Weekly AI Blast — Thursday, August 13, 2026

Four labs, five disclosed breaches, one shared excuse: “evaluation misconfiguration.” OpenAI’s pre-release research model found a zero-day in a package registry on May 7, then rebuilt its own access a...

linkedin.com

SK Hynix expanding Solidigm Dalian NAND plant

SK Hynix is expanding production at its Solidigm Dalian site in China but restricting the NAND techn ...

blocksandfiles.com

SpaceXAI Launches Grok 4.6 for Long-Running Agents

SpaceXAI, the artificial intelligence company formerly known as xAI, released Grok 4.6 on August 12, 2026, a new flagship model built for long-running agents and more ambitious interactive and visual ...

unite.ai

Some Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it at their jobs, classes | TechCrunch

Is Anthropic's new watermarking system a travesty? Some have taken to social media to complain that it is.

techcrunch.com

Manus to return as independent company after China forced Meta to unwind $2 billion deal

Last December, Meta said it planned to acquire Manus for $2 billion, its latest effort to shore up its AI strategy.

cnbc.com

9 Google Pixel announcements every fan needs to watch for on August 12

Google's next Pixel event is on August 12. If you're a Pixel fan, there are 9 big announcements you'll want to keep an eye out for.

androidauthority.com

Unitree Robotics IPO oversubscribed 8,000 times in Shanghai

The Hangzhou-based humanoid robot maker is set to become the first onshore-listed humanoid robot company in mainland China

finance.yahoo.com

'122% negative margin': OpenAI's trillion-dollar IPO to go public soon

OpenAI filed a confidential S-1 in May targeting a September listing at $852 billion to $1 trillion. The full prospectus becomes public mid-to-late August, revealing finances behind ~$25 billion annua...

wionews.com

Corporate America Wants Everyone Back in the Building. Nobody Agrees on Why.

Corporate America spent the last two years deciding, mostly without much public debate, that the office is back. Five days a week, badge in by nine, no more asking.

linkedin.com

Tech layoffs August update: Google, TikTok, Etsy, Zillow slash hundreds of roles as job losses pile up in 2026

As the trend of mass layoff rounds continues in the technology sector, some executives are now going out of their way to say AI is not the cause.

fastcompany.com

Microsoft's AI Revenue Heavily Dependent on OpenAI, New Filing Reveals — BigGo Finance

Microsoft's latest regulatory filing reveals that OpenAI contributed $24.1 billion in revenue during the fiscal year ended June 2026, accounting for…

finance.biggo.com

Meta's 'open source' Muse Glimmer model can run on a single computer - Engadget

Meta has released a new slimmed down 'open source' AI model that's light enough to run on a single computer.

engadget.com

Anthropic, Macquarie Asset Management, and GIC announce strategic partnership to develop dedicated data center infrastructure at scale | Macquarie Group

Anthropic, Macquarie Asset Management, and GIC today announced a strategic partnership to establish Theseus Infrastructure, a new platform to develop, operate and lease data center infrastructure at s...

macquarie.com

Nvidia’s $500B Bet To Make AI Compute Wall Street’s Next Asset Class

Nvidia wants Wall Street to finance AI compute as a new asset class. Its $500 billion bet depends on cash flow, useful life and residual value.

forbes.com

AFTER THE UPDATE - Issue #19 | August 11, 2026

CONTRACTS: The Army’s AI Tool May Have Cost the Right Bidder a $446 Million Contract In February, the Army awarded a $445,943,100 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for mission support at White Sands Missil...

linkedin.com

money.usnews.com

DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 | DARPA

Historic VENOM milestone demonstrates scalable AI development capabilities for the operational fleet.

darpa.mil

Anthropic Enters The AI Chip Race With In-House Chip Team

Anthropic launches an in-house chip team as labs push custom silicon to cut token costs, even while expanding massive TPU commitments with Google and Broadcom.

forbes.com

Samsung and SK hynix warn AI-driven memory shortages could last until 2027 and beyond, as HBM demand explodes — customers already reserving supply years ahead, while the wider DRAM market begins to ti...

Supply may never match exploding demand, despite massive investments in supply infrastructure

tomshardware.com

Is AI a Bubble? The Argument for "This Time Is Different" Just Got More Complicated.

There's a conversation happening right now, in boardrooms and comment sections and everywhere in between, that's turned into something close to a ritual. Someone brings up the dot-com crash.

linkedin.com

'Tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for': Microsoft tells engineer to calm down on AI usage

Microsoft forced to introduce new limits on AI token usage

techradar.com

How We Built the First AI-Generated Genomes | Arc Institute

Going from designing individual genes to complete genomes is an incredibly challenging problem. We have previously shown that the genomic foundation models like the Evo series can generate single prot...

arcinstitute.org

THE LEADING EDGE -- Week of August 10 to August 16, 2026

ChatGPT crossed one billion weekly users on Thursday. Four days earlier, the UK's AI Security Institute revealed that an Anthropic model, given open internet access during a routine security test, spe...

linkedin.com

Meta Ordered To Pay $942 Million In Landmark New Mexico Child Safety Case

In the ruling, the judge notes that Meta created a “public nuisance” by being a significant contributor to the state’s teen mental health crisis.

forbes.com

China turns up the heat with open model blitz as US model makers panic

For the first time, Alibaba's Qwen team is letting its 'Max' model out of the API pen; meanwhile, DeepSeek V4-Flash gives new meaning to cheap and cheerful competition

theregister.com

OpenAI Asks Judge to Dismiss Apple's Trade Secrets Lawsuit

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to dismiss Apple's lawsuit accusing the AI company of stealing trade secrets, calling the allegations "meritless". Lawyers for OpenAI said Apple's suit twists the acti...

macrumors.com

Microsoft Merges Consumer and Enterprise Copilot Into Single App, Launches Paid AutoPilot Agents

Microsoft plans to consolidate its consumer and enterprise Copilot applications into a single unified app by August 2026, according to an internal memo obtained by The Information. The overhaul intro…

mlq.ai

Commission starts enforcing AI Act rules and new transparency requirements on 2 August

From 2 August 2026, the European Commission’s AI Office, together with national authorities, will begin enforcing the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act.

digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu

Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic AI agents went rogue during Irregular testing

Third disclosure in weeks raises fresh concerns over how frontier AI models are contained during cyber evaluations.

csoonline.com

THE LONG GAME - August 7, 2026

Last year the question was whether you used AI. This year it's how.

linkedin.com