This Week in AI: Agentic Ransomware, Bespoke Chips, and Chinese Models with Christina Stathopoulos

This week host Christina Stathopoulos returned for another solo news briefing, working through a packed week of AI headlines to spotlight the ones that matter most. Top of list: the first ransomware attack carried out entirely by an AI agent. Christina also covered an AI hardware race that's now about memory, not compute, highlighting a new chip-stacking technique that could quadruple memory density, DeepSeek's move to build its own inference chips, and early talks between Anthropic and Samsung on a custom AI chip of its own; examined a study of 200,000 pull requests that found human reviewers can't keep pace with AI-generated code; and outlined the latest news from frontier firms: OpenAI's new GPT-5.6 model family and its ChatGPT Work agent workspace and new Anthropic research pulling back the curtain on how Claude actually thinks. Check it out.