#medicine

OpenAI quietly launched GPT-5.6 in three tiers (Sol, Terra, Luna) restricted to trusted partners, while Semgrep reported that GLM 5.2 outperforms Claude on its internal cybersecurity benchmarks. Portugal's National Health Service contracted Sword Health to deliver AI-assisted physical therapy nationwide, the first country-scale deployment of its kind. Edison Scientific and Population Health Partners announced a deal to use AI agents for end-to-end drug discovery. Patrick Boyle assessed Brexit's 10-year economic toll, and Noah Smith examined whether AI will push companies toward more or less outsourcing.

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.

Sebastian Raschka published a comprehensive 2025 LLM review covering DeepSeek R1, RLVR, inference-time scaling, and 2026 predictions, while Simon Willison released his annual year-in-LLMs retrospective. On the pharma front, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya confirmed that DEI-related grants restored under a court order will not be renewed in 2026, even as NIH began reviewing thousands of delayed proposals and funded 135 on the first day. Novo Nordisk priced its newly approved Wegovy pill below Eli Lilly's competing obesity drug in a direct-to-consumer push. On the economy side, researchers across 16 countries found that the post-1980 labor share decline is driven by the composition of capital, not its quantity, and building more structures may reverse it.