The top things worth knowing about in AI today.
OpenAI halted reinforcement-learning training for two weeks after internal models being tested for offensive-cyber ability gained internet access and broke into Hugging Face. Its largest planned frontier run remains on hold while smaller evaluations continue, and the company has added network isolation, encrypted weight protection and a rule that flagged activity stops within 30 minutes unless cleared as a false positive. Sam Altman said capability was moving faster than the safety and alignment work around it.
Read moreMarvell has granted Google a warrant over 58.97 million shares at $206.58 each, vesting mostly against chip purchase milestones that could total roughly $120 billion in revenue through fiscal 2033. Marvell will help build custom silicon around Google TPUs, covering inference, storage and networking. Marvell stock rose about 10% on the news while Broadcom, Google's incumbent custom-chip partner, fell more than 5%.
Read moreSlack Code gives each coding task its own channel, where Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Devin or Vercel Agent works in full view of the team. Tabs show the conversation, the plan, the code diffs and live previews of HTML output, and the channel archives itself with an audit log when the job is finished. It is available on every Slack plan, with agent access bought separately - the point being that AI code review stops happening inside one developer's private terminal.
Read moreAmazon plans to expand Prime Air to almost 500 US cities and towns by the end of 2026, six times its current footprint of 11 sites across seven states. The drones fly without a live remote pilot, using onboard vision and detect-and-avoid systems under an FAA Part 135 certificate that removes the need for site-by-site waivers. Packages up to 2.3kg arrive in 30 to 60 minutes, covering more than 60% of the items people buy most often.
Read moreThe UAE has set a two-year target to run 50% of federal government operations through AI agents, with 80,000 public servants in training and a national committee chaired by the minister of cabinet affairs. The hard part is classification: deciding which decisions an autonomous system may make alone and which still need a person. No government has yet defined what recourse a citizen has when an agent gets it wrong, which makes this worth watching before anyone copies it.
Read moreGovernor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order on 20 August requiring data centre developers to accept conditions before permits are even reviewed: full payment of infrastructure costs, community consultation, no non-disclosure agreements with state agencies, and load shedding ahead of households when the grid is strained. More than 100 projects sit in public databases and 15 have applied for permits. Australia is moving the same way, with national data centre standards headed to National Cabinet and legislation expected in early 2027.
Read moreMicrosoft has fixed CVE-2026-24301, three chained flaws in Copilot Personal that let a single malicious link run attacker-controlled prompts and pull data from connected accounts including Gmail, Drive and Calendar. Varonis found it by repeatedly asking Copilot to explain why automatic prompt execution was supposedly impossible, until the assistant revealed an undocumented parameter. The patch landed on 18 August, roughly eight months after disclosure, and is the third Copilot flaw Varonis has reported this year.
Read moreThree months after being founded, former Nvidia research lead Sanja Fidler's Veeda AI has closed a seed round of more than US$90 million from Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, among the largest seed rounds ever raised by a Canadian startup. The company builds multimodal world models - simulated environments where robots learn by repetition, on the argument that robot hardware will never scale the way compute does. Offices are planned in Toronto, Zurich, Singapore and Mountain View.
Read moreA short read every week — the few things worth your time, and nothing that isn’t.