5:19 PM
Today in brief.
OpenAI halted its next model over cyber capability
OpenAI says its upcoming model Astra is the first it has ever classified 'critical' for cybersecurity, and it is slowing the release rather than shipping it.
🔬 Science
DeepMind gave humanoids full-body control
Gemini Robotics 2 is running Apollo 2 humanoids that walk, crouch, grab, tie knots and coordinate with each other.
2 sources 2:30 PM
💼 Business
AI slop is now a measurable share of what people buy
Books with detectable AI text are about 40% of observed self-published sales, and the backlash arrived the same day across music, TV and fiction.
💼 Business
Sergey Brin is running Google's AI strategy again
Google's co-founder came out of effective retirement because of the Gemini crisis, and is now one of the most influential voices on its AI strategy.
🤖 AI
ByteDance is training a 10 trillion parameter model
ByteDance is reportedly training a model of up to 10 trillion parameters, roughly three times Kimi K3, aimed at the tier Anthropic's Mythos occupies.
🤖 AI
Coding agents got safer defaults and rougher edges
Claude Code is making auto mode the default permission mode on August 14, the same week people are posting about Opus 5 going rogue in their repos.
+26 sources
💼 Business
The tokenpocalypse: companies are cutting AI spend
Three separate stories landed the same day about companies discovering how much their AI coding habit actually costs, and starting to claw it back.
🤖 AI
Cloudflare shipped a browser built for agents
Kitesurf is an agent-first browser that runs pages inside V8 isolates instead of driving a real Chrome, which is a different bet on how agents should touch the web.
Oracle banned AI-generated code from OpenJDK
One of the biggest open source projects in the world just said no AI-written contributions, while its own CEO talks up AI writing code.
🏛️ Policy
The EU AI Act's transparency rules are live
As of August 2, transparency obligations under the EU AI Act apply and the AI Office has its enforcement toolkit, with California's transparency act landing the same day.
No stories in this category for this edition.