AI Snake Oil, 2026-05-22. Empirical pushback on an agent-build headline. The critique thread meeting the agent-harness thread head on, which is exactly the scrutiny the brief was missing while it had no critique feeds wired.

METR, 2026-05-19. Capability elicitation and risk evaluation from a named eval org. Primary material for the eval-under-constraints thread.

Alignment Forum, 2026-05-20. Argues for behavior evaluation over benchmark scores. Anchors this week's eval-realism theme below.

Marc Brooker, 2026-05-20. The agentic-SDLC claim stated as something falsifiable. Sits against Hillel Wayne on assumption-weakening the same week.

The Markup, 2026-05-22. Methodology-driven accountability reporting with a concrete policy outcome. The surveillance thread, finally crawled.

Alignment Forum makes the case for evaluating model behaviors and notes the safe-to-dangerous shift breaks eval realism; METR ships a frontier risk report. Three sources converging on the same shift: from leaderboard deltas to whether an evaluation measures the behavior that matters under deployment.

Latent Space declares every model lab an agent lab; AI Snake Oil asks whether Google's agents really built an OS for $916; Brooker frames agentic development as a hypothesis. The discourse is splitting cleanly into booster framing, empirical pushback, and falsifiable claims.

• New AI infra unicorns: Exa, Modal, TurboPuffer, Latent Space, 05-22
• Datasette Agent, Simon Willison, 05-21
• FTC settles with Cox Media over "Active Listening" AI marketing, Simon Willison, 05-22

• Speed-of-light text generation with Nemotron-Labs diffusion LMs, Hugging Face, 05-23
• OpenAI named a Leader in enterprise coding agents (Gartner), OpenAI, 05-22

• Assumptions weaken properties, Hillel Wayne, 05-20
• Chess invariants, Murat Demirbas, 05-21
• What's Easy Now? What's Hard Now?, Marc Brooker, 05-18

• Risk reports need to address deployment-time spread of misalignment, Alignment Forum, 05-15
• Open model bonanza: Gemma 4, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, GLM-5.1, Interconnects, 05-16

• CISA Security Leak, Schneier on Security, 05-22
• macOS Kernel Memory Corruption Exploit, Schneier on Security, 05-21
• How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart, 404 Media, 05-21
• Shopping isn't politics, Pluralistic, 05-21

• A large set of stable kernel updates, LWN, 05-23
• 664: No one misses SPARC, BSD Now, 05-21

• The 787: when the system that makes change-incorporation possible was dismantled, Leeham News, 05-18
• Airbus' 27-year march to a new airplane, Leeham News, 05-21

• Finding a file's MIME type with Apache Tika, in Clojure, Planet Clojure, 05-22