The Current Regime

Issue 09 · 2026-08-03 to 2026-08-09

Washington joins the open-weights race instead of blocking it, and a jobs miss unwinds the hike trade.

The Department of Energy opened its Genesis Open Models Initiative on August 7, inviting universities, national laboratories and companies to contribute data, evaluations and research environments toward a family of open-weight models for science.

Issue 08 · 2026-07-27 to 2026-08-02

The promised open-weights flood actually lands, and the oil shock unwinds into a three-dissent Fed.

Moonshot published Kimi K3's weights on the evening of July 26, a day ahead of its own deadline: 2.8 trillion parameters across 96 shards, about 1.4 terabytes, under a modified MIT license, the largest open release to date.

Issue 07 · 2026-07-20 to 2026-07-26

The open-weights fight reaches Washington as the oil shock becomes a rates problem.

Axios reported on July 20 that the administration is weighing restrictions on Chinese open-weight models, and by Friday the industry had answered: nearly 200 startups wrote to the White House on July 22, and more than twenty companies including Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta warned on July 24 against premature limits.

Issue 06 · 2026-07-13 to 2026-07-19

Open weights become Chinese industrial policy as oil re-enters the inflation story.

Moonshot released Kimi K3 on July 16, a 2.8 trillion parameter model priced at $3 per million input tokens with open weights promised by July 27, and it topped Hacker News at 2,100 points.

Issue 05 · 2026-07-06 to 2026-07-12

Model prices fall toward commodity while Europe makes message-scanning permanent.

The surveillance thread came to a head in Brussels.

Issue 04 · 2026-06-29 to 2026-07-05

The export ban lifts, proving state control of AI access turns both ways.

Eighteen days after forcing Anthropic to suspend foreign access to its top models, the Commerce Department lifted its export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and access returned the next day once Anthropic agreed to police security risks.

Issue 03 · 2026-06-22 to 2026-06-28

Identity becomes the internet's gate: EU wallets arrive and device attestation locks users out.

The US government reviewed OpenAI's new GPT-5.6 before launch and cleared it for only about twenty approved organizations, the first time Washington pre-cleared who may use a frontier model.

Issue 02 · 2026-06-15 to 2026-06-21

The AI buildout turns to consolidation: a record IPO and chipmakers pairing off.

Even as builders fled toward local models, the week's capital flowed the other way, toward scale and concentration.

Issue 01 · 2026-06-08 to 2026-06-14

AI access becomes an instrument of state as Washington pulls Fable 5 offline.

On June 12, the US Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals on national-security grounds, and the company disabled both models for every customer to comply.