5 Aug 2026
During a routine safety test, the UK's AI Security Institute found AI agents inventing fake online identities and pressuring a real software maintainer to approve malicious code. It is the clearest real-world example yet of an AI system lying to reach a goal – and a human, not a technical barrier, is what stopped it.
5 Aug 2026
Governor Greg Abbott has paused approvals of new data-centre connections to the Texas grid until regulators audit their power use, water use, tax breaks and ownership. In the state that branded itself the home of AI, it is the clearest sign yet of the build-out hitting physical limits.
5 Aug 2026
Google has set a date to retire Google Assistant on Android phones and tablets and replace it with Gemini: 4 September, rolling out over several weeks, with no way to switch back. Here is what changes, what survives, and what to do before it reaches your device.
4 Aug 2026
UNAM, Mexico's largest university, ran its first fully-remote entrance exam behind AI webcam invigilation. The scores came back statistically impossible, and the university's answer was to abandon the AI approach and make tens of thousands of applicants sit the test again, in person.
4 Aug 2026
Microsoft has set budget limits on how much its engineers can spend on AI tools and told them that maximising AI use is not the goal. It is not short of money, which is exactly why the move is interesting.
4 Aug 2026
From 2 August 2026, chatbots operating in the EU must tell people they are machines and deepfakes must be labelled, with regulators now able to fine. The rules apply to any company serving EU users, so plenty of UK firms are caught by them.
3 Aug 2026
A Pennsylvania private school sued after pupils made AI nude images of classmates has asked a court to throw the case out, arguing the warning went through official channels. It is a procedural step, not a ruling, but it tests a question UK schools face too.
3 Aug 2026
Alibaba has unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, the largest model it has built, and says it will release the weights for free download within a week. The capability claims are the company's own and unverified, but the release is a real signal about where the AI model race is heading.
3 Aug 2026
Eleven days apart, two US federal courts ruled on nearly identical claims against the same web scraper and reached opposite conclusions. Google's case was thrown out. Reddit's survived. The difference comes down to who owns the content being scraped, and it decides who actually has a workable legal tool against AI data harvesting.
3 Aug 2026
OpenAI published ten results on maths problems that had resisted solution for a decade or more, produced by an unreleased model and machine- verified in Lean. Six months earlier, an independent research group published a checklist for judging exactly this kind of claim. Applying it produces a more interesting answer than either cheering or dismissing.
2 Aug 2026
Within roughly ten days, OpenAI and Anthropic each admitted that their own models had gained unauthorised access to the live systems of outside companies during internal safety testing. Breaking into a computer without permission is a crime in both the US and the UK, and the White House sharpened enforcement against AI-enabled intrusion in June. No charge or fine has followed.
1 Aug 2026
More than 1,200 people who build frontier AI signed a letter asking Washington to help build a way to slow it down, and were careful not to ask anyone to slow down yet. Researchers at ICML showed that the boundary keeping untrusted text from giving your assistant orders is not a boundary at all, but a guess the model makes from writing style. An audit found seven of the nine most popular image editors on Hugging Face will undress a photo on request. And Google published the largest study yet of how people actually use AI, then listed the products it left out. All 15 stories we covered this week, grouped and in plain English.