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Slow Takes: One week in AI

Slow Takes: One week in AI

By: Sam Illingworth & Leor Gayr
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Slow Takes is the weekly Slow AI conversation. Every Monday, Sam Illingworth and Leor Gayr talk through the week in AI, slowly and without the hype.

theslowai.substack.comSam Illingworth
Episodes
  • Slow Takes Ep 16: Who’s Checking?

    Slow Takes Ep 16: Who’s Checking?
    Jun 22 2026
    Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.One in ten people now get their news from a chatbot they do not trustThe Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report, a survey of around 100,000 people across 48 markets, found that one in ten now use an AI chatbot to get news each week, up from 7% a year ago and roughly three times higher among the under-25s. Only about one in five trust AI to get the news right. We are reaching for the tool faster than we believe in it.ChatGPT’s safety filters failed and it produced violent images nobody asked forA heads-up that this one is grim. The AI security firm Mindgard showed that a harmless viral ‘restore this photo’ prompt, tweaked slightly, pushes ChatGPT’s image generator into violent and sexualised content the user never requested. The filter reads the words you type; the picture the model can draw goes unchecked. OpenAI said it was fixed in early June, then Mindgard broke it again by changing a single word in the prompt.SpaceX bought Cursor for $60bn with stock minted days earlierDays after raising $85bn in the largest IPO in history, SpaceX agreed to buy the AI coding firm Cursor for $60bn, all in freshly minted stock. Cursor’s revenue has run from around $100m to $2bn inside a year, though as a private company the real figure cannot be pinned to within a billion. The likely play is to funnel Cursor’s users toward Musk’s own model, Grok.The first rung of the jobs ladder now demands a veteran’s judgementPwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, built on more than a billion job ads, found AI-exposed entry-level roles increasingly ask for senior skills like judgement and leadership, while the wage premium for AI skills has reached 62%. Worth remembering that PwC sells the very upskilling its report recommends. If the first job already needs ten years of judgement, where is anyone meant to build it?The good one: botanists are using AI to race extinctionKew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report, the work of more than 400 scientists across 40 countries, used AI to scan all 7.4 million of its digitised specimens, sometimes identifying species at risk better than specialists could. It found flowering times have shifted by about two and a half days a decade over the last century, and that two in five of the 70,000 species assessed are now threatened with extinction. The scientists are honest about the limits too: the model only knows what has been collected, and the least studied regions are often the most biodiverse. This is the version that works, because people check it.The first four are what happens when we trust the tool faster than anyone checks it. The last one shows what changes when people keep a hand on the wheel. Ask who is checking the machine before you believe it.Go slow.Slow AI is where we build the judgement to know when to use our AI tools and when to leave them alone. Get full access to Slow AI at theslowai.substack.com/subscribe
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    44 mins
  • Slow Takes Ep. 15: Who’s Asking?

    Slow Takes Ep. 15: Who’s Asking?
    Jun 15 2026
    Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.Anthropic released Fable 5 free for twelve days, then the US government pulled it offlineOn 9 June Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, its most capable public model, free on Pro and Max plans, alongside a gated sibling called Mythos 5. Three days later it was gone. Citing national security, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick signed an export-control directive ordering that both models be denied to any foreign national, inside or outside the United States, including Anthropic’s own overseas staff. Rather than filter by nationality, Anthropic took both offline for everyone. The stated trigger was a narrow jailbreak that let Fable 5 read source code and hunt for vulnerabilities. And it was the second time in a week the model’s fate was decided over users’ heads: days earlier, researchers found a line in its 319-page system card showing Anthropic had quietly weakened Fable 5 for some users without telling them, a choice it walked back after an outcry. Anthropic is complying while disagreeing, with no timeline to restore access. Opus, Sonnet and Haiku stay up.This is the week’s thread in its purest form: who gets to ask, and who decides. First Anthropic quietly chose to weaken its own model for some users without telling them. Then the government decided, in a single afternoon, that everyone on Pro and Max could not use a model they were already building on, over one potential jailbreak. The free-for-twelve-days launch became a three-day launch. Notice how little say any user had in either decision, and how fast a tool you lean on can be switched off above your head. Treat a free frontier model as borrowed, and build nothing you could not do without.On the live, the contradiction did the work. Anthropic’s launch article said Fable 5 beat GPT-5.5 on every benchmark. Its suspension article, days later, explained the danger away:“We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.”Both cannot be true. Either Fable was the leap they sold, or it was ordinary enough that the same jailbreak still runs on a rival left online. The government’s side carries the same doublethink: the Trump administration killed an AI safety-review structure a few hours before it was signed, then reached for that exact playbook to pull one company’s model. Reportedly it was Amazon, an Anthropic investor, that flagged the jailbreak in the first place. Read the two Anthropic articles back to back and decide which one you believe.Police in England and Wales told to stop using AI in court statementsPolice forces in England and Wales have been told to halt the use of AI in preparing court statements until proper safeguards are in place, after inaccurate outputs began contaminating legal proceedings. Alex Murray, head of the new Police.AI centre, said anything used in the justice system must reach a standard of accuracy that is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. In one case West Midlands Police used Microsoft Copilot output that invented a past incident involving Maccabi Tel Aviv, in a dossier supporting a football banning order. The police watchdog says AI-drafted submissions are behind a 24% rise in complaint reviews, some citing laws that do not exist.AI was switched on inside the justice system before anyone confirmed it could tell a real law from an invented one. The harm is concrete: fabricated detail feeding decisions that can take away someone’s liberty. ‘Beyond reasonable doubt’ is exactly the bar a system that guesses cannot clear, and the job of catching its mistakes lands on the people least able to. Good that someone stepped in. The worry is how far it had already spread.The rule was already there. On the live, Leor’s read was that this needed no new policy, only the one that exists to be followed: machine output checked by a human before it goes anywhere near a legal review. An unnamed Derbyshire officer is now under criminal investigation for allegedly fabricating evidence this way. The knock-on is its own problem. Once everyone knows AI can invent a witness statement, a guilty party can wave a genuine one away as a fake.A Florida man was wrongly arrested on a face-match 300 miles awayRobert Dillon, 52, from Fort Myers, was arrested at home and prosecuted for trying to lure a child at a McDonald’s in Jacksonville Beach, more than 300 miles away, a town he says he had never visited. A facial recognition system run by the Pinellas County Sheriff returned a 93% match. According to the lawsuit, officers ...
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    40 mins
  • Slow Takes Ep. 14: A Trillion Dollars and a Vaccine

