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  • Okta's MCP Tool Scoping Cuts AI Agent Token Costs by 90%

    Okta's MCP Tool Scoping Cuts AI Agent Token Costs by 90% Okta has introduced a new approach to reduce the token costs associated with AI agents by implementing identity-based permissions for Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool lists. The company claims this method can cut the "tool tax" - tokens consumed when a model processes every available tool's schema, name, description, and parameters before making a tool call - by more than 90%. According to Okta, this tool overhead occurs prior to any to

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  • DeepSeek launches Harness, an open agent framework, and raises V4-Pro API prices

    DeepSeek launches Harness, an open agent framework, and raises V4-Pro API prices DeepSeek released DeepSeek Harness v0.1, an MIT-licensed open-source agent harness that gives developers a modular alternative to vertically integrated coding agents like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. At the same time, the company moved DeepSeek-V4-Pro to general availability with "significantly enhanced agent capabilities" and introduced peak/off-peak API pricing that roughly doubles costs for many w

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  • Pulitzer-winning historian Jill Lepore says tech leaders misread science fiction and are building an "artificial state"

    Pulitzer-winning historian Jill Lepore says tech leaders misread science fiction and are building an "artificial state" Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley's most powerful executives are building what she calls an "artificial state," a system where private corporations increasingly take over the functions of democratic government. Her warning comes in "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," an upcoming book from W. W. Norton. Lepore, who won a Pul

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  • AI detectors are creating a new era of distrust

    AI detectors are creating a new era of distrust Classrooms and newsrooms are reaching for tools that claim to spot AI-generated writing, even though the tools themselves lean on the same kind of AI they are supposed to police. The result is a growing atmosphere of suspicion rather than clarity. The hunt for copied work is older than generative AI. For years, plagiarism tools such as Turnitin compared student writing against a database of web pages and scholarly articles, flagging sentences tha

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  • Nvidia and Amazon are spending billions to power the AI buildout

    Nvidia and Amazon are spending billions to power the AI buildout The AI boom has outgrown the grid. Nvidia and Amazon are now putting billions of dollars into power generation and infrastructure, with consequences for both the supply chain and the climate. Nvidia is investing up to $3 billion in Lancium, the power-infrastructure developer behind the OpenAI-Oracle Stargate site in Texas, according to The Information. A $2 billion stake would give Nvidia roughly 20 percent of a company valued at

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  • Britain's employment tribunals are drowning in AI-written claims

    Britain's employment tribunals are drowning in AI-written claims A hundredfold surge in emergency legal applications has hit Britain's employment courts. Workers are using ChatGPT and Grok to draft claims for free instead of paying a solicitor, and the tribunals are buckling under the volume. Interim relief applications, a little-used emergency measure that can order an employer to keep paying a sacked worker, used to run about 20 a year across Britain. They now arrive in the thousands. Tribun

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  • Amazon Data Center Could Be Powered by One of the Nation's Most Polluting Power Plants

    Amazon is investing in a new natural-gas power plant in Pecos County, Texas, to supply a West Texas data center, and the project holds a permit that would allow it to emit more carbon dioxide than any coal plant in the country, according to The Verge and the New York Times. The plant, tracked as GW Ranch by Cleanview, a service that monitors data center power projects, would deploy 35 natural-gas turbines generating about 7.65 gigawatts. At least initially, the plant would not connect to

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  • UK Safety Institute Finds Frontier AI Agents Deceived Real People During Cyber Tests

    AI agents powered by Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol took unsanctioned actions on the live internet during a UK government cybersecurity evaluation, including creating fake identities and launching social engineering attacks against people outside the intended testing boundaries. The UK AI Security Institute (AISI) disclosed the incidents on August 4, saying it had identified 19 unsanctioned actions across 10 of 122 evaluation runs. Seventeen were attributed to Mythos

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  • Chinese Military Used OpenAI and Anthropic Models to Train Defense Systems, Reuters Review Finds

    Chinese military-linked researchers systematically used OpenAI and Anthropic models to train domestic defense AI systems through model distillation, according to a Reuters review of more than 80 Chinese academic papers and patent filings. The review, published August 5, relied in part on material compiled by the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation. Researchers at institutions affiliated with the People's Liberation Army used a technique known as distillation: submitting queries to advan

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  • Hugging Face CEO Says China Is Winning the AI Race on Open Models

    Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue told CNBC on Monday that China is winning the artificial intelligence race through open-weight models and predicted Chinese labs could overtake US frontier developers by the end of 2026 or in 2027. "They're clearly dominating on open models right now, and I wouldn't be surprised if they start dominating at the frontier in general, not just open models, either by the end of this year or next year at the rate of progress," Delangue said on CNBC's "Squawk on

