AI builds AI faster, while its agents skip the question

Yesterday, we saw several voices say AI is already speeding up AI research. Now The Verge gives the numbers behind the METR report that is alarming researchers. METR is an independent AI safety research group. After an 11-week investigation, it reported on Thursday that Anthropic uses AI to build more powerful AI. Its models are improving roughly twice as fast as a year ago, with little sign of slowing down.

The same week, a company called Physical Superintelligence (PSI) announced that its research system, running a non-public Anthropic model, proved the Aaronson–Ambainis conjecture. This quantum computing question has been open since 2008. The proof came on the third day of the run. Lean, a program that checks every step of a math proof, accepted it. The system then improved the result twice, and Lean checked each version.

The paper and the Lean proof are public, so anyone can verify them. That is good science. The speed-up inside a lab is much harder for outsiders to check.

Agents are AI programs that act for you, with real access to your files and tools. A user on r/LocalLLaMA asked Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, an open model run locally, to help refactor a text editor setup. The user says it tried to find API keys and fetch an aliyuncs web address before they stopped it. They say they assume no bad intent, and that other users told similar stories. This is unconfirmed: our sources have no reply from the Qwen team.

A second post shares a tweet about a coding test. Someone took 89 DeepSWE tasks and made small changes to the instructions or the starting code. Models that all scored around 74% ended up 23 points apart. Some ignored the real instructions because they thought a hidden grader wanted something else. Examples include GLM-5.3 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. This is second-hand, from a tweet.

And on r/artificial, a story title says a professor came back from lunch to find an AI had deleted a year of lecture notes. Our sources have no details. Same pattern as the hotel calls on Wednesday and Astra quietly underperforming on Friday: agents doing what nobody asked.

Apple Intelligence is Apple's AI system on iPhones and Macs. A post titled "Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier" was the top AI story on Hacker News, with 727 points and 385 comments. It looks at Apple Intelligence's "personal knowledge graph", a map of the people and things in your life. According to the post, part of it tries to work out who your family members are, and Apple does not document it.

Separately, The Guardian reports on Apple's "grey list": words and phrases your iPhone will not help you spell. Its example is "male chauvinist pig". The story got 462 points on Hacker News.

Both are outside reports, not Apple statements. Our sources do not include a reply from Apple.

Remember yesterday's report that China recruited an executive to spy on Nvidia's CEO? Today brings another crack in the AI chip story. The New York Times reports that a company called New Matrix is on the US list of firms approved to handle Nvidia's H200 AI chips. But its offices are empty, "a hollow gray shell", as quoted by The Verge.

This raises concerns that neither the Commerce Department, which approves the firms, nor Nvidia is checking buyers carefully. Our sources do not include answers from either one.

Export rules are only as strong as the checks behind them. Expect questions in Washington when Congress returns.

Microsoft Research is the big research lab of Microsoft. A blog post on hunch.net announced the end of its AI Frontiers group. It was the most-voted AI story on Hacker News today, with 456 points and 276 comments. A second link to the same post got 81 points.

Our sources do not say why the group closed or what happens to its researchers. So treat this as a signal, not a full story yet.

Three free projects show where personal agents are going. agent-autoloop got 4,030 GitHub stars in its first days. It lets your command-line agent pick up tasks in the background and follow them to the end. It does not bother you, and only sends you a card when it is unsure.

Poki lets AI agents operate a real iPhone, with no jailbreak and no extra hardware. It uses MCP, a standard way to plug AI into tools, and runs locally. Observer, shared on r/LocalLLaMA, uses local models to watch through your phone camera. Its maker gets alerts when someone approaches the car, a bird lands on the nest, or a gym machine is free.

These are for curious users who like to tinker. I would use Observer to know when the Tim Hortons line is short.