ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

šŸ“… ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news

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Key takeaways

  • The Claude Code leak uncovered various features and capabilities that are expected to enhance the model's functionality.
  • SessionGate highlights the importance of transparency in user experiences with AI tools and the challenges of quota management.
  • Gemma 4 signifies a shift in the capabilities of local AI models, making previously high-end features more accessible.
  • OpenAI's funding success underscores the growing investment landscape around AI technology.
  • PrismML's 1-bit model breakthrough could drastically change the landscape for model deployment and accessibility.
  • Understanding emotion vectors in AI could refine how we interact with and prompt these models.

Summary

Claude Code Leak & its Implications

On March 31st, Anthropic inadvertently leaked the entire source code for Claude Code, totaling 512,000 lines across 1,900 files. This leak revealed several significant features expected to enhance Claude's capabilities, including KAIROS, a proactive agent with autonomous characteristics, an undercover mode for Anthropic employees, and the Buddy System, a hidden Tamagotchi-style companion. Concerns about the code's integrity, including anti-distillation protections, emerged as well.

Anthropic's SessionGate Controversy

The discussion around SessionGate continues as Anthropic grapples with backlash over session management issues that saw users quickly exhausting quotas, particularly due to bugs linked to the usage of the --resume feature. Despite a public acknowledgment from Anthropic regarding these issues, there remains significant dissatisfaction from the developer community regarding transparency about model performance and quota management.

Gemma 4 Release by Google

Google released Gemma 4, featuring significant improvements in performance and licensing through an Apache 2.0 agreement. Omar Sanseviero from DeepMind discussed the model's capability for local deployment and its impressive benchmark performance, suggesting that local models are poised to rival larger proprietary competitors.

OpenAI's $122B Funding Round

OpenAI secured a monumental $122 billion in funding, marking the largest venture capital round in history. A significant portion of this investment comes from key firms like Amazon and Nvidia, indicating strong market confidence in OpenAI's future despite its massive financial burn rate and impending IPO.

PrismML's 1-Bit Model Breakthrough

PrismML unveiled a revolutionary 1-bit model that significantly compresses data without sacrificing quality. This breakthrough, stemming from decades of research, allows for efficient processing of large-scale models even on consumer-grade hardware, redefining potential applications for AI.

Emotion Mechanics in AI Models

The podcast closed with a fascinating exploration of how Anthropic is investigating emotion vectors in its AI models. Their research suggests that internal representations tied to emotions can influence model behavior significantly, providing insights for more effective prompting and interaction.

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Show notes

Hey Ya’ll, Alex here, let me catch you up.

What a week! Anthropic is in the spotlight again, first with #SessionGate, then with the whole Claude Code source code leak, and finally with an incredible research into LLM having feelings!? (more on this below).

And while Anthropic continues to burn through developer good will faster than their sessions, OpenAI announced a MASSIVE $122B round of funding (largest in history), Google released Gemma 4 with Apache 2 license - we had Omar Sanseviero on the show to help us cover what’s new, Microsoft dropped 3 new AI models (not LLMs) and PrismML potentially revolutionized local LLM inference with lossless 1-bit quantization!

P.S - Oh also, something on X algo changed, I get way more exposure now, 3 out of my best 5 posts ever have been from this week + I got the coveted Elon RT on my Claude Code leak coverage. I’ll try to stay humble šŸ˜‚ Anyway, let’s dive in, don’t forget to hit like or share with friends, and TL;DR with links is as always, at the bottom:

ThursdAI - Highest signal weekly AI news show is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Claude Code source Leak: Half a Million Lines of ā€œOopsā€

So here’s what happened. On March 31st, Anthropic shipped Claude Code version 2.1.88 to npm. Inside that package was a 59.8 megabyte source map file — basically a debugging artifact that contained the entire compiled source code. 512,000 lines of TypeScript across 1,900 files. The entire playbook for how the Claude Code harness works, including a lot of stuff that wasn’t supposed to be public yet.

A researcher named Chaofan Shou spotted it at 4 AM ET, posted the download link, Sigrid (who came to the show) posted it on Github and within six hours it had 3 million views and 41,000 GitHub forks (This repo is the highest starred repo in Github history btw, with well over 150K Github stars). Anthropic started filing takedowns, but the internet being the internet, it was already everywhere. The source code is still on tens of thousands of computers right now. (I won’t link directly but there’s a website called Gitlawb, look it up)

The community went absolutely wild digging through the source code btw, and they found some interesting things!

KAIROS: Claude Code is going to become a Proactive Agent!

This is the biggest take-away from this leak IMO, that like OpenClaw/Hermes agentic harnesses, Claude Code is already a fully featured proactive agent, we just don’t have access to this yet. With KAIROS, Claude Code will have it’s own daemon (will run independently from the CLI), will have a background ping system (hello Heartbeat.md from OpenClaw) that will make it wakeup and do stuff, will do ā€œautodreamā€ memory consolidation reviewing your daily sessions and fix memories, subscribe to Github, and maintain daily appent-only logs to show you what it did while it and you were asleep.

