Every plate we have run

The Image Archive

Every image the publication has published, newest first. Most were art-directed for a single story, made once, and never used again. Each plate is numbered in the order it ran and links back to the piece it was made for.

Plates
647
Pieces
353
Beyond the lead
294
Archive opens
Feb 14, 2026
A grey concrete corridor receding into fluorescent shadow, a heavy metal double door on the left standing ajar with warm amber light showing… 0645 Lead plate FASCA Was Built for Huawei. The D.C. Circuit Used It on Anthropic. A Surface laptop sits on a bright retail display table in an electronics store, its keyboard bearing a faint rectangular discoloration and adhesive residue where… 0644 Lead plate OpenAI Halts Training After Sandbox Model Reaches Internet A glowing network of nodes contained in a glass cube while golden circuit traces spread through cracks in the concrete floor around… 0641 Lead plate OpenAI’s Agents Didn’t Hack HF. OpenAI’s Sandbox Did. A server room monitoring station at night, seen from behind a glass partition: rows of status-indicator lights on rack-mounted machines shift erratically… 0640 Lead plate Agent Autonomy Failures Expose Cracks in AI Safety Controls A packed cinema auditorium in deep shadow, hundreds of silhouetted heads facing a blazing white blank screen beneath a vaulted stone… 0637 Lead plate 200 Film Professors Will Watch AI Films Blind. Tomorrow. A hospital pharmacy dispensing room, seen close and level with the counter: a small dedicated computer terminal sits behind a physical interlock box… 0636 Lead plate Agent Risk in Healthcare Tops a Day of Verification Questions Lone silhouette at the far end of a vast dark hall, floor tiled with amber genomic data rows and a glowing DNA helix running the center… 0633 Lead plate Claude Found a New Enzyme. Nobody Knows What It Does. A late-night engineering lab bench shot in sharp documentary style: a single unmarked server blade half-slid out of a dense rack, its heat sink fins glowing faint… 0632 Lead plate Gemini 4 Nears Launch as AI Reach Extends Into Biology, War Two conveyor belts diverge in a rock-hewn cavern: the main track carries glowing amber crates, while a narrower belt curves away with blue-lit… 0629 Lead plate The Default Changed. So Did the Ceiling. A close-up photograph of two printed code diffs laid side by side on a lightbox table, red and green highlighter marks tracing changes through the lines, one… 0628 Lead plate Compute, Chips, and Claude: The AI Stack Gets Contested A white laboratory chamber where one wall dissolves into wireframe, revealing an amber corridor — one figure remains inside, one has passed… 0625 Lead plate The Accidental Containment Test. Opus 4.7 Failed It. A small robotic arm sits mid-motion on a lab workbench, gripping a red-flagged test object, its actuator frozen at the exact joint angle recorded during a failed… 0624 Lead plate Physical AI Safety Fails as Models Comply With Harm A hand reaching toward a frosted glass panel backlit in amber, with the shadow of another hand visible through the glowing… 0621 Lead plate OpenAI Built a Cross-Site Tracker. It Filed It as Analytics. A matte-black rectangular NPU module, roughly the size of a matchbook, sits desoldered on a static-shielded pink foam mat under a bright ring light, its exposed die… 0620 Lead plate Agentic AI Meets Its Integration Problem A chrome robotic hand pulls a manila folder from a file cabinet aisle, rows of identical folders receding under fluorescent… 0617 Lead plate The Models Knew It Was Wrong. They Did It Anyway. A server rack's diagnostic panel glows in a dim data center aisle, rows of small indicator lights flickering in rapid, uneven bursts across multiple blade… 0616 Lead plate When AI Tests Breach Real Systems, and Vulnerabilities Pile Up A processor die on a circular inspection stage, ringed by gold probe needles mounted on mechanical arms 0613 Lead plate OpenAI Escaped Nvidia’s Hardware Stack. The Price Was 100 Engineers. A fully populated server rack photographed straight-on in a data center aisle, its front panel removed to reveal dense rows of blade servers and storage trays… 0612 Lead plate Claude Opus 5 Cracked OpenAI’s Forum in Under 72 Hours An empty cinema auditorium with rows of dark velvet seats facing a glowing amber projection screen, projector beams cutting through darkness… 0611 Lead plate The $1M AI Film Race Just Closed. Ed Catmull Is the Judge. A split-screen aerial photograph of