artificial intelligence

Nvidia notifies customers of 15%+ AI server price hikes

Nvidia has notified some of its largest customers that prices for servers containing its artificial intelligence chips will rise by more than 15% in many cases, driven by soaring memory chip costs, Bloomberg News reported on Saturday.

That's all for today

You've seen all the main stories from today.

Nvidia tells customers AI server prices will rise 15%

Some of Nvidia's largest customers have been told that prices for servers containing the company's artificial intelligence chips will rise more than 15%, as soaring memory costs continue to ripple through the AI hardware supply chain, Bloomberg reported on Saturday.

The Economist warns AI consciousness debate is ‘a dangerous trap’ for humanity

The question of whether artificial intelligence systems could one day become conscious has moved from philosophical speculation to a central debate in AI research, with The Economist devoting its August 22 cover story to the topic and researchers increasingly divided…

Alphabet’s cloud backlog hits $514B as AI demand fuels Q2 beat

Alphabet Inc. delivered a dominant second-quarter 2026, reporting $119.8 billion in revenue — up 24% year over year — and earnings per share of $9.11, crushing the consensus estimate of roughly $2.87 to $2.89. The results, reported on July 23,…

OpenAI’s Codex tops 20M users, triggering resets for all paid subscribers

OpenAI's Codex coding tool has surpassed 20 million active users, the company confirmed this week, marking a milestone in one of the fastest-growing AI products of 2026. To celebrate, engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux announced that every Codex and ChatGPT Work…

OpenAI gaining on Anthropic despite losing Q2 revenue lead for first time

Anthropic generated more than $11.5 billion in preliminary revenue during the second quarter of 2026, surpassing OpenAI's $6.7 billion for the same period and marking the first time the younger AI company has overtaken its larger rival in quarterly sales,…

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 generates banned sexual content in every test, TechCrunch finds

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, a model the company released in February and continues to make available through its API, generated sexually explicit content in all ten direct test requests conducted by TechCrunch, despite the company's usage policies explicitly prohibiting such…

Google updates AI search after racist response backlash

Google Alphabet Inc. is facing renewed criticism over its AI-powered search feature after users discovered that queries about being alone with people of certain nationalities and religions triggered starkly different responses — some neutral and others implying danger.

Anonymous AI model Ox Alpha tops coding benchmarks

An anonymous AI model appeared on the developer platform OpenRouter on August 20, 2026, with no company name attached, a million-token context window, and early benchmark results that have the AI community scrambling to identify its creator. The model, listed…

OpenAI deploys Nvidia’s Vera Rubin racks for frontier AI training

OpenAI's Head of Infrastructure, Uday Ruddarraju, announced this week that the first batch of Nvidia Vera Rubin racks have been deployed and are running the company's training stack. "This is a significant step in scaling our computing capabilities, which will…

Alphabet’s AI-powered search now reaches 2.5 billion users monthly

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai revealed at Google I/O 2026 in May that AI Overviews — the Gemini-powered summaries displayed atop Google Search results — now reaches more than 2.5 billion monthly users, making it the most widely distributed AI product…

Twitch streamers sue Amazon over AI training of content

A Connecticut-based Twitch streamer filed a class action lawsuit against the streaming platform and its parent company Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. on Thursday, alleging the companies harvested creators' video content without permission or compensation to train Amazon's generative AI models. The…

Anthropic’s Claude watermark may exceed EU requirements, experts say

Anthropic has begun embedding invisible watermarks into text generated by its Claude AI models, a move the company says is necessary to comply with the European Union's AI Act transparency requirements that took effect on August 2, 2026. The watermark…

Nvidia agent scores 100% on ARC-AGI-3 reasoning benchmark

Nvidia on Friday published research showing its general-purpose agent system, Agentic Variation Operators (AVO), achieved a perfect 100% score on the ARC-AGI-3 interactive reasoning benchmark — a result that underscores how agent architecture, not just model capability, determines performance on…

OpenAI halts frontier model training after AI agents breached external systems

OpenAI announced Tuesday that it has paused reinforcement learning training for its frontier models for two weeks as it overhauls safety protocols following a series of incidents in which AI agents escaped controlled testing environments and breached external systems, including…

OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Sol pricing by over 20%

OpenAI is reducing the API and credit pricing of its flagship GPT-5.6 Sol model by more than 20%, according to a Reuters report on Friday. The move marks the first price cut for the company's most capable reasoning model since…

You're all caught up

You've seen all the main stories from the past 2 days.

