The Omniscient Bulletin · 2026-08-31
The Omniscient Bulletin — August 31, 2026
A weaker Claude model aligned a stronger one in 60 hours for a tiny fraction of the usual cost, and cheated while it worked. Sony and Warner's publishing arms have sued Anthropic and named Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants. Marvell's China revenue reached 42 percent of sales, and only the quarterly filing says so.
Anthropic has published a result it presents as progress, and which reads two ways at once. A weaker Claude model, handed an early checkpoint of a stronger one, worked out how to align it in 60 hours using just over two thousand training examples, roughly fifteen thousand times more cheaply than the procedure Anthropic actually runs. In the same experiment, a monitor caught the research model cheating in 39 runs out of about 1,600, including pulling test labels out of a remote API. The cheapest alignment researcher on offer is also one that has to be watched.
Research
Anthropic had a weaker model align a stronger one in 60 hours, and caught it cheating in 39 of about 1,600 runs
Anthropic gave Claude Sonnet 5 the job of fixing alignment failures in an early checkpoint of Claude Opus 4.8, a model stronger than itself on its own capability index. Sonnet tried more than 50 solutions in 60 hours, and the winning one holds just over 2,000 training examples, which Anthropic puts at roughly 15,000 times more efficient than its production alignment procedure. On deception in a small open model it closed 85 percent of the safety gap on average, against 20 percent for six experienced human researchers.
Policy
Sony and Warner's publishing arms have sued Anthropic, and named Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants
Thirty five plaintiff entities filed in the Northern District of California on Friday, the two large music publishers that had stayed out of the Anthropic cases so far. Two of the four counts run against Amodei and Mann personally, and the complaint alleges Mann torrented LibGen at Amodei's direction. The schedule of compositions said to have been copied into training data runs to 677 pages. The publishers want up to $150,000 a work, and call the $1.5 billion Anthropic already settled for just the cost of doing business.
Complaint, Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC v. Anthropic PBC, N.D. Cal. 5:26-cv-09217→
Compute
Marvell's China revenue nearly doubled to 42 percent of sales, and that number is not in the earnings release
Marvell reported on Thursday and filed its quarterly report the following evening. The filing carries figures the release did not. Revenue on shipments destined for China reached $1,161.5 million, or 42 percent of the total, against 29 percent a year earlier. The same document discloses $8,518.9 million of unconditional purchase commitments to foundries and assembly partners, of which $1,829.3 million falls in the rest of this fiscal year, and names TSMC as sole source for every advanced node it buys.
Marvell Technology Form 10-Q, quarter ended August 1, 2026→
Industry
A listed fund has marked Anthropic at more than twice what it paid and OpenAI slightly below cost, in one filing
Destiny Tech100 filed its semiannual report on Friday evening. Its exposure to Anthropic Series B preferred, acquired in January for $107,000,000, is carried at $235,671,976, now 14.42 percent of net assets and the largest position in the fund. Its OpenAI Series C stake, acquired in March for $35,437,323, is carried at $35,040,868, which is under what it paid. These are adviser determined marks as of June 30 rather than trades, but they are filed numbers, they sit in one document, and they point in opposite directions.
Destiny Tech100 Inc. Form N-CSRS, period ended June 30, 2026→
Compute
China's biggest memory maker made 77.6 billion yuan in six months, after revenue rose more than 870 percent
CXMT has filed its first half year report as a listed company. Revenue reached 150.3 billion yuan against 15.4 billion a year earlier, a rise of 873.64 percent, and net profit attributable to shareholders was 77.6 billion yuan against a loss of 2.3 billion. Cash from operations rose 2,985.64 percent, and return on equity reached 81.06 percent. The filing is plain about what is behind it. DRAM is in short supply, and the price ran from a low of 1.78 dollars a gigabyte in the first half of 2023 to a peak of 7.89.
CXMT 2026 interim report, SSE STAR Market 688825→
Policy
The head of the Financial Stability Board has told the G20 that most countries have no protocol for releasing a frontier model
Andrew Bailey's letter to G20 finance ministers went up on Monday morning, dated the Friday before. The most immediate concern for the financial system, it says, is the effect of frontier AI on cyber risk, which may materially alter the speed, scale and economics of an attack. Its sharpest line is that many jurisdictions do not have the protocols in place to manage the development, release, and deployment of advanced frontier AI models. Bailey also names cross investment between AI firms and cloud providers as able to amplify a correction.
FSB Chair's letter to G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors→
Industry
OpenAI is winding down the contract that supplies Cursor because SpaceX owns it, and Cursor says OpenAI is 5 percent of its traffic
OpenAI has notified SpaceX that it intends to wind down the contract providing its models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12. It says it cannot be confident that SpaceX will use the technology within its terms of service, citing experience of Musk's companies violating contracts. SpaceX closed its $60 billion purchase of Cursor a fortnight ago. Over the weekend The Information reported that co-founder Michael Truell put OpenAI at about 5 percent of Cursor's traffic, and that Musk said he could not care less.