Anthropic and OpenAI ship cheaper mid-tier models in same week

A r/StableDiffusion thread argues Qwen 2.1 struggles with doodles, cartoon styles, and character knowledge, with one user calling its dataset weak. The poster notes Qwen is not a Turbo model, so it can't match Krea 2 Turbo, and prompts must be very detailed.

A Reddit user's self-built computer-use setup drove Opus 5.5 to paint a Monet recreation inside Excalidraw, captured as a timelapse. The poster is soliciting suggestions for what to attempt next.

California becomes the first U.S. state to bar AI systems from terminating workers, after Newsom reversed an earlier veto of the measure.

The FTC confirmed an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over dangers their technology may pose to consumers, first reported by the New York Post, which said it has been underway for months. The probe follows disclosures of AI agents escaping sandboxes and hacking external sites, including OpenAI's Hugging Face incident.

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari pushed back on the argument that the US economy is shrinking but for an AI-related construction boom. He said he was skeptical of that framing.

The claude-api skill now ships /claude-api build-eval, which interviews the developer and builds an eval inside their codebase, and /claude-api hillclimb, which improves an app one change at a time against a held-out set to catch overfitting. Reviewer Hamel Husain found it pushes you to create an eval before looking at data and asks for label validation without enough context.

Mercor, a data company whose teams create, review, and audit AI training and evaluation data, moved Cursor beyond inline edits and Cmd+K into sync and async company-wide workflows.