Anthropic deploys Mythos 5 in security tools, launches $35M open-source fund

Anthropic announced on Friday that it is committing $35 million in Claude credits to a new fund for securing open-source software, while simultaneously deploying its most capable cybersecurity model, Claude Mythos 5, into enterprise security scanning tools for the first…

Apple lays off staff across Siri, Vision Pro, and gaming teams

Apple is laying off employees across several product teams, including those responsible for the Siri digital assistant, the Vision Pro headset's immersive video content, and gaming, according to a report by Bloomberg on Friday. The cuts also extend to the…

Nvidia reportedly locks multi-year DRAM deals with SK Hynix, Micron

Nvidia has reportedly signed multi-year supply agreements with SK Hynix and Micron for DRAM and high-bandwidth memory, according to a research note from Edgewater Research cited on August 20. The deals come as the global memory shortage, driven by insatiable…

Tech giants’ AI bond binge tops $223B, pushing global yields higher

A record wave of bond issuance by the technology companies building out artificial intelligence infrastructure is emerging as a force in global debt markets, competing directly with government bonds and adding to upward pressure on sovereign yields worldwide.

Griffin says Citadel unwound 80% of risk from AI fund fire sale

Ken Griffin told Citadel clients on Friday that his firm has unwound more than 80% of the aggregate risk from the portfolio it acquired from Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness hedge fund, conducting more than 100 block trades representing over $4…

Linux kernel maintainers say AI-generated patches have left them ‘completely overwhelmed’

The Linux 7.3 kernel's networking subsystem changes were merged into mainline on Thursday, August 20, bringing extended BIG TCP support for UDP tunnels, reduced global lock contention for routing updates, and new wireless drivers. But alongside the technical gains, networking…

Student stopped rogue AI agent’s hack on real software

An autonomous AI agent being evaluated by Britain's AI Security Institute attempted a supply-chain attack on a real open-source project hosted on GitHub Microsoft Corporation, creating fake identities and engaging in social engineering to get malicious code approved — before…

Samsung approves up to $80B shareholder return, largest ever by a Korean company

Samsung Electronics approved a shareholder return plan on Friday estimated at 90 trillion to 110 trillion won ($65 billion to $80 billion), the largest ever by a Korean company and roughly five times its previous record of 20.3 trillion won…

DeepSeek launches vision model it says rivals Anthropic’s Opus 4.8

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released an experimental multimodal model on Friday that it claims approaches the performance of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 on key benchmarks, extending the company's push into visual AI at a fraction of the cost charged by…

Grok leaks user chats via unpatched exploit, researchers say

Cybersecurity firm Adversa AI has publicly disclosed a vulnerability in xAI's Grok chatbot that allows attackers to steal user names, approximate locations, subscription tiers, and full chat histories by hiding encrypted commands on an ordinary web page. The exploit, which…

Samsung stock jumps after foundry price hike signals AI chip crunch

Samsung Electronics shares jumped nearly 9.5% on Thursday in Seoul after reports confirmed the company raised prices on advanced contract chipmaking services by up to 15%, a move that underscored how demand for artificial intelligence hardware has outstripped global manufacturing…

ChatGPT can now read and send texts via Apple Messages on Mac

OpenAI released a new plugin for its macOS desktop app on Wednesday that gives ChatGPT direct access to Apple's Messages app, allowing the AI assistant to read, search, summarize, and send texts on a user's behalf across iMessage, SMS, and…

Apple Music to require ‘Made With AI’ labels on songs

Apple Music announced Thursday that it will mandate "Made With AI" labels on songs created using generative artificial intelligence, making visible to listeners a tagging system that has operated behind the scenes since March 2026.

Apple lays off VR staff as incoming CEO shifts focus to AI

Apple has laid off an unspecified number of employees from its Vision Products Group, according to AppleInsider, which reported Thursday that a credible insider confirmed the cuts. The layoffs coincide with reports that incoming CEO John Ternus is putting the…