Monday, April 20, 2026

Anthropic researchers deployed autonomous AI agents (Claude Opus 4.6) to conduct alignment research on weak-to-strong supervision, a method for training stronger models using weaker model supervision. The agents achieved a 0.97 performance gap recovery score after five days and 800 cumulative research hours, compared to humans' 0.23 score over seven days, at a cost of approximately $22 per agent-hour. The results suggest automating outcome-gradable AI research is practical today, though the methods did not generalize to production models and required human direction to prevent convergence on limited research directions.

Noetik, an AI biotech company, secured a $50M licensing agreement with GSK that includes long-term deals for models like TARIO-2, a transformer trained on tumor spatial transcriptomics data. The company's AI predicts patient responses to experimental treatments by analyzing tumor biology, potentially improving the 95% failure rate in cancer clinical trials without developing new drugs. The deal represents pharma's growing appetite for AI software tools rather than in-house drug development, focusing on cohort selection and treatment matching.

Datasette 1.0a27 ships two headline changes: CSRF protection now relies on modern browser headers rather than Django-style form tokens, and a new RenameTableEvent fires when tables are renamed inside SQLite transactions. The event lets plugins like datasette-comments stay in sync when the tables they reference get renamed.

The CSRF shift had immediate downstream effects — the datasette-export-database plugin required a compatibility patch (0.3a1) because it had depended on the now-removed ds_csrftoken cookie for signed URLs. A follow-up alpha, 1.0a28, also landed quickly to fix accidental breakages introduced in a27, including a bug in execute_write_fn() callbacks and a new datasette.close() method to prevent file descriptor exhaustion in test suites.

Around the same release window, Willison published patterns for querying Datasette directly from Google Sheets via importdata(), named functions, and Apps Script, and built a Claude-assisted preview tool for the datasette.io news YAML file.

Google is expanding Gemini availability in Chrome to Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam. The rollout covers both desktop and iOS platforms in all countries except Japan, where only desktop access is available. This represents a regional expansion of Gemini's integration into Chrome's browser experience.

Fermi, an AI nuclear power startup co-founded by former U. S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, has announced the sudden departure of its CEO and CFO.

The company has faced headwinds with its AI campus development in Texas. The leadership changes come as the startup navigates challenges in scaling its nuclear-powered AI infrastructure.

Simon Willison enhanced his Claude Token Counter tool to enable side-by-side tokenization comparisons across Claude models, including the newly released Opus 4.7. Testing revealed Opus 4.7's updated tokenizer uses 1.46× more tokens for text than Opus 4.6, and 3× more for high-resolution images, despite identical pricing. The tool now supports all four current Claude models and demonstrates that Opus 4.7's token inflation could increase costs by roughly 40% for typical text inputs.

Hyatt has deployed ChatGPT Enterprise across its global workforce, leveraging advanced AI capabilities to enhance operations and guest experiences. The deployment utilizes ChatGPT's latest models to improve productivity across the hospitality company's teams. This partnership demonstrates enterprise adoption of AI tools in the hospitality sector.

Simon Willison has released version 0.6 of llm-openrouter, a tool for interacting with OpenRouter's API. The update adds a refresh command that allows users to update the list of available models without waiting for the cache to expire. Willison created this feature to quickly test newly available models like Kimi 2.6 on OpenRouter.