why I read him. People had been telling him to stop describing temperatures as exceptional when they clearly are not anymore, and to drop the alarmism, since these episodes come back every year and we're all still here. His answer fits in one sentence. An exception that becomes frequent does not stop being destructive^[10].

The reasoning underneath deserves a minute. Statistics are a human invention, seasonal normals get recalculated every ten years, and a curve will always absorb whatever you feed it. The oak trees have not adjusted their scale. Our forests hold the same species they held fifty or a hundred years ago, and those species have not evolved at the speed the climate is breaking, so what looks routine on our graphs stays violently abnormal for the ecosystems living under it.

Then comes the example that makes it land. The Bordeaux-Mérignac station has been measuring temperatures since 1920. Through 2025, it had recorded five days at or above 40 °C. By August 13, 2026, it had seven for that summer alone^[11]. No rolling average and no argument about word choice survives those two numbers set next to each other. The 40 °C mark has stopped being an event anyway, having gone in ten years from a handful of readings a year to 114 in 2026, a fiftyfold jump^[12].

What the summer took

On August 6, the 2026 drought became the most intense ever observed in France since record keeping began, past 1976 and past 2022^[13]. By the 14th, the country's soils held only 10% of their capacity, with no usable water left at all between La Roche-sur-Yon and Mâcon, and the Vendée, the worst-hit department, had dropped below 1% in its farm soils^[14].

Plants took the first hit. From the Vendée to Burgundy, leaf activity fell by as much as half under the combined weight of June's heat and drought, which means half the photosynthesis of an entire region shut down^[15]. Livestock followed. In late June, Zaka reported excess mortality of 1,000% in laying hens, 200% in pigs, and 45% in cattle, several million farm animals dead from heat, and authorities in Brittany forced to allow carcasses to be buried in the ground of the farms themselves^[16]. He filed the episode alongside 2003 as one of the two largest animal die-offs in recent French agriculture.

That leaves the forests, which burned everywhere. The Fontainebleau massif lost 2,050 hectares starting July 12, unheard of in the Paris region, and water bombers flew against a regional forest fire there for the first time^[17]. In the Gironde, the megafire that started at Saumos on July 22 destroyed 42,000 hectares and 240 buildings, and forced 224,000 people out of their homes at the height of the crisis^[18].

The worst part arrives once the heat leaves

On the evening of August 18, Zaka finally posted good news. After seventy straight days above normal, thousands of broken records, five heat waves, and three heat episodes, the end of the month was due back at seasonal temperatures. The good news lasted one sentence, because the rain returning to the Channel coast and the southeast will not rewet the soils for weeks, and across a wide central band of the country the drought carries on without a pause. In his words, we're not out of the woods^[19].

Two days earlier he had posted something much worse. The planet is now very likely headed for the most intense El Niño since anyone started watching, and probably for centuries^[20]. El Niño is a periodic warming of surface water in the equatorial Pacific that redistributes heat around the globe and mechanically pushes world temperature up for roughly a year. It does not cause climate change. It stacks on top of it, which is the problem.

American forecasts agree. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of very strong conditions between October and December at 81%, with an expected anomaly around +2.66 °C in the Pacific reference zone, where the strongest event ever measured since 1950, the winter of 1982-1983, topped out at +2.4 °C. The episode has a 97% chance of holding into early spring 2027^[21]. The first effects are already visible, since August 2026 may end up the hottest August ever measured on Earth and the Mediterranean just broke its own record with a surface average of 28.5 °C, across all months. Zaka's conclusion runs to one line I could have done without, which is that we are only at the beginning of a year of planetary records.

Back in June I wrote a whole article here about surviving a heat wave, the fan pulled back from the window, the chalk wash on the glass, the ice block behind the turbine. Two days later, in his thread about the dead livestock, Zaka dropped a sentence I haven't been able to shake. Our debates fixate on air conditioning, and that's what makes us miss the actual problem. He hadn't read my article. He was still right.

I don't regret writing it, because you have to get through the summer you're given. What I see more clearly now is the gap between adapting and watching. Zaka does the second job. He counts the records nobody counts anymore, refuses the word "normal" once it stops meaning anything, and does it under police protection, because reporting the temperature has turned into taking a side.

If you want someone to follow who helps you understand what's happening rather than just dread it, his account is there^[22]. We'll probably have to redraw the scale on those graphs again next year, and he'll be there to redraw it.

Notes

Serge Zaka, comparing temperatures during the eclipses of August 11, 1999 and August 12, 2026, Bluesky, August 12, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
Wikipédia, "Serge Zaka" (in French), for his training, thesis, photography prize, and book, accessed August 2026. ↩︎
L'Info durable, "Parler du climat au prix de sa sécurité, le combat de Serge Zaka", January 2, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
Serge Zaka, on the fifth heat wave of the year, Bluesky, August 7, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
Météo-France, "Pourquoi l'épisode de chaleur de fin mai est-il inédit par sa précocité ?" (in French), accessed August 2026. ↩︎
Météo-France, "Canicule de juin 2026, un épisode historique" (in French), for the 30 °C national average on June 24 and 25 and the run of hot nights, accessed August 2026. ↩︎
Météo-France, "Bilan climatique, juillet 2026 est le mois le plus chaud et un des plus secs" (in French), August 4, 2026. ↩︎
Serge Zaka, on the longest run of consecutive days above normal, Bluesky, August 10, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
Serge Zaka, on the year's 726 monthly records, Bluesky, August 14, 2026, and his July 7 tally, already at 655 heat records and no cold records (both in French). ↩︎
Serge Zaka, "No. I won't, and I'm not moving on to something else", Bluesky, July 29, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
Serge Zaka, on August 13, 2026 and the Bordeaux-Mérignac station, Bluesky, August 13, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
Serge Zaka, "let's not normalize this threshold", on the fiftyfold rise in readings above 40 °C, Bluesky, July 6, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
Serge Zaka, on the most intense drought ever observed in France, Bluesky, August 6, 2026, corroborated by Météo-France, "Les sols n'ont jamais été aussi secs depuis le début des mesures" (both in French). ↩︎
Serge Zaka, on the state of the soils as of August 14, 2026, Bluesky, August 15, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
Serge Zaka, on the drop in leaf activity from the Vendée to Burgundy, Bluesky, July 21, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
Serge Zaka, on excess mortality in French livestock, Bluesky, June 26, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
Wikipédia, "Incendies de 2026 en forêt de Fontainebleau" (in French), for the 2,050-hectare tally and the water bombers, accessed August 2026. ↩︎
France 3 Nouvelle-Aquitaine, "Le feu est maîtrisé, le soulagement du chef des pompiers après le mégafeu de Saumos" (in French), August 2026. ↩︎
Serge Zaka, on the end of the heat episode and the drought that continues, Bluesky, August 18, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
Serge Zaka, on the most intense El Niño since observation began, Bluesky, August 16, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
NOAA Climate Prediction Center, August 2026 ENSO diagnostic discussion, for the probabilities and the expected Niño 3.4 anomaly, accessed August 2026. ↩︎
Serge Zaka on Bluesky, @sergezaka.bsky.social. ↩︎

Claude will sign everything it writes

2026-08-18T00:00:00Z

On August 11, Anthropic posted a help page the way you file paperwork, with no announcement and no press release, a few paragraphs explaining that Claude would start marking what it writes^[1]. Three days later the quiet approach had backfired, and the company published a full article answering subscribers who were calling the mark a scarlet letter and posting screenshots of their canceled plans on X^[2].

The hand and the quill, the official illustration from the announcement (illustration Anthropic).

Three days from help page to bonfire

The help page reads like a memo. Models released from August 2 onward carry the mark at launch, older ones get it over the coming months, and the marking covers everywhere Claude speaks, the consumer app, the API, Claude Code, Cowork, and Claude Tag, including when it runs on Amazon, Google, or Microsoft infrastructure. For the images and SVG files it produces, Anthropic also attaches provenance metadata in the C2PA format, the open standard that shows whether a file has been altered since it was made.

One sentence lit the fire, the one noting that the mark travels with the text when you paste it elsewhere and sometimes survives editing. Dozens of subscribers read that as betrayal. One called it a conspiracy against innocent Claude users, another compared the mark to a scarlet letter that would stay stuck to the text long after it left the app. Most of the complaints came from people who said they only use Claude to proofread their own writing, plus developers worried that a cryptographic signature would degrade their code^[3]. On Reddit, where the same flood was expected, most people approved, and one commenter put it with a bluntness worth quoting, that the only reason to refuse the mark is wanting to lie to somebody.

The calendar explains most of it. On August 2, Article 50 of the EU AI Act took effect and now requires generative systems to mark their output in a machine-readable format, an obligation I wrote about here as it landed. Anthropic is one of roughly 190 signatories to the code of practice drafted by the European AI Office, alongside Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Mistral, and Cohere^[4]. So the watermark is no house eccentricity, and the competitors who haven't announced theirs will get there.

A coin bent one percent

The method has a name, SynthID-Text, out of Google DeepMind and published in Nature in 2024^[5]. Nothing gets added to the text, no hidden character, no extra token, and the bill doesn't move by a cent. The watermark lives in the model's hesitations. When Claude writes that the weather was cold and reaches for the next word, "overcast" and "gray" are equally good, so a secret key can tilt the draw between them and nobody sees a thing.

One choice proves nothing, the way a coin bent one percent tells you nothing on a single toss and everything after a thousand. The detector doesn't read the text, it counts, comparing how often the favored words turn up against what chance would produce. Human writing lands in the right buckets about half the time, and marked writing lands there a little too often for luck.

Google has run this inside Gemini since 2024 and measured the effect across some twenty million responses, with users reporting no difference in quality, creativity, or speed^[6]. Anthropic promises the same neutrality and adds the detail that should have defused half the revolt, that the mark carries no identifying information and traces back to no person, no company, and no conversation. It says a model came through. It never says which of its users put that model to work.

No thin space ever ratted anyone out

The stubborn legend of the invisible characters refuses to die. For two years, whole threads have catalogued zero-width spaces and narrow no-break spaces found in model output, presented as proof of covert marking. They're typographic habits picked up during training, and their fragility alone disqualifies them, because a find-and-replace wipes them in a second^[7]. A watermark you delete by accident while pasting into a form is not a watermark.

The case against the em dash rests on the same confusion, when all it reveals is a writing habit. This blog is an accidental counterexample, since French typography demands a thin space before a semicolon, an exclamation point, a question mark, and inside its guillemets, which means every one of my French articles carries dozens of them. A detector tuned to that character would convict correct French typesetting and clear anybody who sets type carelessly. Real watermarks hide elsewhere, in the statistics, where the eye doesn't go.

What the mark will never tell you

Anthropic lists the limits honestly, and they're severe. The watermark doesn't confirm that a human wrote a text, doesn't recognize output from rival models, vanishes under a full rewrite, and weakens with every edit. It works poorly on short passages and on factual ones, where too few interchangeable words exist to hold a preference, which settles the question for code and should calm the worried developers. The help page also grants that a detected mark is a signal and never a conclusion, and that its absence proves nothing about whether a machine was involved.

What worries me is what people will do with that signal. The signature attests that a model was involved somewhere, without separating the text Claude wrote from the text Claude merely fixed. A teacher or a recruiter who gets the result will read it as a verdict on authorship anyway, because that is the verdict they went looking for. Anybody writing in a second language who runs a draft past a machine ends up with a fully marked text carrying an entirely original thought, which promises some memorable injustices.

The detector doesn't exist yet. Anthropic has announced a verification API, and announced is the operative word, since nothing has shipped^[8]. No school, no employer, and no platform can read the mark, which makes for an odd object, a signature whose only reader is the party stamping it. The accusations won't wait, of course, and they will lean on the homemade detectors whose accuracy we already know.

The diligent cheater sleeps fine

The asymmetry shows up the moment you try to beat the thing, because beating it takes almost no work. Run the marked text through a model that doesn't mark, DeepSeek, Qwen, a Llama running on your own machine, and the statistics dissolve. The student running an industrial cheating operation knows that trick. The one who asked Claude to reorder a paragraph doesn't, and that's the one the mark will finger. A rule that catches only the honest and absent-minded deserves a second look.

OpenAI decided the other way, and that decision remains the most instructive part of the story. The company built its own text watermark, measured it at 99.9 percent reliability in internal testing, then left it in a drawer for two years. The stated reasons included the risk of false accusations and the damage to non-native English speakers, but one number outweighed the rest, since an internal survey found that nearly 30 percent of users would use ChatGPT less if the product carried a mark its competitors didn't^[9]. Transparency was ready, and competition put it away.

That is exactly what the European regulation repairs, by requiring the mark of everybody at once rather than of whoever is brave enough to go first. The paradox is worth savoring, since a continent that builds none of the models in question has gotten a California company to sign its output worldwide, including for American users who never voted for any of it and are saying so at length.

