Tuesday, 25 August 2026
Gamma acquires design startup Lica
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AI presentation startup Gamma acquired Accel-backed Lica, whose founders will build a division customizing how AI models communicate across video and design.
GPT-5.6 lands in AWS's Kiro coding agent
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OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family is now in AWS's Kiro, and joint testing found Terra finishing Terminal-Bench 2.1 tasks at roughly 82% lower cost.
OpenAI bans a fake Russian think tank
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OpenAI banned Russia-linked ChatGPT accounts that used a fake Israel-based think tank to push a pro-Russia 'sovereignty index' across social platforms.
Mistral bets big on Saudi sovereign AI
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Mistral and Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN will build local compute, Arabic-tuned models, and cybersecurity AI for regulated industries, keeping data inside the kingdom.
IBM's Granite 4.2 adds real reasoning
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IBM's new Granite 4.2 models add a thinking/non-thinking toggle and agentic RL training, with the 30B version beating half of SWE-Bench Verified tasks.
Apple's new Macs are built for local AI
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Apple's M6 Mac mini and M5 Ultra Mac Studio ship with far more AI compute and memory, aimed squarely at running large models on-device.
Tencent's WorldClaw builds 3D worlds
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Tencent Hunyuan's WorldClaw research paper orchestrates Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-Image-2, and Hunyuan3D to turn a text prompt into an editable 3D world.
OpenAI adds an Admin plugin for Codex
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OpenAI shipped an Admin plugin for ChatGPT Work and Codex, adding workspace usage analysis, member management, and permission controls in chat.
Keenable raises $26M to index for agents
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Ex-Yandex search lead Andrey Styskin's Keenable raised a $26M Accel-led seed to build a 100B+ document web index specifically for AI agents.
Anthropic funds $5M in AI-wellbeing research
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Anthropic launched a $5M grant program for independent, open-source research measuring how AI systems affect users' emotional and mental wellbeing.