The top things worth knowing about in AI today.
Anthropic published results showing Claude designed binder proteins that worked against 14 of 15 targets, with 22-35% of individual designs binding successfully against an industry norm of 10-15%. Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience produced and tested the designs in wet labs independently. Work that has taken a specialist weeks or months per target is a useful marker for how far AI has moved beyond text.
Read moreOpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens for 13-to-17-year-olds, blocking conversations about self-harm and anything romantic or sexual, and adding Quiet Hours and Study Hours controls. Age prediction routes users into the teen mode automatically and defaults to it when the system is not confident. Adults who get misclassified will need to verify their age to get the standard product back.
Read moreOpenAI told investors it booked $6.7 billion in the June quarter, an 18% rise on the previous three months. Anthropic reported more than $11.5 billion over the same period, up from $4.73 billion in Q1, with positive adjusted operating income. It is the first quarter Anthropic has run ahead, and it changes which lab enterprise buyers treat as the default choice.
Read moreAlipay launched what it calls China’s first full-stack agentic commerce platform, letting merchants sell through its Ah Bao agent instead of through app screens. Ah Bao is connected to 16 automakers and five phone brands covering more than 70% of the Chinese handset market, with KFC, Luckin Coffee and Mixue among the retail integrations. Alibaba shares rose 5% on the news.
Read morePew found 52% of US adults are more concerned than excited about AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021, in a survey of 3,488 people. Among under-30s the figure is 55%, and 73% of them expect AI to mean fewer jobs within 20 years. Public sentiment is moving the opposite way to deployment, which is the gap any consumer-facing rollout now has to manage.
Read moreCISA added a remote code execution flaw in the Ray AI framework (CVE-2025-62593, CVSS 9.4) to its known-exploited catalogue and ordered federal agencies to fix it by 20 August. Attackers are turning unpatched GPU clusters into a self-replicating crypto-mining botnet in a campaign named ShadowRay 2.0. Anything running Ray below 2.52.0 is exposed, including developer machines and CI runners, not just production clusters.
Read moreRobotics, autonomous vehicle, drone and industrial automation startups raised $47.4 billion across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, up 80% year on year and more than the whole of 2022 to 2024 combined. Waymo’s $16 billion round and Anduril’s $5 billion led the tally. Capital that spent three years funding model training is now buying hardware that acts in the physical world.
Read moreLegal AI firm Harvey launched Harvey II, built around a Memory feature that carries a lawyer’s preferences across Harvey, Word and Outlook, and Spaces that scope agents to a matter with its files, permissions and history. It also introduced Tenet, its first in-house model trained end to end for legal reasoning, which Harvey says matches strong general models at open-source cost. That cost profile is what makes running agents continuously across every matter practical.
Read moreA short read every week — the few things worth your time, and nothing that isn’t.