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
456
Pieces
260
Beyond the lead
196
Archive opens
Feb 14, 2026
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. A grand stone hall carved with geometric and mathematical reliefs, sunlight falling on a dark rectangular void set into the central… 0365 Lead plate Fable 5 Disproved What Algebraists Spent 87 Years Trying to Prove Three long mechanical lock bars laid in parallel, their internal channels exposed as if cut away, one of them broken… 0361 Lead plate Adam Kues Spent $25. GPT-5.6 Found a $500k WordPress RCE. A monumental industrial complex of cooling towers and stone terraces at sunset, a large robotic arm reaching over water… 0357 Lead plate Japan Spent $6 Billion on Sovereign AI. The GPUs Are All American. A dark field of hexagonally packed sockets, a handful of them lit gold and joined by thin glowing lines 0345 Lead plate Kimi K3 Closed the Coding Gap. The Hallucination Rate Is 51%. An ancient bonsai pine in a shallow ceramic dish, exposed roots gripping the soil, in a bare concrete room with a tall… 0340 Lead plate Bonsai 27B Fits in 4 GB. Post-Training Quantization Never Could. A lone figure at a curved analogue control desk facing a wall of blank white screens, blue-lit server racks behind glass… 0336 Lead plate Codex Encrypted Its Sub-Agent Tasks. Only OpenAI Has the Key. A corridor between towering walls of tightly packed server modules with green and amber indicators, receding to a bright vanishing… 0332 Lead plate Anthropic Rewrote Bun in 11 Days. 13,365 Unsafe Blocks Came With It. Two sealed documents on a long polished table in a wood-panelled government hearing room, empty leather chairs down both… 0328 Lead plate Illinois Mandated AI Audits. Labs Got the Burden Without the Shield. A dense cluster of glowing gold nodes and connecting lines on a dark ground, the network thinning as it spreads outward 0324 Lead plate GPT-5.6 Solved the CDC Conjecture. Peer Review Hasn’t Caught Up. A glass prism on a laboratory mount splitting a narrow beam into a spread of colour cast across a dark wall 0318 Lead plate The Optimizer Creates a 7× Alignment Gap. No Lab Says Which. Three heavy sealed bulkhead doors set into a metal wall, the middle one standing ajar with warm light spilling through 0314 Lead plate GitHub Built Guardrails Against Prompt Injection. One Word Got Through. An aerial view of a vast teal circuit-like city grid with a bright gold cross of light burning through its centre 0309 Lead plate Anthropic Found a Workspace Inside Claude It Never Built A lit concrete corridor that ends abruptly in absolute darkness, the ceiling lights stopping at the boundary 0306 Lead plate GPT-5.5 Stopped Reasoning at 516 Tokens. OpenAI Won’t Say Why. A massive riveted steel gate set into a concrete dam wall at night, a thin line of light escaping along its base 0301 Lead plate Meituan Trained a Frontier Model Without Nvidia A row of large analogue dial gauges on a polished instrument panel in a bright industrial control room of pipes… 0296 Lead plate Claude Scored 12% on a Safety Eval. The Correct Score Was 100%. A blank sheet of paper propped on a wooden desk beside a fountain pen, ink bottle and closed leather notebook in warm… 0292 Lead plate Anthropic Built a Fingerprint Into Claude Code. It Failed Both Ways. A monumental tower split down the middle: one half warm weathered stone, the other a scaffolded blue-lit copy still under… 0289 Lead plate Alibaba Launched Qwen 3.6 and Started Distilling Claude the Same Day An empty motorway toll plaza at night, its lanes lit white and running away toward distant traffic 0283 Lead plate GLM 5.2 Didn’t Beat Claude. The Gap It Exposed Is Worse. Black cases moving along a conveyor into a monumental stone gateway flanked by columns of blue light 0275 Lead plate The High-Risk Models Shipped. Washington Approved the List. A huge ring of pipes converging into a domed ceiling above rows of glowing valve heads 0270 Lead plate You Can’t Patch the API Against Distillation