Alibaba's Qwen team has released and open-sourced Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a 125B-parameter multimodal MoE model with only 6B active parameters per token, priced at approximately 3% of Claude Opus4.6 with training costs reduced by about 90%. Its "Next" architecture is positioned as the technical prototype for the upcoming Qwen4 flagship.
In August 2026, a federal judge in California struck down the Pentagon's blacklisting of AI company Anthropic, ruling that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's actions violated the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment's due process clause. The landmark decision establishes that national security designations cannot be used to punish companies for criticizing government positions.
Anthropic refused to support lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance.
There's a lot of capital pouring into the business of giving models away.
Given 10 benchmarks for specific misaligned behaviors, the automated systems were able to improve performance on every single one without degrading overall performance.
The YZ Index Smoke quick test on 2026-08-29 covered 11 models. Grok 4 topped the day with 96.99 points, while notable gains were seen for Gemini 3.1 Pro, GLM-4.6, DeepSeek V4 Pro, and Grok 4, and sharp declines were recorded for GPT-5.5 and several Claude models.
A recent paper argues that AI is often better at doctoring than doctors. Guess who isn't thrilled.
Meta fixes AI glasses to stop recording any time users cover up the safety light.
Sandhya Devanathan will oversee some OpenAI operations across Southeast Asia and Australia in her new role.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young —Antonio Regalado I knew I’d officially become a “longevity influencer” when a company called Generation Lab offered me the…
A federal judge ruled the Trump administration illegally labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, handing the AI company a victory as its second Pentagon lawsuit continues in Washington.
The company is testing robots that can swap cables, reset servers, and take on other tasks performed by technicians, fueling concerns among some workers that their jobs could be at risk.
The art portfolio platform Cara, designed for creators who don’t want their work used to train AI, has been under assault by trolls seizing and publishing its data.
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done.  Your thermostat may not look like a power plant. Neither does your electric vehicle, home battery, or HVAC system. But utility and energy companies increasingly want to treat them like one. A virtual power plant, or VPP, is a collection of household devices (such…
In the final week of August 2026, Alibaba's Qwen team open-sourced the 2.4-trillion-parameter Qwen3.8-Max, while Zhipu AI's Z.ai revealed that the mysterious "Ox Alpha" model on OpenRouter was actually GLM-5.3-Flash. The twin releases highlight contrasting open-source strategies, a 26-fold inference cost gap, and a shared bet on coding and agent workloads.
A federal judge has called the Department of Defense’s designation of Anthropic as a national security supply-chain risk “illegal and baseless.”
On August 27, 2026, Google DeepMind released the world's first double-blind evaluation pilot report for frontier AI models, using a cryptographic black-box trusted execution environment to keep external test banks and model weights mutually isolated and prevent benchmark contamination.
Standardized driver interface aims to let devices talk to AI and each other.
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the AI Stage is back to dig into the single hottest topic in the community for the past few years, presented by Google for Startups.
xAI accused of training Grok on real and AI-generated child pornography.
