Week of 2025-06-09 through 2025-06-15

Table of Contents

1. Week of 2025-06-09 through 2025-06-15
2. Magistral Small 2506
3. XR at WWDC and AWE
   1. Appel VisionOS 26
   2. AWE 2025
4. AI Cybersecurity Congressional Hearing
5. Disney & Universal vs. Midjourney

Week of 2025-06-09 through 2025-06-15

• This week was relatively refreshing with not being totally fixated on AI developments, largely thanks to expos/conferences from Apple and the XR industry. Those events alone would overwhelm anyone, so the selections are brief and focus on the XR direction seen at each. Back in AI though, Mistral AI released their Magistral series, a refinement of their previous Mistral Medium and Mistral Small that feature the 'chain of thought' approach that yields substantial improvement in certain, although yet unverified, benchmarks. Rounding out with politics and law, since last week wasn't controversial enough, we have a congressional hearing on AI 'security', which presents a fascinating case study on regulatory capture and manufacturing consent, on one hand and a likely consequential copyright lawsuit from Disney and Universal against Midjourney, an image generative AI company.

Magistral Small 2506

• https://mistral.ai/news/magistral
• https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Magistral-Small-2506
• Mistral AI released a refinement of their Mistral Small 2503 model focusing on the 'chain of thought' approach to reasoning in responses. Technically it's more accurate to say they upgraded Mistral Medium 2505 into Magistral Medium 2506, and Magistral Small 2506 is a distillation of that. The specs are close to what you'd expect from such a bump, 24 billion parameters, 128k theoretical token context with 40k practical context, Apache 2.0 license, and some tool calling support. Like many of the other 'reasoning' models, eg Phi 4 reasoning, Qwen 3, QwQ, R1, it prefaces its final response with <think> tags with material that should improve its output. The practical effects appear to be good at certain tasks, with GPQA Diamond jumping from 45.96% to 68.18%, and only slightly behind Magistral Medium, but independent benchmarks appear scarce so time will tell.

XR at WWDC and AWE

• Whether coincidence or planned, this week featured substantial announcements for XR in both Apple's WWDC and Augmented World Expo (AWE) 2025. Apple's WWDC characteristically covered all of their ecosystem, not just XR, but the developments were still noteworthy and substantially more directed, again as expected, versus the eclectic AWE

Appel VisionOS 26

• https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/visionos-26-introduces-powerful-new-spatial-experiences-for-apple-vision-pro/
• News on Apple's XR headset has been relatively slow, and even after two years there is no new hardware to report on despite substantial industry movement. The software, however, has received a few major updates, with a visionOS 2 in fall 2024 and now visionOS 26 (the jokes are too obvious) out in 'beta' with general availability coming this fall. The improvements are generally iterative and provide feature parity with other headsets, with, for example, persistent anchoring for windows and widgets, playback of 180 or 360 video (immersively, not clear if stereoscopic video is supported), and supporting AR mode for WebXR (this is still unclear, visionOS 2 added WebXR support but without AR support and Apple's material indicates AR functionality in Safari, however it's unclear if this is through WebXR's AR module or an Apple specific extension).
• More interestingly, Apple added support for physical controllers, which had previously been conspicuously absent in favor of pure eye and hand based control. While still unclear (a theme apparently), the support seems currently limited to two devices: Logitech's Muse, a digital 6 degrees of freedom stylus, and Sony's Playstation VR 2 controllers. The PSVR2 controllers in particular are an interesting choice considering their tracking is primarily headset based, wiith the controllers have infrared LEDs that the headsets IR cameras can track; they don't have independent tracking (technically they have IMUs but accuracy drifts over time, so the IR system provides periodic position fixing).

AWE 2025

• https://www.androidcentral.com/gaming/virtual-reality/best-of-awe-2025-coolest-xr-demos-niantic-viture-sony-android-xr
• AWE 2025 on the other hand was very broad, even noisy, in terms of the directions vendors implicitly pitched through their demos. Major vendors, namely Google and Meta/Facebook, are apparently taking fundamentally divergent approaches to popular adoption; the former is keeping hardware constrained (Android XR is still limited to a single unreleased device) in favor of finding a software 'killer app' while the latter thinks 'if you build it they will come', released previously Quest headsets and more has several 'glasses' form factor devices in various stages of release. Basic definitions broadly still seem up in the air, some claiming AR, for example, can be as simple as an audio based addition while others that it must involve visual overlay and sensory reprocessing (technically, the broader definitions would include headphones from the late 1800s).
• There were many interesting specifics, but many devices are still in prototype or otherwise unreleased stages, so I'll omit those till they're ready. A clear theme appears to be, depending on your interpretation, either noise and disorder or acceptance of many XR modalities being probable. Device types included traditional VR headsets, now 'traditional' AR + VR headsets like the Quest 3 or Vision Pro, many new input modalities such as smart rings interaction, and even wearable haptics/controllers. Some software vendors seem to be leaning into this, with Niantic, for example, pitching their 'visual positioning system' (6 DoF positioning based on image/video of a modeled area) as being compatible across arbitrary systems.

