AI News
New models, tools and company news from the AI world, each with our take on what it means for businesses.
- Five Tech Giants Agree on a Shared AI Agent Plugin StandardAmazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Vercel and Cursor have agreed on Agent Plugins, a plugin.json-based format for packaging agent capabilities. Anthropic, which authored MCP, is not on the list.
- Anthropic Starts Building Its Own Chip Design TeamAnthropic confirmed it is hiring a custom silicon team, stacking chip design on top of deals with AWS, Google, Nvidia, AMD, and a $10B Volta order. Intention, not product, for now.
- Google Assistant Shuts Down Sept 4 as Gemini Takes OverGoogle Assistant starts shutting down September 4 with Gemini replacing it across Android. The same week, Google Maps gained agents that order food and book hotels for users.
- Meta Ships Muse Code, a Coding Agent for Big ReposMeta's new terminal agent splits big software tasks across parallel subagents and logs every step for exact replay. It enters a market OpenAI and Anthropic had to themselves.
- Shieldstral: Mistral's 3B Open Answer to Content ModerationMistral released Shieldstral, a 3B-parameter open-weight guardrail model that takes moderation policies as plain-language questions and claims parity with models seven times its size.
- Ninth Circuit Lets Perplexity's AI Agent Back Onto AmazonThe Ninth Circuit overturned the injunction keeping Perplexity's shopping agent off Amazon, finding the accessing party is the user, not the AI company. The first appeals ruling on agent access.
- Jeff Dean Exits Google After 27 Years as Hassabis Steps BackDemis Hassabis steps back to chair DeepMind as Jeff Dean leaves Google after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop. Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over as SVP; Alphabet shares fell up to 5%.
- DeepSeek V4-Flash Outscores the Flagship at the Same PriceDeepSeek's official V4-Flash release keeps the architecture and the $0.14 price but redoes post-training, and now beats the company's own V4-Pro-Preview on all nine published agent benchmarks.
- Texas Puts New Data Centers on Hold Pending Grid AuditsGovernor Abbott ordered mandatory PUCT and ERCOT audits before any new Texas data center is approved, after the grid connection queue doubled to 474 gigawatts, 90% of it data centers.
- Anthropic Buys $10B of Compute From Six-Month-Old VoltaAnthropic signed a six-year, $10 billion compute deal with Volta, a cloud startup founded in early 2026, built on a hydropower data center in Norway run by a bitcoin miner. The same week, Google moved its Anthropic chip risk off its balance sheet.
- IBM: 92% of AI Breach Victims Lacked Basic Access ControlsIBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026 finds 92% of companies hit by AI-related breaches lacked adequate access controls. The weak spot isn't the model, it's the plumbing around it.
- Apple Widens OpenAI Trade Secret Case to 11 More Ex-StaffApple expanded its trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI to cover 11 more former employees and asked for an injunction on OpenAI's hardware work. OpenAI answered with a public blog post and chat logs.