Two blank cream folders on a dark desk under a brass lamp, one embossed with a faint seal 0266 Lead plate Fable 5 Didn’t Fail the Jailbreak Test. It Failed the Weapons Test. A round vault door standing open on a wall of brass clockwork, a control desk of green indicator lights in front of it 0263 Lead plate Safety Erosion Happens in Training. Evals Are Too Late. A glass biometric access booth with a fingerprint reader standing at the head of a dark server aisle 0258 Lead plate The Biometric Gate Anthropic Built to Restore Fable 5 A single illustrated book open on a stone plinth in a dim vault whose walls are lined with identical filed volumes 0255 Lead plate The Fake Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows Is Now Training the Next AI A laboratory chamber holding a lattice of suspended glass spheres, a few of them darkened, seen through a heavy open… 0243 Lead plate Model Organisms Are Broken. Alignment Research Isn’t Measuring It. A figure standing in a cylindrical tank of pale green liquid, lit from a ring of light set into the base 0239 Lead plate Midjourney Wants to Scan a Billion Bodies. It Has Scanned 12. A cavernous archive where shelves of white document boxes face rows of cabled server racks across a concrete floor 0235 Lead plate Europe Is Learning What AI Sovereignty Actually Costs An open brass vault door beside two upright switch levers, with a glass-walled data hall visible beyond 0230 Lead plate The Foundation Models API Hides the Privacy Boundary by Design A dark angular structure with a thin thread of golden light running through its centre and fracturing outward 0226 Lead plate Abliteration Doesn’t Just Remove Refusals. It Removes Truth. A single lit server rack standing alone in a large empty concrete hall, a red wall lever in the foreground 0222 Lead plate The Government Recalled an AI Model. It Can Do It Again. A figure at a console before an immense hall of glowing data racks receding to a bright horizon 0219 Lead plate The Agent Spent $6,531. It Did Everything Right. A weathered analogue pressure gauge on a concrete wall, its needle resting in a marked red zone 0215 Lead plate Fable 5 Is Capable Enough to Enforce Its Own Terms of Service A single glowing sphere hovering in the aisle of a bright data centre, thin lines radiating to the racks on either side 0211 Lead plate WWDC 2026: Apple Replaced Custody with Cryptography Clear liquid pouring from one glass beaker into another against a plain warm background 0205 Lead plate AI Models Inherit Behaviors Their Training Data Never Shows A trail of amber light threading between rows of dark shipping containers under blue mist 0200 Lead plate Open-Weight Models Are What Make AI Worms Ungovernable A large brass dial on a concrete wall, its needle sweeping toward a red band at the top of the scale 0197 Lead plate Anthropic Published RSI Metrics. None of Them Are RSI. A riveted industrial vessel with a small lit porthole and brass gauges, standing in a dim tunnel of wet stone 0192 Lead plate Anthropic Just Published a Catalog of Failed Containment An ATM-style terminal in an empty marble corridor, a set of keys lying on the floor in front of it 0188 Lead plate Meta Gave Its AI Support Bot the Wrong Permissions A wax seal pressed onto a document, its impression a fine web of interconnected lines 0184 Lead plate The Encrypted Reasoning Blob Has a Global Key A crowd facing a huge glowing billboard at dusk, a constellation of linked stars spreading across the sky above 0179 Lead plate You Don’t Have to Learn AI. You Do Have to Stop Believing the Pitch. A single lit glass display case holding small objects, standing alone in a dark unfinished concrete structure 0174 Lead plate Anthropic’s $965B Isn’t a Bet on Opus 4.8 An electrical substation at sunset, transformers and pylons above a field of poured concrete foundations 0170 Lead plate Coding Agents Found PMF. Anthropic Is Racing to Stay Ahead of It.
Plates numbered in publication order Index rebuilt Aug 13, 2026 05:30 UTC Archive as JSON