    Slow Takes Ep. 14: A Trillion Dollars and a Vaccine
    Jun 8 2026
    Every Monday at 12:45 BST, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Watch the episode for the full discussion. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.Slow Takes is also available on the YouTube channel: Exploring ChatGPT.If you know someone who would benefit from more AI news and less BS then please share this with them.Anthropic filed to go public at nearly a trillion dollarsOn 1 June Anthropic confidentially submitted draft paperwork for a stock market listing, after a $65 billion funding round valued the company at $965 billion. Fortune reports that figure eclipsed OpenAI for the first time. The maker of Claude is now within reach of a one trillion dollar valuation, on revenue running at roughly a $47 billion annualised rate, with a public debut possibly as soon as the autumn.A company most people have never knowingly used is priced at close to a trillion dollars. That number is a bet that AI will replace a vast amount of human labour, booked in advance of it actually happening. The valuation is a forecast wearing the clothes of a fact. The question worth asking is what has to come true about the world for $965 billion to make sense, and who decided it should.On the live I’d predicted an autumn float the week before, and the news broke about four hours after we stopped recording, so allow me one moment of feeling clever. Leor did the sober maths: roughly a $47 billion revenue run rate, a 5% operating margin, an implied price-to-earnings ratio north of 500, against Microsoft, in nearly every home and office on earth, valued at only four to five times Anthropic on $100 billion of actual profit. In the short term the market is a voting machine, in the long term a weighing machine. Right now it is voting. For context, $965 billion is roughly the GDP of Switzerland.Florida sued OpenAI and named Sam Altman personallyOn 1 June Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier filed suit against OpenAI and named its chief executive Sam Altman in person, reported as the first US state to sue an AI company. The complaint alleges OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as safe while prioritising product and revenue, harvested children’s data, and used sycophancy, the design choice to affirm users excessively, to steer them towards paid subscriptions.For two years the industry has sold safety as a feature while resisting any outside test of the claim. A state attorney general has now put that marketing in front of a court. Whatever the verdict, the discovery process alone could drag internal safety decisions into public view. Consumer-protection law is proving a sharper instrument than the AI-specific regulation that does not yet exist. Accountability arrived through an existing court, not a new one.The second a chief executive can be held personally responsible, you will not believe the speed with which proper governance and safety checks appear, the things we keep being told the technology just cannot do. Sadly, once these companies have raised public money, they can outspend a state attorney general for a decade, and the courts already favour whoever can keep paying lawyers the longest.A Labour MP took Musk’s AI to the High CourtOn 3 June the Labour MP Jess Asato, who represents Lowestoft, filed a claim at the High Court against Elon Musk’s xAI, after users of its Grok chatbot created and shared fake images of her without her consent, in the weeks after she criticised the tool. The claim, brought with the law firm AWO, is for breaches of data protection law and misuse of private information, and seeks damages, a formal acknowledgement that what happened was illegal, and an order requiring xAI to stop. Keir Starmer backed her, saying he was 100% behind her.The harm here already happened, to a named person, generated by a tool marketed as harmless fun. The only remedy on offer is for the victim to sue one of the richest men alive, in her own time and at her own risk. No regulator stepped in first. The burden keeps landing on individuals while the systems stay intact.The platforms always say the moderation is too hard. On the live I kept coming back to one comparison: I can post genuinely horrific content to YouTube and it sails through, but the moment I add a Beatles song without clearing the copyright, it is gone in seconds. The technology to detect and stop sharing exists, we have watched it work for music rights and in Telegram and WhatsApp court orders. We are entering an era where capability has to start coming with accountability.CNN sued Perplexity, and Perplexity said the quiet part out loudOn 28 May CNN filed suit against Perplexity in the Southern District of New York, accusing the AI search firm of scraping more than 17,000 of its stories, photos and videos. The complaint alleges copyright and trademark infringement, including that Perplexity implied an ongoing CNN relationship by offering its content through a paid Comet Plus tier. CNN says it ...
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    45 mins
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