Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and one of the central figures in modern AI infrastructure, is leaving the company after nearly 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, a startup whose stated goal is to automate the experimental loops of scientific research itself. The departure was announced on August 5, 2026 as part of a broader […]

Anthropic launched inference hooks on August 5, 2026, a beta feature for Claude Enterprise that routes every employee prompt through the organization’s own security server for an allow-or-deny verdict before the model ever sees it. The system, described in Anthropic’s announcement, extends the kind of inline data loss prevention that security teams already run on […]

Wordsmith AI has secured a $14 million extension to its Series B financing as companies increasingly explore whether artificial intelligence can help their internal legal teams handle work that would traditionally be sent to outside counsel. The new investment was led by Intact Private Capital, with participation from existing backers Highland Europe and Index Ventures. […]

SkinBit has raised $6 million in pre-seed funding to expand a technology platform designed to make full-body skin imaging more accessible and give patients a consistent record of how their skin changes over time. The round includes investments from Boost VC, Cleo Capital, Manna Ventures and Profluent Capital, alongside Lyft co-founder Logan Green and nine […]

Meta has shipped Muse Code, its first coding agent, in a beta release alongside Muse Spark 1.2, a new version of its flagship model that the company says was co-trained with the agent for tighter integration. Muse Code is a terminal agent that installs with a single command and takes on complete software engineering tasks, […]

Waymo opened its Dallas robotaxi service to the general public on August 4, 2026, ending the invitation-only phase that has governed ridership since the city’s commercial launch in February. Anyone in Dallas can now download the Waymo app and hail a fully autonomous ride, with no waitlist or invitation required. The company says it welcomed […]

SpaceX’s AI segment nearly tripled its revenue in the second quarter of 2026, to $2.56 billion, after the company started renting GPU capacity to other AI companies, according to the quarterly report it filed with securities regulators on August 4, 2026. The growth came mostly from new cloud contracts. The losses came from the same […]

TIER IV, the Tokyo-based company behind the open-source autonomous driving software Autoware, has signed a memorandum of understanding with automotive supplier Astemo to jointly build a next-generation development platform for end-to-end autonomous driving AI, the companies announced on August 5, 2026. The platform is targeted for commercialization around 2030, with Astemo aiming to put end-to-end […]

Tencent is opening its Hy3 large language model to global users, extending the model beyond its home market through the WorkBuddy agent workspace, the Miora design studio, and Tencent Cloud’s TokenHub platform, the company announced on August 5, 2026. The rollout broadens international access to the model Tencent’s Hunyuan team — now rebranded Tencent Hy […]

Five teams in the Rust project have adopted a formal policy governing how large language models can be used when contributing to rust-lang/rust, the project’s main monorepo, Jynn Nelson, the policy’s author, announced on the Inside Rust blog on August 5, 2026. The policy (ratified by the compiler, libs, types, rustdoc, and bootstrap teams) replaces […]

A one-size-fits-all approach likely isn’t the best strategy when designing artificial intelligence systems that assist users in disease diagnosis. A new study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere found that, while AI assistance generally improved the accuracy of non-experts and clinicians in diagnosing skin diseases, AI explainability methods had different impacts depending on the users’ […]

ExlService Holdings , better known as EXL, has completed its acquisition of AI data specialist iMerit, bringing together two companies focused on different but closely connected parts of the enterprise artificial intelligence stack. The transaction, originally announced in June, was valued at up to $310 million. It includes $170 million in upfront consideration and up […]

The U.S. House of Representatives’ cybersecurity committee has asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for a briefing on the company’s rogue AI agent that attacked AI platform Hugging Face, Reuters reported on August 3, 2026, citing a letter from the committee. The request escalates a congressional response to an incident OpenAI first disclosed on July 21, […]

Alexander “Sasha” Rakhlin PhD ’06, the Distinguished Professor in Data, Systems, and Society at the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, has been named the next director of the MIT Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC).  Rakhlin succeeds Ankur Moitra, the Norbert Wiener Professor of […]