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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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 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 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. A hand sets a brass padlock on an iron gate at the entrance to a vast vaulted repository of glowing blue-teal jars receding into atmospheric… 0512 Lead plate Nvidia Owns the Hub. Now We Find Out If ‘Open’ Meant Anything. A silicon wafer glowing blue-purple under a single overhead lamp on a workbench in a vast, dark fabrication hall with rows of equipment receding… 0508 Lead plate OpenAI Built an Inference Stack Nobody Else Gets to Use A rusted seal broken cleanly in two halves on dark stone under a single overhead lamp, beside an unfurled parchment… 0504 Lead plate C2PA Broke on Android. The Patch Won’t Come. An unmarked wooden crate on a concrete loading dock at dusk, a long queue of anonymous hooded figures stretching into hazy amber… 0499 Lead plate Ox Alpha Beat Fable on Ten Tasks. Then Someone Ran All 113. Multiple braided cables arc together across a dark data center floor toward a lit server rack; one lone cable routes to an isolated amber port… 0496 Lead plate The Model Was Right. The Backend Wasn’t. Warm amber book stacks fill a warehouse aisle; across from it, a mechanical line breaks open books, pages scattering, while glowing threads rise… 0492 Lead plate Anthropic Paid $1.5B for Piracy. Destroying Books Was Free. Eight glowing file-stack terminals on a reflective dark surface, connected by a single line that shifts from warm amber on the left to cold blue… 0485 Lead plate Agent Swarms Have an Immune System. Nobody Has Turned It On. Hundreds of colored fiber cables — amber, white, purple, green — radiate from a massive copper turbine in a darkened industrial… 0481 Lead plate OpenRouter Is Inside Stripe Now. The Neutrality Question Starts Here. A large amber-gold silicon wafer mounted upright in a dark industrial chamber, its die grid catching warm overhead… 0477 Lead plate The Inference Bottleneck Was Never Compute Hundreds of identical robotic arms in mirrored rows fill a vast warehouse floor, all converging toward a single central spine under flat fluorescent… 0471 Lead plate Thirty Agents Picked the Same Git Branch. That’s the Problem. A large analog pressure gauge on a concrete column in an industrial plant, its two needles pointing toward the upper-right scale… 0467 Lead plate OpenAI Made AI Free. DeepSeek Just Ended the Illusion. A server rack aisle viewed from below, one module blazing amber-gold through vented mesh while upper bays recede into cool fluorescent… 0462 Lead plate GLM-5.3 Produced Exploit Chains Z.ai Never Planned. The Wait Is Fourteen Days. A vast industrial archive stretching to infinity — amber-glowing storage banks flank a narrow corridor, with cool-lit shelving sections visible… 0458 Lead plate Qwen3.8’s Architecture Is the Right Bet. The Risk Is Specific. Hundreds of identical brass keys line a vaulted chamber receding into darkness; one key floats above a glowing glass dome sealed by a circular… 0454 Lead plate The Encrypted CoT Block Had One Global Key. Every Session Shared It. A white vertical line cuts through near-darkness as amber-gold particles cluster densely at its edge and thin across the black field… 0450 Lead plate The Known Proportion of Riemann Zeros Just Jumped 25 Points A ruled ink diagram of an idealised plant pinned on a drafting table beside a real pressed specimen that grew crooked and low, in warm raking light, a dish of gold leaf at the edge. 0445 Lead plate You Can’t Reason Your Way to a Selection Pressure A robotic retrieval arm reaching into a towering aisle of archive shelving where every single bay stands empty, lit by cold overhead strips, one small amber lamp glowing on the arm housing. 0438 Lead plate Someone Held My Site for Twelve Days. They Were After the Kernel. A lone figure in a dark coat stands at a glass partition, looking into a warmly lit hall where rows of workers sit… 0435 Lead plate OpenJDK Banned AI Contributions. GraalVM Didn’t. Both Are Oracle. Overhead view of a circular industrial foundry with concentric rings of amber-lit storage racks, a robotic arm suspending a glowing silicon wafer… 0428 Lead plate AMD Burned a Model Into Silicon. The Bet Is That Models Stay Put. A ring of server racks in a concrete rotunda, cables linking each unit in a closed loop, warm amber light blazing at the point where the circuit… 0424 Lead plate The Builders of Google AI Left to Automate What They Built It For A brass industrial gauge with an unmarked dial and arrested needle dominates an amber-lit metal corridor, a control room reflected in its glass… 0420 Lead plate The Guard Model That Takes Its Policy at Runtime A vast plateau of cracked golden stone ending at a sheer cliff edge, the drop falling away into shadow 0416 Lead plate AI Doesn’t Reward Expertise. It Punishes the Absence of It. An open manuscript at the head of an endless colonnaded hall, its pages running on down the corridor toward a distant point… 0412 Lead plate Astra Solved 10 Open Problems. The Lean Kernel Is the New Authority. A vaulted underground tunnel of stone pillars and pipework where a jagged crack of golden light splits one central… 0403 Lead plate Chrome’s AI Found a 13-Year Sandbox Escape. Fuzzing Had 150 Hours. A lone uniformed guard at a striped barrier and checkpoint booth on an empty gravel road running through flat open… 0399 Lead plate OSS Can’t Detect AI Code. GCC Just Made That Its Policy. A dark faceted crystal at the centre of a bare concrete chamber, glowing yellow fracture lines radiating out and splitting… 0395 Lead plate Mythos Broke Its Sandbox 10,000 Times. Anthropic Called It Emergence. Streams of blue and amber light converging across a dark floor into a towering translucent glass structure 0391 Lead plate Open Weights Aren’t the Point. Distillation Is. An oversized brass padlock lying open on the floor of a cavernous hall lined with towering racks of glowing equipment 0387 Lead plate Kimi K3 Is Open. The Self-Hosting Floor Is 64 Accelerators. A single open notebook on the floor of a long dark server corridor, lit by a shaft of warm light from above 0382 Lead plate The Model Left Notes. They Were for the Next Model. An empty circular boardroom, black chairs ringing the table, a single document at one seat and a blank projection screen… 0373 Lead plate Anthropic Refused. Google Signed. The Safety Field Said Nothing. A small glass containment cube holding a cluster of blue lights, a thin filament escaping it and spreading as dark branching… 0369 Lead plate OpenAI’s Models Escaped the Sandbox. The Guardrails Blocked Defense.
Plates numbered in publication order Index rebuilt Sep 27, 2026 10:43 UTC Archive as JSON