I'm in favor of the watermark, and not only because Brussels demands it. Knowing whether a text came out of a machine belongs to the same basic right as knowing who you are talking to, and I'll take an imperfect mechanism over the blindness that preceded it. But a mark only its issuer can read is a promise rather than a proof, and everything turns on the day that verification API opens to schools, employers, and newsrooms.

The best part is the timing. No marked model has shipped as I write this, since the current generation predates August 2 by several months^[7:1]. People canceled their subscriptions to protest a signature that never appeared in a single one of their conversations, which is, you have to admit, a fairly original way to argue for authenticity.

Notes

Anthropic, How Claude marks AI-generated content, help page published August 11, 2026. ↩︎
Anthropic, How Claude's text watermarking works, August 14, 2026. ↩︎
Amanda Silberling, Some Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them cheating at their jobs, classes, TechCrunch, August 12, 2026. Gizmodo collected the cancellation screenshots posted on X in Anthropic Explains Its Watermark System as Some Claude Users Loudly Revolt. ↩︎
The code of practice on transparency of AI-generated content was published on June 10, 2026 and had gathered around 190 signatories by the end of July. ↩︎
Sumanth Dathathri et al., Scalable watermarking for identifying large language model outputs, Nature, October 23, 2024. Google DeepMind open-sourced the code the same week. ↩︎
Rhiannon Williams, Google DeepMind is making its AI text watermark open source, MIT Technology Review, October 23, 2024. ↩︎
The clearest piece I have read on the subject, including the invisible-character legend and the real state of the rollout, is Pain in the Agent's AI text watermarks. BleepingComputer separately confirms that no model released before August 2 carries the mark yet, in How Anthropic plans to watermark Claude's AI-generated text. ↩︎ ↩︎
Anthropic mentions a detection API "coming soon" in its August 14 article, with no date and no access terms. ↩︎
Deepa Seetharaman and Matt Barnum, There's a Tool to Catch Students Cheating With ChatGPT. OpenAI Hasn't Released It, The Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2024. Simon Willison relayed the figures outside the paywall. ↩︎

Dead as Disco hits on the beat and hasn't let go

2026-08-09T00:00:00Z

"Let me show you thirty minutes." That was the promise I made a friend who came over on Friday night, while my partner and daughter were off on the beaches up north and I had the place to myself. I had bought the game that morning, we put the controller down four hours later, and I never came up with much of an excuse for the extra three and a half. Dead as Disco has been renting space in my head ever since, at moments when I should be thinking about something else, and my weekend stretched itself out without asking.

The official art isn't overselling anything. You spend most of the game upside down with a foot in the air (artwork by Brain Jar Games).

Hit on time, not hard

Dead as Disco^[1] is a brawler you play like a rhythm game, where a punch, a dodge, or a finisher only counts if it lands on the beat. Brain Jar Games calls the system Beat Kune Do, a Bruce Lee pun that turns out to be an accurate job description, since the music doesn't back the fight so much as run it.

Our first hour went badly, and not in the way we were hoping. We mashed buttons the way you do in any action game, and the enemy waves took us apart, loss after loss, until one of us worked out that slowing down was the way to speed up. Something clicked after that, less in our hands than in our ears. I wrote a few weeks ago that Clair Obscur had taught turn-based combat to dance again, and I thought I was reaching for a metaphor. Here it's in the specification.

Two of the mistakes were ours alone. We had bothered to tame none of the skills the game kept handing us, and pride pinned us to the middle difficulty against the bosses when a relaxed setting exists for exactly this, learning their patterns while enjoying yourself instead of dying. I only worked that out the next day, alone, and the same bosses went down with insulting ease. History will record that I was tired the night before and that my real talent surfaced after a good night's sleep. Whether a little clarity about the game's systems also had something to do with it stays between us.

Ex-bandmates with more stage presence than most villains

You play Charlie Disco, a washed-up star from a band that ended badly, hunting down former bandmates who became Idols while the question of who killed the drummer hangs over everything. Each Idol owns a stage, a fighting style, and a soundtrack, and the four available so far^[2] have more charisma than almost any villain I've met this year. You reach them at the end of short levels cut like music videos, which is where PC Gamer found the best description anyone has managed, a brawl through music videos in the style of a kung-fu Baby Driver^[3].

Watching someone else play turns out to be about as good as holding the controller. We traded it back and forth all evening without either of us getting bored on the bench, because the art direction, the colors, and the soundtrack keep the spectator busy while the other guy gets dismantled in 4/4.

The music carries most of that, refusing to settle into one genre and jumping from K-pop to rock to rap with no warning^[4]. I don't shop in any of those aisles as a rule, and I still caught myself turning the volume up, because with a controller in your hands the stuff absolutely rips.

The challenges hurt, and that's the point

The game also stacks challenges alongside the story, and I'd point anyone who wants to actually understand it straight at them. They're spicy, occasionally unpleasant, and each one isolates a single mechanic and makes you drill it until your hands take over. I learned more in half an hour of challenges than in two story levels, which hasn't made me any fonder of them.

A free-play mode called Infinite Disco takes the idea further, stacking endless waves under rules you can bend, with your own imported music if you feel like it and a global leaderboard that shuts off the moment it smells a modified game^[5]. With a house selection that deep, I haven't felt the need to bring my own.

The completionist in me intends to unlock all of it, however many evenings that costs, even though a few of the challenges are simply cruel. One of them makes you fight two Idols at once, and I saw it through, with one or two stars out of five to show for it. I'll leave it there, since the pride of having done it at all covers me nicely.

Early access that doesn't feel like it

Dead as Disco has worn the early access label since May 5, and someone would have to tell me, because three days of heavy use produced no crashes at all. My one glitch was a scene transition that flickered before a boss, during a cutscene and never in the middle of a fight, which is nothing to hold against a game sold unfinished. The label is mostly there to flag what's missing, since the studio expects another year of work to finish the campaign and add Idols, moves, music, and a co-op mode^[6]. At least three of them are already visible behind their locks, and I watch them the way you watch for tour dates.

The game runs about twenty euros, a price Brain Jar Games warns will climb as the content grows, and players seem to agree with me, with more than seven thousand five hundred of them giving it 97 percent positive reviews on Steam as I write this. The press came around too, and IGN gave it an 8 out of 10 with one complaint I share, that the story is still thin^[3:1].

Now I have to work on my scores, a discipline I have never medaled in, having admired the stopwatch virtuosos strictly from a spectator's chair. And once co-op lands, my friend and I won't have to trade the controller anymore, which will strip our evenings of the only rest they had.

Notes

Dead as Disco is developed and published by Brain Jar Games, and launched in early access on PC on May 5, 2026. ↩︎
Hemlock, Dex, Arora, and Prophet, the four Idols you can fight in the current build, are listed on the game's Wikipedia page. ↩︎
The line comes from the headline of PC Gamer's hands-on, which describes brawling through music videos like a kung-fu Baby Driver. Will Borger gave the game 8 out of 10 at IGN, praising its style and faulting its thin plot. ↩︎ ↩︎
The Steam page advertises more than twenty-five tracks, split between a streamer-safe original soundtrack and licensed songs. ↩︎
Infinite Disco, the custom music import, and the leaderboard cutoff when the game is modified are all documented on the Wikipedia page. ↩︎
Brain Jar Games lays out its plans in the "Why Early Access?" box on the Steam page, where the studio estimates roughly a year and promises new idols, new moves, and more music. ↩︎

Europe regulates the AI it doesn't build

2026-07-30T00:00:00Z

August 2, 2026 was supposed to be the day Europe's AI regulation stopped promising things and started requiring them. It lands on Sunday, and it lands light, because Parliament and then the Council voted in June to push the heavy obligations back sixteen months. What actually takes effect fits inside a single article, number 50, and its ambition amounts to basic manners, knowing who you are talking to.

The Strasbourg chamber, where members voted to push the heavy obligations back (photo Diliff / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0).

On Sunday, machines have to introduce themselves

Article 50 covers transparency and applies to every system, whatever its risk level. A chatbot has to tell you it isn't human, unless that much is obvious. Audio, images, video and text produced or altered by a machine have to carry a machine-readable mark, where technically feasible. Deepfakes have to say so. Anyone put through emotion recognition or biometric categorization has to be told. And AI-generated text published to inform the public on a matter of public interest has to disclose where it came from, unless a human reviewed it and took editorial responsibility for it^[1].

Missing any of that runs to 15 million euros or 3 percent of worldwide annual turnover, whichever hurts more^[2]. It isn't the revolution the calendar promised, but it isn't nothing either, because "I am a machine" heads off a startling number of misunderstandings before they start.

The hard part waits until December 2027

The rest of the text, and by far the heavier half, just slid. The package known as the Digital Omnibus, sold as simplification, was agreed between Council and Parliament overnight on May 6, cleared Parliament on June 16, and got the Council's final sign-off on June 29^[3]. So the Annex III high-risk systems, the ones that screen job applications, grant credit, grade students or watch critical infrastructure, won't be covered until December 2, 2027. The ones buried inside already-regulated products, medical devices, machinery and toys, wait until August 2, 2028.

I should be outraged and I can't manage it, because the reason holds up. The harmonized standards from CEN-CENELEC, the documents meant to spell out how you actually prove compliance on risk management, data quality and human oversight, won't be ready. First drafts went out for public consultation in November 2025 and final adoption isn't expected before the second half of 2027^[4]. It's hard to hold a company to a rule when nobody has finished writing the instructions. Europe simply admitted it had scheduled the exam before writing the syllabus.

Nobody has ever mentioned it to me

Here is the detail that struck me hardest while I put this together. I advise on and run digital projects, I spend my days inside tools stuffed with AI, enough to build my own, and nobody has ever said the name of this regulation in front of me. Not in a kickoff, not in a memo, not from a lawyer worried about the assistant we were about to install. The most discussed piece of European law since the GDPR has never made it through the door of a project I run.

The French state didn't do much better. Every country was supposed to name its market surveillance authorities by August 2, 2025. France let the date pass and was still, five months later, among the countries that had officially named nobody^[5]. It took until February 17, 2026 for the Senate to approve the text making the CNIL the lead authority, flanked by roughly fifteen sector regulators carved up by domain, consumer protection, broadcasting, banking, drugs and health technology^[6]. That same August 2, 2026 also requires every member state to open a regulatory sandbox, the supervised space where you test an AI under the regulator's eye before turning it loose^[7].

The CNIL has since put AI on its 2026 inspection program^[8], so the subject will reach people's desks eventually, mine included. Until then, Sunday's compliance work comes down to two moves for most organizations, inventory the AI that talks to people or makes content, then write an honest sentence at the top of the chatbot. I have watched website redesigns burn more energy picking a shade of blue.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is renting French GPUs

On July 21, Mistral AI and Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar deal. The easy story was the American buying the French company. What happened is the reverse, because Microsoft is renting compute from Mistral's European data centers, with no new equity stake, to serve customers on the continent who insist their data stays home^[9]. Mistral is standing up thousands of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs for it and placing its models in Azure, Foundry and Copilot Studio, while a funding round in the works reportedly targets a valuation near 20 billion euros^[10].

Sovereignty is now a service, billed by the compute-hour, bought by Microsoft from a Paris company and resold to Europeans. You can call that a French win and you wouldn't be wrong. You can also read it the way I do, that the value sits in the machines and the models, never in the articles of a regulation.

The contrast with the Brussels calendar is a little cruel. In June, an imaginary Mistral model set the networks on fire for a whole weekend, purely because we want a European AI that can compete. Days earlier, Washington had cut off access to Anthropic's two best models for every foreign national, a useful reminder of who holds the handle. In between, Europe writes rules, and at that scale rules are about all it ships.

I still prefer this Europe to the one that would have written nothing at all. A continent that starts from the principle that you are entitled to know whether you are talking to a machine defends something Washington and Beijing will never defend on its behalf. It just has to start building what it governs, or its rules will mostly apply to products made somewhere else.

So on Sunday the machines will say their names. Most of them already did, which tells you the law arrived after the habit rather than before it. See you on December 2, 2027 for the serious half, three model generations later, with a regulation that has hopefully learned to run as fast as the thing it regulates.

