Open-source Adobe clones and OpenAI's Iran fake bylines

Somebody rebuilt Adobe's whole creative suite with Claude Opus 5.5. Then gave it away for free. Also today: OpenAI says an Iran-origin operation used ChatGPT to plant about 100 articles in real outlets, under fake journalist names.

One story is about software getting cheap. The other is about lying getting cheap. Both matter more to your business than this week's benchmark chart.

Someone rebuilt Photoshop and Premiere Pro in Rust with Claude Opus 5.5

The project covers Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro. All rebuilt in Rust, a programming language built for speed. All open source and free.

And they are close copies. Same layout, same tool palettes, same keyboard shortcuts.

The main difference is the logo. A cartoon animal sits where Adobe's branding used to be. A fox instead of the Photoshop square.

The builders say this is not piracy. They never looked at Adobe's source code. They described how the software behaves and built it again from scratch.

That is a real legal argument. It will also be tested by a company with a very large legal team.

Here is what interests me. Adobe's protection was never just the code. It was complexity, habit and the pain of switching.

Fifteen years of muscle memory and old project files. That moat held because rebuilding a pro video editor used to take a big team and years of work.

Now a small group with a very good model has a credible version. People say it feels faster than the original. Whether it survives real production work is another question.

Open source adds a second problem for Adobe. Unpaid people join in and fix things. A few hundred designers writing plugins beats a hiring plan.

So should you cancel Creative Cloud on Monday? I would not. Free software with no company behind it brings questions you need answered first.

• Who fixes it when it breaks two days before your deadline?
• Does it open and export the file formats your clients and printers expect?
• Colour accuracy, fonts, codecs: the boring things that make a pro tool pro.
• If Adobe sues, what happens to the project, and to you using it for work?

What I would do this week is cheaper and safer. Look at your real software bill. Most small companies pay for tools and use maybe 15% of the features.

Teams quietly spend hundreds a month on apps nobody has reviewed in years. Some of those tools are now genuinely replaceable. That is a lot of what we end up building for clients.

Not Photoshop, though. The small internal dashboard, the form handler, the tracker at 49 per seat. The build versus buy maths has changed, so redo it on the small stuff first.

And if you sell software yourself, take this as a warning. If your price rests on "this is hard to build", check how hard it still is. The answer changed while you planned next year's price rise.

OpenAI says an Iran-linked operation planted fake bylines in real outlets

OpenAI published a report on an Iran-origin publishing operation. It invented journalist identities and wrote AI-assisted articles. Then it pitched them to real publications.

About 100 articles got placed. Seven fake identities were tied to one operation. The pieces reached millions of readers.

State attribution is still unconfirmed. So nobody has proven who paid for it. The method is confirmed, and the method is simple.

The AI part is not the scary bit. Machines writing readable opinion columns stopped being news a while ago.

The scary bit is that real editors took work from people who do not exist. Seven of them. More than once.

That is a human process failure with an AI engine bolted on. A fake writer used to need a backstory, samples and time. Now the backstory, the photo and 100 articles cost less than one freelancer's invoice.

One more thing to hold in your head. OpenAI found this. OpenAI is also an American company, reporting on an Iran-linked operation, during a US conflict with Iran.

That does not make the report false. The logs are the logs. But the only group that can see inside ChatGPT usage is a group with a side.

We are being asked to take a company's self-audit as the public record. I would like a second pair of eyes on that.

What fake bylines mean for a small business

You are not the target of a state influence operation. You are just downstream of the same tools.

If you hire writers, check they exist. That tidy portfolio with three bylines could be a pile of prompts. A ten minute video call solves most of it.

If you publish under your own brand, you need a human who checks facts. Not a disclaimer. An actual person who verifies claims before they go out.

That used to be a nice extra for a small company. Now it is what separates you from the sludge.

And if you decide things based on what you read online, add one habit. When a post makes you angry or very sure very fast, slow down. Being moved by a post is now weak proof that the post is real.

The two stories meet in one uncomfortable place. Making something look professional is now cheap. That covers a video editor with a fox logo, and a newspaper column by a man who does not exist.

I am keeping my Adobe subscription for now. I would just like to know which of today's headlines was written by a fox.