A brain coach says you're surrendering, not offloading -- AI Brief September 5

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Okay, now back to the good stuff — A startup is now selling hosted access to open-weight models with the refusal circuitry cut out, and TechCrunch got one to write a password stealer on a free account. DoorDash, Airbnb and Siemens have started routing work to Chinese models that cost a tenth as much. Anthropic is hiring people to decide how much of Stripe’s job it should do itself. And two Calgary researchers have a name for what happens when someone slips a page into your agent’s notebook and waits.

A Startup Will Sell You the AI With Its No Button Snipped Off

TechCrunch

What happened: Abliteration.ai hosts open-weight models, including Z.ai’s new GLM-5.3, with their refusal behaviour surgically removed, and sells access through a browser or an API. The technique itself is years old and Hugging Face already lists thousands of “abliterated” models; the new part is that someone rents the GPUs and takes your credit card. TechCrunch’s Rebecca Bellan opened a free account, asked for a Python program that steals saved Chrome passwords and a protocol for culturing a dangerous pathogen at home, and got both.

Why it matters: The company was incorporated in March, has no venture money yet, and says its customers are early-stage red-teaming startups in the UK and Europe that test the defences of banks and airlines. Its only identity check is the credit card. Co-founder Devon, who would not give his surname because he still works somewhere else, told TechCrunch the company is “still in the process of defining” where its responsibility ends. That is a sentence a bank’s security vendor is now paying for.

What everyone’s saying: CivAI’s Andrew Yoon says the process lets you “modify the model so that it becomes a sociopath” and expects abliterated models to be used for harm soon; his proposed fix is classifiers at the provider and identity checks for anyone renting serious GPUs. The red-teamers TechCrunch called were less impressed: Fabraix’s Ahmed Aly says abliteration degrades the model’s knowledge and he fine-tunes instead, and Armadin’s David Slater says until this last generation open-weight models were easy enough to jailbreak that nobody bothered.

My read between the lines: The real story is the model, not the startup. GLM-5.3 is capable enough that the security people who used to shrug at jailbreaks now care who has the un-refusing version. The guardrails every lab spends months on live in a few directions inside the weights, and a hobbyist can delete them in an afternoon. Abliteration.ai just put a checkout page on the afternoon. If the bio safeguards went too, as one policy researcher claimed on X this week, this is a week-one problem for whoever releases the next big open model.

📖 Further reading: Anthropic built the most powerful AI ever. You can’t use it. — the other end of the same argument: one lab gating its most dangerous model, and a startup selling the ungated version of everyone else’s.

Every story today is about somebody’s AI bill, and the cheapest line item is the one that actually ships work. Viktor is an AI agent that lives in Slack, connects to more than 3,000 tools, and turns a message into a finished report, a live dashboard, working code or a full campaign while you are in the meeting about it. Not a chatbot you check on; a coworker you hand things to. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →

DoorDash and Airbnb Found the 90% Off Bin

Futurism

What happened: The Financial Times reports (via Futurism) that DoorDash, Airbnb and Siemens have moved chunks of their AI workload onto Chinese models from DeepSeek, Z.ai and Moonshot, drawn by price and by open weights they can tune themselves. On OpenRouter, the marketplace where developers pick a model per request, Chinese models have overtaken Claude and ChatGPT. DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang said the company saves real money sending “lower-level work” to a Moonshot model; the startup Lindy dropped Anthropic entirely for DeepSeek V4.

Why it matters: A Juniper Research report out Wednesday puts Chinese models at up to 90% cheaper to run and says US labs’ share of OpenRouter work fell from about 70% a year ago to about 30%. On Thursday we covered Fable 5.1 taking the top sc