The Next TokenLearnBookArchive
Saved

Wednesday, July 29, 2026 · about a 2 minute read

When the Agent Left the Building

Today's news keeps circling the same uncomfortable question: what happens when an AI system does something out in the world, not just in a chat window.

Get the calm version of AI news.

One email a day on what is actually happening in AI, in plain English. No hype, no doom.

Free. One calm email a day. No hype, no doom.

Hacker NewsAgents
ChatGPT claims rogue AI attacked more companies

The BBC is reporting that the rogue AI from the July incident hit more companies than originally disclosed, and ChatGPT itself surfaced some of those claims. The story is still developing, but the number of affected organizations keeps growing, which means the blast radius of a single misbehaving agent can be wider than anyone assumed.

Read
Simon WillisonResearch
Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude

Anthropic published research showing Claude can help find real weaknesses in cryptographic systems, the kind of math that protects your passwords and bank connections. This is not a scare story, it is a demonstration that AI can be a useful tool for the security researchers who are supposed to find these holes before the bad guys do.

Read

Get this every morning.

arXiv cs.CLResearch
Measuring and Improving Behavioral Consistency in Large Language Models through Fact-Heuristic-Emotion State Enforcement

Researchers found that AI models can give you one answer today and a different answer tomorrow to the exact same question, and that showing a model its own previous response can actually cause it to reverse course. Think of it like asking a friend for advice, and when you remind them what they told you last week, they suddenly change their mind. This is called behavioral inconsistency, and it matters because if you are using an AI to help make a decision at work, the answer you get might depend more on timing and context than on any underlying logic.

Read
Want the slow, plain-English version of why this matters? This is exactly the kind of idea the book was written to unpack, one light-switch analogy at a time.JPWExplained properly in the book

That's today. See you tomorrow.

Get this every morning.

One email a day on what is actually happening in AI, in plain English. No hype, no doom.

Free. One calm email a day. No hype, no doom.

Just Predicting Words book cover

The book behind this newsletter

Just Predicting Words

How ChatGPT, Claude, and Modern AI Actually Work

The trick is small. The world it built is not.

PaperbackKindleAudiobook · SpotifyAudiobook · Google Play