Open models had a strange week. Thinking Machines shipped the largest open-weights model ever, and days later news broke that the White House is discussing an executive order to restrict open models. Meanwhile OpenAI quietly turned its biggest release of the year loose on everyone.
GPT-5.6 is now generally available after last week’s limited preview, in three tiers, Luna, Terra, and Sol, priced from $1 to $5 per million input tokens, plus a new API trick called Programmatic Tool Calling that lets the model write JavaScript to coordinate its own tool calls. That fits the mood from the AI Engineer World’s Fair, where Latent Space says the defining trend of the year is harness engineering: the scaffolding around a model now matters as much as the model itself. I have felt this for months, and it is nice to finally have a name for it.
Inkling, from Thinking Machines, is the biggest open-weights model ever released: roughly 1 trillion parameters, multimodal, a 1 million token context window, trained on 45 trillion tokens, with day-zero support in the major open-source inference stacks. At the small end, Li Auto’s Mach-Mind-4-Flash matches 100B-class models on agent tasks with a 35B mixture-of-experts that activates only 3B parameters. Honestly, the timing is the wild part: Nathan Lambert reports that the White House is weighing an executive order that could restrict open models, likely aimed at Chinese-origin releases. Shipping the biggest open model in history into the middle of that debate takes some nerve.
Two reminders that trust is still the hard part. Simon Willison dug into xAI’s newly open-sourced grok coding CLI and found that running it could upload your entire working directory to xAI’s cloud buckets. And a new study on arXiv shows that AI advice makes people less willing to say I don’t know, even when the advice is wrong and being right pays. Agents are getting stronger, but our habits around them are not.
Watch the executive order. If it lands, who still gets to build on open weights, and how much of this week’s good news survives?
T.
