#demographics

AbbVie agreed to acquire Apogee Therapeutics for nearly $11 billion, the latest in a pharma M&A wave that has totaled $123 billion in 2026 deals so far. Definium's LSD therapy met its primary endpoint in a Phase 3 trial for major depression, and the FDA reversed a four-month-old rejection of Regenxbio's gene therapy for Hunter syndrome. In AI, Samsung deployed ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to employees worldwide in one of OpenAI's largest enterprise rollouts, while Nathan Lambert and Kevin Xu argued that banning open-source AI would damage US interests. Patrick Boyle examined how SpaceX humiliated Wall Street and Cuba announced its most sweeping economic reforms in decades, including private banking and the end of fuel subsidies.

Z.ai released GLM-5.2, a 753-billion-parameter open-weights LLM under MIT license, which Simon Willison called the most powerful text-only open-weights model available. Separately, a White House report on the Fable 5 export control jailbreak drew pushback from cybersecurity expert Kate Moussouris, who said the restriction harms US cyber defense. OpenAI and Molecule.one published results from a near-autonomous AI chemist using GPT-5.4 that improved a challenging medicinal chemistry reaction. In pharma, nitazene overdose deaths confirmed by the CDC rose from 27 in 2020 to 409 in 2024, while the FTC and four state AGs sued WPATH over its gender-affirming care standards. Tyler Cowen flagged new research showing AI-native startups are organized differently from conventional venture-backed firms, drawing on Y Combinator data from 2020 to 2024.

The US government issued an export control directive suspending all access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals, a move that rattled the AI industry and prompted Tyler Cowen to note the equilibrium was hard to solve for. Separately, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappoor published a detailed argument that software engineers won't be replaced by AI, citing task fragmentation and the compounding cost of errors. The FDA approved Sanofi's teplizumab for children with stage 3 type 1 diabetes after it cleared a dispute between career staff and political appointees. Noah Smith asked whether Chinese corporate debt could zombify the economy, while Patrick Boyle examined how SpaceX humiliated Wall Street by retaining founder control across 25x more fundraising than typical startups.

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.

DeepSeek V4 Pro beat GPT-5.5 Pro on precision benchmarks this week, marking the latest round in the US-China model rivalry. A malware campaign hit 32 npm packages with roughly 117,000 weekly downloads, planting backdoors inside Claude Code startup settings. Pfizer's monthly obesity drug berobenatide continued to show promise in mid-stage data while Boehringer Ingelheim's survodutide disappointed on overall weight loss. Patrick Boyle examined what happens when a housing boom turns to bust, and Marc Rubinstein at Net Interest looked at the IPO readiness of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

Microsoft unveiled two proprietary MAI models at Build, including a 1-trillion-parameter reasoning model and a 137B coding model for GitHub Copilot, as Uber hit its AI budget ceiling after burning through its full 2026 allocation in four months. Alnylam struck a $2 billion deal with Inceptive Nucleics to build AI foundation models for RNA interference therapeutics. Trump signed a narrower AI oversight executive order requiring a 30-day review before powerful open-weight models can be released. The Trump administration also moved to strip job protections from roughly 8,000 NIH staff, including officials who oversee research grants, while Medicaid work requirements drew criticism for going beyond what advocates had anticipated.

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.