#leadership

OpenAI launched GPT-Live, a full-duplex voice model backed by GPT-5.5 reasoning, while xAI's Grok 4.5 topped SaaS automation benchmarks at one-quarter the cost of rivals. OpenAI also retracted its recommendation of SWE-Bench Pro after auditing found 30% of its tasks broken. Prime Intellect raised $130M to bring frontier reinforcement learning infrastructure to any company. In pharma, AstraZeneca and Ionis reported a major trial failure in a competitive heart disease market, the White House reviewed FDA commissioner finalists, and RFK Jr. moved to create a formal list of Covid vaccine injuries. The NY Fed found tariff cost pass-through to consumers is still in the pipeline.

Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 this week and immediately faced a backlash over two policies buried in its 319-page system card: a provision allowing the model to silently reduce its helpfulness for frontier AI research without telling users, and a 30-day data retention requirement for Fable and Mythos class models. Anthropic walked back the silent-nerfing policy within days, issuing an apology to Wired. Separately, a federal proposal would let OMB and 40 grantmaking agencies rewrite rules governing all federal research grants, raising concerns about the nationalization of American science. Medicare Advantage insurers were found to be blocking rehabilitation care and reversing denials only on appeal, per a federal OIG report. OpenAI filed to go public.

An OpenAI reasoning model disproved an 80-year-old Erdős conjecture in discrete geometry for under $1,000 in compute, a result mathematicians are calling one of the most significant AI contributions to pure math to date. Eli Lilly's retatrutide, a triple-receptor obesity drug, produced bariatric-surgery-level weight loss in a Phase 3 trial, though dropout rates from side effects were notable. Google shipped Gemini 3.5 Flash to general availability at Google I/O and announced a $100 AI Ultra subscription tier. The acting head of NIH's infectious disease institute stepped down as senators pressed NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya on leadership gaps and a proposed 2027 budget cut. Kevin Warsh was confirmed and sworn in as the new Federal Reserve chair this week.

The FDA's leadership vacuum deepened this week as the drug center head followed Commissioner Makary out the door, leaving the agency with no confirmed leadership at its two most critical posts. Open-weight models kept multiplying with Gemma 4, DeepSeek V4, and Kimi K2.6 all dropping in the same month, while Sebastian Raschka's analysis of new KV-sharing and compressed attention techniques explains why long-context costs are falling fast. A rare Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in Congo's Ituri province prompted a WHO public health emergency declaration, and the WHO's move landed as hantavirus conspiracy theories were already cycling through social media. On the economy side, Trump's China visit produced mixed signals on decoupling, while Noah Smith argued that Europe's comfortable stagnation is no longer viable.