AI News — August 13, 2026
Daily news briefing for 13th August 2026. Track model releases, research breakthroughs, startup funding updates, and AI signals published on this day.
All Stories Published on August 13 (52)
Workday's Stock Jumps 17% on Report of Silver Lake Buyout Discussions
Shares of the human resources management software company Workday Inc. jumped almost 18% today after a report emerged that it's holding acquisition talks with the private equity firm Silver Lake.
SpaceXAI Releases Flagship Grok 4.6 Model with Advanced Reasoning Capabilities
SpaceXAI today released Grok 4.6, a large language model that it says can outperform Anthropic PBC's Claude Fable 5 in some areas. The company was known as xAI until last month. The Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence provider rebranded in connection with its acquisition by SpaceX Corp.
Accelerating M&A Due Diligence with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
Learn how to build a multi-agent M&A due diligence system on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.
Nvidia's New $500B Plan Is Risky but Brilliant, Especially for Aging GPUs
Nvidia has a plan to make sure its GPU won't lose value. It wants to convince a new crop of financiers to keep lending for AI buildouts.
How Scottish Water Made Its Capital Investment Data Conversational With Databricks Genie
Across Scottish Water's Capital Investment (CI) programme, teams need fast answers...
Vantage Explores $100B IPO as Four Data Center Operators Line up Listings
Vantage Data Centers LLC has held early talks about an initial public offering that would value the operator at roughly $100 billion, Reuters reported today, citing people familiar with the discussions.
Microsoft Kills Off Unsuccessful AI Features While Merging Its Separate Copilot Apps
Microsoft is simplifying Copilot by combining its consumer and business apps, and dropping AI-generated podcasts, Group Chats, Deep Research, and its Mico.
This School-friendly Laptop From HP Is $300 Off
With memory prices still high and showing no signs of dropping, we're always happy to find a good deal on a budget-friendly system with an adequate amount of RAM. Best Buy has the HP OmniBook X Flip discounted by $300, bringing the cost down to $699.99.
The MSI Claw EX Is the Most Important Handheld Since Steam Deck - I Still Wouldn't Buy One
As The Verge's resident handheld reviewer, I have nearly every portable gaming PC on a shelf in my house. The MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus is now the first one I reach for.
Celebrating the One Billion Runs Milestone on Weights & Biases
From 1 billion runs to autonomous AI research, explore the latest Weights & Biases innovations for AI model and agent development.
Your Guide to GitHub Universe 2026 Is Here: the Schedule Just Launched!
The GitHub Universe session catalog is live. Explore interactive workshops, community talks, demos, and panels.
Monitor On-premises and Multi-cloud AI Agents with AgentCore Observability
Set up Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Observability for AI agent running outside AWS: on-premises, on GCP, on Azure, or on developer machines.
What 50 Open Source Projects Taught US About Security in the AI Era
See how the open source projects in Session 4 of the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund combined AI-assisted workflows, maintainer expertise, GitHub security.
Automate Legacy Web Applications with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Browser Tool
Learn how to automate legacy web applications that need human-like interaction using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Browser Tool and Strands Agents.
Amazon Quick for Microsoft 365: Agentic AI Where You Work
Amazon Quick is now available directly inside Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
Class Is in Session: GeForce NOW Levels up Linux, Chromebooks and More
GeForce NOW is giving cloud gaming an extra-credit upgrade just in time for back-to-school season.
Introducing Grok 4.6
Built for long-running agents and more ambitious interactive and visual work.
Mindgard Raises $30M to Handle Security for AI Models and Applications
Mindgard Ltd., a leader in artificial intelligence cybersecurity, announced today that it raised $30 million in early funding to scale up its product in response to significant demand across the industry, given an increase in high-impact vulnerabilities.
What Are AI Hallucinations?
AI hallucination are outputs that sound coherent and confident but are factually wrong, fabricated.
Smart Routing in Unity AI Gateway: Match Frontier Quality with 30%+ Lower Cost Per Task
The price and performance frontier for coding tasks feature a huge diversity of models and harnesses: in 2026 alone.
Bring Your Spreadsheet Data to Life with Sheets Canvas
Sheets canvas turns data into interactive dashboards, custom study trackers, seating charts, and more, all with a simple prompt.
Certificate Transparency Monitoring Is Now Generally Available
Cloudflare's Certificate Transparency Monitoring is now generally available.
Virgin Galactic Wants Your Help Naming Its New Delta Class Spaceship
Horizon , Explorer , Ascend or Apeiron ?
Pet Owners Say Smart Pet Feeder Outage Led to Furry Ones Going Unfed
"I've lost trust ...".
The New Instagram Logo Is the Perfect Embodiment of AI Slop
Opinion: Some remarks about the new wordmark accidentally being perfectly awful.
Rivian's 2027 Changes Include Its No. 1 Most-requested Feature
Pricing hasn't changed, and now you can get captain's chairs for the R1S.
We've Flown a Radiation-blocking Vest to the Moon and Back, and It Worked
Let's shield the astronauts instead of the spacecraft.
Anthropic Set AI Agents Loose on the Same Task. They Started a Turf War.
Anthropic researchers found AI agent can clash, collude and coordinate in unexpected ways, raising new questions about whether today's safety tests capture.
OpenAI Hires New CRO as Executive Shake-up Continues
Dali Rajic will take over as OpenAI's top salesperson.
Writer Introduces New AI Model and Upgraded Harness to Contain Token Costs
Built as a post-training variation on Z.ai's open source model GLM-5.2, Writer says the new system should provide deployment-ready capabilities at a much.