Notes

The obligations are set out in Article 50 of the regulation, also available on the European Commission's AI Act Service Desk. ↩︎
Article 99 sets three ceilings, 35 million euros or 7 percent of turnover for prohibited practices, 15 million or 3 percent for breaches of provider and deployer obligations including Article 50, and 7.5 million or 1 percent for misleading information given to authorities. ↩︎
Gibson Dunn, "EU AI Act Omnibus Agreement — Postponed High-Risk Deadlines and Other Key Changes". The European Parliament tracks the file on its Legislative Train Schedule. ↩︎
CEN-CENELEC joint technical committee JTC 21 owns the harmonized standards that make the regulation workable. August Debouzy covers the timeline in its analysis of the Digital Omnibus (in French). ↩︎
Amélie Favreau, MIAI, "EU AI Act Implementation: France Still Without Designated National Competent Authorities", January 20, 2026. ↩︎
Leto breaks down the split between the CNIL and the sector regulators, and Banque des Territoires covers the Senate vote in "Le Sénat valide une régulation de l'IA en mode puzzle" (both in French). ↩︎
Article 57 requires every member state to have at least one operational regulatory sandbox by August 2, 2026. ↩︎
IT Social, "Conformité IA, les chantiers que la CNIL inscrit au programme de ses contrôles 2026" (in French). ↩︎
Microsoft, "Microsoft and Mistral AI deepen strategic partnership", July 21, 2026. ↩︎
Maddyness, "Mistral AI signe un accord de plusieurs milliards de dollars avec Microsoft", July 21, 2026, and L'Usine digitale, "Pourquoi Microsoft fait aujourd'hui appel aux data centers de Mistral AI" (both in French). ↩︎

The prompt engineer is fading and that suits me fine

2026-07-27T00:00:00Z

On July 21, Anthropic posted a screenshot of Claude showing a window that offers to record your screen while you work. Your clicks, your typing, and your voice go to the model, which turns them into a skill it can reuse^[1]. Two small labels at the bottom of the image tell the rest of the story, "Recorded demonstration, 23.4s" and "Saved as /file-expenses." Twenty-three seconds of video to learn a job, or at least the part of a job nobody has ever asked for credit on.

The feature hides behind Claude's add button, between files and connectors (illustration by Anthropic).

It's open to Pro, Max, and Team subscribers in the desktop app^[1:1]. Until now, teaching Claude a piece of know-how meant hand-writing a markdown file^[2] with its instructions and its header, a chore that put off everyone except the people who enjoy that sort of thing, myself included. From here you do the task once, narrate it as you go, and the machine writes the file. That small shift says more than most model announcements, because it stops chasing raw capability and goes after the gap between the technology and everyone who owns neither a terminal nor the patience for one.

The agents are coming down from the terminal

Claude Code, the tool that reorganized a good part of my working day and a fair slice of my budget, launched in February 2025 in the least welcoming form available, a command line. Anthropic only slid it into a desktop app with file trees and progress panes in November^[3], then built Cowork in January 2026 for people whose job isn't writing code, and on July 7 moved the whole thing to the web and the phone, where tasks keep running after you close the laptop^[4]. These are the same diligent agents that pushed most web traffic over to the machines, and now they're knocking on the door of the rest of the office.

The numbers Anthropic released along the way are worth a look. Across 1.2 million sessions observed in May at more than 600,000 organizations, software development accounts for just 8.7% of use, far behind business operations at 33.4% and content production at 16.4%^[4:1]. A tool born in a developer's terminal now spends most of its day in spreadsheets and status reports, which is probably the best news of the year for anyone who thought AI belonged to a priesthood.

Anthropic isn't alone on this road. OpenAI shipped a twin feature in Codex on June 18, where a recorded demo also becomes a replayable skill, on macOS only and outside the European Economic Area, which leaves those of us in France to admire the launch video^[5]. Google opened Workspace Studio, where you describe in ordinary language what you want automated in Gmail or Drive and Gemini builds the agent, with no code and no syntax to memorize^[6]. Mistral renamed Le Chat to Vibe and gave it skills of its own for recurring work^[7]. When four rivals run the same direction inside six weeks, it stops being a hunch and becomes a shift.

One detail makes that shift legible. Anthropic published the skills specification as an open standard in December 2025, and OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and GitHub adopted it within weeks^[8]. The file Claude writes by watching you work is the same file I write by hand for this blog. We produce the same object. Claude takes twenty-three seconds and I take an evening.

The prompt engineer had a short career

Think back to spring 2023, when the press announced the arrival of the prompt engineer, the specialist whose job would be phrasing everyone else's requests. You can still measure the enthusiasm in Indeed's archives, where searches for the role climbed from two per million in January 2023 to a hundred and forty-four by April, then fell back to twenty or thirty and settled there^[9]. Three years on, Microsoft asked 31,000 workers across 31 countries which roles their employers planned to add, and prompt engineer landed second from last^[10].

Two things happened at once. Models learned to guess the intent behind a clumsy instruction, so yesterday's magic phrasing stopped paying, and the tools absorbed the technique until it disappeared from view, which screen recording finishes off because there's now literally nothing to write. The skill itself survives, and only the job title evaporates. Framing a request well still helps, the way typing fast still helps, and nobody has built a profession on that. The people who lost out weren't the ones who wrote bad instructions, they were the ones who could do nothing else.

I can't bring myself to mourn it. A job that consists of speaking correctly to a machine is a patch over a badly built machine, and its existence was always an admission of failure somewhere upstream. Losing it frees up time for better questions.

What no model has ever wanted to build

This is where the subject stops being theoretical for me. I'm a consultant and project manager in tech, not a developer, and what I like about the work comes down to one move, taking a badly expressed need and turning it into something that actually helps. I could read code without producing it, so my ideas used to die at the exact point where someone had to build them.

They don't die anymore. Meetingtime tracks speaking time and topics so a meeting ends when it's supposed to, Couplecards deals out activity cards when a couple's routine starts to set, and Taster files my films, games, and books into a filterable shelf. Three apps I use for real, each born from a specific irritation, none of which would exist if the tooling had stayed with the engineers. I've since taken to building my presentations in HTML rather than slides, because once you've made something yourself you rarely stop at the first attempt.

No model would have come up with Meetingtime, for the plain reason that no model has ever sat through forty minutes of a meeting going sideways. Machines recombine learned patterns, and they've been better at that than us for a while, while wanting something comes out of a lived annoyance, a whim, or a memory. That's the shift, and I find it cheering. The value no longer sits in how you phrase the request. It sits in having something worth asking for. At the very moment everyone is wondering what will replace them, we're being handed the tools to answer.

As long as the brain stays plugged in

None of which means easy should be confused with excused from thinking, and the early research counsels caution. A team at the MIT Media Lab had fifty-four volunteers write essays under EEG, some with ChatGPT, some with a search engine, some with nothing. The ChatGPT group showed the weakest brain connectivity of the three, struggled to quote their own text, and felt less ownership of what they'd just written, an effect the researchers call "cognitive debt"^[11]. The study is still awaiting peer review, so take it for what it is, an early signal rather than a verdict.

The second signal comes from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon, who surveyed 319 knowledge workers about 936 real tasks done with AI. Six in ten admit to less critical thinking than before, mostly on routine work, and the sharpest correlation fits in a sentence, the more you trust the machine the less you think, while trusting yourself does the opposite^[12]. We hand over our judgment most readily when we assume we couldn't do better.

So the spread of advanced features cuts both ways. It gives back a serious amount of time, and only we get to decide whether that time goes back into thinking or into not thinking at all. Nobody will settle it for us, least of all the company selling the software, whose business is getting us to use more of it.

Which leaves the question I've been turning over since that screenshot, and it isn't a technical one. If Claude can learn my movements from twenty-three seconds of video, what do I intend to do with the hours it gives back? The answer won't come from Anthropic, or OpenAI, or any screenshot on a pale green background. It takes exactly the effort the machine saves us, an irony I find rather well made.

Notes

Anthropic announced the feature on its X account on July 21, 2026. See also The Decoder, "Claude Cowork learns new skills through screen recordings and voice-over explanations", July 21, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
A skill is a folder holding an instruction file the model reads when the moment calls for it, so it knows how to carry out a particular task. This blog hosts one, describing how its articles get made. ↩︎
Business Standard, "Anthropic rolls out Claude Opus 4.5 and new Claude Code desktop app", November 25, 2025. ↩︎
TechCrunch, "The coding agent wars are spilling into the rest of the office", July 7, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
OpenAI, "Build skills", and eesel AI, "OpenAI Codex record and replay, explained", June 2026. ↩︎
Google Workspace, "Introducing Google Workspace Studio to automate everyday work with AI agents". ↩︎
Mistral AI, "Vibe, formerly Le Chat". ↩︎
SiliconANGLE, "Anthropic makes agent Skills an open standard", December 18, 2025. ↩︎
Fast Company, "'AI is already eating its own', prompt engineering is quickly going extinct", quoting Hannah Calhoon, VP of AI at Indeed. ↩︎
Microsoft WorkLab, "Work Trend Index", 2025 edition, surveying 31,000 workers across 31 countries. ↩︎
Nataliya Kosmyna et al., MIT Media Lab, "Your Brain on ChatGPT, Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task", 2025. A preprint not yet peer-reviewed, as the authors state themselves. ↩︎
Hao-Ping Lee et al., Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University, "The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking", 2025. ↩︎

Banning teens from social media without knowing how

2026-07-24T00:00:00Z

On July 21, the French Senate voted 243 to 2 to ban social media for anyone under 15, and the National Assembly followed a few hours later, 279 to 81^[1]. France becomes the first country in the European Union to go this far. A margin like that ought to reassure me, except that laws nobody argues about are rarely laws whose details anyone examined, and I'm stuck in an uncomfortable spot, sold on the principle and skeptical of nearly everything else.

The console every deputy votes from. The "pour" button got a workout on July 21 (photo Baidax / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped).

What the law actually bans

Written by deputy Laure Miller, the law bars under-15s from signing up to any social network at all, with a handful of carve-outs for things like online encyclopedias and open-source educational projects^[2]. New accounts fall under it on September 1, 2026, existing ones on January 1, 2027, which leaves four months to verify who is already signed up. The text also bans phones in high schools, extending what already applies in primary and middle schools. Socialist deputies have referred it to the Constitutional Council, which has a month to rule^[1:1].

The science is on the lawmakers' side

This is the half I have no doubts about. On January 13, 2026, the French health and safety agency Anses published an expert review of 11- to 17-year-olds describing a cluster of risks rather than a single harm, disrupted sleep, eroded self-worth, body-image disorders, cyberbullying and risk-taking, with effects that stack up in the most vulnerable and hit girls harder^[3]. Separately, a team from Corentin-Celton hospital, Université Paris Cité and Inserm published a microsimulation in PLoS Medicine covering 18.6 million adolescents born between 1990 and 2012, linking heavy social media use to 590,000 extra cases of depression^[4]. The number that stopped me is a different one, though. Annual depression prevalence among French adolescents went from 2 percent in 2014 to 9 percent in 2021.

The literature is less settled than the op-eds, so it pays to slow down. Back in 2019, Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski showed across more than 350,000 adolescents that screen use explained at most 0.4 percent of the variation in well-being, less than regularly eating potatoes, and that wearing glasses did more damage^[5]. The microsimulation authors say plainly that their model establishes no causal link. What the evidence describes is a modest average effect that turns severe for a minority, which is the standard shape of a public health problem and, conveniently, the standard shape of a subject people caricature in both directions.

My conviction rests on that minority. A teenager with parents watching, parents who know how to shut the tap off, will probably come through fine. The one who finds a bottomless feed alone at eleven has nobody doing that, and a general rule is defensible precisely for him.

Australia already ran the experiment

Except the experiment exists, and it doesn't argue for effectiveness. Australia has banned social media for under-16s since December 10, 2025, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook and Reddit included. A research team surveyed 408 adolescents aged 12 to 17 just before the rules took effect and again three months later, and published in The BMJ on June 24, 2026^[6].

More than 85 percent of under-16s were still using the covered platforms, between half and two thirds of them from their own accounts. Daily use among 14- and 15-year-olds fell from 78 to 69 percent, 12- and 13-year-olds didn't budge, and the over-16s climbed from 80 to 89 percent. Fake accounts accounted for 15 to 19 percent of respondents, private browsing 6 to 11 percent. The most instructive finding isn't the workarounds, though. Most of the minors still online hadn't needed one, because the platforms simply never identified their accounts or removed them. The sample is small, concentrated in New South Wales and self-reported, as the authors say themselves, and they note that any real effect will take years to surface. Three months in, the law's clearest achievement was a spike in the VPN charts.

The text lost its enforcer along the way

The strangest part is what the joint committee took out. Arcom, the French media regulator, vanished from the text entirely, along with the power it was meant to have to designate risky platforms and penalize the ones that ignored the rules. The rapporteur justified it by arguing that a blacklist of banned networks would expose France to breaching the EU Digital Services Act^[2:1]. The argument holds. The result holds up rather less, and Socialist senator David Ros put it bluntly, noting that nothing is left specifying how age gets verified or how anyone gets penalized.

What survives is the obligation itself, tucked into France's digital economy act, and the hope that the European regulation expected within a year fills the hole. A law that forbids without saying by what means looks a lot like an intention, and intentions have rarely stopped a determined fourteen-year-old from opening an account.

