AI Got Cheaper, Meaner, and More Paranoid — AI Brief July 16

Context Window: AI Daily News Brief · Jul 16, 2026 · 5m

Good day, humans. Two things are happening in AI at once, and they don’t agree with each other. On one side, everyone’s racing to make models cheaper and more open — Mira Murati just gave away a 975-billion-parameter model, and Sam Altman is threatening to sell GPT at a quarter of the price. On the other, the same labs are getting scared of what those models can do: OpenAI built an AI whose only job is to hack OpenAI, and Anthropic is hiring people who know how to build weapons so its chatbot never does. Cheap, powerful, and paranoid. Let’s get into it.Murati’s Thinking Machines Open-Sources…