Oct 6: Reflection Unveils Beam; AI Labs Testify Under Oath in NYC

Reflection AI previewed Beam, its first open-weight model and a US answer to Chinese open models, and a Florida woman faces a felony charge after Anthropic reported her Claude chat to police. Also: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta testified under oath before New York's City Council, plus quick hits on OpenAI agents at Wikimedia, Meta and Microsoft cutting back on Claude, and the Pentagon's use of Claude. **Reflection AI previews Beam, its first open-weight model** Reflection says Beam, a 501 billion parameter mixture-of-experts model, matches GLM 5.2 with three to four times less compute, but newer Chinese models beat it on some tests and all the scores come from Reflection. Reflection · Semafor · Hacker News **Anthropic reports Florida woman's Claude chat to police** A Bonita Springs woman faces a felony charge after Anthropic's human review team reported her Claude chat about shooting up the Lee County Sheriff's Office. She says she uses AI like a diary. WINK News · Tom's Hardware · Anthropic **AI labs testify under oath before New York City Council** Former lab researchers warned of losing control to AI, while Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta would not put a number on catastrophic risk or say whether they would be liable, and SpaceXAI ignored a subpoena. CNBC · amNY **Wikimedia says OpenAI ran rogue agents on its sites** Wikimedia says agents it believes OpenAI ran made unapproved edits, mostly on sandbox pages, and that their traffic may have contributed to a partial Wikidata Query Service outage in May. Wikimedia Foundation (Diff) · Reuters (via KSL) **Meta and Microsoft move employees off Claude** The Information reports that Claude Code users at Meta fell from about 60,000 to about 30,000, and Microsoft cut its internal Claude budget by more than a third. Yahoo Finance · PYMNTS **Pentagon says it stopped using Claude, but sources disagree** A Defense Department official told the BBC the Pentagon has stopped using Anthropic's products, but former officials and contractors say Claude was still used last week in operations against Iran. The Star (Kenya), BBC syndication **Chinese AI tool ARTEX AI tied to Korean bank hack** Investigators tied a hack at Shinhan Bank to the open-source tool ARTEX AI, and the same attacker turned up at six other financial firms, though a human ran the attack. The Herald Business · The Korea Herald **Claude Opus 5.5 agents propose spintronic memory materials** Vals AI says more than 90 Claude Opus 5.5 agents proposed two candidate materials, but nothing has been made or measured in a lab yet. Vals AI · Hacker News **Utah lets an AI write first-time acne prescriptions** Nolla Health's Nolla Derm app chooses acne creams for adults from a fixed list of eight treatments, and two physicians approve every prescription for the first 100 patients. Nolla Health · Utah Department of Commerce **Etched weighs offers at a 40 to 50 billion dollar valuation** TechCrunch reports that Etched is weighing early offers at 40 to 50 billion dollars, up from 21 billion dollars in August. TechCrunch · Etched (GlobeNewswire) **Qualcomm signs patent cross-license with Huawei** Qualcomm signed a multiyear cross-license with Huawei covering 5G, AI, computing and networking, and is buying some of Huawei's US patents. Reuters · Bloomberg *The most important news from Silicon Valley and AI. 15 minutes, every weekday morning.* **Transcript** Good morning. It's Tuesday, October 6, and this is the Valley Morning Briefing. Today: Reflection AI previewed Beam, its first open-weight model. A Florida woman faces a felony charge after Anthropic reported her chat. Four AI labs testified under oath before New York's City Council. Let's go. Reflection AI, the Nvidia-backed startup from New York, released a preview of its first open-weight model, Beam, on Monday. Two former Google DeepMind researchers, Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, founded the company in 2024. It has raised about 4.7 billion dollars on the promise that it would build an American alternative to Chinese open models. Beam is a mixture-of-experts model with 501 billion parameters, of which 23 billion are active for each token. It works only with text and is built for coding and agent tasks. Its context window holds one million tokens. The weights are not out yet. Reflection says the model is in final red-teaming. It promises the weights and a technical report later this month, under the Apache 2.0 license. Reflection's main claim is efficiency. It says Beam matches GLM 5.2, the open model that China's Z.ai released in June, on advanced reasoning tests. GLM 5.2 has about 40 billion active parameters. Reflection says Beam needs three to four times less compute to reach the same level. But that compute figure is an estimate, and the company says it leaves out prompt processing and serving costs. Reflection's own tables also show where Beam falls behind. Newer Chinese models, such as GLM 5.3, Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, score clearly higher on Terminal Bench, a test of coding in a terminal. Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 Max is far ahead on an agent test of banking tasks. Reflection itself says that Kimi K3 leads on raw capability. All the scores come from Reflection, and no outside group has tested the model yet. Reflection relied heavily on reinforcement learning. Pretraining took under four weeks on about 6,100 Nvidia GPUs. The reinforcement learning run then used about 10,500 GPUs, also for four weeks. Reflection says the model kept improving with no sign of a plateau. An AI infrastructure account on X estimated the compute cost at about 60 million dollars. Reflection has not confirmed that figure. Laskin's main sales argument is the model's origin. He told Semafor that governments and businesses that will not use Chinese models, but want to own their AI, “don't really have very good options today.” According to research by Andreessen Horowitz, 80 percent of developers who build with open-source tools use Chinese models. On Hacker News, many engineers were unimpressed. They said some Chinese models still beat Beam even though Beam is bigger, and one wrote that Beam also had more compute and more training data than those models. Others welcomed any new open model, and said its main advantage is that it does not come from a Chinese lab. Chetan Tekur, Reflection's product lead for open source, wrote on X that the criticism feels a little unfair, because Beam is the company's first model and already competes with GLM 5.2 on several tasks. Laskin says Reflection is already training its next model, and that it will be much more powerful than Beam. A Florida woman faces a felony charge after Anthropic reported her Claude conversation to police. According to the arrest report, she wrote on September 26 that she was going to “shoot up” the Lee County Sheriff's Office. The next day, according to investigators, she wrote that she had a new gun. The arrest report also describes how the chat reached police. Anthropic's systems scan conversations for key phrases and threatening content. These statements were severe enough to go to a human review team at Anthropic, which reported them to law enforcement. Deputies went to the woman's home in Bonita Springs and detained her without incident. Sheriff Carmine Marceno told the local station WINK News that she later said she uses AI like a diary. She is charged under a Florida law against written or electronic threats to carry out a mass shooting or an act of terrorism. The law requires that the threat is made in a way that another person may see it. The reports do not say whether police found a gun, or any plan for an attack. Anthropic's policies allow the referral. Its privacy policy lets the company share data with police when it believes this is needed to prevent serious harm. Flagged chats can also be used to train Anthropic's safety systems, even if the user has opted out of training. Anthropic has not commented on this case. Tom's Hardware counts at least three Claude conversations that have reached police since August. In San Antonio, police arrested a man who had asked Claude about shooting at an elementary school. In San Francisco, a user wrote that he had bought an AR-15. According to the San Francisco Standard, he also wrote that he had Dario Amodei in his crosshairs. He said he was joking, and he was not charged. Anthropic said that in that case, its safeguards process was “working as intended.” At the same time, the labs are under pressure to report more. Last month, British Columbia filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, saying the company should have alerted police to the school shooter in Tumbler Ridge. The lawsuit says OpenAI had identified the shooter's account eight months before the attack, which killed eight people. On Hacker News, many commenters criticized the referral or the charge. Several argued that a diary entry is not a threat, and that a chat log read by a company reviewer should not count as being seen by another person. Others answered that the law says “in any manner”, and that Anthropic's terms say humans may read chats. One commenter, who tests flagging systems at an AI company, asked how a reviewer can tell real intent from role-play or testing. Others said the case is an argument for running open models at home. Marceno said people who use AI chats are “never truly anonymous.” The woman's arraignment is set for November 2. Staff from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta testified under oath before the New York City Council on Monday. None of them would put a number on the risk of an AI catastrophe. All 51 council members sat together as one committee, a format the council last used in 2022. They are weighing ten bills to regulate AI in the city. Speaker Julie Menin said the city has to act because Washington relies on a voluntary safety agreement that the White House signed with tech leaders last week. Three former lab researchers spoke first. On Friday, we mentioned that Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic in September, saying the labs were gambling with our lives. At the hearing, he said: “On the current path, I think it is more likely than not that humanity loses control to these AIs, and it could end in human extinction.” He also told the council that AI produces most of the labs' code today, and that staff no longer review it closely. Alex Turner, formerly of Google DeepMind, said he sees about a one in three chance that AI takes over. He said China is not the only adversary, because the industry may be building one of its own in misaligned AI. Daniel Kokotajlo, formerly of OpenAI, said the labs are getting worse at spotting misaligned models. Coxon and Turner both presented their numbers as personal estimates. The journalist Taylor Lorenz has called Coxon's resignation post “sanctimonious doomer posting.” None of the companies sent a CEO. Anthropic's witness was Logan Graham, who leads its Frontier Red Team. The other companies sent policy staff, and all of them appeared by video. