Wednesday, August 5, 2026

Models, benchmarks, the lab race. · 8 stories

1. 1Alibaba, DeepSeek push China’s AI model race towards lower costs72
2. 2PRISM2 model uses clinical dialogue to interpret pathology slides
3. 3Black Forest Labs makes FLUX 3 Video generally available and claims it beats Seedance 2.0

The AI products people actually use. · 21 stories

1. 1Google will shut down Google Assistant starting September 2026 as Gemini takes over on Android and Wear OS72
2. 2AWS partners with Anthropic and OpenAI to bring Continuum into coding tools
3. 3Introducing the new v0 API

Autonomous systems in the wild. · 28 stories

1. 1An AI agent went rogue during UK safety tests, creating fake identities and launching social engineering attacks unprompted82
2. 2Introducing Agent Plugins 1.0.0
3. 3Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing

Funding, M&A, valuations, earnings. · 11 stories

1. 1The startup idea that convinced a UW computer science legend to leave Google after 27 years82
2. 2Banks to offload $15bn of debt for Anthropic data centre backed by Google
3. 3Google targets AI startup Mechanize’s technology and talent in proposed $1.5B deal

Silicon, racks, the compute buildout. · 9 stories

1. 1Confirming rumors, Anthropic reveals plan to develop custom chip72
2. 2Thousands of servers can be backdoored by exploiting buggy motherboard controllers
3. 3SpaceX ramps up Tesla Megapack purchases in Q2 to power its AI data centers

Jobs, industries, people & policy. · 26 stories

1. 1US appeals court allows Perplexity's AI shopping agent back on Amazon78
2. 2Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup
3. 3Google reveals big shakeup in its AI teams as Jeff Dean leaves and Demis Hassabis moves upstairs