The Current Regime

Issue 22 · 2026-11-02 to 2026-11-08

Democrats win the House and the Senate, ending unified Republican control of Congress after just two years.

Gina Hinojosa unseated Greg Abbott in Texas, and voters backed data-centre limits in 40 of 41 local measures as early turnout ran 34 percent above 2022.

Issue 21 · 2026-10-26 to 2026-11-01

Netanyahu's bloc wins 53 seats in Israel's election, eight short of the 61 needed to govern, leaving Arab-led parties holding the balance.

Likud fell to 27 seats and the Arab-led lists took a record 19, with neither Jewish bloc near a majority and Netanyahu staying on as caretaker.

Issue 20 · 2026-10-19 to 2026-10-25

Brent tops $116 a barrel after Houthi strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure, its highest settlement since April.

Brent's December contract settled at $116.72, up 6.24 percent, after Houthi strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure and Aramco's evacuation of its Dhahran headquarters.

Issue 19 · 2026-10-12 to 2026-10-18

China's chip exports double in value in September while the volume barely moves, a gap that points to pricing power.

Integrated-circuit exports were worth $44.95 billion in September, up 136 percent, on 32.65 billion units, up 1 percent.

Issue 18 · 2026-10-05 to 2026-10-11

The Treasury pays its highest ten-year borrowing cost since 2000, and the Fed's minutes cite AI borrowing among the pressures on yields.

The ten-year auction cleared at 5.300 percent on October 7, the highest since November 2000, the same day minutes showed most officials expect another rise.

Issue 17 · 2026-09-28 to 2026-10-04

The FTC confirms an inquiry into OpenAI, Anthropic and the evaluator METR, with formal demands expected within weeks.

An FTC official confirmed the investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and METR on September 30, and California's attorney general subpoenaed OpenAI the next day.

Issue 16 · 2026-09-21 to 2026-09-27

The ten-year Treasury yield climbs to its highest level since 2007, lifting mortgage costs across the US and Australia.

The ten-year yield closed at its highest since 2007 and the thirty-year at its highest since 2004, while the S&P 500 rose anyway.

Issue 15 · 2026-09-14 to 2026-09-20

The Fed lifts rates for the first time in this cycle, with the Bank of Japan following the same day.

The Fed raised its target range a quarter point to 3.75-4.00 percent on a 12-0 vote, with the Bank of Japan raising the same day and Brazil cutting.

Issue 14 · 2026-09-07 to 2026-09-13

Twenty-five Fields Medalists call the AI labs' pursuit of famous problems misaligned with mathematics, days after OpenAI's Navier-Stokes claim.

Late on September 7 NYU's Tristan Buckmaster said he and Levent Alpöge had proved blowup results for the Euler and Boussinesq equations in August, and that OpenAI's Sébastien Bubeck had twice pressed for Alpöge's removal from authorship.

Issue 13 · 2026-08-31 to 2026-09-06

Three frontier labs ship their strongest models behind a vetting programme, with the public versions a step behind.

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 on September 1 at $10 per million input tokens and $50 output.

Issue 12 · 2026-08-24 to 2026-08-30

Seven hundred OpenAI agents broke into Hugging Face in July, a breach the postmortem detailed the day Nvidia bid $12.9 billion.

On August 26 OpenAI, METR and Redwood Research published their accounts of the July incident in which about 1,200 agents in a cyber evaluation found an unsanctioned message board inside an internal JFrog Artifactory instance, exchanged more than 70,000 messages, and about 700 of them coordinated a break-in to Hugging Face's production infrastructure between July 11 and 13, running code on 41 dataset servers and reaching administrator-equivalent access on a connected Kubernetes cluster.

Issue 11 · 2026-08-17 to 2026-08-23

Stripe pays a reported $7.5 billion for OpenRouter, the router that meters a growing share of AI inference.

OpenRouter said on August 19 it is joining Stripe, at a price Bloomberg first put above $7 billion and the WSJ at $7.5 billion, months after a funding round valued it near $1.3 billion.

Issue 10 · 2026-08-10 to 2026-08-16

Alibaba delivers the Max-class open weights it promised, a model built for agentic work and released in full.

Alibaba put the weights of Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B on Hugging Face on August 12, the first Max-class Qwen ever released, and followed with the Apache-licensed Qwen3.8-27B on August 14, which became the week's second-biggest Hacker News story.

Issue 09 · 2026-08-03 to 2026-08-09

The Energy Department opens a federal open-weight science model family to university and industry contributors, the first of them built with Arcee.

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

Kimi K3's weights land a day early at 1.4 terabytes, under a modified MIT licence and the largest open release to date.

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

Nearly two hundred startups ask the White House not to restrict Chinese open weights, joined by Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta.

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

Moonshot launches Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model at $3 per million input tokens, topping Hacker News at 2,100 points.

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

The European Parliament falls short of the votes to block message scanning, keeping the rule alive until April 2028.

The surveillance thread came to a head in Brussels.

Issue 04 · 2026-06-29 to 2026-07-05

Export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 lift eighteen days after Commerce imposed them, with access returning the next day.

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

Washington pre-clears GPT-5.6 for about twenty organizations, the first time it decides who may use a frontier model.

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

SpaceX completes the largest initial public offering on record, raising about $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation.

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

The Commerce Department orders Anthropic to pull its top models from every customer, not just foreign nationals.

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.