Techmeme
August 24, 2026, 4:01 AM

Top News

George Hammond / Financial Times:
Ramp data: Fable 5, launched in June, has plateaued at ~11% of spending on Anthropic tools, as companies shift to cheaper models; Opus 5 surpassed Fable 5  —  AI lab's Fable 5 has met with sluggish demand from corporate clients  —  Anthropic's US customers are using cheaper alternatives …
Rebecca Falconer / Axios:
Trump says communities that oppose data centers are “making a mistake” as they create “tremendous amounts of jobs and money”, amid bipartisan backlash  —  President Trump defended the expansion of data centers in an interview with his former fixer, Michael Cohen, that aired in full on Sunday.
Axios:
Greg Abbott says data center companies “dug their own grave” by moving into communities without first gaining support, signaling growing Republican backlash  —  Texas Gov. Greg Abbott delivered one of the starkest warnings yet from a Republican to the AI industry …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: foldable iPhone feels durable, fits well in a pocket, has useful iPad-like app layouts, excels as a camera viewfinder but lacks telephoto and Face ID  —  Also: Get ready for iPhone price hikes.  —  Apple is about to bring some of its product magic back with its first foldable iPhone.
Natasha Singer / New York Times:
A look at the playbook tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI use to shape American schools to their benefit, and the pushback against unproven AI tools  —  One humid afternoon in the summer of 2025, representatives from Microsoft were waiting as some 200 teachers trooped into a conference hall in downtown Manhattan.
Tracy Withers / Bloomberg:
New Zealand plans a bill to ban social media for under-16s, requiring “high risk” platforms to check user ages or face penalties of up to 10% of global revenue  —  New Zealand plans to ban under-16s from social media, joining a throng of countries worldwide seeking to limit online harm to children.
Katie Roof / Business Insider:
Sources: Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value it at $13B+, up from $4.5B in 2023, and has been working with a bank to evaluate bidders' interest  —  The AI industry's next blockbuster acquisition may not be another model maker.  —  Hugging Face, whose platform helps developers discover …
Telegraph:
At Beijing's World Humanoid Robot Games, a robot made by Honor ran 100m in 9.39s, and another Chinese robot finished 400m in 38.16s, both beating human records  —  Chinese humanoid called Tiangong Ultra nearly five seconds faster than 2016 Rio Olympic time  —  It may have stumpy arms …
Ina Fried / Axios:
Source: AI researcher Luke Metz, who returned to OpenAI from TML earlier this year, joins Meta's Superintelligence Labs and will report to Alexandr Wang  —  Prominent AI researcher Luke Metz has joined Meta's Superintelligence Labs, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to Axios.
Truman Dickerson / Business Insider:
Sam Altman says AI could end up controlled by a few powerful players, partly because AI fears could push people to trade “a lot of liberty for safety”  —  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he worries that AI will one day be controlled by a handful of companies, models, or people …
Reuters:
Alibaba plans to raise ~$10B in a follow-on share offering to fund AI investments; sources: it plans to offer 710M shares at a 3.6% discount to Friday's close  —  China's Alibaba (9988.HK) on Sunday launched a HK$80-billion ($10.2 billion) share placement to fund artificial intelligence-related development.
Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal:
The careers of Z.ai's Tang Jie and Moonshot AI's Yang Zhilin, once teacher and pupil at Tsinghua University, show that China's AI leap is no sudden development  —  University lab nurtured the computer scientists who are using ingenuity and imitation to chase down Anthropic and OpenAI; ‘they know perfectly how to monetize their work’

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Zoho Sign takes a bite of Apple's latest: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate  —  It's September, and you know the drill.  Apple just handed us a fresh batch of releases, and there's plenty to look forward …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Invest Like the Best:
Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Sources:
Baseten's CEO on why every company will want to own its AI
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Training Data:
Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Andrew Feldman from Cerebras
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
Acquired:
The Home Depot
Learn the playbooks that built the world's greatest companies - and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.
Subscribe to Acquired.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:01 AM ET, August 24, 2026.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks