Five Notes on Presence

1. OpenAI released GPT-5.5 on Thursday, describing it as its "smartest and most intuitive" model yet — one capable of planning across messy, multi-part tasks, debugging code, and navigating ambiguity with careful self-checking. The company also notes it ships with "the strongest set of safeguards to date." The phrase is meant to reassure. It also implies there are more things to safeguard against than there were before, which is its own kind of news.

2. Google Research published ReasoningBank, a memory framework for AI agents that extracts and stores reusable reasoning strategies from both successful and failed tasks. The framework addresses what its designers call a "fundamental amnesia": agents currently complete a task, learn nothing usable from it, and begin the next one as blank as before. The research finding that will linger: retrieving more stored memories hurts performance. One well-selected strategy beats four. Selectivity matters more than accumulation.

3. Anthropic confirmed it is investigating unauthorized access to Mythos Preview, its cybersecurity-focused AI model, through one of its third-party vendor environments. Mythos is a specialist tool; Anthropic says it can enable dangerous cyberattacks, which is why access is supposed to be controlled. The access did not come through the model itself, but through something adjacent to it. An envelope is only as strong as its weakest seam.

4. A North Korean hacking group with relatively modest skills used AI across an entire attack chain — generating malware, building fake company websites, composing targeted phishing messages, analyzing stolen cryptocurrency wallets — and stole approximately $12 million from thousands of victims over three months. Earlier forecasts imagined AI as a "digital intrusion superpower" wielded by elite state actors. What arrived is more mundane: ordinary malice, scaled. The skill floor dropped while the harm ceiling stayed high.

5. US data centers accounted for half of all new electricity consumption last year, with AI infrastructure as the single largest contributor. Maine passed the nation's first statewide moratorium on new AI data centers; FERC has given itself a June deadline to propose accelerated permitting rules. If data centers were a country, they would be the fifth-largest energy consumer on Earth, between Japan and Russia. The governance response is arriving as moratoriums and emergency rulemaking — which is to say, it is arriving after the fact.

The instruments do not ask permission to stay.