IBM Partners with OpenAI to Bolster Enterprise AI Push
IBM plans to train and certify tens of thousands of consultants on OpenAI's technologies as part of this deal.
Investors Sue Selena Gomez Alleging Fraud Tied to Her Mental Health Startup
The plaintiffs say they invested nearly $1.2 million in the company, and are accusing Gomez of failing to build and market the startup.
How a Teenage Carpenter Became the Founder of AI Construction Startup Trunk Tools
Our second in a series of articles about non-tech founders getting venture funding feature Sarah Buchner, a "blue-collar worker by background" who set out.
Microsoft's Clippy-like Mico Character Is No Longer the Face of Copilot
Microsoft Copilot will no longer show its emotive yellow blob, Mico, when you use the chatbot's voice mode. In a support page, Microsoft says it's going to move Mico to its Learn Live platform, where the avatar will have "more to react to," as reported earlier by GeekWire.
The Fight Over Flock and Other ALPRs
There are over 120,000 of Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras installed all over the US.
OpenAI Is Losing Its Second Executive This Week
Another OpenAI executive is departing. Denise Dresser, who joined OpenAI as its chief revenue officer in December after serving as CEO of Slack, will be leaving in the "coming weeks" to "pursue other opportunities," she said in a team note posted to LinkedIn.
Suno Is Trying to Look More Like a Real Music Production Tool
Suno is releasing Studio 2.0 with significant upgrades that push it closer to an actual digital audio workstation (DAW), rather than a bare-bones audio editor with generative AI feature. The biggest addition is undoubtedly MIDI support.
2K Launches New Studio to Build Its 'next Blockbuster Sports Franchise'
2K is launching a new AAA game development studio, Small Axe Studios, with an ambitious goal: to build the company's "next blockbuster sports franchise," according to a LinkedIn post. The post doesn't explicitly say what sport this new game will focus on.
Meta Adds AI Screening to Detect WhatsApp Scams
Meta is launching an optional Scam Alert feature on WhatsApp that uses on-device machine learning to flag suspicious messages. Earlier this year, Meta also launched scam detection for device linking requests on WhatsApp.
What to Expect During CrowdStrike's Fal.Con: Join TheCUBE Aug. 31-Sept. 2
AI attacks on enterprise systems are picking up speed. The just-released CrowdStrike "2026 Threat Hunting Report" documented that China-nexus adversaries exploited critical vulnerabilities within 24 hours of public proof-of-concept release.
Industry Experts Weigh in as AI Moves From Proof of Concept to Production
"We've proven AI works, now what?" This common question is being echoed in the halls of numerous enterprise organizations around the globe. It highlights how the path from proof of concept to AI production remains a major challenge for enterprises today.
Writer Launches Major Agentic AI Improvements with Palmyra X6 Flagship Model
Generative artificial intelligence startup Writer Inc. today announced the release of its next-generation flagship model, Palmyra X6, designed to deliver frontier-level performance for marketing and revenue teams while keeping costs in check.
Nozomi Partners with Sophos to Put Operational Technology Data in IT Consoles
Nozomi Networks Inc. and Sophos Ltd. today announced a partnership that pushes operational technology telemetry from Nozomi's Vantage platform into Sophos Fusion, the artificial intelligence-native defense system launched in July.
Applied Materials Delivers Earnings Above Estimates, but Wall Street Isn't Impressed
Applied Materials Inc. beat expectations on both earnings and revenue in its third-quarter financial results today, and followed up with strong guidance for the current quarter, but its stock fell in the wake of elevated expectations from investors.
Regal Ties Its Voice AI Agents Into Five9's Contact Center Platform
Enterprise voice artificial intelligence company Regal Voice Inc. today unveiled an integration with Five9 Inc. that makes its autonomous AI voice agents available to customers of the contact center software provider.
Criminals Have Moved AI Out of Testing and Into Daily Use, Flashpoint Finds
A new report from threat intelligence company Flashpoint has found that criminals now use artificial intelligence in day-to-day operations, well past the experimental stage. The 2026 Global Threat Intelligence Report: Midyear Edition covers the first six months of the year.
A Month with Anthropic's Mythos Left Rubrik Rethinking Remediation
Data resilience company Rubrik Inc. today said a month of scanning its own code with Anthropic PBC's Mythos Preview model surfaced so many potential security issues that it rebuilt its review pipeline rather than hire reviewers.
Lightweight Dragonfly Deployment: P2P Distribution Without the Database Stack
Dragonfly speeds up file and container image distribution using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, but a standard installation deploys several components and dependencies.
LLMOps and Platform Engineering: Who Should Own the AI Pipeline?
A few years ago, getting a model into production meant a data scientist, a DevOps engineer, and a narrow set of tools: train it, test it, ship it, watch the dashboards.
Databricks raises $5B more after annualized revenue tops $7B
Databricks Inc. today announced that it has raised $5 billion in funding at a $190 billion valuation. The round was led by Coatue, Blackstone, MGX, T. Rowe Price and Sixth Street Growth. The funds were joined by more than a half-dozen other backers, most of which are returning investors. The...
Google announces Gemini 3.7 Flash just three weeks after previous release
Gemini 3.6 Flash debuted just 3 weeks ago, but Google says 3.7 has "substantial improvements."
AutoWorldModel-Bench: A State-Centric Benchmark for Automated World-Model Research
World modeling is an unsettled field: architectures, training objectives, and state representations interact in complex ways, and no single recipe dominates...