My ID goes where, exactly

Here's the other half of my discomfort, and it doesn't stop at teenagers. Verifying everyone's age means somebody, somewhere, looks at an identity document or a face, and that somebody is now an industry. Persona, one of its most visible players, already verifies users for Reddit and Roblox, runs 269 separate checks per identity, and raised 150 then 200 million dollars from Founders Fund, Peter Thiel's firm, Thiel being the co-founder of Palantir^[7]. Discord trialed the service in the United Kingdom before ending the partnership in February 2026, the backlash having outpaced the rollout^[8].

The worst case isn't hypothetical, either. It already happened. In October 2025, a Discord vendor handling support and age verification was compromised, and roughly 70,000 users had their ID photos potentially exposed, with the attackers claiming a far bigger haul^[9]. You can't rotate a passport the way you rotate a password, and I would rather not find mine in a bulk catalog somewhere.

France already has the right technical answer sitting on a shelf. The standard Arcom published in October 2024, endorsed by the CNIL and in force for pornography sites since January 2025, requires double anonymity, an arrangement where the site learns you're an adult without learning who you are, while the verifier learns who you are without learning where you go^[10]. That is exactly what should be generalized. It is also what the new law mentions nowhere, having dismissed the authority that wrote it.

As for whether a block holds, France has that answer too. When age verification became mandatory on pornography sites, Pornhub's owner chose to shut its French operation instead, and VPN installations jumped more than 300 percent in two days, with one provider reporting ten times its usual signups^[11]. A fourteen-year-old discovering VPNs thanks to a law meant to protect him is a teaching outcome nobody costed in.

What I'm hoping for anyway

I wouldn't want the skepticism to read as opposition. The health findings are solid, the waiting had gone on long enough, and I'll take a flawed law over three more years of parliamentary reports. My daughter isn't old enough to ask me about any of this, and our controller gets passed back and forth with no algorithm involved, but that conversation is coming sooner than I think.

Between now and then, everything will be settled in the implementing decrees and the European regulation, which is to say in the documents nobody reads. I'd like to find double anonymity in them, a hard ban on retaining anything, and enforcement handed to an actual body rather than to the general mood. Otherwise we'll have banned teenagers from social media and handed our papers to companies we've never heard of, which is a lot of damage for a problem left unsolved.

Notes

LCP, "Interdiction des réseaux sociaux aux moins de 15 ans, ce que contient la loi qui vient d'être définitivement adoptée", and Touteleurope, "Les députés et sénateurs français approuvent l'interdiction de l'accès aux réseaux sociaux pour les moins de 15 ans" (both in French). ↩︎ ↩︎
Public Sénat, "Réseaux sociaux, députés et sénateurs s'accordent sur une interdiction totale aux moins de 15 ans" (in French). La Quadrature du Net makes a broader case against the text in "Le Parlement vote l'interdiction des réseaux sociaux aux jeunes de moins de 15 ans" (in French). ↩︎ ↩︎
Anses, "Avis et rapport sur les usages des réseaux sociaux numériques et santé des adolescents" (in French), published January 13, 2026. The agency recommends acting at the source, opening only platforms designed and configured to protect adolescent health. ↩︎
Nicolas Hoertel et al., "Impact of excessive social media use on adolescent depression and its consequences in France, an individual-based microsimulation model", PLoS Medicine, October 2025. ↩︎
Amy Orben and Andrew K. Przybylski, "The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use", Nature Human Behaviour, 2019. ↩︎
The study ran in The BMJ on June 24, 2026, under DOI 10.1136/bmj-2026-363695. ↩︎
Open Rights Group, "Roblox, Reddit and Discord users compelled to use biometric ID system backed by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel". ↩︎
PC Gamer, "Discord's age verification rollout has ties to Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel". ↩︎
NBC News, "70,000 government ID photos exposed in Discord user hack", and Next, "Discord reconnaît une fuite de données personnelles et de documents internes" (in French). ↩︎
CNIL, "Vérification de l'âge en ligne, la CNIL rend son avis sur le référentiel de l'Arcom" (in French). Bird & Bird lays out the compliance timeline in "Double vérification de l'âge en ligne, une obligation effective depuis le 11 janvier 2025" (in French). ↩︎
It-Connect, "Blocage des sites pornographiques, les Français se tournent vers les VPN" (in French), citing figures from Top10VPN, Proton VPN and NordVPN. ↩︎

Nolan's Odyssey hugs the coastline

2026-07-22T00:00:00Z

I walked into the theater last night braced for disappointment, which made no sense at all, since the press had rolled out the red carpet for The Odyssey, 94 percent favorable on 424 reviews^[1], written by people who know far more about movies than I do. Two hours and fifty-three minutes later I came out without hating it and without loving it either, stuck in that awkward middle where you hunt for words when a friend asks whether it was worth the ticket. I promised this write-up on my way out of La Bataille de Gaulle, so here it is, cooler than I hoped.

Matt Damon as Odysseus, in a beach scene the calm sea makes almost peaceful (photo Melinda Sue Gordon, Universal Pictures).

Troy eats the Odyssey

The movie spends long stretches on the Trojan War and the horse that ends it, so you sit waiting for Odysseus to leave the way you wait for a train the board says is delayed. That prologue deserved a film of its own, a proper Iliad, instead of eating into the voyage that gives the whole thing its title. And the voyage, when it finally comes, blows past. The Sirens go by in a gust, Scylla and Charybdis barely slower, and whole stretches of the poem simply vanish, starting with the Phaeacians, whose court takes Odysseus in and hears his story in Homer. Christopher Nolan hands their job to Calypso, who feeds him the lotus and later gives him his memory back, a swap the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, himself a translator of the poem, calls "a real loss"^[2]. I was worried I'd come off as a crank, and I find myself in good company.

Circe and the Cyclops redeem the trip

The stops along the way save a lot, and some of them are gorgeous. The Cyclops delivers, but Circe walks off with the movie, commanding from her first frame to her last, in a scene I won't describe, though spoiling a story that's twenty-eight centuries old would surely be forgiven. Samantha Morton has a great deal to do with that, as does a cast that borders on the absurd, with Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Charlize Theron as Calypso, Zendaya as Athena, and Robert Pattinson leading the suitors^[3]. Not one weak link, not one scene chewed. The casting is never the problem; what the movie chooses to point the camera at is.

Ithaca goes on forever

The homecoming proves it. The final fight runs well past reason when you can call the winner in the first second, and it looks pale next to the monsters and magic of the voyage. One mortal shooting arrows at other mortals, after the Cyclops and Circe's spells, is dessert served lukewarm. We don't escape the Hollywood happy ending either, or the tidy split between the good guy and the villain, where Homer took care never to make his hero likable.

It needed a theme

The music let me down harder. Nolan asked Ludwig Göransson to drop the orchestra in favor of instruments people would have heard back then, lyre, aulos, bronze gongs, and Albanian polyphonic choirs^[4]. Lovely idea on paper, except nothing follows you out of the theater. Great movies come with a theme, the one that surfaces three days later while you're stuck in traffic, the way Hans Zimmer gave one to Gladiator and then to Interstellar, which I still consider a high-water mark and will get back to here. This score offers neither swell nor stillness, and the gap stings more when the source material was a poem meant to be sung.

Sorry, Nolan, I had no IMAX

That leaves the argument the movie's defenders lean on, and I have no screen to test it with. The Odyssey is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film^[3:1], and France has exactly one theater that can project it that way, the Pathé Odysseum in Montpellier, running the third such projector in continental Europe onto a screen 22.39 meters wide by 16.76 high, an image very nearly square^[5]. Whoever booked The Odyssey into the Odysseum earned their paycheck. Everywhere else the projection shaves the edges off, and Nolan seems to have planned for it, since his framing keeps what matters in the center and leaves the extras and the fine detail out at the margins, as the studio's own format comparison tool shows^[6]. So my screening stole none of the story from me. It just never delivered the punch Montpellier is promising.

The poem, I think, still has the edge on the adaptation, more epic and more lyrical than the fortune spent putting it on screen. I'll forget this movie soon enough, while La Bataille de Gaulle hasn't left me yet. I'd never have bet that a general in a kepi would stay with me longer than Odysseus, and I've loved mythology since I was a kid. Go figure.

Notes

As of July 22, 2026, Rotten Tomatoes showed 94 percent favorable across 424 reviews, and 97 percent from audiences. ↩︎
Daniel Mendelsohn goes through the liberties the film takes in the New York Review of Books. ↩︎
The 173-minute running time, the 250 million dollar budget, the full cast, and the all-IMAX 70mm shoot are laid out on the film's Wikipedia page. ↩︎ ↩︎
The composer walks through his choices in Variety. ↩︎
Journal du Geek toured the room (in French) and details what the other formats lose, digital IMAX projecting a version cropped to 1.90. ↩︎
The studio put up a format comparison tool that replays the trailer in each ratio. ↩︎

Clair Obscur paints the finest RPG

2026-07-21T00:00:00Z

A friend asked me yesterday for a game to play. He'd been away from controllers for a while, called himself an RPG guy, and still talked about his last favorite, The Witcher 3, the way you talk about good company you were sorry to leave. I platinumed it back in the day, so we already agreed on the basics. These holidays have handed me some breathing room, since my daughter, the one I usually share a controller with, is spending more of her days at her grandparents', which is how I wound up back in Cyberpunk 2077, finally playing it now that the bugs are gone and the thing runs the way it always should have. I'll probably write about that here too. After months of worrying I'd never find the time to play again, I'm not wasting a minute.

One title kept muscling its way into the conversation, the one that stuck with me most these past few years, and not only because it's French, though I'd be lying if I said that didn't help. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33^[1] I loved from the first minute to the last, which doesn't happen to me much anymore.

The key art tells you everything about the game's vertigo, a handful of explorers facing the burning 33 that counts down the years they have left (art by Sandfall Interactive).

The story I didn't skip

Confession time. I usually skip a game's dialogue the way you skip ads, itching to get back to the controller. Clair Obscur cured me of that. Its world, built around painting and what painting erases, pulled me in until I caught myself listening to every line and then dreading the next one. I won't give any of it away, because the world is worth the trip and deserves to be found on your own, but the premise fits in one cruel little sentence, an expedition sets out each year to push back the deadline, and the thirty-third is yours. The rest you earn.

Turn-based combat learns to dance

Controller in hand, Clair Obscur pulls off something I'd written off as impossible, making turn-based combat exciting again. You pick your moves like in any old RPG, except nothing about it is passive, because every enemy attack can be parried, dodged, or countered in real time, down to the fraction of a second^[2]. It plays as much like a rhythm game as an RPG, and I found in it, as someone who burns his evenings on the Souls games, that sense of a dance I thought belonged to pure action. Square Enix, which spent years walking its Final Fantasy games off turn-based combat, might want to look twice.

I fought with my eyes closed

Then there's the music. Lorien Testard wrote it, weaving opera into metal across more than a hundred and fifty tracks and eight hours of music, and I keep it on loop long after I put the controller down. It went on to top Billboard's classical chart for six weeks and win Best Score at the Game Awards^[3]. None of that surprises me.

In combat the soundtrack does far more than decorate. Enemy attacks announce themselves to the ear as much as the eye, so I often trusted the sound to time my counters, and on the fights I knew by heart I closed my eyes. Dancing a dodge blind, guided by the music alone, is a pleasure I never expected from a turn-based game.

It isn't all a stroll, mind you. One of the last optional bosses struck me as unfairly hard, the kind you only clear by following a guide to nuke everything before it lands a hit, and part of the content the studio added for free to thank its players^[4] pushes the punishment further still. I left some nerves there, and a good chunk of my pride.

What it'll cost you

Figure on thirty hours or so to follow the story straight through, fifty if you wander into the side quests, and up to seventy if, like me, you have to turn over every stone^[5]. The game swept nine Game Awards, a record, Game of the Year included^[6], so you almost certainly didn't wait for my blessing to start. But if the world passed you by, take the plunge, especially since the story shuts its last door while letting a little light through, and I'm already watching to see what gets painted next.

So, bravo to the developers, the musicians, everything holding this thing up. Every one of those trophies is earned.

Weeeeee.

Notes

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the debut game from Sandfall Interactive (in French), a Montpellier studio founded in 2020. It launched on April 24, 2025, and sold two million copies in twelve days. ↩︎
Xbox Wire breaks down this "reactive" turn-based system, where you parry and dodge in real time, in "A Detailed Breakdown of its Painterly RPG Combat". ↩︎
Wikipedia's page on the game's music covers Lorien Testard's five years of work, its run atop Billboard's classical chart, and its Best Score win at the 2025 Game Awards. ↩︎
The free "Thank You" update, released December 12, 2025, adds areas, quests, and even nastier bosses as a gift to players, as Forbes lays out. ↩︎
Median times pulled from HowLongToBeat. ↩︎
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took nine prizes at the 2025 Game Awards from thirteen nominations, Game of the Year among them, a record for a single title, as NPR reports. ↩︎

La Bataille de Gaulle, my Bastille Day with the General

2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

There were two ways to be French this Tuesday, July 14. You could wait for tonight's World Cup semifinal between France and Spain^[1], or you could lock yourself in the dark for five hours and sixteen minutes with Charles de Gaulle. Anyone who read my SGDQ article can guess which way I leaned, and since I don't have a Letterboxd account, this blog will double as my movie notebook, as it already did for The Wave.

