Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5.5, its first model since Dario Amodei's “pace the frontier” essay, and says it has enhanced safeguards to combat risky behavior  —  Claude Opus 5.5 comes with improvements to certain behaviors, like attempting to escape testing environments.

OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and Luna, saying Sol makes about half as many mistakes as GPT-5.6 Sol and Luna matches GPT-5.6 Sol's performance at ~1% of the cost  —  GPT-6 Sol and Luna arrive less than three months after GPT-5.6, with OpenAI claiming major accuracy gains, dramatic cost reductions …

Xbox has become a shell of its former self, weighed down by job cuts and studio closures, as it focuses on franchises like Halo and reaching “a billion people”  —  The latest changes at Microsoft's gaming division signal a further retreat from the Xbox brand.

San Francisco sues Trump Media & Technology, claiming its Truth API service violates California's Unfair Competition Law by creating an insider trading market  —  The city attorney argued that the service, available for up to $100,000 a month, could allow wealthy traders to manipulate the market …

ShinyHunters claims it used an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day to hack FBI-related services and steal employee and applicant data, and also defaced the FBI jobs site  —  A sample of 5,000 alleged agents seen by 404 Media includes names, addresses, phone numbers, and details on FBI employees' spouses.

Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, both on TSMC's 2nm process, with two 5GHz prime cores and six 4GHz performance cores  —  Extreme by name, extreme by nature  —  Qualcomm has announced not one, but two new flagship mobile chipsets at its annual Snapdragon Summit …

Sources: Scott Bessent is emerging as a frontrunner for the AI czar position; other names include WH OSTP Director Michael Kratsios and OPM Director Scott Kupor  —  THE SCOOP  —  Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is emerging as a frontrunner for President Donald Trump's new “AI czar” …

Sources and Nscale's US SEC filings: ByteDance accounted for nearly 75% of Nscale's sales in 2025 and used Nscale's facility in Norway to access Nvidia AI chips  —  Chinese tech giant was AI cloud provider's largest customer last year but is not prominently named in pitch to stock market investors

The US criticizes Australia's digital duty-of-care proposal, which has a provision that would require social media platforms to let users opt out of algorithms  —  The US government criticized Australia's plan to clamp down on social media algorithms and harmful content online …

Discord is rolling out its updated age-verification policy this week, sorting users into either the Adult or Teen group based on account age, activity, and more  —  It will offer several privacy-focused options for users who aren't automatically confirmed as adults.

In his UN General Assembly speech, President Trump says the US is “officially” renaming AI to “super intelligence” because “artificial” makes it sound fake  —  The president claims the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake.

Anthropic and OpenEvidence partner to offer a specialized version of OpenEvidence's AI search tool for physicians in about 100 low- and middle-income countries  —  Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic and medical knowledge platform OpenEvidence are collaborating to bring AI-powered …

Sources: China's SASAC, which oversees state-owned companies, is surveying the number of Broadcom switches in state-backed data centers amid a domestic AI drive  —  Survey comes amid drive to boost domestic players and reduce reliance on foreign AI infrastructure

Six major banks, including BofA and Capital One, warn that increased autonomy for agentic commerce chatbots could lead to more scams, fraud, and disputes  —  Agentic commerce could increase the amount of scams, fraud and disputes, the banks warn in a new report.

Patreon co-founder Sam Yam says he is joining OpenAI to lead Creator Product, alongside Patreon's Head of Product Drew Rowny and Head of Engineering Shannon Ma  —  1/ I'm joining @OpenAI to lead Creator Product after over 13 years since starting @Patreon. Coming with me are my favorite crew Drew Rowny and Shannon Ma, Patreon's (now former) Head of Product and Head of Engineering. We're going to build together with Creators at OpenAI and share early access to ...

Firecrawl, which provides web scraping tools for AI agents, raised a $75M Series B led by Smash Capital, with participation from YC, Altos Ventures, and others  —  Firecrawl Inc., a provider of web scraping tools for artificial intelligence agents, today announced that it has raised $75 million in funding.

Global AI glasses shipments, including display-less and AR and AI glasses, rose 263% YoY in H1 2026, driven by Meta and EssilorLuxottica's display-less lineup  —  AI glasses market accelerates in H1 2026, driven by display-less devices, Meta's dominance and growing AR & AI adoption.

Chinese chip foundry CanSemi, focused on automotive, industrial, and IoT chips, files for an IPO on Shenzhen stock exchange's ChiNext, seeking to raise ~$919M  —  Chinese chip foundry CanSemi Technology Inc. is seeking to raise about 6.16 billion yuan ($919 million) in an initial public offering …

Survey: US public perception of data centers has sharply deteriorated since January, with 54% viewing them as bad for the environment, as local opposition rises  —  Americans have grown more negative toward the possible environmental and economic effects of data centers since the beginning of the year.

NADI, a new DARPA-like Dutch government agency, launches a €40M challenge to accelerate chip design with AI in collaboration with its German counterpart SPRIND  —  A new Dutch government agency set up to achieve strategic innovation will work with its German counterpart to pursue breakthroughs …

Ofcom opens an investigation into Pornhub owner Aylo to determine whether it has complied with OSA requirements to prevent under-18s from accessing porn  —  Britain's media regulator Ofcom said on Wednesday that it had opened an investigation into whether adult content platform Pornhub …

A profile of Noah Shinn, founder of AI assistant Instinct, who soft-launched it as an invite-only site for VCs and is reportedly fundraising at a $10B valuation  —  Noah Shinn was publishing influential AI research before he graduated from college.  Now, at the ripe age of 23, he's taking on Mark Zuckerberg.

Nat Friedman says Meta built Muse “from scratch” but was “heavily inspired” by OpenClaw, as users compare the two, including calling Muse “OpenClaw for normies”  —  Early adopters of Meta's Muse have been speculating that the reason the AI works …