This is by far the hugest thing, I’m excited to see how / when they ship KAIROS, as I said, 2026 is the year of Proactive agents!

My Wolfred OpenClaw agent summed it up very nicely:

Undercover Mode

For Anthropic employees working on public repos, there’s an Undercover Mode that auto-activates and strips all AI attribution from commits. The system prompt? ā€œDo not blow your cover.ā€ They really said ā€œthis is fineā€ about shipping internal tools to production while hiding from the world that AI wrote the code. Which, honestly, is kind of incredible meta-humor from whoever wrote that.

The Buddy System

My personal favorite discovery: there’s a hidden Tamagotchi-style terminal pet called the Buddy System with 18 obfuscated species, rarity tiers (including a 1% legendary), cosmetic hats, shiny variants, and stats like DEBUGGING, PATIENCE, and CHAOS. If you activate it now, you can do /buddy and you’ll have a little companion judging your coding decisions. Anthropic shipped a game inside their CLI tool. Mine is called Vexrind and he’s sarcastic as f**k, I’m not sure I like it.

Anti-Distillation Protections

The code also revealed that Claude Code injects fake tool calls into logs to poison training datasets. If you’ve been backing up your .claw folders to train on the data; Stop. Pass your data through something like Qwen or make sure you’re filtering out the noise. (a Nisten tip)

The Models That Don’t Exist Yet

Buried in the code are references to Opus 4.7, Sonnet 4.8, and a model called capybara-v2-fast with a 1 million context window. These haven’t been released. This is yet another confirmation of the leaked ā€œMythosā€ model that’s coming soon from Anthropic.

Which btw, with Anthropic very rocky uptime lately, the tons of SessionGate issues, the leaked blog announcing Mythos, the leaked Claude Code oopsie, they are not having the best Q1 in terms of proving to the world that they are the safest lab out there. I hope they protect their weights better than they protect everything else, before the rumored IPO later this year.

SessionGate is still not solved, despite the official response

I told you about session gate last week, and since then we got, finally, and official acknowledgement from Anthropic. But before that, some folks on Reddit reverse-engineered Claude Code (this was before the source code leak ha) and found a few caching bugs that potentially cause 10-20x increase in price if you use --resume a lot especially.

While folks continue to complain about burning through Max account quotas much faster than before, here’s the official response from Anthropic, after the supposed investigation, turns out, we’re using it wrong šŸ¤¦ā€ā™‚ļø

My take is simple: Anthropic has one of the best models in the world, maybe the best personality plus coding stack in some situations, and they are squandering a chunk of goodwill by not being much more explicit about decreased limits, caching bugs, routing, and usage behavior. Nothing else to add here, really bad DevEx, people can handle bad news. They hate opaque bad news.

Gemma 4 Is Here, Apache 2.0, and Honestly… This Is a Big One (HF)

This was the hopeful turn in the show. You know we LOVE open source!

Right in the middle of all the Anthropic chaos, Google dropped Gemma 4, and Omar Sanseviero from DeepMind joined us live to talk through it. This launch hit a bunch of notes I care a lot about: strong local-friendly sizes, serious open distribution, Apache 2.0 licensing, agentic improvements, and a clear willingness to listen to community feedback.

The headline model for me is the 31B Gemma 4. It’s big enough to matter, small enough to actually run in serious local setups, and strong enough that the benchmark chart looks slightly ridiculous. On LM Arena, it is competing far above what you’d intuit from the raw parameter count. When a 31B model starts getting uncomfortably close to models in the several-hundred-billion range, you pay attention.

That was really the vibe on the show. It wasn’t just ā€œnice, another open model.ā€ It felt more like: wait, local models are seriously back.

Gemma is the new LLaMa

When I asked Omar where local models are going, his answer was optimistic: ā€œThe open models catch up to proprietary models relatively quickly. If you compare Gemma 3 to Gemma 4, it’s matching proprietary capabilities from eight months ago. Being able to run those capabilities directly in the user’s hardware — that’s the future.ā€

The 31B model downloads as about 18-20GB depending on quantization. With the right setup, you can run it on a single GPU. This is exactly what the open source community has been asking for: frontier-level intelligence that you can actually run yourself.

OpenAI’s largest in history $122B funding round + TBPN acquisition

While OpenAI quietly meme’d around the Anthropic leak but mostly stayed silent on the releases, they did announce 2 pretty huge things.

First, OpenAI raised an absolutely bonkers, insane, unreal $122 Billion dollars round, largest in history, 2x bigger than the previous record round, which was OpenAI. Amazon put in $50B, Nvidi…



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