AI Cybersecurity Congressional Hearing

• https://homeland.house.gov/2025/06/09/media-advisory-chairman-garbarino-sets-hearing-on-securing-ai-in-the-us-cybersecurity-mission/
• https://homeland.house.gov/hearing/security-to-model-securing-artificial-intelligence-to-strengthen-cybersecurity/
• https://homeland.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/2025-06-12-CIP-HRG-Testimony.pdf
• First, strictly the facts. On June 12th 2025, the US House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection held a hearing titled "Security to Model: Securing Artificial Intelligence to Strengthen Cybersecurity". The hearing featured four witness testimonies, whose written testimony is linked, advocated for various approaches to improve US security posture with respect to AI and using AI. Witnesses included Steve Faehl, Federal Security CTO at Microsoft, Kiran Chinnagangannagari, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Securin, Gareth Maclachlan, Chief Product Officer at Trellix, and Jonathan Dambrot, CEO at Cranium AI, Inc. All of them working at companies somehow involved in AI, cybersecurity, and AI cybersecurity.
• Now, interpretation. Calling a hearing on AI featuring the word security three times and inviting four witnesses that are all corporate representatives is a very deliberate choice. Moreover, all of the witnesses presented, and could reasonably have been predicted to present, essentially the same viewpoint; the future of AI should, and as a national security concern, must, be centralized, under corporate control, with light government regulation. The specifics differ, even conflict at times, but the assumed context within which they argue for their specifics is that same.
• Going a layer deeper, the vocabulary itself is a rhetorical move. Security, in a cybersecurity context, isn't strictly objective but easier to define what is or isn't a vulnerability. Generally, a user should or shouldn't be able to do or read something but are able to anyway. This covers both poor configuration, which is more a human level problem, and traditional 'hacking' where defects in software are exploited. Security as it applies to LLMs as used here is in an entirely different class, particularly when focusing on the highest level aspects like jail breaking or spreading misinformation. Context and the meanings humans bring is uniquely, inappropriately, and inaccurately applied to notions of security here and neatly demonstrated by one of the earlier jail breaking strategies. Somewhat famously, relatively recent models would disregard their training and instructions to, for example, not describe how to make explosives if a user prompt were framed as help with their grandmother's family recipe for explosives.
• Context matters deeply in the messy human world: using a knife to cut someone is generally bad, but a surgeon doing so in an operation is good; cultivating viruses in a lab to research a vaccine is good, cultivating viruses to make a bioweapon is bad; writing and deploying malware is bad, unless you're a professional red team security researcher, then it's good. Context is in fact the key factor for the legal definition of hacking in the US, which hinges simply on whether the user would be considered, in a human perspective, as 'authorized'. This presents a key internal contradiction to the witnesses' arguments, in that despite claiming AI tools need to be used to augment cybersecurity operations their advocacy for this definition of security would preclude its use; the only difference between a jailbreak and legitimate use is the context and human interpretation.
• The witness selection and choice vocabulary are the means; I struggle to find a motive or explanation other than facilitating regulatory capture. Were congress legitimately looking for input on this issue, which would be laudable, there's a long list of stakeholders with different interests that would create a more informed landscape. Academics, open source contributors, government agency representatives, intelligence and military representatives, the list goes on; presence of even one of them would likely have complicated the picture. Instead, other lawmakers and news reports got a uniform narrative, making this hearing a rather blatant case of manufactured consent.
• Sidenote: This didn't fit for brevity but it's too good to ignore. Some of the witnesses went so far as to blatantly lie; they define 'DeepSeek' simultaneously as a dangerous open source model that cybercriminals can remove safeguards from and a hosted service the Chinese government can access user data from. This is a contradiction: to edit a model you must be running it locally, and if you're running it locally it cannot be hosted by DeepSeek. DeepSeek the company, DeepSeek's models, named things like V3 or R1, and DeepSeek's hosted chat service are not the same thing.

Disney & Universal vs. Midjourney

• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/business/media/disney-universal-midjourney-ai.html
• https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Disney-NBCU-v-Midjourney.pdf
• https://apnews.com/article/disney-universal-midjourney-copyright-lawsuit-722b1b892192e7e1628f7ae5da8cc427
• A lawsuit by Disney against some AI company had long been joked about and anticipated with AI circles, but the time finally came in the form of Disney and Universal versus Midjourney. The claims and evidence mostly speak for themselves: even vague allusions to characters from those companies will produce clear representations of them. The actual filing is some 143 pages long, so the claims are in fact more nuanced than that, but the main claim is of copyright infringement.
• Disney is rather famously, or infamously, aggressive about ensuring legal protection of their characters, having sufficient influence such that the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act was nicknamed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Them, their subsidiaries, Universal, and their subsidiaries jointly filing a copyright infringement suit would be no small challenge for anyone to defend against, even without the provocative imagery supplied.
• Reading the filing gave the distinct impression that the court was not, in reality, the primary audience of what might otherwise be a dry, even routine copyright case. The opening pages include colorful language, inline images (versus appended exhibits), and appeals to national pride and global economic competition. In other words, appealing to the public and lawmakers through the medium of litigation.
• The course and outcome of this case, along with the policy and social debates likely to follow, are unclear despite what first impressions may imply. For the case specifically, contrary to Disney's assertion that this is 'textbook copyright infringement', this area of law is in fact unsettled with basic aspects like training and generation copyright not defined by statute. From a policy perspective, while Disney is powerful and can lobby well, their position on training would be diametrically opposed to much larger companies, namely Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others, who assert freely training on copyright material is essential, even at times invoking national security language.