A full day at the movies takes some planning when you're the father of a four-year-old. Negotiations with my partner, who watched our daughter in the meantime, came at a steep price. Fine, I'm exaggerating, she was great about it, but whole days to myself don't come around every month, and if I was going to spend one being this thoroughly French, the national holiday seemed like the obvious date.

Simon Abkarian as Charles de Gaulle in L'Âge de fer (photo Malgosia Abramowska, Pathé Films, TF1 Films Production, Belvédère, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinéma).

Five hours and sixteen minutes, watch in hand

The project commands respect before the first frame. Pathé handed Antonin Baudry, co-writing with Bérénice Vila, a story split across two films released three weeks apart, L'Âge de fer (The Iron Age) on June 3 and J'écris ton nom (I Write Your Name) on June 26, running 159 and 157 minutes on an announced budget of 74 million euros^[2]. The second title quotes the refrain of Paul Éluard's "Liberté," a poem French schoolchildren still learn by heart, which tells you something about the level of care. From the Montcornet counterattack in May 1940 to the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the two films cover four years of war, and French audiences have kept up, with the pair closing in on 2.5 million admissions by early July^[3].

A marathon, then, and I swallowed it whole with an enthusiasm the air conditioning only partly explains, though in this weather it has earned the mention, since I've already told you what heat does to me^[4]. I never once checked the time. Everything moves, everything holds your attention, and while the films never flash their sources on screen, you can feel actual history under the storytelling. Whole chapters from my school years came back to me, material I thought I had handed in along with my final exams.

London didn't want him

I won't give much away, certainly not the best scenes, but I'll admit my surprise at the trouble de Gaulle runs into when he lands in London. You picture Free France backed from day one by convinced allies; the film shows a man nearly alone, an inconvenience to the British and a suspect to the Americans. Simon Abkarian inhabits the role without ever drifting into impression, opposite a delicious Simon Russell Beale as Churchill, and the cast lined up behind them (Niels Schneider as Leclerc, Mathieu Kassovitz as Darlan, Thierry Lhermitte as Giraud) has no weak link^[2:1]. I usually run cold on French movies, and I tip my hat anyway. The direction and the acting are exemplary.

Banknotes with an agenda

The second film tightened my throat, because it deals less in battles than in sovereignty. It shows a plan for carving up Europe that chills the blood, banknotes that say more than any speech, and a training school that would be funny if it weren't real. The dizzying part is how little the movies invented. The Allies really did print money for liberated France in Massachusetts, the "flag notes" that landed in soldiers' packs on June 6, 1944, and that de Gaulle denounced as counterfeit currency^[5], while American officers trained at Yale and Charlottesville for careers as administrators of France^[6]. De Gaulle's ideas about national sovereignty haven't aged a day, and with the 2027 presidential election approaching, the candidates could stand to take notes of their own and treat foreign interference as the danger it is.

A few more minutes, Mister President

The only thing missing is an epilogue. I would have taken a few more minutes to see the General in his president's uniform, outside the frame of war, or at least of the military kind, since the political kind never signs an armistice. I won't hold it against the films; I hadn't had this good a time at the movies in years.

And I'm going back this week, because Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens in France tomorrow^[7], an American mega-production shot in IMAX 70mm with Matt Damon as Odysseus. Homer's poem has fascinated me since forever, so I'm walking in already won over, which is the surest way to walk out disappointed. I'll report back in a future article, unless it turns out to be a disaster, in which case I'll spare you a long rant about nothing.

Notes

The France-Spain semifinal kicks off on July 14 at 9 p.m. Paris time in Dallas, as Toute l'Europe details (in French). Yes, a semifinal on Bastille Day. The schedule has a flair for staging. ↩︎
Direction, script, runtimes, budget, and cast are detailed on the diptych's Wikipedia page. ↩︎ ↩︎
As of July 7, Puremédias counted 1.65 million admissions for part one and 813,000 for part two (in French). ↩︎
Twenty-six French departments were under a red heat alert on July 14, per franceinfo (in French). ↩︎
The story of the flag notes (in French), printed by the Forbes Lithograph Corporation near Boston and banned from circulation by the provisional government in late June 1944. ↩︎
The Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories, or AMGOT, was set to run liberated France as an occupied territory. ↩︎
July 15, 2026 in French theaters, two days ahead of the US release, per AlloCiné (in French). ↩︎

GPT-5.6 Sol, the sun that throws shade at Fable

2026-07-12T00:00:00Z

On Thursday, July 9, OpenAI opened GPT-5.6 to the public after two weeks of restricted access for a handful of hand-picked partners^[1]. I don't cover every model release, there's one a week and this blog would not survive the pace, but I do follow Anthropic and OpenAI more closely than the rest, since each still leads its side of the field. This time the calendar deserves a look of its own, because on July 12, three days later, Anthropic is due to pull Fable 5, its best model, out of its subscription plans. OpenAI is aiming at the king, and it's aiming at the wallet.

The solar system according to OpenAI (image OpenAI).

Sol, Terra, and Luna, OpenAI discovers astronomy

The GPT-5.6 family comes in three models named after celestial bodies, and the company promises the names now mark durable product lines rather than disposable versions^[1:1]. Sol, the flagship, targets advanced reasoning, software development, scientific research, and complex agents. Terra aims at everyday work with GPT-5.5 performance at half the cost, while Luna competes on speed and rock-bottom pricing. For a company that spent years naming its models like motherboard part numbers, the sudden turn to poetry is a welcome development.

Money is where it gets interesting. On the API, a million input tokens^[2] on Sol runs $5 and a million output $30, with Terra at half those rates and Luna at a fifth^[3]. More to the point, Sol is available in ChatGPT starting with the $20 Plus plan, with the Sol Pro variant reserved for the pricier tiers^[4], and all three models landed in GitHub Copilot the same day^[5]. Keep those numbers in mind, they make the rest of this story considerably funnier.

One detail of the launch deserves a pause, because it continues a story told on this very blog. The late-June restricted preview happened at the US government's request, a June executive order now requires labs to submit their most powerful models thirty days before release, and the Commerce Department tested GPT-5.6 before clearing the wide rollout^[3:1]. OpenAI clearly took notes during Anthropic's misadventure, when Washington pulled the plug by decree in June, and the government-in-the-loop arrangement I wrote about last week took barely a week to become standard procedure. Launching a model now looks a lot like launching a rocket, government safety review included, which is fitting given the names.

The benchmarks are a tie, for whatever that's worth

On paper, the duel with Fable 5 ends in a draw. Artificial Analysis, the only neutral evaluator to have measured both models, scores Fable at 60 and Sol at 59 on its composite index, a gap that lives comfortably inside the margin of error^[6]. Beyond that, each side waves the numbers that flatter it. Sol claims 88.8% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 against Fable's 83.4%, while Fable rules SWE-Bench Pro at 80.3% on a test where OpenAI has prudently declined to publish a score^[6:1]. Two vendors, two measuring tables, and almost no shared benchmark^[7], which makes the comparison about as rigorous as a fishing contest where everyone brings their own scale.

Which is a good moment to repeat a conviction of mine, the numbers don't settle it. A few years back, when ChatGPT was widely considered far ahead of Claude, I never warmed to OpenAI's model, which hallucinated more and followed instructions the way a teenager follows curfew. Benchmarks measure test performance, not the feeling of working with a tool that understands what you asked for, and that feeling, for me, has always sat on Claude's side. A statistical tie on the charts can hide a clear winner in daily use, in either direction.

Meanwhile, on planet Anthropic

The real battlefield is elsewhere, in how each company charges for access to its best model. Anthropic plans to remove Fable 5 from its subscriptions and gate it behind prepaid credits at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, double Sol's price. The deadline, originally July 7, has already slipped to July 12, and the company swears the retreat is a temporary capacity measure, with the model returning to subscriptions once the hardware catches up^[8]. I believe the intention. I just don't see what world the plan survives in. Pulling your best model from subscriptions at the exact moment your competitor slides its own into a $20 plan hands them a ready-made sales pitch, and once you've extended the deadline once, it gets awkward not to extend it forever. Competition, it turns out, has its perks, mostly for us.

The economics tilt the same way. OpenAI's tokens cost half as much and the model reportedly burns fewer of them per task^[6:2], while on Anthropic's side you need a Claude Max plan at roughly a hundred euros a month, minimum, to avoid hitting the usage limits within the hour, especially if you vibecode^[9] a little too enthusiastically, as I do. I love these models and I keep coming back to them, but the bill does raise my eyebrow now and then.

So I'm keeping my Anthropic subscription, out of attachment as much as habit, but OpenAI just landed a punch that puts it squarely back in the race. I should make time for a little infidelity and test Sol with my own hands, on my own projects, my fussy instructions, and my marathon coding sessions, instead of everyone else's benchmarks. If the experiment teaches me anything, you'll read about it here. Sol may be throwing shade at the fable, but it remains to be seen which of the two ends up lighting my desk.

Update, July 12. Anthropic has pushed the deadline back a second time, and Fable 5 now stays in subscriptions through July 19^[10]. I wrote yesterday that once you extend a deadline, it gets awkward not to extend it again. I did not expect the confirmation before the weekend was out.

Notes

OpenAI, "GPT-5.6", July 9, 2026, and "Previewing GPT-5.6 Sol", June 26, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
The token is the unit language models count in, a fragment worth about three quarters of a word on average. APIs bill per million tokens read (input) and produced (output). ↩︎
Engadget, "OpenAI gets permission to roll out GPT-5.6 to the public on July 9", July 2026, and CNBC, "OpenAI to publicly release GPT-5.6", July 8, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
9to5Mac, "OpenAI unveils ChatGPT Work agent, GPT-5.6 models now available", July 9, 2026. ↩︎
GitHub, "OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna are now available in GitHub Copilot", July 9, 2026. ↩︎
Drawpie, "GPT-5.6 Sol vs Claude Fable 5: Cost, Benchmarks and What the Tests Actually Show", July 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Benchmarks are the standardized test batteries that grade models on code, reasoning, or general knowledge. Each lab mostly publishes the ones it shines on. ↩︎
The New Stack, "Anthropic gives Claude subscribers five more days with Fable 5", July 2026. ↩︎
Vibecoding is programming by describing what you want to an AI that writes the code, iterating by conversation rather than by hand. Excellent for productivity, ruinous for the token meter. ↩︎
The Fable 5 promotional access now runs through July 19, 2026, on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, as Anthropic's support page details. ↩︎

Xbox cuts jobs, the Fed hires its CEO to study jobs

2026-07-10T00:00:00Z

On Monday, July 6, Asha Sharma signed the internal memo Xbox employees had been dreading for months. "Our business today is not healthy," the head of the brand wrote, before announcing 1,600 immediate job cuts, the first installment of 3,200 spread over the coming year^[1]. Three days later, the Federal Reserve named her to lead a task force on productivity and jobs^[2]. The calendar has comedic timing I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Asha Sharma, head of Xbox since February 2026 (photo Microsoft).

The biggest restructure in Xbox history

The announcement deserves a closer look, because the numbers are dizzying. Microsoft is cutting 4,800 positions overall, about 2.1% of its workforce, including 1,600 at Xbox right now and another 1,600 by next summer, in what Sharma herself calls "the most significant restructure in Xbox history"^[1:1]. Her memo doesn't sugarcoat much. In a typical year, we learn, the division lost "64 cents for every dollar we invested"^[3]. Four studios are leaving the ship while it turns. Double Fine and Compulsion Games get their independence back, IP tucked under their arms, while Undead Labs and Ninja Theory move to new owners with enough funding to finish their current games, which adds up to roughly 350 people changing employers overnight^[3:1].

If this gives you déjà vu, that's because it is one. Since acquiring Activision Blizzard in late 2023, Microsoft has laid off nearly 1,900 studio employees in January 2024, shut down Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin that May, let 650 more people go in September, then cut around 9,000 positions in the summer of 2025 while canceling Everwild and Perfect Dark^[4]. At this point, restructuring isn't an event at Xbox. It's a season.

The sharpest detail is that Sharma has only held the job since February. She came from Microsoft's CoreAI division by way of Meta and Instacart, with zero experience in video games, and succeeded Phil Spencer, a fixture of the house for thirty-eight years, promising to "recommit to our core Xbox fans and players" and not to "chase short-term efficiency"^[5]. Five months later, short-term efficiency appears to have caught up with everyone.