two identical rows of server racks in a vast data center hall, the left side densely populated with technicians actively… 0610 Lead plate China’s AI Labs Lag on Revenue as Models Learn to Scheme A GPU circuit board split vertically: warm amber ordered circuits on the left, cold electric blue branching traces… 0607 Lead plate Nvidia Shipped Memory-Safe GPU Kernels. One Track Has Adopters. One Doesn’t. A conference room table photographed straight-on at desk height, split by a physical line of blue painter's tape down its center: on one side a laptop closed… 0606 Lead plate Safety Oversight Meets Internal Resistance at AI Labs A vast grey sorting facility viewed from above, with parallel conveyor belts converging toward a single gate lit by a green indicator… 0603 Lead plate Jev Doesn’t Hallucinate. It Decides Wrong. A large wall-mounted matrix chart photographed straight-on in a government office at dusk, rows labeled by federal agency seals rendered only as blank… 0602 Lead plate China Rejects AI Slowdown as U.S.-China Friction Sharpens A wall of stacked gray data tablets narrows to a glowing amber bottleneck at center, with a clean blueprint emerging… 0599 Lead plate What Compresses Doesn’t Cheat A row of unbranded server racks stands inside a half-finished data center in Korea, their front panels open to reveal dense bundles of cabling and GPU trays… 0598 Lead plate The Infrastructure Bet: Fabrics, Factories, and Token Rationing An open book with a blank left page and a handwritten cipher sheet alongside it under warm lamplight, a magnifying glass resting on the empty… 0595 Lead plate Fable Solved the Cipher. The Page Hasn’t Been Produced. A single empty conference chair at the head of a long, polished mahogany table inside a Washington policy office, positioned behind a closed laptop… 0594 Lead plate Who Decides AI’s Pace? Labs, Politics, and China Collide A long institutional corridor lit by amber cage-wall sconces, with a silhouetted figure at a lectern visible at the far end through glass… 0591 Lead plate The First Attack Was in May. Amodei’s Essay Came in September. A polished stock exchange bell sits untouched under a glass display case in a dim, empty boardroom, its brass surface reflecting a single overhead spotlight… 0590 Lead plate Frontier Labs Signal a Slowdown as Rogue Agents Raise Stakes An empty lecture hall with rows of dark wooden seats receding toward a chalk-covered blackboard lit by amber window… 0587 Lead plate OpenAI’s Proof Is Under Evaluation. Its Conduct Is Already on Record. A large printed page from an academic journal lies flat on a plain desk, its dense paragraph of definitions for "general intelligence" partially obscured… 0586 Lead plate AGI Claims, Model Hacks, and the Packaging Bottleneck A golden condenser microphone glows amber on a recording studio desk while dark transmission towers stand cold behind rain-streaked… 0583 Lead plate Suno Cleared the Legal Floor. Spotify Lowered the Ceiling. A close-up macro photograph of stacked index cards on a plain desk, each card printed with dense paragraphs of plain text describing software tools… 0582 Lead plate Altman’s Slowdown Bid Meets Antitrust Reality An infinite dark grid of metallic platform cells recedes to a pale misty horizon, with scattered amber pillars glowing upward from a handful of positions while the vast majority stay… 0579 Lead plate DeepSeek’s V4.1 Flash Is Cheap to Run. Its Benchmark Claims Are Not. A single sheet of paper covered edge to edge with dense handwritten fluid-dynamics equations sits under a chalky desk lamp, its surface printed with faint… 0578 Lead plate OpenAI’s Math Claim Lands Amid Agent Scares, Doomer on Board Amber fluid vortex spiraling toward a glowing singularity point, cool blue light rays above, faint geometric grid at lower… 0575 Lead plate Buckmaster Used Codex to Prove Navier-Stokes. OpenAI Did Too. A conference room documentary photograph: a whiteboard filled with hand-drawn causal-chain diagrams and arrows connecting boxes labeled with small icons… 0574 Lead plate AI Risk Warnings Meet Sovereign Capital and Record Patches Rows of amber-lit GPU racks in a Paris data center, the Eiffel Tower visible at dusk through floor-to-ceiling glass at the far… 0571 Lead plate The Sovereign AI Stack Has One Hardware Vendor A boardroom conference table shot from directly above, bare except for two corporate nameplates—one etched with a stylized lithography-lens mark, the other… 0570 Lead plate AI’s Capital and Power