Wednesday, 23 September 2026

Pentagon blames AI overreliance for Iran school missile strike; Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5.5 as OpenAI answers with GPT-6 Sol and Luna

Today's Lead

Engineering

Bloomberg

Pentagon Says Overreliance on AI Contributed to Missile Strike on Iran School

The Pentagon reported that overreliance on AI contributed to a missile strike on an Iranian school that killed approximately 120 children. Primary causes were human and institutional failure, with civilian protection staff cut 90 percent, target databases incomplete, and decision-makers who did not verify targets independently. The incident demonstrates how AI enables humans to delegate critical safety decisions and avoid accountability without proper oversight.

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Engineering

Anthropic

Claude Opus 5.5

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, which matches Claude Fable 5.1 performance at 40 percent lower cost and 30 percent faster output generation. The model excels at software code work and includes new safety features that resist prompt injection attacks. Pricing drops 20 percent for input and output tokens, and 60 percent for cache reads.

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OpenAI

Introducing GPT-6 Sol and Luna

OpenAI released GPT-6 Luna and Sol models to expand its lineup. Luna cuts costs to $0.10 and $0.50 per million tokens (50-58% reduction) while maintaining strong performance on coding and classification. Sol offers higher capabilities for complex tasks and competes directly with DeepSeek and similar alternatives.

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Reddit/sysadmin

Grammarly Will Send Unhinged Messages to All Your Users If You Try to Cancel

Grammarly sent unsolicited in-app and email messages to all enterprise users when a customer tried to cancel their subscription. The messages encouraged end users to contact management to reverse the cancellation decision, bypassing IT procurement processes. This aggressive tactic signals financial pressure as the company faces product decline and competition from AI alternatives, while eroding customer trust regarding data collection practices.

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foxscript.org

FoxScript: Visual FoxPro Revived on a Modern Runtime

FoxScript revives Visual FoxPro with modern capabilities such as lambda expressions and HTTP server support. The runtime uses Rust and WebAssembly to build a 64-bit virtual machine that runs bytecode across platforms. Organizations can modernize legacy FoxPro applications without rewrites by using existing business logic and data formats.

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GitHub Security Advisory

WordPress: Unauthenticated Path Traversal Leading to Conditional RCE

WordPress versions 4.7.0 to 7.1.1 have a path traversal vulnerability (CVE-2026-87902) in the get_page_template() function. Unauthenticated attackers can include a readable PHP file to execute remote code if specific theme conditions exist. Update to WordPress 7.1.2, 7.0.6, 6.9.9, 6.8.10, or appropriate security release for your version.

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Humanities

JSTOR Daily

Why Italian Fascists Loved Samurai

Italian Fascists adopted samurai imagery to add spiritual authority to their military nationalism. Nitobe Inazō's book and the romanticized portrayal of Japanese soldiers in the Russo-Japanese War supplied the primary sources. Fascist thinkers reinterpreted samurai honor codes to support their ideology and strengthen ties with Japan.

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Aeon

How the West Was Fun

At Old Tucson theme park, visitors escape into a romantic vision of the Old West that never truly existed in history. The park removes hardship to present a sanitized past. This reveals how myths shape American identity more than facts.

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