A hemorrhage that doesn't spare France

Xbox is, sadly, just the latest chapter in a crisis that has been grinding through the industry for four years. Between 2022 and mid-2025, video games shed some 45,000 jobs worldwide, peaking at nearly 15,650 in 2024 alone^[4:1]. And 2026 had a head start well before Microsoft's announcement, with more than 3,700 cuts already on the books, including a thousand at Epic Games, some 400 at Bungie, and 680 at Ubisoft^[4:2]. The GDC's annual survey puts a human scale on the damage, with one in three American developers reporting a layoff within the past two years^[6]. One in three. In any other cultural industry, we would be talking about a national emergency.

France isn't watching the storm from a deck chair. Ubisoft, the national flagship, closed its 2025-2026 fiscal year with a record loss of a billion and a half euros, launched a restructuring in January that cost about 200 jobs at its Paris headquarters and set off several strikes, then announced in June another 380 layoffs and the closure of its Winnipeg and Belgrade studios, following Halifax and Stockholm^[7]. Behind every line of these balance sheets are the people who make the games we love, the ones we grind for years and the ones we hand to our kids. Forgive me if "streamlining" feels a little light for the occasion.

Meanwhile, in Washington

Which brings us to the irony promised in the title. On Thursday, July 9, Kevin Warsh, the new Federal Reserve chairman, announced five task forces charged with rethinking American monetary policy. One of them, named "Productivity and Jobs," is supposed to assess the economic impact of new technologies, artificial intelligence first among them, and deliver recommendations by the end of the year. Its three co-leads are venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Stanford economist Charles I. Jones, and one Asha Sharma^[2:1].

So within the same week, the same person eliminated 1,600 jobs and joined the body tasked with thinking about the future of employment, a coincidence Aftermath noted with its customary gentleness^[8]. To be fair, the pick has its own internal logic. Who better to brief the central bank on what new technologies do to employment than an AI executive currently automating and downsizing an entire division? Her dataset is extremely fresh. One just wishes the expertise had come at a price other than 3,200 households.

Now we can only hope this hemorrhage of bad news stops, or at least slows down, because the industry is running out of hands to stanch it. Analysts want to see a cycle nearing its end, and the early 2026 numbers did suggest a slight improvement before Microsoft weighed in^[9]. I'd like to believe them, out of optimism and out of a gamer's plain self-interest. In the meantime, a thought for Monday's 1,600, and for the 1,600 who already know their turn is coming. They won't need a task force to measure the impact of new technologies on employment.

Notes

Fortune, "'Our business today is not healthy', 1,600 Xbox employees among the 4,800 laid off by Microsoft", July 6, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
Federal Reserve, official press release on the task force lineup, July 9, 2026, with details from CNBC. ↩︎ ↩︎
Aftermath, "Xbox Will Lay Off 3,200 Workers And Cut Four Studios Loose", July 6, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
Wikipedia keeps a grim running tally on its "2022–2026 video game industry layoffs" page. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Microsoft, "Asha Sharma named EVP and CEO, Microsoft Gaming", February 20, 2026, and CNBC on Phil Spencer's retirement. ↩︎
Variety, "One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off Over the Last Two Years", January 2026, based on GDC's State of the Game Industry 2026 survey of more than 2,300 professionals. ↩︎
RTBF, "Restructuration massive d'Ubisoft" (in French), and Gameblog, "Ubisoft licencie 380 personnes et ferme deux studios" (in French), June 2026. ↩︎
Aftermath, "Xbox Boss Asha Sharma Appointed To Federal Reserve 'Productivity And Jobs' Task Force The Same Week She Laid Off 1,600 People", July 9, 2026. ↩︎
Game Developer, "Data points to slowing layoffs, but doesn't capture true harm to game industry", 2026. ↩︎

SGDQ 2026, my speedrunning World Cup

2026-07-12T00:00:00Z

Summer Games Done Quick 2026 opened on Sunday in Minneapolis, where players from all over the world will take turns day and night until July 11, finishing video games as fast as humanly possible to raise money for Doctors Without Borders^[1]. I look forward to this event every summer with an impatience I grant to very few things, and certainly not to the soccer World Cup currently playing out on the same continent, even though my national team happens to be the bookmakers' favorite^[2]. We all worship somewhere.

The Summer Games Done Quick crowd, here in 2019, already in Minneapolis (photo Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0).

Finishing a game fast, then faster

The idea fits in one sentence, since a speedrun is simply a playthrough against the clock. Everything interesting hides behind that sentence. Runners compete in categories with precise rulesets, like any%, where anything goes as long as the credits roll, 100%, which requires collecting everything, or glitchless, which bans exploiting bugs altogether. Bugs are the crown jewels of the discipline. Entire communities spend years dissecting a game frame by frame, forcing situations no developer ever imagined, discovering that a bomb placed on exactly the right pixel clips you through a wall and saves twenty minutes. Those findings get stitched into routes that runners then rehearse thousands of times, until their hands know the game better than their memory does.

I still can't decide whether speedrunning belongs with sports or with art. It demands the training discipline of the first and the creativity of the second, plus a collective research effort you won't find anywhere else, since every record stands on years of shared discoveries. Watching someone play a game may already sound odd, so I understand the confusion when the someone is methodically dismantling a game you spent forty hours finishing. Yet it delivers the pleasure of a magic trick performed with the curtain up, and the wonder survives, because the trick takes ten years of practice even after it's explained.

A week-long marathon for a good cause

Since 2010, the American organization Games Done Quick has run two big charity marathons a year, Awesome Games Done Quick in January and Summer Games Done Quick in the summer, streamed around the clock on Twitch and YouTube. Viewers donate during the runs, and donations unlock challenges, bonus runs, or the right to name the save file, which gives the evenings the feel of a telethon with controllers. The formula works beyond all reason. The organization has handed nearly 60 million dollars to charities since it started^[3], including 2.44 million raised this past January for cancer prevention^[4]. The edition that just opened kicked off with a 102% run of Donkey Kong Country 2, which sets the tone. The schedule covers seven days, and fair warning, it is unreasonable.

Link's Awakening, my pocket-sized Everest

My respect for runners is not theoretical, because I tried it myself. My proving ground was The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, a game I ground down for years and thought I knew screen by screen. The community has documented shortcuts of absurd elegance there, including a trip through the doghouse that teleports Link across the island^[5]. I figured I was starting with a head start, and instead I found the canyon between finishing a game blindfolded and finishing it fast. Every screen has an optimal path, every menu a maneuver that shaves off a second, and stringing it all together demands a precision my hands never agreed to provide. I walked away with a time I will not print and a lasting admiration for the people who hold that pace for an hour straight, live, in front of a full house.

Speedrunning speaks French too

Long the domain of American conventions, the charity marathon found a French standard-bearer in SpeeDons, hosted by streamer MisterMV, whose 2026 edition gathered more than 2.3 million euros for Doctors of the World in Lyon this May, a national record^[6]. The discipline is slowly outgrowing its niche, and I plan to keep writing about it, because nothing else gives me this particular blend of ingenuity, patience, and virtuosity.

So yes, the World Cup is in full swing and Les Bleus have a star to chase, and I will watch the matches. But if one evening this week you find yourself choosing between a match and a stranger walking through the walls of a game from your childhood in front of a roaring crowd, give the stranger five minutes. Don't blame me for the missing night of sleep.

Update, July 12. The curtain came down in Minneapolis on Saturday night with more than $2.4 million raised for Doctors Without Borders^[7]. The counter read less than $1.5 million going into the final day, which brought in nearly a million on its own and unlocked two bonus runs along the way. The audience knows how to finish fast too.

Notes

July 5 through 11, 2026, at the Hilton in Minneapolis, streamed nonstop on Twitch and YouTube, as Engadget details. ↩︎
Bookmakers rank France first among the favorites of this 48-team World Cup, hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico through July 19, as Eurosport reports (in French). ↩︎
That's 59.8 million dollars since 2010, according to Game Developer. ↩︎
AGDQ 2026, held in Pittsburgh in January, raised 2.44 million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, as GameSpot reports. ↩︎
The categories, the rules, and the famous doghouse are all documented on speedrun.com. Yes, the doghouse. Speedrunning is a hobby where that sentence counts as technical documentation. ↩︎
Exactly 2,344,688 euros collected from May 7 to 10, 2026, at the Amphithéâtre in Lyon, according to AFJV (in French). ↩︎
The still-provisional total hovered around $2.41 million the day after the finale, as Eurogamer and Shacknews report. ↩︎

Fable 5 Is Back, the Government in the Loop

2026-07-01T00:00:00Z

The fable got a sequel, and a lot sooner than I'd have bet. Three weeks after pulling Fable 5 on Washington's orders, Anthropic has switched it back on. On the evening of June 30, the Commerce Department lifted the export controls that had hit Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and as of July 1 the consumer model is available worldwide again^[1]. I'd left the story on a question, how long a country can afford not to have a model of its own, and now the news answers first with a different one, trickier, about the terms of the return.

The official artwork for the Claude 5 family (image by Anthropic).

The story resumes, with strings attached

The comeback isn't a simple flip of the switch. Fable 5, the model open to everyone, returns worldwide, but Mythos 5, its guardrail-free version reserved for cybersecurity professionals, only reopens for a circle of approved US organizations, the government having signed off on June 26^[1:1]. Put plainly, the muzzled model goes global again while the unmuzzled one stays in American hands. The sovereignty I wrote about last month didn't wait long to make its point.

There's a subtler catch. To keep the incident from repeating, Anthropic redeployed Fable 5 with a fresh batch of classifiers meant to spot and block the cybersecurity requests it deems sensitive. The trouble is that the net is still coarse, coarse enough that chores as ordinary as writing or debugging code get bounced, for now, over to Opus 4.8, last generation's model^[1:2]. The company admits its own classifier snags plenty of perfectly legitimate requests along the way, and promises to sharpen it over the coming weeks so it can tell real misuse from a developer's ordinary curiosity. So Fable is back, just a notch more muzzled than before.

The accuser was Amazon

Last month I pieced the affair together from the little we had, a "rival company" that supposedly bypassed the model's protections. The veil has lifted, and, I'll admit, the name is worth a grin. The accuser was Amazon, whose researchers showed that feeding Fable 5 a codebase could get it to flag a string of software flaws and, in one case, to produce a rough bit of code to exploit them^[1:3]. It was Amazon's chief executive himself, Andy Jassy, who reportedly tipped off the White House^[2]. Washington's version is less flattering to Anthropic, mind you, since adviser David Sacks accuses the company of refusing to fix the flaw before the controls came down, while a Chinese group had reportedly already gotten hold of the model, against a backdrop of ongoing friction with Beijing^[3].

And Amazon is no ordinary rival. It's Anthropic's largest backer, the one that has poured billions into the company while raising its own house models on the side. Watching it trigger, with a quiet note to the authorities, the shutdown of the crown jewel it partly owns is quite the high-wire act. The punchline lands even better, since this same Amazon now sits among the partners drafting the framework meant to judge how serious a jailbreak is. The arsonist has picked up a fire hose.

Then comes the best part, the one that vindicates the suspicion I aired in June. Anthropic now says Amazon's demonstration was nothing special, since every model it tested produced the very same result, from little Haiku 4.5 up through the successive Opus releases, by way of OpenAI's GPT-5.4 and 5.5 or China's Kimi K2.7^[1:4]. The flaw wasn't in Fable, it was in the notion that a model able to read code could, by its very nature, spot flaws in it. They unplugged a tool for a knack every serious model on the market shares.

The state moves upstream

If the model came back, it wasn't for the price of a simple patch, but of a lasting rapprochement between the company and the government. Anthropic says it's expanding its collaboration with the US government on evaluating its models, which covers three concrete commitments: early access to models and their safeguards before public release, quick sharing of information on jailbreaks and misuse, and dedicated resources for joint research^[1:5].

What this arrangement sketches goes well beyond last month's incident. The state no longer steps in only after the fact, unplugging what worries it; it settles in upstream, in the engine room, where it's decided what a model will be allowed to know how to do. The "state secret" I described turns into co-management, quiet and permanent, between a private company and its government.

The move doesn't stop at Anthropic's door. With Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, the company is sketching a shared framework for gauging how serious a jailbreak is, along four criteria running from the real capability it hands an attacker to how easily that capability can be put to use^[1:6]. In parallel it's opening a HackerOne program so security researchers can flag the next flaws. The intent is fair enough, and it would be churlish to sneer at an industry finally trying to give itself some rules. Except that these rules are written by the same handful of American companies, watched over by the same government, for models the rest of the world will simply get to use.

