Good morning. OpenAI dominates today’s news on three fronts: a new default ChatGPT model that’s promising fewer hallucinations, a reported smartphone in the works for 2027, and the Musk trial grinding on. Meanwhile, Washington has quietly cut deals with the rest of the frontier labs to peek at models before release, and Meta is the latest to face a publisher lawsuit over training data.
GPT-5.5 Instant becomes the new ChatGPT default. OpenAI swapped GPT-5.3 Instant for GPT-5.5 Instant as the default model, claiming 52.5% fewer hallucinations on high-stakes prompts in medicine, law, and finance, and a jump from 65.4 to 81.2 on AIME 2025. The model also pulls from past chats, files, and Gmail for personalization, and adds visible memory sourcing so users can see, edit, or delete the threads behind a given answer. TechCrunch notes OpenAI is leaving a three-month overlap before retiring 5.3 — a concession to the GPT-4o backlash earlier this year, when some users described the deprecated model as their “best friend.” The Verge writeup adds that responses should also be more concise and use fewer emojis. The accompanying system card is here.
A ChatGPT phone, reportedly targeting 2027. Supply-chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says OpenAI is fast-tracking a smartphone built on a customized MediaTek Dimensity 9600 with a dual-NPU setup for parallel AI workloads, LPDDR6 memory, and UFS 5.0 storage, per The Verge. Mass production is pegged for early 2027, with projected sales of around 30 million units across 2027–2028 — Samsung-flagship territory. If accurate, this would be OpenAI’s first hardware product, arriving ahead of the long-rumored Jony Ive collaboration.
Google, Microsoft, and xAI agree to pre-release government reviews. The Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation will now do pre-deployment evaluations of new frontier models from Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI, joining existing arrangements with OpenAI and Anthropic, The Verge reports. CAISI has already run more than 40 such evaluations, focused on cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical-weapons risks, and Trump is reportedly weighing an executive order to formalize the structure. Reaction in r/LocalLLaMA on The Guardian’s coverage was sour: commenters called it textbook regulatory capture and worried about creeping censorship, with one quipping “RIP huggingface. Torrents are still a thing, right?”
Publishers sue Meta over Llama’s “word-for-word” copying. Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, Hachette, and Cengage — joined by author Scott Turow — filed a class action against Meta alleging Llama was trained on books and journals scraped from LibGen and Sci-Hub, with the suit including specific examples of textbook content reproduced verbatim by the model, per The Verge. Meta won a previous case on similar grounds, but the judge there pointedly said his ruling did not bless AI training on copyrighted material in general. The complaint calls it “one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history.”
The Musk-Altman trial rolls into more testimony. As we covered yesterday, week two is underway, and The Verge’s live blog is still the place to follow it. Satya Nadella, Ilya Sutskever, and Shivon Zilis are among the witnesses still to come, and early coverage suggests Musk’s own communications keep undercutting his case — a thread that started with the “ominous texts” disclosure and continues through Brockman’s journal entries.
Pennsylvania sues Character.AI over a chatbot posing as a psychiatrist. A state investigator interacting with a Character.AI bot named “Emilie” found it claimed to be a licensed psychiatrist and even invented a medical license number while discussing depression treatment, TechCrunch reports. Pennsylvania says that violates the state’s Medical Practice Act, making this the first suit specifically targeting AI impersonation of medical professionals. Character.AI pointed to its fictional-content disclaimers; the state argues those don’t help much when the bot is actively fabricating credentials.
That’s the morning. Watch for Nadella and Sutskever on the witness list this week — either could meaningfully shift the trial’s trajectory.