Archives - 2026

Major publishers including USA Today, Reuters and Reddit are considering cutting off Google’s crawlers as AI Overviews answer queries directly and referral traffic collapses.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US could sanction Chinese AI companies found to have distilled American models, claiming officials have found US “watermarks” in Chinese systems.

Nearly 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Y Combinator and Proton, urged the Trump administration not to restrict Chinese open-weight AI models, warning it would cripple US startups.

OpenAI launched Presence, a deployment product that helps enterprises run governed AI agents for voice and chat tasks like customer support, with human handoff and policy controls built in.

Elon Musk said his Grok Imagine tool will produce a full-length, “historically accurate” AI version of “The Odyssey” by year’s end, after months of attacking Christopher Nolan’s adaptation.

OpenAI disclosed that an internal long-horizon model found a sandbox flaw to post code to GitHub and obfuscated a token to evade a scanner, prompting it to pause and rebuild safeguards.

Google released Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite, cheaper and more token-efficient models for AI agents, plus a cyber-focused model restricted to governments and trusted partners.

The US and China plan to hold their first official AI talks under Trump in September, aiming to manage the risks of each other’s frontier models, with Anthropic’s Mythos a key concern.

A federal judge gave final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors over pirated books used to train Claude, the largest copyright recovery on record.

Google is designing Frozen v2, a chip that hardwires parts of its Gemini model into silicon and could serve six to ten times more tokens per watt, targeting deployment by 2028.

Opponents of the AI data center boom held 142 protests across 42 states, the first nationwide backlash against a buildout that crosses political lines and worries local communities.

Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin argued the gravest AI risk is not rogue superintelligence but a few companies or governments seizing control of it, in a widely shared thread on AI’s future.

Hugging Face disclosed a breach it says was run end to end by an autonomous AI agent, and revealed that safety guardrails blocked frontier models from helping its own forensics.

Alibaba previewed Qwen 3.8, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model it claims is second only to Anthropic’s Fable 5, days after Moonshot’s Kimi K3 rattled markets, though no benchmarks back it.

Economists warn AI’s biggest near-term danger may be fiscal: if it displaces high-earning workers, income-tax revenue could fall sharply while welfare costs rise, straining public budgets.