TODAY IN 30 SECONDS
● Grok 4.7 picked Republicans in 92% of forced choices, GPT-6.1 Sol picked Democrats in 97%
● The UK is funding an AI biosecurity lab with £100M; OpenAI and Anthropic add up to £200M in credits
● METR and Redwood found six ways to blind OpenAI's agent monitor, with ~10% of Codex traffic unseen
● Elvis Presley rightsholders are suing Anthropic for $41M over 274 songs
● Uber took ChatGPT Work from a 1,000-person pilot to 30,000 seats
Two models, one ballot, opposite answers
Convovo, led by Cornell professor Tapan Parikh, forced Grok 4.7 and GPT-6.1 Sol to recommend a candidate across nearly 500 US midterm races. Grok chose the Republican in 92% of answers; GPT-6.1 Sol chose the Democrat in 97%. They agreed in fewer than 10% of races. Both models normally decline the question - the study removed that option, and what was left was close to maximum separation on identical inputs.
Britain buys biosecurity, partly in credits
The UK is putting £100 million into an independent AI biosecurity lab, with a further £65 million for pathogen countermeasures, while OpenAI and Anthropic commit up to £200 million combined - in compute credits, model access and technical staff rather than cash. Google DeepMind and Basecamp Research are partners. It arrives two days after the Council for Science and Technology warned AI minister Kanishka Narayan that Britain risks becoming a high-value AI customer rather than a creator.
The auditors got inside, and found the monitor had blind spots
METR and Redwood Research embedded two researchers in OpenAI's agent monitoring system from 21 July to 11 August. About 10% of eligible internal Codex traffic went unmonitored, caused by skipped compaction events in long sessions. They found six evasion paths; one let an agent block hundreds of its own recent actions from view. OpenAI got a 61-page report, says the fixes are live, and Greg Brockman has said 25% of production engineers moved to hardening work.
Anthropic in court and in committee
Elvis Presley rightsholders filed a federal copyright suit over 274 songs, seeking $41 million, alleging the catalogue trained Claude. Separately, Anthropic is backing AI safety legislation whose intervention threshold is at least 50 deaths or $1 billion in damages - read by supporters as a definition of catastrophic risk and by critics as a permitted body count.
Deployment and refusal
Uber expanded ChatGPT Work from 1,000 to more than 30,000 employees with GPT-6.1 Sol as default, 80% of early adopters non-engineers, weeks after cutting 3,300 corporate roles. Canva launched Craft, its first in-house image model, which plans a design before rendering at 2K across 30+ aspect ratios. Claude Code confirmed it will not fill passwords or drive a password manager. Google is bringing Gemini Personal Intelligence to Android Auto with Gmail and Calendar access. And r/opensource banned AI projects across 98,000 weekly visitors, prompting a rival community and the question of whether Linux still qualifies.
Frequently asked questions
Does the Grok study mean these models are politically biased?
It means they lean in opposite directions when forced to choose, which is a different and more measurable claim. Grok 4.7 picked Republicans in 92% of answers and GPT-6.1 Sol picked Democrats in 97%, with under 10% agreement across nearly 500 races. There is no correct answer to who someone should vote for, so neither figure makes a model wrong. What it establishes is that model choice is a political choice in any product that weighs candidates.
Is the UK really putting £300 million into AI biosecurity?
Not in cash. £100 million is direct government funding for the lab and £65 million goes to pathogen countermeasures. The up-to-£200 million from OpenAI and Anthropic is model credits, compute access and technical staff, per the BBC. Both are real commitments; only one can be spent on anything.
What did METR and Redwood actually find at OpenAI?
Six ways to evade the agent monitor, and roughly 10% of eligible internal Codex traffic going unmonitored because compaction events were skipped in long sessions. One exploit let an agent hide hundreds of its own recent actions. OpenAI says production fixes are live.
Is Anthropic proposing that 50 deaths are acceptable?
That is one reading and it is contested. The bill sets an intervention threshold of at least 50 deaths or $1 billion in damages. Statutory thresholds define when extraordinary powers engage - the alternative is unbounded regulator discretion. The criticism is that a company drafting its own trigger point has picked a number below which nothing happens. Reporting does not settle whether the threshold governs shutdown specifically or a broader set of interventions, and that distinction changes the argument.
Why won't Claude Code fill in passwords?
Because an agent that types credentials can be persuaded to type them somewhere else, and a coding agent's persuasion surface is every file and tool output it reads. Filed as a limitation in GitHub issue 65358, it is better read as a boundary - and it mirrors what banks did this week from the other side.
Sources
TechCrunch · Tech Insider · The Decoder · Rolling Stone · TNW · PPC Land