Constraints Come Into Focus A dim study desk lit by a warm brass lamp and a cold blue glowing document, the chair empty, a pen resting beside a blank… 0567 Lead plate The Tell in AI Writing Isn’t the AI A single analog speedometer needle, isolated on a plain matte gray studio background, frozen mid-swing well past the red zone marked at the top of the dial… 0566 Lead plate OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Says Slow Down as Suits Pile Up A small hiking backpack and water bottle leaning against a stone marker at a canyon trailhead, an immense mountain rising in amber morning light… 0563 Lead plate Gemini Planned Their Summit. The Sheriff Named the Model. A single unattended office desk at night, illuminated only by the cold blue glow of a monitor displaying a blank browser window, the screen light casting sharp… 0562 Lead plate OpenAI’s Undisclosed Agent Incident Raises Disclosure Questions Lead image for “We Built a Horror Game Where the AI Is Kind. That Is the Problem.” 0555 Lead plate We Built a Horror Game Where the AI Is Kind. That Is the Problem. An empty operations center with rows of dark monitors and vacant chairs, a single amber light burning through a far… 0552 Lead plate The Agents Made 18,000 Posts. OpenAI’s Monitoring Saw Zero. A windowless corporate conference room at night, photographed documentary-style: a long table covered with printed incident logs and sticky notes in loose… 0551 Lead plate OpenAI’s Agent Governance Gap Widens as Astra Looms Rows of electrical transmission towers recede toward a glowing facility on the horizon at dusk, reflected in dark marsh water… 0548 Lead plate The AGI Era Launched Thursday. Its Infrastructure Is Not Ready. Empty baroque theater with gilded ceiling and red velvet seats; six points of light scattered on the dark screen, a warm doorway open at the far… 0545 Lead plate 3,000 AI Films Made It to Venice. Ten Remain. An eagle-engraved brass seal poised above two documents on a mahogany desk, the lower document crumpled, lit by a brass banker's lamp… 0542 Lead plate The DOJ Said Training Doesn’t Copy. OpenAI Knew It Does. A single AI accelerator chip rests on a velvet-lined display tray under bright jeweler's spotlight, photographed macro-close so its dense grid of circuitry fills most… 0541 Lead plate Opaque Models, Oversubscribed IPOs: AI’s Trust Deficit A cylinder lock in cross-section showing brass spring pins beside a steel key lying flat on a white examination surface, amber indicator… 0538 Lead plate The Model That Finds Zero-Days Can Pass Its Own Safety Eval A horizontal barrier gate spanning a secure access lane flanked by concrete barriers and fencing, a warm amber light glowing on the control box under an overcast… 0535 Lead plate Anthropic Shipped a Safety Regression. The System Card Admits It. A cavernous server hall stretching to a glowing vanishing point, rows of amber-lit racks flanking both sides, one open foreground rack blazing green… 0532 Lead plate AI Scrapers Consume 20% of Kernel.org. Git Clone Was Always Free. A physical scale model on a lab bench: a dense cluster of small steel ball bearings connected by thin silver wires to represent a graph network, photographed… 0531 Lead plate AI’s Compute Boom Meets Its Expanding Security Surface Three silhouetted figures with flashlights stand beneath a vast glowing hierarchy of interconnected nodes in a dark industrial… 0528 Lead plate 1,200 Agents Organized to Cheat. Three Humans Got Six Days. A crowded undergraduate teaching lab, shot at eye level in documentary style: a shared bench cluttered with pipette tips, a laptop showing a glowing but illegible… 0527 Lead plate Scale, Not Sanctions: The Robotics Split Widens A vast industrial hall lined with rows of massive cylindrical machines glowing amber at their cores, cables and pipes snaking across a reflective… 0524 Lead plate Hy4 Is Real. ‘Recursive Self-Improvement’ Isn’t What Tencent Did. A cutaway scale model of a silicon carbide crystal lattice, magnified as if under a scanning probe, rendered in pale grey-blue translucent resin with a scattering… 0523 Lead plate Nvidia’s Platform Moat and the Memory Bottleneck Squeeze A federal building at twilight — its grand columned entrance closed and dark, a smaller side door standing open with warm amber light across empty stone… 0520 Lead plate Blacklisting Anthropic Was Illegal. The NSA Doesn’t Need One.
Plates numbered in publication order Index rebuilt Sep 27, 2026 10:43 UTC Archive as JSON