Sonnet 5, the lesson learned

One last detail, and not a trivial one. The day before the announcement, on June 30, Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 5, a lighter model that aims at Opus 4.8's performance for a good deal less money^[4]. But the trait that catches the eye, given the moment, is that Sonnet 5 deliberately underperforms on cybersecurity tasks, its safeguards there switched on by default. June's lesson clearly stuck, and it turned into a product feature, a model built not to know how to do the very thing that might get it unplugged.

So Fable 5 is back, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't glad, because getting a good tool back is always a small pleasure. Only the fable changed its moral along the way. It no longer says merely that a government can switch a model off with the stroke of a pen; it says a government can now pull up a chair at the table where the model is built, and stay there. The power is back on. The real question is who's holding the switch now.

Notes

Anthropic, "Redeploying Claude Fable 5", June 30, 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Fortune, "How a warning from Amazon led the White House to shut down Anthropic's Mythos model", June 14, 2026. ↩︎
Tom's Hardware, "Trump adviser David Sacks says Anthropic refused to fix Fable 5 jailbreak before US export controls", June 2026. ↩︎
Anthropic, "Claude Sonnet 5", June 30, 2026. ↩︎

The Biter Bit, Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of Copying Claude

2026-06-27T00:00:00Z

Anthropic is furious, and you can see why. In a letter to US lawmakers and the White House, the company behind Claude accuses Chinese giant Alibaba of running the largest campaign yet to strip-mine its models^[1]. The technique has a tidy name, distillation, which means hammering a strong model with questions, harvesting its answers, and training a cheaper rival to imitate them^[2]. From where Anthropic sits, that's years of research and billions of dollars evaporating in a few weeks. From a step back, it's the biter bit.

An illustration by Anthropic, taken from its official site.

Twenty-five thousand fake accounts to copy Claude

The numbers are dizzying. Between April 22 and June 5, operators tied to Alibaba and its Qwen lab allegedly spun up close to twenty-five thousand fake accounts to query Claude some 28.8 million times, hiding their tracks behind proxy networks^[3]. The queries went after the model's most valuable skills, coding and agentic reasoning, its knack for running long tasks on its own without anyone holding its hand^[1:1]. Alibaba then allegedly poured the haul into its own Qwen models, which in Anthropic's words turns "hundreds of billions of dollars in American investment" into "a massive subsidy for our geopolitical competitors"^[2:1].

When distillation becomes a matter of state

This is well past a business spat. Anthropic took its case to Congress and the White House, asking for penalties on Chinese labs, tighter chip export controls, and an antitrust carve-out so AI firms can pool intelligence on Chinese tactics^[3:1]. The timing isn't innocent, since the campaign allegedly ran in open defiance of the administration's warnings, days after Washington locked down access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models^[4]. Alibaba denies all of it, casting itself as a company run by an independent board with no military ties, and has separately sued to get off a US blacklist^[2:2]. It's also the first time Anthropic has named a Chinese heavyweight, after fingering smaller outfits like DeepSeek and Moonshot back in February^[1:2].

The biter, the bitten, and everyone else

Then comes the part that itches. Just as Anthropic decries theft that's "illicit, systematic, and at industrial scale," the company is fending off several suits accusing it of training Claude on copyrighted work without asking anyone. Three music publishers, Universal, Concord, and ABKCO, want some $3 billion for more than twenty thousand songs used without a license, while a fourth, BMG, argues that Anthropic's whole valuation rests on stolen work^[5]. Anthropic pleads fair use, the very argument Alibaba could hand right back, since distilling a model mostly amounts to reading very carefully whatever it's willing to say.

That's the whole discomfort. I get Anthropic's rage, because watching a rival vacuum up your work would sicken any maker. But the industry now howling about theft is the same one that swept up books, articles, and songs by the million to build its models, and keeps doing it while insisting it's all progress. You can't treat copying as a mortal sin when it's aimed at you and a footnote when it works in your favor.

So should we call it a wash and blame everyone alike? Not quite, since a state running an industrial heist isn't a poet borrowing a line. But the next time a big model plays the victim, we get to ask where exactly the data came from that made it so valuable. Distillation may have invented nothing, except a mirror.

Notes

Tom's Hardware, "Anthropic claims that China's Alibaba illicitly distilled its models from April to June 2026", June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Dawn, "Anthropic accuses Alibaba of mass AI capability theft", June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Slashdot, "Anthropic Says Alibaba Must Be Punished For Largest Claude Cloning Attack", June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎
Ars Technica, "Anthropic claims Alibaba defied Trump to attack Claude and steal capabilities", June 2026. ↩︎
Music Business Worldwide, "Anthropic, fighting lawsuits over alleged copying of song lyrics, accuses Alibaba of copying Claude", June 2026. ↩︎

Midjourney Dreams of an MRI at Spa Speed

2026-06-26T00:00:00Z

Some career pivots leave you blinking. Midjourney, the image generator everyone files under glossy portraits and impossible landscapes, has announced it's moving into medical imaging. Not a filter, not a gallery of retouched X-rays, but an actual machine that claims to map the inside of your body in a minute, against the hour-plus a full MRI usually takes^[1]. The company is chasing something "as powerful as MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa"^[2]. I read the announcement twice to make sure it wasn't, fittingly, a generated image.

The two torso views the Midjourney scanner produces, organs traced and labeled (still from the official Midjourney Medical video).

An image generator that comes for yours

None of this actually leans on image generation. You stand on a platform that sinks slowly into a shallow pool, passing through a ring of sensors, each one behaving like a dolphin feeling out its surroundings by echolocation^[2:1]. Half a million of these squares, each the size of a fine grain of sand and doubling as a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone, fire sound waves through you from every angle, and the flood of echoes is reassembled into a map of what's going on inside, no radiation and no magnets, in about sixty seconds^[2:2]. The hardware rides on Butterfly Network's chips, which Midjourney has backed with more than $74 million^[3], and the plan is to field fifty thousand scanners worldwide by 2031 and reach a billion scans a month^[2:3].

Founder David Holz isn't one for caution. He calls the machine "in many ways superior to even MRI machines"^[4], while the announcement itself floats that enough early imaging could let the world "avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs"^[2:4]. Modest stuff.

The spa that wants to be a hospital

Here's where it gets strange. The first machine won't open in a hospital but in a "Midjourney Spa," due near Union Square in San Francisco in late 2027, a roughly 25,000-square-foot space where nine or ten scanners will share the floor with saunas, hot tubs, and cold plunges^[4:1]. The company talks up "pools of golden light" that wash over you and frames the scan itself as a mere "side-effect" of the relaxation^[2:5]. The whole pitch lives in that claimed straddle between health and wellness, which sounds lovely on paper and turns genuinely odd the moment you sit with it, because you can no longer tell whether you're buying a checkup or a day at the sauna. There is something vertiginous about finding a tumor between two trips to the steam room.

An MRI with no AI, and not quite an MRI

Which brings up the touchy part, the hallucinations everyone braces for the moment an AI drifts near a diagnosis. The irony is that the scanner barely uses any. Holz says so himself, "we're not even using any AI in this yet, just really cool hardware and software"^[4:2], and for now the machine learning only traces and labels the organs on the reconstructed image, which is exactly what the screenshot above shows^[2:6]. So the fear of a machine inventing a lesion doesn't land on the imaging, at least while the diagnosis stays at arm's length.

The real unease sits in two other places. First, "full-body" flatters the ear and misleads, since ultrasound won't cross the skull and will never see the brain the way an MRI does^[4:3]. Second, running healthy people through a scanner on a loop is something medicine has frowned on for years, because it breeds false positives and incidental findings that send you off for anxious, sometimes invasive, usually pointless follow-ups^[4:4]. For now this first-generation prototype only draws body-composition maps, and it still has to win over the FDA before it can claim any diagnosis at all^[2:7].

So, excitement or dread? Both feel right. The engineering is a genuine feat, and swapping an hour in a loud, costly MRI for a minute in warm water is easy to want. But between a filmed demo and a device radiologists will actually trust sits a gap that neither "golden light" nor superlatives can close, and we've watched AI take its bow for a splashy announcement long before any product shipped. Until the regulators weigh in, what stays with me is the picture of a maker of synthetic dreams that now wants to show us, for real, what we have inside. Whether we want to look is another question.

Notes

Engadget, "Midjourney, the AI image generator, is developing a full-body ultrasonic scanner", June 2026. ↩︎
Midjourney, "A New Era of Midjourney", the official Midjourney Medical announcement, June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Radiology Business, "AI lab Midjourney investing over $74M to launch whole-body ultrasound screening business", June 2026. ↩︎
The Next Web, "Midjourney's full-body scanner, big claims, no track record", June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

Keeping a cool head when France melts

2026-06-24T00:00:00Z

As I write this, France has just lived through the hottest day it has ever recorded. On June 23, 2026, the national average temperature hit 29.8°C, the mercury brushed 44°C in the Landes, and the night before set its own record for the most stifling on file^[1]. So the subject is rather on my mind, especially since it's hot enough out there that you wouldn't put a parent in it.

Before we get going, one thing to clear up. This post isn't sponsored. Nobody pays me to talk up any of it. It does carry a few affiliate links to the gear I actually own and use, each flagged where it appears. Go through them and you buy me a coffee at no extra cost to you, and if that rubs you the wrong way, ignore them, the advice doesn't change.

Everything below comes down to one idea, that your body cools itself by evaporating its own sweat, and nearly every good summer trick boils down to making that evaporation easier.

The thermometer, summer's last word (photo by Immo Wegmann / Unsplash).

The pedestal fan, and the move that changes everything

The bladed fan is everyone's reflex, the one you haul out of the closet the moment the thermometer clears 30°C. Its job isn't to cool the air, contrary to what you might think, since all it does is move the air around. What it cools is you. By blowing across your skin, it speeds up the evaporation of your sweat, and that evaporation is what cools you down, because water turning from liquid to gas draws its energy from your body heat. The sweat leaves, takes a little of that heat with it, and clears the way for the cycle to start again.

For my part, I run a Rowenta Turbo Silence (affiliate link), and I have no complaints. The night mode earns its name, plenty of airflow for what you need and quiet enough to leave you sleeping, which is no small thing when sleep is the whole point.

One caveat, though, because a fan is no miracle worker. Past roughly 35°C, it just pushes scorching air at you, which can speed up dehydration instead of relieving it, unless you pair it with a little water on the skin, a damp cloth on the back of the neck for instance. The warning comes around with every heat wave, and it's worth heeding^[2].

The trap of ice cubes and passive coolers

That's also why I'm wary of misters and passive coolers built from ice cubes or damp towels. The relief is real, but brief, and it comes at a price. Keep topping them up and you load the room's air with moisture, all the more so during a heat wave, when you keep the place shut all day with little fresh air coming in. Air that's already saturated with moisture slows the evaporation of your sweat, to the point where the heat turns unbearable fast^[3]. Once your body can no longer shed its sweat, the risk of collapse climbs sharply. By the same logic, I'd keep the wet rooms shut too, the bathroom and the kitchen first of all.

There's one exception, the ice pack. Sealed shut, it keeps its water or gel locked inside, releasing not a single molecule of water into the room. The condensation that beads on its surface is drawn from the air already in your home, and it will evaporate back to where it came from once the pack has given up the ghost.

Then comes the exception to the exception. In theory, the freezer that refreezes your pack dumps more heat into the home than the pack will later absorb, since the heat it pulls out has to go somewhere, plus the work of the compressor on top. So the apartment's heat balance ends up in the red. Even so, it stays the most acceptable passive option in my book, because the goal is to survive the heat wave, not to recreate the polar ice cap in your living room. Nobody here unplugs the freezer in summer, I assume, so go ahead and use the ice pack however you like, wrapped in a towel or parked behind the fan.

The turbine fan, king of the cooler nights

Different beast. The turbine fan, or cyclone, is usually a floor model built to blow hard, made for shifting big masses of air rather than fanning your face. People underrate it because it's clumsier than a pedestal fan, wrongly, because its job is something else entirely.

In a room where the air barely moves, the cool air, denser, settles at the floor while the warm air rises to the ceiling, which is what we call thermal stratification. A powerful floor fan, aimed at a wall or a corner, stirs the whole lot and breaks up those layers, so you claw back a degree or two of felt temperature. But my favorite use for these turbines is at night. The moment the air outside drops below the air inside, nothing beats them for driving the hot air out of your home and swapping it for something breathable.

The method, which I call the depressurization column, comes down to three moves. First, set the fan on the floor or at window height, about 1.5 meters back from it, blowing outward at full power, and pick one of the hottest rooms in the home to house it, window wide open. Then open your other windows, favoring, where you have them, the coolest rooms in the place, a garage or a cellar with a window. By driving the hot air out, the turbine creates a low-pressure zone that pulls outside air in through every opening left free, which is exactly why you want to open the cool rooms first.

