OpenAI Releases GPT-5 and Why Barndoor is APIs 2.0

This week I interviewed Oren Michels, who ran API company Mashery in Web 2.0 (a long-time ReadWriteWeb sponsor!). He's back now with a modern twist on API management: Barndoor, a control plane for agentic AI.

"If you take APIs and you take the ‘P’ out, it’s a whole lot more interesting."
- Oren Michels

But of course the big AI news this week was OpenAI releasing GPT-5 on Thursday (Techmeme). The web angle here is that part of GPT-5's appeal, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is using it to create web apps. The announcement post states that GPT-5 "shows particular improvements in complex front‑end generation and debugging larger repositories."

Other news that caught my eye:

• 🤦 Cloudflare claims that Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives (Cloudflare)
• 🛠️ Google on Wednesday launched its AI coding agent, Jules, out of beta, just over two months after its public preview debut in May. (TechCrunch)
• 🛑 Researchers have found a critical vulnerability in the new NLWeb protocol Microsoft announced just a few months ago at Build. (The Verge)

Web Platform

Not a lot of non-AI web news this week, but there was one special anniversary to celebrate...

Wednesday was the 34th anniversary of the release of the World Wide Web.

Even if AI dominates the news these days, many people continue to make cool things on the base web platform. Look no further than HTML Day, which happened last Saturday, August 2. See the highlights on Are.na.

And yet...the web continues to butt up against the dominant app platforms. One piece of good news this week on that front: Apple might actually be forced to open up iOS to other browser engines, at least in Japan.

Open Social Web

Ghost 6.0 launched this week and it was great news for newsletter writers and other indie publishers. Now, Ghost is fully connected to the open social web:

"That means millions of people can discover, follow, like and reply to your posts from any supported social web client - including Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Ghost, WordPress, Surf, WriteFreely, and many more."

Media brands are trying out open social integrations too. Vox Media, which owns The Verge, has a new feature on its sports property SB Nation called "The Feed".

Often the coolest things come from indie devs, though. For example, natalie b. is building Bluesky comments for her blog (via Hacker News).

Meanwhile, on the fediverse, a small part of it met in real life: FediCon was held in Vancouver, Canada last weekend. For those of us unable to attend, the videos are becoming available:

Couple more open social links for ya:

• 🛠️ My IndieWeb Journey: Building, Sharing, and Owning Your Online Presence; Ana Rodrigues
• 💡 "Social media destroyed personal websites in a lot of ways, but one thing it’s taught us is that brief and published is often better than perfect and still-in-your-head." Chris Ferdinandi

One More Thing

This post by Katie Mack nicely captures why I favour social media products that treat hyperlinks as first-class citizens. Bravo to Mastodon and Bluesky, BOO! to Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn and X. And btw, whenever possible I will use Mastodon and Bluesky posts in my newsletter (although sometimes, as with Sam Altman above, I'll have no choice but to use X).

Editor’s note: This article was originally published when the site operated as Web Technology News. It has since relaunched as Agentic Web News, with a sharper focus on the companies, protocols, products and people shaping the agentic web.