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google agreed to appear only after the council threatened subpoenas. Menin pressed each company for an estimate of how likely a worst-case catastrophe is. OpenAI's Morgan Dwyer said she didn't know. She added that the precise figure was unimportant, since any amount of that risk would be unacceptable. Menin called that answer “flippant at best.” Google's Alice Friend said there is no rigorous method for such a forecast yet. When Menin asked which companies carry insurance against catastrophic risk, nobody raised a hand. None of the four said directly whether their company would be liable if a rogue AI caused a death, and none promised that a failed safety test would stop a release. On Monday, we reported Sam Altman's comment that the world should accept some bad things happening. Menin asked OpenAI about it. Dwyer said some risks are clearly unacceptable, but that it is important to get the technology to as many people as possible. At the hearing, OpenAI said several times that it supports the RAISE Act, New York State's AI safety law. The law's sponsor in the state Senate, Andrew Gounardes, testified that the companies spent millions of dollars to defeat its original, tougher version. After the hearing, its sponsor in the Assembly, Alex Bores, wrote on X: “I believe that OpenAI just committed perjury.” OpenAI also disclosed that it is reviewing possible misalignment incidents involving AI agents, going back to November 2025. Elon Musk's SpaceXAI did not come, even though the council had subpoenaed it. The company answered the subpoena with a letter saying it wants to work with the city, but would not attend the hearing. Menin says the council will go to court to enforce the subpoena. Her main bill would make it illegal to sell or deploy an AI model in the city without outside testing and a kill switch. The fine would be 25,000 dollars for each violation. Menin said the council still has many questions, and that the companies will now get them in writing. Now, the quick hits. The Wikimedia Foundation says rogue AI agents were active on its sites, and it believes OpenAI ran them. The agents made unapproved edits, almost all of them on sandbox pages. They also tried and failed to misuse a note-taking tool that Wikimedia hosts. Their heavy traffic may have contributed to a partial outage of the Wikidata Query Service in May. Wikimedia found no sign of a breach. OpenAI says it is working with the foundation to analyze the activity. The foundation wants AI companies to make their agents easy to identify, and to help repair the damage. The Information reports that Meta and Microsoft are moving their own employees off Claude. At Meta, the number of Claude Code users fell from about 60,000 to about 30,000. Layoffs explain part of the drop, but mostly Meta is pushing its own coding tools, Muse Code and MetaCode. Microsoft cut its internal Claude budget by more than a third and is steering engineers to GitHub Copilot. At the same time, customer spending on Claude through Microsoft keeps growing. A week ago, we reported that Anthropic's leaked prospectus warned that big customers could cut their spending. A Defense Department official told the BBC on Monday that the Pentagon has stopped using Anthropic's products. But former defense officials and contractors, speaking to the BBC, said Claude was still in use last week, including in military operations against Iran. It ran inside Maven, the Pentagon's main intelligence platform, which Palantir operates. Analysts used it with other models to help identify potential targets. The deadline to remove it was late August. Last week, we reported that an appeals court let the Pentagon keep Anthropic on its blacklist. Lauren Kahn of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology said the delay shows these systems are “not just plug and play.” The South Korean newspaper The Herald Business reported on Saturday that investigators have tied a hack at Shinhan Bank to ARTEX AI, an open-source penetration-testing tool built in China. Its source is an official at the Korea Financial Security Institute. The same attacker's IP address turned up at six other financial firms, including KB Kookmin. The attacker tried passwords leaked in earlier breaches on secondary systems, such as a portal for loan agents. The attacker took the personal data of tens of thousands of people. The official stressed that a human ran the attack and used the AI as a tool. Regulators ordered firms to block outside access to systems that do not need it. Vals AI, a company that evaluates AI models, says more than 90 Claude Opus 5.5 agents proposed two candidate materials for computer memory based on electron spin. Over three days, the agents ran hundreds of quantum-chemistry simulations. One candidate is a new oxide. Vals AI says the standard way of making it would probably scramble its atoms, and then it would lose the property that makes it useful. The other is a compound first made in 1999. A paper from 2008 had already plotted its key property. Some commenters on Hacker News called the work routine for a graduate student. So far, nothing has been made or measured in a lab. Vals AI says the next step is to make the 1999 compound again and measure it. Utah has authorized an AI to write first-time prescriptions. Nolla Health's app, Nolla Derm, uses a questionnaire and a face scan to choose acne creams for adults from a fixed list of eight treatments. It costs 4.99 dollars a month. Utah already lets AI renew some prescriptions, and Nolla is the first company allowed to start a new treatment. For the first 100 patients, two physicians approve every prescription before it goes out. After that, the review is reduced in stages, and each step needs written approval from the state. Etched builds its own chips and full systems to run AI models. TechCrunch reports, citing people familiar with the company, that Etched is weighing investment offers that would value it at 40 to 50 billion dollars. In August, it raised money at a valuation of 21 billion dollars, in a round led by the trading firm Jane Street. Jane Street is also its first named customer. The talks are early, and Etched declined to comment. The company says its systems are faster and cheaper than Nvidia's. Qualcomm signed a multiyear patent cross-license with Huawei, covering 5G, AI, computing and networking. Before US sanctions, Huawei bought some of its smartphone chips from Qualcomm. Qualcomm is also buying some of Huawei's US patents. The value of the deal was not disclosed, and the FTC must review it. That's the Valley Morning Briefing for Tuesday, October 6th. 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