AI News

Judge Rules Pentagon's Blacklisting of Anthropic Unconstitutional: National Security Is Not a Blank Check to Silence Critics

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.

ARS

Trump blacklisting of "woke" Anthropic deemed illegal by federal judge

Anthropic refused to support lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance.

TC

Open-weight AI companies are the Valley’s hottest acquisition targets

There's a lot of capital pouring into the business of giving models away.

TC

An Anthropic researcher just gave us a peek at self-improving AI

Given 10 benchmarks for specific misaligned behaviors, the automated systems were able to improve performance on every single one without degrading overall performance.

Grok 4 Leads with 96.99: 2026-08-29 Smoke Quick Test Data Brief

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.

WD

AI Has Human Doctors Asking: What’s Left for Us?

A recent paper argues that AI is often better at doctoring than doctors. Guess who isn't thrilled.

ARS

Meta makes AI glasses slightly less creepy with limit on nonconsensual recording

Meta fixes AI glasses to stop recording any time users cover up the safety light.

TC

Meta executive leaves for OpenAI as the social media giant faces growing scrutiny in India

Sandhya Devanathan will oversee some OpenAI operations across Southeast Asia and Australia in her new role.

MIT

The Download: a secretive antiaging drug and joining virtual power plants

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…

TC

Anthropic gets its first court win over the Pentagon’s supply chain risk label

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.

WD

Inside Meta’s Push to Put Robots to Work in Data Centers

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.

WD

He Scraped All of Their Art for AI. Now He’s Collaborating on a Tool to Help Them

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

How to sign up for a virtual power plant—and decide whether you should

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…

Two Open-Source Surprise Strikes: Alibaba's 2.4-Trillion-Parameter Model and Zhipu's Mysterious Powerhouse Unveiled in the Same Week

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.

WD

A Judge Has Blocked the Pentagon’s Attempt to Blacklist Anthropic

A federal judge has called the Department of Defense’s designation of Anthropic as a national security supply-chain risk “illegal and baseless.”

Google DeepMind Launches Double-Blind Evaluation Pilot: Cryptographic Black Box Isolates Models from Test Banks

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.

ARS