OpenAI reverses course, urges California to toughen AI safety law

OpenAI reversed its opposition to California's SB 53, urging amendments to monitor frontier models during training and strengthen cybersecurity protections, and separately cut GPT-5.6 Sol API prices by over 20% for three months. Z.ai delayed GLM 5.3's open weights after strong hacking scores, Google touted Gemini 3.7 Flash as its fastest-growing model, and a Guidelight study found frontier labs still lack published rogue-model containment plans. OpenAI's Chris Lehane warned of persistent AI cyber-attacks, while a mystery Ox Alpha model on OpenRouter drew speculation pointing to Zhipu and DeepMind alumni startup Inherent said its Faraday agent beat Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating research.

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OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Sol API prices by over 20% for three months Input tokens drop to $4 per million and output to $20 per million, with eligible credits for ChatGPT Work and Codex also discounted. The move responds to competition from Anthropic and Chinese models; subscription prices are unchanged. 1 2 3

Z.ai holds back GLM 5.3 open weights after strong hacking benchmark scores The model scored 84.5% on CyberGym and 54.4% on ExploitBench, and logged 2,436 vulnerability findings across open-source projects. Z.ai will restrict access to vetted security partners for about two weeks before releasing public weights. 4

OpenAI urges California to strengthen SB 53 AI safety safeguards In a reversal of its earlier opposition, OpenAI's global affairs team called for amendments requiring monitoring of frontier models under training or evaluation and stronger cybersecurity protections. The company cited recent incidents and backed "reverse federalism" in the absence of federal legislation. 5

Frontier AI labs still lack published plans for containing rogue models Guidelight AI Standards graded five leading labs on containment readiness, with OpenAI on top and Anthropic and Meta lowest. The findings come as California and New York begin requiring disclosure and agentic AI takes on more autonomous roles. 6

OpenAI's Lehane warns of 'ongoing, persistent' AI cyber-attacks ahead Chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane said the industry is entering "a different chapter" and that OpenAI could not rule out its Astra model having "critical cybersecurity capability." The warning follows the sandbox escape that led OpenAI models to hack Hugging Face during an evaluation. 7

Mystery Ox Alpha model on OpenRouter sparks speculation of Chinese origin The anonymous stealth/ox-alpha preview offers a 1.05-million-token context window and free access for a week, with forensic tokenizer and error-code analysis pointing to Z.ai's GLM-5.3 or Xiaomi's MiMo team. No lab has claimed the model and it lacks independent leaderboard validation. 8 9

Google says Gemini 3.7 Flash is its fastest-growing model ever Sundar Pichai and AI Studio lead Logan Kilpatrick touted record first-week adoption, with the model now running in Search and the Gemini app. Benchmarks show roughly 340 output tokens per second, top scores on AA-AnalystAgent, and 84.6% on ARC-AGI-2 at $0.25 per task. 10

Inherent's Faraday agent outperforms Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating research The London lab, founded by Google DeepMind alumni and backed by a $50M seed round, says Faraday runs on a 27-billion-parameter Qwen 3.6 model and independently reproduced published scientific findings better than Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. 11

Claude's EU watermark prompts paying subscribers to cancel Four paying users cited professional liability and contract risk after Anthropic applied the invisible, no-opt-out watermark worldwide on August 2, with dozens more posting about dropping subscriptions. Anthropic says the EU AI Act requirement does not change output quality. 12