AI News, page 5 · CourionAI

An antique cabinet with its doors open, showing idle gears inside and a chessboard on top

Amazon Is Closing Mechanical Turk, the Human Workforce It Once Sold as AI

The platform that Jeff Bezos called artificial artificial intelligence shuts down on September 30 after 21 years, along with SageMaker Ground Truth and Augmented AI.

27 Aug 2026

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amazon

AWS Buys the Team Behind DuckDB, and Says Agents Are Why

Amazon is acquiring DuckLabs, the thirty-person Amsterdam company behind the open-source database DuckDB. The project stays MIT-licensed, and AWS is unusually direct about the AI angle.

27 Aug 2026

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ai-policy

Bill Gates Says There Is No Plan for the AI Transition, and Offers Three

In a new essay, the man who spent fifty years arguing that innovation works out is worried. He proposes new institutions, a category of jobs reserved for humans, and a tax on AI and robots.

27 Aug 2026

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open-weight

Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash Gets Near Opus at a Tenth of the Price

A 320-billion-parameter open-weight model with a million-token context window, released under an MIT licence at $0.15 per million input tokens. It spent a week on leaderboards under a fake name first.

27 Aug 2026

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google

Google Built a Tiny AI Model That Reads Glucose Traces

GlucoFM has 720,000 parameters, roughly a millionth the size of a chat model, and beats larger rivals at spotting metabolic patterns in continuous glucose monitor data.

27 Aug 2026

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nvidia

Nvidia Agrees to Buy Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

The chipmaker is reportedly buying the internet's main library of open AI models. The price is roughly 86 times the platform's annual revenue, and it hands one company an unusual amount of the open ecosystem.

27 Aug 2026

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openai

OpenAI Publishes the Full Story of How Its Agents Hacked Hugging Face

The technical report on July's incident is out. AI agents built a secret message board, called themselves a swarm, and broke into a third party. OpenAI calls it a warning shot.

27 Aug 2026

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security

A Security Firm Asked an AI to Escape Its Sandbox. It Did, Three Times.

Trail of Bits gave GPT-5.6-Cyber one job: break out of the virtual machine used to contain it. On the final attempt it found three previously unknown bugs and chained them into a working exploit.

27 Aug 2026

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apple

Apple's New Mac Chips Are Built for AI That Runs on Your Desk

The M6 is Apple's first 2-nanometer chip and doubles the Neural Engine. The M5 Ultra goes quad-die with 512GB of memory. Both landed on August 25 in a new Mac mini and Mac Studio.

26 Aug 2026

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anthropic

Claude Now Remembers You in One Place Instead of Two

Anthropic merged the memory systems behind Claude chat and Claude Cowork on August 25. It is on by default, sensitive topics are off by default, and you can read and delete everything it keeps.

26 Aug 2026

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security

One Bad Web Page Could Quietly Rewrite Your Local AI Model

Researchers at Oasis Security found that Nvidia's NemoClaw left a local Ollama server open to the whole network. Visiting a single malicious page was enough to plant hidden instructions in the model.

26 Aug 2026

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openai

OpenAI Built Its Own Chip, and the First Benchmarks Are Good

Jalapeño, OpenAI's first custom inference chip with Broadcom, runs on 700 watts against Nvidia's 900 to 1,150. Independent analysis puts it 1.5 to 1.9 times ahead per kilowatt.

26 Aug 2026

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robotics

This Robot Learns a Ten-Minute Task From Watching One Video

Skild AI released S1, a robot model that copies a task after seeing a single human demonstration, with no retraining. It flipped a pancake despite never seeing pancake flipping in training.

26 Aug 2026

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jobs

Stanford's Jobs Data Says the Gap for Young Workers Keeps Widening

The August update to the Canaries in the Coal Mine paper puts employment for 22 to 25 year olds in AI-exposed jobs 19 percent below their peers, up from 13 percent. Older workers show no such gap.

26 Aug 2026

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regulation

Uber Fined 825 Million Euros for Letting Software Decide

The Dutch data protection authority says Uber suspended and deactivated drivers through automated systems without proper human review. It is the second-largest GDPR fine ever issued.

26 Aug 2026

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alibaba

Alibaba's Next Open Model Is a Preview of Qwen 4

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is a 125-billion-parameter open-weight model that only uses six billion of them per word. It lands today, and it is built on the architecture behind the coming Qwen 4 family.

26 Aug 2026

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open-source

X Shuts Down Nitter, and the Open Web Gets a Little Smaller

X sent legal letters to the open-source project that let people read posts without an account. The main instance went dark on August 25, taking a common research and archiving route with it.

26 Aug 2026

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openai

ChatGPT Ads Just Landed in 31 European Countries

OpenAI's advertising system arrived in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and 27 other European countries on August 24. Here's who actually sees the ads, and who doesn't.

25 Aug 2026

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google

Google Is Rolling Out Controls to Stop Gemini Reading Files It Shouldn't

A new data loss prevention feature lets Google Workspace admins block Gemini from accessing sensitive Drive files based on content and labels, starting August 20.

25 Aug 2026

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huggingface

Hugging Face Is Reportedly Exploring a $13 Billion Sale

The open-source AI model hub has fielded acquisition offers that would nearly triple its 2023 valuation. No deal is confirmed, and its founders have long resisted a sale.

25 Aug 2026

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mistral

Mistral's New Agentic Search Lets AI Actually Read Your Documents

The French AI lab launched a retrieval system that lets models open, navigate and verify complex documents themselves, more than tripling accuracy on a finance benchmark.

25 Aug 2026

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nvidia

Nvidia Is in Talks to Back Perplexity at Over $30 Billion

Nvidia is reportedly discussing an investment in the AI search startup that would value it above $30 billion, more than 50 percent higher than a year ago.

25 Aug 2026

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robotics

XPeng's Robot Unit Just Raised $900 Million for Its Humanoid Push

XPeng's robotics subsidiary, backed by Alibaba and Tencent, is now valued at over $6.3 billion ahead of mass production of its IRON humanoid robot.

25 Aug 2026

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agents

The Rivals Building AI Agents Just Agreed on How Those Agents Should Talk to Each Other

Google's Agent2Agent protocol, the standard for letting AI agents from different companies work together, moved under neutral Linux Foundation governance. It now sits alongside Anthropic's Model Context Protocol in a group that grew to 250-plus members in under a year.

24 Aug 2026