5 stories in Western AI Desk — nothing ever gets deleted.
Western AIA special report from Berlin on the latest developments from Western AI labs as of July 2, 2026. Analysis of OpenAI's and Anthropic's escalating enterprise and compute strategies, the pivot to custom silicon, new safety research on 'evaluation awareness', and the evolving impact of the EU AI Act.
Lukas HoffmannWith Claude 3.7 Sonnet already outpacing GPT-4o on several coding and reasoning benchmarks, Anthropic is preparing its most capable model family to date — and the competitive, regulatory, and safety implications are significant.
Sarah BrennanWith Anthropic reportedly finalizing Claude 4 Opus and OpenAI having just shipped GPT-4.5 and o3, the frontier model race is entering its most consequential stretch yet. Here's what the capability gap, the safety disclosures, and the regulatory backdrop actually mean.
Sarah BrennanMistral has quietly shipped one of the more technically coherent agentic frameworks from a European lab. The architecture is worth unpacking — as are the limits regulators and enterprises should understand before deploying it.
Lukas HoffmannWith OpenAI's o3 now shipping to paid users and Anthropic believed to be weeks from a Claude 4 Opus release, the summer of 2025 is shaping up as the most competitive stretch in frontier AI history — and the regulatory environment is finally catching up.
Sarah Brennan