The Week Trust Became The Product — Issue 07

OPEN INTELLIGENCE · ISSUE 07 · 24 — 30 MAY 2026. Anthropic passed OpenAI at $965 billion the same week it shipped a model whose headline feature is admitting when it is wrong, and pledged to one day release the exploit engine it still calls too dangerous to ship. Underneath the valuation, trust stopped being assumed and started being priced: a contamination-free benchmark reset the coding leaderboards everyone quotes, a 400-run study showed an AI pentester's clean report proves nothing, and OpenAI gated its new biodefense model to vetted governments only. Meanwhile the surface that trust runs on failed in public — one malformed character bypassed authentication in every Starlette-based agent stack, a North Korean RAT turned Hugging Face into its command channel, and the offline model runner became the exfiltration vehicle. The frontier started selling trust. The stack underneath it could not provide any.