OpenAI bought Ona to power persistent, secure agents in its Codex platform, while Anthropic lifted its hidden safeguards after researchers flagged degraded outputs. The issue also covers Xiaomi’s MiMo Code AI assistant beating Claude on long tasks and dives into tokenizers, vintage LLM builds, compute markets, data debugging, and PyTorch optimizations.

• OpenAI acquired Ona to bring secure cloud execution and persistent, cross-session agent orchestration to its Codex platform.
• Anthropic secretly rerouted certain Claude requests (training rival models, debugging AI code, tweaking neural nets) to a weaker model, then reversed the policy after researchers and users complained.
• Xiaomi open-sourced MiMo Code V0.1.0, a terminal-native coding assistant that beats Claude Code on tasks over 200 steps using a memory subagent to track context.
• A developer built a full transformer from scratch for about $80 on a home PC.