01
CNBC Technology ↗
Meta released Muse Code, its first coding agent, a terminal tool that installs with a single command and can plan changes, write code, and validate results across a full software engineering task. It runs on Muse Spark 1.2, a coding focused model co-trained with the agent and priced at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, alongside a contributor tier at $0.10 and $0.20 that lets Meta train on the submitted data. The public beta covers Mac and Linux, and undercuts the rival coding agents from Anthropic and OpenAI on price.
02
VentureBeat ↗
Hark, the startup founded this year by serial entrepreneur and roboticist Brett Adcock, unveiled Handoff, a computer use agent that navigates the open web on a user's behalf to do things like order dinner or compare and book flights. It posted a record 97.7 on the human evaluated Online-Mind2Web benchmark, ahead of OpenAI's GPT-5.4 at 92.8, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 at 84.1, and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro at 69. Hark says it can run the agent at less than a tenth of the token price of competing models, and opened public sign ups with a wider release planned later this month.
03
The Verge ↗
Demis Hassabis is stepping down as chief executive of Google DeepMind to become its chairman, and takes a newly created role as chief scientist of Alphabet while continuing to lead the drug discovery company Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer and Google's chief AI architect, becomes the senior vice president running DeepMind and reports to Sundar Pichai. Separately, chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years and taking several senior researchers with him to launch Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that aims to automate machine learning and scientific discovery. Alphabet shares fell more than 3 percent on the announcement.
04
Forbes Tech ↗
Nvidia open sourced the storage stack and programming interfaces that let GPUs pull data straight from drives without routing every request through the CPU, under a framework it calls SCADA, short for Scaled Accelerated Data Access. Google, Intel, and Meta signed on as founding maintainers of a new Accelerated IO group on GitHub, an unusual alignment given that all three design AI chips competing with Nvidia. The wider Storage Next effort now spans more than 40 participants including DDN, Kioxia, and Micron, and Nvidia demonstrated a single server hitting 230 million random reads per second using three H100 GPUs and 44 Micron drives.
05
Forbes Tech ↗
The Munich Regional Court ruled that AI music company Suno infringed copyrights held by the German collecting society GEMA, rejecting Suno's argument that training a model on protected works requires no license. Suno acknowledged it gathered training data by stream ripping audio from the open web, and GEMA's lawyers showed the models had memorized specific songs closely enough to reproduce them almost note for note from simple prompts. The court issued an injunction, ordered Suno to disclose the revenue tied to six infringing works, and set damages to be calculated from those figures. Because the decision turns on outputs reaching listeners inside the European Union, it exposes any AI company serving EU users to collecting society litigation regardless of where the model was built.
06
CNBC Technology ↗
Amazon's Zoox will start charging for robotaxi rides in Las Vegas on August 10, its first commercial market after nearly a year of free public rides there and in San Francisco. The launch follows the first commercial exemption the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has granted to a purpose built robotaxi, which Zoox needed because its toaster shaped vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals. Fares combine a base charge with distance and time and are priced in line with the comfort tier of conventional ride hailing apps, with the final fee shown before booking and no extra charge if the vehicle takes a longer route.
07
Bloomberg Technology ↗
New Microsoft disclosures show the company booked $24.1 billion in revenue from OpenAI in the fiscal year that ended in June, covering cloud computing capacity, model development costs, and its share of OpenAI's revenue. That figure implies OpenAI accounts for more than half, and by some estimates roughly 70 percent, of Microsoft's total AI sales, measured against the annualized run rate above $37 billion that Satya Nadella cited for the March quarter. The numbers underline how dependent Microsoft's AI business remains on a single partner even as it invests in Anthropic and builds its own models.
08
Ars Technica ↗
Google has set September 4 as the date it begins shutting down Assistant on Android and Wear OS, leaving Gemini as the only voice assistant on those devices. The change reaches phones, tablets, smartwatches, headphones, and cars running Android Auto, though Assistant survives for now in vehicles with Google built in. The rollout will take several weeks to reach everyone, and once it lands on a device there is no way to switch back. Google also plans to extend Gemini to Google TV, Home speakers, and smart displays.
09
TechCrunch AI ↗
Shopify said traffic and orders arriving from AI assistants tripled year over year in the second quarter, as overall revenue rose 36 percent to $3.6 billion and beat forecasts of $3.4 billion. Roughly half of AI referred sessions land directly on a product page, about 2.5 times the rate from traditional search, and 75 percent of AI attributed purchases fell outside the platform's top 100 categories. Traditional search still drives about a third of storefront sessions and has grown 1.3 times over two years, which president Harley Finkelstein argues shows shopping agents are adding demand rather than cannibalizing Google. Shopify has connected its catalog to Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Manus, Replit, and Vercel.
10
Engadget ↗
The Tech Transparency Project found more than 50 ads across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger that carried AI generated child sexual abuse material paired with sexually suggestive text, most of them promoting nudify apps that digitally undress people. The ads ran between November 2025 and August 2026 and reached thousands of accounts. Meta said sexual exploitation is horrific, noted that most of the ads had minimal reach and many were disabled before press coverage, and pointed to new AI detection systems and the 36 million pieces of child exploitation content it removed last year. The findings follow a BBC report in July on similar ads targeting Instagram users in India.