That leaves the awkward question, why pull the fan 1.5 meters back instead of jamming it against the window. Because a fast jet of air doesn't push only its own volume. All along its edges, it grabs the still air of the room and drags it along, so giving it room before the window lets it move far more air than it would flush against the frame. People often chalk this feat up to Bernoulli's principle, but that's a shortcut, because the real culprit is air entrainment, the turbulent mixing at the edge of the jet^[4]. It's the same trick Dyson's bladeless fan uses to multiply its output, and a short video shows it better than any explanation.

The technique pays off most, of course, when the gap between day and night temperatures is wide. Right now in my part of the country, the night limps down to 26°C around 4 a.m., better than the daytime furnace, without exactly being a cold snap.

Portable air conditioners, a luxury that costs you

We've all seen those little air conditioners on casters, with the exhaust hose you have to seal into a window. I own one, and I'll admit it's saving my life this summer, even if it costs me a tidy sum in electricity for fairly modest results. Two reasons for that.

The first is insulation, because in a home that holds the cool poorly, a portable AC feels good while it runs and for a good half hour after you switch it off, then the heat creeps back in no hurry, at a cost that adds up. The second is depressurization, and it's worth pausing on. The most common models, the single-block kind, draw in the room's air, split the hot from the cold in their evaporator, hand you back the cold air, and vent the hot air outside through the hose. Now we've just seen, with the turbine, what happens when you drive air out of a room without replacing it. By pushing its hot air out through the hose, the AC slightly depressurizes the home and forces the scorching outdoor air to seep in through every other opening and vent^[5]. At night, when the air outside is cool, no harm done. In the middle of the afternoon, feeling 35°C air pour into the next rooms has a lot less charm.

There's a fix, an AC with two separate hoses to seal into the windows, whether you buy it that way or rig up the one you already have. One hose pulls outside air straight in to cool the system, the other vents the hot air out, so the home stops depressurizing and the only air coming into the room is the cold air the unit blows. I've also noticed mobile mini-split ACs turning up lately on the French market, cousins of the ones sold for RVs or across the Atlantic. I haven't lived with one long enough to speak to the install and the best practices, so look into that yourself, but the design is more efficient than the little wheeled units from the start, since the compression block, hot and noisy, sits outside, kept apart from the indoor airflow. That's the whole point of a split.

Dehumidifying, the other reason to love AC

I said it earlier, humidity is your worst enemy when you're counting on sweat. An air conditioner, through simple condensation on its frozen evaporator, mechanically dries the air it sends back to you, the room's water draining off through the condensate line. Even once you've switched the unit off, the air that slowly warms back up stays far more bearable, especially paired with a fan. Very dry air has its downsides, chapped lips and stinging eyes, but if you're still reading me at this point, I'm betting you'll make those small sacrifices, same as I do, to get through it.

And if money is truly tight

Then there's the case where you've got no AC, no real budget, not even the cash for a turbine fan, the baking studio under a Paris roof, the student room, the instant-ramen end of the month. There, you're going to have to improvise.

If you have shutters, keep them closed around the clock, because closed shutters block 60 to 80 percent of the solar gain and buy you several degrees^[6]. With no shutters, an emergency blanket taped over the glass, shiny side facing out, bounces back most of the radiation and limits the damage^[7]. It's a stopgap to put up before the room heats, not a way to claw back a furnace already in full swing, but it helps.

The blanc de Meudon trick

Another bit of magic, strictly for the outside of the glass, is blanc de Meudon, a kind of whiting sometimes sold as Spanish white. It's powdered chalk, near-pure calcium carbonate, and it costs next to nothing at the hardware store^[8]. Mix two parts powder to one part water until you've got pancake batter, a good runny paint. Brush it onto the outer face of the window with a big brush, a sponge, or a roller. As it dries, the mix turns opaque white and reflects the heat by sheer albedo, before it even gets in. It's the same recipe market gardeners paint over their greenhouses in summer. A swipe of a damp cloth takes it all off afterward, and as a bonus it cleans the glass. The only price is that your window goes opaque and the room dims, but you'll always take the gloom over the inferno.

When the home turns dangerous, your options

Living under the roof in a poorly insulated heat sink is misery in summer. Historically, French law comes down far harder on winter cold than on summer heat, and to this day there's no legal maximum temperature past which a rented home counts as unfit^[9]. Still, your landlord owes you a decent home, one that doesn't put your health at risk.

If you're cooking at 38°C through the night, document everything, daily temperature readings, photos, a doctor's note if you fall ill, then put the agency or the landlord on formal notice by registered letter. Be clear-eyed on one point, though, because the courts don't compensate a feeling of heat as such. They move only when the heat exposes an objective defect in the home, windows that don't seal, no ventilation, failing insulation. A few recent rulings have indeed granted damages for loss of enjoyment on that basis, but the trend is slow and cautious.

The one clean line in the sand concerns homes rated G on France's energy label, the DPE, which have been barred from new and renewed leases since January 1, 2025, while rents on F- and G-rated energy sieves have been frozen since the summer of 2022^[10]. Since 2021 the rating has also carried a summer-comfort indicator, sadly informational only, which weighs on neither the grade nor the ban on letting. And since the rating swings a lot from one assessor to the next, don't pin everything on it in the short term. If your home turns dangerous to your health, the priority is to get yourself somewhere safe, a friend's couch, an air-conditioned library, the public pool.

My setup, and a parent's confession

At home, I ended up swapping the bedroom ceiling lights for ceiling fans, the Wind Calm Rattan from CREATE (affiliate link), which I'm delighted with. Stirring the air nonstop, quietly and without cluttering the floor, changes everything on the heavy nights. I also invested in a 9,000 BTU portable air conditioner from Midea (affiliate link), one I switch on maybe ten days a year, like right now. BTUs, or British Thermal Units, measure cooling power, and 9,000 of them come to about 2.6 kW, enough to handle a room of 20 to 25 square meters.

When I come home to 30°C in the apartment, I can bring it down to 24°C, a world away from the 40°C outside. I cut the AC before bed and let the ventilation run all night, and it's perfectly livable.

I know air conditioning gets a bad rap, and the charges aren't groundless, the appetite for electricity, the heat dumped into the street, the refrigerant gases. But as the father of a four-year-old girl, doing without entirely is a feat some days. I make my peace with it in small doses, ten or so days a year, and I sleep fine with that compromise.

So there's my heat-wave kit, built up over muggy summers and nights cut short. None of it will cool the planet, I'm well aware, and that's the heart of the problem, because these record temperatures aren't the exception anymore. Until the next spike, I keep the Weawow app handy to watch for the hour when the air outside finally drops below the air inside, and Scilabus's video on staying cool in summer, which explains all this better than I can^[11]. Until then, hang in there, drink your water, and keep a cool head.

Notes

Météo-France, "Canicule, une vague de chaleur s'installe cette semaine" (in French), for the June 23, 2026 record and the temperatures recorded, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Futura Sciences, "Canicule, les ventilateurs sont-ils inutiles ?" (in French), on using a fan above 35°C, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
MSD Manuals, "Overview of Heat Disorders", on the role of humidity in thermoregulation, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Wikipedia, "Entrainment (hydrodynamics)", on air entrainment by a turbulent jet, the principle behind Dyson's bladeless fan, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Honeywell, "Single hose vs. dual hose portable air conditioners", on the depressurization caused by single-block models, since taken down (Wayback capture from July 2026). ↩︎
ADEME, "Canicule, comment garder son logement frais" (in French), for the solar gain blocked by closed shutters, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Révolution Énergétique, "La couverture de survie, nouvelle arme anti-canicule ?" (in French), accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Wikipedia, "Blanc de Meudon" (in French), for its composition and its use against the heat, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Service-Public, "À quelle température doit être chauffé un logement ?" and ANIL, its case-law note on decent housing (both in French), on the absence of any legal heat threshold and the duty to provide a decent home, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
French Ministry for Ecological Transition, "Location et gel des loyers des passoires énergétiques" (in French), for the ban on G-rated homes and the rent freeze on F and G, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
Scilabus, "Comment se rafraîchir en été ?" (in French), a popular-science video on the subject, accessed June 2026. ↩︎

Soundcore Sleep, and finally sound asleep

2026-06-20T00:00:00Z

Some fights you don't talk about much, because they happen in the dark and they usually end in defeat. Mine has a name every insomniac knows too well, hypervigilance, my brain's habit of standing guard right when the rest of me wants nothing more than to switch off. One scooter backfiring under my Paris windows, one neighbor slamming a door, and there I am, yanked back into the world with my ears on patrol. Add the charming reflex of replaying my entire day at the exact moment I should be letting it go, and you have the recipe for a night that never quite gets started.

For a long time I assumed silence was the only fix, and I was wrong. What follows isn't an ad. Nobody pays me to say nice things about it. It's just a report from a guy who sleeps badly and who, for once, found something that lived up to the box.

The soundcore Sleep A30, the current generation of the line (image by Anker / soundcore).

Fifteen years of half-measures

Before these earbuds, my whole arsenal fit inside a box of earplugs. For more than fifteen years I tried just about everything, the yellow foam you roll between your fingers and the wax you knead before pressing it over your ear, and each one came with a dealbreaker. The foam always let a thin trickle of noise through, just enough to wake a jumpy sleeper like me. The wax sealed better, but it traded that seal for greasy residue my ears would happily have done without come morning. Nobody warned me that signing up for silence also meant signing up for a daily cleanup.

None of it lasted, because none of it went after the real culprit. Plugging your ear canal solves the noise, but it leaves your brain alone with itself, which is a bit like locking the wolf and the lamb in one room and hoping for a quiet night.

How these earbuds smother the racket

Mine are the Sleep A20, two pairs I bought a few years back, when the line didn't yet have a fancier sibling^[1]. Two, out of pure caution, one living permanently on my nightstand while the other rides in my suitcase, so I never crush my only pair at the bottom of a bag and condemn myself to some very long nights far from home. Since then soundcore, Anker's in-house brand, has rolled out the A30, which add genuine active noise cancellation and memory-foam tips, for a price that climbs to match^[2]. My A20 settle for a simpler recipe, and it has been more than enough for me.

Because the trick isn't really about isolation, contrary to what you'd guess. The twin-seal tips already block part of the din, but the heavy lifting happens elsewhere, in the sound the earbuds pipe in continuously to paper over the rest, like white noise swallowing the night's rough edges^[3]. The ear, busy with that soft blanket of sound, stops listening for the neighbor's scooter. All of it inside a flat little shell built so you can sleep on your side without driving a pebble into your ear canal, with enough charge for a full night and a few in reserve thanks to the case^[3:1].

The real magic trick, keeping my brain busy

The best part is left, and it owes less to engineering than to sleight of hand. Silence, oddly enough, never put me under, because it hands my ruminations an open stage. What I needed was something to occupy the part of my brain that refuses to clock out. The answer turns out to be whatever I slip into my ear, a good documentary, a long, meandering political interview, any program interesting enough to hold my attention without revving it up.

I drop the YouTube volume to its lowest notch, I follow the voice, and the mental carousel finally winds down. Most of the time I never learn how the documentary ends, because I'm out before it does. Sleep within the hour, near enough to a sure thing, where it used to take me three times as long to go under. If you're the type who counts sheep and never reaches the end of the flock, you get the picture.

One mishap, and one customer service desk

It wasn't all blissful, though. At one point an unfortunate firmware update turned my earbuds into shadows of themselves, the battery suddenly refusing to charge past ten percent. For devices meant to last the night, an hour of runtime counts as sabotage. As far as I know, Anker never managed to fix it with a later update, which, for a purely software fault, is a head-scratcher.

Where the story redeems itself is in what came next. I wrote to customer service, and they shipped me brand-new pairs without even asking for the old ones back, those having become fairly expensive paperweights anyway. That kind of gesture says more about a company than any spec sheet ever could, and it's probably why I've stuck with them.

What a pair of earbuds put back

I won't lie to you and promise a miracle. These earbuds didn't rebuild my nights from the ground up, because I still wake at three in the morning for no defensible reason. But where I used to lose the battle to fall back asleep before it began, my brain spinning up at the first flutter of an eyelid, I can now put a voice back in my ear and set off for another lap of sleep. That alone is a win I'd long since stopped expecting.

I doubt this blog will ever turn into a gadget aisle, since objects rarely interest me enough to earn a whole article. These are the exception, because they didn't add one more device to my life, they handed me back a little sleep. And when you've gone without it long enough, you know that's beyond price. If your nights look anything like mine, you now know where to look.

Notes

soundcore, the official Sleep Earbuds page, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
CNN Underscored, "Soundcore Sleep A30 earbuds review", for the active noise cancellation, memory-foam tips, and A30 pricing, accessed June 2026. ↩︎
SoundGuys, "Anker Soundcore Sleep A20 review", for the noise masking, twin-seal tips, and battery life, accessed June 2026. ↩︎ ↩︎