Archives - August 2026

Google Cloud launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal, a specialized AI platform with agents for drafting and contract work, joining Anthropic and OpenAI in courting law firms.

Porsche signed a five-year, €1.25 billion AI partnership with Tata Consultancy Services, which is separately buying Porsche’s IT consulting arm MHP for €320 million.

OpenAI banned ChatGPT accounts it says originated in Russia and built a fake “expert institute” using plagiarized academic work to manufacture false credibility online.

Apple launched new Mac Mini and Mac Studio models with its M6 and M5 Ultra chips, explicitly built for developers running AI models and agents locally instead of in the cloud.

Nvidia is in talks to invest in Perplexity at a valuation above $30 billion, a 50% jump from a year ago, as the AI search startup’s revenue triples on its new agent product.

Alibaba launched Wan3.0, an AI video model that turns business documents into 30-second clips, a day after raising $10.2 billion in Hong Kong’s largest-ever follow-on share sale.

Hugging Face is reportedly exploring a sale valuing it at $13 billion or more, nearly triple its 2023 valuation, though no deal has been reached and no buyer identified.

Michael Polansky’s biotech startup Outer Biosciences keeps donated human skin alive for weeks and uses it to train an AI that predicts promising new skincare ingredients.

OpenAI launched AI Futures, a blog from a new Strategic Futures team arguing that AI’s gravest risk is letting power escape the checks that have long depended on human cooperation.

ChatGPT began scoping far more searches to specific websites on August 8, a change that coincided with Reddit’s citation share collapsing from 3.8% to 0.5%.

ByteDance and Tencent each received about 10,000 Nvidia H200 chips, but Chinese regulators want the hardware kept in Hong Kong, which lacks the power to run it.

Meta launched a Mac app for Meta AI with screen sharing and Google Workspace access, aimed at creators and small businesses running campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.

Alibaba’s profit fell about 75% in the June quarter as AI infrastructure spending jumped 75%, even as cloud revenue grew 45% and the company touted its new Qwen3.8-Max model.

Nvidia has discussed investing in Mercor, a data-labeling startup that supplies expert data for its Nemotron models, in a round that would double the company’s valuation to $20 billion.

Anthropic’s ongoing system-prompt changelog now documents instructions for Claude Fable 5 and Opus 5, revealing how the company steers agentic behavior in its newest models.