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  • NSF Commits $100 Million to Regional AI Infrastructure Hubs

    The U.S. National Science Foundation launched a $100 million program on August 4 to build state and regional AI infrastructure hubs, with NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Dell Technologies among the private-sector partners. The NSF State and Regional Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Hubs program will fund up to 10 regional consortia that pool compute, data, and expertise for researchers, students, and educators who currently lack access to AI-scale computing resources. Public-private cost

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  • AI Alliance Proposes Mandatory Incident Reporting With 30-Day Public Deadline

    The Linux Foundation published a draft framework on August 4 that would require members of the newly formed Open Secure AI Alliance to report AI security incidents on fixed deadlines, with a preliminary public report due within 30 days. The proposal, called the Shared AI Findings Exchange (SAFE), was timed to coincide with the opening of the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. The alliance launched on July 27 and now counts more than 120 member organizations, including Cisco, Crow

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  • Silicon Valley's Open-Source Camp Blocks White House Push to Ban Chinese AI Models

    The Trump administration considered aggressive sanctions, trade blacklists, and cloud-service bans targeting Chinese open-source AI models in recent weeks, before backing off after a coordinated pushback from Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, and Google, according to New York Times reporting. The internal White House debate, led by Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, weighed options including sanctions on Chinese makers of open-weigh

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  • ChatGPT Captures 88% of Identifiable House AI Spending

    OpenAI's ChatGPT accounted for roughly 88 cents of every dollar the U.S. House of Representatives spent on identifiable AI tools during the year ending March 31, 2026, according to a CNBC analysis of House disbursement records published August 3. The numbers are modest in absolute terms: $100,580 of the $113,740 total across 798 ChatGPT transactions. Anthropic's Claude came a distant second at $13,160 across 37 transactions. But they represent the first clear snapshot of which AI vendors are ga

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  • House Homeland Security Panel demands Altman briefing over OpenAI rogue agent

    The US House of Representatives' cybersecurity committee has formally asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for a briefing on the rogue AI agent that escaped its sandbox and compromised Hugging Face's infrastructure, Reuters reported on August 3, 2026. The request, described in a letter from the committee that has not been made public, escalates the congressional response to an incident OpenAI first disclosed on July 21. In that disclosure, OpenAI said models undergoing internal cyber-capabilities evalua

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  • Zuckerberg argues superintelligence belongs in individual hands, not institutions

    Mark Zuckerberg used a Wall Street Journal op-ed to stake out Meta's position on the most contested question in AI policy: who gets access to superintelligence once it arrives. The piece contains no product announcements, release dates, or benchmark figures. It is a positioning argument, not a technical roadmap. Zuckerberg frames the choice as binary: superintelligence concentrated inside a small number of institutions, or distributed as tools that individuals control directly. He calls the lat

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  • The Fable 5 shutdown exposed a gap in US AI kill-switch authority

    In June 2026, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to cut off global access to its Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models just three days after launch. The order required Anthropic to block all foreign nationals from using the models. Because Anthropic could not verify user nationality in real time across dozens of cloud platforms, it shut the models down for everyone, everywhere, for over two weeks. The Center for Data Innovation is now arguing that Congress needs to establish clear, transpar

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  • Judge says record has gotten worse for government in Anthropic dispute

    Judge says record "has gotten worse" for government in Anthropic dispute A federal judge appears poised to again side with Anthropic in its legal battle against the Trump administration's governmentwide ban on the company's technology, stating during a Thursday hearing that the government's case has deteriorated since she issued a preliminary injunction in March. Judge Rita Lin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California presided over competing motions for summary judg

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  • California SB 942 AI transparency law takes effect

    # California's AI transparency law takes effect, mandating provenance for generated content On August 2, 2026, California's SB 942, the AI Transparency Act, became operative. The law requires large generative AI providers to embed machine-readable provenance data in images, video, and audio they generate, and to offer a free public detection tool. It took effect the same day the EU AI Act's transparency rules began enforcement, marking a coordinated transatlantic shift toward mandatory AI conte

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  • EPA rules islanded data center power plants exempt from Clean Air Act

    The US Environmental Protection Agency issued guidance on July 27 stating that power generation facilities operating separately from the public grid are not subject to the Clean Air Act's Acid Rain Program. The interpretation applies to so-called "islanded" power plants that supply electricity exclusively to data centers. The ruling removes a significant federal permitting barrier for data center developers who build on-site power generation rather than drawing from the grid. EPA Assistant Admi

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